Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
Sarko_Issue_3
SARKO
Mon July 20, 1994 Volume 1 : Issue 3 ISSN 1022-1069
In European countries, a common sight is:
bees with wings flapping and emitting a
bussing sound are joyfully watched by
people. Probably the bee-and-man
relationship has been one of companionship
since the advent of mankind.
Royal Jelly and Its Uses
Dr. Keiichi Morishita
CONTENTS, #1.3 (July 20, 1994)
[022] <1.2> Seen from the 18th Floor September 8, 1993 Ha Wo Che
[023] <1.0> "the ether is the skein" July 9, 1993 Shatin
[024] <1.0> The Infant Jesus International Landing Field. July 9, 1993 Shatin
[025] <1.0> Mola 1 July 9, 1993 Shatin
[026] <1.0> They July 9, 1993 Shatin
[027] <1.0> "Day dreaming in link" July 9, 1993 Shatin
[028] <1.0> "you can get nailed for saying anything" July 22, 1993 Shatin
[029] <1.0> "The consequences are becoming real now" July 8, 1993 Shatin
[030] <1.0> "Mola had spent a month in St. Gall" July 9, 1993 Shatin
[031] <1.0> Mola 3 Shatin
Sarko is a journal of fictional works-in-progress
published bi-monthly in ascii format by d.i.h. press.
Sarko is distributed on the net as Literary Freeware. You
are encouraged to copy and distribute for non-commercial
purposes.
Unless otherwise stated Sarko is copyrighted (c) Brad
Collins. All Rights Reserved. Sarko is registered in
Paris as ISSN 1022-1069. This is not public domain, it is
Literary Freeware. You are encouraged to copy and
distribute these texts for non-commercial use as long as
this notice is attached.
These are completely original literary works by Brad
Collins, who bears all customary responsibilities for its
contents and arrangement. The characters and events
portrayed herein are fictional; any resemblance to other
characters living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Back Issues of Sarko are available via Gopher or ftp in
etext.archive.umich.edu :/pub/Zines/Sarko
If you don't have have ftp access. Send a message to
sarko-request@mach.hk.super.net. and in the subject line
put:
Sarko-Announce -- to be added to the announcement
list
Sarko-Distribution -- to receive each issue by mail.
Sarko-Request X.X -- if you want to be mailed a specific
issue
To paraphrase the Prisoner, I am a man, I am not a
listserv.... These messages are not automated so don't
hesitate to say hello.
Brad Collins [brad@mach.hk.super.net]
snail mail: dih press PO Box 1010
Shatin, NT Hong Kong
---------------------------------------
Seen from the 18th Floor of Hang Tong Commercial Centre
in the West Barrows.
A broad bare lobby
of oddly proportioned mottled stone
polished to a dull shine,
a bank of lifts lending no coordinate
and a glass wall running perpendicular,
level with a merlin ((escaped from the Tung
slowly circling an updraft outside Wa Street Bird Market
defining the volume,
boundary and flux of the column
as it slowly banks and glides,
scanning for rats, tiggers
or an unwary pigeon,
between a checkerboard
of thirty-floor tower blocks,
their innards exposed
fer all the world to see,
wrapped in a skin of muted cream,
rust and tan tiles,
2500 to the square meter.
A rooftop patchwork,
of stratified residue, lay below,
rusting barbwire slinkies,
snaring anything airborne,
plastic bags, shards of cloth and old rags,
children's toys and drifts
of pigeon feathers and meep-fuzz.
Cracked and dried sheets
of asphalt roofing,
in various shades of fading blues,
reds grays and greens,
spliced together with splashes
of spilt tar over long crooked stitches
of galvanized roof tacks,
defining vents, stink pipes
and blackened, boarded skylights.
Clothes lines strung between
a leaning transgression
of corroded, corrugated tin sheds
surrounded by flower pots gone to seed,
stacked bamboo crates
with woven poly-bag grain sack roofs
serving as makeshift chicken coops.
A stone toilet bowl barbecue
marks the center of a litter
of tiny red and blue betting slips
inside a ring of folding chairs, stools
and beatup armchairs
fished from the rubbish.
Occasionally a police flasher
darts from point to point
along the grid, like a humming bird,
fishing for neutrinos
and scanning in the infrared
for anything bigger than a dog,
the zoning hash set,
looking for violations,
blinking blind for those
who paid the proper bribes. . . .
