by Linda Talbot
The Soul Shadow
And Other Tales of Tomorrow
By Linda Talbot
Copyright Linda Talbot 2013
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~~~~~Table Of Contents:~~~~~
Introduction
The Soul Shadow
The Bell Flowers Of Lymphos
The Song Of Selenus
The Mission
Klein
The Mutant
Zizi’s Last Wish
The Time Twins
Rollo, The Labour Saving Lover
The Flood
Shades Of Home
Author's Note, other writing and contact blog
The Soul Shadow
And Other Tales of Tomorrow
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Introduction
These stories are often rooted in reality. But they soon become improbably perturbing, droll or outlandish.
I have placed this book between Book One and Two of Time Trance Of The Gods to offer a change of pace and content - like a water ice to freshen the palate between the courses of a memorable meal?!!
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The Soul Shadow
One evening Shama would not be coaxed from her corner. The soul shadow had seeped in earlier, drawing her from the open door to crouch on the dark side of the shimmering house.
She was an elegantly tall Limosian, whose hair like spun gold drifted in the light air and framed cautious grey eyes. She had Limosian attributes of patience, creativity, telepathy. But she lacked courage.
"There's nothing here now. Come into the light," urged Rhune, her consort who was also exceptionally tall and whose calm was marred by curiosity and a brittle lack of patience. He resented Shama crouching like some creature cowed by a malevolent master.
Slowly she uncurled and raised her face as though testing the air for treachery and tentatively she moved towards Rhune. But her skin retained a palor prompted by the inner danger of disintegration that increased each time the intrusive shadow stole.
The Limosians had no clear recollection before life on Limosia, the tenth planet that a former race called “man” had sought for centuries and failed to find. Occasionally the dim disturbance they had named the soul shadow descended; some unseemly hint of horror and irrationality, but it lifted as swiftly as the heavy dew replenishing the planet.
Shama and Rhune belonged to the second generation of Limosians who were subject to fewer disturbances than their predecessors but were aware nonetheless, of a seeping sense of incompletion; of being related to some force stronger and darker than themselves and, momentarily, the brightness of Limosia dimmed.
Rhune and Shama walked through the violet haze of early evening to Limos; the city whose reflective buildings, made from a clear substance found in a far flung part of the planet, gleaned faint warmth from the distant sun. There was no rainfall, but each morning, that dawned once every thirty six hours, a heavy dew replenished growth; flowers of fragile diversity and fine fibres that glinted, gold and silver in the soft light and were the staple diet of the Limosians.
Like all Limosians, Shama and Rhune had the limbs and features of the old race of man. But adaptations had occurred. Their skin was translucent, their head and body hair finer. Genetically, they had adjusted to the rarefied conditions on Limosia. They were almost able to float over the spongy surface where clouds of dust generating new stars drifted to settle among the flowers. The finest forms emerged from a liaison of star dust and dew.
They had entered like all Limosians into the three lives. For one hundred years they learned; with the first generation of their race had come a muddled knowledge of belief, speculation, creation.
Apart from the soul shadow, Limosia was not threatened; the beliefs that were based on fear were superfluous and abandoned. Speculation was dead, since Limosia provided, with her flexible materials and staple strands of food, a gentle self sufficiency.
Creativity was cultivated in the hundred years of the Second Life; fantasies were fashioned from a malleably fine material akin to the substance used for building; objects pulsating and reflecting abstractions, moving like moods too mysterious to otherwise express, in the shifting Limosian light.
Among the flowers grew coloured strands related to the edible species which the people wove into a fabric that rippled with independent life, its folds finely shaped to their lithe limbs. They made flexible stringed instruments that like the Aeolian harp that once eerily caught the winds of Earth, filtered the floating currents of Limosia and to them the people sang with a wistful atonality.
In the Third Life of a hundred years the Limosians fully existed. They had absorbed, participated and were ready to enter, in stillness, surrounded by their completed creativity, the experience of being. They were one with the rhythm of growth, the drifting star dust, the heavy dew. They ate, slept, communicated, but with a synchronisation that required no effort. They carried within them the essence of Limosia.
