Mytholumina

by Storm Constantine

  Sallyann’s heart has begun to beat quickly in her chest. ‘I want to move in with you,’ she says urgently. ‘Let me live here.’

  Danny raises one eyebrow. He is silent for a few moments, then says, ‘Sleep on it,’ and squints up at the sky.

  Sallyann follows his gaze. ‘Shooting star!’ she cries, pointing.

  ‘Falling satellite,’ Danny says, ‘but perhaps it’s the same thing.’

  God Be With You

  You think I should talk about it? Why? It’s gone hasn’t it? Yeah, o.k., talk it out, spit it out, inner cleansing. I see. I suppose it all started just before my father walked out. That makes it sound like he was just sitting there one minute and packing up the next, but of course it took months overall for him to decide he had to leave. He left it so long because it only started with the small stuff, the problems, I mean. We never guessed it would get so bad, you see. We never guessed.

  My mother was whacked out at the time, teetering between heavy neurosis stuff and hi-flying tranq heaven. She’d mope around the place, drinking rye nectar, and then stand staring out of the fisheye at the place where she said Gaia would be. She’d ramble on about a thing she called Life, but which my father intimated through shrugs and glances meant nothing of the kind, or at least that she’d got mixed up about it somewhere. I didn’t know what was happening to her, though some people say some of us just never evolved properly to live off-world, out here in the Widebetween. We live on Africa Plate you see, the Experimental Autonomous Off-world Luxury Urban Complex, to give it its full title. It’s a tumbling anemone structure, the size of a small planet, orbiting the sun somewhere between Gaia and Mars. Not just anybody was given a place here; it’s bursting with bright sparks, scientists of all persuasions, mindtravellers and engineers, who bounce off each other and think up new ideas from the resulting fireworks. My father is a bioengineer. He invents plants; worktime, creating biomass that we can eat and use to regulate our atmosphere; hometime, perfecting his hobby of designing orchid-ferns. Our place was full of them which Mom forgot to look after. I had a good relationship with them though; one was clever enough to brew me nectar liquor in its bladder sacs. I used to take it along when I was gaming; the gang appreciated that.

  So, the small stuff that got my father worried. I don’t know how it got such a hold; no-one does, but it began as an interesting curiosity and escalated from there, spreading through the homekeep community like smoke. Not everybody has a high-responsibility lifepath on Africa Plate. My mother was one of those; bored looking out the fisheye and thinking of home. I was born on the Plate. It meant nothing to me.

  Anyway, it started with a man called Graham Seeds, a biochem technician’s boyfriend, telling everyone he was getting messages. Messages from an Alien. Of course. We were out here in space, weren’t we? Exactly the right place to pick something like that up. Perhaps we’d find out at last why they’d been flitting around the home world for so long interfering with our evolution. Ha ha. Such sarcastic wit had no effect on the appeal of Seeds’ disclosures. It burned like holy fire through the social meets of the uprooted husbands and wives associations. Something to latch onto. A purpose. Messages for the future. Life change interface. Everybody else thought it was a joke.

  Me and the gaming gang even started bringing it into our scenarios, laughing about it. Alicia took the role of a woman who was tuned into it all. We made her a prophetess. Laughed. Alicia goofed along and camped it up. Her mother was compiling notes about the whole thing, so she had the research material. I was chipping in with the stuff I’d picked up from Mom about how certain foods were bad to eat. Apparently, the Alien was saying we shouldn’t be tampering with genetics, whether of plant or animal, never mind the fact it was a necessity of life in a place like the Plate. My father is a patient sort. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been. He said nothing when our mealtimes began to change. One night she gave us porridge for dinner. She wouldn’t eat what Dad and I made when it was our turn to prepare meals, frugally laying out her apples and corn, saying nothing to us about what we ate, but the silence was crippling. One night, I just had to tell her corn itself had been mutated by people back on Gaia over thousands of years. She took no notice. Dad smiled at me encouragingly though and made me another fern. My room was getting so swamped I took a trayful over to Alicia’s because she was hosting the game that night.

