Finally, in what was considered an act of compassion, a small fig tree in a planter was placed in front of her, atop a wooden stage of sorts. The tree was as plastic as the planter.
Meanwhile, she was bound to the stake. She called out to the land, the earth, to animals, to the bones of animals, to the sky and rain and dead sun, to rivers and salted oceans and fungi and algae and insects—to beetles, of all things. To species long extinct and those now in their compromised twilight. Anxious CIEL authorities piped in synthesized laughter in a feckless attempt to undermine her message.
Before the kindling and wood were ignited, other forms of burning were produced. Boiling oil was poured upon her exposed flesh, molten lead directly onto her chest. Burning resin, wax, and sulfur melted together over her body, forming streams of liquid fire until the top few layers of her roasted away and her skin began to slip from her body. The scent of burnt blood and honey, mixed with meat and acrid ash, was recorded. Finally the wood was lit, and the flames leapt up the length of her body. How mesmerized we were at the image, a beacon through the flames, as if somehow her features had ascended Skyward— mouth and eyes too open, visage frozen upward, asking only Why? Or so we thought at the time.
As Trinculo and I buried our faces into each other’s flesh, cradling each other like animals, Joan of Dirt burned. She, the last piece of earth and everything it stood for.
It wasn’t Why she’d uttered that night, we later learned. In fact, it wasn’t a word at all.
It had been music. A song whose origins floated above our heads in the deep fields of space, cosmic strings plucked and rippling through time itself. A song that comes back to me a phrase at a time.
But it wasn’t a woman’s body burning we saw the day of her execution. That was all a matter of special effects.
Joan had escaped that day. Rather than admit it, they’d opted to spread false images of her death around the world, in endless succession, until the images and stories became one and the same. Until her death replaced her altogether.
But she was still out there.
There is no complicated set of ideas to consider. They are going to execute my beloved Trinculo, and no one but I will even take a breath differently. I have three aims: to finish my body work and develop a cell of like-minded comrades; to free Trinculo before they kill him; and to drive Jean de Men and the entire CIEL world straight into the godforsaken sun. Finish it.
There is a new kind of resistance myth emerging, one I suddenly understand: the world ended at the hands of a girl.
What an ungodly choice she made. To destroy life on Earth as we knew it because of the suffering she saw ahead.
When the volcanoes of earth erupted, when the waters rose and Joan emerged, it was clear to me now, we’d gotten the story all wrong. In our desire to claim her as ours, we’d misread our heroine’s aims. We thought she’d wanted to end the Wars, to save mankind, each of us secretly hoping to be chosen.
But Joan knew one thing we never learned: to end war meant to end its maker, to marry creation and destruction rather than hold them in false opposition.
The Bible and the Talmud, the Qur’an and the Bhagavad Gita, the scrolls of Confucius and Purvas and Vedas—all that is over, I understand now. In its place, we begin the Book of Joan. Our bodies holding its words.
My moment of pause is over. I bring my young comrades back into focus around me—busy as little clone bees—then plunge the heated stylus into the flesh of my left upper thigh, the skin soaring up with red-white, tiny traces of smoke tendril around my work.
I see her differently now.
Here is the revised battle scene that delivers to us this new world. Before her signature fills the sky in devastation, she stands at the familiar cusp of war, in the place we carved out for her as our savior, and carries out the opposite of a resurrection: a decreation. I raise the words. I burn:
Joan’s foot sunk into sand so surrendered to oil that her boots suctioned with each step to the black earth. In front of her, a multitude of snakes: snakes in the form of man-made roads, and river snakes of thickened-black crude, and toxin snakes from rivulets of runoff, and land snakes of sinking sand, and the jut and crease of eroded canyon edges cutting up and slithering out. Everything black and blue and smelling of excavation and the drive to conquer, colonize, deplete.
She surveyed the territory differently from the way a discoverer would. This was the future city we had made. This viscous thickening wasteland.
She could cast her mind backward to a world of lush hills and green valleys. To a distinction between earth and sky. She wasn’t old, but still she could remember it. She had been a child when we still had choices: there was us and there was the environment and there was what we were doing to it. The union we were meant to manifest was irrevocably broken.
What sprawled before her now was a bruise-colored tableau of our insatiable desire for refinement. The Alberta Tar Sands. Oil, then water. That’s the order the story would go in. It wasn’t a secret, not difficult to see coming. It was commonplace, really: how we blind ourselves purposefully in the name of progress.