Sense Memory Sense

I experienced a sense-memory this morning.

They aren’t unusual.  I won’t be the first person of a creative bent to marvel at the power contained in a single minute smell or sound.  Like the strength of a déjà vu – probably caused by something as mundate as a random transmission error between eye and brain, or misfiring synapse – these tiny things can trigger sudden expected responses.  Is it mundane?  Or is it amazing?

I was in the train station at Sheffield, where I catch a train most mornings to work in Leeds about an hour’s commute away.  Like most stations, it’s as much outdoors as in: everywhere you look you can see trees and grass banks through the pillars down the length of every platform, or stone walls built a few hundred years ago, or snatches of grey sky.

The trigger for the memory, I think, was earth.  Maybe a fleck of half-dried mud on someone’s boot, or a pile of mushy loam brought in from the rain outside.  For just a second that rich smell mingled with something else – maybe the wet, cool air, or a particular pattern of pressure across my face from the breeze.

*          *          *          *          *          *

Twelve or fifteen years ago, my Dad took me fishing.  I think it was on the River Wye.  If I have the right river, the source of the bubbling water running beneath those overarching trees was about 150 miles away in Wales.  Dad was part of a club, or friend-of-a-friend to some Duke or other, who controlled fishing rights of the water.  Anyone else would have been poaching those trout.

We trudged maybe half a mile from the van to the riverbank.  In those days it will have been an NDT van – the company Dad worked for testing metal.  The white van had no seats in the back, but a working space big enough for tools and equipment.  My brother and I would sit on fold-down shelves, facing inward and bickering or joking, strapped to the inner chassis by black seatbelts and unable to turn away from each other.

The road to the river was muddy; it had recently rained.  Birds twittered in the trees around us.  At the river, which curved at either side, I examined the different fishing lures we’d brought with us: tufty red ones, tufty brown ones.  They were designed, Dad said, to look like flies so that the fish would try to eat them.

The rod seemed a work of art.  The pole was polished to a chestnut hue but made by Dad himself from, I reckon, split bamboo.  According to Wikipedia:

“Split bamboo rods are generally considered the most beautiful, the most ‘classic’, and are also generally the most fragile of the styles, and they require a great deal of care to last well.”

The handle I remember was cork – because it absorbed the sweat from the fisherman’s hands.  It squeaked as he slotted it onto the bottom of the pole.  The line, fed as everyone knows through the wheel on the rod, felt like nylon but may, knowing my Dad a little better now, have been varnished silk. 

The reel made a unique chattering sound that I’ve never heard since.  To turn it by its tiny handle, Dad had to make a delicate pinching gesture with his hand.

There was some teaching of technique that involved slow sweeps, a flicking of the wrist.  The line is almost invisible.  The ‘fly’ lands on the surface of the water.  Underneath is brown silt and smooth stones, mostly obscured by light reflecting off the surface.  The fly makes ripples, the line does not. 

We wait.

I don’t know if he thought I might be bored.  It was very peaceful.  Probably once or twice we heard someone walking a dog on the other side of the trees and bushes, but if there was any real disturbance I don’t remember it.

Dad drew in the line.  He’ll try another spot.

We wait.

Maybe it was here that he told me that he made the rod himself.  I’m amazed by this.  He said that he’ll make me one, too.  A shorter one.  I say yes please.  Because I don’t ever mention it again, the rod never got made.  I don’t mind this.

No fish.

Maybe we tried another lure. 

I had a go with the rod.  It was harder to balance that I imagined, probably twice as long as I was tall.  I flicked the rod back.  The line got caught in a tree, like in a Goofy cartoon.  Dad took back the rod and retrieved the line.

Later we landed a trout.  It wasn’t large.  I looked at its glistening scales and weird translucent mouthparts.  It gasped with the hook lodged in its face.

I asked if it hurts.  The answer wasno.

I asked how come?

Maybe I learned then, or learned years later, that there are no pain receptors in a fish’s mouth – or if there are, the fish isn’t capable of processing that kind of pain.  I’m not sure if this is the case.  I looked it up online.  See what this internet wanker has to say on the matter:

“i never had one complain when i am getting the hook out. next time i have one in the boat i will be sure to ask it. but why would you ask this? … it really don’t mater because we are on top of the food chain and there are some things you just have to over look … if you worry about these kinds of thing than you are not going to eat much.”

