Alex was a funny kid, the kind that parents dread without realizing it. What they want is a quiet kid who does what he’s told. A kid who’ll show enough interest in books to do well in school and find himself a decent job afterwards, marry a respectable girl they’ll approve of. The kind of kid that’s polite to his elders and his teachers.
Alex was close to being that kid. He was always polite, called you sir unless you happened to be female, and he was indeed very interested in books.
Hell, Alex loved books, to the point where his favorite was a four book series called the A-to-Z Encyclopedia. He loved the pictures in it and he loved the words and how they always had something to say about everything.
Then there were books on space, though not rockets themselves. Rockets were old things people used in ancient history; shuttles were new and cooler. And satellites! Alex loved the thought of all those satellites orbiting the earth, and he often looked at the stars, hoping he would spot one.
He knew all the planets of the solar system and could sort them by name, distance from the sun, size and color (Alex really liked pictures of planets, especially Saturn, with its ring which Alex knew from his encyclopedia was made from chunks of ice). He was also amazed by heroic stories of astronauts who walked on the moon and lived in orbiting stations and had to eat and sleep with no gravity at all.
*
One night, Alex was lying in bed, reading about the beginning of spaceflight by the small glow of his flashlight, which he kept so that he could read past his bedtime. The story was about a little girl-dog called Laika that was shot into space to see if it would harm her. Alex thought this was a very brave thing of her to do, since she could have died up there.
It seemed to him that if not for the bravery of Laika, nobody would have ever dared go into space, because…well, because people were afraid a lot in the old times (a fact he’d also picked up in his encyclopedia) and they needed a dog to show them that space was a great place to go.
So, the next day, Alex asked his mom, who was watching the TV at the time, a show about people who had tears in their eyes a lot and then kissed which bored Alex out of his mind, whether they gave Laika a medal after she returned to Earth in her capsule.
“Huh? They didn’t bring Laika back down, Alex,” his mom replied and switched her attention back to the TV. He was quite puzzled by this, because he’d been sure Laika must have wanted to come back home, like that whale Willie did in that movie. So he asked his mom what happened to Laika.
“Laika died in orbit,” said his mother, “because they didn’t bring her down.”
*
Alex couldn’t sleep that night at all, and he had nightmares for the rest of the week. He couldn’t even look at the stars at night anymore, because now he had an terrible image stuck in his head; not the sleek, golden and silver shaped forms of Russian and American satellites spinning past each other and beeping, but a horrible and silent view of a body of a dog, rotating silently around the earth in cold and empty space.
(all crouched up small as if sleeping next to a mother, trying to nudge up to her for warmth even though she wasn’t really there, dead eyes behind half-closed lids and a thin trail of blood floating out of her mouth in the land of no gravity)
Because nobody bothered to bring her down, because she’d served her use, she could be abandoned, because she had no value anymore, and that was enough to let a puppy die in the heartless gaze of uncaring stars. It was, in Alex’s eyes, the ultimate wrong anyone could commit.
Thursday, 4 December 2008
Tuesday, 2 December 2008
CHAPTER ONE: She’s standing in the shade of this big oak tree,
out of the sun, which is really hot this time of year. It’s actually kind of uncomfortable because the ground is really uneven, all bunched up from all the roots poking out of the earth, like the wrinkles in someone’s brain. It feels like you could twist your ankle just by standing there long enough. She notices she has a cloak on, and it takes her a while to identify what it’s made of, it’s so strange.
Something living used to have it for skin, she realizes, and then someone had to go out and kill it and then someone else entirely, someone with a lot of skill and practice, spent God-only-knows how long tanning it or whatever it is they do to make animal skins into real clothes. And it was all done by hand.
A feeling almost like awe settles into her at that thought, and she’s reluctant to unzip it (although she notices it doesn’t really have a zipper, of course, and not really buttons either, but carved and painted clasps made from an animal’s bone) as if that might somehow damage it, like she’s renting the thing and when she returns it the man at the counter will go over it with a microscope to see if she took good care of it.
