Mar 28, 2016 Original Short Story
Polaris-Bound – A Short Story*
March 24th, 2013
©By Vijaya Sundaram
The stars were very bright that night. I looked up, and saw Polaris, and became still. I knew that I had to do something within the hour, because if I didn’t, I would lose the game which had released me as a pawn into the night those many decades ago.
The man stood in his toll booth, counting change. Car after car came by, slowed down, stopped. Anonymous people rolled down windows, spurted out change, exchanged meaningless words, and pushed off into the night, so many flashing streaks of light, released like arrows into the unknown.
The man was alone. There was another, just like him in an adjoining tollbooth, also alone. They did not communicate. They didn’t need to. They were both from different worlds. Each did not exist in the other one’s world. I wasn’t interested in the other one. He seemed dull, dull as a drainpipe filled with leaves.
Loneliness is an absolute thing. It cannot be described. It cannot be reduced to songs, stories, descriptions, but we try, anyway. So, I’ll tell you about this man, because he was lonely, except that he didn’t realize it.
I watched him from the side of the road. I saw him sigh, his shoulders rising, chest filling with air, and falling, air flowing out from him, making little puffs of cold mist that dissipated in all directions. His mouth was the toll booth, and the hot air left him, and it seemed like so many cars coming and going into a cold night.
Crouched in the tall reeds by the side of the road, I watched him calmly, dispassionately. I was trying to get a read on him, you see.
I watched him pull out a thermos, pour himself some coffee, click on an old-fashioned radio.(Where on earth does one get a radio like that these days? I wondered.) He sipped his coffee and drummed his fingers. He looked at his wristwatch (Doesn’t he have a cell-phone? Nobody wears a wristwatch these days!), stepped out of his booth, did a few stretches. He seemed restless as a thirteen-year-old boy in a classroom (I know, because I’d masqueraded as one, once, long ago). Again, his shoulders rose and fell in a sigh.
“Can you hear me?” he spoke urgently into the darkness, his head tilted towards the stars. The man in the adjoining tollbooth seemed not to register that he had spoken.
I wondered when I would go up to the first man. My knees were getting stiff, deep in the tall grass by the side of the road where I crouched. I was biding my time, though.
He looked up and down the roads approaching the tollbooth and saw that there were no cars coming up (it was 2:00 a.m.). He seemed to make a decision. He went inside again, reached down, and pulled out a saxophone.
And he began to play.
And the music poured out of his horn like the cry of the accumulated lonely nights of all humankind. It spoke of despair and hope, it spoke of dreams that arose with the dawn and died with the day. It lingered in the air like the smoke from his cigarette, long after it had been crushed underfoot. It poured down the slopes of his being, like an endless waterfall, the kind in which people perish if they step into swirling waters, little knowing the danger down the line. It swirled around like the kind of eddies which sink ships, and leave nothing, except a single suitcase floating on the surface. It spoke about night after night of no one to go home to. It climbed up my spine and shook my brain-stem. It made the air shiver and weep. Or, was it just me?
I shivered, and wept.
And I turned back into the tall grass to where I needed to go. I had learned a lot by reading and listening to people in the past several decades. I had paid close attention to all the noise and chatter that poured out of their computers, their phones, their television sets, and I had seen the horrors they had endured through all the hatefulness that seemed to dog the footsteps of their kind. I had seen the ice-caps melting, and their forests dying. I had heard their politicians lie, and their talking heads nod endlessly as they passed on the lies, pocketing the change – different type of tollbooth workers, they seemed to me.) I had seen their dying and their dead. I had seen children reduced to skeletons, hunger big in their eyes and in their bellies. I had been filled with a hopeless rage, and a helpless horror.
But I had also seen their women thrown into the pits of hell and rising again stronger, more determined, despite their pain. I had seen little children picking up the trash that littered the woods around them. I had watched a teenage boy make magic out of wasted bits and pieces of trashed electronics, so that his people could have working radios. I had seen a teenage girl find a way to provide water purification through the power of the sun, and it cost very little, and would help millions. I had seen an emaciated man feeding his emaciated dog before he fed himself, and I knew that there was something here that was not to be denied.
Still, I had been determined to do what I had come there to do. I was not about to lose the game, and go back to my people to face the consequences.