  We were seriously into Kaoristica at the time, a fast, mind-development game, meeting three times a week, to travel the fractal paths of evolution, our game leader dreaming up reality conflicts to send us spinning into para-infinities. I’d reached Tripanic Experience and had started to compile my own scenarios at home, reckoning within a few months I’d be hosting my own game. I had a few surprises worked out already. Chevy nearly spoiled the game that night. He was in such a sulk. The rest of us were getting prickly and fouling our experiences because of it until Drina got him to tell us what was bugging him. Apparently, his father had got into this Alien business and had taken to barricading himself in their recreation room for two hours every night to commune with Him, moaning out all manner of mumbo-jumbo that drove Chevy and his mother mad with annoyance that was very nearly fear. In a low, embarrassed voice, Chevy told us his mother had confided in him about how she and his father no longer slept together. All that’s just for making babies, she’d said. The Alien had told the father that. Suddenly, it seemed quite a few of us had tales to tell concerning the Alien ‘transmissions’. There were ten people in our group, and only three of them hadn’t been affected by it in one way or another. It was noticed straight away that those three people had parents who both worked for Plate Maintenance and Evolution. Gardner was the first to suggest that maybe this problem might get more serious than we thought. Perhaps it was a mistake to treat it as a joke. A sobering idea. When the conversation dwindled, we renewed the game with dampened vigour. Even my DNA Alchemist character was beginning to think more about the possible consequences of this madness than the reality manipulation in the Labyrinth beyond the Moon he was involved in. He was beginning to wonder if it might not be a good idea to investigate the Alien thing right away; perhaps there was some truth in it, after all. Neither I, nor the Alchemist, were particularly cheered by this conclusion, which is probably why I never followed it up.

  Things got worse. Like Chevy’s father, my mother drew away from her family, looking at us sourly as if we didn’t smell right or something. Occasionally, she’d come out of her shell and corner me or my father, telling us the joys of embracing the Alien’s words. She spoke of how her world had opened up, her heart was filled with love, but there was little of this for us to see. Dad told me he’d had a word with our section mindtraveller who was responsible for community well-being and that she’d just thrown up her hands in disgust when he’d suggested Mom ought to pop along to her office for a chat. ‘O.k., o.k.,’ she’d said bitterly. ‘Your wife along with the hundred other people directed to me by their families!’

  It seemed there was a waiting list in her department right now for consultations.

  ‘They believe this junk!’ the mindtraveller had said. ‘I sit there asking their beaming faces questions and they’re so happy, and nodding and smiling, that I’m beginning to wonder whether, in fact, it’s not me that needs the therapy.’

  The thing is, all these Alien lovers were not doing anything illegal or blatantly anti-social, so there wasn’t much anyone could do. Everyone has a right to free choice. If it wasn’t harming life on the Plate in any way, it had to be allowed to continue.

  Then my mother married the Alien. Yes, really. Apparently, her contract with my father was invalid in her eyes because he was not a believer. She married a creature she had never seen (nor ever would in my opinion), in some kind of cerebral trysting ceremony presided over by Graham Seeds, the self-appointed Alien mouth-piece. I remember my mother taking my hands in hers, my flesh crawling, as I looked in horror at her bland, smiling face. She asked me to understand. ‘I’m so happy,’ she’d said
. ‘I know I’m loved.’

  ‘By what?’ I’d asked, almost choked. ‘Don’t you know we love you, me and Dad?’

  ‘I believe in Him,’ she’d answered, eyes gazing upwards, beyond the multi-structures of the Plate into space itself. ‘I really do believe.’ Her face and neck flushed pink.

  I pulled away, sensing the gulf, and a hint of something obscene.

  My father moved into a singles block next day. Even though I begged him to choose a duapt and take me with him, he’d gravely shaken his head and asked me to stay with Mom. ‘Just keep your eyes open,’ he said as he packed his things to leave. ‘Please do this for me, son.’

  ‘Isn’t there anything we can do?’ I asked him, pleading, my comfortable image of Father Capable of Solving Anything dissolving to mist.

  He shook his head. ‘It’s her choice,’ he said. ‘We can’t force anyone to think in certain ways. You know that. We left all that behind a long time ago.’

  Did we? Some scared part of me was beginning to wonder.

  I took to visiting my Dad regularly, in between meeting the gang for gaming sessions. It got me away from home, which was a relief because my mother was beginning to spook me thoroughly. I cooked for myself all the time now, which at first hadn’t bothered her, but lately she’d begun to whine about how I was perpetuating the sins of the people by my actions. It is not easy to eat a meal when someone’s yelling that your food’s evil down your neck. I was choking on her words as much as what was on my plate. Gradually, I was forced to take more of my meals in the canteen down the hall, just to get some peace and quiet for my digestion.

  One day I got home from college to find she’d blanked all the wall-screens in my room. I was furious. All my scenarios for the game I was creating had been mapped there. Mom looked triumphant as I raved my angry hurt at her.

  Her eyes gleamed. ‘Someone has to close the doors that let evil in,’ she said.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I cried. ‘What evil?’

  ‘The wall-screens. What you create there comes in and takes you. I know. He told us that. I won’t have that in my home. I’m sorry, Lyle, but I’m going to have to do something about the wickedness you’re involved in.’

  My heart slopped into my stomach and I could feel the walls closing in on me, blank screens or not. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  Mom raised her arms, and stalked about, high on whatever was running in her veins to make her think this way. ‘Screens, games, holo-films; all lies. They warp the truth and turn people into the walking dead. Lyle, I understand it all now, and it has to be stopped. We have a chance here, out on Africa Plate. I was wrong to want to go back to Gaia. It’s here Salvation will find us. He found us here. The only thing we have to do is make the Plate a decent place to live. Then He’ll come to us, but not before.’

