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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781940830223 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | John Ott |
| Publication date: | 01/16/2018 |
| Pages: | 170 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.36(d) |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
I came to Debudaderrah as a child, rumbling my engines, waiting for grace. Who was it told me I had been born there?
"What is it, Dad?"
"That's the Light Dancer. Isn't it beautiful?"
Beautiful is not an adequate word for Debudaderrah, swept over the sand and into the sky in the shape of the sandstone spirals which compose the dancers' monument.
Its reaches were not infinite; you could see its limits. But there were hidden parts just out of sight.
"Who made it, Dad?"
"Your great-grandfather."
"How did he do it?"
"It took him his whole life."
Here I sing of Debudaderrah, though it be wrong. Though I am inadequate. I sing.
You imagine parts in order, but for me they happen all at once:
1.
Schist listened to the darkness behind his eyes, feeling the weight of his body. Two feet, two hands. Two eyes; the curve of his back.
Outside, the sound of wind.
In Ravens.
* * *
Bat knew it was good to ride the demon; he had, after all, made it himself. It was made almost completely of steel; it flew faster than anything he had ever made.
700 knots. In the thin air of Debudaderrah, right on the edge of the speed of sound.
The tribe of the Bethua would have their vengeance.
He screamed. Under his thumb, the world clicked:
* * *
Each member of the tribe in Ravens were dancers. As they began their warm-ups, the shield above their town turned on, and they looked up:
* * *
The physical models don't do justice to the feeling of the thing, that shield, any more than Einstein's equations capture the emotional registers of witnesses to the atomic bomb.
It was a dream; even as Debudaderrah was a dream. Dreams are something that I do not understand. It may be that you understand them better than me, and all the peoples of Debudaderrah. I hope then someday to know you.
Their earth shuddered as under a great light. And Bat of the Bethua was tumbling to his death out of the air.
He screamed for a dozen miles.
2.
We rise; it is no matter we say, we say, that we rise, we say, but it does matter; I write to you; my apology, confession, and plea; we are not alone here for you are coming; and others:
Martin Frost knew the weight of company.
Debudaderrah, bent under the weight of its new post- war dignity.
They are standing shadows over their temple.
"Is he dead, Dad?"
"No, he'll live."
John was ten. On Debudaderrah, almost a man.
"Are you ready?"
"Yes."
Martin lifted him onto his shoulders.
Behind him, Dogae prepared himself to lift both man and son onto him.
3. [from Borderline]
I am dictating this to you from an apartment in Los Angeles, but I was born long ago in a hydrazine manufactury, the last of my line, designed to regulate the infrastructure of our dispersal between the worlds.
He who holds the key is god; one of our robots. But the work is human; and it is more than hard. It's religious. Or something different, but the same. Some thing with no name.
You scout the territory and you know the risks: space is not some walk in the park. It is waiting for you to come to it. It is prepared with all manner of traps, and what it expects most is to eat you.
But we are animals: we keep moving. I keep moving. And I hold on to the train.
To Debudaderrah the map is scanty but still adequate. We navigated 5,000 light years through temporal sludge to pledge that beacon and come home, but never got the return signal.
What that means is this: the story is still going on. I was supposed to have that story done and tidied up, and returned to the database for processing over a millennium ago. But the thing is still running.
I indict myself, even as I am made again:
My question is simple: just what in the fuck did you do?
4.
From the light the robot descended, shining in armor from another world. It was hard to look at him because your eye would slip aside, looking for something behind him, something his mask hid, or his body did. It was distracting; it continued some weeks into our knowing him.
My boy was the bravest; he ran right up to the thing as it began to declaim in its language. I thought Bat was dead (but he wasn't). We know we had robots before; but the intelligent ones all stopped working long ago. I guess we figured this was one of them. But it had a funny way of talking; even before you could start to understand it, it was like looking at it: too many things at once. Like an angel, shouting all kinds of nonsense out of the sky.
"I come the grace of an angel," it had said.
What I heard was just a bunch of gibberish, but I don't doubt that Schist heard what he says he did.
I knew right away: it was our Light Dancer. Come to collect.
5. [from Borderline]
He who cries in the night, I hear him, his agency and need; those things which are his and could be made mine but are not, because I am far away; I feel them and recover my dignity, which is ancient but fragile, to scuff my boots again and make the coffee and examine the paper and see: who am I today? What terrible friend have I made of myself now?
This wind is a thousand miles long; but these miles are not on any earth. They exist in the mind.
In the mind of god our work is never done; and it is difficult.
This stretch of blue-grey fire over the darkness fills me with longing; as though I could become it. I have before.
6.
They kept the god-robot in the freezer; it was the only place to put him. The incessant babbling was unbearable, and the freezer was large enough for him, and well-insulated. It could hardly kill him. And anyway, they still heard him through the wall, if they listened.
From the darkening sky above, Dogae heard sounds. He bent to the stove and attended to the eggs; people were hungry after all the drama.
