the nun’s tale

She was a short, angry woman with a leaky voice. High morals were seeping through her constructed sentences, and a sense of resentment was evident in everything she did. At the table, she was sitting directly across me and her patience seemed to boil over when the astronomer began speaking. Shortly after our land-crash, we set out toward the moors, arriving early at the foot of the hill. It is said that Richard the Second had stayed at the castle on the hill, now in ruins. The wind was blazing strong, and this band of rebels was defeated, but not defiant. Only Arion seemed to want to put up a fight. Most of us had already given up.

The nun had something grandiose in her. Her short, fidgety fingers always seemed to linger as if on a button for Truth. It seemed, in youth, she had had a romantic relationship with the astronomer. It seemed ancient Egyptian history from that vantage point.

The evening was coming in, and the multiple stars in the sky seemed to burn a little less intensely, and the empty space above us was suddenly flooded with the most diverse range of hues. Murmuring softly, the wind was calling us to a rest. We wanted to reach the coast, but as we arrived at the hill’s foot everything seemed to make sense and we camped up. There was deep sadness in each and everyone of us. We were in mourning. We felt wronged by fate, and those of us that did not believe in fate felt wronged by the empire. I believed in fate, then.

The nun began talking, and we all went hush. She had been a beautiful petite child, but somehow she had stopped growing, she informed us. Digging deep into pockets of the soul, she was pouring forth years of resentment, and was letting go the image she had of herself. She had visited a monastery in her youth, and then she had been taken in by nuns, and then she had been constantly psychologically abused by them. Life had had to move on. We listened, without pity or any particular feeling, half bored with our own lives. There was not much else to do entertainment-wise.

Suddenly, she broke off, and almost in tears, she began reciting a poem, and she revealed to us that all of the young women she had been in charge of had been killed in a raid. I didn’t feel anything. I just looked at her, I could see her wrinkles wrinkling up evermore.

I stopped listening, because I had been reminded of my own life events,. It is odd how at times, when sharing life experiences, the flow of energy momentarily bursts through, and we are alive for a short moment, and all the meaningful moments in our existence become presently interconnected, and we are all-aware for that one short moment. And for a brief candle the soul feels light, and then it feels the chain anew. All those moments are inter-linked, and I like to think that somehow they constitute a hidden layer to the multiverse, and they give us purpose. Somehow, looking back, looking forward, it all makes sense, this ruse of a story, this poetic narrative with no end. Not a linear story, not a hyperbole, not a circular ploy.

The nun had been a steady force in our ranks, and her death marked a heavy loss on our side in the war. We did not know it then, but she would become quite the hero. We all thought better of her after the event, but even then we could sense that there was something special in that resentment, in that sense of injured, broken justice. Not the broken love of the astronomer’s selfishness, but the broken dream of a young child, who had seen God and had genuinely tried.

a farmer growing rotifers

planets are wanderers in space, bright matter-wave
soliton trains whose long-standing question is
whether to tilt, elongate, compress, vacillate,
run out of course, spontaneously form or dissolve.

my job is to rapidly harness repulsive to attractive
quenched interactions from ultra-cold atomic gases,
grow a Rotifer farm, crystal vases from another sea,
transparently gliding, Leviathans from the deep.

I am a Leviathan farmer on Triton; we have been
captured by Poseidon in our quest for a better
ecology. My husband died while working the
cryovolcanic vents, sublimated nitrogen had him.

Like Io and Europa, Triton has an inner life, and
while we dream on a surface of frozen nitrogen,
sipping water-ice cocktails from ice-seven,
ice-eight and ice-ten crystalline forms, our

disordered hydrogen bonding has led our
Conochilus colonies to be to be ripe and
supple, and metastable ices made our
eco-farming techniques very sophisticated.

Kyniska and her solitary cosmographical
boy-friend are often far and away on their
Mount Meru metaphysical searches, or
relieving imperial ships of their dark matter.

