The Grandaddy of Evil; Ian Watson and the Inquisition War Trilogy!

 A REGISTERED CRIPPLE 

"When they were heading away from the barricade through the host of pilgrims and tents, a scrawny liver-spotted hand clutched at Jaqs hem. 

'Charity for a registered cripple' croaked an elderly voice. 

Smouldering thuribles of incense dangled on chains from a gibbet-like frame. Backed up against the base of this frame was a rickety cart with small iron wheels. Upon the cart crouched a ragged crone. her face was wizened with age. her stringy long hair was white. Yet her rheumy blue eyes were keen with a light of tense intelligence. In those eyes was a quality of anticipation for which expectancy of coins alone could hardly account. 

Grimm scrutinized her circumstances. The thurible-gibbet protected this cripple from being trampled accidentally. A handle jutted from the rear of her cart. It might be pulled or pushed. Here she crouched under the cool red sun, begging.
...
 
'Was the temple breaking your legs, mother?’ Surely the Occidens Temple did not need to create and exploit cripples, pitifully to swell its coffers. 

The crone rocked forward, as if in sudden anguish from a cramp of the bowels. 

'Oh yes, it was breaking my legs!' was her reply. 'Yet not in the way you're meaning. 

Grimm hunkered down by the cart. Soon s did Lex and Jaq. 

The crones name was Herzady. One thing she had never been was a mother. Defiantly she declared herself to be elven years old. 

Who else on Sabulborb would dream of counting their age in local years? She had lived long enough to arrive at double figures. She had endured more than a hundred and ten Imperial years - the vast majority of them spent in this cart. Grimm was impressed by Herzady's longevity, even though to a long-living Squat a century was rather small beer. 

'Pretty impressive for an ordinary unenhanced human being, particularly in such reduced circumstances!' 

A century earlier, as a young girl, Herzady had attended that Holy Years unveiling in company with her pious parents. During the bedlam which ensued, her mother and father both lost their lives. Herzady's legs were permanently crippled. A compassionate priest had taken pity and provided this cart. For decades Herzady had awaited the next Holy year. When the unveiling came again she was watching from a safer place than on the previous occasion. 

Bedlam? 

Oh yes. At the unveiling fifty two years later there had been homicidal bedlam once again, due to the hysteria of the pilgrims intent on seeing... what could not be seen. 

Could not be seen, what did she mean by this? 

Why, Herzady had been all ears and eyes for decades. She knew that the visage had faded, aeons since, into invisibility. On the climactic day of Holy Year when the high priest of Occidens in splendid procession carried the requilary out along the walkway, briefly, to open the sacred container, what he would expose to the gaze of hundreds of thousands of pilgrims was a cloth which was blank, apart from a couple of stains vaguely located where the eyes might have been. 

'Pilgrims are glimpsing almost nothing sired! How they are straining and struggling to see!'
....... 

Gently he said to Herzady, 'Being crippled, crippled because of adoring him, you are partaking in His vaster malady.' 

'I am waiting, she replied bleakly, 'for many more persons being crippled and killed the day after tomorrow, as surely must be happening. Then I am dying contentedly.' 

it was to witness this calamity that Herzady had endured indomitably throughout the five decades since the previous holy year! The crones persistence was pathological. her lucidity was madness.
...

The little man prompted her; 'Hundreds of people dying outside that courthouse earlier on today. All imagining the True Face being unveiled early - and panicking.' 

Galvanized by shock, the crone sat bolt upright upon her twisted shrivelled legs. She gasped tragically. 'Herzady missing so many deaths....' 

Her wizened face spasmed in pain. A thin spotted hand fluttered to her chest. She slumped over. 
Lex checked her pulse. In his hefty hand her wrist looked no wider than a pencil. Herzady was dead. Of a heart attack, of a broken heart. 

It was Grimm who reached to close the crone's gaping empty eyes. 

'Huh' he said, 'saved myself half a shekel anyway.'" 
 

Blanche drawing Jaq Draco as... Sean Connery?

 

BEHOLD

I return to the beginning; the original Black Library novel and first Warhammer 40k fiction. Dan Abnett dedicated the first volume of ‘The End and the Death’ to Ian Watson, likely out of respect to this originating series. 

I read one book in this series many many years ago and I did not like it at all. I thought it was dirty and weird. Uncomfortably so. 