Still, whether or not the fish feels pain they soon appear to forget about it and carry on feeding.  We threw the trout back and it disappeared with a flick of its tail.

*          *          *          *          *          *

My train arrived at 07:47 and departed at 07:51, direct from Sheffield to Leeds.

– db

Journal RSR – Knot, 18 Torp

Knot, 18 Torp

Earned 0 / Spent 8

Savings 17,361

~      ~      ~      ~      ~      ~

I thought it was a dream.

The jungle north of Kernel is a thick place, dense with vegetation and teeming with unclassifiable wildlife.  Trees wider than I am tall reached up and up all around me; everywhere a tree seemed to block the way.  There was no clear path.

When I moved, branches clawed at my face and clothes.  Sometimes I found that they’d closed a fist on my tunic and I had to tear it to get free.  Terror is beyond the usual definition of emotion.  It is a kind of fever that comes, temporarily, to debilitate you past the capability of useful function.

I screamed but the jungle was too close to give me an echo.  Like a pillow of finest mellowbird, it muffled all the sounds I made.  I ran in silence.

At some point I became aware that the Earthen Crustaceans had awoken.  The heat of their bodies wilted the thick leaves of the bonyik trees, shrivelling vines to gnarled twists of fibre.  I couldn’t see their faces because of the dripping canopy, but their limbs punched through the foliage like gargantuan shivs ten times the height of my shack on Capital Hill.  Their presence is massive, their mass incomprehensible.  To them, I am an ant.  To me, they are gods striding across this dark and frozen country.

~      ~      ~      ~      ~      ~

You know when it’s Torp in Kernel.  The ground is as hard as granite, caked with rimy frost soon worn smooth by arctic winds.  These slick white runners curve across the face of the town like blanched muscles, ribbed and sculpted, in some places dirtied by the blood of those who have slipped.

Winter here is nowhere near as harsh as, say, the Red Republic to the northeast, or at the uninhabited poles.  The cold snaps bring in wild shili from the wet regions to the south, and they stride into the fringe towns on their impossible legs, dropping rain from their dehydrating bodies high above.  These towering fish-things congregate near the water tower, sensing the moisture within its copper shell.  At sundown their skin and scales begin to freeze over, and one by one they saunter down to water again to rest their limbs in the depths.  A warmly-dressed observer could witness their bodies floating on the surface like rubber ducks, with long legs trailing behind them like jellyfish tendrils beneath the surface.

When running you can hear the frost crunching as it manifests in the creases of your clothes.  In the stagecoach the snowflake patterns spider across the glass.  Looking through it, the world is a dusted fairyland.  It is a stark contrast with the summer fertility of the rainforest.  In the month of Torp at least its relentless growth is stymied – temporarily. 

And on the other side of Terrene there is Foist, who I imagine in the warmer climes, dressed in skirts and  shawls the colour of terra-cotta.  She smiles in the bright sunlight between patches of refreshing shade.  It is the other side of the world.  On days like this I feel the distance between us and miss her terribly. 

In a few months it will be Spring, and the month of Pollinary will come with a burst and a flourish, brightness and warmth, and I will wake to the sunshine and have to close the curtains at night so that it’s dark enough to sleep.

— RSR

Journal RSR – Bloomsday, 08 Torp

Bloomsday, 08 Torp

Earned 26 / Spent 13

Savings 17,310

~      ~      ~      ~      ~      ~

It’s not good business to argue with a customer, but sometimes they’re asking for it.

Today I took the jungle route to Beckon with the PMU’s negotiation package.  The path had been worn by the constant rain to a slimy brown trail between the stumps of trees.  I passed Kernel’s two rotormen, who were busy keeping the rainforest at bay: mechanised exoskeletons buzzed and licked at the thick branches.  Metal teeth burred through wood, sending showers of green leaves and droplets of sap over me as I ran beneath.

