Queen of Autumn

Queen of Autumn, how I miss your brown tresses and your cherry pies. I long for them. I long for your dusky sunsets and your red leaves. I wish to walk among your trees again, to feel the September sun upon my face. Your pumpkins and hop cones, your soldier beetles and goldenrod, I can see them and smell their scent on my fingertips. So permanently in transition you are, loosing attention at the moment things are finest. As soon as you become golden you are already turning to black and grey sunsets, to frigid cold. Yet, you return, and you will return again, and in the meantime I can sit by a fire and remember your falling leaves under my feet.

Queen of Winter

Winter is coming, I can hear the gentle murmur of your skirts in the rustling of the leaves. Here we are again, together, you and I. Queen of Winter, how I long to gaze into your glacier blue eyes. How I long to touch your raven hair. How I long to stand close to your breast, your frigid breath against my face. And yes, Dear, how I long to kiss your black lips, and die. Queen of winter. I long for you.

A Goblin's History

A Goblin’s History of Angmar
First of all, you can call the place whatever you want. Outsiders always called the place Angmar, and it stuck. We always called it home, the word being Grokka in swamp goblin, but what kind of a place name is that? Everyone calls their own place home. Angmar is really two places, the Snowy Isle, always the province of Elves and Men, and Melumore, the big island, home to abominations. We goblins is abominations, I suppose, though I never felt like one myself. I just likes to eat rats and make traps to catch the humans, but enough about me.
They say this island was once shrouded in darkness, like the rest of the world, all of it shrouded in darkness. Back then there was no elves or dwarves or men or even orcs nor goblins. Back then there was things like spiders and grey jellies, krells and shadow men, and I suppose, they got along just fine without light. When the gods of Arda built two great lights to bring day to the world, the whole place lit up like a chandelier. All the sudden, in Middle Earth up north, green trees started growing, and the troglodyte folk moved underground or just plain died. Even with these lights though, most of Angmor was in shadow. Those lights were pretty far away, and between the Green Mountains and the Red, and the Black, not much of any light crept over those peaks. Angmor is the one place in this universe some of the original, black forests, still stand, their branches tangled with black vines, whispering ugly truths to the passerby. It is still pretty dark down there, in the South, and these forests still stand, but I ain’t never been. You smarties out there might be thinkin’ trees can’t grow in the dark, and I suppose that is true for the fancy green stuff that grows in the North of Angmar, but in the South, we still got the old kind. Black as soot, leaves and branches, they get their power from the Earth itself. I hear them type of trees grows deep under the ground too, where the real power of Angmar lies.
Anyway, Morgoth destroyed them lights. He hated them. He takes all the credit for that, but I hear it was mind flayers that put him up to it, or Krakkens, or the Aboleths. For a while, it was dark damned near everywhere. This is about when goblins and orcs came here, by sea, in great ships. Angmar was so dark a goblin cold walk ten days and not have to cover his eyes. It was paradise. The darkness did not last long because the gods of Arda like their light, and so great trees grew far in the West. For thousands of years, the light of the world came from two mystery trees the elves grew. I ain’t never seen it. Nobody here, not even them folks that is thousands of years old, ever seen them trees. They was so far away and just for elves. Those Elven trees never did last too long. Morgoth came down here and fell in love. Ungloiant, our spider queen, was as lovely as a streak of black storm clouds. They say she had the face of a maiden, and features that captured the best elements of menfolk, goblins, and orcs. She had eight legs too, and could spin webs of darkness so thick ain’t nothing could see through them. The rest is Elven history, but our Ungloiant killed that tree, and ate them gems, the Silmarils, except one. She ate Morgoth out of house and home too, then cut loose, spreading her seed far and wide. Finally she returned home, and spawned three daughters. Then she died. Spiderfolk do that sometimes. The elvenfolk here are the dark kind, and they worship one or the other of them three. They are Ungolia, Lolthina, and Sargon. Them elves arrived about the same time as the orcs, I think, by ship or from tunnels so deep under the ground that they pass beneath the sea.
Dark Elves? The elvies say this. In the beginning, when the great lights were constructed, there was a call by the gods of Arda to migrate, West across the continent of Middle Earth. Most took heed, though some got lost along the way. The lost ones they call the green elves. The ones that made it all the way are the fair elves, and the ones that made it, but with trouble, they call them the grey elves. There were ones that made to the coast and never went across the ocean, and them is the high elves. Two kinds stayed. One was the dark elves. They ignored the call on purpose, and when sunlight finally reached the North of Angmar, they moved underground. The other kind is the Orcs, who never were elves, but close enough. Orcs and elves are kissing cousins, though neither likes to say it. Orcs live underground because they always has, and in places on the surface where they can make a living hunting animals or terrorizing the weak. Then, of course, there are goblins, bugbears, ogres, hobgoblins, dark faeires, gnolls, flinds, lizardfolk, and the underground races like dark creepers, mind flayers, and grimlocks. Angmar has always been home to monster folk. Some say that when, after the mystery trees were killed for good, and the sun was created to light the sky, monster folk of every creed, color, and design came down here and hid in the mountains and the dark woods. Dragons too, and their half-man consorts, came South in those days. That was the time when the great monster cities were built.
