The Godhead

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The Godhead

Postby Harvey » Fri Jan 06, 2012 1:09 pm

Hi all.

A little offering to you all. I started writing it about fifteen years ago, just a few paragraphs in a notebook at Euston Station on the way back from my illustration agent at the time. My daughter was as yet unborn, my wife was still alive, and Blair was yet to ruin us. Anyway, I remembered it recently and just carried on writing where I left off. It's rough, and I have no aspirations to be a writer so any of you are free to do with it anything you like.

Anyway, if any of you have ten minutes to spare, I hope you enjoy it.


The Godhead (a short story)



Reality continued to condense in the city like grease in a kitchen vent, but out here was different, it was barely more than the steam over a broth. Chef was well across the terminator and into the night side. Some of the distant mountains were still tipped with orange and shading into cool gold, all against a dusty, star sprinkled azure. He was entering The Dreaming from which few had returned to tell a tale. What accounts did exist ranged from the contradictory and confused to the outright disturbing. They described a place where consensus reality no longer held the majority share.

Chef Harris passed a deserted old mineral rig, a stray mountain lying abandoned by the road. Huge red and white helter-skelter projections, its earth grinders, were pointing lopsidedly into the sky, its vast tracks and thrusters all crushed or askew beneath the bulk of the refinery. It looked recently abandoned, stranded like everything else when ‘The Real’ had begun popping at the seams. As it disappeared behind him into the blood red dust of his wake, Harris understood he was probably alone. From here on in the planet was empty of man. His remaining works were so much scrap metal.

Eden was half again the size of earth and from orbit, the undulations of its massive equatorial continent resembled a golden dragon coiled around some vast blue egg. The two main cities were on the day side, in opposition to the ancient native ruins currently in Eden’s long night. All excavations, like everything else on Nightside, had ceased. Chef was on his way there when the ship had come down less than a hundred and thirty kilometres from the terminator. In mission terms, it might as well have been ten thousand were it not for a transporter depot, still lit, atop the crest of a ridge in front of him as he climbed out of the smoking wreckage. Several large trucks were fuelled and ready at the deserted loading docks, without them his mission would have ended right there.

Jon Gardiner was dead along with the pilot. Chef was the only survivor, not counting ships AI who wasn’t speaking to anyone. Mainly because he’d shut down its comms channels before the crash. The final straw came when it had begun singing mid twentieth century beat poetry (they’d been able to identify it only because Gardiner was a retro fan) in the style of hardcore Qurang acapella thrash. Perhaps the failing AI had been responsible for the loss of all systems control but Harris thought probably not. In any case, without the complex avionics the pilot might as well have been attempting to glide a dishwasher.

Chef hadn’t looked too closely at what was left of the pilot’s suit, still (mostly) in his chair and had made his way through the cracked hull, dragging a brace of air tanks with him. He had also decided not to look too closely at the shifting, stirring madness visible toward the twilight where he was soon to be going.

Harris spotted Gardiner’s green suit outside the ship. It appeared intact. He’d come to rest as if leaning against a boulder, seated insouciantly with his back to the gathering mysteries of the night side, the functioning visor mirrored to the imminence of the sunset in front of him. Sunset wouldn’t occur for another month or so here. Eden was nearly at perihelion and its star had slowed all westward progress for a short while. Soon it would stop completely for days, moving backward across the sky for a time before continuing on toward the horizon. Chef wasn’t quite sure why but Gardiner had explained it to him once. It had something to do with Eden’s eccentric orbit and its increased orbital speed closest to the sun. It wasn’t tidally locked with its star but one full day/night cycle took three years on Eden. The nights were long and cold but with virtually no axial tilt, at least the seasons were mild. Or so his half brother Hector liked to joke, rather lamely.

It had taken several tense and delicate hours using a combination of functioning lifting equipment, improvised straps from some tied together packing harnesses and a change of air tanks for Chef to wrestle the cargo container free of the ships hold. Then he’d had to jerry rig an attachment to the requisitioned transporter cab which of course had a different gauge trailer mount. All the while a strong wind was blowing out from the eastern highlands in Nightside. Though thin, the wind was treacherously fast and made working difficult as it flicked deftly at him. By the end of it Chef was nearly too exhausted to raise his bruised arms above aching shoulders. Almost numbed by the concert of painful sensation, Harris climbed slowly up the side of the cab, feeling every flexion with hyper-real clarity. He pulled himself into the airlock, nearly fainting with pathetic gratitude at the release of his final reserves of strength. Looking back to view his handy work Chef glanced to sunward, toward his past life in The Real. Now he was bound for darkness, for The Dreaming and for his future. Whatever that would turn out to be, assuming time continued to persist. He bade silent farewell to Gardiner and the pilot, whose name he’d forgotten, then closed the hatch.