Shama and Rhune had one child, Liana, conceived in the Third Life by concentration on the act of creation.
They sat among the fiscus flowers for two days; an integral aspect of their opening and closing, their drinking of dew and motionless being in the reflected rays of the sun.
By dusk of the third day, a transparent sphere materialised from the rarefied air, as though forged from dew and shot with the colours of the fiscus flowers.
It hovered above a thin layer of stardust, expanding as though breathing, and very slowly, within, grew a female child, curled tightly like a flower bud that gradually, throughout the night, unfolded; her pale blue hair loosening, her fragile features forming, her translucent limbs reflecting the dancing colours of the sphere.
As the heavy dew of dawn fell, the sphere drew one last breath and burst. The child stood on bare feet in the flowers, her blue hair shot with the first rays of sun, her arms outstretched to her parents who lifted her high. The Third Life cycle was complete.
Shama and Rhune placed the child gently on the ground and with measured steps walked towards the faint spillage of sun. On the rim of Limosia they paused and turned to look back once more at the girl child who watched, shot with brightness. Then they were absorbed by a gossamer cloud of dust, bearing them beyond Limosia, through the galaxy of Vega where they would disintegrate to become in turn, the dust from which stars are born.
Each couple was permitted one child in this way at the end of their life cycle, when Limosian qualities coalesced.
Liana, the girl child, instinctively joined the other children at the central seat of learning in Limos. They were led through literature selected for its love of words, which were sounds woven from the air of Limosia and distant memories of other languages that were steeped in anguish, doubt, envy. But, being irrelevant to Limosia, these had diminished like wasted limbs of learning.
Then Lem, a Limosian with an uncharacteristic urge to investigate, built a floating ship from the flexible material confined until then, to the structure of the city. As though mysteriously motivated, he mastered the art of technical construction, so at certain times of day the ship was capable of rising on currents and hovered like a gleaming insect above the planet's surface.
As it hung, anchored by fibrous strands, Limosians ventured from Limos to gaze. As they stood in the violet light of late afternoon, the soul shadow stole suddenly, creeping like a sinister, black-shelled being from beneath the ship towards them. It blotted out the violet light and an alien cold possessed the air and immobilised the onlookers.
But ten days later, Lem persuaded twelve Limosians to board the craft. Liana, who had inherited her father's impatience and keen curiosity, also slipped incon
spicuously on board. For the first time in their short history, the Limosians rejected the completion of their unclouded life.
Solari, the craft, hovered close to the surface of Limosia for several seconds, whirring and vibrating softly. Then it rose on an air current and lifted lightly into the violet air.
Liana saw Limosia glimmering with stardust and flowers and in the centre, Limos, shot with shafts of violet light. Momentarily she recalled the sphere in which she had grown like a flower; an environment of calm, protectively enclosing until she stepped into the outer atmosphere.
But this craft was alien, lifting randomly away from all she had known. Her curiosity was dulled now by doubt. The other Limosians too were subdued as though realising for the first time that this venture might entail some new, unfamiliar experience outside the perimeter of the protection they had known.
But the Limosians knew nothing of the galaxy around Limosia. They knew nothing either of the dust cold planets that burnt out aeons ago; all life extinct, and of the many that never bore life. And there were those destroyed by their inhabitants and shrouded in toxic layers as though ashamed of what had transpired.
Liana looked from the transparent sides of Solari and in a flash saw Shama and Rhune watching her anxiously from the end of their Third Life cycle. She shivered.
The craft approached the constellation Draco, formed where long ago a Greek hero called Cadmus had flung a dragon, which was coiled as the constellation now for ever around the North Star. The stars Etanin and Alwaid which never set, were its watchful eyes. Now they gleamed malevolently, never leaving the movement of Solari which floated through the galaxies that had grown from star dust to replace those of the ancients.
Some original planets such as Pluto, Uranus and Jupiter, remained. They revolved coldly; no star dust glittered with heavy dew, forming flowers. And there was another planet which was invisible, fixed between Venus and Mars, with its own sun and moon but whose surface was now hidden beneath clouds of toxic dust, blackened and frozen in a nuclear winter, a howling wind supplanting the race of men who were once its inhabitants.