Every day we attack the edges of the unrelenting jungle; every night it regrows, pressing in on Kernel and the surrounding districts that grow beside us like secondary infections.  If those rotormen bought it I don’t know what we’d do.

Deeper into the root of the verdent archipelago I went, trying not to smell like vegesaur food.  Once or twice I thought I heard the bass clucking of cauliraptor chit-chat, and pumped my muscles all the harder to break out the other side and back to civilization.

Beckon is a wide expanse of low valley-and-hill, where rainwater from the jungle trickles into great lakes that have collected in the bowls of these rambling dales.  Where three lakes point towards the north-east, there is a country home built by pre-Displacement natives – a house, a small kirk, some stables. 

They were peculiar people, the natives: intelligent and at home in the wilds of Terrene, they evolved to Victorian-era tech long before Kernel was conceived of.  Much of the estate is steam-powered, and I heard it before I found my way out from the trees – belching steam and the clunk of turbines and wood-powered motors.

The natives were also deeply suspicious, and protective of what they had.  Escape tunnels run beneath the hills, wide enough for horse and carriage; a zepellin pad is hidden in plain sight, painted (I’m told) to look exactly like another pond.  One of the lakes is now a reservoir for Beckon and Kernel, and rumour has it that a brass microchosm sits on its bottom, complete with lounge and kitchen and bedrooms, and coral gardens on three sides.  They fear thieves and they fear invadors, though no-one from Kernal has ever shown them the slightest discourtesy.

The estate owners have been good clients of the PMU for years, but now they want another courier service.  ‘Haven’t we done our best?’ we ask, but those people at Beckon who know the answer are stricken with the moss, and are no longer involved in the running of the country house and its grounds.  They may not be long for this world.  Their replacements are harder, more akin to the ancient natives, disguised by their huge mustaches and coats of coarse gitten hair.

They speak better Context than I do native, but I had to strain my ear to understand them.  Still tired from the run from Kernel, I had to hide my panting as I offered them our negotiation package.

‘You cost too many seeds,’ said one. ‘Last year we gave you oyster pearl.’

A pearl to these people is worth a lot, equivalent to a handful of walnuts in Kernel.  They have more in common with the weird crab people of the Jade Reefs that the Kernelites, with their water-based interests and seal-skin shoes.   

Another said, from behind his walrus ‘tache, ‘We have other courier units at us.  They talk about…’

Some whispering between them as they searched for the right word in Context.

‘…Transparency.’

‘Transparency?’ I said.

‘Want to know what the fee is for.  How it … breaks down.’

The first of many little issues, niggling matters introduced by the sneaky salespeople of the other couriers.  It’s hard to look like you’re considering a matter seriously whilst running on the spot, but they’re used to couriers being like this.  And the moist air helped my root infestation, calming down the thrashing tendrils.  The greeting room was filled with steam; the brass panelling and windows dripped with condensed vapour.

After three hours I was glad to leave.  They have the package from the PMU, they have our arguments.  If they’re going to move units then we can’t stop them, only cross our fingers.

On the busy days, I forget about the Disc.  But when the sun sets and I catch a breath, I find the air heavy and warm, and I am stifled.

 

— RSR

Journal RSR – Fallsday, 06 Torp

Fallsday, 06 Torp

Earned 32 / Spent 14

Savings 17,243

~      ~      ~      ~      ~      ~

I take the gold needle every day.  My nervous hands feed the syringe into the fissures of my petrified shins, deep and deep until I feel the nip of the needle against the secret flesh within my leg.  Close to the bone.  The outer two inches of my legs are stony wood now, grey and unfeeling.  Amazingly, I can still flex my toes and ankles.  The petrified wood creaks and complains when I do.  I am unforgiving with the long, glass needle.

Does it make running any easier?  When I pass through the muddy thoroughfares of Kernel, past The Den and along the edge of the jungle, I don’t notice much of a difference.  But has the infestation of the drakeroot slowed a little?  Are the writhing tendrils, which are at their worst first thing in the morning before the sun rises, a little less vigorous? 

