"Huntress: Maps (2)" (03JUL17)

...last was here...

She left the bar with a buzz she hadn't been able to enjoy in three standard months.  Focused on Gamon's case - alternating an inner dialogue of 'I need this' and 'I really need this'.  The pay would help her even out Kharma - the ship needing a good two weeks in dry dock.  Air it out.  Overhaul the sub-light engines.  CO2 scrubber leak.  Her AI, Flask, needed the latest soft upgrades.  A right bath.

She wobbled out into the S'G'en hallway, ticking off the myriad lists rolling in her head.  She had the money now so the list rolled off her brain like a dumpling on a tongue.

"---?"  She paused at her name being said in such an official tone.  Her blood instantly chilled because, in her experience, that typically was not a positive sign.  She had to focus to see the four figures in front of her.  Possibly two behind her.  *Station security?

"Don't understand you."  She took in a deep breath and instinctively squared up.  She saw two of the figures square up as well.  There was a good half-second of actual effort in thinking she could take them on.  'No way stupid.'  She put her arms out slightly from her body, but stopped short of making it look like she was guilty.  Not that she was, at least what they thought she may have been guilty of.

"May we please relieve you of your weapon?"  *Definitely S'G'en security.  Very proper.

"You may not relieve me of my weapon unless you can dignify the request with the...the..."  The Hausenfleur came up in a small pop.  "...appropriate and legal..."  The one figure, very dignified, stood forward.

"---, we have the Sartorial Minister of the Fersion here that has offered evidence that you have a crime of material omission against crimes not only in the Fersion Sector but minor crimes in the Verse.  It is because of this..."  He went on.  She weighed options.  Too many guards.  A S'G'En station.  A right proper Chief.  All not in her favor.

"Ok. Ok.  I hear you."  She slowly raised her hands above her hand and landed the tips of her thumbs together.  Imperceptibly, she tapped a small button hidden underneath the flap of her fingerless gloves.  *Please let the AI know to call Toddy.  "You may take my weapon, but you are doing it only based upon your evidence and I do this NOT to qualify your charges but upon my free will.  I ask that the S'G'En further recognize this is not an admission of guilt."

"We do.  Thank you for your compliance."  The Security Chief stood back and allowed the two guards behind her to remove the weapon.  They brought out binders, but the Chief waved them off to the dismay of the Fersion Minister.

"Now I ask that we go discuss this discretely - as an esteemed member of the Brueger Freepilots, I ask that we do this with dignity and respect."  She could hear the Fersion Minister scoff, its tentacles clutching together to the sound of little flaps.  The Chief looked down on the sign of disrespect and smiled warmly to her.  "Of course.  I assure we only want to get to the bottom of the matter."

"I would like a witness."

The Chief nodded and one of the four strode forward.  "I am not an unclothed citizen of the S'G'En asked to help witness the matter.  I am Farthou."

"Farthou - please witness my compliance and that I am willfully inebriated."

"I witness."

"Witness to that I would like to make a call before we proceed with any questioning as is my right."

Farthou looked over at the Chief, the latter nodding.  Their blue skin dry as a bone.  *Well, they aren't outwardly lying.

As they walked the Fersion couldn't speak to her, Starports would not allow for it.  It instead spoke to the Chief.  "May we please ask her who she was in contact with?  Time is of the evidence."  The Chief did not acknowledge him and they strode on.
...
It had her name there, on his primary screen.  Shaun scowled at it.  He crossed his arms and leaned against the kitchen cabinets cursing the day he met her.  *What's this now?

'She's in trouble.  That's the only reason.  And why should I care?  She's not done one bloody thing for me...ever.  She's only given ME trouble.'  The intrigue is what calls him.  Almost a standard year and she doesn't even send a status - his heart was broken, then the anger, then the resolve, then the dull reasoning required to get over it.  Then, all over again.  He knew the ultimate question, he's done this four...five times now?  The question, "Is it worth it for her to be in trouble when I can do something?'  He resented the question more than anything else.

