The Meat Tree O’Love
by William O. Lucas

When everyone is dead, The Great Game is finished. Not before. –Rudyard Kipling

ISLAND'S population stood, as it had since time immemorial, at 1024. And if the People had their Way it would for evermore. Man plus woman doubled and redoubled on their digits equaled the magic number. Two to the power ten was the population that Island could support. Consequently, though the total might slip by one or two it was never down for long—a few months maybe. And if it ever crept over the mark . . . well, that error was rectified before the day was out.

            As per their Elders’ decree, all the People on Island also practised philately. But that Law was only thirty years old; Island’s national pastime dated from a day within living memory. Joňan referred to it—when he had to—as the day that The Shit Hit The Fan. Having to explain what an electric fan was often helped to steer the conversation in another direction.

            So, sometimes there were stamps to cull. Sometimes it was newborns. Being single, Joňan was not much concerned with babies—Whether a man marries or not, he will regret it the rest of his life. In his role of Exchange Supervisor, however, he did have a lot to do with children. It was only fair that he held this important position, since he was the one who had thought up the Game. Rumor had it that he’d come up with the idea on the spot. Joňan grimaced the first time he heard that. Fairer to say that it was a tight spot he’d been in. You don’t call it the day that TSHTF for nothing.

            Today, though, was a special day—one of the finest. It was the 1st day of the first month and, together with the 3^rd day of the third month, the 5^th of the fifth and so on, added half a dozen red-letter days to Island’s liberally chequered calendar. In spite of the fact that the climate was constant (apart from a gradual heating that no one tried to mention) the People enjoyed six distinct seasons: Earth, Water, Space, Air, Consciousness and Fire.

A line of people padded up the path. All had on their best embroidered wraps and wind funnels, and the womenfolk wore Mother Hubbards. In addition, every man, woman and child clasped his or her treasured wallet. These weren’t as embellished as their wraps. They consisted mainly ‘disposable’ files and photo albums—there was a lot of plastic back in the day. Though the stuff was not made to last, it had been made to.

            At Camp Musa everyone waited for their turn to clap hands, bow, and touch a knee to the ground as befitted the conferral of a Gift. While Joňan watched, his helpers passed out hundreds of envelopes . . .  while Yæli watched him. Neither noticed a third observer.

“Well done, folks,” Johan beamed at his flock of philatelists. “That’s it for another Season.” At that signal the youngsters tumbled out through the door, as keen as anybody to get home and unseal their own envelopes. The year’s first Game was officially underway.

Joňan swung his basket to the other hand, adjusted his funnel and picked up the pace. Yæli must have grown an inch since his last visit; he was certainly faster. Joňan wasn’t getting any younger either. “Almost home now,” he panted, but the barefooted youth gave no response. They’d spent the morning gathering mountain vegetables, and in all that time his Godson hadn’t uttered a word. Well, whatever-it-was would work its way out.

            Reaching Joňan’s hut they did their best to cool down. Joňan unhooked his harness, loosened his wrap and set about to fixing them some tea-juice. He hummed to himself—Smile though your heart is breaking. In a couple of minutes the dub-bub-bubbling of the percolator began to putter. Joňan dialed shut the distilling spigot and snapped his finger at an air bubble. Beaker in hand, the two then divvied up their spoil of bracken tips, bamboo shoots, butterbur, burdock and fungi. “Isn’t that furry question mark plant a beauty?” Joňan asked in between sips. Yæli grunted back its real name—flying spider monkey tree fern. Well, that was something. Cross off that possibility: it’s not a cat that has the young man’s tongue.

            The plants bundled and the tea drained, Joňan and Yæli wiped their hands and brought out their stock books. How were their selections shaping up? They were each of them eager to see. Paper, scissors and rock determined that it was Yæli who went first.

            Yæli lifted the cover of Joňan’s book and considered. It didn’t take him long. Joňan watched his index finger dart from one stamp to the next, lingering over a smattering of mainly East European issues, the two USs, plus some rag-tag material from some of the Desert Countries. From his own Back-of-the-Book Yæli flushed out several stamps with an Age of Space theme to insert into Joňan’s. The latter admired the lad’s aesthetic sense but remained silent as per protocol.