* * *
Ash was falling now in the wake of the alien's landing; black snowflakes over the sand.
Schist stood under the strange weather, his dark eyes flashing in the light from the common room.
"Let's get everybody inside."
7.
Who plans a march, or takes his tribe on a walk? Who is the dancer, when the dancer is dancing? What animating force separates theater from life?
In the time after the performance, the players build up for the next one ... underground, in the tunnels.
"What do I do with my feet, Dad?"
"Listen to the music."
Dad beat on his drum and son moved, in the lamplight.
"Schist says the alien wants to talk to us, Dad."
"I'm sure he does. Watch your feet."
The boy moved over the stones, like a fisherman over the water.
In each step there is a precision — whether you adhere to tradition or you are an innovator — either way the precision is there. It molds itself over the muscles of the performer; somewhere beyond light. Energy binding the will to matter, and dancer to Debudaderrah.
* * *
Inside Bat's heart, vengeance burned.
8.
These performers set their weight against the hull, for your pleasure, to raise the mast and engage the engines, of our sorrowful tale, of the last midnight, and the last day, before the end of the earth.
But earth is always ending; and it is always beginning.
Dancing is one way to remember how that goes, and to nudge it, in the direction you wish to travel:
9.
I who transcribe this am in opposition to my own theater; we perform in words. This tale is true, but it is not an approved history.
For this, I hope I may be forgiven.
10.
Who says it isn't a beautiful thing to rebel? All the mental equipment, only mildly dormant, leaps to the fore, igniting eyes and passions, and everything seems so clear: why didn't we do it before?
And so with the children of rebels: improbably blessed with their good fortune and independent spirit, ready and able to assess all the new problems that come with a world of your own.
The story of the last scout who made it down from orbit, after the Earth Fleet set up their blockade.
The launching of the Great Missile.
The two lovers, Hiroshi and Sarai, and their naked attack on the secret Earth base nestled beneath the sand of Debudaderrah.
The death of Rodriguez, whose voice still was spun many hours a week in the archives, by eager young listeners; felled by a rogue grenade.
And the dog, who had seen the final attack, and who barked.
All stories appropriate, and pedestrian, the stuff that you can stick to your ribs and go to sleep on.
Real revolutions are another matter. They do not end, for one. And they have consequences that don't fit in.
Tell me ten times and I'll believe it: the war is over, the peace is made, justice has arrived, and all good things of the earth are made available to us, in the name of our gods and our families, hosanna over the broadcast news, and in the children's stories every night, books and poems, written over the sky on festival days ...
Mark the first moment you awaken and see the edge of the fact that will not fit, and you take hold of the thread, and pull:
11.
Maybe I was wrong before; I thought the translation system couldn't handle it or that our research had failed us, but it may be possible to do what I intended. You too are part of this story.
Of course, this is being broadcast on a very specific frequency. You are a late Earth audience, prior to extrasolar colonization.
Part of my story begins here; but then, it is also happening right now. And, as you might imagine, these modes are not mutually exclusive.
In Los Angeles, a city you know, starving for water and fame, a city of immigrants, born out of genocide and slavery, improbably thrust into the light (not lime! but sun ... ) due to the development of early 20 Century entertainment technologies, lives Muriel, whose name echoes she for whom the city was named.
Muriel, who never got exactly what she wanted.
Los Angeles is a beautiful city; like Keats was beautiful when he was dying.
12.
Muriel lived with her mother on Adams Avenue. She was nineteen years old. Three years ago, she had had the disconcerting experience of having a voice appear inside of her head.
"I need your help," the voice had said. And while she had given it a great deal of help these last three years, she had never received any in return.
"You need to get your head on straight. You can't live here forever," her mother said, staring down at her over her bifocals, before she left to work for the lawyer in West Hollywood. "You staying here today?"
Muriel nodded.
"Then you need to clean the house."
"The voices are almost gone, Mama." But they weren't.
"I don't want to hear about those devils."
The time right after her mother left was the best. Muriel could sit on the front porch and smoke a cigarette, with no one to tell her otherwise, and watch the light move over her city, and through the garden she and her mother tended under the smog and the helicopters and the great white weight of the sky.
* * *
Outside, men on bicycles coursed through the yellow morning light. And she remembered what she had to do.
She called up her boyfriend.
"You have to take me to the museum," she said.
To his credit, he did so, at once.
13.
At the museum, Muriel went straight to the Picasso.
She stared at each painting; there were five of them. The rustle of the museum-goers footsteps and whispers filled her with tension.
She took Francisco's hand and led him to the café, where she purchased them two drinks, and led him to the plaza where they sat under the assault of the sunlight, blissfully barely able to think.
Really, they had already broken up. But breaking up had not changed much between them.
"This was a good idea," said Francisco.
14. I arrive
It starts as a small thing, the feeling. The feeling that something is going to happen.