Now I think it is a work of GENIUS! Clearly I have migrated to one end or another of the I.Q. graph meme. Which end I cannot say....

 

 

PULSING ALBUMEN-WOMB

 “A dreary slope of great boulders, poised on a scree, extended downward into murk. Upward likewise. In the upward direction rococo-metallic towers were visible. A small fleet of grotesque vessels might have impacted in the terrain. Evilly flamboyant, these towers were canted at absurd angles to one another in defiance of gravity, yet they were linked by eerily wrought bridges along which prowled tiny figures.
 
In a bilious sky hung an hourglass sun. Two suns were joined impossibly at the waist like a double yolk within a glutinous pulsing albumen-womb of glowing gas. This absurd sun made the eyes and the spirt ache. How was gravity thus defied? That double-sun should have cohered into one sun aeons ago. Two such celestial bodies could not exist side by side.
 
‘Chaos’, breathed Jaq in horror.”
 
 

ITS THE UR-TEXT 

It’s all about the FUKIN STAR CHILD BABY! It’s all coming back! Perfect circle!

Ok so what is this story actually about? Essentially an Inquisitor wants to bang his Callidus Assassin, that’s the main driver of the plot. 

Let me try again.. 

Our story is about Inquisitor Jaq Draco, who encounters a super-mega conspiracy within a conspiracy of the Inquisition to create a psychic ‘Hydra’ and turn all of humanity into a giant singular hive mind and thereby ‘save’ it. 

Over the course of three books [SPOILERS] Draco accidently exterminatus’s a planet, fights genestealers, enters a space hulk, visits a demon world, goes to Terra and infiltrates the Imperial Palace for a chat with the Emperor, sleeps for 100 years, enters the webway, visits Ulthwe craftworld, gets into the mythical Black Library and steals the book of the Apocalypse, gets his Callidus assassin girlfriend killed, hides out on a nutty pilgrim world, steals a relic, escapes into the webway again and performs a mysterious ritual to undo fate. Other things also happen. 

The over-plot is all about the Sensai, the Star Child, the schitzoidal mind of the Emperor 

Very old 40k lore from Rogue Trader says that when the Emperor fought Horus he cut out all the actually nice parts of his psyche and cast them into the warp so he could win. These more fluffy bits have been floating around out there for 10,000 years and are about ready to reincarnate into the Star Child; the actually-nice superbeing who will create the golden path to humanities hopeful future. 

Roaming around in the galaxy are the Sensai; 40ks original Woke Warriors who roam the galaxy fighting oppression yes this is real and I am not making it up.

Meanwhile in Games Workshops two active series, in the final books of the Horus Heresy series, Dan Abnett is finally creeping towards the Final Confrontation with Horus where all this is actually set up, and has been reintroducing the idea of secret immortals in 40k. And in the ‘present day’ Dawn of Fire series by mainly Guy Haley I think, the idea of the Star Child and the Emperor ‘awakening’ has been reintroduced. 

So, essentially, the Horus Heresy series, the current Dawn of Fire series and this Inquisition War series, the first one published, form a coherent whole, or are being formed into one. It was all just one giant saga all along… 

And it’s amazing how much of a 40k book it is, right from the offing, rich with ripe dankness. Within 200 pages of the fist book we have genestealer purging, exterminatus, a squat on a trike, a space hulk, the Eye of Terror!, actual Terra and a month long oddesy through the imperial palace lead by the Star Child (probably), and a MEETING WITH THE EMPEROR. The sheer amount of stuff, of details, of incident, combined with the wild euphonia of the prose really adds up to make a funky stew

 

 

TENDRILS IN THE SPINAL SOCKETS

"During stages in Lex's novitiate as a future Space Marine he had been initiated dauntingly enough - by a feast of foul excremental unfood and other formidable ceremonies.

 The forced rite of initiation which took place like a ravishment within that Chaos vessel was execrable and almost unspeakable. How could Lex obliterate from memory the Kiss of Corruption, the Communion with Chaos, the Prayer of Perfidity, the spells and the invocations? And all the while he was experiencing the slither of tendrils within his spinal sockets. These invaded his nervous system, generating nauseating visions of the fragility of the comos, of the feebleness of reality which demonic fingers sought to unpluck and reknit with such vile success.