He begrudgingly qualified his jacking into the net, 'The last f-cking time.  The last f-cking time.'

...

poem:"....Watch the slow door" (15jun17)

Christina Rossetti's Echo is a rhapsodic memory of past love and the rekindling of what was lost, and ne'er to return.

"Come back in tears...love of finished years." [5]

Although in a dream, she pines for death where she can be in Paradise with him.  Where, perhaps not described this way before is that of Heaven as a 'slow door', "That opening, letting in, lets out no more." [12]

The idea of the slow door is telling, it shows Rossetti's comparative discord in the poem, in one point the terribly quickness of the dream where she recalls her lover, and the agonizingly slow door of Heaven.  The placid pace of time and what was lost, the immeasurable time of 'finished' years.

She grasps at him in the last, and urges him to "speak low, lean low" [17], as he did before.  Rossetti was an English poetess and fairly popular in her lifetime, she died of cancer in 1894.

ECHO, 1854
Come to me in the silence of the night;
   Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
   As sunlight on a stream;
      Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.

Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
   Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;
   Where thirsting longing eyes
      Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
   My very life again tho’ cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
   Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
      Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.


...
SONG, 1848
When I am dead, my dearest,
         Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
         Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
         With showers and dewdrops wet:
And if thou wilt, remember,
         And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
         I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
         Sing on as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
         That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
         And haply may forget.

...

musing:Kerouac haiku

Reading collected poems of Kerouac, musing over haikus:

"The cow, taking a big
     dreamy crap, turning
To look at me"

"Train tunnel, too dark
    for me to write: that
'Men are ignorant'" [562]

Jack with the long, dull stare.  The blankness belies the deep understanding of movement.  The facts of a scene.  "This is what is happening.  Unencumbered."

Realness that has been degregated today.  Real is overly subjective, with currents, and politics, and emotions, and narcissism.  Real as not what is, but it means in who I want to show the fake me to be.

Jack looking out from the bus window.  Enmeshed in the slatted bench on the dry wood porches of the general store.  Hazily awake through lace curtains and hand crafted glass.

"Run after that
     body - run after
A raging fire"  [527]

"Mild spring night -
     a teenage girl said
'Good evening' in the dark" [560]

Hungry poets, looking for truth in moments.  Unencumbered by sights, smells or touch.  Emblazoned in your mind with words instead.  Hungry for feeling.  Rawness.  Newness.  Sensualness.  A deep faith.

"Jack Kerouac...was a Catholic poet - his cross was not a plain cross, not a Protestant cross, stripped of the body of the sacrificed man-God....his own heart that bled like an iron rose, a Rose-En-Fer....the depths of infinite thoughts." [xxi]

"To be a poet's poet is to hurt.  To hurt singularly, to hurt incomprehensibloy, to suffer a wound that never heals..." [xxix]

Jack, awash in an abandoned supermarket parking lot, finding meaning in purple flowers.  A needy cat at home that interrupted his reading of Zen koans.  A poet who wrote in spurts, three words and done.  Then tracts and tracts on rolls and reams.  Eternity of nothingness, then of God, then of the Devil, then of cows dreamily staring at him with their empty orbs as they shit in a hot Missouri field.

[Reading "Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems" edited by Marilene Phipps-Kettlewell, Library of America, 2012.]

data:STvSW (Trek Novel Count vs Wars)

I've always salivated on the raw number of genre books whilst losing myself in the local Waldenbooks, a B.Dalton, Borders or Crown.  I'm no spring chicken, so I can tell you how fantasy, for example, which popularly started with Tolkien, ramped up from two shelves with no label (falling, generically, under 'fiction') to taking up two entire bookshelves, then onto an entire row.  Star Trek (ST) and Star Wars (SW) novels are no exception to the rapid expansion across store shelves.  As ST preceded SW by a decade (the first ST novel was January of '67), it obviates that those novels were readily available.  By the time I was a little lad, they were in easy rotation at the used bookstores (Book Baron, Anaheim, was a favorite and a weekly habit).  SW would first come out in advance of the movie in 1976 (SW the movie would come out in May of the next year).

