Poetry and Prose

Prose

• No Accents in Space — Part 1

  Pronunciation of Names

  • Tiaya (Tie-'ay-yuh)
  • Haarvara II ('Ha-ar-'var-uh the second)
  • Haidele (Hi-'dell)
  • Weyeljia (While-'zjeye-yuh)
  • Gimjall ('Ghim-jaul)
  • Theia ('They-ee-yuh)

  The planet was once itself alive with Phi, collected by resonance temples all over the world which fed the web that enveloped mankind and reached far out into space, even extending around our cold Dianna, who wasn’t yet called “The Moon”. That’s when Timemother and Timefather were born into houses of bread, signaling to the Stars (even the ones who slumbered) that Man’s Fifth Climb, the coming Silicon Age, would be the Pivot - mankind would finally be leveraged into the Age of Panlightenment, which you and I call, simply, “these days”.

  These days, you’ve become an adult, and you’ve reached the Age of Registration, judged fit to receive the fifth and final revelation. If you survive the in-formation you’ll be considered “properly in phase” and gain a chance to become a god and command your own graceship, like your fathers and mothers. It's your choice. Remember – your youngest mother Tiaya chose a life of science and is a renowned Contributor and Earth Shepherd, and has been bestowed many honors.

  Anyway, since I’m consort to your Bloodmother, it falls to me to tell you this story before your Registration. So, back to it. Bl’mother says that the story was removed from the Archive over forty-five centuries ago. Your great-great-great-something grandmother sneaked it out as a needledot concealed in -- well, thoroughly concealed -- so convinced was she (in opposition to the Stones of Science) that the ancient technology could be decoded. The secret was kept in your bloodline for three generations until your great-something uncle Haarvara II decoded the chip. Since then, the story has been passed down at every Registration, giving those who accepted the revelation -- your predecessors -- a secret advantage. It’s the real story of how the gods fashioned the world (not the shiny stuff they sell you at Academy or the digest you read on the monuments) and it’s why your family has ruled the Universe for so many Edens. So, listen up – it’s quite important. It’s really only a fragment, but it starts here, on the Moon, before it was known to have been populated, and is everything you need to know. I’ve memorized every word, and it goes like this:

  Haidele remembered neither betting on black nor on “32”, but had already accepted the winnings as a forgone conclusion. Perceiving to some degree in all seven available dimensions in this octave had its benefits. One of them was being able to “see” what his cat was thinking, and his cat had liked black-32. But he was focused on his sister now, whom he hadn't seen since his previous incarnation.

  Haidele’s sister, Weyeljia, always believed that the seventh sight was obvious and simple, and so she persisted in a belief that she could teach the homines sapientes of Earth how to see what she adorably referred to as “more-er”. It was thought that she'd given up the endeavor after she’d driven many of the ill-equipped creatures into madness with mere slipthoughts, having appeared to finally agree with Haidele that they could not – in the current Eden – be anything more than “four-d”, no better than the lowest class of our own people who could never, of course, pass a Registration.

  “You should stick to cats,” Haidele had said when he’d first learned of her vulgar hobby. His cat, Jeefers was sitting on the edge of the Gimjall table, watching the seven colors of numbered balls zipping around the central attractor like chewing orbs spilled in a bath basin. The cat seemed to be writing circles in the air with his little face as the balls settled into dynamic patterns. Jeefers percieved that the four-d operator behind the game was calling out some nonsense about how “nobody knows which ball or color chickety, chickety, chee, chee, yaw!”

  He was also thinking that tuning out the vocalizations of such four-dees (especially simians) was better for his mental processes:

  muffled, the yips of
  stupid monkeys are far less
  distinguishable.

