Who Killed Iron Joe? Part 8: Moon of Black Cherries

From the journal of Fialkov:

When I first arrived at Magnumtown, I was cautioned to keep my distance by just about everyone.  At first I found this advice to be absurdly counterintuitive, but the more I thought about it, the more it sounded rational.  It made sense to keep a certain amount of perspective.


The Danab, it should be understood, are not always good with perspective.  We are a race bred for superiority, or so the myth goes, hand-selected by the Tikanni to excel most others in every degree, so that adversity becomes something of a simple matter to overcome, and most accomplishments are foregone before they are even undertaken.  The only problem we’ve ever had is handling humans, who are a stubborn people, incapable of admitting defeat.  That is their singular characteristic.  They don’t know when to quit.  I wish I could explain that.


There is another myth among my people, in that there is nothing noble among humans, nothing breathtaking, and that in contrast, that is all there is to know about Danab.  These are my private thoughts, and so I am free to express this here, no matter how dangerous they may be.  Yet even that, should this journal ever become public, would be embraced as characteristic.  Danab don’t accept limitations, and they love a challenge.


I suppose that means I should have been happy to come to Magnumtown, because there are few comparable challenges, except, historically, the colony at Wanethrex, which proved to be one of the biggest challenges the Danab ever embraced.  I sometimes like to consider Magnumtown to be my personal Wanethrex.  It was there, too, where a Danab was challenged to reconcile our people with humanity.  I intend to succeed where my forefathers failed.


The leaders of the Tuska bore me already.  They are pedestrian and predictable, and so I do not expect a challenge from them.  It’s the shining dancer Carrie Arosen who continually fascinates me.  She writes letters almost daily, and she does not believe that I read them, and they are vivacious and cruel in their accusations, their assumptions about me and my goals.  I had barely stepped foot in Magnumtown the first time I read them.  I believe she didn’t even know my name the first time she wrote one.  This is not uncommon within the Tuska.  The fact that she writes often of potential alliances is what intrigues me.  She has borrowed this theme, too, but she is the only one who seems to believe they’re possible.  


If I had never seen her, it might be possible to divorce the image from the content, the shining dancer.  I cannot talk about her with my attendants, or in my reports.  Knowledge of this young woman is dangerous.  I doubt she registers on anyone else’s radar, even her own people’s.  Yet I alone seem to understand her significance.  She is the beacon of a new resistance, perhaps the symbol of the future.  She calculates possibilities most others would never consider.  I feel almost intimate with her.  Perhaps she herself does not know her potential.  I have always argued that the best individuals are not stuffed with pride, but rather are filled with the knowledge of their capabilities.  This and any other world does not reward that.  The Danab should, if anyone, but they don’t.  They value achievement, and will not abide anything less.  They value the tangible, when it’s the intangible that ushers revolution.


 The progress here in Magnumtown is dull and grinding, and for every step forward there are the proverbial two steps back.  I am forced into the worst decisions every day, and feel as if I will lose myself, if not for the strange example of someone like Carrie Arosen, who may yet teach us all what it’s like to change the world without any real power to do it.  If that does not make any sense, then I am at a less to explain anything.