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...