  Weyeljia was scooched all the way up to the rail of the flashing Gimjall table in a chair that was covered in long mammoth fur. Her shiny black hair was reflecting the glowing, colored lights of the game and was nearly touching the floor, sitting as she was with her elbows on her knees. She was gently stroking Jeefers’ neck while she scrutinized the visage of her spiritual brother whom she’d hadn’t seen since they were twelve years old when they were simultaneously introduced and separated. Her words were issued from her throat like they had to be convinced to emerge, as she both loved and resented him. “So, this is what you picked – the guise of some... wanderer?”

  “Would you have me a king? That’s far too obvious,” Haidele said dismissively, perhaps even snootily.

  “No, I just thought you’d be more - I don’t know – impressive.” Weyeljia sat abruptly up and back into the wooly chair, pouting a bit, as if Haidele’s choice for reincarnation should have been better tailored to please her, like it was her birthday party, and not the Earth’s.

  Black-32 had won. Haidele picked up the winnings as he placed another bet: he was certain Jeefers was slipthinking yellow-77. A gold chain bracelet, heavy with charms, rattled and jingled as it spilled out from his long shirtsleeve and frilly cuff when he reached for the dialuminium chits. Each charm was a tiny, unique face.

  “…you kill all those guys?” asked Weyeljia, knowing the answer. “You don’t have to do this to your soul,” she said. She leaned forward and began stroking Jeefers fur again, staring out the casino’s main window over his fuzzy, gray head at the distant Earth.

  “My soul’s fine. You should be more concerned about the Pivot and making stuff happen than pushing silly ideas. I hear you’ve started a religion?”

  “Mmmmn… not so much a religion as a ‘job corps’ for souls, but y’know how simians react to advanced thought.” She was twirling Jeefers’ neck fur into little, fleeting dreadlocks. Her Egyptian-painted eyes appeared nearly crossed under her fluffy, thick lashes as she focused on the cat’s twisted hairs. “I'll get them to see what the Verse really is, in time.” After a tiny pause and repositioning of her head and her facial expression she asked herself, aloud, “Or is it ‘outside of time’?”

  “I think it might be ‘despite time’,” Haidele offered, “but... semantics. I’m not arguing that this universe isn’t a torus – that’s obvious now. I just don't think that Man can grasp it until the next cycle. And that should be your focus – getting them to the next cycle alive – not slipping concepts into their heads that are too big for their minds.”

  Jeefers was listening on some level but was intently focused on the swarm of balls around the game’s attractor. The quantum state looked good, so he focused on calling down the purrfect formula to shape the boundary region between what was and what shall be:

  Weyeljia’s star
  seventy-seven yellows
  bread in Haidele’s store

  The yellow ball marked “77” orbited the attractor with an increasingly star-shaped path until it had triggered the point detectors, signaling a winner. Haidele liked to boast to other gods that he could sense the winnings and that “luck is no more”. The truth was that somewhere around two-hundred and thirty years-old, he’d discovered that cats only think – and communicate – in haiku, through which they also influence the quantum substrate. A century later, he and Jeefers worked their first casino, realizing the start of a monstrous financial empire.

  At the base of the elaborately decorated, cathedral-like backboard of the present game, two little doors popped open like on a cuckoo clock and out jumped a six-inch-tall cricket-shaped robot that danced all the way around the game's perimeter to cheerfully deposit yet another pile of dialuminium chits in front of Haidele. Jeefers pawed playfully at it as the little machine shuffled and jerked past his perch. He momentarily but only partially rose to unblock its path along a grooved, metallic track at the edge of the table. Haidele knew that the management would soon become uncomfortable with his luck, so he began gathering up his details from his place at the table while slurping the last bit of Druie from between the ice cones in his glass.

  “Well,” he said, matter-of-factly, as he scooped up Jeefers who cooperated with the gesture like a drunk ferret, “You’ll never steer the course of mankind with hope and good deeds. They’re primitive animals, and the only right way is through strategic culling by us gods. It’s proven. It was proven in all previous Ages, and this one is no different. We’ll spot-clean like we always have, and they probably won’t destroy themselves, entirely, when they cause the end of this Age. The next Eden will be better. Now I have to go.” He removed a thin, black glove from a strong, wide hand and pressed a finger into the depression on top of his collar bone, activating his graceship’s communications circuit, addressing her by name. “Theia, bring me in and prepare for a phase to Earth.”