It will take another month for the gold needle to build its cumulative effect and start to defeat the infestation.  Meanwhile the Disc moves back and forth across the sky, sometimes breaching the edge of the sun’s radiant circle.  Other times it disappears behind a cloud and, although I can still feel its gaze burning into my chest, I can almost ignore it.  It will be long into Vernuz before I settle on the gold needle dosage.  By then I’ll know whether the alchemist will have to up the amount.  At least I’m not fiddling around with blue totems anymore.

She warned me of side effects.  Nausea.  Loose bowels.  Impotence.  I remind her that I’ve taken the gold needle before and that it beat my infestation.  I never felt for a second that the drakeroot hadn’t been completely scorched from my system.  But maybe it hadn’t been; perhaps a lingering tendril of the invasive little plant still remained, deep in the marrow of my bone.  

Of course, like the most frightened of cancer victims, I carried on sucking in smoke.  The drakeroot infestation took hold again.  Sometimes you’re just too scared to do anything else, and the root is part of my life.  I can’t run without it, even though it’s destroying me.

– RSR

Knot, 24 Frost

Knot, 24 Frost

Earned 0 / Spent 8

Savings 16,993

~      ~      ~      ~      ~      ~

Knot comes again.  Five days of running, one day of rest.  The weekend is always too short.  Another early morning.  The Frost sun streams in on Capital Hill, I woke up knowing that it’s today I have my second appointment with the alchemist.

I refused to run.  I walked down the hill, along the Kernel side-streets, in the cold and with flecks of rain falling almost sedately from somewhere in the heavens.  You never know where the raindrops started falling.  The wind blows them so far, they could come from a cloud right above Gamut, or the Jade Reefs, or anywhere in Terrene.  And the cloud could have drawn that water from any river or lake or desert oasis under the Disc.

So it was that I walked to the alchemist and sat in front the ex-apothecary, who asked how everything is and whether things have improved.  They have not improved.  My situation is the same, I explained.  Or worse.  And I put my heel on her desk, spilling the papers and box of tissues, my toes tickling her potted plant.

‘Your leg.  Is the other one the same?’

I removed my foot and pulled the leg of my trousers down over the writhing drakeroot tendrils.  The skin is hard and cracked, and living roots extrude like threads from my shins and ankles.  When the deformity was covered, the alchemist steeled herself for the difficult questions.  I answered every question she had about the root.  How deep it runs.  How far it goes. How it affects me, and how I run. 

‘You’ve had drakeroot infestation before,’ she said.

Six, maybe seven years ago.  I explained the nebulous causes.  Root for running.  Root for training.  Root for concentration.  Root for dealing with women.  The infestation was long and bad.  In truth, I’ve only just rid myself of it.  Then the Displacement.  Then the running and the root, root, root.

She said, ‘It’s the same as before.  Better or worse?’

‘I don’t want to be as bad as that ever again,’ I said, and she nods at the three blue-and-blue totems she gave me the last time.  I’ve been wearing them as prescribed.  Rubbing the little fetishes three times a day like a kind of prayer, Make me better. 

‘They don’t work,’ I tell her.

‘The last time you had an infestation, what did you try?’

‘Depetrifier,’ I said. ‘The “gold needle”.’

‘That’ll work,’ she said, and wrote me a prescription.

— RSR

Journal RSR – Skeinsday, 22 Frost

Skeinsday, 22 Frost

Earned 26 / Spent 12

Savings 17,191

~      ~      ~      ~      ~      ~

Another union courier agrees to take eight packets at a time and drops one; I pick it up.

The stagecoach can’t make it to the union building, so I run to where it’s stuck on the highway and carry my packets twice as far, for twice as long.

I don’t even feel that I’m good at what I do.  Other couriers run faster, they seem to work harder.  They want to run; they want to run fastest.  But they’re riddled with drakeroot infestation and their feet and legs are petrified wood now, creaking under the non-weight of their lithe bodies, dry and – in a few years – too brittle to stand on.

Sometimes people in Kernel become part of the jungle, as tough they were always supposed to be here.  Built in, ensconced.  The Blue Parliament talks about ‘cementing’ Kernel.  There’s no word more inappropriate for this fertile, wild place that we’ve tried to tame ever since the Displacement.  But cemented is what the others are: grown into the earth, intertwined permanently with the work until they don’t know how to separate themselves from it.  The work becomes the life, the life about the work.