The first thing he heard after turning on the radio was the ship broadcasting merrily across all available wavelengths: “...angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…” The next several hours were enough to convince chef that he was inside some kind of starry dynamo and that the end was nigh. He was squinting habitually; almost unable to sort through the shimmering merging forms for something meaningful. The closer twilight came, the thinner the world outside the cab had become. Objects would appear to separate from themselves as if they were stereoscopic photographs sliding apart.

As soon as he was fully into the shadow side, a kind of perilous vertigo had taken hold. If he looked for too long, the formless panic spread into his chest, and cold waves of gooseflesh washed over him. He remembered the time he was standing on a glass walkway miles above the canyon floor at Tharsis.

That is what this feels like - The distance between Mars and here was vertigo inducing by itself.

Chef was loose - Chef tried to live within the drone of the engines and the roar of air conditioning but Chef couldn’t be sure whether he was living or dead. Looking outside was enough to be unsure.

The heat is real enough - He touched the brakes, nothing much happened, he touched on them again, this time with intent, heard them shudder, felt the inertia carry him forward as the rig slowed - I’m still here -


He was still there in the mechanical groan of the engine, still there in the hiss of hydraulics, there in the reverberations drilling through his eye sockets, there in the muted scream of internal turbines and the whir of servos, feeling all of it. Believing it.

What if something essential fails? I don’t know enough to imagine the whole fucking engine together - the life support -

Deep in the darkening uplands of a ravelling world, Chef realised that there was little he could to help himself, except perhaps pray. He pounded the fist sized plastic bag with the side of a heavy spanner until its contents began to pulverize and took a good thumbnail of the resulting powder to one nostril.

If it’s the end of the world -

He’d found the cocaine pouch in one of the cab lockers. It wouldn’t make any difference now, and it might even help. He snorted back and felt the diesel sting bite him between his eyes and in the back in his throat, felt himself lift and smooth out, felt the rush. Then he did the same with the other nostril.

He’d also found a shoebox full of hand rolled cigarettes. They were forbidden under several treaties but the cartel tacitly allowed their workers to grow, process, and smuggle tobacco on all their colonies. “A little dirt keeps them all cleaner,” ran the motto. Plus, the cigarettes, the cocaine, the booze, the coffee, they all helped each other to cement and support the hard work that needed to be done. Keeping the costs high, by black market, kept them earning day in day out. But at least the coke was free. Chef took the stubbiest looking smoke with a trembling hand and lit up. It had been a while.

At the edge of the world, a horizon of sorts shimmered in scorched purple meanderings of alien bush, ridge, tree, parched earth, rocks, all invaded by swathes of sky cart wheeling into the land instead of meeting crisply. Nearer to hand, things much larger and mercifully indistinct were moving through the landscape of their own accord, though chef knew Eden had no surviving fauna to speak of. He chose not to dwell upon those. He saw that there was no division of earth and sky anymore. There was a merely a confusion of twisting realities, a war of realms.

What the? -

Harris tried to ignore the wrongness as it spread outside, a region of instability, marked by frenzied whirlwinds, each a fractal procession of screaming faces spiralling down into a growing central area of darkness. It reminded him of the agonised field lines he’d watched once, linked into Gardiner’s augmented eyes. He had watched a solar storm working its way hurricane like through Eden’s magnetosphere, spinning off tornados of disruption along its edges, but this was scarily even more real, though at a fraction of the scale. At least it remained a good few hills away to the south. He concentrated instead on the navigational displays, alternating between the view aft and the glowing road markers ahead. Harris watched as the markers became obscured by the threshing geometries, blinking, disappearing. Not seeing it with his own eyes, he could not have believed it was possible. Harris had known the oceans of Earth, and the rhythms of the sea, knew how strange it can get out in the middle of a storm with no other human life for hundreds of kilometres in any direction. But this -

And now the sky is bleeding –

He stared, almost in wonder as something seemed to be dripping down the sky like rippling streamers of crimson of cloth.