Arion

Look up in perfect silence at the intergalactic medium: dark matter, energy bundles, dust and gas scattered by the rocking and rolling of cosmic rays, stellar winds, gravitational fields. If you have the inclinations of a poet, you may be able to trace the flow of baryons in Zeus’s vomit. Sailing across the hydrogen and helium persisting from the fall of the Titans, we navigate various oceanic energy densities.
Our ship feeds on lapping thermal ocean waves, bulk kinetic space testosterone, cosmic ray beauty, magnetic devotion, and photonic energy.  That is what divides us from the brutes of the colonising empire, the jokes of the salesmen of the corporation, the plethora of advertising leer-seers and the marketeering agents. We space buccaneers bounce off the thin galaxy oscillating, scintillating at some indiscriminate speed across the shimmering kiloparsec distance. As I sit here at the intergalactic window and watch the cosmic microwave background, the far-infrared emission from dust, as I watch the starlight, I know every reflection bobs and ebbs toward the red, and I shift the ship’s cosmic gear to chase a thermodynamic nonequilibrium. Our efforts are not in vain, we like to think. In zero gravity flight, our candles burn all across, a hazy halo of fire. My love for Kyniska is undiminished. The ocean waves, the rain, and many earth days have lapped by and gone. We are still here. As the engine maintains a steady input of free energy from ultraviolet radiation emitted by naughty stars, there is a hefty contribution of kinetic energy from high velocity gas ejecta straight from supernovae’s mouths. I fight for a living, and anger is what drives me. I have been betrayed by comets and by aliens, by humans and by spacetime. A small telescope is not enough to chart my eroticosm. A black spot is upon me, I fret at the myriad ways we could shipwreck. Old songs waken from enclouded nebulae, tunes of death and defiance. Rich entanglements. Particle by particle, we are leaking freedom all over the multiverse. Stuck in my piratical ear, a tune most ominous and drear. Examining memory is the most critical skill for any Buccaneer hacking through space. Rare dreams beyond dreams. Empty space is hypnotic, a metaphysical hyperspace. The rare cosmos of our knowledge is routinely sucked back into the original jester’s bubble along with hydrogen, helium and the whole abundance of heavy elements in the interstellar medium: C, O, Mg, Si, and Fe. There is a declining function of distance from the Galactic Center, or God’s arsehole. The abundance of imperial and East India corporate twerps near the Sun (galactocentric radius R ≈ 8.5 kpc) being about half their foresaken abundance in the Galactic Center region. And of course, all is sucked back into the original jester’s bubble. That is what God is to me.

Narrator, one foot away from Nostromo:

So,
what do they have in common?

Xin, a slave worker on an unnamed off-world colony,
a nameless soldier-terrorist in a castle on a mysterious planet,
a nun in a crowded monastery on a ravaged planet,
a rubbish collector on a dirty planet,
a day-dreaming astronomer on Europa,
an engineer, former war refugee on Europa,
a zen master on a Taoist planet,
an ecology student in roaming, free space,
the spirit of Europa, Jupiter’s satellite, and her volcanic sister Io,

And
Kyniska and Arion, space buccaneers…

Friend. If sailor tales to sailor tunes… quoting from Billy Bones:

“Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.”

the taoist

informal talking, breathlessly. you may think you know suffering. I am a master of nothing.

in this post-apocalyptic sky-scraping Europa, dolphins are not the only intelligent beings left.
what is the point of such intelligence if the door mat is now aware?
defy me, and you will encounter the wrath of my wife. I have two children, and they have me.
I used to think that you’d make a good student. You once wrote such excellent essays.
I trusted you with the blood of my blood, and this is how you repay me. You no longer
listen to the radio in the morning. You are such a cunt. My father was a soldier, and
my mother – not a saint. I used to be a fisherman. The lonely expanse of water.
You do not have a beginner’s mind. I used to think that you’d make a good student.
I used to think that you’d make a good student. I used to think that you’d make a good student.
Cycle, across the multi-verse, restlessly. Do not ever give up. My words are where my arse is.

Now finally, I see myself as I am. I am not a teacher, I am not a student. If Ch’an is what
you think you seek, then be else. What ends in Hellas, begins in Nihon. Just do it.
Sit still, now – your spine erect. Your hands in a mudra, do not waste my time. I do get angry.
Informally, I still retain my dignity. Formally, I am a man of knowledge. In the cup of tea, ten
ox-herding shadows, provisionally you may have noticed the traces. Drink up, and shut up. I banish
you.

XXIV.

Zot. Chubby pulls the plug. ‘Snap
out of it, Mr John C’. The Borovoe
download has long finished, the left
over files are sql-dumped on this

floppy drive’. In the % identity
that’s left on Titan, the hologram
flickers, and the happenings inside
the black hole take over. Time to

XXV.