            Joňan spoke only when it was his turn. “Let's see what you have here.” He rubbed his hands and perused Yæli’s pages. The 150 postage stamps represented various countries in loosely organized groups—short series of definitives and commemoratives loosely arranged by size and color. Suddenly the pattern leaped out.

            “Someone was certainly on the ball here. They’ve steered you in the direction of a Colonies collection.” Joňan slid some stamps around. “These ones are all British. You can tell by the Heads—did I ever tell you that George the Sixth was a philatelist too?”

            Nothing from Yæli—well, there wouldn’t be, would there—Rules are rules—so Joňan continued with his commentary. “You’ve got a few Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese colonies too—altogether a nice balance.”  As he spoke, Joňan selected a dozen stamps that didn’t belong and transferred them B.O.B. From his own, he extracted a few Indian crowns, a Coronation from Bermuda, several Australasian Olympics, and a small set of Singaporean fauna to augment Yæli’s work-in-progress.

            Their swap-meet over, Joňan and Yæli secured their wallets. Yæli squirmed visibly in an effort not to speak, but his mouth won out. “You took away some American stamps. Why? Wasn’t the USA once a colony?”

            Joňan paused before answering. “Strictly speaking that’s true, but that was well before the Age of Stamps. The USA became the opposite of a colony when it mutated into BaseWorld. As such it was the ultimate doer, not the done-to.”

            “But what are countries anyway? Why should people have to live in them? What if you just want to remain as you are be bothered by no one?” Hm, the floodgates had finally opened. Although Joňan sensed it was coming—over the years he’d facilitated the Dawn of Realization of dozens of adolescents—it wasn’t something that he relished. Why did the responsibility of making us excuses for civilization fall upon his shoulders? Who’d assigned that role to him? Who was he to defend the indefensible, and why should insanity be sanitized in the first place? Joňan didn’t want this job; he had questions enough of his own.

            “C’mon Yæli,” he groaned, “That’s ancient history. It’s a drag to be put in that mindset.” Several decades removed from events once current, Joňan was all conspiracy-ed out. He’d become convinced that butterflies flapping their wings on the other side of the world had more impact than humans—Small groups of dominant men. Systems self-organize. He didn’t believe in collusion any longer. In all likelihood the world latest-’n’-greatest empire started out the way Rome’s had. It wouldn’t have been planned or carved in granite. Joňan didn’t doubt that people generally started out with the best of intentions. But that didn’t mean that shit never happens.

            “Okay, if you must know then here’s my take. Think of it like this: you approach your neighbor and offer to protect him from his and your shared enemies. Hey, what could be wrong with that? It’s just a treaty. You both retain your independence. All you ask for is a piece of ground to build your fortress (Ha! Some of those bases became so big that they needed up to a dozen internal bus routes to shunt around their personnel). It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement, is all. The only problem is that things get kind of quantum mechanical in that you can’t just observe and expect to have no effect on a country’s goings-on. A military presence leads to joint planning, joint exercises, assistance programs and the like. The tendrils enmesh you both until one fine morning you wake up and find you’ve 160 clandestine missions on the go every day.

            “No, BaseWorld wasn’t purchased outright. ‘Sold out’ is more like it. The last bit of real estate that the USA acquired was in 1947 right after the Middle World War. The Marshall Islands it was—yes, mark it down as a colony too. But it was easier to keep unrolling that red carpet of military installations. No one knew for sure, but at least a thousand of them sunk their fangs into two hundred different lands—a million buildings and pieces of equipment. And that estimate might even be on the low side. In Afghanistan—you mostly get bogus stamps from there—there were nearly 400 camps, forward operating bases and combat outposts. The military had this nifty way of excluding from the official statistics the countries in which wars were being fought.

            “The advantage of military bases over colonies is that you don’t have to do much actual managing. You outsource to contractors thereby covering up your accountability. You avoid the need to seek the sheeple’s consent; you just rake in their tax dollars. All it took the United States of America to achieve and then maintain Full Spectrum Dominance was a power of cash.