Lex in torment saw the whole cosmos burst forth from a mere bubble in the energy warp. A sparrows fart the universe was!"

 

 

IT FROM THE 90'S

It’s kinda, no, scratch that, incredibly pervy, rich and ripe with strange life, overflowing with crazy stuff, wild with colour. It feels a lot like David Lynches Dune in its gleeful perversity and general oddness.

 

The vision of 40k is absolutely one torn from the pages of early White Dwarf, Realms of Chaos, Rogue Trader and other early vibrant texts; 

“And so Meh-Lindi approached the monster on the throne: a leering fang-toothed, armoured hog of a grandsire alien. Its eyes glared at her from under ridged bony brows. One of its lower, humanoid hands, adorned with topaz and sapphire rings, contemplatively stroked a fierce claw-hand that rested on its knee. One of its hooves tapped the floor. Loaves of armour-bone jutted from its curved spine, and it rubbed these against the carved back of its throne grindingly, as if to dispel an itch. Its spatulate tongue stuck out, tasting.”

 

 

And is absolutely riddled with often ridiculous and sometimes really quite discomforting sexual and bodily weirdness, especially surrounding the Callidus Assassin Meh-Lindi who starts the book doing exercises in a giant ritual hamster wheel and then examines herself in the mirror naked at length while remarking on her boobs as women so often do. Then she gets a pseudo-plastic Genestealer skeleton implanted in her body in an excruciating surgery scene.

  

GROTESQUELY MUTATED RAMPANT GROINS

"Were the screaming tethered female prisoners hallucinating while abominations were perpetrated slowly and perversely upon their flesh? The Slaanashi Chaos Marines had certainly used hallucinogenic grenades -as well as boltguns and meltaguns and terrible chainswords, and heavier weaponry too. Were hallucinations intensifying the already appalling sight, and the implacable cruel touch, of pastel-hyed armour exquisitely damascened with debauchery upon the breast plates and the shoulders? Was that which was already monstrous being multiplied far beyond the brink of sanity?

A few tormentors had shed items of armour, exposing grotesquely mutated rampant groins, their organs of pleasure bifurcated and more, with squinting eyes sprouting from them, and with drooling lips.

Others had no need to shed armour. Chaos Spawn had materialized: wolf sized creatures with legs of spiders and bodies of imps, with questing tentacles and phallic tubes. Jaq himself almost believed that he was hallucinating. A snake-like umbilical cord connected these spawn to the swollen groin-guards of their master - who stood back, roaring and whinnying with delight, as they guided the spawn in the ravishing of their captives, soaking up the sensations of these roving external members."

  

ITS A TOY COMMERCIAL 

Even at this early stage its clear this is about SELLING PRODUCT. We have to put the toys on display and while I think probably Watson enjoyed the breakneck pace and sometimes delirious invention of the blizzard of encounters, its also true that Inquisitor Jaq Draco encounters pretty much every model that you can buy right now; Genestealers, Eldar, Space Marines, Chaos Marines, Harlequins, Titans, Commissars, 

And the Space Marines and others are fashionable in an exquisitely 90s Warhammer style;  

 

TINY SILVER PENTACLES

"Strapped in the gimballed control seat, protected by padding and armour, the princeps faced those great slanting eye-screens. Bronze bones framed the screens. Across an array of lesser data screens diagnostic icons shuffled like phosphorescent beetles. A spaghetti of cables led from his reinforced mind-impulse suit into ducts. Cables coiled from his shoulder pauldrons, and wires from his impulse-helmet - which now swung round to scrutinize the newcomers. 

Behind a goggle-visor: weary blue eyes. below the visor: a hooked nose with sapphire rings through each nostril, thin lips, and a depilated chin tattooed with tiny silver pentacles. 

 

DAMASCENED GROIN-HAUBERK 

“Grimm urinated into the open helmet of the Chaos Marine. Sizzling softly, the webs became a gingery mat clinging to horrid contours above the gaping metal-fanged jaw. 

From one of his pouches Grimm produced a bar of marzipan and began to gobble. 

Lex snapped his visor shut to scan data and diagnostic icons. When he opened it again, he announced, ‘My waste storage unit may be malfunctioning somewhat.’ He murmured a prayer to Rogal Dorn. 

Grimm cocked his head. ‘Does that mean your mighty metal legs will start to fill with muck? 

