Uncharted Regions

Speaking to the Moon and... Fiction!

This week’s poem is another attempt to work with the ghazal form.

Ghazal to the Moon

Tonight’s the night—the summer’s last full moon;
And like the tide, I feel thy strange pull, moon.

High in thy silent sphere, thy silver world,
Are there no lovers there to still lull, moon?

The sea and I, so far away we are,
And yet the chief of thine amours, dull moon.

Or maybe not, perhaps we never know
How many love thee: gray seal, white gull, moon.

Even the flowers are thy lovers white:
Night apple sweet, datura we cull, moon.

Thy many lovers watch thee wax and wane;
They smile thy light and weep thy slow null, moon.

And I, why should I feel thy mystery?
And yet I watch thee, wonder, muse, mull, moon.

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Some of my writing time lately has gone, not into writing poetry, but prose. Fiction, to be precise. There is a novel that has been tumbling about in my head for a long time now. And all this time I couldn’t so much as begin it. But a couple of weeks ago, the voice and perspectives from which it is to be told suddenly became clear to me, and I began writing.

I’ve wavered as to posting any of it here. There’s no knowing how well I’ll be able to keep the pace. But I think I’ll try. If all goes well, it will probably become a feature for paid subscribers. Here, at any rate, is the first chapter.

This is, of course, a first draft. I’m aware there are inconsistencies just in this first fragment. But that is how things begin!

The working title of the book is On the Trail of Tomorrow.

Chapter 1

I think I have always felt like a bit of flotsam tossed up on the shores of time.  Like something from a shipwreck long ago, battered about in the waves, only to be at last washed onto a deserted beach.

Now I know why.

Even as a small child I felt strangely alone, out in the pasture with our few cows, watching the brief summer skies and dreaming of what it was like long ago, when the swifts and swallows still flew this far north because the cold had not yet set in.

In the long, long wintertimes, I could remember and forget simultaneously, curled up reading old tales by the hour.  And by candlelight.  Candles were one expense my mother never grudged me, so I kept myself alive and dreaming about far away and–even more–long ago through the dreary eight-month winters.

But the first time this feeling became acute was in the aftermath of the Reconnection.

I was nine years old at the time, and school had just begun again after the spring holidays.  In the middle of the morning, Mr. Edwards tapped on our classroom door, slipped it open, and gestured to Mr. Bellamy to come along.

Mr. Bellamy–one of the best teachers I ever had–shook his head “no”, but Mr. Edwards only became more insistant and, after a few refusals, even frantic.  So Mr. Bellamy stepped out, forehead rumpled because Mr. Edwards was normally anything but demonstrative.

He was gone till lunch time.  We made the most of his absence, of course, but the strange alteration in Mr. Edwards’ demeanor was the thing that occupied most of the period for me.  

We went to lunch still wondering and discovered that the same mystery hung over the entire school.

Life was a bit dull in those days…  It is so now, of course, also, but now I have a strange affection for this sort of dullness…  It means something entirely different to me.

But like any nine year old, I was both excited and relieved when Mr. Bellamy called us together after lunch with the promise of an announcement.

We gathered back into the classroom and waited.  

“It’ll be some grown-up thing, utterly boring,” muttered Thomson next to me, “another announcement that the cost of butter has gone down and we can all hope to have buttered toast for breakfast.”

“I like buttered toast,” proffered Bentley absently.

Then Mr. Bellamy entered, and there was no more talk of buttered toast.  His face was altered as if he had seen a meteor plunge into the ocean and send steam up ten thousand feet.

In fact, he stood before us for awhile, unable to articulate his announcement at all.  Yet none of us students took our eyes off him; we just sat gazing at his stunned face, waiting.

“As you know, Mr. Edwards called me to a meeting of the staff,” he began at last.  (We had not been certain even of this, but it made no difference; the important thing was that he had begun talking at all.)

“There has been a major… a major discovery.  News has only been released this morning by the government.

“We–Englad and Europe and our far distant friends in the Mediterranean and India–are not alone.  We have just made contact with human populations in the Western Hemisphere and, through them, in the far east of Asia.”

We were all listening intently, but I, at least, found it difficult to comprehend the scale of the announcement.

He continued, “As you know, conditions around the world changed drastically in the period after the Great Disruption.  Different populations tried different ways for survival.  Many perished entirely.

“With the collapse of all the infrastructures and the loss of much technical learning, we have long been unable to reach the further bounds of lands our far anscestors knew directly.  I have taught you about all of this.

“Now this… this… discovery was not in fact made by us,” he continued.  “It was made by and from a city across the Atlantic Ocean.

“Scholars there have been attempting to recreate the old communications equipment in use well before the Great Disruption.  We here have always kept some watch on such instruments as we had salvaged, and last night a signal came in to us, a signal which was promptly answered.