Then she notices the armband. It reminds her of the ones Nazis wear on television, red and white and black, except the white is a thick line that goes all round, so maybe it’s more like a flag of some sort, and there are letters stitched into it in black cord. Nina, it says, which is funny because that’s her name. That’s when she figures out she’s dreaming.
*
The tree, it turns out, is vaguely in the middle of a grassy field that has a road running through it. The summer has made the road dusty and white, the grass into the gently browning color of an old photograph. Further off, there are mountains that look like they might scrape against the moon if it ever has an off day, and there’s a forest in between, promising more of the delicious shade. The air is so thick with cricket-song that she can imagine it pressing against her skull and pushing her eyeballs to the back of her neck.
Isn’t there something about lucid dreaming? She seems to remember reading something about it, how if you can manage to figure out that you’re asleep while you are, you know, asleep, you can take over the dream-world, make it do what you want. It’s all your head after all, and it’s a chance to play God for a little while, making yourself dream what you want to dream.
Well, as far as Nina can tell, it doesn’t seem to be working for her.
Maybe I only dreamed I read about it? That would be kinda funny, in an annoying, solipsistic kind of way.
Then she hears the procession. At first it’s hard to hear over the endless roar of the crickets or cicadas or whatever invisible bug made all this noise, but gradually she can make out a song and what sounds like a very disciplined avalanche, timed with a metronome, that turns out to be a whole bunch of horses all walking in the same time. It occurs to Nina that she’s never seen so many horses together in one place, not even during a demonstration when all the cops came out of their hidey-holes and some of them rode horses like crazy blue knights with batons instead of swords.
Way before she can actually see the procession, though, she can tell which direction it’s coming from by the huge cloud of dust that’s rising in that direction, like someone exploded a bomb under a desert. She can see a city in that direction, far off and mostly hidden by a hill, but there’s a sudden ordered geometry to the shapes that way that you only find in cities, even the ones that turn out to look like they were built by ants on LSD when you get up close. She can see towers that way, and one of those spherical roofs, a cupola.
Then she finally gets a look at the main event itself. It starts with guys in shiny armor carrying big flags that probably started out white, but have picked up a lot of the road’s pigmentation on the march. She can see various animals on the flags, usually portrayed in some sort of aggressive posture if the animal permits it. Then a bunch of guys on foot, less shiny because they’re wearing cloaks over their chainmail. It’s confusing at first because they remind her of protesters carrying huge transparents and signs and placards, so what she’s expecting to see is something like GOD HATES TAXES or CORPORATIONS AREN’T VOTERS or GIVE US BACK OUR JOBS or BEHEAD THOSE WHO OPPOSE THE DEATH PENALTY or whatever. Instead, the crowd seems to be equipped with a kind of easily portable grafitti, done on bed sheets or possibly sails off a ship, with crazy writing done in a thousand different hands, too small to make out.
Then come the guy with the drums and the trumpets and all the rest of the equipment she has no name for, so maybe this is a parade, but if so it’s the most depressing, soul-crushing parade she’s ever heard of, like they’re celebrating You’ve Got Bird Flu day.
- - - - - - End of Fragment No.1 - - - - - -
Okay, what I'm primarily interested in here is what you think about the language. It's always bugged me that fantasy novels adopt this bullshit formal English that nobody really uses in real life. So I tried for something more casual. I'd say I was gunning for William Gibson if that wasn't kind of presumptuous.
So tell me, what do you think of the language?
out of the sun, which is really hot this time of year. It’s actually kind of uncomfortable because the ground is really uneven, all bunched up from all the roots poking out of the earth, like the wrinkles in someone’s brain. It feels like you could twist your ankle just by standing there long enough. She notices she has a cloak on, and it takes her a while to identify what it’s made of, it’s so strange.
