A Vomitorium for Terrasites

Manta Ray—Bon Voyage

this excerpt from
A New Leaf
by Kerry Alan Snyder
is freely available under
a Creative Commons License
(Attribution/No Derivative Works).

You look up and there is a Star!  The clouds hold the milky glare and glint of the pulsing pockets of fanfare below.  Neon here, radon there, halogens here and there. The glimmer and glare obscure the primal truth of the raving masses.  You couldn’t hear them from here, no chance, but the earth trembles in trepidation at the revelry of the masses.  Lightning peals off Tesla’s mask, and Devendra must not be far behind.

You blink at the flash and in the distance you see twin torus-shaped wire coils, like robotic beanstalks wearing enormous copper turbans, sizzling as their omnipotent moment passes.  The heavens seem to have met their matches.  ”Tesla shall be heard, hold no doubt.”  The Transition begins and things seem gradually furrier; unexpected meaning darts out of every nook.

The ground is moist and warm; it is good Terra here.  That Star now has a companion. They drift in resolute tandem, as the hum of ultramassive lightning storage capacitors charging rumbles over you from across the landscape.  It is a primitive people here: their sustenance, sanitation, and shelter are all provided for and run on the wireless magnetic power generated from (and somewhat causing) the lightning.  You’ve seen this before, long ago. The air has that same resonant shimmer as in the 3rd Transition, through the empty space.  The Helix have been here, with their delicately coiled self-devoted monuments flash-frying the sky, driving the locals insane with productivity.  They plant the coils first.  Then the locals have everything they need.  The rest is now an assumption.  You think, “About 47 Transitions now and those things pop up twice.  The odds of that are….” A cold shudder traces your veins.

Here the Big Bang was a Big Pop.  Entropy was noticeably slower.  No meteors fall, no comets mystify, no stars shoot, nor novae super.  It’d be interesting to know if this place is closer to the Pop than we were to the Bang.  This universe seems young, but it is also slow.  So perhaps, like the 30something angina-ridden Wall Street stock trader and the mortally panplegic, octogenarian MacArthur fellow, each vying for the Miss Universe title, it is a strange collision of the swift shrift and the slow know.

Either way, the Coils have found their places; the locals have toiled for centuries to situate them just as the Prophecies have thunderously implied and impelled.  Every time you see them — “Devendra be my umbra” — your soul quakes with the thought that this quest is futile.  That you have picked the wrong side, as if one could imagine sides as dimensionally possible in a conflict of this scope and scale.  There must be a right side though, something perpendicular to the wrong way, the wrong ray.

Anymore you feel like a ray yourself.  Dart headlong in this singular direction.  Change orientation, prepare the buffer, ignite, and dart again.  Never the same place or time.  Hardly ever a recognizable biome, though thankfully you, the Transitor, can avoid prohibitively antibiotic environs. The Morphaser always sends an expendable probe, at least every time so far, that catches and returns a momentary glimpse of the potential destination. If that glimpse yields nothing arable, potable or spirable, it just rolls the 7 Phase Dice again.  The destination-generator always struck you as more of a celestial spinning wheel, a destiny-generator  minute, unknown fibers and filaments to your delicate thread of fate. “Hey, it’s a living!” you recite.  Transit survival is but your secondary objective.  You remain a ray of hope, just a sadly confused one.

As the Transition continues, the second star twitches towards the first.  A band of light hangs in your retinae.  Like a famished squirrel watching a bench-fixed old man waving a white-hot acorn, you boggle and reel.  A signal, a warped luminous ring like a loose rubber band breaks through the milky clouds; below this skyborne portal-to-the-galaxies the milk swirls into the wiggling maw in an upward flurry, and the curls and wisps uniformly come to shape around the emerging form.  It’s MANTA!  In the universe that is your protean progenitor, your personal font, Manta is a zodian known. Even to the Radix, for Millennia, Manta is the omen of blissful upheaval, the harbinger of happiness.  The Manta skates down through the heavens, flagellating nebulae like a cat with nine angry tails and only one left life.  Change is afoot.  At hand?  Blackness stomps out the sky, leaving no doubt to hold.  Everything else follows suit.  Sound ceases with a whistling whisper.  The terran warmth beneath you dissipates into numb deprival, and the soft waft of the hume with it.  Smell is always the last to fade, sometimes seeming even to make the Transition with you.  If only you could remain anywhere….