Focus on the road - cutting through chaos and rising up in a dark inverted cone. Far ahead it shimmered and writhed like a snake, bitten with points of light. Just here, beneath the wheels as he passed through, it could be trusted. A dry artery long since bled into the alien land, but still not quite of it.

His fingers were questing blindly for more chemical assistance, when the machine around him shuddered wearily and began to fail, not with a concatenation of bangs and clangs, but with a soft descending sigh. As the great rig sank disconsolately onto the road, still coasting forward for awhile, all the lights began to sputter out. Chef’s skin crawled inside his suit. The darkness became total. He reached toward his helmet with a weary fatalism. The air scrubbers powered down into the widening silence. Harris snapped the helmet into position over his head. Now, he really was alone. A drowning sensation overcame him. His world narrowed to nothing more than the view through his face plate and all sound transmuted into the loud rasp of his own breathing.

Outside a strange greenish-red dust storm was un-scrolling across the dark lands. Harris watched, climbing down the side of the cab, far as he could judge, it appeared to be region wide. He was shivering despite the heat inside his suit which he hoped was merely a bad thermostat. Surveying the roiling dust cloud Chef hoped that the best of the remaining visualisers were still tracking his progress from the cities via satellite. Supposedly they were keeping his immediate environment survivable, visualising the rules of physics and chemistry along his route. The storm would surely cover him and judging by its apparent speed it would do so very soon. He wasn’t sure what they could do for him if they couldn’t even see him.

If the Satellites are still up there -

He checked for a GPS signal, it was there. He was a good eighty kilometres from the target area. At least some of the satellites remained effective.

Didn’t do nothing for the rig -

He knew what he was supposed to do, get the package to the destination. But how? And at this point, why?


“Or kiss goodbye to reality itself,” was what Hector had said. “It’s the end of all human beings on this planet.”

“What is being, Hector? I always thought the universe was contingent upon an absurdly anthropocentric model anyway.” Gardiner lurched and leaned over the bar drunkenly as if he might vomit.

Hector looked away from his junior yes man, exasperated. The flow of no’s just lately made him increasingly obsolete. Harris meanwhile was seated at Hectors desk, successively mashing the nozzles of his entire pen supply into the desk blotter.

“He’s right,” Chef grunted. “Reality isn’t what it used to be. All I know is that it hurts, and it’s only getting worse.”

“Should you die, or be otherwise unsuccessful, you have to understand that all life on this planet ends.”

“All human life,” said Harris.

“We can’t even be sure of that,” said Gardiner, “this thing could be universe wide. As you know, not a ship, not a single communication from Sol system or anywhere else since it started. ”

“But that’s the point of all this isn’t it,” Harris looked up for the first time during the entire exchange.

“Could you leave me at least one of those?” Hector was looking at the wreckage of his pen jar.

“You won’t need them.”

“I’m beginning to think you’re the wrong man for the job. Just because you’re my brother in law-“

“Who else will do it?”

Harris looked away, his smile desolate.

“I never liked you, Harry” Hector said. He got up, swept toward the door and stopped. “But I always admired your drive.”

Harris, still smiling dropped the final pen, un-ravaged, back into the jar.

“It’s Nice of you to say so. The point is we’re being swept clean from this planet, maybe the universe. Did we breach a sacred place we were never meant to see? Or maybe we took what we were never meant to hold.”

“I don’t pretend to understand what’s going on but the artefact must be returned, that’s all, and then we can carry on as before.”

“Did you ever stop to ask how it’s doing all of this? And if it can be stopped?”

“We don’t have to fucking well stop it!” Hector yelled.

Even Gardiner had rocked back in surprise.

“We just have to do what it wants, return the artefact. Then it’ll be alright. Don’t fail.”

Hector was looking at Harris, intently, but his eyes, glittering like raisins pushed into the skin of bruised plums, weren’t even seeing him. Harris thought they were staring outside, even though all the screens were blank and the windows shuttered.

