INTERSTELLAR DUST TO VOLCANIC ISLANDS
And the great goddess Gaia gives birth to many offspring. Among them are the demigods known as Titans who do so much to build her legacy and ensure its permanence in the cosmic drama. But one of these Titans is the defiant Prometheus who audaciously creates thinking beings. These are new and unique creatures that on the vast template of time and by virtue of their capacity to reason become more powerful than all others. Gaia is furious and envious. She sees that she is upstaged and forever after wages war against these thinking beings—Prometheus’s legacy.
From an unknown drama by Aeschylus, lost
to
history until its papyrus is found in the cave
of a remote island in the Aegean Sea.
Its title: Gaia's War.
From the beginning, planet Earth had water—immense quantities of water.
This is understandable, for throughout the universe, hydrogen is the most common element with oxygen not far behind. Because each is highly reactive and bonds readily, boundless stretches of interstellar dust and gas contain water in the form of ice. Indeed, ice is the most abundant solid object. Not surprisingly then, when this dust and gas coalesce to form solar systems, certain planets and moons—if conditions of pressure, temperature, and gravity are fortuitous—trap huge masses of water beneath their mantles. Earth, due in large measure to size and distance from its sun, was one of those planets. And so it joined the other water-blessed planets and moons in the universe—they would be countless—all offspring of the eternally-repeating cosmic drama of stellar evolution.
After planet Earth came into being, a different form of evolution began. A volatile molten core seethed beneath her massive reservoirs of captured water; for more than half a billion years, volcanic eruptions broke through her crust and spewed superheated gasses high into the primordial atmosphere. Water vapor was one of those gasses. When it cooled, it condensed into rain, and the rain inundated the planet with water. Eventually, it reached a depth of more than two miles over her entire surface. Temperature and pressure maintained the water in its liquid state; gravity prevented it from escaping into space.
This was a blessing, for the water soothed Mother Earth, slaking her passion for violence until finally there was the relative quiet of a breathless potentiality. A new planet, blanketed by water, was now ready to define herself. Thales of Miletus, philosopher-scientist of Ancient Greece, could he have witnessed it, would have been taken by it all. He it was who identified water as the originating principle of everything else, as if he had somehow divined the above drama.
Subsequent acts in the drama confirmed his principle. Lightning bolts, striking the rich chemical soup of ancient ocean water, triggered the creation of a new stuff. This stuff was a fusion of carbon and hydrogen and other elements. The stuff was animate matter. Living matter. Matter that could replicate itself, the never-seen-before complexity of which would become an inextricable part of Earth’s history.
Earth’s animated matter was exclusively microbial for an unimaginable span of time. It was billions of years before the plants and animals evolved. But microbes had paved the way for them with atmospheric oxygen, that vital product of one microbe in particular, photosynthetic cyanobacteria. Then, as if in full circle, all life, to this day, fundamentally depends on microbes to function, survive, and thrive.
Earth’s evolution was not smooth. Although relentless, it was marked by fits and starts, extinctions and re-starts. Some were cataclysmic, and the planet’s ever-changing geology was a sweeping canvas for it all. But one portion of the canvas was especially significant. Cooler parts of the planet’s crust were pulled downwards into the molten lower mantle, and this weakened the surrounding crust. Many repetitions led to plate-like boundaries that gradually formed giant tectonics adrift on a viscous lower layer. Later, these evolved into separate land masses that eventually merged, before breaking apart again. This happened more than once in the planet’s four and a half billion years. Evidence suggests that the most recent was three hundred million years ago and was the supercontinent scientists call Pangaia—Pan for “All” and Gaia for “Earth.” Pangaia’s eventual breakup yielded today’s continents and demarcated Earth’s various oceans and seas.
One of these oceans is the Atlantic, and a small part of the Atlantic is the Caribbean Sea. This sea is a million square miles of such breathtaking beauty, that it easily rivals that of the slightly smaller Mediterranean Sea. Its depths bottom out on the Caribbean plate situated between the much larger ones of North and South America. Many islands, primarily volcanic, formed in the Caribbean Sea, products of tectonic plate movement—processes that are still at work today.
Over the centuries European countries colonized these islands and vied for dominance. War, slavery, and imported pathogens decimated native populations, but slaves imported from Africa replaced them. Because the climate was ideal, the sugar trade prevailed, and the islands became known as Sugar Islands.
But this name disguised a curse. The sugar trade was based on a savage and inhuman scourge—slavery.
Slavery is gone, but the islands remain in the stultifying grip of coercion, albeit of a different stripe. Paternal authoritarian governments keep these lush lands stopped in time—still. The islands could be hugely prosperous, but they are not. Instead, they are typically marked by various levels of stagnation and, in some cases, outright impoverishment.
Except for a rare exception . . . .
