Lampions (Sci-Fi) SphereDreams of a Doubled Star

Lampions (Sci-Fi) SphereDreams of a Doubled Star L. Edgar Otto Feb. 4, 2012

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Olney & Orenda came across an Oriental fisherman on the pier of his house in the fog & soon realized there are copies of this scene up, down & staggered, all around. Like they have long playe as children on the endless beach & understanding this new world in the Great Landscape was like a spacious wallpaper, they jumped down in chasing each other coming over & over again to the same startled fisherman in what seemed the same scene.

But they soon discovered it was much easier to jump down rather than upward & this worried them, made them ask if each level was different & if they could become trapped or lost on some level of their endless fall.

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So they decided to linger at the next scene & talk with the bearded gentleman who gestured to his daughter to bring tea, then spoke to them.

"What fine fish," he said in amiable jest, " have jumped on to my pier out of the water.."

"Honored Sir," Olney said as Orenda politely went to help Su Kodu, the daughter with the tea service,"We have jumped a thousand times find so many copies of your house & pier, are you unique or but one shadow?"

"Bowing Guest, did you see as many copies of yourself there? Do you think, in my peace here I fish for nothing in the fog?"

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After tea Orenda, trying to find out something about this wallpaper world & people, houses with walls of paper, sat under the veranda & eased Su Kodu into telling her life story & view of her world.

"Well, I know I've been unhappy here for once I jumped down to the next hous only I was the same daughter there. I do not know if my spirit, my illusion of a unique self goes back to the house I left - but I expect this so. For the next old father left his fishing pole to ask me why I became so dark & frantic in my mood. He said in all time he never saw that before.

"I did not want to confide with this stranger so I leaped back & climbed up the pier to the big grin of my father. He said,
"Daughter, you continue to surprise me in your antics. You have been so happy lately that has been a great comforting change for my rusting old bones."

"So, I let my fingers slip off the pier, looking for freedom or escape, in flight an illusion awhile that I would not find the same old house I knew would be on the other side. Then I just fell & fell, the households growing fewer until I reached beyond some level where it was easy still to jump from place to place on the same plane. Then, it took so very long to find a house in the fog, only a few of them rare and stray beyond the galaxy of fisher folk, so I clung there. After a very long time I confided in my father who had very little to say most of the time."
"Do not despair, daughter. Eventually our house will rise again to reach the great galactic band & teeming city. Even to rise above where no stray stars can rise, atop the rigid hexagon of Saturn, one snowflake yet the many. The great sphere of us as one, yet the light once clear like snowflakes pointing, reflecting everywhere, becomes foggy white. The all such cycles & the cycle of it all begins again."

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Olney took Orenda's hand, "I think we should move on from this place, the Source is calling us back for suppertime - that old shawled lady is so hard to hear and hard of hearing in the conch shells or in the wind of our dunes. Though the season's warm it can get cold after dark & she will never scold us but lets us know she does not like to wait so late to scry the sky & make up stories about the Twins and Dipper through the bubbles of air within her glass paper weight, half a crystal ball, so she says but really I was there when she bought it for a nickel at the thrift store."

"Oh, Oln, when she lays those tattered cards down late for her bed, her arthritis hands pain too dark a picture of this world. It colors our adventures the next day & we walk a high wire having to pay too much attention not to fall, find out if we like fish in her hair net are caught where she holds back the sky & before we wake up finding out the end in our bad dream. But the worlds are so wide & varied she cannot take too much from our adventures. Still, would we just fly through the air with the greatest of ease my daring young man beyond our trapeze. How shall we get home?

"Sweet child, forever young, yet born an ancient one just like her, today we will walk, or rather run. The inexhaustible force of tides will not weigh us down, our buoyancy renewed under water. Nor will the shifting sand hold back our feet. The gods are holding council as if not to be disturbed in the wild on the gallop like so many colored unicorns. They will not notice when we turn the oceans into land & islands into seas. So we may slip through the Sound, an inland island at the shore of the archipelago barrier lakes, find her cabin near the village."