            Yæli appeared confused. “Why did Americans crave so much control while we Islanders are content with so little?” This question—or different versions of it—was never an easy one to answer, not least because Joňan had no idea. He shared Yæli’s sense that whoever had written the script must have been bananas. With no answer at the ready, he could only grope.

            “Americans were different from other people in that we didn’t recognize—or want to—that our country’s military possessed such a stranglehold. Maybe it was because of government secrecy. Maybe it was the education system. You certainly didn’t learn about such issues in any History or Geography class. The real work of schools was to make the kids submissive, not smart. And if you don’t know something—if you cannot admit that it exists—then there’s no way for you to change it—Catch 22. There used to be a Constitution, but it became completely undermined. Oh, the people knew that they were being screwed and that as a society they were gobbling through the lion’s share of global resources. But they couldn’t imagine living otherwise—Our way of life is non-negotiable—and so they refused to think about it, much less make changes.

            “But they were quite prepared to swallow all sorts of incredible bullshit: That it was only right and proper to be so much stronger than other nations. That there was a moral difference between us bombing others and others bombing us. That the reason for interfering with their politics had nothing to do with stealing their resources—roughly 70% of an army’s mass consists of oil—but to spread democracy. We were the good guys. We helped out by ousting evil dictators. And then, when swarthy men took exception and despised us for vague, no-good reasons—They hate our freedom—ha!—it made us indignant.  So we labeled them terrorists and started wars against ‘all them sumbitches’.

            “The government promised that our troops went only where they were wanted, welcomed and needed. Using euphemisms was standard operating procedure. ‘Lily pads’, for example, were US FOSs or Forward Operating Sites. They were ‘kept warm’—deadly that is to say. Ready to be mobilized or expanded at a moment’s notice. Once a base is established, it takes on a life of its own. It invents mission as reasons for its continued existence and expansion.

            “But look at what happened. The 9/11 attacks by Osama Bin Laden—you won’t find him on any stamp, by the way, though you will the twin towers—were provoked by the blasphemy of establishing bases in sacred territories. The military intensified the very insecurities it was sent there to dispel. They generated fear and hostility—rightly so because it was all an extortion scheme. Every incident was exaggerated so that copious funds could be demanded to ‘counter terrorist threats’. But BaseWorld’s empire operated at a loss even as it grew to monstrous proportions. Bankruptcy, just as what had occurred in the Soviet empire, was only a matter of time.  Listen, there are only three things that the military do well: shoot civilians, blow things up, and swagger. We were good at looking as if we were doing something, while in essence we did zip.”

            Yæli interrupted. “You used the word ‘we’. I know that you are, or were, an American. Don’t tell me that you were a soldier too. How were you personally involved?”

            Joňan rubbed his eyes. “You mean, what part did I play? How much guilt should be laid at my door? Look, in those days everything was disintegrating—Peak Everything people finally came round to admitting. I was just a student wet behind the ears. I’d accumulated an awful debt, just as the government had accumulated its awful debt—trillions of dollars that wouldn’t hyper-inflate away, and meanwhile they just kept printing money hand over fist to keep their military a-trucking—Kunstler’s (someone else you won’t see on a stamp, more’s the pity) psychology of previous investment. All sorts of tricks were tried to slip out of the noose. One was to make students with loans an offer that we couldn’t refuse: serve a term or two and we’ll wipe your slate clean. Well, what are you going to do? I ask you, what are you going to do?

            “Besides, the military does not just consist of soldiers. Among the quarter of a million personnel  deployed throughout the world there were technicians, spies and teachers. People worked on the routine monitoring of emails, faxes and telephones. No one peeled potatoes or did their own laundry. The mail was delivered and the toilets were cleaned, so all that was contracted out. Geez, can you believe that we even maintained a couple hundred golf courses! No, I wasn’t a soldier exactly, and I never shot at anyone.” Joňan breathed heavily for a minute. “If you don’t mind, I'll stop there.”

