In The Rightness of Things, the fourth and final novel of the Joad Cycle, the epic saga of Gil Rose comes to its climax. From his days as an immature teenager, he has grown into a leader. Gil and his rebel forces will sacrifice everything to restore freedom to the America of the late twenty-first century, now ruled by autocratic, libertarian capitalists. Gil has been captured by Chairwoman Tanya Brandt, who forces him into training as a Morgan Missionary consultant. Once his training is complete, the chairwoman commands Gil to lead a rebellion against her-so she can wipe out the remaining rebels. When he resists, Brandt sentences him to a severe emotional inquisition performed by Gecko, her powerful Avatar. After Gil is broken, he is sent out, once again, to lead the rebellion. During his journey, he meets legendary rebels who once helped his great-grandfather Bernie begin the rebellion. As his own loyalties are tested, he comes to understand the importance of what he must do. Can Gil overcome the chairwoman's powerful government and restore freedom to America? For more on the book and America in the middle to late twenty-first century, visit www.joadcycle.com.

THE RIGHTNESS OF THINGS

Book IV of the Joad CycleBy GARY LEVEY

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Gary Levey
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4697-7900-3

Chapter One

Monroe, D.C.—Spring, 2083

The cabin shook. Vivid, loud explosions turned the trees black and the sky grey with bursts of white, yellow and red. Frightened from a troubling sleep, he grasped his mattress tight, his screams squelched by the throbbing bass of shells detonating while his sparse possessions skittered along a shelf to fall on the cabin floor and continuing to vibrate with each new blast. Outside, evergreens ignited in bursts of reddish white flames and his world was painted orange.

With his ears ringing in unnatural silence, he flung his cabin door open to stare as terrified villagers fled into the night. A man wearing a white dishdasha dragged a chained and near-naked blonde slave girl past his door. He paused and turned, rolling one side of his pencil thin mustache between the thumb and index finger of one hand while pressing the slave girl to her knees with the other. He smiled grandly.

"This one could have been yours if you had cared. Now, I have her.

And I will have her whenever I wish and when I no longer want her, she will want me that much more. She will beg for me. She will cry for me and she will do my bidding in hopes of winning my love back. That is the cost of your indifference."

Fearfully, the slave girl looked up at him. He recognized her and looked away. With her green eyes red with tears, Stacey Grant spoke in a sad, broken voice.

"Why can't you be worth it? Why can't ever you be worth it?"

His heart was broken, again.

His own dream-induced moaning woke him. Shivering and sweating, it took a moment to realize that it was a dream—that dream. He took a deep breath and tried to calm himself. He was, shirtless, lounging on his lanai, floating on a translucent nano-fiber hammock while warm, artificial breezes gusted gently over the lake and through his lagoon, gently rocking his yacht. This was his peace—an inadequate peace, but it was all the peace available to him.

In nearby fields, indentured servants, shirtless, even the women, labored in the hot sun under large conical plastic hats, a sheen of sweat on their worthless bodies as they landscaped, earning another day of life doing the back-breaking, thankless, unrewarding job required to appreciate the assets on these executive luxury homes.

The weary gait of the exhausted slaves was disturbing so Gil focused his attention on the more productive movements of the experimental agribots working tirelessly, oblivious to the employment threat they posed to their less fungible human counterparts. He put his hand up to shade his eyes from the scattered sunlight reflecting off the lagoon. Time had taught him that to survive, he must quarantine what hurt, but sometimes that lesson didn't take. He wiped away tears caused by the sun and closed his eyes.

Gil Rose was a free man, Chairwoman Brandt had decreed it, but he felt as imprisoned as any free man can be. Ten years of dread, acrimony, and disappointment, mostly with himself, along with guilt and shame, will do that to a man and it certainly did it to him. And the worst part was that he could never let on, even if he found someone who cared. That his death, by any means imaginable, was but an insane ruler's whim away, only added to his stress. He was an adult. He had the proof. Life had seared his soul and numbed his heart, turning the defensive boundaries that he'd built to survive into insurmountable prison walls.

Rejected by Joad and captured by Chairwoman Tanya Brandt, survival required that he be on constant guard, anticipate correctly, and speak the precise right thing while reading others' reactions and remembering what was safe to say and do. And mostly, he did that but his thoughts were of other things, wrongs that shouldn't exist so he forced himself to keep busy and stay away from Monroe for as long as he could so as not to slip, and yes, he was required to deliver the best consulting work that a Morgan missionary could possibly deliver. So far his performance had been enough to keep him thriving, but barely living.

After his capture, for some unfathomable reason, he had been commanded by the Chairwoman to enter the Morgan Missionary College with its requirement that interns gain experience through long-term overseas consulting assignments. Each time he returned from an assignment, he found that his wealth had grown. And each time he returned he had a larger mortgage and a more expensive home located closer and closer to the seat of power, Chairwoman Brandt's mansion. To add to his misery, he and the Chairwoman were neighbors, now.

He had just returned from his final foreign missionary engagement, this one in Bolivia, and for the first time since he was arrested by Reverend General Tucker, he was facing the high risk of real down time where, in this center of intrigue, even closing his eyes and thinking other thoughts could be a life threatening blunder.