In the end, a courier never stops running.  There’s an old story about the courier who literally ran himself into the ground, where the collossal Earthern Crustaceans carry out their trials of eternal slumber.  In the moisty loamy caverns, with worms trying to find their way into his mouth, the courier tried to speak to those buried gods in order to find his way back to the land above.

“Where do I run?’ he asked, and the massive deities of the Jade Reefs looked at him with sadness, full of their unceasing patience, and pitied him.

Maybe it’s the Disc that makes me think this way.

Sometimes it seems to be moving away from the sun, other times it slides across the heavens like a great manhole cover making a sewer of the universe.

The Disc has been known to grow in the sky, or to shrink to a point.  It glimmered darkly like an inverted star for years, almost forgotten.  Some days it even appears to go behind the sun.  How this can be, nobody knows.  No-one understands it.  They don’t want to talk about it, as though it’s an embarassment or a taboo.  Everyone thinks, “No-one wants to hear what I think about about the Disc.”  They want to pretend it isn’t there.  But it affects more people than we know.

It’s always there.  Some people are more aware of it than others.  I have been aware of it all my life, that dark blot, that blemish.  Sometimes I’m indoors and feel like I can see it, like an eye watching me, right through the wall.

What is the Disc?  Why is it always, always there?

The last time it eclipsed the sun, the Displacement happened.  Nobody wants to talk about that, either.  The birth of Kernel.  The creation of a world.  A wonderful thing.  But we don’t want to think about it – a power that great.  The power to create a whole new place out of nothing.

When people cross over to Kernel, they’re forgotten about.   And likewise, they try to forget about the old world.

Who’d want to remember it?

I could live in Kernel forever.  Until I grow into it.

–RSR

Journal RSR – Budsday, 19 Frost

Budsday, 19 Frost

Earned 24 / Spent 15

Savings 17,130

~      ~      ~      ~      ~      ~

You know the maréchaussée are out in force when you never see any of them.

The weather drives everybody out of the streets.  Kernel never could cope with rain.  It’s the proximity of the jungle, pressing in close at the edges of the town: all that water makes it alive, alive, thrashing with life and the things that live in it … Hundreds of birds, some as big as a man, and lizards in flickering lounges that sometimes dash out from the protection of the trees – out across the mud to snatch at waterlogged insects.  Vegesaurs thunder through the forest, agitated by the weather.  They hate it.  Cauliraptors stalk the boundary of the jungle as they wait for the rain to let up.  You’ve never seen so many cauliraptors.

Yet I haven’t seen a single member of the maréchaussée this week.  That makes me nervous.

Rain comes when you need it, I’ve found.  You look up and realise the sky is as grey as your mood.  The Disc is close to eclipsing the sun.  When you feel like crying, sometimes the sky does it for you – long and hard, the sound of clouds overlapping coming like wracking sobs

Running has worn me out.  Yesterday in the cold Frost dark I wound my way to the alchemist.  I walked.  They named the month right: it was freezing.  Up past the Den I went in the rain, watching the trees lean out over the ramshackle town of treehouses.  The people of the Den are crazy most days, but in the rain they scratch themselves with anxiety with the jungle towering over them, growing greener and thicker.  I swear I saw vines curling over the suspended walkways like grasping fingers.  Xylem were tearing about the place, little mischief makers in the downpour.  They just soak it up into their branches and hunker down in the slippery earth to digest.  Rain doesn’t bother the xylem.

It was a new alchemist, and ex apothecary, but she was sure and fresh.  She wore the hood and hemp of the trade, rough material surrounding her smooth face.  I tell her about the root, I tell her about the running.  When she asked to take a sample, she surprised me by finding a thread at the side of my neck, under my ear: a tiny root tendril that has growth through the skin.  One of the earliest sign of Drakeroot addiction. 