            Yæli stiffened. “What, you’re asking me to drop it? Earlier on you used the expression ‘sold out’. It sounds to me like that’s what you did,” he spat and scrambled from the hut. Joňan jumped to his feet, but by the time he reached the door his Godson was halfway down the hill. No dammit! Not his Godson. His own son.

            Yæli went AWOL. Days passed, and Joňan had to pass on the vegetables he’d left behind to a neighbor, his wallet to his parents. What could he have done differently? What should he have said and how should he have acted?—You make your bed and lie in it. What if America had ceased all warfare, withdrawn its troops and dismantled its overseas bases? Certainly that would have caused radical changes to the economy, its industries (those that it hadn’t been shifted to other shores) and the American Dream. But changes of that magnitude were on the way regardless. National debt—could that have been reduced, or had had that boat been missed already? The same question applied to pollution, resource consumption and the environment. Would America’s standing in the eyes of the world have been salvaged? It couldn’t have sunk much lower.

            But how in God’s name could it have been managed? Not from the top down, that’s for sure. Those tricksters were in it purely for the power and glory—or money. Politics! Unless something was fixing to become a crisis in the next couple of weeks, it didn’t get a look-in. Pass that buck on to the next lot in power and blame them for the mess. But move Heaven and Earth—using foul means and fair—to get re-elected. What would it have taken for people at the grassroots level to achieve solidarity, slough off the dysfunction and strive for a saner world?—Come together, right now, over me.

The Season of Earth ended. On the 3^rd of the Third everyone came together to admire the form and structure of their friends’ collections. Gratitudes were expressed, and then there was a communal meal. At that gathering no stamps changed hands, of course, but everyone went home with someone else’s album. Over the next few weeks those albums would trickle from person to person, not returning to their owners until the close of the Season of Water. The first in line would transfer every postage stamp B.O.B save one. That stamp was to start a pictorial renga sequence. Every pair of eyes would attach another so that it linked to the previous one in some way—be the same color, come from the same country, bear the same numeral or royal figure. It was rapid-fire and fun especially for youngsters. And adults could scratch their heads for esoteric references.

Joňan’s hut filled with laughter. Children crammed themselves into every nook and cranny but in an orderly manner. Wasn’t this just the thing for a rainy day? The stock books at hand belonged to no one present, so there was no need for secrecy and quiet. Stamps flew like confetti, and so did the comments—not all of them on task.

            Hey, someone got something mauve for me? I need a triangle, or better yet a diamond. Looking for a sixteen-petal chrysanthemum this side of the room. Ideas please on what could follow this Ajman dinosaur! Already they anticipated the next great feast when all wallets were returned. You needed your wits about you then, if you wanted to identify and name all the links. Time limits were set; penalties imposed if you exceeded them. This Game favored the nimble and quick—Jack jump over the candlestick.

            “Joňan, what’s ‘face value’? Is it the same thing as ‘money’? Is currency just another type of stamp?” The questions nudge-winked the start of the favorite diversion Get-a-load-of-how-weird-the-world-was. Stories from a Strange Land never failed to amaze. In fact, as the years went by Joňan’s incredulity grew too. Could life in the ‘Real World’ really have been so bizarre? He gave up trying to explain how money operated—that you needed it for every Gift: food, services, the right to live where you lived, sleep where you slept and die where the body gave out. He ended up tying himself in knots. What were taxes? What was interest? As for debt, that was impossible to explain. How could you have negative stamps? What good was the accumulation of unshared wealth? How could that be the definition of success? Why, that would be like having a permanent stamp collection that you never showed off or had fun with. You might as well—ludicrous proposition—keep it under lock and key! Joňan’s audience convulsed with laughter.

Came the Season of Space. Yæli had still not shown up. Neither had—ha-ha—Yuri Gagarin. No, in the context of the Game the term ‘Space’ applied to a two-dimensional grid (some called it a Matrix). Stamps featuring faces were matched against those that did not in a two-month multi-player tournament that combined certain features of Go, Chess, Sudoku and Snap! (the best way to learn it was to dive right in and play). It sure brought the cerebral types out of the woodwork.