Lex’s gauntlet lashed out. He stayed the blow before it could pulverize Grimms face. 

‘I can recycle and detox my own waste for two days, abhuman. This suit is ancient,’ he declared. ‘Reverently repaired.’ His groin-hauberk had visibly been renovated with a damascened silver engraving of a potent warrior firing a storm bolter.”

  

A VERMLLION BADGE OF NOBILITY 

“Scar tissue on Hachards chin stood out whitely as though he had been punched. His cheek-tattoo was of a skull skewered by a dagger. His teeth were painted black as a signal that any smile of his was dark. A vermillion badge of nobility -a stylized power axe – adorned his right knee-pad modestly so that, whenever bending to the Emperors image during devotions, he should kneel upon this heraldic honour. His gloved hand strayed to the Imperial eagle emblazoned in purple on his lavender dress cuirass, as if to emphasize his unquestioning loyalty.”

  

 

THE PROSE, INVENTION, DIALOGE AND TEXTURE

Its mad with dankness.

The tumbling maddening harlequinesque prose combines and overlays with the deranged invention

Watson is very clearly going carefully and joyfully off his tits with his prose, his word choices, idea combinations, rushing but ever-uneven rhythm, hold onto your hat at the start of every sentence and paragraph because you don't know how it is going to end, like a fairground ride that segues into some other ride in the middle, and again before the end. A KNOWING SMIRK is the emotion I am detecting here but not the joyless Dreamworks smirk of the empty ironist who abstracts themselves from their own ID through a veneer of eyebrow, but an Orson Welles-type smirk of a plump gourmand of words and concepts who is about to gorge themselves on sounds.

  

SOLIDIFYING OGRESPOOK – NIGHTMARE INCARNATE! 

“Night rolled towards them like a velvet curtain, or like a negative of an aurora. It hid from view those leaning towers. In the sickly sky an eclipse was eating swiftly across the leftward sun. 

This was not how night fell in any sane reality! 

The curtain of darkness halted before it reached them. Within that darkness flapped moth-like shapes, faintly phosphorescent, visible in violet. 

More such moths swiftly gathered, They massed to form a giant humanoid figure bestriding the shrouded land. The hulking figure gained substance moment by moment as Lex continued to engrave Azul’s eye. 

On the shoulders of the figure were mounted what appeared to plasma cannons. Great grasping powerhands dangled. Around the ankles of that solidifying ogrespook capered shadows – reminiscent of that horned spiked suit of armour which had lain in Ulthwe’.”

… 

“Jaq was sighting his force rod tentatively at the looming colossus, muttering prayers of his own. Just then an extremely low moon sailed into view. Astride the capsized crescent sat the vilest of creatures, as on a saddle. Such saucer-eyes, such a parrot-beak. That tentacled fiend resembled some kraken from the deeps of an ocean. Its tentacles trailed down, becoming vastly long threads. With these, it began to fish.

… 

“Here was nightmare incarnate. Another thread snared a Chaos Marine, plucking the armoured brute from out of the darkness. ‘That ain’t no helmet,’ exclaimed one of the Imperial Fists, ‘that’s his head – ‘ 

To the amplified horror-struck gaze of the Marine it was evident that the grotesquely metamorphosed Chaos warrior was guffawing with insane delight as he was drawn up to share that surreal perch with the daemon.” 

……………………

  

THE DIALOGUE feels like a kind of arch 70's fantasy somehow, declarative, anquished, arch, pointed, ridiculous. Theatrical. Is he joking? Is he screwing up or screwing about, or both? We will never know… 

 

HOMOGONIZED ENTRAILS 

“Lex’s voice rumbled sympathetically. ‘I understand loss, Sir Jaq.’ 

Loss? 

Jaq had long since lost his holy office. He had lost the fellowship of his ordo. He had lost his cherished funereal ship, which might well have been blasted to pieces in that eldar dock by Imperial forces quite incidentally. Now he had lost his…. Helpmate. 

‘Reckon we can steal this hyper-lance?’ Grimm asked Lex. ‘Can you use it? Must be ancient and revered to be so powerful. Shall we pull it free? Reckon that’s wise? 