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Chapter 1
STOWAWAYS
The ship rolled over long swells of ocean under a luminous gray sky. A great hurricane was raging more than 250 miles to starboard, and the air was wet with it, even at this distance. And agitated. Sprays of water were ripped from the waves and flung into the growing tropical light—bursts of unbridled freedom. There was a wild beauty to it all, to which the ship was utterly oblivious.
Deep below deck, inside one of its containers, stowaways huddled. They were a young man and woman, recently married, and five days ago, they had committed themselves to this voluntary entombment, along with an aunt and uncle. Women's apparel filled the twenty-foot-long chamber, a soft cargo that was able to yield space to four bodies with meager possessions, though with great reluctance. Except for the aunt, whose entire work life had been with a cigar maker, all in the family had labored in the sweat shops of their island's garment industry. That was their common connection to this particular ship—and container.
Perhaps it also explained their folly. Once locked inside this tomb, they found that they were effectively buried alive. They were barely able to move and were in total darkness except for a few flashlights without spare batteries. Not a one of the four stowaways spoke of the dark claustrophobia which was little better than the impoverishment of the life they were fleeing—or of the abject terror that consumed them. It was not their way to complain. Their way was to pull together, each a source of support for the others.
Soon, however, the aunt succumbed to the oppressive heat and, the next day, the uncle. The family had been assured by their contact that the container would be above deck, but he was not speaking the truth. There was no way he could have known that. With hand drill and hacksaw, the stowaways had been able to cut vents in the reinforced walls of the container. This gave them air to breathe, but it was without the wind chill and air circulation that they would have had above deck. The heat in the ship's cargo hold was suffocating, and because dry-goods containers do not require temperature control, their battle, from day one, had been a losing one.
On this the fifth day, the two survivors were squatting on the makeshift bed that all of them had once shared. They faced each other and held hands to balance themselves against the nauseating motion of the ship. In their exhaustion, they leaned forward and their foreheads touched. Their relatives were now sealed within plastic sheets that had once been garment protection. And that dreadful task had physically and emotionally depleted them. Finally the young woman spoke. "We are on our last water bottle, my husband, and our last flashlight is nearly spent. I feel so weak. I fear for us."
"I know, my Livia, but remember our old life. We want so much more than that. Think of our new island . . . a most excellent place . . . where we can grow . . . and thrive. Rest now . . ." Still holding hands, they lowered their bodies.
The next day, the ship's rolling had lessened. Lying on their backs now, the couple could hear the beating of the diesel engines, the heart of the beast whose belly they were in. The young man spoke into the darkness. "I should not have trusted that man. He took our money and deceived us. We were supposed to be safe. I have failed you, my wife, and I have failed our family."
She did not answer. But then, "You did not fail us, husband. Our dream island . . . filled with hope . . . " and her voice trailed off. Until finally, "It was worth it, my Angel. Yes, it is worth it, Angel Ramos."
He was beyond hearing, and she feared it was too late—for both of them. But had there been light, she would have seen the trace of a smile remaining in the corners of his mouth. He was far away now, dreaming of another place, a place of unlimited opportunity—and unbridled freedom. It was a place of excellence—unsurpassed excellence.
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Chapter 2
ORIBEL
Marek Rankl could not remember a time he did not love islands. At this very moment, in the forty-second year of his life, his yacht Oribel was approaching the southern coast of a small Caribbean island that he wanted to make his own. He thought of the huge number of islands in the world. Most of them originated from oceanic volcanoes, and the rest were offspring of continental shelves. More than ten percent of the world's population lived on islands. From a lifetime of studying islands, Marek Rankl knew all this.
But his main interest was in a special subset of islands, the tropical ones. Tens of thousands of them, each twelve or more acres in size, populated the world's oceans. It was a one hundred acre tropical island that was taking shape before his eyes this day, as he watched from his yacht's bridge. He said to his captain, "Dial it back a bit, Armando. I want to approach slowly and circle it before we land."
The island was roughly trapezoidal in shape. They had been approaching it from the northeast, and now they gradually veered to port and started on a clockwise circuit. The island had a volcanic mountain, long dormant, which now dominated their view. It rose to more than four hundred feet midway on the widest part of the island, which was nearly a mile in length.
Halfway up, a cliff had been hewn—sculpted—out of the lava rock. This cliff became a long balcony for an excavated dwelling behind it. Mango trees, growing directly above, provided shade, and continuous horizontal windows ran its entire length. During the day, the dwelling was visible mainly by the light reflected off the glass. It was a subtle presence, a natural part of the small mountain.
The Oribel slowly progressed around the island. Vegetation enveloped it in green. Low cliffs, varying in height, edged the island's circumference, girding it against the relentless onslaught of the sea.
Completing her circuit, the yacht headed for the eastern pier. An old man was waiting, and Rankl recognized Jorge Besosa, the owner of the island, the man he had come to see. After introductions, they headed up an incline for the lift to his home. Armando was securing the Oribel, and Besosa called back, "Join us when you finish, Captain Rojas."
