The Indigestible

I’m going to try something a little different here, though nothing that’s never been done before. A while back I let a character, Cock, leak onto this blog; he’s actually a principal from a work in progress called The Seven-Year Mirror. Overall I think the narrative is doing well but it’s stalled; I’m going to begin posting it here serially to see if that reignites the flame and lets me carry it through to completion.

7YM is a log, long work — a couple hundred thousand words at least, so far — and it’s by far the strangest work of fiction I’ve done to date. I like it, but it’s not for everyone, and it’s definitely not for kids. This is Adult Content material we’re talking about here. Not porn, but mature subjects and, in some chapters, disturbing ones regardless of your age.

The following posts in this category are from the first book (or major section, or movement), “Cool” — which superficially is meant to be a description of the seasons on the world where this story takes place.

In terms of background: The setting is a pelagically-oceanic world called Castor, which has a twin, Pollux, that shares a close enough orbit around their blue-and-yellow stars the worlds actually occult each other’s skies regularly. Castor and Pollux are part of the Twenty, an agglomeration of human-habited worlds I’ve mentioned elsewhere in my Beasts of Delphos and Allasnu Nomu.

The setting is about 2500 years in a human future, and to date no one has ever met any extraterrestrials. There was a Golden Age of sorts that ended some 2000 or so years previous, when a lot of rich technologies that enabled fairly fast and fairly non-Einsteinian transport among stars fell into a Diaspora of forgetfulness.

Cock is a teen youth who lives on Castor and, with his friends Fan, Rip and Tube, basically heads up a band of something like a motorcycle gang, except they use hydrofoils instead.

Cock is also schizophrenic and bipolar, and for that reason is a profoundly difficult character to like — and to write.

The narrative begins, here, not from his point of view, but rather with another character, whose significance appears later in the story.

This is a work in progress and as such is quite organic. What you see posted here over the next few months will probably not resemble, in either content or chronological structure, the final product — but my aim is to eventually produce a fully-finalized novel that more or less is true to what you’re going to witness.

All content, BTW, is ©2007 me. You are not allowed to reproduce this, but you can link to it.

Hope you like it.

==== The Seven-Year Mirror ====

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.

O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,

bequeath us to no earthly shore until

is answered in the vortex of our grave

the seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

— Voyages II, Hart Crane

This is a love story.

Prolegomenon

I first realized that I was different when I was eight.

No. That’s not wholly accurate. I was aware of being different long before then, but I wasn’t truly conscious of it, or worried by it, until that day by the sea. Before that time I didn’t have the awareness that let me look into the mirror of Treva’s eyes and say to myself, I am not as he is.

But I’ve got ahead of myself.

I tend to do that quite a lot.

What do I recall of that day? I’m no longer sure. It’s been recounted so often, by me, by my mother and father, by Treva. I no longer know with certainty what is a true recollection versus what is something that I only think I recall, something patched together like a bad viscast effect, something masquerading as memory, or insinuated into my mind by the reminiscences of others, rather than being the real thing.

I’m fairly certain I remember the ride to the shore, but we took so many of them in those days that what I recall is truthfully more of a montage of journeys, taking place in at least three runners, the first one so old that it actually used hydrogen power. That was before my father’s career had stabilized around his triune tasks of teaching, tutoring and terrology.

(Perhaps I should apologize for the alliteration. It’s not always easy for me to tell if I’m being clever, hackneyed, glib, or just irritating. I usually err to caution’s preference and assume I’m the lattermost. I’ll try not to be too burdensome with my delusions of wittiness.)

Regardless of the actual runner we used, regardless of the particulars of the journey that particular day, I can relate some details with something like certitude, for in most respects the landscape of Taliesin has not changed in its centuries of habitation. Sand is sand, sea is sea and the suns are still red and hot yellow.

