Nanowrimo 2022

Flying Cattle Class

American Kingdom Day 29.2

Previous chapter:

We landed on a side runway, a short taxi to the Fedex ramp, of all places, quick exit into two black Cadillac Escalades with flashing lights on top, hurry, hurry, hurry, Lady Marion pumping her arm, bags in the back, jump into a seat through open doors.

“Good to see you, Your Grace,” I said, bobbing my head.

“Sergeant Freytag, you too.”

She took her seat beside the driver. “Moving now,” she said into a walkie-talkie, and we were rolling at speed along a service road.

A major airport at night, seen from the airside service areas, is rather like some dystopian science fiction film. We passed by endless nosewheels, battered utility vehicles, industrial hoppers and containers and pipes of all descriptions, slack-faced workers doing unknowable things to weird pieces of equipment.

After ten minutes of this, I began to suspect that the driver had somehow managed to get stuck on some loop; it was all exactly the same, and at some point the cloned workers would attack the now slowly-moving luxury vehicles, dividing our belongings amongst themselves while our bodies were hidden in a freight container bound for Liberia.

We came to a stop at an anonymous glass door, haul our bags into a lobby where five trolleys and a uniformed airport worker waited.

“Follow Jésus,” Marion said, smiling.

Jésus led us through a plusher, calmer land, one with carpets and art on the walls, planters filled with green, speakers playing soft music.

“Marion, what on earth is going on?”

“Oh, they haven’t told you?”

“Just that we’re ordered to the Palace. Via Madrid. Overnight. In a tearing hurry. I’m hoping you can tell me more.”

“I can. You’re flying Iberian. I’ve managed to get two Business seats and three in Premium Economy on a completely full flight. You can split them any way you want but I recommend seniority, which means the two captains will sit together up front, the three sergeants behind.”

“Three? I thought Nathan was E-4?”

“He received a well-deserved promotion for topping the course.”

“Oooooh,” I sighed. “If you only knew, Marion.”

We had reached a series of check-in counters. No long snaking queues of weary passengers. Just a series of smiling clerks.

“VIP check-in, dear. The limo dock is just the other side of those doors.”

Marion approached one of the clerks, who held up a clipboard. “I’ve managed to get one more J seat for you.”

“Thank you, Sandra.” She beckoned us in. “We’ve got three Business class seats. Oscar and Annie, you lovebirds get two of them. Because you outrank these three sergeants.”

Nathan’s face lit up.

“You three can choose who gets to fly up front, and who gets the two Premium Economy seats. They aren’t bad, just not as much room, and the wine isn’t quite as nice.”

“Are they together?” I asked.

The clerk nodded.

“Nathan,” Hazel and I said in unison.

Lady Marion supervised our check in. Bags disappeared, each with a blue “Priority” tag, we were handed boarding passes, and “Fast Pass” tickets for TSA security.

“Go straight to your boarding gate,” Marion announced. “This is goodbye for now but I am sure I will see each of you again. Best wishes for future happiness, Annie and Oscar. Ask for their best cava once you get aboard and tell them why. Hazel and Nathan and Molly, enjoy your flight, enjoy your time there. Molly, we will have to get together soon. I get over there a couple of times a year, we can catch up then. Oh yes, Brian sends his love.”

“Oh, where is he?”

“He’s packing up a helicopter that wasn’t needed. Just as well, he’s as good a pilot as he is a driver.”

Annie, Oscar, and Nathan took the premium lane, flashed their boarding passes and were gone.

I sat with Hazel until our rows were called. It had been a long and certainly interesting day. Tiring, too. Not so much in body but in my mind, with so many things happening, so many changes to process.

I reached over and took her hand. For comfort, for company. She gave me a squeeze and we sat happily until I realised that Premium Economy was included in the premium lane.

Oh joy! We followed the last of the Business passengers aboard.

Our seats in the small cabin were nothing special, not like the lounge chairs up front, but compared to your regular Coach there was more space, individual footrests, more room to recline. We found our seats — two together, window and aisle, on the left side.

Oodles of space in the overhead locker, storage for my handbag, nooks and crannies, a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, pillow, and blanket.

I folded my blanket over my lap. For a night flight I’d be able to drape it over my recumbent form, as would Hazel on the window side.

We were offered glasses of juice before take off. Up front they had the option of cava as well — the champagne equivalent they had in Spain. Then again, I’d had a fair bit of alcohol already at dinner and in the club. A glass to top me up would be nice but maybe they’d serve it with dinner.

They did, as it happened half an hour into the air, and I had a taste of the white. Dry, flavourless, not a patch on the chardonnay we’d had in Camp Whiffie. Dinner was something to look at and pick at rather than devour. Some of the passengers around us must have been famished, but our appetite, at least for food, was approximately zero.

Finally the plates were cleared away, the last of the passengers had visited the bathrooms, and the cabin lights were dimmed. I reclined my seat a little — not a lot; I wanted some privacy — and spread my blanket, as did Hazel.

We held hands under the blanket, enjoying the feeling of companionship until I pulled Hazel’s hand over to my side and pushed her wandering fingers further south.

Next chapter:

The whole novel (in progress)

Notes

Oh boy!

Under the gun now. I have some real-life things going on — on the last day of NaNoWriMo, talk about your poor planning! — and feeling tired to boot.