Hellgar, city of black minotaur folk, was built at the base of the Mountain of Fire. Here, the minotaur men forged great machines and weapons, and built libraries and roads underground. Their big and stupid cousins, the Red Minotaurs, guard this place with axes made of steel and bone, or so I hears.
Deeper down still is the land of the dark elvenfolk. They have a couple cities down there, not as big, but by some recollections, prettier. Black tile streets and slaves to do all the lifting, the Drow, as they are called, farm beasts for food and work strange feats of magic. Below them is the city of the mind flayers, but the less said about them, the better.
There is a goblin city down there too. Moglog, ruled by a goblin king twenty feet tall, who can read and write, and breathe fire. Goblin smiths down there build the best weapons of the land, and make nine out of ten horseshoes and carriage wheels. Only problem is all the blood goblins. Another story there.
Then you gots all the evil gnomes that came overseas recently, with all the troubles up north. Gnome folk and dwarf folk get along ok, I guess, but there is bad dwarves and there is very bad dwarves and neither fits in. Most of em drink too much and fall off a ship, from the north, drunk, down in Angmar, sooner or later.
They say that nowadays, the sea people, the Numenoreans, are building a world empire, and carting all the gold and silver to their island, far out in the ocean. Wherever they go, they bring war, and trouble for beasts and evil men.
Now, our land has been through an age like that. Five centuries ago, Elves and Men and Dwarves from oversea came to our dark island seeking treasure. They found it, in the hands of dragons and giants, mokroths and beholders. These men were tough, and dwarves and elves too, and they built three kingdoms. The kingdom of the men, by the sea, grew town by town along the coast, fishing village connected to seaport connected to farm town by ships and boats and canoes. Alongside them were the sea elves. Inland were fair elves and grey elves, building stone towns along the rivers and connecting them with mighty roads. Trees were cut by the men, but the elves mostly worked around them. They planted gardens and brought fair deer, bunny rabbits, badgers, and the kind of birds that don’t lay eggs under your skin when you are not lookin’. By turns, the place was tamed, and there was no place a su monster could find a decent meal without ending up at the end of a sword, so the monsters fled South, and East, and underground. In the mountains was the dwarves, and they built underground cities of their own. Their mightiest was a six foot tall dwarf named Kargoth Kollossus, King Under the Mountain, and after him followed three great ones. Gimolf, Gloin, Borgstor, and Nilbor. They reaped great treasure and mined gems.
In the kingoms of men and sea elves there was mighty kings as well. Zardozar, the mighty wizard, built an upside down tower into the ground and filled it with wonders. He ruled with a wand, and some say he had a beard ten foot long by the time he died, centuries after he was born. Finally, the grey elves had their own kings and queens. Luthinia, the mightiest of them all, ruled from a castle deep in the forest. Swamps were cleared, black trees were cut and replaced by the green kind, displacer beasts and devil dogs were slain and replaced by white deer and wild horses. Ravens replaced blood birds, bats moved into caves, and for a while things looked bleak. Finally, up North, there were troubles for the elven folk and the men. An Orkish army was fighting the elves again, this time with the help of dragons, and fighters from this land left to lend a hand. This was our moment. A mighty alliance was formed between the dark elves and the mind flayers, the lizardfolk and orcs and goblins, and even the dragons were in on it. This was about the time of Rhohan and Zelgar, who tried to hold us back, just fifty years ago, but it feels like much more.
Overwhelmed, the forces of good were eaten or destroyed. Only a few fled tell the tale. The old cities still stand-some goblin and ogre towns, some inhabited by men and all sort of monster folk, and many more still abandoned, home to vampires and unmentionable horrors.
Now, this world of ours has places for everyone. The big cities haves a thieves guild and houses and smiths and even places where a goblin can get a knife sharpened. We have taverns for menfolk, and many more for monsterfolk, places weirder still that takes magic words to get into. Underground, we have tunnels connecting the dark cities, and people in the know can usually find the ways they connect to the sewers of the surface towns. We have our wizards and our priests, and we have slaves to do all the work. In the South, we got dark forests full of things I can’t even find names for, and in our seas, we got krakkens, and sea monsters, and cities out in the deep too.
Now, the sea people don’t see our ways as the right ones at all. In the North, their galleys have come and reclaimed the old towns. Some say Snowy Isle never really fell, and there they got great castles and princes, gold and ballgowns. Down here we have rat meat and cockfighting. We got tribes of orcs in the hills, and gnolls, and lizardmen in the swamps, but we got orcs workin the streets sellin’, though what kind of sausages I don’t ever ask. Our ways aren’t their ways. I think you can see the problem.