One day Joňan returned from collecting firewood to find that someone had called and left some pickled plums and potatoes outside his window. The potatoes were wrapped in green grass, the pickled plums in a scrap of paper. On the paper was the donor’s name. As his meals had been rather tasteless recently—mostly turnips and greens—he boiled up the potatoes with some fermented beans and salt. They tasted magnificent. Forgetting about filling his stomach eighty per cent only—his trusty rule for health—Joňan finished three full bowls. If only his caller had left some brew-juice then this would have been a feast. But for an ordinary person ordinary bubble tea was just as good. Joňan ate a fifth and stored the rest. He felt like a rich man. For the next few days he’d have something to share should anyone drop by.

Joňan urgently needed company. Though he preferred his own and could easily survive for months without seeing a soul—his legacy from an individualistic culture—the Season of Air was approaching. As breathing is the essence of life, it was only natural that this essential in-out rhythm was replicated in the Game. But there, breathing was a two-sets-of-lungs affair. Played vigorously, it replied on speed, memory, communication and tactics. The goal was for partners to assemble identical collections. You traded with everyone, of course, but only with the aid of memory. You couldn't cheat and write down lists. All that you could do was to pass on information (it would be too easy to collect duplicates and simply split them up between the two of you). The Game in this incarnation resembled orienteering. That is why Joňan regretted the continued absence of Yæli; he had the legs for it. Did the boy mean never to show up?

“Ryokän, let me be,” Joňan pleaded. He felt guilty that the woman annoyed him; it wasn’t her fault that she reminded him so much of her sister. “You know that social occasions aren't my scene. Let me do as I do, and be as I am.”

            “Look Popeye, it’s not just that you didn’t show up at the Festival of Season’s End,” Ryokän scolded. “But you’ve been avoiding me too. I seem to recall that you enjoyed yourself last year—you and Yæli did so well. You should have found yourself a replacement.”

            “I’m sorry. I did mean to thank you for the other week.” Joňan felt bad about not reciprocating Ryokän’s Gift sooner, especially given her status as an Elder. But then again, he was the same age and by rights should also have attained that standing. But it did no good to go down that road. Instead her mention of Yæli prompted him to ask where that one was.

            “You didn’t know? I thought that he told you himself. He left months ago. It’s Yæli’s Time; he’s gone Sail-about.”

            Joňan hid his shock by absorbing himself in the Game of Opposites. In the Season of Consciousness you chose pairs of opposites by matching stamps from the backs of both books—yours and your trade mate’s. Big-small, purple-yellow, old-new, NZ-Portugal (opposite sides of the world). He sneaked a glance at Ryokän to find her studying not the stamps but him. “Why so glum?” she asked. “You of all people ought to understand his motivations. You were the same age when you set off vowing to conquer the world.” Shamefacedly, Joňan turned back to the page. Vertical-horizontal, Airmail-ordinary, mint-used, intaglio-letterpress, USSR-USA . . .

            Having wangled his way to the States Joňan eventually earned his citizenship. He then decided to capitalize on his lucky streak by a) gaining himself an education and b) sending money home whenever he could—Money makes the world go round. The learning curve for every aspect of Northern Hemisphere survival had been steep. Joňan’s subsistence-culture background made Finance the toughest field of them all to make any sort of sense of, the craziest notion of all being that economies—and populations—must always keep growing! The New World was a school of hard knocks. Its first and most important lesson was to be selective where you got your information. In this culture everyone had a stake and an angle. Doctors accepted kickbacks from drug companies. Politicians were bribed by lobby groups. Even schools had vending machines in the hallways. Who could you trust?

