No Geek Rapture for Me
I’m Old School
by Jonelle Renald
©2017 by Rock Branch Productions
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner
without the prior written approval of the copyright holder.
Published by Rock Branch Productions
Paperback:
ISBN: 1-60045-482-8
ISBN-13: 978-1600454820
eBook:
ISBN: 1-60045-490-9
Cover artwork: Graphics licensed from 123RF Stock Photos
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Copyright: Gloffs, Fisher Photostudio - Germany
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Body under X-rays — https://www.123rf.com/photo_10857063_male-body-under-xrays-isolated-on-black.html
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Copyright: naphotos, Setsiri Silapasuwanchai - Thailand
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Quotes from Dante’s Divine Comedy:
[Translation by] Sayers, Dorothy L. “Dante: The Divine Comedy,”
[3 vol: Cantica 1: Hell / Cantica 2: Purgatory / Cantica 3: Paradise] ©1949 by Dorothy L. Sayers (Penguin Books Ltd: London, England, 1962: reprint ed.)
Acknowledgements
I’ve wanted to write a novel for a long time now, made several attempts that didn’t go anywhere because I wasn’t able to complete the story. Even after filling out notebooks filled with ideas on characters, settings, and background, the plot just wouldn’t go anywhere. However since then, I have received help from two excellent books — Writing the Natural Way, by Gabriele Lusser Rico, which helped me find an organic way to gather and then express my ideas, and How to Write a Movie in 21 Days, by Viki King, which gave me the idea of creating the rough draft for this novel using her method for creating a movie script, charting out key moments in a character’s development as the story progresses and challenges are faced. This helped me overcome my previous deficiencies, and writing this novel has been one of the most enjoyable and satisfying experiences of my life. (I wrote a novel!)
Also, I’d like to thank Paul Ludwig for his expertise and feedback concerning the fencing passages in this novel. Any inaccuracies and/or absurdities found in this book concerning the use of a saber are mine and mine alone.
Preface
Excerpt, That Hideous Strength
“Then what we are up against,” said Dimble, “is a criminal’s [head detached from its body, his] brain swollen to superhuman proportions and experiencing a mode of consciousness which we can’t imagine, but which is presumably a consciousness of agony and hatred.” ...
“It tells us something in the long run even more important,” said the Director. “It means that if this technique is really successful, the Belbury people have for all practical purposes discovered a way of making themselves immortal.” There was a moment’s silence, and then he continued: “It is the beginning of what is really a new species — the Chosen Heads who never die. They will call it the next step in evolution. And henceforth, all the creatures that you and I call human are mere candidates for admission to the new species or else its slaves — perhaps its food.”
“The emergence of the Bodiless Men!” said Dimble.
------------------------
That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis
Chapter 9, “The Saracen’s Head”
Originally published by John Lane, ©1945 (The Bodley Head: United Kingdom) EPub Edition ©2012 (HarperCollins: New York)
Kindle locations #9714 and #9725
The Building of the Tower of Babel,
and Confusion of Tongues
From Ane Dialog betwix Experience and ane Courteour,
by Sir David Lyndsay (c. 1490–1555) [updated]
To base their great fortress then did they excavate,
And dig down till they got sure ground.
All fell to work, both man and child,
Some dug up clay, some baked the tyles.
Nimrod, that subtle and elegant champion,
Deviser was of the donjon, that strong tower.
Nothing they spared their labors,
Like busy bees upon the flowers,
Or red ants travailing into June;
Some beneath worked, and some above,
With strang ingenious masonry,
Upward their work did fortify —
The plain about was beautifully level,
The tower raised over it a tall imported mountayne.
Those foolish people did intend,
That till the heaven it should ascend —
So great a strength was never seen
With any man’s eye in all the world.
The walls of that work they made,
Two and fifty fathom full breadth —
One fathom, span of arms outstretched,
In that day, as some men say,
Might been two fathoms in our days —
One man was then of more stature
Than two be now, of this be sure.
The translator of Orosius
Into his chronicle writes thus —
That when the sun is at its height,
At noon, when it doth shine most bright,
The shadow of that hiddeous strength
Six mile and more it is of length:
Thus may ye judge by your thoughtful opinion,
If Babylon be of highest worth, or be an empty nothing.
Then the great God omnipotent,
To whom all things are ever present,
He seeing the ambition,
And the prideful presumption,
How their proud people did intend
Up through the heavens to ascend,
Such languages on them he laid,
That none knew not what another said —
Where was but one language afore,
God sent them languages three score —
Afore that time all spake Hebrew,
Then some began for to speak Scots,
Some Dutch, some language Saracen,
And some began to speak Latin.