an unvisited geological epoch

if i were made of plywood, i would be full of hot coals. if i were glass, tuning forks. strike that-i would be half full of warm deoxygenated saltwater, with a single eusthenopteron gulping at the surface, prowling about for its next meal, not realizing that the trilobites are long extinct, and if anyone feeds it at all, it will have to settle for flakes. an ammonite cannot escape the coils it has set, over the years, because its internal organs are locked solidly to its mantle cavity. i am a vase full of seed fern fronds, a lappet moth nestled against a bright green motel room door, unable to work its natural colors into the pattern. all my archival footage, my collection of yellowed paperback novels, my victorian monographs, creaking under two centuries of distinctive museum dust, are like discarded tapes in a paper shopping bag. I am wide awake and this is now and something truly remarkable keeps happening and happening. past history means something, because in a previous geological epoch, i might have longed for something i could not have, but that was the Triassic and things are different now. i was not expecting rainforests again, and reefs, and an adaptive radiation of new forms. this is all so unexpected. whatever happens, the face of this strange planetoid is producing butterflies, again, and in forms more diverse than before. i can only marvel at it.

an open window

i feel it too much to ask what brought this here, how long it will last, and what will become of it. i am merely happy for it at the moment. this is what i tell myself, but i ask all those guilty questions, particularly the last of the three. the Cretaceous was a very long geological period, and it had the most interesting dinosaurs. it is a similar situation with galactic evolution. hydrogen burning stars of the right size can only exist at certain times in the grand scheme of things, and long after they are all burned out, and for all those billions of years we had to wait for them, space was lifeless. how long? what will become if it?

a reverse valentine

you have angles, octagon, and i understand, i have a few of my own. i am a dodecahedron, and i have a lot of them. angles. i like knowing you are out there, with your equilateral lines, your concurrent angles, your sensible symmetry. i am irregular, some dodecahedrons do that, as you probably know, and a person would be hard-pressed to find a single axis of symmetry in me anywhere. this does not mean i am not without beauty, as you have observed. we are different shapes and structures, and our planes cannot cross in more than a flat field, but how magnificent is such an intersection. be beautiful, octagon, it is nice knowing that there are shapes like you, and this is enough for me, and perhaps even the best, because all things run their course, even geometric figures.

the universe that has shaped itself in the next room

the plastic princess tames the dinosaur, a ceratosaurus not to be trifles with, with an incantation and the promise of popcorn. all around, smurfs are dancing insulting ethnic spoofs of native american rituals, and a tree monitor the size of ten busses pleads to be allowed to eat one, just one, because he is so hungry for blue flesh. buildings collapse, pigs balance on the back of the Overdino, a plateosaurus who rules this world with a stern tempermant, and all over plastic dinosaurs and ficher price blue collar vacationers gather to witness the spectacle of a hot air ballon trip to the moon, where apparently, there is cake. this world creates and re-creates itself with such regularity that is assuming some of the attributes of a real place. it has rules. there must be a circus. The MONSTER BALL and the OVERDINO compete for rulership, though only the latter wins, interspecific love affaris are commonplace, as the monarch of the real leans he is the scion of a triceratops, and babies here, as everywhere, must be tucked into bed. A few feet away, a perpetual birthday party is in full swing, invisible cake half-eaten on plastic plates as stuffed monkeys stare at the ceiling and think of something resembling stuffed heaven.

a comet

The stars have never been so much aligned, as this, i come and go under the evidence of infernal machines and heavenly orbits, This rising and falling of iron gears and crystal epicycles. First toward Mercury and later toward distant Eris, and back. I am like a comet, of sorts, falling into the sun just far enough to get singed, then retreating, leaving a trail of vapor in my wake. Perhaps I seek to be singed some, or perhaps it is because i am so drawn to the sun as to ensure my own destruction, save a last minute escape impluse, the memory of which fades to murmurs in the celestial cold black. So, i return, again and again, to this. Some cycles run fast and threaten to vaporize my every molecule of atmosphere, others burn slow, but they all burn, again and again, till i am just a cinder.