            From alternate news sources, Joňan gleaned that globally something was seriously amiss. But the knowledge was only academic, as he’d already been posted overseas (in the general geographical vicinity of home, luckily) not that he had any intention of going back—The best-laid plans of mice and men. He read that all Empires eventually go broke, and that people never see it coming. They always underestimate the probability. When large and sudden changes occur, they are often taken completely by surprise—Sovietologists more than anyone when imperial USSR collapsed. Rome took half a millennium to wither away. Russia broke up in just a couple of years. Portugal, France, the Ottomans and Great Britain—all dissolved in anything from a year to a couple of decades. The USA was predicted by some to collapse at the upper end of that range, but instead it set a speed record. It folded in on itself in just a few very strange days, triggered by, of all things, a disputed sports result—US forces get the nod.

            “You’re still not over it, are you?” broke in Ryokän. “Why do you find it it so hard to submit to the Will of the People?” Joňan gazed at her from miles away. She waited for a minute, searching his eyes for a sign of life. None showed up so she turned on her heel in a huff.

            They'd dithered for far too long. By the time that its leaders decided that it might not be a bad idea to liquidate BaseWorld’s overseas holdings, there was little left in the coffers with which to effect it—All the will, but little wherewithal. The US military empire could no longer be wound down in any controlled fashion. Stranded troops relied on their families to donate food, toiletries, clean underwear—the greatest show of overseas charity since . . . well, ever actually. The USA had never been big on supporting those who could not help themselves.
            Some servicemen saw the light and decided not to return home. They’d only find themselves in the same position as the three million recently paroled prisoners—no funds either to keep them locked up. They married their local girlfriends, if they and their families (and communities) would have them, and they adopted the local customs, religions and lingo (or else). It was chaos. Many lily-pads were abandoned to their fate. The host-graft rejection of these bases became known as the Third World War. The world’s greatest empire ended with the kind of fizzle that characterized climate-change conferences.

            Joňan stood before the Council of Elders—Not quite the prodigal son. “Technically you are an American. But although you have Citizenship, you do not hold that country’s Nationality. On Island we know nothing of wars. We want nothing to do with them, or with those that promote them. Still, we understand that you used to send money home. It’s no good now, you know. How ironical to have hyperinflation on an island without a currency,” chuckled the Eldest.

            “We have made our decision. You may return to this land of your birth, but under certain conditions. First, you forfeited the right to have children when you assumed another country’s citizenship. That cannot be undone, and so any that you do have will be regarded as surplus. You know what that means: they would be invited to be reborn, as is our Way. Second, you must prove yourself useful. We will give you until nightfall to come up with a use for a potential resource that, until now, we have found no purpose for, except perhaps as very inefficient toilet paper. There is a large carton that arrived in the last days of the postal system. I believe that it contains old stamps.” The Eldest peered at him from under grizzled brows with eyes that suddenly glinted. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “What are you going to do?”

            Joňan described  his vision to the Council, and it met with their provisional approval. They saw the Game as dovetailing with Island's Gift economy, even suggesting that he rope in Island's children to help; they had keener eyes and nimbler fingers. That was astute of them. The kids would have access to a new educational resource . . . and instructor! At the time he resented it as a particularly cruel way of twisting in the knife.

Not long after  the Season of Fire had commenced, Joňan received a visitor. “Yæli, you’re back!” After some hesitant shuffling of feet they threw their arms about each other. Joňan had to beg off first from the back-pounding. “It’s so good to see you. Sit down and tell me your story—I’m sure you have many. I’ll open a bottle of brew-cha.”

            Yæli filled Joňan in about where he’d been and the people he’d met. Most of them were friendly, but all but one were land-based and hadn’t been able to tell him about the outside world. BaseWorld especially was a Black Hole. The exception was a peculiar old man. “I found him on a yacht anchored in a lagoon.  He must have been in his eighties but was very fit. He was scouring his hull. I offered to help and we became friends. The man had a wry sense of humor, and a high-pitched but pleasant voice. I could understand his English well enough, except for his name. He told me that he wasn’t American by birth—seemed rather proud of that fact.

            “Yæli,” he told me after we’d been working for several days, “from what you tell me about your father, he sounds like a good man. Seems to me he got out as soon as he reasonably could. Don’t blame him for joining the Armed Forces. A lot of people signed up for honorable reasons. They believed what they’d been fed about its peace-keeping role. They were taken in by an Uncle-Sam-Needs-You sentiment. It's ironic. The poster’s original title was ‘What are you Doing for Preparedness?’That's something we could have made use of.