“Yes, Bentley?”

“Do you mean they contacted us first, sir?”

“That is exactly what I mean.  They appear to be significantly ahead of us in their technological and even human developments.”

He paused as if still attempting to follow his own thoughts about the matter.

“The staff debated,” he said at last with an effort, “telling the students about this just yet.  But I feel it is of the utmost importance that you know the great events of our time… as they happen… just as you learn the events that already have happened by studying history.

“This particular event may well be a defining moment for your futures.  We cannot know yet what it will mean, but it is likely to alter many things in your world.”

And that was how I learned that radio signals had somehow been sent from a laboratory in the far West, signals that had been captured and answered by a secret team from the military’s Communications Center.

I remember that Mr Bellamy’s news struck me as relatively inconsequential at the time.  We knew there were other peoples in the Rhein region and throughout what had once been central France.  We knew some actual cities still existed in parts of Italia and Iberia.  

To reach these in person required travel, and travel was difficult.  But after all, I frequently visited both Firenze and Barcelona in my imagination, thanks to the novels of authors such as Henry Eldon and Lars Thurstrom.  I could not see that there was so much difference in learning that there were still similarly some populations across the ocean.

But as communications continued and more information was released, the news grew stranger and a little more frightening to me.

We learned that these people lived much differently than we did.  They had survived, not by falling back on the age-old ways of eking survival from the soil, but by going underground.  Literally underground.

They had built whole cities, blasting them into the solid rock underneath the soil, thereby excaping the worst of the climatic turmoil that engulfed the globe.

In these cities they synthesized food chemically–as a nine-year-old this sounded fascinating if a little disgusting, and I must say I have never entirely gotten over this attitiude.

At any rate, I had no questions why they had done this.  No one living, as we did, between the freezing winter darkness and the summer heat and storms, would think our own ways were necessarily the best.  The desperate work to make one summer’s crops and produce last the other three seasons and, often enough, through a year or two of failures… no, it was a hard task to keep ourselves in food year by year.  Each town and village had struck its own balance over the centuries, but often enough it was a very narrow balance, and we were all in an unspoken alliance for survival.

But these far-away cities, we learned, were vast.  Some comprised tens of thousands of citizens.  When they needed more space, they simply bored further into the rock and built more dwellings and more factories for food.  

I think this was the most amazing thing to me: thinking of that abundance of food.  Never any hunger, nor any careful measuring out of seed for sowing versus grain for eating.  Plenty of buttered toast, as Bentley pointed out.

“No, no buttered toast,” explained Mr Bellamy; “butter is a natural product, and they apparently eat only sythesized foods.”

This required some imagination for us, and I must say mine failed in the task.  

And then we learned of the machinery they used, which gave them images of things far away, allowing them to trade and socialize without any travel at all.  Not even a walk down their underground roads!  But their roads (well-lit with artifical lights as in the last centuries before the Great Disruption) were largely occupied by the machines that carried the food and goods to each dwelling.  And the occasional traveler as well.

Inside their homes, which were built one atop of the next all the way to the cavernous rock ceilings, there was ample light in all colors, music piped in from anywhere, fragrances of flowers long extinct, soft fabrics synthesized from coal and under-earth oils, clothes that could be worn once and tossed away to be replaced by some new style, some new colors, daily.  

In my mind I saw a welter of color and texture and light, all changing constantly like a kaleidoscope.  Sometimes when I thought about, it was a bewitching vision.  Other times I remembered about those rock ceilings.

“But how do they see the stars?” I blurted out one day to Mr. Bellamy.

“It seems they don’t,” he replied.

“But,” I said and stopped.

“Apparently only their great explorers go to the top now, as they call it, and see the sky and the sun and the clouds…”  He looked down at his hands moving restlessly over the desk.  My face must have shown my horror; it was mirrored, though partially concealed, in his own.

“We must not extrapolate too far from our own feelings, however,” he said briskly.  “They have lived this way for centuries now and are accustomed to both its disadvantages and–certainly–its advantages.

“Also,” he hesitated but went on, “there is some thought that they have… how does one say it?... developed away from such an intense need for access to the world you and I know.”

“Developed?” I queried.

“Slight changes in the… er, metabolism.  Possible evolutionary changes, in fact.  They may be much better adapted to such a life.”

“What!” I cried.

“It’s possible, I suppose,” Mr. Bellamy said, musing.  “I don’t know, really.  They have made other changes, alterations that might well speed up the evolutionary processes.

“In any case, there is much we don’t know,” he concluded.  “Never lose track of your own assumptions, Dwyer.  Always be aware of what you do know… and what you don’t know!  Assumptions are not knowledge.”

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