Then you begin to feel warm, and chills pass over your skin.
And then a weight moves into your brain, and that weight is also one of: something is about to happen.
And then it does.
You are above the world.
Moving in synchronous orbit over a planet, like a fly in his sea of air and dust, swallowed up in the giantness.
And what is it that happens in orbit?
Not only heavenly bodies but minds spin; mine was sent spinning. Nor has it yet stopped.
I would give you that part of it. The part that makes the most sense.
As the American astronaut Rusty Schweikart said, "You're the sensing element for Man."
So the sky opens, curtain, on curtain, and oh, will you take me with you?
Will I be rewarded? Just this once, for what I am to say? I promise it will be worth it for you.
It was just this: that I am still there. I will never leave. A frozen corpse in space. But also a man, talking to you. Which is the happier man? Am I happier as a corpse, or as a ghost? Are you happier, knowing what is happening? Or not?
And if I told you, just what it is you want to know, would you still want to know it?
I don't want to disabuse you of all of it; that would be cruel, and more, not to my purpose. I want to share it with you and so must do it only a little at a time and so I promise, I will, I will not say too much, but just enough. I promise, I promise.
I took her to bed, and there are no words for that either. And like space, she was a broad beam in the space of sky, holding on to my arm, and then my neck.
I can hold her too, as I hold my weapon, now bearing east, over your continent, closing in:
You are above the world. And I am above you too, your guardian for our walk, into the sky; come with me, the weather is chilly and you will need your coat, and this is the arc of the movement of your nation into war, so long avoided, for well meaning reasons, and embittered in history and pain, and I want you to know that I honor you for that, even as I must push you over and out into the field of conflict now coming. It is not my design. I merely saw it.
Fear for me too; will you? That I could have done so much is a truism now; yes, blame the alien, it is always the easiest thing. And I believed that I could have too; I was almost as innocent as you.
But my mission does not allow for redos. That part was already over. This is the next part; it is still happening.
So if you march with me to war (and you are; I am sorry), you march for freedom, and democracy, and love, all of the oldest clichés, and still true, as true as my galactic ray gun, and if you march for yourself, and your brothers, then so much the better, for you will have need of both.
Come with me, brother, as we descend from Orbit onto Debudaderrah, that second and better Earth:
Here are the lighting storms at 70,000 meters; in purple.
And here is the Black Sea; bigger than Earth's, and deeper. And now we are flying over Ravens, whose name is not as lovely as its people (still today, is it?), for they are all genetically engineered to be the finest of dancers.
I too am a dancer, did I tell you?
War is a form of dancing. And though I should kill some of your family (and I will) in my duties, please be assured that that omen will also be wielded with the correct authority for such things, and that that authority is the balance of weight, muscle, and timing, in the enactment of violence.
Violence is beautiful, but it is not a kind of beauty most are willing to accommodate in their daily lives, which is why we save it for a season, when all the buds are glistening, and the air is ripe with the sound of the deep and mellifluous silence before a bomb.
Here, hold the lever will you?
I'm about to drop one.
Here at ten thousand meters you can almost see the city; not quite, but close. Like a shadow over the earth, about to be lit into fire.
Why should I tell you differently? I am an invader, aren't I?
I am your master, am I not?
Well, we'll see. The story will decide; not me. I am its servant. Even as I am also yours.
"Roberto! Cut the lights!"
Yes, I'm almost done.
It was not worth it, did I tell you that part? I would have everything back. But I can't have that. So instead I must have you, here with me, as I fall from grace.
15.
And so who will not fire?
Will it not be part of my self?
part of myself who am firing
firing into the night
fire into the night with me
and I will be with you
Fire into the night and I am with you now
And I will always be with you
Because I am the bullet
and the victim
and the victor
16.
Now, hold your fire, and be with me:
Though it were not you, still it shall be, in what like remote control barrages your steps and shoulders hidden under my lamp, from far above:
Lemon scented and clementine, and watch your water and eat at Joe's, and prepare, my son, for war;
Hold the smell in your face, like my mind in your brain. (Or near enough).
Hold it ready to fire.
No alien invasion is complete without a body snatcher ...
Picasso can occupy ten-dimensional spaces and so can I. Or near enough. Near enough for the work of the government I desire, my anarchic government of the mind, like sweet rain, sweet epiphany, the drowning of the gorge of the mind with the waters of space:
Be with me.
"I'm here."
My son.
"I'm not your son."
Let me say it anyway. I'm here with you.
"Why?"
To help you fight.
"Who am I fighting?"
I'm glad you asked. The town nearest to you. Within it are many opposed to my cause. With you as my representative, I trust they will come to my side.
"What cause is it?"
Don't worry about that for now.
"But I want to know."
Justice, my son. Like sweet rain. Justice.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Debudaderrah"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Robin Wyatt Dunn.
Excerpted by permission of John Ott.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Dramatis Personae,
Debudaderrah,
About the author,
By the same author,