            The man went on to tell all that he’d witnessed—and what he presumed had gone down—in BaseWorld. "I sailed away before conditions got too bad, but right up until the last moment the leaders kept prattling on about national security to ever-dwindling crowds. They no longer fooled anyone. You could tell that they were more concerned with saving their own hides—there was a rapidly growing market for body guards and security consultants. Members of Congress avoided their constituents and cowered inside gated communities. Outside, though, a new spirit of neighborliness took root. Squatting in an unoccupied dwelling became ‘settling in’. Trespassers freed up ‘rights of way’. And fences, deadlocks and burglar alarms were replaced with watchful eyes, attentive ears and helping hands. Despite those warm fuzzies, there's a story that the politicians were hunted down—every man Jack (and woman Jill) of them." 
            “He tried to tell me his name,” Yæli concluded, “but I couldn’t catch it. Sounded like The Meat Tree of Love, if that helps. He asked me to pass on his best wishes. He said that you wouldn’t know him personally, but that you’d probably read his book.” Puzzled, Joňan shook his head. Who could it have been? He repeated the phrase several times to himself, slowly and then quickly, before the penny dropped.
            “Good heavens! If I’m not mistaken you only enjoyed the company of the Great Granddaddy of Collapse himself!”

The Season of Fire was a time of reckoning. This Game now became a comprehensive stock take. No thrills and spills accompanied this exercise. People amassed multiple copies of a single stamp (if it was common), or the entire stock of a rare country such as Heligoland or Tannu Tuva. The task then was to arrange them according to condition. They might be torn, have thins or have faded. They might be creased, bear hinge remnants or be smeared with grease. A few would have grown mold or rust. Everyone brought in their stock books. Many hands helped. There was pasting, patching and mending to do. Depending on their condition, the stamps were cleansed in soap, salt or vinegar baths (there’d been thirty years to experiment). In the old days collectors used to fret over a missing corner perforation. Ha! These days you were lucky to tell if a stamp was perforated. Scissor-cut trims were the rule, not the exception.

            As many stamps as possible were recycled, but for a small number it was the end of the road—This is the end, my only friend, the end. Joňan recalled his second meeting with the Eldest. Both looked older, more sombre. “I hear that your partner gave birth.” Joňan swallowed. It was true. “I hear that the mother died.” Joňan hung his head. “I'm sorry. However, the baby may survive; it takes up life in her stead." Joňan looked up. “Naturally it must be adopted out, but as a token of our gratitude at what you’ve achieved the Council grants you this concession: you may remain the child’s Godfather. This we have decided.”

            Why was it so hard for him to submit? Had he been tainted by his years in the outside world? The rules that the People had to follow weren’t draconian. No infant ever died; all were invited to be reborn—Unless you are reborn you can never enter the Kingdom. (Which king? He knew them all. All had perished. All were fading.) A newborn’s spirit never vanished; it went to the head of the queue. The Gods were kind, and bereft parents never had long to wait. Their infant’s spirit entered into the very next fetus. It would be born to two mothers, two fathers.

            At Camp Musa, Joňan took out a key and unlocked a cupboard. He removed the well-protected carton that was by now half empty—Or is the glass half full? He tallied up the total for destruction. Creation and destruction—two sides of the same coin. Shiva and . . . who was the other? From the box he picked out a handful stamps whose average age was one hundred years old. They’d last till the rest of his days. And after that—leaves, sticks, stones?—The Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stone. They were mostly off-paper. He counted out the required quantity and separated those that needed soaking.