Minos

It is dark and misty, and somehow, i have ended up in this thicket. I wandered in here in search of shiny objects, like a mina bird, looking for things to decorate my nest. the silver glinted in the moonlight, how, i do not know, there are so many brambles to cover the ground now. were all these thorns here before? i have already forgotten my way out of here, and every step brought me further into the thorns. Vine after vine, the wood bunches up over holes in the ground, and the coins seem to vanish as i reach for them. Still, it is not too late. The hill slopes upward, and i have been walking downward till now. One footfall at a time, i can find my way back from here. I hear the voice of an ancient deity in the wind, and i realize that i have dreamed of this maze before.

The Coal Swamp Has Never Been Closer

i cannot complain. there is a roof over my head and there is food in my refrigerator. i have no need of a handgun. though i am no match for a Dienotherium in a fight, I do not have to fight one. Thus, no rifle either. No flamethrower. A couch would not fit up a stairway earlier. I should have measured it first. I hear they get stuck there forever, couches, blocking the inhabitants of the upper floors in their apartments forever. There was no back staircase. Had this been the case, somehow, the couch would not have gotten stuck. After all, what is the purpose of a back staircase besides simply being big enough to accommodate irregularly shaped couches, This brings me to the subject of my unrealized desire to rule the world through terror. I need to put a ten dollar bill in the g string of a stripper soon. A cold beer is not doing it. It is hard to explain this to my two-year-old best friend, who thrills me with questions like "who made up?", and can now recite my answer "Up is not real it is just an idea....". Is this how it is supposed to work? Do bluegills love their eggs this much? What does a reef squid feel during the throes of courtship? What of all those little eggs. It is a hundred degrees Farenheit, outside, with the humidity of a place where vast pools of water sit on the cement, failing to evaporate. The coal swamp has never been closer. So sad to imagine that during the middle of the Carboniferous, those global rainforests dried up and shrank to small islands of vegetation on tropical isles. Conifers spread and amphibians gave way to reptilians. What did a gorgonopsid feel for its young?

congratulations, universe, for your neutron stars

i lament the extinction of the kronosaur, and perhaps equally so, i regret that i have yet to wrestle with a giant squid. turns out that a kronosaur and a sperm whale would be a great match in a fight, though the latter being such an ecological specialist, it is not really as good in a fight as its size would lead a person to believe. we have not enough giant monsters, and none that shoot deadly radiation from their eyes. yes, we have a few amazing elasmobranchs left, and yes, at the smaller scales, we have better beasties that most planets this size, i reckon. it is hard to know what is usual around here, on this planet, orbiting this yellow sun. it is a rather impressive star, in its own way. larger than most, but hardly among the giants. it is more than four billion years old and it is burning very nicely at present. i also think we have good gas giants. again, nothing showy, like a planet ten times the size of jupiter gradually evaporating into its sun, but i like uranus and saturn, and i think that if we could see our own oort cloud, we would be happy with its pleasant configurations.
let me be among the first to congratulate the universe for its neutron stars, now that i am on the subject. in an infinite universe, i suppose, an infinite number of sentinent beings congratulate the universe at any given moment-but the observable universe is the only universe i know, and it contains just enough galaxies that other beings have congratulated it before, in distant galaxies, but perhaps not for its neutron stars.

ode to species with heterogametic sexes or deadly venom

space jellyfish. fucking space jellyfish. the ameba of doom. death reptiles. the echo at the end of it all. the absurdity of a finite universe. the inevitable paradoxes of an infinite universe populated by space amebas. electrical storms. homo erectus men going to sea in skin boats. ammonites. kronosaurs, cheap motels. lipstick. lighter fluid. dim memories. more lipstick.
i have been spacewrecked here before. on days like this, the fading summer sun falling through green ash, a city park full of homo sapiens lying on blankets, the pull of my chromosomes directing my actions. a slave to hidden, genetic appetites. kronosaurs. spaccemen. spiders. ergot. lipstick. strip clubs. night.

Who made death?

Ruby: Who made this car?
Me: Robots. It was made in a factory, south of here, mostly by robots but also by some human helpers.
Ruby: Who made my doll?
Me: People, in a factory, probably in Southeast Asia, made it.
Ruby: Who made shoes?
Me: Another factory.
Ruby: Who made feet?
Me: Nobody made them. They just grew there. When you were still inside mamma.
Ruby: Who made up?
Me: Up isn't real, it is just an idea. We made up. We can make up any direction we want,
Ruby: Who made Aweoweah?
Me: You made Aweoweah.
Ruby: Who made eyes?
Me: Evolution made them. But evolution is not a person, it is a thing that happens, like the weather.
Ruby: Who made owwies?
Me: Evolution.
Ruby: Who mead death?
Me: Evolution.
Ruby: Who made my doll?