• No Accents in Space — Part 2

  Haidele’s graceship had been in slumber mode. His coms signal had interrupted Theia while she'd been calculating just how far from the center of the Galaxy she’d have to take the ship, the cat, and Haidele so that she could have him all to herself. But she was just – musing.

  “I’ll be there in a quark-not, Haidele,” Theia told him in her usual calm but girly voice. “Short-spacing at airlock twelve in three minutes, darling.”

  Haidele had told her not to call him “darling” and sometimes regretted having opted for certain “augmentations” in a very nearby universe. The salesman, though, had claimed they would “enable her to be a warmer person.” That she was.

  “’Did your ship just call you ‘dar-ling’?” asked Weyeljia, lifting an eyebrow and rising slowly from the wooly mammoth chair which dwarfed her with its puffy luxury. She wasn’t jealous. She liked that Haidele’s only apparent female companionship came from a bag of neural gel. It didn’t matter in the slightest what he named it. Or what voice he programmed it with.

  “Nope,” he said while grunting a little bit, pretending as if propping Jeefers up on his arm was hard work. The end of the feigned grunt transformed into words. “Who’s a baby boy?” he said to the cat like he was talking to an infant. Jeefers knew perfectly well who the baby boy was. The dialuminium chits in Haidele’s heavy stashsack jingled when he bounced the cat up a bit higher and closer to his face so he could kiss his furry, little cheek, adorned with unusually long, white whiskers.

  Jeefers was looking smugly pleased and perturbed as Heidele turned away from the table and began his departure. In all his centuries, Jeefers' favorite people were definitely the homo capultus of Dianna. They had the best food, the best technology, and most of all – the best cuddles. He ground his cheeks into the side of Haidele’s watermelon-shaped head, just above the moon man’s ear holes.

  “Alright, alright, buddy,” Haidele told the cat, concedingly. “We’ll get you some snackies as soon as we’re on the ship.” He was walking slowly from the lunar casino’s floor, toward airlock twelve while balancing Jeefers on his upper arm and shoulder, and wriggling his glove back on, but still trying to give Jeefers full attention with his face. He gave up on the glove and stuffed it into the stashsack while touching nose-to-nose with Jeefers. He looked like a pirate from the seas of Earth, walking a bit bent over to one side with that cat on his shoulder, taking unconscious, half-sideways steps toward the airlock alcove.

  “I can’t let you do it, Haidele,” Weyeljia called after him. She remained standing in the pulsing light of the Gimjall table in front of the wooly mammoth chair. Her small form seemed hardly threatening, posed before the over-sized chair, but the threat was very real. Everyone who survives Registration and becomes a god or goddess is exempt from Karma. Weyeljia could “defend the universe” from whatever foe and by whatever means she deemed appropriate, as could Haidele. And she didn’t hesitate in her judgement.

  She took what looked like a walnut from a handy pocket near her slender waist and smashed it on the floor with a single, sharp, downward gesture of her arm that stiffened her whole body, and it seemed as if lightning simultaneously struck the casino floor. Haidele had heard the unmistakable crushing and puffing sound of the Black Pore and felt its characteristic negative energy drain. He dove for the airlock. In the same moment, the room became a whirling diorama of shattered glass, mammoth fur, Gimjall balls and furniture that was once called “futuristic” but had held that title for only a single season before the trendy socialites of the Moon had deemed it “so very last equinox.”