On assignment, it was easier to act like a consultant and be in control. It was the free time that terrified him but even fear couldn't stop his guilty mind from wandering where it didn't belong so he could never relax. It was concentrate or die.

He requested shade from his nano-hammock and once the sun was blocked, he stared out at the lake where perfect, man-made three-foot mint-green breakers formed in the center, swelling outward in a quiet rush, crested and broke, painting a foaming lacey gash along the otherwise pristine white-sand lakeshore before washing into a gentle ripple in his private cove. He stared at the water, unable to escape; as it was sucked back out and forced to reform again.

He had come far from those days and nights on the run. He had come far, too, from those nights long ago in Aeden when his father, Howard, had employed him to genetically alter his prized Dionysius flowers. Gil smiled at that. How nave Howard had been, expecting flowers alone to gain him promotion to an Executive town inferior to the one Gil now lived in. Howard's goal was impossible, and not being able to inform him of that made him feel duplicitous. Maybe someday, when he had proven himself, when he was more successful, richer, freer, he would be allowed to contact Howard. Once again, his eyes fluttered open and he stared at the waves, searching for the cue that would bring on the needed calm that he had learned to show but never feel.

Somewhere above him, in addition to shade, a nano-fan generated a pleasantly synchronized breeze and once again he closed his eyes and his thoughts drifted. It had been almost twenty years since he had last seen Howard. Twenty years! He had been alive longer without Howard than with him. And because the Chairwoman forbade him from communicating, he knew little more than that Howard was still alive.

The Executive town of Monroe was his home now, but nothing here felt right. Even the guarantee from the nano-hammock manufacturer, which advertised that floating on a cloud with nothing apparent below, was the best relaxation that money could buy, even that wasn't quite right. Like so much in his life, those marketing claims weren't satisfied because he could never relax.

Gil was thirty-two, Howard's age on that fateful, life-altering day when his great-grandfather, Bernie, conned him into aiding a stillborn revolution by saving his grandfather and former President, Mark Rose. That day, that fateful decision, it changed his life because it involved him in the kidnapping of former Chairman Andrew Crelli, and that began a long, perilous, and surreal ordeal that ironically led here to Monroe, to Gil becoming a Morgan Christian missionary with Executive status, and to his palatial estate.

His troubled thoughts drifted to Presque Isle, Michigan, to Annie and her daughter—his daughter—who he would never see. Mary Khadijeh—that's what Annie had said she'd name her. That child, no, his daughter, she would be the same age now that he was when he had first met Bernie and it troubled him that Archive had no record of Annie or their child—as if they didn't matter;an uncomfortable thought given his culpability. He took what comfort he could from knowing that Annie was a Toller leader's niece and that information about Tollers simply wasn't worth the cost to accumulate it and he was left to hope that they were alive and productive, and not disappeared like so many millions. He squelched the guilt before it rose up to defeat him.

Once again, he opened his eyes and tried to concentrate on his most recent consulting assignment in Bolivia. It had been successful and he felt that this time he had truly helped people and not just converted the poor to Morgan while increasing a corporate client's profits. Anyway, it was satisfying to believe that. He needed to keep that focus and relaxing triggered bad or sad memories that were a dangerous way to live.

As a focused consultant, he had achieved successes for his clients, but in unguarded moments, his mind sought troubled purpose, forcing him to face all of his failures. But Joad had failed him, too, and her duplicity was the hardest thing to accept. She had caused his capture outside Presque Isle the morning after Clarke Jackell had instilled in him renewed purpose. There was yet another of life's ironies. Just when Clarke's story had convinced him to join the revolution, an utterly hopeless revolution, almost immediately after he'd made that decision, he'd been captured by Ginger Tucker, the Chairwoman's Reverend General. But even Joad's treachery couldn't assuage Gil's guilt. He had procrastinated so long that what he felt he should have done became irrelevant.

He tried not to dwell on Joad because when he did he felt the uncomfortable tug of the love he had once felt for her as a nave teenager and she was his avatar lover. He hated her now. She was a two-faced bitch who had trapped him into this life. That moment when he saw Reverend General Tucker, he knew that Joad's rival avatar, Gecko, was the avatar with true power and with that knowledge, his interest in revolution vanished.

After capture, he had endured months in isolation, fearing for his life before fate provided an unexpected turn. He met the Chairwoman. In many ways, she was exactly what Bernie and Mark had described, yet different. Extraordinarily beautiful for an older woman, she had striking, violet eyes that had staggered him at first because he'd seen another, better version of them in Bree, his faux wife from Profit. But when it should have been Brandt's breathtaking beauty, it was her radiant, yet hard and insincere smile that defined her.

His audience with the Chairwoman was not what he expected. Brandt had been affable, and though he was under great stress, he found himself enjoying her wild, rambling conceit. She was all but omnipotent, yet she was bawdy and alluringly brash as she acted as if nothing but her was sacred. When the audience ended, he was escorted out, unsure whether he would live or die. More months of isolation followed and then, to his astonishment, he was provided a scholarship to the Morgan Unified Colleges of Theological Economics, Liturgical Sciences, and Faith Based Technologies.

