THE OPEN INDEPENDENCE OF THE SEAS THE OPEN INDEPENDENCE OF THE SEAS Loyd L. Fueston, Jr. Published by Loyd L. Fueston, Jr. c 2010, Loyd L. Fueston, Jr. Substantially finished by mid-1990s when proposals were sent out to dozens of large and small publishers. Some rejected it and some didn't bother to reply. I'm now publishing it on the Internet with some minor changes. Rights reserved according to Version 3.0 of the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license as written and published by Creative Commons Corporation. This license can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. A copy is also appended to the end of this book. The poem The Anecdote of the Jar is by Wallace Stevens and not by Dylan Shagari. 1 Parnell Lopez watched as his wife Marie pulled up her line to reveal a squirming, two-pound mass of bullhead, white-belly shining in the sun. A fine meal would it make, but Marie's squeals anticipated something other than gastronomic pleasure. More likely was it fear that made her hold the pole at arm's length keeping danger at least six feet away. Having a fine son in the vicinity, Parnell chose to sit quietly as Jimmy, a little man at ten, strutted over to rescue his mother. Four year-old Alicia stared in horrified wonder as her brother grabbed the line with his left hand and then put his right hand towards the monster so capable of inflicting pain. The confident lad expertly placed his fingers around the bases of the stinging appendages. With his hand so close to the creature as to be beyond the reach of its weapons, Jimmy held on tightly and worked the hook out of the bullhead's mouth As the excitement dissipated into the breeze, Parnell laid back to stare at the clouds passing by. The winds were strong up high. The clouds were moving and shifting about rapidly. It took not many heartbeats for two pillow-shaped formations to collide and become one. Only forty-three times did his eyes blink before a wispy collection of icy water vapor disappeared completely. Not a feather had it been, but far less, for such a miragy thing could not have supported the most ghostly of sparrows. For all the damage they could cause, there was little more density to thunder-boomers than to the most harried of scuds. For all their grandeur did clouds come in and out of the world so quickly and so easily. Not much were clouds like constellations, though both, to be sure, put on quite a show in the sky. The constellations marched so stately, allowing the Earth to spin beneath them but declining to participate in the con- stant change of lesser things. Except, of course, that many of their points were active nuclear furnaces burning up immense quantities of matter and 1 2 CHAPTER 1. shooting radiation and gases all over Creation. Other constellation points were galaxies lying longfar agoway. Still others were strange objects which might have come to be shortly after the Universe cooled down enough that particles and electromagnetic energy could separate one from the other. So far as anyone could tell, many of those objects had passed out of exis- tence, or perhaps had become other objects, after occupying slender slices of space-time. Parnell never forgot { however romantic it might have been with Marie under the Zodiac, that those points of the constellations were all moving so rapidly. Even the closest stars were moving many tens of thousands of miles an hour through space. As were the galaxies which contained them. And the clusters which contained the galaxies. The expansive movement of the entire Universe was still a relative mystery. One thing was sure though { some of those objects so longfar agoway appeared to be traveling away from the Earth at respectable percentages of the speed of light. Still, there was enough of an appearance of stability to allow Parnell to think of constellations as representing well-structured things while the clouds seemed to be of flimsier and more contingent stuff. As absurd as the effort seemed, even to Parnell. Sought he patterns in the most ephemeral of processes, in the shortest- lived collections of elementary particles. A foible it was, but Parnell knew and accepted even the most rational components of his personality. He was not sure what other choices he had, and, besides, he considered himself likable enough if often absentmindedly absorbed in one thing or another which might have caught his attention. Well enough did he understand the ways in which he percepted the world and painfully did he know the differences between his ways and those of most men. Abstract were his ways of thought. Biased was he to see structure even in the messy stuff of life. Tended he to stand quietly and search for patterns even in the midst of bloody mayhem. He could not deny it, had no reason to deny it: He was self-consciously autistic in the other way if not in the first and most concrete way. Watched he did as his mind worked the bullhead incident into the complex web of memories ever being restructured by the environmental and neuronal events of the percepted present. By such a process of re-membering had he made some sense of a world in which he had seen so much and lost so many. Not fully did the world or his life make sense. The decisions of other men, the brutally factual contingencies of the physical world, and sheer unexplained 3 fuzz acted to turn the most carefully constructed narrative into an extended joke which never reached the punch-line. Hard had he worked to make sense of his life and of his context. Some of the people most important in his life had not been easy to fit into a coherent narrative. People seemed to be like that. They resisted all attempts to treat them even as categorized creatures let alone as objects. The most important of people? Marie, Jimmy, and Alicia occupied many a node in the web of his mem- ories. Presumably, he in theirs. What of the dead? His parents and grandparents. He had never met either of his father's parents, and he had never met his grandmother Morgan Llewellyn, the well-known neurobiologist who had a reputation as being a nervy biologist when she was morally aroused. Clearly a dominating figure when alive, she merely passed by at the edge of Parnell's most imaginative re-creations of the past. James Llewellyn, sometimes a missionary or a slayer of man-eating leop- ards and sometimes a designer of systems to launch missiles and anti-missile missiles and etc. was a giant in Parnell's memory. He was the grandpa who had sat Parnell down when he was but eight and taught him about the renormalization of the bare electrical charge necessitated by the flood of virtual particles surrounding the electron. Infinite could be the calculated probabilities without the proper techniques! For just a second, Parnell was lost in wonder at such a thing. Infinite probabilities! Wise had been the grandfather for those renormalization techniques had proved useful in solv- ing a wide range of physical problems involving that impossible division by zero in one stage of one process if not another. Nevertheless, those tech- niques had not been at all well justified. Clearly the techniques of men were not adequate to the task of solving the most simple and best formed of problems. So why did those adhocky methods work so well? Parnell was damned if he knew. There had also been the wise killer and poor little Donnie who had watched from inside his own head as the doggies were being tortured. Par- nell had met the killer and he had watched as Donnie was released by a furry mammal which had evolved rapidly as it had moved through a gigantic computer network. Not to be forgotten was the wise killer's master { the 400 pound Overlord- General who sat wherever he damned well pleased. And that seemed to have been mostly on someone's face. 4 CHAPTER 1. There had also been a 400 pound gorilla, Alpha Draco, who had been a friend of the poet. In all likelihood, he would have been able to sit pretty much where he wanted most of the time, but, from all reports, he had been too gentle to realize his power. Anyway, the jungle had been swarming with men with little in the way of fungible paper but plenty of rifles. Those men had been after the hides or tusks of many a living creature, hoping to gain the money which would allow them to buy more rifles if not necessarily more food. The Dracos, a nice family from all reports { if a bit infested with fleas, had been named by their friend, the poet. The poet. The damned poet. The damned, beloved poet. Most of all, the poet dominated the unbirthed narrative of Parnell's life, though he had never met that cousin of his mother. Half-Nigerian had been the poet. A bit more than half-Welsh as well. The pretty neurobiologist, student of Morgan Llewellyn, had provided the link between the poet and the 400 pound man. She had been a simpler person, being 100% French despite her Vietnamese father. Nevertheless, she had managed to turn herself into an even greater mystery than the poet, for she had left behind little documentation on her person.