Probably there were burras winging through the sky and calling to each other with their strange, laughing cries. Probably the land shone under the cloudless or nearly-so sky. Rocks by the roadside would have bulged like strange geological warts, growths as peculiar and baroque as a ciliated mole, dark brown ancient-pocked basalt sometimes with the wink of silicate or mica crystals, or rusty or pale transmuted sand in layers like pastry.

The air surely crackled with the discharge from the sandrunner’s repulser field and with the ecmite seatcovers’ friction against our swimming trunks. Mother’s hair ruffled in the induced breeze when Father goosed the runner’s thrustplate. The air, though we were near the shore, was dry and cool; most of the light and heat energy that reaches Taliesin is not from the red dwarf it orbits. The yellow-spectrum companion is the source of much of it, most of it, and Taliesin’s orbit is far enough from its dual loci that the oceans, at its poles, are thick plates of ice.

Father used to believe that the polar regions of Earth, the lost cradle of us, were similar, basing his conclusions upon his studies of the vanished planet’s records. But the evidence, such as it is, is inconclusive. At least as many terrological papers have been written on the subject of a warm, wet planet like Delphos or Gem, but with less surface area and considerably fewer forests, based in similar citations from Earth’s scant remaining records. Father argued that the discrepancies were explainable simply: The climate changed.

He was ever at a loss to show how such huge changes could have been wrought in the memory-span of only two generations; records from one era speak of frozen poles while those written a bare century later mention no glaciation whatsoever. No natural effects could have produced such a radical difference, it’s been said many times; the best conventional explanation I’ve heard is that Earth’s people (who were just like us, of course) were fond of myth and fable. Much of the cultural and literary history we have today came from them, and we still love stories of the fantastic. Therefore, obviously, the accounts of Earth with rimes of ice at its axes are examples of such flights of fancy.

Father accepted none of that. His ideas were shocking, and — but I have left the subject, I fear, and quite considerably besides.

It’s funny, I suppose, if funny is the word to describe the urge I still have, so long after his death, to defend my father’s work; but I still feel a flame of ire in my breast when I hear certain patronizing tones in some people’s voices. They spoke of my father in the same way. As he got weaker, they became less and less careful about sounding so demeaning, so belittling, when he was in range to hear them. And after a while … he seemed to stop caring, but he hadn’t; he simply was too tired to go on. And still I want to join the battle, rally to his banner, though he cannot carry it any more.

====

But all this is years after the day I began with some eight hundred words ago. We halted the runner by the hissing bubbling fizz of the tide as it broke across the flawless porcelain sand. When I was very, very young I used to press my feet into that sand to look at the contrast, the fascinating interleave of my toes against the wet pack, the way they seemed to mesh together in the spaces between, like gears of black and white. Or ink running across a page of pape.

When I was older and studying some Pollucan texts I got that sensation again, so powerful that it was a combination, almost, of déjà vu and homecoming. The Pollucans’ T’hey-che’yah is predicated upon the same idea, the interpenetration and interdependence of the dark and the light. One without the other loses much significance.

Contrasts and reflections, meshes of the unlike. Granting meaning by opposition. And Treva.

Yes, and Treva.

Father went up the shore to search for specimens. There never were many to be found. He explained that to me once when I followed him, asking what type of specimens he was looking for. The ocean pounded everything to sand; all that was left to find was the occasional well-scoured flake of stone that might once have contained traces of mineral deposit or even that grail of all Talec studies, a fossil.

Fossils are nearly impossible to find on Taliesin because none of its indigenous life ever got as far as developing calcified structures or, indeed, any hard body parts at all save substances analogous to chitin and cartilage. Even the predators are toothless.

The Delphan Sirens are not ours.

I wanted to know why Father sought specimens if he knew that there wouldn’t be any. He simply shrugged.

Years later I encountered a fisherman angling in a placid lake and overheard his conversation with a bystander. He knew there were no fish to catch, yet he did it anyway. It made me think he and my father would have got along well.

But by then Father was gone.