The first marked difference though is that ST novels first came out as compendiums, or a combination of short stories.  This was the fashion of the time, culling the works of several authors per consolidated novella.  The very first of these were meant for young readers - equating, again at the time, for readers 'of age' (maybe as early as 10 but up to 17).

SW novels, contrarily, started as straight novelizations of the movies: populist for the most part.  However, quickly shifting with extensions of its universe by 1978 with Splinter of the Mind's Eye.  From there, demand exploded with subsequent extensions of the universe, including the exploits of smuggler extraordinaire Han Solo and he ..at Star's End.  It was of these popular novels that the affinity for Solo appeared to strengthen above the Skywalkers.

Now for the raw numbers...I was reveling in the picture I took at Barnes & Noble last weekend, and simply wondering how many books have come out for SW (and then ST)...from there I used GoodReads as the foundation for the count:

There are 251 Star Trek novelizations overall.
There are 376 Star Wars novelizations overall.

That's a whopping 125 book difference, despite the decade lead on SW.

Yes - I acknowledge the differences of each respective zeitgeist.  I would also make an argument in the quality of those novels.  I have found, over many a year reading them, that ST is much more cerebral than SW.  It's more 'hard' science fiction (if there is such a thing, knowing it is a loaded definition), then the populist trappings of what could be assumed as fantasy more than science with SW.

Out of either series, I personally recommend the first 12 of the ST novels, probably avoiding number one and going straight into any other number.  For SW, I am enjoying the latest canon books by James Luceno (Catalyst, Darth Plagueis).

Also pitching to support your local bookstore, so I'm throwing in links for Anaheim:

BOOKTOWN: https://www.yelp.com/biz/booktown-usa-anaheim 
POP COMICS: https://www.yelp.com/biz/pop-comics-and-culture-emporium-anaheim
PHAT COLLECTIBLES: https://www.yelp.com/biz/phat-collectibles-anaheim-2


PS - for Shlitz and giggles, I had to look up the most prolific series and came up quickly with the Perry Rhodan series - Wikipedia states, As of April 2017, more than 2900 booklet novels of the original series plus 850 spinoff novels of the sister series;plus over 400 paperbacks and 200 hardcovers have been published, totalling over 300,000 pages. Having sold approximately two billion copies worldwide alone, (including over one billion in Germany), it is the most successful science fiction book series ever written. The first billion of worldwide sales was celebrated in 1986."

Wowzers - never heard of Rhodan.

"Huntress: Maps" (16apr17)

..last was here...

Concourse 9570TAE typified the gleaming sensibilities of the S'G'en sector.

No one could conclusively state an exact timeline: if the 9000 Concourse design came before the Cambridge sector, or, if two hundred and seventy standard years before it was a response *to* the Cambridge Concourses.  The latter were well derided across the lightways for dozens of years.  They were compared to the strip malls that cropped up all over the United States right before the 21st century.  The intersection of convenience and lack of aspiration. The affluent yacht jockeys would burn more fuel than step foot in a Cambridge.

S'G'en had, for thousands of years, been religious techvangelists.  Their walls without a single seam, meeting each other in a curvature with a molecular degree of angle that was legendarily machined.  The lengths of the starport were calculated to a degree that took several different supercomputers to compile the variances.  All were designed to maintain airflow like a planet.  The air felt fresh and not recycled.  The tech would eventually convert toward personal use, helping those with respiratory issues that could not be resolved otherwise.  The angles perfected to maximize the gravitational uniqueness of the structure.

She strode the gleaming white halls like a black shock on a blank papyrus.  Stares followed her along the thoroughfare, she brought her obnoxious blaster.  The laws around the Verse may vary, but the ability to protect oneself at a port were immutable.  Factions counted in the thousands.  One had to protect themselves.  There were constraints: the blaster could not fire projectiles, lest the station suffer.  Only energy weapons that ranged in a certain spectrum [even then those could be spoofed].

Gamon wanted a neutral station.  Not to protect himself from her - she was a Hunter not a Merc - it was from his prey that Gamon knew there was no safety outside the confines of the peaceful S'G'en.

