Free The Celestial Instructi0n by Grady Ward Page B

walked out the
stone arcade the way he had come in; it was surprisingly warm outside in the
Portland air. He walked windward on a street lit with only two working yellow
sodium-vapor lamps several blocks apart. From there it took about forty minutes
for him to reach the bus station. Paradoxically as Joex receded from the Church
of the Crux, Serena and the Games Machine, he felt the anxiety return to his
stomach and shoulders. At the station, a very bored and tired security guard
casually examined him. Joex chose the cleanest of the rows of red molded seats,
the ones with the drainage holes in the center. The fixed armrests prevented
him from stretching out.
    From paralyzing fear to exultation in taking the
church introductory program. How could such a system of evil and control
possibly have such intoxicating beauty? As he fell into a disturbed sleep
dreaming of men sharing the back of an old cathode ray tube as if it were a
nipple, Joex awoke in confusion whether he was thinking about the Games Machine
or Serena with the bifurcated eyes. Again, the erection.

Chapter 22
     
    The weather off the East river was not yet what
could be called hot, but it was humid and gusty. The young gentleman sat for a
moment on the bench to watch the water taxi plow through the whitecaps and
listen to the chugging of the helicopters landing at the heliport. He dressed
in a way that he deemed modest, an off-the-rack suit: a ten-thousand dollar
Brioni. This was modest for the chief executive officer and chair of the
board of one of the worlds’ greatest credit ratings agency. “Qu,” as he was
known to the Triax, was attending an angelic conclave at a secure Church of the
Crux meeting chapter-room in downtown Manhattan. Now 666 E 34th St. was not its
actual address; in reality it was the most central office between the three full
floors leased by the Church, but that was how Qu marked it in his calendar. In
a few minutes, he would be meeting “Wu” and “Xi” for a presentation by a person
introduced by the Dominion Cassandra Jones of the New York parich.
    Qu felt that the business of business was an
ideology unto itself; what the business schools taught in leadership,
marketing, finance analytics, law, and laughably, ethics, was the window
dressing, the shroud of respectability covering the stench of the guts of
perjury, grand theft, conspiracy, wire and mail fraud, money laundering, and,
perhaps now if his intimations were correct, treason.
    It wasn’t just the money; that—like the Wharton or
Sloan curriculum—was just the numbers that appeared on the scoreboard so the
crowds would know who to cheer. Rather, it was the exercise of power in such a
way as it fed back unto itself, amplifying, a musical oscillation that eventually
shook the world. For the musician, the world itself would shed, over time, what
was inessential from the expression of pure power. Despite what crimes or evil
he might do, his daughters would rise gilded with the accrued wealth and
influence, but retaining nothing of the stink of the work necessary for their
father to accumulate it. The world would remember his power, but forget his
sins. Carnegie library. Frick museum. Stanford University. Rhodes scholarship.
Nobel Prize.
    For him? Perhaps a wildlife preserve. Yes. That
would be perfect. From the wilderness springs life; green, natural; biodiversity
is really another name for a bonobo raping and eating its own young. He rose,
brushed his top coat lightly and turned from the river to his meeting.
     
    Dominion Jones, Esq. introduced her two foreign visitors
she simply referred to singularly as the “Angel” to the members of the Triax. Dominion
Jones was tall and was wearing her customary costume: a tailored dark grey
suit, almost charcoal. Despite the weather and working within the heart of the
Church offices,  long black leather gloves, which seemed almost gauntlets, Qu
thought. Her black hair was straight and long. It usually hung loose over