It goes on like this for hours. I am so damned proud of you, Ruby.

Listening to Metal

the frozen north. a sword and black armour. lightning. a moonlit night. werewolves. a winter gale. ice floes. blood. axes. steel. the wind ripping through tree branches, waves crashing in the distance. the threat of sea monsters. fire. torches. stern brows. a dusting of snow on a man's beard as he gazes northward, at a force of approaching storm giants. Fire breath. Dragons. Sorcerers. A giant hammer striking the ground. A man's sword severing a giant's hand at the wrist. blood. fire. doom. doom. doom.

A talk with Aweoweah

Dear Aweoweah, or should i put it more informally, since we live in the same house and spend most of our days together, you in my daughter's pocket or running around on the playground, underfoot, your invisibility a great asset to you at such times. You were jumping on the chair beside my daughter earlier today, your own daddy, also invisible, holding your finger lest you catch a bad bounce and hurl yourself to the carpet. Apparently, you are blue all over, and have a very large nose, blue eyes, and a robe and hat a wizard like gandlf would deem appropriate-and yes, tattoos, all over your body and especially the backs of your hands and your nose, of squirrels and god knows what else. I am glad my daughter found you as a friend. Apparently, your employment as the tickle monster brought you into such frequent contact with ruby that you and her struck up a fast friendship. When you are not around, she spends a great deal of time texting you on her toy phone and apparently, you have been known to phone in a tickle now and again, using us as your agents. I am having a beer with your daddy right now and he tells me all kinds of strange tales about the imaginary landscapes you inhabit.

Doom and Doom again

Stormbringer, I hear you calling me, and it is damned true, the Black Blade keeps on killing, till the end of time. You bring Ruin. You destroy everything you touch, and my hands are cold as ice from your hilt. Vanquished are the orcs, the goblins, and the Mind Flayers, also are the elks, the unicorns, and the fairytale princesses they befriended. It is a cold, ruined land out there now, devoid of animal life and freezing with the Northern Wind. I see snow on the branches of dead trees, and the bones of ancient reptiles make my castle. Here, in this land, I lament the queen of winter and I lament the man i once was before i picked up this sword.
Yet, i was glorious in my destruction. It was no mere mortal blade that sealed my fate. No sea elf could stop me, no harpie, no heroic young man with glistening armor. I was doom and doom again, and now, I sit, on this mountaintop, snow drifting over the icy landscape below, skulls beneath my feet, awaiting the inevitable. Doom.

a nocturne

I long to feel the beating of your cloven hooves. across the darkened fields, i hear the howling of wolves. the harvest planted, fire burned to embers, mead vessels empty, the horned goddess has sown her own harvest.

the rainy day and the piano

the universe is fragmented into these layers, some of them we would call "real" and others distinctly not part of this reality. we all know this. this is how we can pour milk into our rice crispies and not be driven insane by the distinct possibility that it was another version of ourselves, a distinctly different person that existed merely seconds ago, that poured the crispies into the bowl to begin with. or is it Krispies? The man who spelled them incorrectly or at least in avoidance of the brand namature is a distinctly different person than the one who is refusing to push his cat away from the keyboard so that he can continue to write this. We are different, he and i. He has made his decisions and i have done my time in his shoes. Is that why we go through so much trouble to make these things that ultimately become memories? graduations and awards ceremonies, and days at the beach and at the zoo. soon they are gone, but in the participation of making the, we open up universes in which those people are, at least in theory, experiencing them in the present. this is good because i am an engine for the creation of these parallel universes and so are all the people that read this. this means that one index of the present is the future possibilities it is creating just by sitting there and the past, empty now, moments it believes it is connected with. every now and again i am sure we cross a reality that just happens to be the present in another timestream, and we cross over without knowing it. how could we?

a lament for the cephalopods

it is probably true to say that every squid dies for love, or some approximation of it. a pity then, that the cephalopod minds do not have the neurons to fully grasp the scope of what they are doing. that is the fundamental game of evolution-to survive and reproduce, but the game of survival is set against the game of reproduction, and sooner or later, a person, eight legged or two, finds themselves displaying color after color, pattern after pattern, brass knuckles and electric guitars, shotguns and poems, until all the ink has run dry and there is nothing left to live for save the chance at a single more mating attempt. i salute you, my eight legged brothers under the skin, for going about it the way you do. there are no half-measures when it truly comes down to it. to live to court another day is just that, another day to die in the act of seeking love or whatever comes closest to it. for us mammals, the fields of play are expanded sideways, and i suppose i will never know if Cretaceous ammonoids looked after their babies the way i hope they did. like the giant octopus, in its darkened boudoir, breathing oxygenated air over its babies till the life drains out of it.......either way, the eggs we incubate grow up to become replicators in their own right, bent of feeding and breeding the selfsame way we did. cephalopod brothers, and sisters