She stood off when she spotted him.  Gauging.  *Was he alone?  Was this a trap?  Were there anyone else watching them?*  After an hour of focus, she determined that they were, indeed, alone.

He pulled into himself when she walked into the bar.  A roboserver strode up immediately, without a word.  "Hausenfleur.  Ice."  It strode off, only a momentary nod indicated it took her order.  The bartender was keeping an eye on them, not obviously, as it would be a sign of disrespect for a S'G'en.  As they were open people, it was nude, it's blue skin shimmering in the glow of the bar.

"How're you?"  She threw at his nervousness.  *He hasn't been sleeping.*  Perspiration beaded under the three primary eyes.  The other dozen were half-closed.  An Asripian cannot hide it.  That information saved her life once.

"Do you have what I need to clear my name?"  He wiped moisture from his face.  Her dark hair fell forward, and, learned through years of necessary parlor tricks, she left two metal plates in front of him to study.

"Is this...?"

"It's what you paid me for."  Gamon shifted forward and put three-fingered hands around it like castle walls.  His gills shivered.  She gently pressed the back of his hand, it was clammy.

"But.  Let's be clear, I have the information that shows you were definitely not in the arena that night.  You didn't steal what they said.  *But* they have this information too.  And by knowing, they could use it against you, especially if they knew you had it."

His hands dropped in failure.  *He's weak.*  "What do I do?"

"Get to a Laohshian bank and have this uploaded immediately.  Notarize it with a S'G'en acolyte, as I assume you wanted to meet here for that purpose.  Get a Verse lawyer.  In that order.  File a motion before they have a chance to respond.  You have hours, not days."

He shivered and shook, "You're pay?"  She nodded, "I took the liberty of taking it from your account.  I don't like doing it, but it's part of my line of work."  She passed him her pad.  "Enter your number while I look away."  He did so.

"Now go."  He stood up and left without a word.  The bartender's posture shifted as he watched him go in the mirror.  *He's being watched.  Interesting.*

The Hausenfleur came, the honey-colored liquid shone with a deep shimmer of light.  It smelled of bees in the summer on a Terran Alpine slope.  Grass.  Melted snow as it runs over granite.  She sipped it for a while and decided that Gamon owed her a little bit more on the advice.  She charged the drink and asked for the bottle.  It took three weeks of intense work to get Gamon that information, she figured he would owe her just a little bit more.

She pressed the pad.  Gamon made her day without knowing it.  If the Hausenfleur kicked in before she left the station, he may make it one more time.

...next is here...
...

poem:"you will hear me" (10apr17)

static still in a moment of horror
the world explodes
unwillingly and complete
cacophony of screams
and abrupt stillness
and fragility
exploited
on black top
in pews
in prayer
in moments

if one asks you what death's cause
look not to its instruments
but in its narcissism
ego raw, dripping of the
insipidness
not to be explored

seeing the world
as nothing more
than blots of shadow
and never lights of triumph
of our collective will
for a moment of peace

emptiness aching in
madness of the one
the ticking incessant
and we pay the price
for a crusade
in
one
head

Eric Lacombe .

"Beth" (a snippet)...26mar17...

San Marino.  The Huntington Library is alive in the late winter.  Especially as Pasadena, at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, warms to a pleasant 80 degrees.  The tens of thousands of roses are not adorning their plants yet, but leaves are sprouting from thick straight stalks.  The branches are dark, a type of green that one has to closely inspect to believe it has any color at all.

Where the roses and lily pads are still dormant, the camellias are in full bloom.  The Huntington has colors I had yet to see otherwise, including a camellia with pink and white strips, almost as if the Queen of Hearts had not yet finished with her chores.

rikioscamera flickr

And, where one may miss the smell of roses, they are easily forgotten by the smells of a hundred other variety of flowers that sit across the property.  Wisteria hangs heavy from the trees, draping over the water, it's light purple majestic and appropriate with the Mountains not far away as a backdrop.  The swimming stone sculptures of limestone towered up into the clean, blue sky.