The wind was getting up as Harris broke the seal of the cargo container, and though insubstantial it was very fast. He was grateful for the functioning servo assist, the wind grabbed at the huge doors as they swung wide. A thin mist buffeted him with evacuating atmosphere. Moisture sweating on the inside of the doors had iced over even before they were properly open. And of course, the interior lights were not working.

So this is the artefact -

An unsettling dislocation took place inside his skull. He looked along the dark perspectives of the cargo hold toward the object itself. There had been no discussion with him about whatever it was and up to this point he’d had relatively little interest. His job was to get it to the excavation site. That was all.

But now, staring into the darkness with the beam of his helmet light, it seemed for a moment very much like Harris was looking at massive knotted ropes of hair, beyond which looked to be a gigantic pale crescent of brow, and beyond that, the bulb of a vast nose. Harris stood staring for long moments but it continued to look the exactly the same.

Communications were long dead, there was nothing from the radio, not even the crooning ship and his phone was useless. There was no one to appeal to anyway. Harris climbed into the darkness, peeling off a more powerful flashlight from his tool vest and lighting up the object.

“It actually is a giant fucking head.”

Harris approached it gamely; all sense of caution, hesitation or surprise had long since been purged from him. If it was somehow alive, now that might actually cause him a flicker of interest. The head was crammed into the available space just barely and must have measured four and a half metres in diameter. He was relieved to note that it sat a on a heavy duty cargo sled which he hoped was still functional. If even one of those assholes from the newly formed Visualisation Committee had actually bothered to come along, it probably would have been.

Harris could clearly see that yes, it was a head. It rested mostly on its side, wedged in the diagonal between floor and ceiling, the back of its skull in the lower corner, the long concave nose jammed up against the opposite roof. Harris surmised that he may as well get on with it.

The sled blinked to life in a merry dance of LED’s. He let out the breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding then began slowly working the sled from side to side until he’d eased it to the edge of the container. From there he lowered it slowly onto the ramp and out under the waiting sky.

Harris managed to get a good long look before the leading edge of the dust storm enveloped him suddenly and completely, obliterating any meaningful visual information apart from the sled lights. It had been a strange but strangely human face. The long nose ended bluntly like the snout of a lion but in sweeping upward it widened considerably toward the brow, spreading between the bulging almond eyes. One of them was open and milky, staring back blindly, the other was an indistinct but empty socket with something glittering inside. The narrow forehead swept back in an arc to the hairline and seemed to lead into small horns amid the tangled foliage of hair. Seated centrally in the long concave slipway from nose to chin was an impudent hillock of mouth curled sensuously in a delicate smile. In that moment before the dust storm, it appeared as if the mist of a last breath emerged and was whipped away from it.

Dumbly, Harris took up the handle of the sled and began hauling it alongside the rig toward the cab. He stopped only to retrieve a number of spare 02 tanks, wedging them with great difficulty beneath the head. Then as he pulled, the rig fell behind and there was only road in front of him. Everything was obliterated to uncertainty beyond a dozen metres by flying sand.

Chef realised immediately that although the AG-Sled was weightless, its cargo retained all of its inertia and in this wind he might as well be pulling the rig itself. After less than a hundred metres of hard won progress and already close to collapse, he called out with inarticulate entreaty to the wind. Almost instantly the wind lessened and the sand began to fall out of the air around him.

Chef began to see what might be flickering light not far ahead, off to one side of the road as far as he could tell; it looked like something on fire. He switched off his lights and could see a diffuse but welcoming glow. He’d gone around in a circle but at least the rig seemed powered up again. He pulled desperately on the sled hauling his cargo with greater ease now toward the glow which had begun to permeate the darkness. After fifteen or twenty metres he stopped.

He could see moving shapes beyond the veil of sand, perhaps what looked like a building. The view was still indecipherable and he wasn’t confidant in the wisdom of proceeding given the apparent strangeness of the scene he could almost perceive.

Then, entranced, watching a suddenly enlarging shadow-like form amidst the general confusion, he reared back in terror as it resolved into a tall dark skinned figure with jet eyebrows, squinting fiercely but with glittering eyes. It grabbed him and beckoned him forward. The man wasn’t wearing a suit. And yet he lived.