====

Treva and I swam out, as always, and as always he went faster, stroked farther and longer, had better endurance, and as always I felt a sick, helpless fury in my breast. He never failed in anything we played at together, as long as the contest was physical. (In the mind, at least, we were evenly matched, with one exception.)

But that day I felt something else. Something that drove me more than I’d ever been driven before. Something that compelled me to dare, to push, to strive as I never had.

Shame can do striking things to a person, even when he’s just a boy.

And I had gone too far. Childlike, I didn’t realize it until it was much too late, and then it seemed to be too late all at once. So fast, so fast.

I hesitated, the shore still dozens of meters off. A wave caught me and I faltered, foundered, and knew I was lost. I had begun to drown before I’d even caught my first lungful of the stinging, too-acid water of Taliesin. I gurgled and choked and then the water was washing into me in surges.

Water in the lungs is a terrible sensation. It is too cold, heavy, dense, feels almost like wet sand. It is terribly alien and my body, which was barely old enough to be under my control at all, even marginally, stopped obeying my commands and tried to gasp the water out. The problem was that my head was still below the surface, so when my lungs expanded they filled again with that awful cold density, and that only made me cough more.

And the whole time I was thinking, you knew you were too deep to touch the bottom; if you had just lain on your back and floated you wouldn’t be dying now.

I was almost clinically detached. I didn’t have the time then to feel the emotion of it. I was too busy dying to have an opinion on the fact. I was simply very disappointed with myself for panicking, for letting myself be goaded, and especially because I knew Treva was not goading me. He had stopped boasting of his victories more than a year ago. Lately he had seemed more desperate, more frantic, more urgent for me to succeed. Each time I failed to match him in a contest he would give me a searching, worried look, and those looks frightened me because I almost knew what they meant.

If only my feet could touch the bottom, I’d have a stable place to launch myself from and I wouldn’t be so afraid. I felt so lonely suddenly, out of touch with the land, with the air. An unutterable wave of sadness washed through me. The ground wasn’t under me any more and the sky was too far over me. I was falling into blackness entirely out of touch with everything I thought I had known, everything that had seemed so sure and so solid. Abandoned and doomed, betrayed by life into silent, toothless jaws.

And then a hand, clutching tearingly at my hair, jerking my head toward the light.

I sputtered to the surface and gasped, retching, and felt myself pulled on my back, Treva’s arm about my chest, humiliatingly supine and helpless in my brother’s saving grasp. Hot silent tears of frustration and betrayal burned in my eyes, but I didn’t resist, didn’t try to fight Treva off. I was too embarrassed to be ungrateful, to struggle much. Besides, I was exhausted.

I lay on the shore where he dragged me and managed somehow not to groan, I think. A thin streamer of mucus and bile ran from my mouth; somewhere in the process of trying to purge itself of Taliesin’s ocean, most of which I believed I had aspirated, my body had also cleared itself of all things esophagus-related and I coughed until my throat felt shredded. At least I had managed to maintain control of the sphincters and other delicate systems below my waist. That humiliation atop everything else might have caused me to crawl back into the sea facedown.

Treva tried to make it look a game. He leaned over me and smiled, water dripping from his nose and chin into my face. “Next time you play rescue on me,” he said, filled with false jollity. Our parents, faces pinched with worry, heard his words and relaxed, though not much. I nodded weakly, furious and twice furious. I owed my life to Treva and now I owed my pride as well.

And then I began to wonder. I began to wonder why I was not as he was. I began to truly understand that it was a problem. I began to grasp why Treva always looked at me as he did when I lost these contests.

Treva was a stronger swimmer, and that wasn’t all. He was better at running, at climbing rocks or trees, even at jumping, and he slept less than I did, always had a better appetite, never seemed to run low on energy.

And, lying on my back that morning, water droplets that had fallen from my twin brother’s mirroring face drying on my own, I began to understand that didn’t make sense.

But then, neither did the eerie way in which I could almost see the near-drowning and rescue before they’d actually occurred.