As Solari flew over the shrouded planet, cries of anguish trapped in the ionosphere, drifted and bore her waywardly through the particles of poisonous dust.
And then the soul shadow seeped around and within. The Limosians tensed and closed their eyes; the way they had learned to tolerate the dark intrusion until it lifted. But now it drove deep within and brought with it illusions.
Even Lem saw the shattered forms of burnt out beings with monstrous malformations, cowering beneath the impenetrable cloud. They cried feebly for help, but could not move or see or hear clearly and with the spread of the shadow - the spectre of their suffering - came intimations of malevolence sealed in pain; an urge to dominate and corrupt. These sentiments were alien to the Limosians yet possessed them with fear.
Solari soared and dived, Lem able only to partially manipulate it with his mind. He too was beset by earthly emotions but pretended they had not touched him. The vibrations continued for more than an hour as the craft turned in slow circles over the burnt out planet. Then with a supreme effort Lem willed her to rise above the clouds.
Drawn by Limosia, she headed through the Solar System, which exerted an impulsive pull, as though to claim her for its plaything.
From the Earth, once known as the Blue Planet because of her extensive waters, they passed the massive face of Jupiter, the System's largest planet that spun rapidly, its polluted cloud belts obscuring their view, but through them they glimpsed a vivid lake simmering like iridescent fire.
They reached the great rings of Saturn, strung from countless particles around a planet that was once the second largest in the system but which had diminished so the hovering rings rotated with an independent vigour, moving restlessly from rim to rim.
The green of Uranus, discovered to be an impenetrable form of water weed, had darkened and heaved as though some great being was thrusting beneath the surface, while ominous vapours rose from its undulations. Of Neptune, once glimpsed from Earth as a blueish disc, there was now no sign.
The craft glided through an uncharted sea of time; the Limosians suspended in a state of meditation that needed no sustenance, until they sighted ice-like Pluto that had grown greater with time and orbited even more eccentrically than before, as though seeking the warmth of the distant sun.
Limosia lay far to the west on the edge of the Vega system where planets were strung like the luminous beads of a necklace on the dark skin of space. Limosians had had no urge to explore their neighbouring planets but now, as they re-entered Vega, the worlds pulsated as though to impress their presence on the oblivious visitors. They hung, like the beads momentarily unstrung, each displaying its facets to dead eyes. For the Limosians rested in trance; unseeing, unneeding, until they re-entered the atmosphere of Limosia.
Liana, however, retained her sensitivity. With Rhune's curiosity, she adjusted to the troubled vibrations, the unknowable expanse of space and the cosmic communication of the spheres. She might have been an instrument selected for their interpretation.
And Lem remained vigilant. He was consumed and haunted by the pull of the blackened Earth and her often eerie Solar System. He perceived the unsavoury insistence of thwarted power. Yet, unlike his fellow Limosians, he could not reject it. Straining to see the last trailing stars of the Solar System, he felt deprived. He did not want to deny destruction. He wanted to wreak it.
Liana watched the set of his prominent jaw, the rapid motion of his eyes, the clench of a hand that would take control. For the first time she was afraid.
For a while after they landed, the Limosians retained a state of near trance; a defence against the shock of the soul shadow that had crept too close.
But Liana pursued her studies uneasily, perceiving in the flow of the abstractions and careful construction of the books, an unreality; a self conscious rendering of the truth masking a doubt, that, if acknowledged, would prove paralysing.
She watched Lem, who had rejected the planet's peaceful rituals. He sat for hours on the stark rim of Limosia's highest hill, gazing towards the Solar System as though trying to absorb its restlessness.
His influence on the Limosians was subtle at first. He did not blatantly manipulate their minds. But he conveyed his fears, warning of some malevolence that might descend and destroy them. And, as though at his bidding, the soul shadow seeped more often, its insistence darker and probing deeper.
The Limosians began to heed Lem. For days at a time they abandoned their peaceful pursuits and sat by him, wide-eyed.