Chef emerged, half dragged into a large and ancient tarmac clearing. It looked older than the occupation of Eden, surrounded by scrub and swept by vermillion sands. In the centre of all this stood an antique, abandoned filling station. Harris could no longer feel the air moving, but all around the station opaque living walls of restless dust swirled noisily, illuminated to a blood-warm seething gold by the many fires which burned here and there. Beneath a large corrugated rain canopy in front of the station, and casting shadows up across it and over the derelict fuel pumps, were groups of strangely dressed men and women. People of all colours, races, cultures; strangely dressed not least because none of them wore an environment suit. And scattered among them were larger objects, mostly wrapped, on wheeled carts or attached to trailers, but not all. Chef saw a giant foot with an intact section of shin reaching as high as the canopy; a vast Raven several times bigger than a man; a single baleful eyeball and attendant muscular and vascular apparatus, three times as big as the man standing next to it, reflecting the firelight merrily. And there were other things.

The pressure inside his head had increased almost to bursting when Chef realised with a thrill of pure horror that the man who had led him here was expertly unsnapping the helmet locks. He fought to resist but it was too late. He felt the slight hiss of escaping air and then nothing. The air outside was warm as a summer night on Earth and after a few terrified moments, he realised, perfectly breathable.

The man beside him was now deftly helping Chef out of his suit. The release of fetid odours from his body greeted him sharply but the fellow (Native American?) didn’t seem to mind. The sachet of cocaine fell to the concrete from the folds of the suit, where he’d shoved it for whatever reason.

The stranger picked up the packet, seemed to recognise its contents, and dipped a finger to taste it.

“Ah, coca. The justice of my peoples upon yours,” he said. “Every grain is filled with the anger of our gods. It is heavy with the blood of my ancestors, and the spirits of all those who died to procure it or to sell it. It is the maddening beast which shakes apart your spirits. And it brings all men, from the lowest addict and the most exalted public official to their knees with the power if it’s desire for your blood.
The coca dream is money, or sex, or power, or whatever fever dreams of desire it gives to you. Its thirst is eternal; it seeks only to revenge the destruction of our cultures and our peoples.
You see, you never killed our gods. They went into the coca plant. I’m surprised your people never realised this.”

He shook his head, stopped and laughed with a pleased grin, then held out a hand.

“Amaru” he said.

“Chef Harris.”

“But now our gods are here again to be renewed, Chief Harris.” Amaru said, waving a hand across the congregation. “Together with yours, and others. Come, let us eat.”

Chef didn’t correct him. He followed and joined him at one of the impromptu circles among the great throng and all their grisly cargoes. Four cairns of red rocks painted over in rough whitewash formed a close square about the fire, casting wavering shadows outward toward he throng. Around this were ranged a circle of a dozen or so remarkable looking men and women from among the many others at similar gatherings across the forecourt. Chef could hardly guess their origins or how they came to be here. Or even, should he care to consider it, how he came to be seated by a fire, breathing air on a world with so little oxygen that neither the fire nor the breath itself were possible.

Amaru seated himself next to Chef, holding up two wooden cups one of which he passed across.

“It is the wine of the apple tree from our friend of the east.” Amaru raised his cup to an old man across the fire, though seated and bundled up in rags it was evident that he was tall and gaunt, yet somehow appeared possessed of great strength and vitality.

“We need stories tonight!” Amaru called out. “For it is a long night, and there are things in the darkness that wish us all harm! But they are afraid of the light and the sound, and the truth of a tale well told.”

There was general cheering at this. Chef was beginning to realise that the words he heard were all unfamiliar to him, and yet he could understand the rich associations of meaning which they unlocked in his mind, even as he could appreciate the foreignness of their strange music. A similar warmth spread through him from the drink and the fire and the sudden unexpected companionship.

Amaru told what seemed a sombre story, about a prince, wronged first by the passion of his own people and then by the judgement of another people and yet who kept love in his heart as he went gladly to his death. As Amaru spoke, bread and roasted chicken, cheese, fruits, berries and other foods began to be passed around the circle.

Next an elderly African man told of a king who brought light in the darkest of times, he carried nothing but a twig, some kindling and the hip bone of a lion. Everyone told the king that he was foolish to try. But with these few things he brought light where there was dark and warmth where there was cold. Many were those who lived instead of perishing on that dark night. Then someone else told another a story of the unlikely friendship between a tortoise and an eagle.

