2. Down came the night
Dara sat at the steering wheel of the department truck, staring through a dirty windshield at stars heraldic as snowflakes. Her key remained unturned in the ignition. For hours, she had barely moved, the glue gone from her thoughts and into her muscles. Ideas didn’t connect, and she couldn’t think clearly about what had happened with the three men.
Chimes cosseted her free of the crystalline sky. A number she didn’t recognize occupied the ghost glow from her cell’s display.
“Hello.”
“Mommy…”
Dense fear opened, then shut to colossal silence.
She made herself ask, “Who is this?”
“Me, mommy.”
She listened hard.
“Mommy, where are you?”
The connection sizzled, and a dial tone threaded her emptiness. She closed the cell.
She had to get out of the Pines, find some coffee, something to clear her head. Caffeine and fluorescent lights would make her thoughts legible again. Then she’d see these crazy events as some misunderstanding of a rational fact, no doubt something dangerous, a brain lesion. A tumor can be excised. When she turned the ignition key, she had convinced herself she still had a place in the everyday world.
The truck’s headlights illuminated a small, young girl standing in the road, thirty feet away, squinting. The child remained still as a figment of human dreaming. A quiet breeze lifted strands of her blonde hair as if fingering for choices. Her red cardigan, open on a blue jumper, looked brand new as did her cross-strap yellow sneakers. She continued squinting into the high beams yet did not move or raise a hand.
Dara worked to breathe. She wanted to get out of the truck and go to the child yet couldn’t budge. She had gone to sleep in the pale skin of herself. With some effort, she opened the door and stepped down. Sand crunched like sugar as she trod upon her shadow through the unreal quiet.
“Logan?” Her voice vanished in an exhalation of disbelief. She tried again, “Are you Logan?”
The girl watched her, features impassive, green eyes pulsing with urgency. A shout burst through her paralysis, “Mommy! They’re here!”
Forge hammers boomed nearby, abruptly and all around, smashing the night. The child’s cheeks smeared back. Her eyelids fluttered, hard pressed by a tremendous wind.
Spectra, bezants and medallions of rainbows, spilled onto the road through pitch pines and scrub oak. The sudden din stamped vibrations in the air, and swells of warping density lobed sight into a chrome sphere. The girl folded into that dazzling mirage and disappeared.
Dara sat down.
All around, streaks of iridescent energy spun loudly through the trees. Inverted darkness strobed and pulsed, a musical cacophony, gamelan thunder and sheet lightning.
Three radiant, orange globes wobbled across the road, coalesced and shot straight up to a zenith of carousel lights. One more step and she would have stood where they had come together and departed.
The hammering ceased, and the truck’s headlights snapped off. Night swelled closer, stars whispering in the seams of darkness.
Dara rocked where she sat, trying to fit all her senses in their right places, and her ears coughed deep inside.
“It’s after midnight,” she spoke just to hear if she could hear. “It’s after midnight, and I’m sitting in the Pines.” Noises smoldered in the woods: a purling brook, barking frogs and that wind again rummaging for its choices.
She put palms to the ground, pushed herself upright and froze. Starfire rayed out of the woods – and an iron hammer thumped.
The stonefall of her heart sat her back down.
A beat-up ’95 Bronco pulled around the bend and swerved to a stop, engine pinging. Out jumped a young man in faded cowboy denims and suede shoes. Harlequin lanky with doleful eyes set among vague features, he resembled a mime before makeup. “You okay?”
Clear facts, but fragmented like memories, arrived with a name: “Simon.” Simon Lehns, grad assistant in the department office, not a botany guy, not even bio, a data gaffer from Computer Science humping a keyboard, tweaking lab-and-lecture schedules…
“You seem shaky. Maybe you should lie down.” He squatted beside her, shoulder-length hair momentarily tenting her face as he read her pupils. “Oh, you think you can stand?”
She leaned into him until she found her balance. In a voice that seemed to angle upward toward a human space, she heard herself, “What are you doing here?”
“You logged the truck out early. Before eight AM.” He put a hand on each of her shoulders and gently squared them. “You should have been back by dark. No bedroll or rations in the truck last I checked, and the Wedgemussel Survey requisitioned all overnight kits for their big weekend.”
Eyeing her steadiness, he backed toward the truck. “After sunset, I called your cell. No answer.”
When he reached in through the open door, the headlights lit up for a moment before he pulled the keys. “Rang your apartment. Nothing.”