She pulled on it and I screamed; the extraction was agonising, drawn out, and I sobbed through the process as the thread was pulled out from under the skin like a tapeworm, tugging the muscle of my neck and shoulder and chest.  Eventually she had the whole thread.  She ran it through her fingers and said she could help, prescribed a totem painted in two halves, blue and blue, that I’m to strap to my stomach and touch three times a day.

Blue and blue, there’s irony there – but you don’t care much in the rain, even when the rainforest presses in. 

In the sky, the sun is almost completely covered by the Disc.  That hasn’t happened in six or seven years.  There are whispers of another Displacement. 

I’m not sure we can handle a second one.

— RSR

December now. Can’t avoid Christmas.

December now.  Can’t avoid Christmas.

Staff at T K Maxx yesterday:

“I’m fucking sick of these wank Christmas songs, I want to kill myself”.

A hundred outlets called “XMAS £1 SHOP” already packed with people buying:

• Extra thin wrapping paper
• Degradable stockings made of pressed felt
• As many tiny sparkly reindeer you can shake a candy cane at

The rest of us try to shoulder down the high street without getting press-ganged by righteous charity collectors or buskers.

Seriously, who plays an acoustic version of “Mad World” at Christmas?  It’s only the most depressing song of all time.

With the exception of everything written by David Gray in his entire career.

I don’t mind Christmas.  I like the trimmings and firelight reflected in tinsel and foil, the promise of snowfall and carollers and warm nights in when the nights are cold out.

It makes me think of school.  Baby school.  Normally you’re home by four o’clock at that age.  In winter it’s already getting dark.  A week before Christmas Day you’re with all your friends at school (during night time!?) putting together your costumes for the dress rehearsal of the Nativity play. 

It was strange, being in school when it was dark.  You see your own reflection in the window, behind which is the blackest night.  Inside the room, teachers are supervising the use of blunt scissors and PVA glue.  I remember glitter everywhere.  Did we have to make our own costumes? 

Miss I broke the elastic on my mask.

Miss I need a wee.

Miss Tommy just farted.

Miss I glued my nose shut.

Laughing.  Some nervous silences, sometimes.  A coincidence of sound when conversations come to a natural end but all at the same unnatural interval.  You remember why you’re there.  You’re going out on stage.

On the night it’s even worse.  Mums and Dads are there.  I vaguely recall not being able to find Daddy in the audience one year.  Fluffed my lines looking when I should have been concentrating.  Then as I walked off stage after the performance he was there in an isle seat, surprisingly me with a big moustachioed smile.

Some Dads still had moustaches then.

Usually in the plays I was a narrator.  You always knew what parts everybody would get.  There were outgoing, good-looking kids who would get the lead roles every year.  You learn at an early age what you really need to get ahead in life.  Usually it’s the same kids who spend half their playtimes in detention making an early start on their homework.  Where’s the fairness in that!?  Come on, teacher!

The bookish kid in the massive owlish glasses gets to be narrator every year.  I kind of liked it anyway. 

It’s funny that now, I work in a job that requires me to type up meeting minutes every now and again, as the main players go about the real work.

I’m still the fucking narrator!  But … I kind of like it anyway.

 

Christmas is about a great big tree with mismatching baubles and little chocolate ornaments that disappear after Day 2.  It’s about seeing members of your family you don’t get to talk to very often.  Bring out the comfy chair for grandma.  Tot of sherry?  It’s about people handing presents to each other in a melee of good will.  Arms crossing over, cups of tea going around.  Doesn’t matter if you had to ask what they wanted beforehand. 

It’s about Christmas fucking dinner.  You know it.  Oh god, we love Christmas dinner.  It’s Sunday Roast Plus.  It’s three types of meat AND those little sausages wrapped in bacon.  Cranberry sauce and stuffing.  Gravy smooth like caramel.  Christmas crackers banging all over the place.

Sleepy afternoons.  Gathering scraps of paper, plastic packaging, twisty ties off the carpet and stuffing them into carrier bags to throw out.  Boxing day with nothing to do.  Go for a watch.  Watch one of those new DVDs.  Eat hot leftovers. 

Maybe it’ll snow?