---------------------------------------
the ether is the skein
keeping Ariadne's thread
from unraveling
---------------------------------------
The Infant Jesus International Landing Field.
A cluster of ault-worn buildings sat at the edge of
a fenced field of muck, fused sand and refuse. Lunar
riptides tugged at the expanse, a topological spandex,
stretching and quaking like some tectonic jelly against the
huddle of sheds and hangers. The control tower, looking
for all the world like a giant granite jujube bean pressed
half-way into the mud by some enormous thumb come down from
the heavens.
Amid the perfect democracy of mud lay objects,
reference points to be neatly plotted and clocked.
Loaders, splattered with fungus and other natural snot,
crouched stiffly with a hodge of flits, floaters and the
odd truck waiting in the blank drizzle for instructions,
empty of tension or ambition. Three rusting Humpers, the
remnants of another generation's abandoned defense, lay a
meter deep in the mud, intakes choked with mozzarella moss
and masher barrels dripping green stalactites. No one had
even bothered to power them down. They just slowly faded
cool, spitting neutrinos at the bastards who'd left them
for dead. It took twenty years....
A decades accumulation of discards from a thousand
repairs lend texture, the piles forming a hierarchy of
refuse. Reactors and lift plates with long hot half lives
sit ostracized and alone, a leper colony for anything with
a deadly tik count. Twenty meters to the east, the rotting
remnants of an ornamental crucifix attempts to sanctify a
pile of desecrated clutter. Bulkheads and bone,
acceleration couches, toilets, rent sheets of insulation,
curled frizz fins and hydraulic casings lay about with
rusting springs, broken plates and plastic milk bottles.
The squat buildings hunched against the drizzle
like a tribe of huddled Visagoths, their sloping sides
bunkered against a blast that would never come.
It was a sequential equation buffered by the
elements, pierced only by the interspacial nausea of drive
fields messing with your digestive track, the very
molecules in the walls grasping to hold together or...
vanish!
After so many centuries of rain and wind wearing
the concrete, only the turret slit windows distinguished
the structures from the local rock squinting a willful
welcome to the machines that dropped from the sky to burden
the ground with their mass....
The concrete in the buildings had been poured
almost three hundred years before. Hard to describe unless
you've seen it, three hundred year old concrete. It's like
trying to describe colour to a horse, or Rice Crispies to a
Floxie. Three hundred year old concrete, it's... old, sort
of a ceramic molten angst, shiny smooth and mold pitted.
Molten Angst
Remember, we ain't talking about any of that Roman
Pozzoulana shit. And don't even try to pass off that
clayey limestone stuff as the real article unless you want
to be wearing it. People get real personal when it comes
to concrete. Make no mistake, we're talkin' Hydraulic
Cement -- Portland Cement.
Quick and Easy Portland Cement
Gently fold together in large mixing bowl, lime,
silica, alumina and iron oxide and heat at 1482C, till
mixture nearly fuses. While heating add dicalcium,
tricalcium, silicate and tricalcium aluminate.A solid
solution containing iron ore should form. Now grind
solution while adding the slightest whisper of gypsum until
powder forms. Now mix with water as desired using one
part cement, two parts sand and five parts gravel. Pour
mixture into mold. Shake periodically to avoid
honey-combing and let stand until hardening occurs.
1 : 2 : 5
It don't matter what mix, 500, 2,000, 20,000 we got
it all the way up to 47,000 pounds now, heading toward that
mystical goal of 50,000 pounds. Concrete Alchemists
believe something wonderful will happen when the 50,000
mark is reached. Concrete will transmute into granite,
lead into gold, water to wine. The heavens will split
open, rent asunder with a mighty matrix wasting clap of
thunder as God shimmies through the opening and sets up
shop, out the in the open air -- armageddon, spring
cleaning. The soap companies will make a fortune....
Some believe that the Civil Alchemists (as they
like to be called) are playing with fire, building a
reinforced concrete tower of babel. You just can't mess
with pre-Cenozoic theothermal lines of force without dire
consequences.... Granted, it's a stronger tower than the
original, able to withstand sheer forces of biblical
proportions, but still....
Of course these people weren't complete idiots.