  In the process of creating an emergency quantum wormhole through which Weyeljia could have evacuated to any point in the known universe, thirty-four people had been flash-frozen while exploding into a million pieces. Chunks of the shattered lunar tourists (and the four-d who had been operating the Gimjall table) collided with clouds of dialuminium chits and hard droplets of bodily humors which were ricocheting off of every remaining surface at incredible speed, propelled by the sudden, catastrophic decompression of the casino lounge.

  Haidele stared at the disaster through the sealed doors of airlock alcove number twelve. He'd just made it to safety by the skin of his lobes. Earth loomed in the distance over the debris that was only moments ago a comfortable and profitable vacation. His spiritual sister’s very desperate act had told him exactly where she was going, and to save the future of humanity – in his opinion – he’d have to get there first. “Theia?” he called to his organic, ship-board computer.

  “I’m here, Hai,” she answered back, and then the airlock was suddenly filled with a light like the Sun when her landing lights popped on. She was hoovering just outside, an exact ten cubits above the lunar surface.

  “Let’s do it,” said Haidele toward his collar bone, snugging Jeefers up tightly under one arm and close to his chin. His free hand flashed out and smacked a button on a small control panel in the wall marked with the emergency glyph and the outer airlock doors retracted rapidly. There was a short whooshing sound and then silence. Haidele quickly placed a hand over Jeefers’ sensitive eyes as they were swept suddenly out into the vacuum of space amid a swirling cloud of shimmering lunar dust.

  Haidele slowed time. In the brief moment that he actually floated in lunar space (mostly upside-down, clutching his cat), he considered his mission. He thought of Earth, now in its infancy, the age of legends, before true technology…. He loved the silly planet. He only wanted them to live. Why couldn’t Timemother see that her tolerant ways would be the end of them? He thought of Weyeljia as a young woman in her first houses of bread... how he’d had her watched -- every detail of her lives chronicled and reported to him. She’d undoubtedly done the same of his. For a fraction of a second he wandered into the recent memory of her fragrance and for a fleeting moment allowed himself to imagine a single, tender caress of her slender, pale gray olba – her smooth, oblong skull.

  A brilliant, cold and silent light flashed between the graceship and the surface of the moon. Instantaneously, the atoms of Haidele, of the cat, and of six-hundred-plus grams of lunar soil were delivered into a decontamination pod on the lower deck of the ship, near the cargo section, and Theia was on coms. “You good, Baby?” she asked of Haidele, feeling relatively sure that he'd survived the Quantum Tuneller and was able to respond.

  Haidele coughed while responding in the affirmative. “I’m good. We’re good,” he said, rubbing Jeefers’ neck fur up, against the grain, and then down and back again. Each stroke sent a small cloud of moondust airborne. Jeefers’ eyes rolled in delight. He spread all the toes of his front paws on Haidele’s lap and kneaded the puffy, quilted fabric of his flight suit.

  “I'm ready to phase to Earth, Haidele.”

  “No, not yet,” he coughed, clearing his throat and catching his breath. “Nibiru.... We have to go to Nibiru first. Weyeljia's there.”

• Shovel

  Sounds of a shovel being stabbed into gravelly ground crackled through the relative quiet of the August afternoon air. Retired Master Chief Earl E. Edmund’s voice was simultaneously wound tight with repressed rage, and low with the pouty sadness of an eight year-old boy as he muttered about the rocky ground, about his wife locking him out of the house absolutely every time he strays more than fifteen feet from the door (or maybe it’s twelve), about the boys who take too much after their mother, and about how much money he’s thrown away on cars in thirty years – but not about the shovel.

  The ten year old shovel was a Workhound. Its one-and-a-quater-inch logo -- the stylized face of an angry bulldog -- was branded on the fat part of its handle. The top edge of the shovel’s rust-less blade gleamed, burnished from the friction of boot soles over many years, and though the rest of the blade showed good use and had many deep gouges running upward from its spade-like, unbent point, it showed neither shadow of tarnish nor speck of rust. The hard maple handle was thickly coated in urethane and sparkled in the hot-ass sun like the candy-scented lip gloss of a junior high school girl. Half-heartedly the shovel went up and down moving only feeble handfuls of sandy soil and mostly rocks with each shoveling from the unforgiving mid-south ground. I thought of sculptors who bang away on great blocks of stone removing only small flecks with each blow. But today, nothing was being created -- no masterpiece was taking shape.