"We must form a force for the defence of Limosia," he stated. The Limosians had no conception of "defence". But the conviction came to Lem in harsh visions; an urge to organise, categorise, mobilise into a co-ordinated force, with himself in control.
Liana attended these meetings, moving uneasily at the back of the crowd, Lem's words perturbing and engendering dread. Soon he had organised his first force of two hundred people, ranking women with their powerful stature and rapid response, with men.
Books were closed, music no longer moved through the sensitive city, touched now with trepidation. The reasoned rhythm of Limosia was replaced by a distant unease.
A second battalion was formed and the soul shadow, as though responding, stole almost every day, lying like a heavy hand on the people, the flowers and the strands of fine fibre.
"There is an invasion imminent," stated Lem, addressing his ranks early one morning. He had woven a jagged emblem from some fibrous strands to wear as a sign of leadership and created simple variations for those, who, in rank, were closest to him.
Liana shivered in the calm now charged with uncertainty. Beyond Limosia, the stars, still faintly perceptible in the diffused light, glinted unperturbed. Every exterior detail of the planet was unchanged. It was the Limosians and Lem, oppressively insistent, who created the potential catastrophe; some retrogressive and destructive step that was self-induced.
"We shall send out a reconnaissance expedition," Lem decided, "If an invasion is imminent we shall know where to deploy our force."
Liana recoiled and saw, with unnerving clarity, an appalling conflagration; Limosians and some faceless adversary, that might be their distorted mirror image, consumed by fire.
The reflective city dimmed, the soft light of Limosia lowering as though wary of what her people would perpetrate.
Liana walked from the edge of the stiff battalions; Limosians in matching calf length tunics, newly woven from the fibrous strands, their long hair looped severely on their heads, men and women barely distinguishable. She gazed at the reflective domes and walkways of Limos, absorbed the suppression of the baffled planet and as the soul shadow stole with a cloying triumph into the soft fabric of her being, she paused.
She saw Lem select twenty Limosians from the ranks, who stepped forward and knelt in obeisance. They rose and solemnly followed him to Solari that hovered in readiness on the planet's rim.
In a revelatory flash, Liana saw the culmination of Lem's action; the attempted conquest of a shadow that was some lingering fear from a forgotten past, followed by the imposition of terror, a sealing of the senses that had grown to encompass a unique coherence, where existence was its own end.
She felt the insidious presence of the soul shadow. She was unable to communicate with anyone. The Limosians turned eyes that were glazed over wells of fear, to her anxious face. They moved like automatons, scheduled to desecrate the ideal of which their forbears had dreamed but failed to find.
Liana turned from them and wandered, unregarded, to a lonely tract of land overlooking the silent city. She sank among the untended fibres and flowers. She moved nervous fingers over their familiar forms and they emitted a faint warmth as though responding sympathetically to her fear.
She breathed deeply, drew to her the flowering of fulfilment that possessed her planet and wrested strength from the force that she sensed still beneath her body.
Motionless, she concentrated, until her frame was supple and primed with unified power. She saw Lem and his party lift in the craft, hang briefly over Limosia in the violet light, then drift like some wayward flower-head towards the outer reaches of Vega.
Liana rested her eyes unflinchingly on Solari. She transmitted every vestige of her belief in retaining the essence of Limosia's existence, to the body of the mission craft.
She wept cold tears which she observed, alarmed and without comprehension, in her palms, as she willed Solari to disintegrate. And as the craft hovered uncertainly on the outer verge of Vega and Lem sighted the shifting stars of the Solar System, a ring of fire from dust particles under unprecedented pressure, surrounded and consumed Solari.
The soul shadow that had infiltrated and almost forced a repetition of the past, did not steal through Limosia again. Some grisly ghost had been laid. The Limosians, as though waking from a coma, entered once more the essence of existence.
Limosia glinted, her flowers unfurled with fresh vibrations that liaised with the reflections of Limos.
But as music and the murmur of Limosian voices blended beyond the reach of pain, Liana's blue hair was lifted by light air currents about a body deprived now of life; expended through its final effort, to lie like an empty and finely shaped shell among flowers.
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