Chef listened on into the night as each told a story, growing sleepy from exhaustion and good food. When he was called upon to speak and because he knew no stories of his own, he told one that Hector had once spoken of, from the beginning of the cartels. Although he didn’t believe in it, the story reminded him with sadness of his wife and called forth much buried emotion. He thought it had been well received; there was a murmur of approval and much nodding of heads. Then the weight of his exertions earlier in the day finally dragged him comfortably down to sleep. He vaguely sensed a blanket being draped over him and murmured his thanks.

In the morning the light roused him to consciousness. The first thing he realised was how much his muscles ached, all the way through his bones. It was painful to move but move he must as he woke to the realisation that he was no longer in the darkness. He lay inside his suit on a narrow triangular shelf of pale rock. The sun was halfway up the sky and shining directly into his visor.

Chef forced his way painfully to his feet. No odd little filling station, no people. No strange cargo, or sled, no night, no wind. Everything was eerily still. He could see footsteps in the sand leading away from the rock and across the crimson sea toward a shadowy north eastern escarpment that was perhaps a few kilometres away.

I must be on the other side of the planet -

Even as thoughts of impossible night time feasts withered in the glare of the sun, he checked his suit radio and heard a voice repeating emergency call signs. He tried to respond but the transmitter in his helmet was broken. He tried his phone which also had its own separate uplink independent of the land network. It appeared to connect. He sent a message to Hector, logging his exact position from the GPS. He already had a rough idea where on Eden he should be. Soon a voice on the suit radio interrupted the drone to announce that a rescue party was on the way.

In moments Hector himself came online.

“Hey bro! Are you okay?”

“I have no idea,” he said while typing a reply on his handset.

“What do you mean?” said hector before he’d finished.

Chef froze.

“You can hear me?”

“Loud and clear, Ché.”

“I thought my radio was broken,”

“I was going to ask, how come it’s working! It’s all we can do to keep the important stuff ticking over. Your ship went down near your current location at 14:00; everything started to hit the fan not long after that. The VisCom guys figured a way to make some things work. Smart hombres. Figured you were dead in the crash for sure. Or out of air by now, or something.”

Harris was looking at his dead radio transmitter display and thinking hard.

“We went down at 14:00?”

They’d crashed around 19:00 according to his recollections.

“There about. Do you still have the artefact?”

“No I, ah, I think it got lost in the crash.”

“What do you mean ‘got lost in the crash’? You came apart in the air?”

“No, I think we lost it after impact. Maybe it was destroyed”

“That crate and the carbon foam packing are strong enough to shield it from a nuke. We’ll find it.”

Hector was beginning to sound upbeat again.

“Carbon foam?” Harris was confused.

“Yeah, mi amigo, the whole crate is filled with the stuff.”

“I never asked you, Hector, what is it?”

“The artefact? You mean what’s it look like? Ah… It’s sort of like looking at three concentric doughnuts with empty space in between the outer two, whichever direction you look at it from. It’s like looking at ripples in a pool of mercury but without the pool. The tech guys say it’s because most of the thing is in some higher dimension, I don’t know.”

Harris couldn’t think of a reply to that, but something else was occurring to him.

“Any word from Jon or the pilot?”

Hector told him that there was no sign of the pilot yet but that Jon had checked in, seeming a little disoriented, at the time he had been within visual range of the crash site but he was heading north. This put Gardiner less than two hundred and fifty metres south of Chefs current position according to Hector.

“I don’t see him. I’ll go look”

“Okay but don’t wander too far, our boys are on the way. Over.”

Harris set off across the nearest dune, against the protests of his aching muscles. Dune after dune in blinding red and orange sand sloped away with successive waves of colour for as far as he could see. Each was etched with ever smaller dunes rippling downscale to infinity. The effect was a mesmerising level of detail illuminated by the stunning sun light. Apart from the undifferentiated purple scrub which sprang up near occasional rock formations, there were many blue net like trees which Harris had never seen before, occurring mainly on the leeward sides of the dunes. Each had a central radiating hub of lighter turquoise lobes, above which reddish bell shaped swellings were topped with sprays of bright yellow spikes.

No surprise to discover new plant life. The majority of the vast continental deserts had never been seen with human eyes. Most of Eden was virgin territory.

“Jon? Can you hear me, Jon?”