Their conversation paused while Rankl pondered the implications of what his host had just said. They were sitting in the long living room of the dwelling, looking across the island to the Caribbean Sea and the much larger island to the north. Spacious windows ran the full length of the room and framed a medley of translucent blues and greens. Breakers approached and lost themselves against the cliffs, below their line of sight. White Longtails crisscrossed in the sky overhead and Marek learned from his host that he had introduced this bird species to the island many years earlier, from elsewhere in the Caribbean. It had flourished on this small island. For a full minute, the only sound was the ice cubes in their glasses.
Then Besosa broke the silence. "Yes, my friend, I know what you are thinking, now that you have heard my story. What you have learned is known to only a few. And now you have a decision to make, bigger than the one you came here to talk about today."
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Jorge Besosa had been born and raised on the much larger island ten miles to the north. As a youth, he became enamored with Caribbean revolutionaries, above all, the famed Brazilian Marxist, Chan Chan Morales. Morales was a flamboyant guerilla leader and skilled propagandist educated in leftist ideology. The young Besosa devoured all he could find on him, and his parents encouraged their son in his studies. The Besosa family had controlled the island for more than a century, and, when the time came for college, they sent Jorge to London's renowned Karl Marx Institute. He excelled there.
When he took over the reins of government from his father, Jorge Besosa was thoroughly imbued with socialist ideology. His education reinforced what his father had taught him as a youth—that capitalism is a system of cutthroat competition, a system in which one swims with the sharks, or gets eaten; that capitalism is a system of class struggle where the wealthy dominate and control poor starving workers; that because socialism addresses these ills, the fact that, under it, the lives of the people belong to the state—in this case the Besosa regime—was, they were told, a small price to pay.
Early in the Besosa era, the island had gained its independence and had become a sovereign nation. But it was already largely impoverished by a history of coercion, corruption, destructive agricultural practices, and abysmal stewardship of its resources and infrastructure.
After Jorge's ascension to power, however, there was improvement. In college, when he studied Das Capital, he noted Marx's statement in the preface that, historically, the productive superiority of a market economy was indisputable. And so, during his years of study abroad, he read widely in the extensive literature of free enterprise. He was greatly taken by the work of the economist, Fernando de Gama, with his emphasis on the vital importance of property rights. In addition, he studied the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics.
He also studied the history of the Aegean and became fascinated with Greece's golden age from five hundred to three hundred BC. He resolved to develop his island and to make it a great power in the Caribbean, in short, a place of excellence. And thus he renamed it Arête, Greek for excellence, or virtue.
When Jorge Besosa assumed control, he sought to promote market forces, the profit motive, and property rights. Improvement was rapid in many sectors of his island's economy. And as a result, it became a haven for Caribbean refugees fleeing the impoverishment of their islands.
A family by the name of Ramos was among them, who created and then managed a new immigration program for Arête. It became well known, and Jorge Besosa, very much the driver of it all, was lauded in the hemisphere as a youthful idealist.
But the improvements did not last. To his dismay, Besosa's mixed economy of market forces and state controls inexorably trended to nearly complete government control. His ministers found the reins of power hard to surrender. For every setback, they simply concluded that more government intervention was needed. That meant less freedom, and Jorge Besosa invariably signed off on more regulations. Gradually, Arête became less free.
In recent years, an intensified period of calamities had beset the island. Hurricanes occurred regularly, with devastating impact on infrastructure. Outbreaks of cholera and other diseases often followed. Invariably, global climate change was seen as the culprit, and an underlying despair of the situation ever improving sapped the island's energy.
High level government bureaucrats began to abscond with what wealth they could. Lower level bureaucrats, too, each of them a looter in his own way, further depleted what scant island resources remained.
Seeing what was happening and helpless to do anything about it, the population fled except for the stubborn few who struggled on. Most of these owned their own homes and had a bare subsistence existence, farming or running small businesses.
The remaining few were subcontractors taking in simple work from other islands, making cigars or hand stitching colorful Caribbean accents onto garments—such as those in the Ramos's container ship years earlier. They were a middle class, of sorts. But gradually, they became more impoverished, and as Arête Island limped along in this state, its population dwindled.
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By the end of his story, Jorge Besosa's creased face was etched with sadness. He looked at Rankl and saw that his final words had touched a nerve. He had no way of knowing that his guest already knew his island's history. Nor did he know that Armando Rojas had made Rankl aware of facts not commonly known—important facts. Watching his guest, Besosa could only ask himself: Is this the man to give my Arête a new life? A man for whom it is not too late? Is this why my final words have him sitting in stunned silence?
"My remaining ministers," Jorge had admitted to his guest, "each of them basically an honest man, is looking to get out of the whole cursed thing. Like me, Señor Rankl … like me, they are very old and very, very tired—agotado."
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