Next stop was a roadside fruit stand. Much haggling ensued over a melon the size of New Scotland. He insisted that it not be cut for a sample. The melon was cut nonetheless, with a knife worthy of a bad horror flick. Once it was cut, Colchis didn’t want it. Now that it was cut, he had to take it. A price was named worthy of a Spartan grocer. For an unwanted, uncut melon? Never! Colchis bought elsewhere. Despite much brandishing of melon knives, only fruit was threatened, and in the end he bought two monstrous fruits for half a crown.
Of course, he was hoping for archival news, mundane or otherwise. Much of the next several days was mundane indeed, spent reviewing invoices for equipment orders, making final decisions about placement of things, and figuring out what, if anything, they were to do about the leaky roof. It required the combined decision-making skills of four professors, the university president, a civil engineer, a security chief, a systems integrator, a budget analyst, and a secretary to accomplish this, but accomplished it was. Installation at Zion University, God willing, was to be finished the following week. Work would start in earnest on the Temple in the next several days, with Bonneville to follow.
One might well have asked what fighting in remote corners of the city had to do with installing archives. Nothing. Everything. Nothing, at any given moment, in that it was physically happening far from where Colchis was. Sometimes he heard gun ships flying overhead. Sometimes, if mortar fire and counter-fire was really intense, he heard a distant rumble, mostly drowned out by traffic noise. Everything, over the toll of days, because of rumored calls for, and threats of, violence. One day, a rumor would ripple down the street from the fruit stand: it’s bad today! But Colchis would hear nothing. Two days later came footage of the extent of the fighting; the hundreds or thousands (hard to tell) demonstrating in the streets in some far-off neighborhood.
Barthes saw news interviews with locals, righteously indignant at the prospect of Maxroy’s Purchase TCM troops entering this or that pocket. Any talk regarding Maxroy’s Purchase and Accession resurrected fearful memories of the aftermath of the first “Jackson Delegation” visit. There was strong conviction that MP and Imperial factions were sponsoring a good deal of the violence. Local TCM members, formerly sympathetic to the Maxroy’s Purchase troops, now saw the latter as spoilers who wished only to take over control of holy sites on New Utah. MP fighters, in the local view, were a bunch of hired thugs, and quietly most would allow that their True Church Elder was the worst kind of political opportunist. Colchis heard this from people of all religious stripes: Sixer, High Christian, Muslim, even True Church adherents themselves.
A rumor was circulating, supposedly corroborated by several witnesses: on the day of the church bombings, before the bombs went off, reporters were on hand, cameras trained on the doorways on the sheltered side of the church, just in time to catch the screaming victims burst out. How could they have known to be there? Who knew. Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe they were not there at all. But in that climate, calls to random violence certainly did not need any more media outlets.
Flyers appeared, circulated to non-Mormon shops. Convert to the True Church, they said, and you will no longer be in danger. The Bishop himself declared a curfew on all ministries, warning employees to stay home “for their own safety.” “Hooligans” attacked ambulances and water-delivery trucks serving poorer, fringe neighborhoods. So although nothing overt happened within central Saint George itself, and certainly nothing within the Security Zone, events elsewhere cast a pall over street-level commerce. Some businesses closed up for the day; some just closed early; others opened late. Yet again the university was closed, and no work done. So, they would not finish the following week after all.
One Thursday night was exceptionally bizarre. All was normalcy: the shops, the traffic, the bustle of loading docks. All was awry: the brightness, the meetings, the walk home; the gun ships, the horns, the sirens. Then silence. Then cheerful sounds of an evening get-together next door: laughter, clinking glasses, a blaring tri-v. A game of some kind. The rising and falling cheers of a sporting match. A happy evening. He was lulled to sleep.
He awoke to discover that, instincts intact, he’d just hit the floor behind cover, as a roar of gunfire engulfed the city. It volleyed; it rolled; it thundered; it erupted from beneath his very balcony. Shouting erupted with it, from every direction: hundreds, it seemed thousands, of—of cheers? And fans screaming GOAL!!!!? He realized that he’d been jolted from sleep by—a winning side in a trophy match? Yes! Saint George defeats Bonneville! Securing the cup! The gunfire was deafening. It grew in intensity. It swept eastward, then westward, then eastward again. Then, in a staccato riff on dueling strings or howling dogs, distant burps were answered by local reports. As it began to fade, he could once again hear his neighbors clearly—unconcerned, laughing and clinking and happy. He became extraordinarily bright himself. He climbed sheepishly from the floor.
But what goes up, must come down. The velocity of a bullet, having reached the apex of its trajectory, and falling once again to the ground, is the same as it was when it left the muzzle of the rifle, discharged into the sky. Following the jubilation, came a different kind of rifle fire. More pointed. Single shots. With a different kind of shouting. Angry shouting. Angry fire. Some of it from directly beneath Barthes’ window. Then silence. Then horns. Then sirens. Then, finally, a less easy quiet, with night watchmen milling like disturbed ants on the street. Finally, relief, and, in the wee hours, sleep.
So it came as no surprise to hear on the morning news—having caught up at last with the wind—that fighting in the east of the city had been fierce on Thursday, with scattered fighting throughout the night. Colchis spent his Friday alternately doing normal things: a bit of washing up, a bit of writing—while plotting exit strategies and contemplating some security meetings of his own for Saturday morning. Then, in the afternoon, four explosions rattled his windows from about half a mile away. Then sirens. Then helicopters. And then an evening movie on the tri-v. And then he waited for the news delay, that would tell him what had been.
The satellite on which Barthes’ regular communication access depended remained inaccessible for days, leaving him feeling deaf, dumb, and blind. Tense, tense, tense: everything and everyone was tense. He spent one day twiddling with a presentation showing some of his progress. He queued it up to send once re-connected. Then, once the connection came up, solar flares, or something, had communications down anyway. Fierce fighting was rumored near the Medical College. Reports flowed in to the main Zion Univers ity campus: windows rattling on and off for three days; mortars falling in residential neighborhoods everywhere; security guards posted everywhere; TCM and civil police nowhere to be seen. Daytime curfews had shut down all transportation between city districts. Stranded at his office, he had good news from the Zion campus itself: no disturbances there, and work managed to limp along. Barthes was amazed by the courage exhibited every day, day after day, by those around him.
And then, abruptly as it had begun, came several days and nights of calm. The air was stunningly clear, lending Barthes to pensive consideration of the landscape, and agriculture, and history of New Utah. At Zion University, the large, new instructional lab and reading rooms were complete, and at both facilities the datasets were brought online. Evening Citizen Workshops were scheduled to teach all comers how to access public lecture, archival, and research media.
Colchis spent his nights troubleshooting, upgrading, and updating all the behind the scenes cataloguing, circulation, and reference support more-or-less taken for granted at home institutions. He emerged each morning to glorious weather. Cool, breezy, and clear. Finally, they were done. It was on to Bonneville for Colchis Barthes now.