Three years of virtual studies at Morgan University at Monroe led him to an Advanced Missionary degree in Technological Spirituality with a field of concentration in Moribund Societies. He spent the next three years in an intense internship where he learned everything a consultant needed to know about interpreting body language and understanding brain chemistries. In the College of the Rule-of-Law he added classes in Applied Blessings and Value Added Mysticism and in the daily stock market analyses and prayer services he attended, he learned the essentials of Morgan dogma required of all consultants representing Church enterprises in overseas locales. After a post-intern assignment at a Morgan-run keiretsu in Kyoto, Japan, he spent three years concentrating on Economic Visioning and God-based Supply-side economics at Thomas Gorman University. Upon completing his coursework, he was assigned to Bolivia from which he had just returned.

Before becoming a true Morgan Missionary Master of Commerce with his chosen specialty in Consensus Building, he had one last hurdle. He need only pass his final exam to claim a Missionary Master Degree that would assure his financial future far more certainly than developing unique botanicals ever would for Howard. The curious thing was that not one of the Morgan consultants on his team would divulge anything about the exam that he had to pass or he wouldn't survive.

Would Bernie have been proud? He knew that answer and so tried his best to avoid thinking about Bernie.

A sound distracted him and he chastised himself for letting his mind wander again and so easily. He was so close to his goal that reminiscing about unhappy pasts and miserable futures was distracting, and worse, it was potentially lethal.

He flipped on his headgear to access Archive so he could check on his exam schedule. In virtual, he walked down color-coded streets to the repository that housed his final requirements. He meandered through his schedule, careful to avoid the virtual classrooms that were in session and he was busy confirming his final study plan when he failed to notice the blinking yellow caution light that signaled a real person needing attention. When he didn't respond in the allotted time, Archive faded and he saw his gardener, Keven Daig, standing beside his hammock.

"Oh, sorry, Keven."

Keven was a fair haired brute of a man with an easy smile. "No problem, sir, I'm sorry to bother you but you haven't approved this year's landscaping budget. I trust there's no problem. We're getting back-logged and I need to schedule your workers before it's too late."

Gil put his headset aside. "Why would there be any problems? I invested pretty heavily in landscaping before I left for Bolivia and now that I've seen it, I'm happy with it. Everything's where it needs to be. I've been away a long time and I'd like to enjoy what's already been done before doing more."

"Right, sir, but we have some exciting new botanical concepts this season. Current trends are showing more decadent, global warming themes and I'm pushing a tropical look that the climate in Monroe supports.

"Frankly, sir, the botanicals I'm recommending are becoming more abundant as climate changes so there are real price opportunities, if you catch my drift. We've had great success with Royal Dutch palms that were evolved a few years ago in Discipline, the Iowa Corporate Agricultural community. Its creator earned the Management Town Landscaping Entrepreneur of the Year Award for his achievement with these sturdy, sub-temperate climate palms. You've just returned so you need to be aware, Madam Chairwoman loves them so much she's contracted for fifty to encircle her personal ice skating rink. By summer, these trees will be the rage and prices will be through the roof.

"Excuse me for saying so, sir, but an up-and-comer like yourself won't want to appear so 'last year' and we have palms aplenty. I can make them available at our delivered cost—plus labor and material—and we offer a long term maintenance contract that includes replacement at cost plus labor and other materials."

"Maybe next year, Keven. We'll talk in the fall."

Assuming his landscaper was leaving, Gil put his headgear back on but before he could reach his study plan, the yellow caution light was blinking so he pulled off his gear.

"Yes, Keven?" He tried not to sound annoyed.

"I'm sorry, sir, you've just returned and perhaps you don't realize the situation. My landscaping firm has never lost a job in Monroe and I have a team of a hundred yard men and two hundred indentured servants under contract with that assumption. They depend on these jobs, you know, to support their families and all."

Negotiations, Gil understood. "You're not losing a job; I'm delaying it. You said you have plenty of work and maybe by autumn the style will change."

"Sir, am I free to talk?"

"Why wouldn't you be?"

"Delicacy, sir. I have a full spring schedule, yes, but as you know, you live and we work in the highest per capita net worth Executive Community in the world and as a Missionary Consultant, I'm certain that you understand that our overhead expenses are extraordinarily high. As you're quite aware, the only highway into this community is hidden from view of the residents and that constrains the size of what can be shipped in economically. And to show concern for global climate changes, the Chairwoman prohibits internal combustion machines in her paradise, except, of course, for the Zamboni that resurfaces her skating rink. This adds to the complexity of our efforts. It means we haul trees and shrubbery through the hills using high maintenance livestock because slaves haven't proved to be a cost effective solution. Oxen react much more favorably than do slaves to the whip but they require more food and water.

"Sir, logistics can be quite expensive, so if we lose or delay even one project, the servants will ... well, you know." Keven shrugged.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE RIGHTNESS OF THINGSby GARY LEVEY Copyright © 2012 by Gary Levey. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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