Geochristian rites were mawkishly observed. Priests from
the New Jersey Archdiocese were given pagers and kept on
twenty four hour call in exchange for substantial donations
(anonymous and under the table) to the St Mary's Cathedral
renovation fund in Trenton. The work was conducted in
sanctified underground laboratories in Paterson and
Rutherford. Ornately carved mahogany stations of the cross
adorned the cinder-block walls. An enormous granite statue
of the Virgin Mother cast her beatific gaze as if frozen in
mid-miracle at the moment the Medusa caught her in the
open....
A near illiterate three hundred pound Sicilian
named Guido guarded the entrance. Guido, dressed as an
alter boy, gripped an Israeli Uzi, loaded with plastic, oil
filled bullets that would kill without desecrating the
laboratory.
Bibles in Latin, Greek, German, Italian and English
were kept at strategic locations around the room behind
glass doors inscribed with the legend: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
BREAK GLASS. Holy water was kept on tap throughout, on lab
benches and under ventilation hoods, next to the gas and
oxygen. Prayers were offered at matins, lauds, prime,
terce, sext, none, vespers, and compline with an exhaustion
of genuflecting, and invoking equations and leaving the
poor researchers with chronic knee problems.
An Empire Blue Cross actuary, who noticed the high
incidence of knee operations among concrete research
workers had to be bribed and later, permanently silenced.
If word had leaked that the inter-family ban on Concrete
Alchemy had been broken, the cartel would have collapsed
into open war. The stakes were that high, but so were the
rewards. Al Capone had been the last to make a grab at the
Grail. He had Alchemists working around the clock near
Boston in a front company called Methuen Sand and Gravel.
For a time it worked, rocketing him to undreamt of heights
until the roof caved in. The family said that he had
challenged God and lost.... If Al Capone could be brought
down, then what chance would the DeMarco's have? But the
work went on, as it must. Each new formula was mixed,
Gregorian chants booming in the background as they crossed
themselves ritually and solemnly intoned the holy name of
Saint Monier before that first drop of water... ignites!
The Patron Saint of Concrete
No, it's not Saint Monier, the fools, no wonder
they failed. Monier invented re-enforced concrete. It was
Saint Joseph Aspdin who blessed the world with the miracle
of Portland Cement.
It was the DeMarco family in Paterson, New Jersey
who instigated the disinformation campaign in the early
fifties that toppled Aspdin's place in the hearts of the
Families of the Tri-State Concrete Cartel. The resulting
chaos that ensued gave the DeMarco's the opportunity to
stage a coup, taking control of the Cartel.The DeMarco's
reigned supreme until the start of the twenty first century
when the ruse was discovered by an obscure Punjab historian
in Chandigarh. When word came down the East Coast the
DeMarcos were targeted and rubbed out within three
years.Dominick DeMarco caught a shotgun blast in the mouth
when leaving a dentist's office in the South Bronx. Luigi,
his wife Eileen DeMarco and two bodyguards died when thirty
pounds of plastique detonated in the trunk of their Black
Lincoln Town Car. The death of Carol Channing's Pekingese,
who was the only other causality of the blast was covered
on the front page of every major daily in the country,
except the New York Times which carried the story on page
two. Michael DeMarco was shot twice in the head in a
Trenton cinema, during a Clint Eastwood film festival.
Louise DeMarco's Calico cat was encased in concrete up to
its neck. The block, with the cat still crying, was found
on her doorstep the next morning. Anthony DeMarco actually
killed himself, clutching an M-1 fragmentation grenade
while jumping off the Throgsneck bridge during rush hour.
He was neatly bisected by the blast, each half hitting the
water fifty feet apart. No one believed it was a suicide,
it was too professional a job. His suicide note had been
thrown out by his Haitian cleaning woman an hour before he
jumped. Several bodies were symbolically entombed in the
pilings of mid-town Manhattan high rises with the knowledge
that they would remain for eternity, encased in concrete,
suffering eternal damnation for their sins against Saint
Aspdin.No one ever pieced together the whole story. It
would have made a great mini-series. . . .
---------------------------------------
Mola 1
Mola Bonecutter slowly moved away from customs and
into the open drizzle (a volume of atomized hydrogen
di-oxide) feeling her new heaviness, weighing the thickness,
the closed predictability of it close in on her. Mud
(becoming a new constant, a center and texture in this, her
new universe) stretched off into the drizzle on all sides,
leaving a record of her movements, like a bread crumb map
left for the birds to erase. Mola's lungs ached -- there
was no other way for it. It was this heavy air. After
months on ship with that fat twit from Nytglo, belching
obscenities in the key of C while he whipped that brass
zipper up and down his chest, playing it like a slide
trombone, hour after hour.