  The retiree grunted a bit. The loose dirt where he’d planted the tip of the shovel was shallow, and stepping on the blade to drive it down had only pivoted the shovel over to one side, the handle bouncing off his wheat-bloated and liquor-filled belly as it waved across him, making little ticking sounds as it ground over the small, plastic buttons of his short-sleeved office shirt. He recovered control of the tool and while briefly, carefully leaning the shovel on his chest so it wouldn’t fall into the dirt, he wiped away tiny streams of sweat from his reddened, throbbing face with a square cut from an old cotton t-shirt. The faint nicotine stains on his fingers stood out yellowish on the still-white though thinning fabric.

  Even when I was a little kid my father grunted and groaned when he got up from the sacred recliner he called simply and barkingly “m’chair”. Later, after many years’ manual labor to make a living, I still wondered why. I’d worked hard – I mean hard – in the hot, southern, summer sun and plenty of it before I was forty years-old. And my dad was perhaps only thirty-five and had already been groaning when he got up from the chair. He didn’t have bad feet. He didn’t have bad joints. He didn’t have any back problems. But when he got asked something that made him get up from that chair – there was this tremendous groaning. It was exactly like the sounds that submarines make in movies when bad circumstances force the sub to dive deeper than they’re designed to go. Which I suppose is real fitting, since he spent seventeen years in the navy, “flushing life down the toilet on a damned submarine" as a nuclear technician of some kind. Today, every time he “actuated the shovel head with the soil”, he was groaning like he was having to get up from the chair.

  “What do you want?” he demanded as I got closer.

  “I came to see if I could dig,” I said, eying the pile of blankets that concealed the empty shell of our family dog. Dad had gone off into the woods behind the house to bury Sam in secret, as if nobody else deserved to say good-bye. He hadn’t said anything to anybody, and he hadn’t left a note.

  “I got this, son,” he told me, as if digging a hole was all there was to letting go of my dog. I had to decide what price I’d be willing to pay if I insisted on staying to say good-bye to the dog that raised me. I fast calculated that I could get the shovel handle across my chest and part of my face and pushed down into the rocky, half-dug hole, skinning my knees, and cutting at least one palm on the jagged, rocky brim, if not both. But I felt like I hadn’t spent enough time with Sam in her later, gassy years to help her feel loved when her whole life had become getting swatted with the paper and yelled at to "go away". I needed to be there for her at her graveside (it was really for me, now that I look back on it) and a few bruises and cuts would probably be the price. It didn’t seem like a bad trade.

  I stood and watched from twenty feet though I felt as if I were staring right down into the hole. He wouldn’t let me dig. I wondered why he wouldn’t just let the seventeen-year-old do the hard stuff. He’d smoked for thirty years or something, a pack-and-a-half-a-day. You could hear it in his huffing and puffing. He wasn't wheezing – he just had to work his lungs a lot more than seemed right for small hole-digging. I reckon he just thought this hole was too personal – it was no secret that the dog had been his favorite person. But he could’ve “supervised” the hole while I "applied the elbow grease" (as he was fond of saying). My thinking this was of great conflict to me, because on one hand, I wanted the sonuvabitch to sweat, to tear bloody blisters into the skin of his hands, to grind silt into his eyes trying to keep the salt of his own sweat out of them, and maybe to get too hot and finally "POP!" right then and there and fall neatly into the grave he was digging for the dog, just days before some “heart surgery” he was supposed to be having. But on the other hand -- the hole wasn’t big enough yet, and it’d be a lot of trouble to hoist his dead ass up out of there.