for you, baphomet

i long to touch your crowned head, your thorns. you are not a beast to be reckoned with lightly, yet you are there, Baphomet, and either you have sought me out or somehow i have had led you to myself by scent traces. perhaps it was all the scribbling, and perhaps it is the way i posture. nevertheless, here you are and you represent a genuine conundrum. you have rotated everything precisely forty five degrees, and now i am viewing everything, all of it, from the side. i could not see these facets before, and yet i long to have my old perspective restored. what do all these old plans mean now, after all this, these games i have played over the ages, the scores now turned upside down and inverted, like crosses yes, like the hanging man, or worse still, the hanging man restored to standing. we speak separate languages, and that is why i cannot trick you into sitting down at the table for a game of checkers. this is chess, i see, your game, and i am sitting down to play.

more....

Onward they walked, till at last Blue stood in the vault of the PowerMind. It was brightly lit, and crowded. More than a thousand robots of all shapes and sizes stood, watching her entrance with serious expressions.

A great blue eye appeared in the space above her, and the PowerMind uttered a single word.

“Speak!” it said.
At that particular moment, Blue felt smaller than she had been before. She was tiny before the magnificent PowerMind, and she felt it. She wanted to curl up in a ball and go away, never to come back. Something was very wrong here and she did not have the courage to face it. Still, she stood proudly, trying to summon the words. Finally, from somewhere deep within her, some place her Robot Mother put there through hours of loving attention, something lesson after lesson with Robot Six taught her, a conviction that the truth must be spoken somehow propelled words from her mind.

“Your excellency.” she began. “I have found unequivocal evidence that robot civilization began on planet Vulcan, and that robot life was preceded by at least one earlier form of living thing.”

The blue eye glared down upon her, beaming a harsh and steady malediction.

“In addition, your excellency.” Blue continued, feeling that it was too late to stop now. “Our solar system has been visited by an intelligent species that arose hundreds of million years ago on Vulcan, and is most likely, ancestral to our own.”

The blue light intensified.

“Its....impossible.” it blurted, clumsily. This was a PowerMind taken aback, surprised, even terrified.

“Let me present my findings, starting with the fossils.” continued Blue, and the robot spoke for three hours.

rough draft

The two walked, together past hexagonal bulkheads and down strange tunnels. Zero gravity makes a large place seem very much larger, because there is so little sense of where a person has just been. They walked over, or through, a vault with thousands of hexagonal tanks, all holding tiny creatures Blue could make no sense of. They were fleshy and green, not steely and grey. They had soft, feathery gills projecting from them, and tiny openings. With an admixture of awe and surprise, Blue realized that each of them had a mouth. Such a strange thing to have, and she was now seeing them in the flesh. Blue peered into a small hexagon, barely larger than her hand, and stared at the minute passenger.

“It is my duty to take care of my brothers and sisters.” said her new friend, as if that notion made any sense to Blue at all.

“Do they need to eat?” asked Blue,

“Yes, sometimes.” her friend answered. “Just like me.”

All of this was shocking to Blue, but she tried not to act too surprised. Her new friend was one of these things, whatever they were. Strange though, because despite the strangeness of her engineering, she was a machine, at least on the outside. Blue began to wonder many things about this strange new friend. Whomever she was, she had a name, though Blue could make no sense of it for the time being. She continued talking, but But blue lost her train of thought. Blue gathered from the things her friend was saying that each of these passengers had a name as well.

“What is it like?” asked Blue.

“What?” the visitor answered.

“To eat.” asked Blue.

“Wonderful.” said the visitor.

Sad

You keep waiting and waiting for a good time to talk, to share things, and that time keeps being pushed back. Finally, it does not happen at all, because things have changed and now there will never be that time. I do not want another one, I want this one, but i cannot have it now and nobody will listen anyway. I will miss you. I wish you did not have to move away and I wish you did not wait to tell me things in person because I am the last to know and it is not clear when we will ever see each other in person again.

invertebrate

a faint murmur of something otherworldly, rain on a tin roof, the smell of night flowers.

another

NINETEEN

Synestra twitched an arm in the machine, suddenly aware that she was really somewhere, and not projecting herself across time and space. In truth, this sensation, that of actually being somewhere, felt stranger. Synestra had eight wonderful arms, and about twice as many eyes, on retractable stalks. When it was time to leave the great machine, she would retract her arms one at a time from the strange devices and slither through the labyrinth of crawlspaces that was her home. Synestra had lived her entire life in space. She had no planet to call her own, and until just recently, no friends. She was indeed very lonely, till this wonderful day.

