The Ring 💍 Paris

La Vie en Orange

Souvenir

As he walked up Rue du Ruisseau toward the café, Kenneth felt guilty and triumphant at the same time. He realized that it was uncharitable of him to feel happy that Jean-Marc had been incinerated. Apparently, the Baulians had as much use for his culture du jour as Kenneth did. At least Victor Hugo could stop turning restlessly in his grave. He might even sit up in his stony chair, look out over the Cour d’Honneur, and warm his bones in the bonfire of human vanity.

By the time Kenneth stepped up to l’Étoile de Montmartre, he had completely dismissed any lingering guilt about Jean-Marc. He was instead thinking about the wedding. He wondered how many of his relatives would be able to make it to Paris. As he opened the door, he halted in his thoughts, wondering how many of them had been eliminated. were left. But his calculation remained incomplete: absent-mindedly searching for Martine in the crowded café, he saw the same orange light he had seen in the auditorium. Yet this time it beamed from the head of the orange-haired man into the forehead of his fiancée.

It was the same man he saw during his lecture, right before the earthquake. At the time he was so overwrought with indecision and portents of amatory doom that he never considered any other sort of doom. Neither earthquakes in Japan nor aliens from Baulis Prime. But now he remembered it all with clarity: he was thinking about the text Martine had sent him, the one that threatened him with Jean-Marc’s new job in Tokyo. “He's invited me to Japan. Should I go?” The ring on his finger was pulsing and there was an orange shaft of light emanating from the man with the orange hair. Kenneth thought further: was his hair actually orange or did the orange beam only make it seem that way? Back in the auditorium, any type of orange beam or orange hair didn’t figure into his calculations. But now, he looked more carefully. The man’s hair was in fact blond.

It wasn’t until Kenneth saw Martine connected by an orange beam to the man with the blond hair that he suspected she wasn’t entirely human. He always thought he didn’t understand her because she was French, or because she was a woman, or because she was an actress. He assumed a French actress would appear alien to a straight male from Alberta. But now he wondered if he had got it all wrong.

Martine

Martine figured it was about time Kenneth understood what was going on. The whole game was really unfair. It was bad enough that she took advantage of him in a romantic way. He was such an innocent, as if he’d walked out of some corn field in Iowa. Teaching in Oxford for a year hadn’t helped him either. It merely made him think that his ideas were that much more powerful, and that he was, as a result, that much more powerful. But to Martine it just made him that much more vulnerable. All that thinking just covered up his emotions, which he could barely locate, deep down under all those intellectual absurdities.

It was bad enough that she was a scheming French woman. But to be a Baulomorph and a scheming French woman just wasn’t cricket — an expression she resented. She may not know the rules of cricket, but he didn’t even know the name of the game she was playing.

Well, at least some of the rules were coming to light. The slicing orange beams from the sky had seen to that. The next step was more delicate, however. How to show him that she was a Baulomorph, and yet get him to believe that she hadn’t been playing him all along? That she actually cared for him, loved him?

How to face him without worrying about hurting his feelings? The worry was the problem. As a Baulomorph she shouldn’t have worried at all about her role in the Great Game of Empire. But as a human, she did worry. And that’s what worried her.

It was a play-relationship that Martine had played for so long that she couldn’t tell if she was playing anymore. So, she did what she’d always done: she kept on playing along.

Thløn

Martine’s play-acting didn’t bother Thløn in the least. It didn’t really matter if she called him a Bauliamate or a steam-chamber partner. Her petty remorse seemed inconsequential. He expected it of her and he pitied her because of it. She was, after all, only a Gradient Baulomorph.

Still, Martine was a useful tool, and a lively, beautiful one at that. As an agent of the Streak Police, Thløn wasn’t required to feel any warmth toward his operatives. Yet he felt protective of Martine. He smiled indulgently when she talked about her feelings and other rubbish.

The Empire needed her kind in order to get into the heads of the races they needed to control. The Streak Police had long since arrived at the conclusion that a race was never completely subjugated until it no longer felt subjugated. Or, failing that, until every single thought of rebellion had been isolated and dealt with. To rule an Empire one must not only be ruthless; one must also be thorough.

It didn’t bother Thløn in the least that Martine occasionally lost her psychological balance because of this loser from Edmonton, a city of about a million people, now a circular kilometre of skyscrapers surrounded by parks and soy bean fields. The fields had been fertilized by 17% of the inhabitants, just to make it clear to the independent-minded Albertans that they should give up all thoughts of forming an independent state.

To add insult to injury, Edmonton hadn’t been chosen to be one of the 777 Cities of Global Culture, despite its claim to a lively arts scene and large Ukrainian community. To the west, however, the beautiful Banff & Jasper Mountain Parks were thriving: together they had 15 million human workers and 75 million Baulian tourists and executives. Some called the two new cities the Zurich and Geneva of Canada.

The Edmontonians tried to complain to Ottawa, but were just sent brochures of new barista and waste management opportunities in the mountain loft resorts and conference centres of Jasper and Banff.

Thløn put on his most sympathetic face, and reached out his hand in a gesture of bonhomie. To pretend to care was the only sure way to locate, and then to snip, the thin thread of rebellion that linked Europe to North America. And while, deep down inside, Thløn did harbour a little ember of feeling toward his operative, he threw sand on it whenever he saw Kenneth’s stupid face.

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Next: ✏️ Au Bord de la Seine

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