The Wandering Sea: part 1

Finally starting my Nano-NaNoWriMo obligation with 5 days left in the month.

This is a first draft of my short story.  When I finish the final draft, I’ll add it to the Table of Contents (making it the second entry in almost a year…).

Cheers!

The scene: a void between galaxies, so dark and empty that the vacuum is measured in hectares between atoms.  Onto this stage slips a black hole, long ago shaken from its host galaxy, an empty knot of space-time drifting through nothingness like a dead ghost.

But it is not alone: attending the spectre is a cloud of invisible particles, not entirely known to our science, wafting along the rim of the gravitational pit in flaming tendrils.  This dark cloud, more effusive than any breath, is a puff torn from the ethereal string of pearls that once inspired matter to coalesce into galaxies, merely through suggestion.  It airily ignores the universe it helped to create and flits its own way, passing through rock and space with equal disregard, even drifting through its own arms when it deigns to hug itself.  Yet this cloud has an affinity for the lone black hole, sliding through the emptiness with drooping mouth, the image of perfect agnosia.

The cloud curls and swarms the blank disk, clustering thick along its edge, so thick that it begins to glow with the heat of its own collisions— a tiny exception to near-perfect effervescence.  Deep in the swirling cluster, particles unlucky enough to meet annihilate, relinquishing their mass to become hard radiative energy, a more piercingly purple light than X-rays.  If you or I could be there, we would see nothing but darkness, yet boil over in the radioactivity.

Far from the black hole and its radioactive shroud orbits a little planet.  Long, long ago when the universe was much younger and smaller, this planet had a sun.  Or rather, a star, because it had been so distant that the sun looked like a bright speck on the horizon, much like our Pluto.  Its tiny sun rose and set over pillars of ice, rose and set, aged, swelled into a firey ball, and one day burst like a silent firecracker.  The inner planets slid from their comfortable orbits into the messy aftermath as the supernova remnant coalesced into a black hole.  One by one, the stars faded away as the milky rim of the galaxy receded in the sky, until there were nothing but faint, fuzzy smears in the distance.

But under the dark glare of radiative mist, our planet flowered.  It had only ever known ice as a type of rock, and now the ice was melting!  Whole mountains dissolved into seas and lakes, leaving craggy gouges in the landscape where veins of ice dribbled away and the rock remained.  Pools gathered and rushed into floods whenever a cavity-bitten tooth of a mountain collapsed under its unsupported weight.  The planet convulsed as parts of its core rotted away, starting new tectonic motions, driving geysers, washing and carving the surface, hissing and spurting, churning and bellowing, mixing chemicals, heating them, drying them, gorging them with water again, charging up balls of lightning to snap and spark in the darkness, the only real light in the universe, and then CRACK! Dark again.  Brave new worms crawled in the bubbling pools.

It was an unusual path to life, but when life took hold, it spread and clawed as fiercely as on any other planet.  There was no eating or being eaten; all the life-forms on this world had developed a curious photosynthesis which down-converted hard gamma rays into electric currents.  There was no need to develop a drama of passive oxygen producers and hungry oxygen consumers as on Earth: everything on this world is technically a plant.  Here, the struggle is over basking rights.  The muck of decaying matter simply dissolves into the tide.

The tide is the other unusual thing about this planet.  Waters on Earth vibrate slightly in their basins, resonating a little with the orbits of the moon and the sun, rising and falling no more than tens of meters and throwing up a jaunty spritz.  But here, the whole sea wanders.  Every day, the ocean crawls around the globe, an immense flooding wall on the fore side, a draining hem of lakes behind.  It is the devourer of the dead, pulverizing it into the soup that sustains the living.  Nothing but day-lilies actually root themselves in the ground: to live is to march around the world, lapping at the puddles, clamoring for high places to be irradiated, and to cast your enemies into the frothing wave.  Eventually, they got very good at it.

This is how intelligence came into the world: the first sentient thoughts were about leaping from one mushroom-shaped mountain to the next and how to cause others to miss.  The first intelligent creature was a kind of wolf that looked a little like a lizard; they organized themselves into clans, “Protect your kin! Death to strangers!” and had no mouths, no teeth, and no eyes.  Radiation shines through their flesh, being only a little attenuated, so instead of eyes on the surface of their bodies like ours, these beings grow shards of crystal in their guts that glow and spark in proportion to the radiation they receive.  With these, they see around them everything that blocks radiation from the sky: a world-wide X-ray, a shadow-play of black mountains in sharp relief, faint outlines of fellow lizard-wolves, their skeletons, the dark, spiny crystals in their guts, and the hideous shapes of strangers.

