his finger was about to touch the center of the inner dome, he awoke.
The glow of the ringed planet shone in the one small window above where he slept on the floor. He became immediately aware that he was not alone in the structure. He cleared his eyes and saw the gleam of their hair and the shadowed curves and soft contours of their naked bodies.
âMethina,â he said and held out his arms.
As she came toward him, the final move of the Loverâs Conceit, she smiled sharply in her myriad forms.
There you have it, one kernel of human history to serve as an example of the whole twisted game. The planet that Sikes had been stranded on is now called Fereshin, and the oasis that held him captive still exists. The Geets are still there and yet more changes have been wrought in them, leading on from the work he had accomplished. There are those who still bare a strong resemblance to Methina, and irony of ironies, their eyes are now the exact green of Karjeet. This development came not directly from Sikes but from their acquired cannibalism of those born differently without their selected beauty. Some chemical in the heart, I believe.
Sikesâs unnatural stress on the species moved them to a sharper level of cognizance. The Methinas who became violently ill from the consumption of his flesh now had the wherewithal to remember never to devour another like Sikes again. His looks had become imprinted upon their newly vibrant minds and, in their eating of the ugly others of their species, they avoided those Geets who carried any of his physical traits. Follow the progression of this practice over generations. Now, if you were to travel to Fereshin and the far oasis in the red desert, you would find it predominantly populated with a multitude of Sikeses and Methinas, like a single couple trapped in a labyrinth of mirrors.
The old saw in writing fiction is show it, donât tell it, but there are those writers who tell it and do so to wonderful effectâBorges, Chekhov, Steven Millhauser, sometimes Kipling. This is a story in the âtell itâ vein. I was influenced in writing this piece by the book , Ka, a reconfiguration of the stories of the Gods of India, by Roberto Calasso. These amazing myths take all kinds of wild and wacky plot twists without warning. They waste little time on devices that contemporary fiction insists upon to suspend disbelief. The concept at the end of âThe Far Oasisâ that deals with the radical altering of a species through unnatural selection came to me through an essay in Carl Saganâs collection Cosmos. In this essay, he tells about a place in the Sea of Japan, where a princess and her Samurai retinue drowned themselves instead of being captured by the enemy. Local crab harvesters, in the ages that followed, sometimes found crabs with a mottling on their shells that somewhat depicted the face of a Samurai and would throw them back in honor of that ancient sacrifice. Now, there exists in those waters a species of crab whose shells carry precise portraits of those noble warriors.
The Woman Who Counts Her Breath
Dorothy Himmelreich, as I know her, has a stocky build, generous of bosom and gut, a rear end in the Rubens-meets-gravity line, and rather thin limbs. She wears her hair cut short, a bleached-blonde skullcap that is never quite perfectly combed. All of this is of little consequence, existing merely to frame her face. It is a meaty face, jowly, and thick in the lips. Her nose is short and pushed in a bit. The eyes are deep-set and always on the move, scanning the room to see that everything fits into her expectation of how it all must be. Should she come across, say, a child acting out or a person expressing a complex thought, her top lip curls ever so slightly and her nostrils flare. A slight grin that has nothing to do with merriment is the sure sign that she is about to set things straight. Her overall air is one of constant suspicion, an ever readiness to
The glow of the ringed planet shone in the one small window above where he slept on the floor. He became immediately aware that he was not alone in the structure. He cleared his eyes and saw the gleam of their hair and the shadowed curves and soft contours of their naked bodies.
âMethina,â he said and held out his arms.
As she came toward him, the final move of the Loverâs Conceit, she smiled sharply in her myriad forms.
There you have it, one kernel of human history to serve as an example of the whole twisted game. The planet that Sikes had been stranded on is now called Fereshin, and the oasis that held him captive still exists. The Geets are still there and yet more changes have been wrought in them, leading on from the work he had accomplished. There are those who still bare a strong resemblance to Methina, and irony of ironies, their eyes are now the exact green of Karjeet. This development came not directly from Sikes but from their acquired cannibalism of those born differently without their selected beauty. Some chemical in the heart, I believe.
Sikesâs unnatural stress on the species moved them to a sharper level of cognizance. The Methinas who became violently ill from the consumption of his flesh now had the wherewithal to remember never to devour another like Sikes again. His looks had become imprinted upon their newly vibrant minds and, in their eating of the ugly others of their species, they avoided those Geets who carried any of his physical traits. Follow the progression of this practice over generations. Now, if you were to travel to Fereshin and the far oasis in the red desert, you would find it predominantly populated with a multitude of Sikeses and Methinas, like a single couple trapped in a labyrinth of mirrors.
The old saw in writing fiction is show it, donât tell it, but there are those writers who tell it and do so to wonderful effectâBorges, Chekhov, Steven Millhauser, sometimes Kipling. This is a story in the âtell itâ vein. I was influenced in writing this piece by the book , Ka, a reconfiguration of the stories of the Gods of India, by Roberto Calasso. These amazing myths take all kinds of wild and wacky plot twists without warning. They waste little time on devices that contemporary fiction insists upon to suspend disbelief. The concept at the end of âThe Far Oasisâ that deals with the radical altering of a species through unnatural selection came to me through an essay in Carl Saganâs collection Cosmos. In this essay, he tells about a place in the Sea of Japan, where a princess and her Samurai retinue drowned themselves instead of being captured by the enemy. Local crab harvesters, in the ages that followed, sometimes found crabs with a mottling on their shells that somewhat depicted the face of a Samurai and would throw them back in honor of that ancient sacrifice. Now, there exists in those waters a species of crab whose shells carry precise portraits of those noble warriors.
The Woman Who Counts Her Breath
Dorothy Himmelreich, as I know her, has a stocky build, generous of bosom and gut, a rear end in the Rubens-meets-gravity line, and rather thin limbs. She wears her hair cut short, a bleached-blonde skullcap that is never quite perfectly combed. All of this is of little consequence, existing merely to frame her face. It is a meaty face, jowly, and thick in the lips. Her nose is short and pushed in a bit. The eyes are deep-set and always on the move, scanning the room to see that everything fits into her expectation of how it all must be. Should she come across, say, a child acting out or a person expressing a complex thought, her top lip curls ever so slightly and her nostrils flare. A slight grin that has nothing to do with merriment is the sure sign that she is about to set things straight. Her overall air is one of constant suspicion, an ever readiness to
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