Gently, he closed the truck door. “So, I swung by to see if you had taken the truck straight home.”
The round lenses of his wire frames aimed two hot holes of reflected high beams at her. “Sorry about hacking your personnel file. I had a strong feeling I should find you. After I went to three of your other tagged sites out here, I – uh saw those lights, in the sky.”
His voice wisped like December, synesthesia fumes shredding in the July air.
A flashback of the small girl who was refused this world trembled in her, a Gnostic veil rippling between higher realms and the shadow of her brain.
“Hey! Hold on!” Simon rushed forward and caught her under one shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. I’ll drive back for the truck tomorrow with one of the lab grunts.”
While Simon handled the Bronco, negotiating a maze of unpaved roads, night furled through Dara. Dark existence reconciled itself to her mind’s small spark. No one spoke until they cruised onto 206 North.
Asphalt and orange highway lights asserted sanity’s tedium. “What did you see?” Dara asked, not turning her face from the passenger window. “In the sky.”
“That was so weird! I don’t know what I saw. It was – bright!” He looked away from the empty highway and stared at her until she faced him. “What happened to you out there?” In the dashlight, his lensed eyes glistened as inwardly as honey. “What did you see?”
Fear gaped, and she shook her head.
“You can tell me.” He changed the fabric of his voice and returned his gaze to the road. “I saw those lights.” Subdued by her stillness, he whispered, “Whatever they were.”
“A Kruskal-Szekeres Radial Corridor.”
“A what?”
“A passageway between worldlines…” She regarded him with grim attentiveness. “A portal between different histories of the universe. In another history, I have a daughter. Logan. She’s four-years-old. That little girl wandered into a Kruskal-Szekeres Radial Corridor – and in most histories, she dies.”
He slowed the Bronco and pulled onto the shoulder. “You better start at the beginning.”
“Three men came walking.”
Like Adam with his mother, he listened to her describe something different. She recounted her bizarre experiences with fluent detail including the older man’s words precisely, “‘…this undertaking will leave you fugitive to all worlds but this one – and your odds of returning precisely here are very slim. Very slim indeed.’ Dramatic. Emphatic. Just like that.”
Dara finished with the small girl vanishing in a spectral storm, and Simon stared like stone. “You think we’ve been exposed to a psychotropic agent? A spore or something that got loose in the department labs? We could be carrying it on our shoes.”
“I thought of that. But what plant induces lucid hallucinations? I’m totally clear-headed.” That was truer now than earlier. Sharing her story with Simon had clarified her mind, and she recognized how much this young man she had barely noticed cared. At any other time the revelation of a secret admirer might have flattered. Instead, she began wondering if his graduate research in Computer Science had anything to do with artificial intelligence…
Gravel crunched. Over her shoulder, Dara glimpsed one of the young men who had approached her in the Pines.
He stood very close to the open passenger window, almost erased in the dark by black head scarf and leather garb. In his open hand, he showed her a ring worn palmside, set with a gold barb, iridescent at the edges like razor wire.
“Know the shiv’morfa!” He clapped her shoulder, driving metal into muscle, and answered her painful shout with a shameless laugh and a blur of star-like teeth.
Simon grabbed for her and instantly pulled back. Under his appalled stare, she shriveled to smoke. Her clothes flared apart, gusting into bits of dwindling confetti.
In moments, nothing of the woman remained. A large moon-pale moth fluttered over her absence.
It lingered, sawtoothed wings beating uncharacteristically slow, a flicker-frame display of membrane markings with the startled likeness of Dara Egan.
Simon’s panicked breathing nudged the flitting insect out the side window, where it whirled into the languid night.
Chimes cosseted her free of the crystalline sky. A number she didn’t recognize occupied the ghost glow from her cell’s display.
“Hello.”
“Mommy…”
Dense fear opened, then shut to colossal silence.
She made herself ask, “Who is this?”
“Me, mommy.”
She listened hard.
“Mommy, where are you?”
The connection sizzled, and a dial tone threaded her emptiness. She closed the cell.
She had to get out of the Pines, find some coffee, something to clear her head. Caffeine and fluorescent lights would make her thoughts legible again. Then she’d see these crazy events as some misunderstanding of a rational fact, no doubt something dangerous, a brain lesion. A tumor can be excised. When she turned the ignition key, she had convinced herself she still had a place in the everyday world.