Mola had plotted his death a thousand times, recording
them and playing them back through her witness, flash cut
frames of his death, flashing on the inside of her eyelids
like some nightmare playing at the nickelodeon.... He was
twisting in the wind, from a creaking hemp rope, his fat
purple tongue hanging from his mouth like a spoiled piece
of liver, his zipper straining at the crotch, wet with
urine.... He was screaming as the ropes cut into his plump
tender wrists tied behind a white pine, his hair stuck in
the sap that bled from a severed branch as an Algonquin
warrior pulled his intestines from his fat gut as if he were
about to play jump rope.... Blinking in silent wonder at
the hole in his chest as the reverberations from the shotgun
blast echoed in the chamber just before he realized he was
dead.... As a lightening bolt hit his zipper dead full,
frying his brains blue, his blood boiling in his veins,
before he hit the ground. It was a hell of a way to spend
three months....
There was a sky, there usually is. On a clear day
it might even be a blue, this sky with clouds and air and
weight that she wished would go away.... Mola looked up,
wishing she were back on the launch, feeling not a little
marooned under all this huge unpartitioned sky, even though
it would mean being back with the zipper man. She could
always kill him, blow him out the air lock he while jerked
off just before second watch.... The prick didn't even
clean the sperm off the walls, leaving it to freeze into
white chunks that floated out with the crew when they left
the ship to ritually eyeball the drives before jump....
Mola's bag grew heavy in her hand while that fat slob
was probably still playing his zipper somewhere half a pec
distant by now.
The sky was grey. But grey is a colour too, a
featureless texture hiding a terrible empirical truth,
masking the void where wrinkles come from.... Surfaces like
a thick skinned pudding, a bowl of tomato soup, or the blanket
of a dit's cot that won't bounce a coin.... Texture, a
multifarious congress of elevations and imperfections,
permutations and perforations, a street lamp's glance, dancing
on the concrete's midnight cracks, the gaping rent in a
dropped pumpkin, the dark October canyon breaking the
faithless symmetry of a lemon meringue.... Signatures,
proportional imagery and the dance of an electron's votive
spin on the head of a pin, lost amid the angel dust and
wasted lives, sanity and faith somewhere during that third
of a life spent watching the boob.... Interest, the soothing
lap of water at ponds edge as the adolescent moon plays in a
puddle, the ocean shifting on its heals, removing the
imprint left by two teenagers fucking in a frozen summer
moment on the cool Scusset sands. The wet spot dissolves
with the first rush of foam, pushed gently by the moon's
broom, wearing down sand castles, beach houses and property
values... shifting, smoothing, removing, all moving back to
begin again, a clean slate... for the morning batch of
summer suckers decked out in loud and plastic, all transient
smiles and pee, on vacation from their houses of trash in
generic municipalities where faded paintings adorn city
halls with white tile water closets. There ain't much
beyond the cuddle and subterfuge, the furtive mumblings and
ice cream smiles. Everything here is a foundation of cinder
block and cornerstones of hollowed granite holding banal
treasures of teacups, crumbling comic books and illicit
contraceptives in textured latex for the amusement of future
generations.
Someplace a twig snapped, across time, it was all so
much plot and instance, a talk show host whose smile was too
tight, the guest too distracted, the audience. . . . looking
off camera. A twig snapped.
Hundreds of enormous metallic transport containers
waiting to be filled with two-row barley lay in great stacks
or toppled like toys with scratched and chipped logos
reading like a travel log from a thousand worlds. The names
read like a roll of ancient brewers, Martain, Anheuser
Busch, Carlton and United, Baadle Interworld, Hooker Ent.,
Arthur Guinness Son & Co., Toohey's Ltd. They had come from
as far away as Bozo, just spinward of the Bambi/Thralfell
pispint, a scatter of pinholes piercing the colorless fabric
of the firmament.