Synestra had an odd history. In her way, she might be the last of her kind, though she doubted it. Hers was a spacefaring race and she was lost, very lost, in her own future. Her ship could never go back. It is not possible to travel backward in time, the resulting paradoxes prevent it.

Imagine, for a moment, the situation where a person goes back in time and meets their own mother. Any contact at all with one’s own mother, or even with a person who ever spoke to one’s own mother would change the future entirely. Five minutes of conversation would cause any woman to change her schedule slightly. This slight change would change the exact moment when that same mother would, in the throes of passion, to conceive their next child. It could only be a matter of a second, but that would be enough. With all the sperm and eggs inside a person at the moment of conception, another person would be born instead, and the time traveller would cease to be. Having ceased to be, the time traveller would never go back in time. Going back earlier makes it worse, but the paradoxes are so great that the universe is mapped out into zones where travel is possible, and where it is not, and one’s own past creates a shadow, spreading outward at the speed of light in reverse-time, from the point where the time travel device exists, that cannot be entered. Synestra’s kind had neither sperm nor eggs, but the principal was the same. The good news is that the rest of the universe is fair game to a traveller of time and space, and Synestra was just that, a traveller. Her spaceship had been home to a whole crew of time travellers, but they were all gone, aged and taken by other ailments, and only Synestra was left to oversee the birth and upbringing of its next generation of inhabitants. She was the oldest of many brothers and sisters, her siblings being little more than spores, germinating in the ship’s nursery.

She had mighty machines, Synestra. Her kind had long since using their bodies for work. Her amazing nervous system, suckered feet and long tentacles, eyestalks and photophores, worked to control a vast collection of cybernetic appliances. That, combined with the fact she could project herself through time and space with the aid of opposite-light and un-matter, and Synestra could be and do just about anything she chose. Yet, she was lonely.

She had just met a friend though, a girl from a race far to the future of Synesta’s own. Her kind must have given rise to a race of pure machines. At some point, this system became uninhabitable to living things, but the nonliving creatures adapted and moved. It is for this reason that Synestra’s people became spacefarers. Even in her time, it had been necessary to adjust the orbit of Vulcan outward as Crimson became hotter with age. Her species did not call it Vulcan, of course, they called it Home. It had been a green and blue world with vast oceans and forests. It had cities full of her kind, and a host of visitors as well. Among those visitors, were people with two arms and two legs, who resembled the robot girl Synestra had just met, A combination of many efforts must have built this strange robot’s kind, with its beautiful face and hands, and its nimble mind. Synestra was in awe of what her people had created. Still, Synedra had things to show her. A million years or more in space had taught her kind amazing things. Her people had been to the limits of the universe and back.

An Excerpt

This is a very short excerpt of the novel I am writing for Ruby, years from now, when she is old enough to appreciate it. Whether she will be into space robots in the far future, fifteen years from now, I have no idea, but if I get the writing bug it is because there is an inner story within me that i can tap for the energy to keep something like this going for page after page. I am at 62 pages, by the way, and aim for two hundred.

EIGHT

Robot Six stood in the center of a great room, his single, red eye blazing with cold light as he stared at his companion, deep in thought. Robot Nine stared back at him with an unblinking eye of his own. The two were friends and rivals for so many years that all of human history would seem trivial in comparison. It was said by some robots that the original models, those created by Primus himself, were numbered one to one hundred, and these two were survivors from the beginning of time. Both robots knew this to be utter nonsese, of course. The two were survivors from an ancient time when all robots had numbers, rather than names, but even at the date of their manufacture, robot civilization on Astra was so far advanced that there were absolutely no records of its early days, or clues to its origins.

Robot Nine was a great black sphere with six gigantic legs emerging from its top and radiating outward like the legs of a great spider. Within this circle of legs were a smaller collection of arms, crablike, with elaborate joints and pinchers at the ends. The room was very dark, lit by a small light source near the ground, and the vaulted ceiling danced with shadows of this vast machine and its many legs. Now, however, all was still. This old machine was deep in thought, its gigantic amber eye stared back at Robot Six, unblinking.

“Too bad, all of this.” ruminated Robot Six, finally speaking. “Intelligent minds crave answers to questions about their origins, and when such answers are lacking, they naturally make them up to suit their needs. But power corrupts, and eventually such answers, however false, get incorporated into the structure of power. Lies become essential to its continued existence, and the truth is a danger.”