The truck’s headlights illuminated a small, young girl standing in the road, thirty feet away, squinting. The child remained still as a figment of human dreaming. A quiet breeze lifted strands of her blonde hair as if fingering for choices. Her red cardigan, open on a blue jumper, looked brand new as did her cross-strap yellow sneakers. She continued squinting into the high beams yet did not move or raise a hand.
Dara worked to breathe. She wanted to get out of the truck and go to the child yet couldn’t budge. She had gone to sleep in the pale skin of herself. With some effort, she opened the door and stepped down. Sand crunched like sugar as she trod upon her shadow through the unreal quiet.
“Logan?” Her voice vanished in an exhalation of disbelief. She tried again, “Are you Logan?”
The girl watched her, features impassive, green eyes pulsing with urgency. A shout burst through her paralysis, “Mommy! They’re here!”
Forge hammers boomed nearby, abruptly and all around, smashing the night. The child’s cheeks smeared back. Her eyelids fluttered, hard pressed by a tremendous wind.
Spectra, bezants and medallions of rainbows, spilled onto the road through pitch pines and scrub oak. The sudden din stamped vibrations in the air, and swells of warping density lobed sight into a chrome sphere. The girl folded into that dazzling mirage and disappeared.
Dara sat down.
All around, streaks of iridescent energy spun loudly through the trees. Inverted darkness strobed and pulsed, a musical cacophony, gamelan thunder and sheet lightning.
Three radiant, orange globes wobbled across the road, coalesced and shot straight up to a zenith of carousel lights. One more step and she would have stood where they had come together and departed.
The hammering ceased, and the truck’s headlights snapped off. Night swelled closer, stars whispering in the seams of darkness.
Dara rocked where she sat, trying to fit all her senses in their right places, and her ears coughed deep inside.
“It’s after midnight,” she spoke just to hear if she could hear. “It’s after midnight, and I’m sitting in the Pines.” Noises smoldered in the woods: a purling brook, barking frogs and that wind again rummaging for its choices.
She put palms to the ground, pushed herself upright and froze. Starfire rayed out of the woods – and an iron hammer thumped.
The stonefall of her heart sat her back down.
A beat-up ’95 Bronco pulled around the bend and swerved to a stop, engine pinging. Out jumped a young man in faded cowboy denims and suede shoes. Harlequin lanky with doleful eyes set among vague features, he resembled a mime before makeup. “You okay?”
Clear facts, but fragmented like memories, arrived with a name: “Simon.” Simon Lehns, grad assistant in the department office, not a botany guy, not even bio, a data gaffer from Computer Science humping a keyboard, tweaking lab-and-lecture schedules…
“You seem shaky. Maybe you should lie down.” He squatted beside her, shoulder-length hair momentarily tenting her face as he read her pupils. “Oh, you think you can stand?”
She leaned into him until she found her balance. In a voice that seemed to angle upward toward a human space, she heard herself, “What are you doing here?”
“You logged the truck out early. Before eight AM.” He put a hand on each of her shoulders and gently squared them. “You should have been back by dark. No bedroll or rations in the truck last I checked, and the Wedgemussel Survey requisitioned all overnight kits for their big weekend.”
Eyeing her steadiness, he backed toward the truck. “After sunset, I called your cell. No answer.”
When he reached in through the open door, the headlights lit up for a moment before he pulled the keys. “Rang your apartment. Nothing.”
Gently, he closed the truck door. “So, I swung by to see if you had taken the truck straight home.”
The round lenses of his wire frames aimed two hot holes of reflected high beams at her. “Sorry about hacking your personnel file. I had a strong feeling I should find you. After I went to three of your other tagged sites out here, I – uh saw those lights, in the sky.”
His voice wisped like December, synesthesia fumes shredding in the July air.
A flashback of the small girl who was refused this world trembled in her, a Gnostic veil rippling between higher realms and the shadow of her brain.
“Hey! Hold on!” Simon rushed forward and caught her under one shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. I’ll drive back for the truck tomorrow with one of the lab grunts.”
While Simon handled the Bronco, negotiating a maze of unpaved roads, night furled through Dara. Dark existence reconciled itself to her mind’s small spark. No one spoke until they cruised onto 206 North.
Asphalt and orange highway lights asserted sanity’s tedium. “What did you see?” Dara asked, not turning her face from the passenger window. “In the sky.”
“That was so weird! I don’t know what I saw. It was – bright!” He looked away from the empty highway and stared at her until she faced him. “What happened to you out there?” In the dashlight, his lensed eyes glistened as inwardly as honey. “What did you see?”
Fear gaped, and she shook her head.