‘No-oh-oh-oh!’ Such a howl burst from Jaq’s throat, a howl of universal rejection and misery. Pull the great blade from Meh’lindi’s ravaged ribs and homogenized entrails? ‘No!’ he cried. ‘She shall not be treated like some harpooned sea-beast!’

 

ITS AN *ACTUAL* EPISTOLARY NOVEL

 Or at least it tries to be for a while. 

Most 40k texts are fake Epistolary novels; remember in the grimdank future no record can be trusted and unreliable narrators and whatever, but *in effect* books tend to be written from a floating 3rd person perspective and are clearly not 'in-world' texts in any way, and furthermore, texts part of the same general series are clearly attempting to tell a coherent story where all the details match up, and not presenting a dracula-style collection of missives or whatever. 

So there is a certain fakeness to the 'everything is true and untrue' shtick. But the Inquisition War, while written in a 3rd person, does fully purport to be an in-universe text, (apart I suppose, from some framing stories where some people are reading it and asking "why did he write it about himself, in the third person?") These ‘novels’ are actually strange chunks of paper found in the entrails of the Golden Throne, transcripts of a report of something and Eldar Farseer maybe said, or just a funky book from the Inquisitorial archives. 

They kind of give up on this somewhat , actually the middle one is the only 'impossible' report as it ends with Jaq raiding the Black Library, 

I do love the idea of it being a theme with Inquisitors that they commonly write their own experiences down as pulp novels and hide them in archives, a useful technique since the truth must be disguised with fiction and fiction with truth, an ever-deniable record which may represent true events, or the shape of true events. 

 

FURNACES OF NAUSEOUS LIGHT

“The ribbed wraithbone walls of an immense dome rose sombrely upward. Across the zenith stretched a lake of night. A vast sky-light or energy-field excluded yet also revealed the void of space. 

That funereal lake was polluted by diseased lurid gases. Hues of jaundice and gangrene and blood and bile stained those billowy shrouds. Suns within the sickly veils of gas, and of vile corruption, of a cancer spreading through the void. 

It was the Eye of Terror – where Chaos spiled into reality. Where warped worlds of unnatural geometry orbited furnaces of nauseous light. Where daemons ruled.” 

 

 

(many of) THE BAD BITS ARE NOT THAT BAD ACTUALLY 

Ok the perving on the Callidus assassin, including her constantly stripping naked, putting on sysnskin, examining herself in the mirror naked and noting the shape of her breasts (watson what the fuck). Pretty much everything to do with sex is anguished, overwrought, obsessive, horrifically and malignantly autistic in a negative sense.. however, is this Watson being a charismatic nutter or brilliantly illuminating the perverse compression of natural human desire in a nightmare future? I refer you to the IQ graph above.. 

The meeting with the emperor is relatively well done and not that dumb. It takes a super-competent inquisitorial team about a month to weave their way through the palace, constantly changing identities, being lead a crazed path of opportunities by a prescient fragment of the Emperors soul itself and they only get through the Eternity Gate because a larger gestalt of the Emperor casts Time Stop and pulls them through.

 The last book is a downer with the team hiding out on one single world instead of having a crazed rollercoaster time, but there are still a host of deranged moments and a sad, hurried end.

 

 

JAQ DRACO WILL RETURN! [SPOILERS!] 

What happened to the Ordo Hydra? 

The Sensi are coming back! The original Woke Warriors for our Disney Plus future! 

The Star Child! 

At the end Jaq Draco DIES but his spirit is trapped in the webway where he can commune with dead Eldar seers. HE COULD STILL BE IN THERE! Its going to be great if he pops up randomly in some future book. 

Meh-lindi the sexy, dangerous Callidus assassin is sort-of resurrected in the end! I fucking BET Abnett or *someone* will being back the only Callidus to successfully impersonate a Genestealer AND and Eldar (though not at the same time), she is still out there! 

Grimm the Squat! That utter legend! Will he turn up on Necromuda? 

Probably GW aims to escape the looming tentacles of the hysteric left and the pink captialists “WHAT ARE YOU DOING THERE NERDS? IS THAT FASCISM I SEE?” by shattering the Galaxy, turning it into something like Age of Sigmar with bits dominated by Primarchs and godlings, and brining back the Sensai and the Star Child so that you can finally tell your mum “No mum I an playing the good-guy anti-fascists actually!” 

Hey its from Rogue Trader, its scripture so you can’t complain.