The Network had forgotten to arrange
transport for Mola to the tiny city of Promise, so she had
to walk. The dull dented orb of a Westinghouse Witness
floated behind her (still camouflaged rust red from the
endless carbon copy jungles of the Sark) silently recording
all. Mola pulled her brown hooded robe about her against
the cold and shouldered her bag, clenching her jaw as she
tottered in the mud, trying to think herself off this
forsaken pisshole back a thousand years, back to the
security and warmth of broad beamed monasteries where there
was naught else to do in Ermitage, Leffe, Westvleteren,
Grimbergan, Tongerloo, and Aulne than to tend the gleaming
copper Mash Tuns breeding bier amid divinities softly
papping in solemn vows of silence. . .
---------------------------------------
Wait a minute. What is really going on here? Just
a thought balloon feeding words like a teleprompter?
There are strings being pulled here that even the matrix
didn't know about.... They know what I'm talking about.
Though, to be perfectly candid, there is no They, that
great nameless paranoid catch phrase of all the furious
locked door lonely hearts and revolutionary masochists,
glancing nervously over their shoulders, palms sweating
while furiously pumping their harmoniums and whispering,
The Paranoid Mantra
Theeeey is here
Theeeey is there
Theeeey is fucking ev-ry-where!
[Repeat]
as if They were a named, prim proper group with
storefronts, accountants and a tax status.... The
network is vast, with over thirteen registered logos,
Haystack bank accounts and embossed stationary. They plant
subliminal bumper stickers in religious organizations, slip
hidden cameras into the pubic hair of asian prostitutes,
place sentient towels with eidetic memories in executive
wash rooms, sneak hired gremlins and poltergeist into homes
through the copper tubing of air conditioners. . . .
Still not convinced? Did you know that They make it rain
during picnics, outdoor weddings, barbecues, invented spam,
leave the toilet seat up late at night, hire couples to
perform boisterous copulations in all adjacent hotel rooms,
purchase the last package of mallowmars in every
supermarket, make sure that only tall people sit in front of
you in the cinema, hide all the toilet paper in public
toilets, restock convenience stores with warm beer, leave
large sticky wet spots on bus, train and cinema seats, are
responsible for 68.2% of all hair loss, 84.6% of all
pimples, 48% of hangovers, 29% of all sour milk, 89% of all
snoring, 23% of burps, 22% of farts, 18% of all hiccups and
72% of split ends. You don't think that garlic breath
really comes from garlic do you?
They can be contacted in any major city throughout the
matrix, just write to:
THEY
P.O. Box 0000
Brockton, MA 02403
Skowhegan, ME 04976
Portland, ME 04101
Wapping, CT 06074
Gloucester, MA 01930
Woonsocket, RI 02895
Winooski, VT 05404
White River Junction, NH 05001. . . .
A Good Rule of Thumb
If the city has an American Express office, They will be
there. ((They don't exist, right?
---------------------------------------
Day dreaming in link is willy, random fantasy
augmented by an exponential babel of data -- an image
sheath of light and byte, floating and interweaving just
under the threshold -- sort of an information fugue state.
Some call it a link sausage high. No one knows why. . . .
i wanna be a data fiend,
wash a-lost a byte binge tide,
it's better than a mainline nod,
trip-linking so pure you cry.
you can pump my stomach, just try,
i'll heave dry while you scan
my trackless legs up my skirt,
hiked as high as that bad baud can pump
my shattered meat with perfect parity.
It wasn't always like that -- that first time you
link, like some strange hand feeling you up, crawling
around your brainpan, like ants, getting cozy with your
anxieties, riffling through your desires as if in search of
some tasty tidbit, a gossamer grain of gossip to use
against you. But as soon as the ants stop crawling down
your spine, as soon as you learn to disarm your ego, erase
your body, strip bare your femininity, leaving only a lean
mechanical soul, chemicalless emotion, a holy, kinetic
spirit thing, pure energy caressing your libido, loosing
frame, becoming the link, windowing into infinity, a
shatter of disparate information in pristine
disarraignment. It is then that you loose that exposed
feeling and make the worm do yr bidding.... Any logic
is a manifestation of faith sister. Don't they teach you
people anything out backwash?
---------------------------------------
Okay -- you can get nailed for saying anything, so
why not throw caution to the wind, throw back your head, eat
lettuce, go for a week without zipping your fly, spin a
prayer wheel every time you take a piss, (hey, ya know that
could really add up... When the words have piled up into
great driftlike dunes, a very slow fluid.
Dunes... you can apply it across the board; dunes,
sand, snow, words, feelings. It's all the same thing.