“You can tell me.” He changed the fabric of his voice and returned his gaze to the road. “I saw those lights.” Subdued by her stillness, he whispered, “Whatever they were.”
“A Kruskal-Szekeres Radial Corridor.”
“A what?”
“A passageway between worldlines…” She regarded him with grim attentiveness. “A portal between different histories of the universe. In another history, I have a daughter. Logan. She’s four-years-old. That little girl wandered into a Kruskal-Szekeres Radial Corridor – and in most histories, she dies.”
He slowed the Bronco and pulled onto the shoulder. “You better start at the beginning.”
“Three men came walking.”
Like Adam with his mother, he listened to her describe something different. She recounted her bizarre experiences with fluent detail including the older man’s words precisely, “‘…this undertaking will leave you fugitive to all worlds but this one – and your odds of returning precisely here are very slim. Very slim indeed.’ Dramatic. Emphatic. Just like that.”
Dara finished with the small girl vanishing in a spectral storm, and Simon stared like stone. “You think we’ve been exposed to a psychotropic agent? A spore or something that got loose in the department labs? We could be carrying it on our shoes.”
“I thought of that. But what plant induces lucid hallucinations? I’m totally clear-headed.” That was truer now than earlier. Sharing her story with Simon had clarified her mind, and she recognized how much this young man she had barely noticed cared. At any other time the revelation of a secret admirer might have flattered. Instead, she began wondering if his graduate research in Computer Science had anything to do with artificial intelligence…
Gravel crunched. Over her shoulder, Dara glimpsed one of the young men who had approached her in the Pines.
He stood very close to the open passenger window, almost erased in the dark by black head scarf and leather garb. In his open hand, he showed her a ring worn palmside, set with a gold barb, iridescent at the edges like razor wire.
“Know the shiv’morfa!” He clapped her shoulder, driving metal into muscle, and answered her painful shout with a shameless laugh and a blur of star-like teeth.
Simon grabbed for her and instantly pulled back. Under his appalled stare, she shriveled to smoke. Her clothes flared apart, gusting into bits of dwindling confetti.
In moments, nothing of the woman remained. A large moon-pale moth fluttered over her absence.
It lingered, sawtoothed wings beating uncharacteristically slow, a flicker-frame display of membrane markings with the startled likeness of Dara Egan.
Simon’s panicked breathing nudged the flitting insect out the side window, where it whirled into the languid night.
posted by A. A. Attanasio at
2:18 PM
4 Comments:
I like it!
You are strong with it now.
The Moth.
The Dragons of Babel and
Thunderer have Moth things..
Both novels have Jan. 2008
1st edition release.
I have to think-The Sea Snake
delivered something unique
undercover of a little startlement
and pain.
Variant of 3 men came walking..
Early this am..I had a thought..
Slappy Brane
Soapy Planck
Sleepy *******
******** of
Mr. Bubble
in
The Ocean
Swanwick and young Gilman
are trying to communicate
hoping for mercy for humankind.
and last night
I studied the eyes of various of the children
in the Field & Stream Dec/Jan 2007-2008 issue.
In some cases the fathers were present in the photos
Nothing for them as of now.
To be taught to revel in the deaths and blood of innocent animals is not acceptable.
If The Horn of Time the Hunter
is to be forever muted
Then even those children
who are willingly lost in darkness
shall never see the realm of light.
I suppose tears of repentance
will do..
afterall wasn't it the gift of tears and dreams that was
vouchsafed to the ape 130,000 years ago...and in just a few more years
another increment
The gift of surfing effortless
the abyss between the stars..
"Our chances looked about equal for perishing as miserably as the Norse did in Greenland, or settling into a sameness like the Polynesians in the Pacific."
Courage is what will see the humans through..
Hanno will come again
to captain a grand ship far
into the undiscovered country.
As long as a girl like the one who sings that microsoft tune
'I'm a young soul-in this world to learn about give and take-and what is true and fake'
It will be alright if she sings Kyrie eleison up by the carved masthead..
On se veut
And it shall!
had a lucid hallucination a couple days ago...The phrase..Polymorphic Symbolism came up..so I googled it..and wow!
I will now call up Paul Dirac to hear what he has to say.
Sir Ginarr Gnomesbastard
is lurking on the 33rd step down dreamland way...Hornbori Monadnock will slip a peel under his shoe..
Puissance is the key word in The Dragons of Babel..
Swanwick also supplied
the word hunched in multiple forms..this means the Other used Unca Mike as facet..