The master foremen began to go wild,
Crying for lumbers, they got tyles.
Some said, Bring mortar here quick,
They brought them wood blocks, bricks.
And Nimrod, their great champion,
Ran raging like a wild lion,
Menacing with words coarse and rude,
But never one word they understood.
--------------------------------------------------
Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes, Asia (vols. xxi–xxiii) — Mesopotamia: Babylon
editor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1876–79)
Table of Contents
Chapters
Preface
1|Cloud
2 |Bar
3|Fence
4 |About
5 |Change
6 |Offer
7 |Rash
8 |Job
9 |Rattle
10|Lie
11 |Dress
12 |Confer
13 |Hunt
14 |Recruit
15 |Want
16 |Tear
17 |Hide
18 |Capture
19 |Mind
20 |Snare
21 |Fire
22 |Air
23 |Land
24 |Cave
25 |Spring
26 |Drop
27 |Save
28 |Share
29 |Side
30|Reach
31 |Touch
32|Freak
33 |Impress
34|Wish
35 |Fair
36 |Distract
37 |Recall
38 |Attack
39 |Join
40 |Wrap
Back Matter
After Words
About the Author
Appendix
—Vocabulary
—Bibliography
1 | Cloud
On the morning of January 6, the Feast Day of Epiphany, a day for recognizing the Christ Child born as a human baby, gift from God to the world, Dr. Maria Marwitz (called Mia by everyone but her mother) was driving east across Iowa on I-80, returning to her home in Barrow Heights in northeast Iowa and to her job as Associate Professor in the English Department at Edgestow College. As a professor of English lit, specializing in Renaissance and medieval literary studies, Mia knew that in literary theory an epiphany is defined as “a sudden illumination, a new and intuitive perspective on reality brought on by a routine event that takes on a transcendent meaning.” She said out loud, “I wish there were more epiphanies in my life.”
Inside her sporty four-door Japanese coupe with a manual transmission and a black cherry metallic finish that she bought used because it was speedy and a good fit for a person with a height of six feet and a long torso, Mia was toasty warm even though it was very cold outside. When she left her parents’ house in Blair, Nebraska at ten o’clock that morning, the day had been suited for a feast day celebrating illumination and new insights. The temperature outside had been a brisk 18ºF with a wind chill of 5ºF, but offsetting that was a brilliant sun and bright blue skies. Edgestow’s spring term didn’t begin for another ten days, but she was returning home early for two reasons. First reason: take part in an all-day regional fencing tournament tomorrow at Edgestow’s Stark Gymnasium and Activity Center. Given the roster of respected fencing clubs that would be attending, she was looking forward to testing her saber skills against some very talented competition. Second reason: have a few quiet days after the tournament to do some work on an article she was developing for publication before getting ready for the next term.
Focused on excellence in education with a great assembly of faculty and students, Edgestow College was special to Mia. Founded in 1861 as a Methodist-Episcopal institution for higher education by Clive Stapleton, an immigrant from England, the college was named after his alma mater in England. Mia even liked the name Edgestow after discovering that the suffix -stow meant “a holy place of assembly.” The campus had been built on the site of a small eighteenth century chapel, part of a settlement named Souriant that had been established after a visit and report by Father Marquette, Catholic priest on the French mission of exploration down the Mississippi River in 1673. The college had grown from a two-story wooden building into a dozen stately white limestone buildings set on rolling tree-covered hills. Just under two thousand students were taught by a full time faculty of one hundred and fifty professors.
Two hours into her trip, Des Moines was thirty miles ahead according to the last green highway sign. Driving past farms plotted across the prairie in perfect squares, some sprouting wind turbines like giant flowers blowing in the nearly constant breeze, Mia’s view of the dome of the sky was unobstructed from horizon to horizon. And she could see a cold front moving south, marked by a gray cloud stretching diagonally across the entire sky, eating up more and more of the bright blue sky.