“I’m here,” said Gardiner.

It sounded like the voice was immediately behind him. Harris turned around startled. “Okay Jon I’m heading in your direction, can you come to the top of the nearest dune?”

Gardiner appeared a couple of dunes along, saw him and waved. “I’m looking after him,” he said.

“The pilots alright?”

“The pilot?”

A minute later Harris was all but running up the final dune. “Who are you talking about?”

“The other me.”

Harris stopped near the crest looking up at Gardiner who was silhouetted against the glare of the sun, light streaming through his visor in a brilliant sunburst and catching the outside rim of the helmet in a halo. The green suit was a little banged up but otherwise looked okay.

He held out his right hand and said in a reverent whisper “Come and see.”

Chef took his hand and hauled himself up level with Gardiner who turned away and pointed.

Chef stood still with ice in his veins and sweat running down the inside of his arms.

“What is it Jon?”

Gardiner didn’t answer; instead he shuffled down the dune with a drunken gait, Harris following after. The oasis was beautiful with trees, vines and flowering plants growing visibly, spreading as he watched. He recognised the red suit in the water. It was the pilot. But the other figure was naked and face down. As he drew close he could actually see the water level of the pool rising up the sand and over the body, keeping pace with the vigorous growth all around it. Gardiner knelt by the body and turned it over tenderly. Gardiner’s own face looked up blankly, eye sockets filled with roots and leaves. As Chef watched horrified, the mouth opened and questing roots pushed forward as if Gardiner were licking wet lips with them.

“There, there,” Gardiner was murmuring. Harris backed away.

“It is beautiful,” he said and turned toward Chef who could now see that the parody of a face inside the helmet was formed by tightly woven leaves and vegetable fronds creating an illusion of light and shade.

“Come with me,” said Gardiner calmly. “It’s beautiful.”

Chef had seen enough and was racing back up the way he’d come, Gardiner’s voice following him.

“What’s wrong, Chef? Please come back, we’ve been waiting for you for so long.”

Harris could still hear him as he turned off his radio and kept running, past the rock where he’d awoken and on into the desert. Exhaustion caught up with him before long and he had to stop to rest. Looking back he was a good long way from the beginning of the dunes but not nearly far enough.

“It’s no good, Amigo. There’s nowhere to run.”

Harris turned around; he could hear Hector but scanning the cliffs to the north and the dunes to the south he couldn’t see a thing.

“Where are you? I don’t even have my radio switched on man. What is this?”

“Stay where you are, we’re nearly there.”

“I can’t see you, Hector”

“Nearly there. Did you find Gardiner?”

“Yes, and the pilot, both dead.”

“The pilot?”

“Yes. Dead too.”

“Chef, you are the pilot.”

Chef was turning around and around searching the empty sky. Nothing. Impressions were beginning to force their way into his memory. He was sorting through them as he walked toward the rock formation ahead of him, toward the door set in its eroded face.

“I’m the pilot.”

“You’re the pilot. Did you deliver the package?”

“I think so.”

“The Dreaming is still growing, Chef. It’s on the day side now. Is that alright?”

“I think it’s alright. I’m the pilot.”

“It’s alright. We’ll bring it all back. Just not as it was.”

He opened the door.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


Eden Ahbez
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Harvey
 
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Re: The Godhead

Postby Harvey » Sun Jan 08, 2012 3:42 pm

If I'd have thunk it was this bad I wouldn't have bothered. Too late I guess.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


Eden Ahbez
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Re: The Godhead

Postby Project Willow » Sun Jan 08, 2012 7:09 pm

^^ Don't give up yet. :thumbsup I haven't read it through, but I shall, and I would guess others are in the same position.
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Re: The Godhead

Postby Harvey » Sun Jan 08, 2012 8:07 pm

Project Willow wrote:^^ Don't give up yet. :thumbsup I haven't read it through, but I shall, and I would guess others are in the same position.


I'll hang on in there :wink:
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


Eden Ahbez
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Harvey
 
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Re: The Godhead

Postby Project Willow » Mon Jan 09, 2012 4:25 pm

You have an ease with language that I find enjoyable. I did have to go back and re-read the first couple of paragraphs after I had a more firm understanding of where the story was taking place.