Towards the end of it..Unca Mike put in Prester John(a Copper John variant)/so it was not at all a cantrip..it pointed the way to Julian Barbour and his Platonia End of Time Theory..The word verification 'okakzind' is interesting.
a blur of star-like teeth.
this i like very much.
as for the rest, it held
me captive. which is the
best that writing can do.
now i have kidnapped you.
superb. i'm blown away by your talents Mr. Attanasio.
Hello!
It's me...Slappy Brane!
Excuse the lack of comm.
The books reading stuff is integral..actually.
Not for you anymore..as you did that first.
As for me..I do things backwards.
I get information from life first and than read stuff.
Fer instance...A.J. Heschel/"The Prophets"...
Gen. 6:3..."My Spirit shall not contend for ever"
Rashi(Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki/Troyes,France C.E. 1040-1105); interpreted this to mean..."My Spirit shall not be in a state of discontent and shall not strive within ME because of man...My Spirit has been contending within ME whether to destroy or whether to show mercy: such contending shall not be for ever." I suppose all this is related to Ruah...and really cogent is the manuscript "The Book of Thomas the Contender" from Nag Hammadi..a hellenistic jewish philosopher from 189 C.E. thoughts on a transcription of the historical J.C.'s words spoken to himself...His lower soul the Contending Spirit/His twin/Judas Thomas.
You must realize now/that words in the form of books/from anywhere or when have a spirit that is not subject to any set laws.
Jews have great interest for me/because of their learned ways...
although they cannot or will not go beyond the parameters of Jerusalem.
A few nights ago...I came up with the title...Basileus Rex..I thought I was the first to put these two words together..
When I learned today/that this is an epithet for Scottish Kings..difficult it is for me to admit a bloodline of Gael(Scot via Ireland or Irish via Scotland and Israel via France or French via Israel)The nastiness of the Old World peoples has caused me to only think of the First Nations spiritual inheritance as legit.
This is not an intellectual error/the Gnostics writings make this clear.
The friend you have named Shaun...I just noticed today that he is from Salt Lake City...I lived at Cottonwood Heights during late 2001.
And I know of and have visited the threshold of the Home of The Lord of Light which is located in a remote part of the State of Utah/which still causes me to give leeway to the Mormon people.
Also..I know of the residence of the Lord of Manifestation..located in another western state and have walked by this place.
Both of these I did not enter/contending forces within and without...since you love the islands so much/will go back 15,000
years and take them as they were/and 1,000 miles of surrounding ocean for a complete bio-sphere..you can be director and populate with whatever Hominidae you choose/You can be Hominidae Rex.
Battlestar Gallactica/final episode~"Sometimes A Great Notion"
I thought it was a cute title/I have not watched any full episodes and just a minute or so of any of them/Too depressing/The remmnants of the Human Race/I found the Cylons interesting as they strived to become.
I wonder what the 14 year old boy who jumped from the High Bridge in Saint Paul because the original was being cancelled/what would he think/there will be a place for such children in the Great Life to come/would you invite him to the islands?
When and if the islands become part of the Bright World.
Speaking of children/you were right in your thinking back in the old Tucson days/quantum tip of the infinite iceberg...
Since you have access to ITA(information Technology assist)~~~this~~~St. Paul Pioneer Press/Morning Dispatch for Saturday August 10th 1946..
The weather report on the early morning hours of August 9th.
someone coined it thus...*******....it is a file heading...each letter is a initialization of a word.
I find it funny/as I use the acronymn(sic?)tCatEoT for Bear's new book...GB is an agent for "The Joy of Matter" intelligences/which is alright/but why limit reality to a single universe/cause they can't get out of it/and it is dying?
Bethatasitmay/Neal S. and his "Anathem" takes it to other and higher verses/humans live in hope/see his Calca #3...
Like I stated somewhere else recently/This "Anathem" is obvious/He got a lot of help writing this/Think of "Radix" as foundation and or cornerstone/special books are rooms/"Anathem" as observatory...
Everything can be as PKD said in his exegesis/page 83-84.
Because this galactic universe is a finite temporal structure..it is dealt with by a finite computational mind/and this mind has limited itself for this venture by a seemingly prodigious number/ candleflicker by the supreme standard...This is the number/999^999^999/a chip of the old ineffable block so to speak.
That brings up a question/is a piece of the Ineffable still ineffable/of course it is~that is the reason it called the Shekinah/it can be known by select humankind.
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