The lizard-wolves were first, but not the only intelligent beings.  Giraffe-like creatures were next— at least, they look like giraffes without the neck and head, and they have pointy spikes on their hooves.  Then there were leaping spiders, stingray-bats that could glide through the air, corkscrew-heads with a million centipede legs, and a something like a six-armed ninja whose limbs were all swords.  In less than a hundred million years, dozens of strange and varied creatures received the gift of reason, and they all used it to kill and keep ahead of the wave.

One exception was a kind of floating blimp-whale which rose sagaciously into the sky, lolling in the warm air above the Wandering Sea.  This story is not about them.

This story is about a man who rose higher and brought a lasting peace to his world.  I call him a man because it would do no good to present him as a strange beast, a creature with no eyes and no soul.  In fact, picture a man, an old king with a white beard and rotund stature, a Charlemagne.  He ended centuries of violence, waged for the sake of peace.

His was an enlightened people, who knew that warfare was unnecessary, but were strangely unable to bring it to a close.  “The Dominant Party calls for peace!” the headline ran.  “The Opposition interprets that as a cry for war, and attacks before the fighting can break out.”

Whole eras were defined by conflicts that everyone believed should stop.  Even when they didn’t physically struggle, they contested ideas, philosophies, preferences.  Schools of thought fought like lizard-wolves.  Everyone could see the problem: deprived of their genetic motivations, the reasons seemed trite.  But who can remove himself from his self?  They jogged through the motions of combat, dreaming of floating away, breaking free.

How did King Aforementioned— for that is his name— smash through the cycle of violence?  By making war!  He was the first unabashed warlord in generations, and made a glorious image of it.  Imagine a lone figure on a horse, set at the top of a jet-black mountain, a shadow-play of paper cut-outs in flickering, projected candle-light on a dirty sheet.  He raises his sword, glinting in the night air, and behind him pound the Taiko drums, fast-and-slow, fast-and-slow, the gradual, acheful drone of tuning bagpipes, the giddy barking of trumpets.  His horse leaps from the mountain-top, paper legs dangling as he smoothly arcs down the mountain, a silhouette framed in amber glow.  He created the art of it, and probably didn’t do much actual fighting— nobody really knows.  But the impression he made was monumental; he spoke to a boisterousness in his people’s hearts, what they couldn’t and wouldn’t give up, and left out the muddy, unpleasant business of stabbing and death that they could all do without.  And so he became their Che Guevara, their poet of war, their Churchill, and finally their Charlemagne.

His rule was a Golden Age, a new empire, and this elogy caused him to reflect on the lessons of history.

Aforementioned: “‘GOLDen Age!’— ‘EM-pire!’— ‘CIV-il-i-zaa-tion!’  What am I to do with thee?  What am I to do?  What can I do?

“This is not the first time a king has ruled the world.  O, heroes of old!  Where are your empires?  Dashed!  Beneath the Sea!

“No matter how gallant, no matter how noble, no matter how savage, a king must have children, and sons must be petty, dividing the kingdom, with squabbles and intrigue, unto death once more.

“This is my home, yet it is a wasteland!  Nothing but ruin, ruin and waste.  RUIN! and nothing more.”

The King would have collapsed where he was, in a heap on the muddy plain, just to let the morning light come and crush him under the punishing wave.  He would have just relented, but for a tiny glimmer where there should be darkness.  Night was always pitch black, or it had always been, but something new was forming in the sky.  The glint became a glow, the glow became a radiance, and the radiance became a ball of light like a new sun— a gamma ray sun, a bright flash of piercing radiation that bathed the countryside in the only kind of light they could see.  Everyone stopped— wolves and giraffes in deadly combat paused, and looked into the sky.  Squabblers forgot what they were complaining about.  Insects stopped chirping.  Contestents engaged in bitter rivalries stood gaping, casting long shadows on their fields of settlement.  Even the eternal song of the blimp-whales droned to a stand-still as they gazed in wonder.  King Aforementioned had only time to wipe his tears and press his fist to his chest when it was gone.

Aforementioned (standing): “Behold! Behold the way to eternal glory!”

For he conceived in his mind a plan, whereby his rule would extend forever and his dynasty maintain the freshness of Kublai Khans, if not a Genghis!  He dashed to tell his advisors of the meaning of the light and how they would break forever free of the cycle of competition.

Construction began the following day.

(Continued in part 2…)