In the Next Life, Canto III, stanzas 270-274

I haven’t, since he cut the women loose,
discussed his plan. Well, here’s a little hint:
He brought some rope with which to make a noose.
To start a fire, he brought a piece of flint.

The trading post lay halfway in between
the compound and the city limit line,
though nothing of the limit could be seen.
Corrosion long ago had claimed the sign.

The spot he chose had been a narrow street
that separated two old factories,
and if I’m ever wanting of a cleat,
a piece of rusted rebar, if you please.

His length of rope would reach three times across,
with slack enough to leave room for a knot.
Like fingers in a strand of dental floss,
the rope and leg would be bound at that spot.

As soon as sundown’s rays imbued the sky,
he gathered up some branches, leaves, and grass,
preferring green and dewy over dry.
Less flame that way, and more repulsive gas.

©2011 Louis A. Merrimac

In the Next Life, Canto III, stanzas 265-269

If nothing else, these musings occupied
our hero as he readied Seven Six
for her role in the coming homicide—
a part he’d recently put in the mix.

They helped distract his mind away from grief,
the journey being lonely to the town
where he had gone in old days with his chief
to pick up food and lay transistors down.

He’d never learned how, long ere he was born,
the ancestors of Darna first took in
what carriers would take in trade for corn,
and how communications could begin.

At first, presumably, they’d merely dealt
with humans, who would understand their need.
The carriers would copy those who dwelt
within their bellies when they would succeed.

What mattered to him when he first passed through
was that the traders did, in fact, transact.
This time the place had one main feature, too:
Its carriers were ripe to be attacked.

Her role: We never learn what part 76 was to play, as the curtain comes down before she is ever called to the stage.
They’d: The antecedent for this pronoun has to be the ancestors of Darna.

©2011 Louis A. Merrimac

In the Next Life, Canto III, stanzas 258-264

He found that he could reconcile this need
with her insistence on the search for gain
if he imagined that it were a seed
that lived and reproduced within her brain.

This thing was planted when she was a girl.
From someone else’s mind it made the leap.
She’d cut the leaves off as they would unfurl,
but never found the root that grew so deep.

It was more complicated than that, sure.
It manifested itself other ways.
It wasn’t quite a life form—not that pure—
more like a symbiosis, but with strays.

The basic urge, which he called ‘Species A’—
the need one feels to have a legacy—
would lie in wait for gods to whom to pray,
and thus would find a partner: ‘Species B’.

A neat Darwinian scenario.
A mutual assistance textbook case.
But what environment would let this grow?
What of the species that supplies the space?

Did human genes, at some point way back when,
enjoy some benefit when they’d allow
these creatures to invade the minds of men?
If he could answer that, he’d answer how.

Much like a portrait of a looking glass,
the question was within itself contained.
An artist often reaches an impasse
and paints the way self-knowledge is constrained.

The search for gain: Again, the Objectivists’ regard of rational self-interest as a higher good.
Mutual assistance: What we called symbiosis in biology class.
Constrained: Lack of perspective.

©2011 Louis A. Merrimac