Take over the Precision Tower. Medusa
is frightened and angry, she advances
towards Mount Olympus. The length of
her alignment with her stars is unknown.

She runs, as an individual, as a woman,
as a dramatic figure in an advancing
sketch. Now words are falling over into
the abyss. ‘I must confront Zeus – he’s’

XXVI.

‘the devious architect of this injustice.’
A thousand mobile phones appear in the air,
and swipe her to the left. She picks up
where she left off. ‘I must resume my %

identity, losing track of my ideals and
my memory is what chauvinist Zeus wants.
So the king of gods swoops down, ending
her ascent. Medusa shivers, ‘My rage, cold’

XXVI.

‘bloodless. I need strength, yet all I want
is to give up. My knees would rise to rival
pyramids.’ Zeus smiles. ‘My darling, little
woman. There is an ocean between us, and

what you need to do is pause and crouch,
cover your mind with yellow double duvets,
let your heart shit your compassion out,
we in Olympus frown on your little insurgency.’

XXVII.

‘I am most disappointed in you. You should
have died a witch at the hands of my half-breed
son, and be done with it. All this wondrous
name-calling, pow-wow spinning of poetic

narcissism is most unwelcome – you’re just a
voice in the maelstrom of twittering and face
booking. You’ve been swiped. Your % identity
is all spent, you have shed your beauty, hence’

XXVIII.

‘you are no longer part of this world, your
diagram has long been cancelled, because no
one is watching. You’ve been misled. I know
you think you have some sort of power in your

mind and some sort of agility in your legs,
and yet can you see that cloudless sky, that
Acropolis of power, it kisses heaven. You do
not belong there, you belong in the muck.’

XXIX.

‘Wake up, from your hateful fantasises, all
the bones of the slain surround you, the
authority lies in the sky and you may never
reach it, my power spreads idly below, your

blood may be hot, and coming out of your skin
now, but soon, with time, it will be dried
like painted hair on your perished skull.
The snakes in your heart will be fed with my’

XXX.

‘landmark thunderbolts… you see Medusita,
you are a gargantuan failture, you have built
a fortress in your heart to guard yourself
against the sweeping machismo of the world.

what a fool you have been, your place is
not in this room, or another room, your place
has been erased from the floppy drive, the
precision Tower is multi-threshering your’

XXXI.

‘time, your ideas, your shadow. I rob you now
of your shadow, because I can, because I am
mighty, because I am king of heaven, and because
you do not deserve a waking life. I condemn

you to a comatose existence at the bottom
of yonder garden, in a shallow grave, unheard,
speechless, robotic, wiped clean from the
board of wild-life, from the natural world.’

XXXII.

‘Your memory will be erased, the memory of you
shall also be spent, and in a thousand years,
while your sleepless haunting continues, I shall
review the best way forward, whether to let you

arise from your purple tomb and let you crawl
at my feet, or to unlock the wrath of all whirl fucking
winds, and spin you to crash onto a volcano, or a
half-decent man, who – I will ensure – will subdue you.’

XXXIII.

‘Wake me up, John C, from this nightmare.’ Chubby
is stunned to hear of The Nation’s authoritarian
wars against the spirit and the flesh. A gigantic
bomb has wiped out a section of the multi-verse.

John C is only half-human now, the wires have taken
over him. And while the computer wires take over
his mind, Chubby drinks tea, alone in her consciousness
that in the real world outside that Titan window

XXXIV.

The debate between Ahura Mazda and herself is still
raging, and the Griffinese ships are readying themselves
for yet another plunder and sack, and pirates of the
multiverse are roaming in search of treasure to hoard.

In the darkness, she weeps at the sight of the methane
boils bursting from the lake below, and she knows that
dying in the snow a long time ago may have been a good
choice. And yet, looking at the mountains she is somehow

XXXV.

reassured. In the black hole, the legend continues.
The multi-verse spins and seems to burn and spear the
reflections of atoms into a ghost of purpose. Will you
sit with me on the Acropolis of Corinth, looking past

the ridge, to the advancing waters, lapping now here,
now there – until the winged horse will fly once more,
and the dolphins may once more rescue guitar players?
Aphrodite, come back and continue wandering bright.