As she entered the suburbs on the western edge of the metropolitan area, she passed an unusual utility vehicle, tall, white, and boxy, covered with antennas and two satellite dishes on top, its science-y appearance making it stand out from the other vehicles on the road. Fortunately, this was the only out-of-the-ordinary occurrence. The rest of her trip through the state capital was incident-free, and traffic was light on the four-lane road during the middle of the day. She exited the interstate on the eastern edge of the city (near the state’s biggest amusement park) to get gas and pick up something for lunch. She had barely begun to push open the car door when a blast of cold air caught it and flung it wide, pulling the handle out of her grip. “Frack! That wind is freezing cold!” She dragged her wool coat out of the car and hurried to put it on and button it up, pulling her long blonde hair out from under the collar. The temperature was dropping with the arrival of the cold front, and the solid gray cloud cover had engulfed over half the sky. As she stood next to the car while gas filled the tank, she noticed a strange thing in the sky. At the leading edge of the cold front — defined by the boundary of that gigantic gray cloud — there were four or five white lacy strips, overlapping but distinctly separate. Their arrangement made it look like the gray cloud had forced them to pile up on top of each other, pushing them into the part of the sky that was still blue. Judging by their appearance, these white lacy strips weren’t clouds of some sort. Each overlapping strip was parallel to the others, running east to west across the entire sky, edges too straight to have occurred naturally. They had a superficial resemblance to an airplane’s contrail, but the strips were substantially different from the normal condensation vapor emitted by jet engines. A long-time sky watcher, Mia knew that jet contrails persisted only for a few seconds, but these hadn’t even started to fade or disperse the entire time she was watching them. And what contrail could survive being pushed south by a cold front? Also, these were much wider than a contrail and had gotten layered on top of each other. This formation was very different from anything she had ever seen before — and she was a regular traveler across the state of Iowa. If this was something not naturally occurring, what were they? As she put the gas nozzle back, she thought, “What’s going on up there?”
Back on the interstate heading east again, a short time later Mia passed that same white boxy utility vehicle covered with antennas and satellite dishes that she had passed earlier on the road west of Des Moines. This time she noticed the logo and company name in red letters on the side of the front door — Hautonnibrol Fluid Systems. She had seen the name of that company before in news reports, but as a private contractor involved in American military conflicts in the Middle East, not as a fluid systems company. How did combat support relate to fluid systems? She’d never seen the company name on any vehicles on the busy trans-continental interstate before, even though she traveled I-80 several times a year. And although there was no reason to make the connection, Mia couldn’t help but speculate that the Hautonnibrol truck with all the monitoring equipment mounted to it was measuring the impact of those extremely long white strips in the sky, taking readings for a report on some secret government project. “This is weird! What is going on?” But there was no way of knowing.
As she continued traveling east, Mia’s cheerful mood withered and vanished along with the disappearing blue skies. The gray clouds moving in with the cold front covered everything but a thin sliver of blue to the south. And even that little bit of blue had taken on a faded, silvery color, imposing an overall haze everywhere. Ninety minutes later, just west of Iowa City, Mia took the exit for I-380 north.
This year for the Christmas break between semesters Mia stayed at her parent’s home in Blair,
Nebraska for two weeks, celebrating all the traditional holidays with family — Christmas Eve and Day, New Year’s Eve and Day, and last but not least, the playing of the Cornhusker post-season bowl game. In between she made the rounds to see nieces and nephews at both her brother’s and sister’s homes, visit with friends from high school and college who lived in the area, dropping off cards and gifts, congratulating people on recent life events like engagements, weddings, and births, while deflecting with good humor the question that everyone would ask her — “When will it be your turn to (marry, have kids, fill in the event), Mia?” At a nearby grocery store, she’d also run into the man she had dated in college — and decided against because he was constantly telling her she was too tall — along with his new wife, who was four inches shorter than he was. They certainly seemed to be very compatible.
For the first time since her sophomore year of high school, she had gone with her parents to their church for the midnight Christmas Eve service. Her memories of their mainline church consisted of a string of dull sermons and meaningless rituals, but to her surprise, this year she found she was touched by the beauty of the service. Happy families seated together, the special string quartet playing beautiful Christmas music, the sanctuary lit by candles, decorated with greenery, shiny glass balls, and ribbons of silver and gold. The songs and carols celebrating the birth of the Baby Jesus took on a new meaning and significance for her somehow, and the sight of a young couple with their wee babe taking part in the Nativity Pageant was precious. When the pastor said to the people, “Lift up your hearts,” she responded with her whole heart, “We lift them up to the Lord.” She knelt and took communion with the congregation and felt like she was truly a part of their community.
For whatever reason, the wall that she usually felt separating her soul from God, the barrier that prevented her from celebrating the joy of the season had come down this holy night. Everything about the service had a transcendent beauty. As they left the church at midnight, large feathery snowflakes were floating softly down on the still night air. As she looked up, snow flakes fell on her face and melted like tiny ice kisses. She had thought, “Maybe it’s a sign that my thirty-second year will be a year filled with miracles and wonders.”
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