Planting strategic grasses can only do so much. One good
blow will bury it all -- pissing in the wind. And we all
know what would happen if you did that! Or do we? Who has
actually done it, actually pissed into the wind, felt it
splash back hot into yr face. Or, really sat down and
watched the shit hit the fan?
Now yr talk'n cowshit. You know that's what you
think when yr mom rolls her eyes heavenward, intoning in her
best Jack Nicholson voice, "it's gonna hit the fan when yer
father finds out." You know it's cow shit she's talking
about. It's cowshit that'll be hitting that fan when yr
dad gets home.
But have you you ever tried? Perhaps starting off
with a scoop of rabbit shit, little round pellets (hard to
discern from that Rabbit Chow) that just bounce around the
room like shiny bits of chocolate. Then, maybe moving up to
doves and pigeons with their stringy smear that might make
you feel like you're a bronze statue in a park but there's
no feeling that any real shit has hit the fan. You can try
chicken shit, tossing it into yer man-made maelstrom just
before you pass out from the ammonia fumes. Come'on folks,
chemical warfare has nothing to do with gettin' into deep
shit. Now try horse shit, just for a break, what a joy, so
dry and warm after those green, white-tipped atrocities the
hens contributed. But then, everyone knows that horse shit
ain't even real shit.
When your finished with the pigs, sheep, goats,
dogs, the odd raccoon, white tailed deer, field mice,
(throwing in an owl pellet just to see the bones shatter as
it hits the wall) you're ready.
Find yerself a good solid Sears & Roebuck 3 cubic
foot barrow and head down to Franklin Park. Go right to the
end, to Suzi's cage behind the night's embankment of autumn
leaves. Don't worry that she looks so old, those deep
wrinkles are camouflage, just look in her eyes... it's the
only way to go when you wanna get into some really heavy
shit....
So... what's so mystical, about an Indian elephant
and a red wheelbarrow full of brown shit 'mid a milling of
white pigeons? How much do you need, living on a concrete
slab enclosed by steel bars framing the seasons scrolling
past. The minutes marked only by an endless drone of little
kids, pointing sticky fingers... so that all meaning is
packed into that tight retention,thirty minutes each morning
and blink or so before watching Frank the Keeper roll it on
off, in a cloud of steam rolling through the crisp morning
air.....
---------------------------------------
The consequences are becoming real now, tangible
and stolid even as they congeal seemingly a lifetime ago,
lost in a field. There's no order here, only words. Ask
Phil, he knows -- left like a beached whale on the heavy
surface of it. Left to dehydrate and ooze puss onto the
white grains of words, existing on a plane of temporal
temperance, abstaining from any empirical high....existing:
((with a sense of humor. How else could you explain
Plato? They'd hid, crouched behind a metaphorical can of
Spam and giggled as Plato scribbled. You see Plato, that
vast totalitarian bastion, didn't wear any underwear....
((with a DNA, a phonetic double helix, inter-
twisting and twining, as syntactic objects in the matrix --
collecting -- through some smirk of physics, in Richard
Brautigan's waste basket....
Tell me, am I outside the field yet? Have I been
able to modulate and collapse in on myself, packing my
sentences tighter and tougher, stuffing the chapters like a
Christmas goose till it all collapses, from the sheer mass
of words and... vanish! Become a syllabic kugelblitz.
They say that escaping the field is more difficult
than shaving a Poodle, than sheering a sheep, than toasting
marshmallows on a stick of Sassafras, than eating Captain
Crunch quietly. Did even Hawkens manage to escape his
field? Did he feel the pea deep beneath the stack of
equations and soar on a numerical carpet outside the
field... outside that poor crumpled meat.
It's doesn't feel any different.
Are we there yet?
---------------------------------------
Mola had spent a month in St. Gall, a Benedictine
monastery in the balmy southern Geosector of New Dublin,
almost fifty years before when her transport, a connecting
flight to a major Ubbik shipping lane didn't materialize.
A low sprawling brewery and a cheesery hunkered
next the monastery which was described in travel brochures
as a "faithful reproduction of the Plan of St. Gall." It
was an ontological trap. This was the original. The
elegant plan drawn up in the eighth century had never been
built. For centuries, books had been written, models
constructed, bent plans hypothesized, as if they were
reconstructing Jericho or Troy. But St. Gall only existed
on paper until the Catholic church decided to finally build
it almost a thousand years after the plan had been drawn
up. The monastery was built exactly to scale, every line
and dimension was faithful to the holy plan. The shell was
pure, but inside it was souped up, a turbo-monastery. The
spartan interior was illusion. The horse shit, that
smelled just like horse shit should, wasn't even real, just
light and odor. Yr foot goes right through it. . . .