 

JONATHAH KEEBLE NEEDS TO PERFORM THIS BOOK! 

That’s it! Imagine him reading this stuff. It would be wild!

 

  

WE ARE MANY

“WE ARE MANY, INQUISITOR’. The voice boomed in his mind almost gently – if gently was how an avalanche would sweep away a doomed village, if gently was how a scalpel might strip a life to the bare, aching bones.

HOW ELSE COULD WE ADMINISTER OUR IMPERIUM – ‘

‘AS WELL AS WINNOW THE WARP – ‘

‘HOW ELSE?’ 

The Emperors mind-voice, if that truly was what it was, had dissociated into several voices, as if his great undying soul co-existed in fragments that barely hung together.

 

‘SO DOES THE HYDRA THREATEN US?’

‘IMPERILLING OUR GREAT AND AWFUL PLAN TO STEER HUMANITY?’

‘PERHAPS, IN A PART OF US, SINCE THIS HYDRA PROMISES A PATH?’

‘SURELY A MALEVOLENT PATH; FOR HOW COULD HUMANITY EVER FREE ITSELF?’

‘THEN WE MUST BE MALEVOLENT TOO. FOR WE HAVE EXPELLED OUR SENTIMENTALITY LONG AGO. HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE ENDURED? HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE IMPOSED OUR RULE?’

‘YET BY VIRTUE OF THAT WE ARE PURE AND UNCONTAMINATED BY WEAKNESS. WE ARE GRIM SALVATION.’

…..

‘NOTHING THAT SAFEGUARDS HUMANITY CAN BE EVIL, NOT EVEN THE MOST STRENUOUS INHUMANITY. IF THE HUMAN RACE FAILS, IT HAS FAILED FOREVER.’

….

‘WHEN WE CONFRONTED THE CORRUPTED, HOMICIDAL HORUS WHO ONCE USED TO SHINE LIKE THE BRIGHTEST STAR, WHO USED TO BE OUR BELOVED FAVOURITE – WHEN THE FATE OF THE GALAXY HUNG BY A THREAD – WERE WE NOT COMPELLED TO EXPEL ALL COMPASSION? ALL LOVE? ALL JOY? THOSE WENT AWAY. HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE ARMOURED OURSELVES? EXISTENCE IS TORMENT, A TORMENT THAT MUST NOURISH US. EVIDENTLY WE MUST STRIVE TO BE THE FIERECE REDEEMER OF MAN, YET WHAT WILL REDEEM US?

 

‘Great  lord of all,’ whimpered Jaq, ‘did you know of the hydra before now?’ 

‘NO, AND SURELY WE SHALL ACT IN DUE TIME – ‘

‘YET SURELY WE KNEW. HOW COULD WE NOT KNOW?’

‘ONCE WE HAVE ANAYSED THE INFORMATION IN THIS SUB-MIND OF OURS,

HEAR THIS JAQ DRACO: ONLY TINY PORTIONS OF US CAN HEED YOU, OTHERWISE WE NEGLECT OUR IMPERIUM, OF WHICH OUR SCRUTINY MUST NOT FALTER FOR AN INSTANT. FOR TIME DOES NOT HELT EVERYWHERE WITHIN THE REALM OF MAN. INDEED TIME HALTS ONLY FOR YOU. 

‘WE ARE AN EVER-WATCHFUL LORD ARE WE NOT? DID YOU HOPE TO GAIN OUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION?’

‘HOW ELSE SHOULD WE SOUL-BIND PSYKERS AND OVERVIEW THE WARP AND BEAM THE ASTRONOMICON BEACOM AND SURVIVE AND RECEIVE INFORMATION AND GRANT AUDIENCES ALL AT ONCE, UNLESS WE ARE SO MANY?

‘AND YET STILL WE MISS SO MUCH, SO VERY MUCH? SUCH AS THAT WHICH GUIDED YOU HERE.’

‘OUR SPIRIT GUIDED YOU.’

‘NO: ANOTHER SPIRIT, A REFLECTION OF OUR GOODNESS WHICH WE THRUST FROM US.’

‘WE ARE THE ONLY SOURCE OF GOODNESS, SEVERE AND DRASTIC. THERE IS NO OTHER SOURCE OF HOPE THAN US. WE ARE AGONISINGLY ALONE.’