Something living used to have it for skin, she realizes, and then someone had to go out and kill it and then someone else entirely, someone with a lot of skill and practice, spent God-only-knows how long tanning it or whatever it is they do to make animal skins into real clothes. And it was all done by hand.
A feeling almost like awe settles into her at that thought, and she’s reluctant to unzip it (although she notices it doesn’t really have a zipper, of course, and not really buttons either, but carved and painted clasps made from an animal’s bone) as if that might somehow damage it, like she’s renting the thing and when she returns it the man at the counter will go over it with a microscope to see if she took good care of it.
Then she notices the armband. It reminds her of the ones Nazis wear on television, red and white and black, except the white is a thick line that goes all round, so maybe it’s more like a flag of some sort, and there are letters stitched into it in black cord. Nina, it says, which is funny because that’s her name. That’s when she figures out she’s dreaming.
*
The tree, it turns out, is vaguely in the middle of a grassy field that has a road running through it. The summer has made the road dusty and white, the grass into the gently browning color of an old photograph. Further off, there are mountains that look like they might scrape against the moon if it ever has an off day, and there’s a forest in between, promising more of the delicious shade. The air is so thick with cricket-song that she can imagine it pressing against her skull and pushing her eyeballs to the back of her neck.
Isn’t there something about lucid dreaming? She seems to remember reading something about it, how if you can manage to figure out that you’re asleep while you are, you know, asleep, you can take over the dream-world, make it do what you want. It’s all your head after all, and it’s a chance to play God for a little while, making yourself dream what you want to dream.
Well, as far as Nina can tell, it doesn’t seem to be working for her.
Maybe I only dreamed I read about it? That would be kinda funny, in an annoying, solipsistic kind of way.
Then she hears the procession. At first it’s hard to hear over the endless roar of the crickets or cicadas or whatever invisible bug made all this noise, but gradually she can make out a song and what sounds like a very disciplined avalanche, timed with a metronome, that turns out to be a whole bunch of horses all walking in the same time. It occurs to Nina that she’s never seen so many horses together in one place, not even during a demonstration when all the cops came out of their hidey-holes and some of them rode horses like crazy blue knights with batons instead of swords.
Way before she can actually see the procession, though, she can tell which direction it’s coming from by the huge cloud of dust that’s rising in that direction, like someone exploded a bomb under a desert. She can see a city in that direction, far off and mostly hidden by a hill, but there’s a sudden ordered geometry to the shapes that way that you only find in cities, even the ones that turn out to look like they were built by ants on LSD when you get up close. She can see towers that way, and one of those spherical roofs, a cupola.
Then she finally gets a look at the main event itself. It starts with guys in shiny armor carrying big flags that probably started out white, but have picked up a lot of the road’s pigmentation on the march. She can see various animals on the flags, usually portrayed in some sort of aggressive posture if the animal permits it. Then a bunch of guys on foot, less shiny because they’re wearing cloaks over their chainmail. It’s confusing at first because they remind her of protesters carrying huge transparents and signs and placards, so what she’s expecting to see is something like GOD HATES TAXES or CORPORATIONS AREN’T VOTERS or GIVE US BACK OUR JOBS or BEHEAD THOSE WHO OPPOSE THE DEATH PENALTY or whatever. Instead, the crowd seems to be equipped with a kind of easily portable grafitti, done on bed sheets or possibly sails off a ship, with crazy writing done in a thousand different hands, too small to make out.
Then come the guy with the drums and the trumpets and all the rest of the equipment she has no name for, so maybe this is a parade, but if so it’s the most depressing, soul-crushing parade she’s ever heard of, like they’re celebrating You’ve Got Bird Flu day.
- - - - - - End of Fragment No.1 - - - - - -
Okay, what I'm primarily interested in here is what you think about the language. It's always bugged me that fantasy novels adopt this bullshit formal English that nobody really uses in real life. So I tried for something more casual. I'd say I was gunning for William Gibson if that wasn't kind of presumptuous.
So tell me, what do you think of the language?
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