The pubs on New Dublin, vast halls dotted by a blur
of heavy brown hardwood tables, were not happy places. Try
as they might, the Dauk never could actually bring
themselves to actually like beer. They brewed it and they
drank it but they never enjoyed it. For the Dauk, drinking
was an act of contrition, an atonement of sin, almost an
act of self-flagellation. The suffering was palatable, a
thick abrasiveness in the air.
The Dauk brewed a high gravity bottom fermented,
heavily hoped lager called Gree with an impossible clarity.
Gree was known throughout the sector and had become
something of a legend beyond, as far away as Wastglo and
Mercanter and was often drunk in conjunction with a stick
rolled from cragg leaves or (as is often seen washward of
Wastglo and the Mitsu) sipped while chewing sour Remington
gum, a hold over from the Tagji Gene Brokers in their
velvet vests and watered down colored breaches of soft
gauze and high laced organic calk boots, polished raven
black. With a slapping of thighs they stomped the woodish
dance floors and the feet of unlucky prostitutes, peppering
both with tiny holes.
Mola met Gosper in a pub called the Ball and Cock
the day after she'd made landfall. His dark hair was kept
shaved to a fuzz, and he often sported a olive green, army
surplus skull cap that kept him in-link with the local
matrix. The dark prostration suffusing the fabric had
driven them to drink almost despite themselves. Bozo
prospectors filled half the hall, raising hell and
erections as they tornadoed through the pubs, a brief,
intense grasp at contact before heading back into their
solitary, sweaty coffins of plasteel and bone to rip apart
asteroids and moons with their psychotic tools sending
quivers of terror through the spacecloth. Enormous Dauk
waiters, the floors creaking from the weight as they
walked, trays a sloshing gold of fried food and pitchers of
beer, their massive amber eyes glowing below their
blowholes, wound their way through the cross dressers of
both sexes, lace bras stuffed with Ubikk pomegranates and
crotches padded with Ukrainian sausage, flirting with regal
S-curve gestures awash in a creeping bank of dry ice smoke
to the sounds of Smokey Robinson, Johnny Cash, Ornette
Coleman, Verdi and Bob Marley heard only by those in-link.
Mola and Gosper had gulped three jars before getting
around to introductions.
"Gosper," said Gosper after Mola had asked.
"Mola," with a nod each which was all that was
required of either. The next pitcher was served without a
word by an ancient pudgy Dauk wearing its green red
wrinkles like an expression. The apron it wore looked
absurd, but then nothing looked right on New Dublin.
Two jars later Gosper was looking a bit green,
and excused himself to puke. Mola looked about the hall,
through a thick curtain of beer. Dauk, scattered
throughout the hall, drank solemnly, without joy or any
sound but the occasional clink of heavy tankards. Gosper
came back a moment later, looking much better and ready for
another round.
Mola was thinking how nice his skull cap looked, as
if it had been screwed onto his skull with six stainless
steel phillips head screws. It was exactly six, no more,
no less. She could see the slotted heads gleaming even in
the dull light of the pub. She smiled, thinking about how
they must twist into the bone and the sharp white threads
that would be left behind when removed. The thought was
starting to get her excited but it was only her turn to
puke.
When she returned the screws were gone. Their
absence made Mola sad, after all she had just turned three
hundred and fifty years old and little things like
stainless steel phillips head screws meant a lot.
Gosper lifted the pitcher to empty the last third
into each stein. Carefully draining the warm foam he
slammed it back down with a solid thud to stew empty in a
puddle of its own juices. They lifted their steins to
toast, almost missing each other before drinking in a
single slow-mo draught.
Mola wiped the foam from her mouth with her sleeve,
shuddering violently, as the warm sour dregs hit home.
Gosper stood up with a burp that said, enough. Mola's head
was spinning clockwise, Gosper's was spinning counter
clockwise. Between the two of them they almost stabilized
as they weaved through the geometry of heavy tables and out
into the night.
The two eighty five meter stone towers of the abbey
church loomed above, bathed in the blue of New Dublin's
twin moons. A queer fluke of the lunar phase provided both
front and back lighting, an eerie banishment of shadow.