Beth sat with her leg crossed, a serious look upon her face.  Her hair was pulled back, the dark brown and chestnut highlights were accentuated by the sun.  The straight lines and her matronly demeanor drew her pensive look into deeper focus.  Her eyes never lost their luster, they still glowed with an intensity - a shadowed topaz, that didn't lighten despite the sun sometimes alighting her face.

I had to catch myself constantly, as if the past didn't exist - and, for me, I didn't feel it.  It had been eight years.  We were in our later twenties then and full of fire.  We stayed up all night wordlessly making love, in a time when we didn't know sleep as intimately as we do now.

I loved lightly brushing back the strands of hair from her temples and staring into her eyes.  She stared back with an equal intensity.  If it hadn't been for her job, and mine, we would have stayed together.  At least that's what I tell myself.

The truth is that it was better this way.  Better to have that distance where we didn't have foresight.  It made us better.  She was married, no kids, and I got close to both, but my career ruined a string of chances.  And, equally honest to myself, none of them held a candle to Beth.

She had that mysterious allure that held my respect.  The classic touches on her face, the ever present shadow in her hair, her eyes and even in the earthen color of her skin - a mixture of Vietnamese and Polish descent.

"Where's the doctor at today?"  I smirked slightly, awaiting her to turn to me.  She didn't.  This was odd.  We sat at the Chinese Garden House.  We had stewed pork belly in coconut sauce and a few odds and ends.  I sat with a Buddha Beer.  His exaggerated smile looking into me.  He got the joke.

"Why didn't we stay together?"  Great.  A hard question first.  My mind bounded to keep this day light, I felt like a boxer trying to keep the fight going, at least in the best way possible.  I shouldn't answer lightly though...

"I can assure you it wasn't for lack of thinking it over."  It was true: we both tried to make it work, each on their own, but returned to the same point and the same decision.  She still didn't look at me.  Try harder dummy, I spoke to myself, the sweat starting to come.  "But here we are...now.  At this moment."  I shifted the food away.  "The Tao would say this is where we needed to be.  Together.  I don't think you've noticed, but I'm holding in an elation that I've had for two weeks."  I didn't want to reach out, but I've wanted to hold her hand the moment we walked unto the grounds.

We left the food behind and walked back toward the Japanese Garden.  Along the footpath, the camellia fell low.  The shafts of sunlight dappling our path.  I know what she was thinking.  There were too many variables for her.  She was a doctor and of high analytical mind.  There was too much baggage.

"It's unfair to think that our past could command what could be."  She still hadn't made eye contact.  The sweat came down.  I'm not going to lie, I wanted this to go right and exactly what I thought could not is happening.  Having been a known quantity killed the chances for spontaneity.  "It was a life time ago, before all of this."

"And you could so easily take me back?  You don't know what I've done..."  We walked up a trail that was cooled by bamboo, right next to the traditional Japanese House.  I couldn't take anymore, I swung her around and looked confidently into her eyes, "I don't care."  As I held her by her arms to turn her toward me, her eyes relaxed and I could feel her body soften.  She put her hand on my face and searched my eyes.  I fought every urge to say something - but I knew it would fall apart.  She said nothing as well.

She turned and sunk her body into mine as we walked past the House.  All the walls were open today and you could see from one end to the other.  It must have been that way in the dead of summer, allowing any breeze to flow through.

On the other side of the House there was a zig zag of bridge that cut through twenty-foot-high bamboo.  She deftly moved our bodies in that direction.  Her hips and her side felt impeccably right against me.  My chi had filled, embarrassingly so...but there was little I could do to control it.

Beth moved me, as if I was led like a dancer, against the railing and pushed against me.  Her eyes were wrought with abandon.  I didn't know what it meant for tomorrow, just as I thought that she wanted, I wanted assurances for me as well.  I couldn't stand to lose her again.  She pulled her lips up to mine and we kissed until the warmth of the afternoon fell and the sting of the cold evening brought us back to reality.