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When they came to her cabin they found a rain barrel. She was swimming in it in the form of a thousand mosquito larvae. Yet she was in a joyful form on the surface of the water, her song a reflection of a thousand stars & fireflies - save for one discordant note, a young oriental girl, a raindrop making circles on the water & and waves that as if made only of ghostly forms passed unknowingly through themselves. The fireflies broke into vibrations as the light connecting again as they gathered at her origin to show the long way and resolve the note as with any spice of stumbling error back to sign, to begin her song again in the loops of her decisions & vanishing lyric & heart, her "I shant get home tonight."

Wherefore Olney turned the land back into the sea . He & Orenda walked into the door seeing the Shawled Lady baking & stirring chocolate for pralines, the table set with teacups full of warm apple cider and cinnamon.

"Ah, just on time. Be sure to chew the mullet well & watch out for needle sharp fish-comb bones."

Olney & Orenda looked at each other holding back guilty smiles as if some trick played on the old lady who cared for them freely, so often the children seen but not heard imagined what the elders believed, things beyond their simple lives as the final word from the gods- so to lay ground for future dreams in the procession of all doubled stars. The old lady did not seem concerned that the children were dizzy eating the whole and yet inexhaustible gingerbread house of powdered sugars and colored canes of candy.

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Just before dawn when the violet & red pale rainbow of the Belt of Venus shrunk & faded into the cyan of a cloudless sky leaving the solitary Morning Star, Olney & Orenda left to fly as butterflies over the bog reeds & drink the wild flowers. Mars had faded first & as if a cloud moves away from the sun all the stars evaporated all at once along with the morning dew. Mars, like Olney in another parallel & mundane place was in retrograde he on leave back, the Red Horseman of war usually drunk with its fear & faith or on some mission to find a crack into his lady's dancing pinwheel pentagram, her angled wings drew over time, her clock almost perfection in the shifting orbit around the sun she etched into the sky.

So these two could only come so close, both half of some ideal dream once one, brother & sister, a double star, & being outside time & generations each to the other were their ancestors & offspring.

Yet this way too was an aid to their explorations by the bring sun that kissed to crescents the planets & the moon, passion the gray line of earth-shine- or they could circumnavigate by the dark star that slowed the light & changed the tide in the Earth's core.

But just as they could see the Shawled Lady in all the fireflies in the rain barrel they could only gaze and dance for each other at a distance with compound eyes.

"Gee, Rendee, you are so creative in your dance," Oln teased her, "Remember when Mercury played peek-a-boo above the horizon at belt fall you in your lover's single eye?"

"Oh Oln, we sisters cuddled- I half forgot - that was such a long time ago."

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Doing nothing once can be consumed by the growing crowd of the innumerable souls & stars for nothing remains still in the universe, never far from its violence.

Raising your voice monkey mouthed & not a heeling dog who sees behind your smile a threat of clamping teeth soon in fanfare or in secrecy you vanish from the herd.

Nor can one win lukewarm, life passes you by in the mainstream, you race in the middle, half-hearted, not an upstart leader with oaths and guidons, nor a straggler who is lost, their way alone, letting, perhaps wanting, life to just pass by.

Not even government of men knowing well those dreamers who made possible victory over the barbarians by their machines of war can protect them against the centurion overseers with swords & whips exuberant beyond the law, they deep down afraid of ghosts & shadows, fanatics armed with false gods, or the sorcerers, diviners, astrologers, the fools without the true wisdom preemptively put to sleep again as traitors, threats to the state.

One can hide on the lam & move freely through the Noir dimensions of the underworld, bounce from black hole to black hole too small to fail, be noticed save by a chance encounter with the tax & toll men building walls. Yet even then consuming the general
capital too big to fail, they are doomed to be no more than petty thieves.

"Olney, I am proud you go to war, but I want you not to."

"Orendee, I need there your cloak of needing me to carry through. Evil has a soul of its own until all souls are exhausted, tired. But never be just my camp follower, be a warrior if you desire or as the Amazon floods is the renewal of the rain forest, fertile creator of life & future soldiers, defender & carrier of the collective wisdom, culture, even a Typhoid Mary in defense of children, a solitary single she bear to the chest beating spear rattling men, Souls lost into each other in the end & endless rise to gain life's unreachable quest for joy and sorrow, we puppets of desire & Love's hallucinations.

And, Rendee, the war is never for what it claims in our donning of our father's uniforms, causes, & flags- but the war for the West. We shall explore there, seek for it if I return from the lottery if I do or are doomed to many times- if there is a West left in our shrinking dreams of new frontiers."

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