I could give you a fuller response if sci-fi or mythology were areas of special interest for me, but they aren't. In fact, I probably missed a few references, and so strayed off the main path, if there was one intended. My own led me to think about our relative insignificance, and our ridiculous arrogance. Thank you for sharing your work, and good luck with it.

I wish some other RI folk for whom this piece is a better match would speak up. Nudge, nudge.
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Re: The Godhead

Postby Harvey » Tue Jan 10, 2012 8:00 am

Thanks so much. I understand that this isn't your cup of tea so I doubly appreciate your taking the time to comment, that's very generous of you. :hug1:

Project Willow wrote:I did have to go back and re-read the first couple of paragraphs after I had a more firm understanding of where the story was taking place.


You're not alone. A few people have found the opening a little confusing, I suppose that illustrates one of many reasons why I'm not a writer!

Project Willow wrote:My own led me to think about our relative insignificance, and our ridiculous arrogance. Thank you for sharing your work, and good luck with it.


That's one of the underlying themes. I enjoy writing but it's only a hobby.

:)

Thanks again.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


Eden Ahbez
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Harvey
 
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Re: The Godhead

Postby Harvey » Tue Jan 17, 2012 4:15 pm

Here's an excerpt from my latest story which I'm still fine tuning. I'll post it as soon as my confidence permits.

I would still love to receive some criticism of 'Godhead,' since there are more than enough smart and erudite people here who could give me a few pointers, should they wish, and I really would appreciate it if they would. If any of you have the time I'd be most grateful, especially as I have no illusions about this stuff, it's just fun. Be harsh!

Flesh Trees is starting to take shape and you can have it once I'm beginning to approach being happy with it. This is the opening few paragraphs.

The Flesh Trees

We are truly the exalted ones, forever set apart by our station. That’s why, of all the places in Empire, the flesh trees grow only here on mount Ziria, where we reside in self imposed seclusion. Or so I thought, until I tried to leave.

It all began the day of the cave in, the same day that Li arrived from the Chinese prefecture of Western Greece. I suppose it was intended that Li and I should have been friends. I would be her protector and mentor. But nothing ever turns out the way you intend it to, except perhaps in stories. And so, instead, I killed her.

As a boy, I’d known Li’s mother. Mai was her name. I suppose Mai was the same age when we’d met as I was the day I first saw her daughter. Back then in Kastro Kyllini, Mai had seemed like the mother I’d never known. I was swimming across to Faros and back. That’s how we became friends. We’d met in the sea, going in opposite directions and somehow got talking. Over the following days our jaunts had sort of synchronised. Then on day trips we’d swim out to further islands for picnics and snorkel together. I remembered how I would delight her with my ability to capture squid, one after the other from the sea floor, using nothing more than a mask and a toy net from one of the tourist shops. I always knew where to find them, and they always surrendered themselves to my net. Mai would run down to the sea laughing, collect them, and return with them lightly cooked in batter. Or we ate them raw as we sat on the rocks. I still remember eating calamari with her more clearly than most of my birthdays. She forever in her faded denim shorts, a pale blouse tied over her bikini top. Her sun bleached hair caught the light and tossed it in curls about her shoulders, bright as the sea itself. Those were the shining glorious days. Although I was only twenty when Li arrived, those lost days with her mother already seemed distant and irretrievable, a dream.

“Master, I am not ready for this honour,” I said.

“And yet ready enough to know that you are not,” Tan JanWei, stood beside me, looking across the plains, or he could have been watching the distant airship. It was impossible to tell.

I knew it was pointless to argue, even if I could interpret his meaning. Not because Tan was intractable, because he was not. My motivations might as well have been written in the tree lights. Tan could read most people easier than a book; to him I was a shouted slogan.

I was thinking resentfully that I didn’t want to be shepherding this newling when there was so much to do, so much to learn, but then I wondered if that wasn’t precisely the reason that I ought to do it, or something like that.

“No. You are thinking in circles,” Tan said this gently in reply to my unvoiced musings. The slightest shift in my posture was screamingly loud to him.

“I will do my duty, of course.”

I could sense his disappointment as he withdrew gracefully, then I realised he was neither disappointed nor withdrawing.

“Come. You will find this interesting.”
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


Eden Ahbez
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Harvey
 
Posts: 4165
Joined: Mon May 09, 2011 4:49 am
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