I can honestly claim 50,000 words written if you count up these notes and comments related to the project.

So I’ve already won.

For fiction, I actually have 815 words to go write now, according to my spreadsheet where I’m calculating wordage two different ways. By daily word count on one side and adding up the words per chapter on the other. They agree to within two words. That is probably coincidence rather than good planning.

I’ve been writing in Medium and dumping the words into Scrivener as I go. This gives me a daily count according to a nifty document in the NaNoWriMo template but the true count has to be the total of the chapters I’ve also been constructing as I go.

I did a test compile, pushing out an epub file and it’s looking good.

When I finish for real I’ll compile, push that into Vellum, and make this into a beautifully-formatted epub and PDF with custom fonts and graphics that I can load up on KDP.

That’s likely January for a novel finish — because I’m not going to writing at this rate through December — February for editing, and March for publishing. Professional editing once I’m done will likely be a couple of thousand dollars. I’ll assess my situation then.

I’m not quite finished this 50,000 words but I know where I’m going. Another chapter to get to the Palace and then everything is going to change. Second half of the novel — and the novel series after that — will drive some significant conflict. Very likely I’ll go back and retrofit some of this into what I’ve already written which it must be said is pretty bloody tame right now.

A novel series, you say?

Yup. I have an arc sketched out in my head. It adds up philosophically, it has a great deal of scope for conflict — both internal and out — and will satisfy what I hope will be a growing legion of fans and followers.

I distinguish the two because Molly and her adventures aren’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea. The bones of anguish are already set. This libertine claims to be a Christian but takes the Lord’s name in vain, isn’t anywhere near as modest as she might, and is right now engaged in lesbian sex acts under a blanket on a night flight to Spain. The horror.

Don’t blame me. Blame the early Church. It took Christianity about three hundred years to settle on a dogma, and in that time there were some pretty wild and woolly ideas floating around. Just how and where and why was Jesus both human and divine? Was there some dividing line that could be found? Was he both fully human and fully divine at the same time? Did Jesus the boy child actually create the entire universe?

While the Church was working out the Nicene Creed, the living memories of Jesus himself had vanished and the texts associated with the first years of recording and spreading the Gospel were fragmenting both physically and in their contents. By the time anyone got around to compiling a canon of Christian scripture there was literally nothing left from the time of Jesus.

Jesus himself — like Socrates — did not write anything down. At least Socrates had Plato to record the dialogues and spend the rest of his life sorting out the philosophy into some semblance of coherence. Jesus had nobody.

Just oral tales and sayings. There must have been the sources — Q and M and L and so on — compiled and copied and passed around in the years after His death. We don’t have these first sources. We don’t have the original manuscripts of the Gospels. Or of Paul’s writings. Or any New Testament text at all. Nothing.

These were all written on papyrus, which has a short effective life, especially if people are passing the texts around, reading from them, discussing them, copying the words.

Copies lead to discrepancies and editorial changes. When we look at the earliest copies — and most of what we have are tiny fragments of stained papyrus, just a few lines on a fragile piece of disintegrating plant pulp — we find that the New Testament contains a higher number of errors than the total number of actual words.

The Gospels tell different stories. The familiar stories of Nativity and Passion aren’t found in any one place. They are cobbled together from different sources. John has Jesus executed on the day of Passover, the earlier Synoptics have him crucified the following day.

As with the record of the life of Jesus, so too with what he taught. Did he teach that good works alone bring salvation, as in Matthew, or can you have faith in the last instants of a criminal life and get a Fast Pass into Heaven, as Luke says?

Jesus Himself may have said different things at different times, according to his own evolving understanding of his being. He wasn’t walking around in his childhood declaring that he was the Creator God of the Old Testament. Nor in his adult life, we may safely assume. You’d want to be doing more than turning the odd flagon of water into wine to justify such appalling blasphemy amongst Jews of ancient Palestine.

Modern — post-Nicene — Christianity is more a matter of picking and choosing from the sources. The authors of the earliest texts had their own agendas and views. Paul wasn’t concerned with Jesus himself — he barely mentions the central figure of Christianity as an actual living human being — so much as sorting out doctrinal differences in diverse gatherings.

John — written decades later by someone who had never met Jesus — moves away from the Synoptics and towards Nicaea. By the time John was compiled it was painfully obvious that Jesus was not returning during the lifetimes of those who had heard him promise it. An alternate view had to be found.

So Christianity is really a matter of picking your source to suit your opinions. Jesus never spoke out against homosexuality or any other diversion from traditional Jewish gender roles and yet Paul in Romans has some pretty strong words to say. He goes on to discuss circumcision, giving it a lower importance than Jews would rightly support, because by the time Romans was written the infant Church had spread beyond the synagogue network that cradled the first Christians.

I choose to have Molly exhibit a healthy approach to sexuality. She gets her pleasures according to her wants and needs, not by any biblical code of morals. In a steady relationship, she is faithful. When she is not with the one she loves, she loves the one she’s with.

There will be those who love Jesus who do not love Molly. This will be as true in my fictional world as it is in the real one. My Kingdom is more free and open than many churches, but still…

Anyway, enough musing. I have writing to do right now, even as I plot the future.

Molly