            This was his once-a-year task. Nevertheless, Joňan had many times witnessed a stamp reveal a secret when it was coaxed off its rectangle of old envelope. Sometimes a postal clerk would have scribbled the price. Occasionally you’d find a miniature heart with initials.  More commonly there was some guide printed on the stationery for positioning the stamp—a box, a symbol or dotted lines. Now, one stamp with a very fine sock-on-the-nose postmark slid off to uncover a message:

  

Place

Stamp

Here

Joňan halted. He’d seen the phrase before, of course, but today it read as new. How would one analyze the grammar? Was it a command, a request, a suggestion, or . . . perhaps . . . an invitation? With the benefit of hindsight and an objectivity obtained over decades, Joňan pondered. What could we have done? How should we who regarded ourselves as enlightened have acted?

            Just then there came a tapping at the door. It was Ryokän. “What are you still doing here?” she asked. “It’s getting late. I hope you’re almost finished, or you’ll ruin your eyes.”

            “No fear of that,” Joňan countered as he waved a magnifying glass at her. “Yæli brought me back this Gift from our mutual friend. You know, I’m glad that he’s back. I've more fingers on this hand that I have close friends. I really miss the guys of my Unit. They may have been misguided but they were loyal.”

            “I know.”

            “But I miss her even more.”

            “That makes two of us. It’s not unusual for twins to be close.”

            They went silent for a while. Joňan turned back to his work. Place Stamp Here. He looked up again.

            “You know, most people are decent deep down. Is showed up in every poll: that the majority of Westerners knew that things were rotten.” Ryokän nodded.

            The word ‘Westerners’ brought to mind westerns and then movies. It had been a long times since he saw one. Joňan named one and asked if she’d seen it. She hadn’t. He told her of the TV Anchor in the old classic, Network. The man tried to galvanize viewers into taking charge of their lives. He got them to get up out of their armchairs to shout I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore! " Joňan shook his head. "Is that what it would have taken to get through to our fellow man, or would something less extreme have done just as well . . . or better?” Place Stamp Here.

            “Something simpler?” Ryokän prompted, “You have something in mind?” But Joňan went off on yet another tangent.

            “I wonder if there’s a connection between the word ‘doom’ and the Doomesday Book. Or could it have been Domesday with only the one ‘o’. Pity that there’s no way to check.”

            “Where are you going with this?” Ryokän asked. Joňan noticed that the woman formed the hint of a pout when she was exasperated.

            “What I’m trying to discover is what it would have taken to turn the Titanic from the iceberg. But even as late as thirty years ago if you approached people in a group and directed their attention to what each of them singly would have admitted was obvious, they would have given you 'the look' and castigated you as a Doomer. Group psychology, I guess. I just wonder if there wasn’t a better approach—one that didn’t involve histrionics. What would have stirred the masses up enough to act?

            “I suspect that the first step should have been to reclaim the word ‘doomer’ as ‘gay’, ‘queer’ and ‘black’ had been. Wrest it back into the arena of respectability. Be proud of it. Stand up for it.” Place Stamp Here. “The second step would have been for people to declare ownership by including their names in a 'Doomersday' list. Can't you see it going viral via the Internet?”

            “You’d need a time machine to go back,” Ryokän giggled. “Where’s H. G. Wells when you need him?—apart from on the odd stamp.”

            “In my crystal ball I see a roll call of concerned citizens committing to the common good. But it wouldn’t have an agenda, manifesto or grand plan, at least not to start with. Initially you only need a seed, a catalyst . . . or a nuclear pile. The digits keep doubling, doubling, redoubling until you reach critical human biomass. From that point on, the whole thing self-organizes.”

            “Sounds dangerous to me—unless you’re thinking only in terms of local stamp circuits where people get together and start up their own Game versions.”

            Joňan winked, but she didn’t react. It had grown too dark—A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat. “Isn’t that what life is?” Ryokän must have nodded, because he felt her shoulder move.

            “Yes, life is a Game. But it can also be regarded as a movie.”

            “Yeah? Well, it could only be Science Fiction,” Joňan quipped, but Ryokän ignored him.

             “I’m thinking of The Neverending Story." she said. "Do you remember the conversation at the end? The boy and the princess are talking, but there’s also a third person present—the one who has the actual power—who is drawn into the story.

            Joňan slid closer. “You think he’s going to show up here and save us?” He took her hand. “Here, let me lead you past some watchful dragons.”