—db, 2nd December 2011

Journal RSR – Fallsday, 05 Frost

Fallsday, 05 Frost

Earned 19 / Spent 12

Savings 16,975

~      ~      ~      ~      ~      ~

When I run, I run hard.  The drakeroot keeps me going, but some days it’s not enough.  It’s easy to stagger and fall on a long run.  The distance gets too much, your muscles try to give out on you but you won’t let them.  The union works me hard, runs me ragged.  I just chew more root, dust myself down, keep going.

Can’t keep going forever.

Am I to run for my whole life?  There’s more to existance than work, than a few seeds.  A heap of caraways and a nut or two will keep me in rent and food for a week, but what then?  Run more packages, earn more seeds, rent and food and chew more root…

Things are getting a little easier at the union.  Sometimes they make an effort, something I gave up on a while ago.  Keep things sweet and reinvigorates your work muscle, keeps things from getting on top of you.  In Kernal that’s too easy.  In the end, your nerves are frayed and it only takes a glimpse of a few feral cauliraptors to put you into full meltdown.

It’s Frost now.  The winter’s setting in.  The jungle never dies, but it shrinks.  The leaves grow small and tight.  Vines coil inward towards the warmth and security provided by the trunks.  The birds and reptiles hunker down during the cold nights and only fly close to noontime, when the sun is at its highest.  The Disc is a threat to them.  One eclipse during this time and the birds get a full day without heat.  I run past them, watching them sleep.  Lizards die clinging to branches and become like shrivelled dry leaves, orange and crunchy, ready to fall off at the slightest breath.

Am I good at what I do?  I’m not a board member of the union.  I’m not on the top Kernal league table.  People do what I do every day, running up and down Capital Hill, through the industrial districts, skirting The Den and the jungle and buzzing the stagecoaches on the lower paths.  I do the work.  I put in the hours.  I chew the root. 

—RSR

Journal RSR – Budsday, 07 Senescence

Budsday, 07 Senescence

Earned 0/ Spent 10

Savings 16,602

~      ~      ~      ~      ~      ~

When there is a storm in Kernel, it comes with a great pressure that exerts itself upon the township.

It always comes from the far side, the place where the new union sits.  It arrives with shades of grey that literally roll over each other in the sky, thunderheads like new continents surging through the realm of the gods.

Spatters of rain come at us from high above.  The jungle loves this weather.  A storm near Kernel only feeds the verdant wilderness that surrounds it.  As it darkens, even so early in the morning, I peer into the shadow between the massive trees and picture the changes that go on there: roots surging with vigour through the moistening earth; leaves outstretching to catch the rare waters that trickle through the canopy.  Petals of yellow and red swell vividly.  The Earthen Crustaceans, of legends still too recent to forget about, are maybe stirring in their burrows.  I both fear and anticipate the day when those colossi awaken.  The relief that their mythical destruction will bring.  When the time comes, I would hope to be with those of the Jade Reefs who claim the Earthen Crustaceans as gods – and devils.

The pressure rolls in.  Couriers wouldn’t work on days like this.  It’s too easy for a parcel to get drowned and ruined in the downpour.  And even easier to get paid and lose that packet of seeds to the Green Shower and find yourself in a new garden, deified by seedless, as the powerful rain creates life from your life savings.

As it happens, I had a day free from work to return to the tree where I used to live.  There, the two domesticated xylem still roam like miniature walking trees.  I imagine them staring out of the windows at the rain, vaguely confused by the weather but appreciating it in some primal way, a blood memory from the times when they used to be wild and free.  The other tenants are out today – I’ve checked.  It will be empty.  I feel a responsibility to return to it and tidy up the place for the retiree, reorganising the mess of the student who lives with her, and picking up after the xylem.  It will be a long few hours, but it will distract me from the bombardment of Kernel and the shadows that lurk in the jungle.

I wonder how long I will stay in Kernel.  Of course, I want to be with Foist in Metrodon, but some days this seems like a dream.  Cut off by the weather and the new union: seen through veils of fancy.  Metrodon is a costly dream in more ways that one.  Should I concentrate on Kernel and the new PM Union, or should I surge towards the envisioned happiness that Metrodon must bring – a spiritual healing?

—RSR