Tonight, however, I saw and heard something that was beyond all that I’d seen. I heard in that music all that I needed to know about this lonely being, and all of the lonely beings on this strange planet. I understood them. I looked up again. The stars blinked back at me, brighter than they had ever been. I sighed.
These people might yet be saved, but I wasn’t the one about to do the saving.
I had lost the game, but I didn’t mind. I was ready to go back and explain why I hadn’t destroyed this tragic, flawed planet, this beautiful, blue pebble that swung around the sun, full of death, full of life, full of music.
And the music followed me all the way to my home, far, far away.
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* This is a story I wrote in 2013, and shared on my now-private first blog V-Hynagogic Logic. I decided to share it on my new blog today.
Tags: #Alien, #Music, #Philosophical Science Fiction, #Saving the Planet, #Science Fiction Short Story
May 18, 2014 Original Short Stories
Dark Matters (A Short, Short, Sort-of Science-Fiction Story)
©May 18th, 2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
Calling it a storm would not be enough, DaMaGenie1! thought. It would have to be called “The Storm of the Multiplex Universe.”
DaMaGenie1! had been brewing it expertly for billennia. After all, she had nothing else to do.
She had been born from herself in the depths of a new universe, formed from hydrogen and helium, and, of course, with the usual smattering of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, silicon, magnesium, neon, iron, sulphur and so on (see chart, courtesy of nasa.gov ).
And then, since she’d been feeling queasy ever since, she collapsed, scattering her elements around her. Wailing, she withdrew into a shell, and drew a circle around herself, forbidding all contact.
Other stars near her found themselves deeply attracted, and paid her homage. She did NOT want them. They flowed towards her, and were never heard from again. She had absorbed them all.
And they died in ecstasy, sinking and sinking in an irregular orbit forever in a howl of light around her, but the rest of the universe could not see them. She laughed, pouring forth darker and darker matter, chewing noisily on the remains of her shining self.
DaMaGenie1! was lonely, that’s what was the matter. She knew it, but she didn’t care.
She created her minions, Dream and Nightmare – and she called upon them, and they came before her, humbly.
Give birth to life! she commanded them harshly. They nodded, mute and resentful at her tone, and went away.
It took them a long time. They hated each other, you see, even though they were twins. And yet, because there was no one else, they came to each other, seething with hatred and burning with unexpressed rage. There was no edict forbidding them their coupling, since there was no one else.
Billennia continued to pass. DaMaGenie1! burned within, with a cold, unrelenting passion, colder than the coldest imaginable thing, still crying in grief and loneliness. The Universe spun around on its axis, getting bigger and bigger, and growing more and more of her siblings, who seemed not to notice that she’d ever been there.
DaMaGenie1! watched, unwinking, coiled, ready to strike. Then, she realized that she could do something. She needed to brew something.
And while she brewed it, she watched stars and planets form. Finally, she noted something on an obscure little planet, which was revolving around an insignificant sun (she disdained it, for she recognized that, despite its strangely quiescent glow which seemed submissive, it was like a bantam rooster, crowing loudly in its little corner, and mounting the darkness. Dream and Nightmare stood aside. They had done their work. It pleased them to see what was coming from it. For a moment, they were unified in a truce).
DaMaGenie1! saw Life. It smelled good. She leaned over and took a deep whiff. Flowers and fruit, dirt and leaves and grass, and babies and young animals, and trees and water and rain. She was pleased.
And then, she saw Death. This made her cry out again. Her rage re-erupted. She recognized it. It was a piece of her that had broken off and made its way into Nightmare, and thence, into this new-formed thing that smelled of leaf-rot and wood-rot, of flesh-rot and grief.
DaMaGenie1! had left off brewing for a while. It was hard being herself, and she had been tricked by her own desire.
Now, she renewed her work. Her brewing became frenzied. She was going to make the “The Storm of the Multiplex Universe,” and it would be of epic, epochal, cosmic proportions.
It was ready now.
DaMaGenie1! opened her mouth wide, and took a big swallow.
The Universe went quiet.
Then, it vanished. And so did she.
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[NOTE: I was inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s short story titled “siseneG” and an Isaac Asimov short story titled, “The Last Question,” although, of course, my story is different!]
Tags: #Original Short Story, #Ouroboros, #Science Fiction Short Story, dark matter, self-reflexive story, vanishings