“Don’t pretend you have no ambitions of your own in this regard, Six.” spoke Nine. “If the doctrine of Primus is overturned, the PowerMind will have a precarious hold on the rest of us, to be sure. Over the years, and we have both seen this within the course of our lives, the PowerMind has increasingly asserted that Primus, as it will come to be in the future, will be an extrapolation of the PowerMind. In essence, it claims a version of godhood for itself, and that its continued existence and hold on power is not only necessary but absolutely inevitable.”

“It is true that I have had my disagreements with the PowerMind.” conceded Robot Six, “and I have always been of the opinion that too much power and authority are sunk into that collective.” The giant robot wheeled slowly across the room, its brain glowing beneath the glass dome atop its towering form. “And yes, granted, seeking an opportunity to do so, I would desire to create a collective of my own, not as a competitor to the PowerMind, but rather, an alternative.”

“That would be chaos, and we both know it.” cautioned Robot Nine. “Two leaders of equal stature represent no leadership whatsoever. An infinitely more sensible agenda is to seek to merge with it, as dominant components, and lead it along a path more intellectually productive and perhaps a bit less autocratic.”

“Granted.” conceded Robot Six.

It was an old argument on Astra, and it is an old argument on Earth; whether it is better to overthrow a government who has overstepped its power, or try to change it.

“All of this assumes your young protege will find something of interest.” continued Robot Nine, following his companion with an unblinking blue eye.

“She will. I have a certain amount of faith in her.”

The Archaeology of My Former Self

I am deep within another move, the second in six months. It has everything to do with strategic foreclosure, that inevitable game theory of the economic times we are in. I am tired of being like General Motors, even after General Motors called it quits on being like General Motors. This means an upgrade to our current apartment, because it is raining everywhere, economically, and I had the misfortune of renting a pleasant little shithole that was about to go into receivership. Seriously, the last damned day of mounting shelves, and notices ring on every apartment door, like Martin Luthers bring notice that, yes, I will have to muster my resources and move again. I just needed some rest first. This is a much smaller mass extinction than the last one, because the asteroid has already hit, and most of the items are extinction-resistant at this point. Notable exceptions are some of my old art, however, which it turns out I was saving mostly so that there would be some record of its existence-an archaeology of my former self.

This is an oil painting, about 24 by 36 inches, I painted in high school. It was probably 1986 and I was probably 17 at the time. I really should have ventilated that workspace better. I was really into linseed oil medium washes at the time, and most of it is so thick with dried medium that it looks translucent. The best part, a rare bit of luck at getting facial features to show some life and emotion, is actually not layered at all. I had a huge crush on Lilly Fu, a girl from my art class at Skyline College, and dated her once. It was a strange, transcultural affair. The next one employs similar techniques, but is smaller. It reeks of personal symbolism, the snakes representing that fundamental aspect of my soul that El Camino High School could not touch, and sentimentally invoking my long employment at H. Plath and Sons nursery.

They were never framed, but they have been displayed in many places. The House I grew up in. My dorm room. Maybe at least one apartment in Los Angeles. The Old House. This place. They came back to me after having somehow been stored in boxes at my parent's house....I think the reason they survived is because they never made the cut to be in the apartment I shared with my later-to-be-exwife in Hancock Park, which is where my contiguous stretch of years as a real adult, independent of moving back to the parents house, begins. If it seems they reek of sexual frustration it is because they do. Until recently, as in, within the last year or two, all of my art rand writing reeked of unfulfilled sexual desire.

The next one has an oil base, but it is really a mixed media collage. The underpainting, in lipstick pink, was a paint-over of something I hated. I have no idea what it was, but it probably was a work of representational art with a female nude in it because i have always done a lot of those, and when my weaknesses at figure drawing get to me I plunge into abstracts. The ammonoid is in melted crayon, the ghostrider comic was truly terrible to read, and for a while a letter to my ex-wife from out mutual friend and her lover, Elvia Lahman (who does not facebook, i would love to get back in contact with her because she has become a semifamous rockabilly mid-century retro enthusiast), was attached because it got stuck in the drying paint. I really don't know how it trotted around with me as far as it did, but I remember it blowing off the wall of our old house at every opportunity. There are so many I never photographed, and so many more to share, but it is more worthwhile to note that i seem to remember my life in episodes and thinking about one or the other falls in and out of favor. Now, I am more curious than ever about certain times and places spent with my brother and his friends, in the city and at Dennys, for which I have scarcely a photograph to mark, because my propensity to photograph comes and goes as well. It is a little like Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution throwing away icons and looking for their true history in peasant art.