Gosper mumbled something, tripping on his own feet
and toppling the two into a heap. Gosper giggled with
another belch while Mola starred at the towers in an
attempt to ward off the spins.
"They look like salt and pepper shakers," Mola
finally said.
"Damn," Gosper said, looking up sharply.
"Which is which?"
"St Michael is right, Gabriel on the left."
"No, which is the pepper?"
"Which one has the bigger holes?"
"Can't tell," he said after a pause, peering.
"Let's find out."
Getting on their hands and knees, grunting to their
feet, barely keeping upright, they made for the heavy front
door of the church. Monks, returning from Matins and Lauds,
glided through the cobble-mist narrowness of the night,
their heavy hoods leaving only turret slits to navigate by,
blinders to better see the way. Lamps glowed warmly in
rainbow halos, lighting nothing but marking boundaries of the
gloom.
The heavy oak doors must have weighed several tonnes
each. They stood eight meters high and almost thirty
centimeters thick, but opened at a touch. They slipped
inside, thinking themselves silent and turning left to
stumble blindly in the dark for the door to enter Gabriel.
"What are we looking for again?" Mola said, looking
at the dimly lit stone staircase winding up in front of
them.
"Pepper."
"Oh, yeah," she said, wishing she had something to
drink. As if by magic Gosper pulled a fifth of peppermint
schnapps from his jacket and handed it to Mola who was so
happy at the miracle that she gave him a big hug and bit
his ear. Gosper just stood there with an idiot grin on his
face and rubbed his cock against her leg.
They both took a swig and started up the worn stone
steps. It was a common form of penance at the Abbey to
climb the towers, pausing to say a prayer at each of the
one hundred sixty steps before praying at the alter at the
top and then repeating the process on the way down. The
tower appeared to be empty as they began climbing the
steps.
Gosper Takes a Piss
Gosper stopped at a turret window just short of the
top and stuck his head out. "Glory be to the Father," he
solemnly intoned as he opened his fly, "to the Son,"
pulling out his cock, "And to the Holy Spirit," and hanging
it out the turret window before letting loose, "As it was
in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. . ." the dark
yellow stream sparkling as it vanished into the black, ". .
. World without end," as the last drops dropped with a
wiggle.
"Amen." Mola said as they continued up.
The stairs ended in a circular room with a simple
stone alter to Gabriel in the middle. There were dozens of
candles on gold pedestals flanking the alter where a frail
looking Dauk, in a well worn robe knelt. Gosper and Mola
stopped dead, surprised to find anyone there and turned to
leave.
"I would speak with you," came the rasped address
to their backs.
"Good morning Brother," Mola said as she turned
around to face the wraith-like Dauk, its loose dry skin was
almost grey with age.
"I am Brother Trßßgkl keeper of the alter of St.
Gabriel."
"And we are humble Cagots," Gosper said with a
straight face, "Come in search of pepper." They nodded,
watching Brother Trßßgkl expand and contract through the
beer-veil. It was all Mola could do to keep from laughing.
"There is no pepper here."
"I see," Mola said and started back down the steps....
---------------------------------------
Mola 3
A small pack of children, caked in mud, darted and
screamed, running about the containers. Mola stopped to
watch. There were no nervous glances skyward, muffled
voices, hollowed stares or missing limbs. These were
children, Mola thought. Reality, the ubiquitous "real
world" had not infected them yet, smothering their
imagination, dismantling their curiosity, leaving only a
directionless passion to be warped by Mother Church, state
and hormones.
"Got all that?" she said to the familiar hanging
above her head, "Kids, playing."
The mud quickly seeped into her shoes, squishing
between her toes. Without thinking, she tried to call up a
scanning menu before realizing that she wasn't plugged into
a combat link anymore. She only had the late model
Westinghouse's limited array. The familiar didn't have
sonics, it was a helpless feeling.
Mola suppressed a shiver, feeling blind and tried
not to think of what might be living in the mud and kept
moving, townward. The roadway dried out a hundred meters
further, gaining elevation amid the stiff grey Ash grass
standing three meters high, partially concealing a
congregation of abandoned equipment.
Mola peered at the wreck, feeling uneasy in the
silence, before shuddering and continuing her cold trudge,
her floating familiar recording all.
---------------------------------------
========End Sarko Volume 1 : Issue 3========