  She was waiting for her husband. The new one, without a name.

  ‘The Ships will come,’ my mother breathed, hands clasped, eyes all glassy, ‘great shining, wonderful ships and they’ll take us away from here, to the world of immortality and ultimate beauty.’ She fixed me with a gimlet glance and added sharply, ‘However, only the Believers will be given places on those ships.’

  ‘And what about the rest of us?’ I asked, just as meanly.

  She hesitated. ‘We have been told the Plate will destroy itself eventually. Those who insist on clinging to their ways of wickedness and ignorance will perish.’ She put her hands on my shoulders, either ignoring or unaware of my flinching. ‘You are my son,’ she said. ‘And I can save you. You’ll see this for yourself eventually, I’m sure. I can wait.’

  The mindtravellers were the first to get attacked. Oh, nothing physical. The Alien lovers were too smart for that. There were plasmaflyers in the air, adhering to walls, saying the mindtravellers were denizens of the black abyss beyond the universe disguised as men, whose sole purpose was to lead the people of Africa Plate towards dissolution. Apparently, these black denizens were lurking all over the place and hid in the subconscious mind. Trying to open up these areas, via normal personal development or with the mindtravellers, was a dark, disastrous mistake we were all making.

  ‘We must get back to simple things,’ my mother told me on one of the occasions I was trying to sneak out of the apartment to get to my father. ‘If we trust in Him and turn away from the infernal meddling into our evolution, we will be Saved.’

  I left her ranting.

  Dad had a friend over when I reached his place. A mindtraveller named Selene, who I’d always liked, and who, it seemed, Dad has always liked as well, though perhaps not in quite the same way. She looked tired and harried, locks of hair falling into her eyes, which she kept having to brush away. We sat on Dad’s cushions drinking orchid-fern nectar while Selene spoke in short, anxious sentences.

  ‘Our department has been in touch with Gaian authorities over this,’ she said. ‘Left it too late, maybe. Wanting to prove we can manage without them. Shit!’ She punched air and appealed to my father. ‘I’m scared now, Lorin, really scared. These people spook me. We let it get too big. Laughing...’ She shook her head. ‘Yesterday, some maniac tried to throw something over me, saying the Alien had blessed it through him. Told me it would cast out the black denizen in me. He had no aura, Lorin, really, just nothing. Like he was dead or something. It sped me out.’ She sipped her drink and looked at me. ‘Lyle, you be careful.’

  ‘Oh, I just ignore it,’ I said, trying to cheer her up.

  Selene shook her head. ‘What I mean is, those games you’re into. They’re tuning into them now as the next Bad Thing. Get it? Be careful.’

  ‘How is your mother?’ Dad asked tightly.

  ‘I don’t tell her anything,’ I replied. ‘She blanked my screens.’

  ‘Maybe you should find yourself a place for you and the boy, Lorin,’ Selene said.

  It was what I wanted, but the mere fact it was necessary scared me rotten.

  The skin round Alicia’s eyes was purple when she came to the game-meet at Pieter’s place. We were having to be more careful about where we met, and had naturally narrowed it down to the three members’ homes whose parents were both still OK. Pieter’s Mom really sped out when she came to sit and chat with us for a while and saw Alicia’s face. We were all feeling a bit sick because bad bruises - that’s what the purple skin was - wasn’t something we saw too often. OK, people have accidents, but Alicia began to cry, thick tears running down her face, and told us her Mom had hit her. Not once, but four times.

  Pieter’s mother went green. ‘What the ‘Form’s sake for?’ she asked, swallowing deeply.

  Alicia rubbed at her face, leaning against Chevy who’d lent a comforting arm. ‘Because I told her yesterday I was coming here,’ she said. ‘Mom said it was evil, that I was letting the black denizen in my head take control. I tried to tell her she was wrong, that we didn’t do anything bad, but she wouldn’t listen. I told her she could think what she liked, that was her right, but that I didn’t agree with her and I was coming here anyway. That’s when she began to... that’s when she began to hit me.’

  ‘What did your father do?’ Pieter’s mother asked, her hand pinching the flesh of her throat.

  Alicia blinked. ‘He’s not there anymore. She told him to go. She married the Alien. That’s what she said. And she thinks she can save me. She says it’s a war she’s fighting, a truth war. I think that makes it OK for her to hit me.’

  Pieter’s mother had gone from green to white. She stood up. ‘You guys carry on,’ she said. ‘I have to... I have to speak to someone. Anyone!’

  After she’d gone, Alicia said in a small voice, ‘This is violence, isn’t it? This is what we’ve read about, isn’t it? People hurting each other. I never really believed it. In-forms! It’s real now.’

  It was too late to speak to anyone. An angry wind was sweeping through the halls, tunnels, chambers and walkways of the Plate. It reached right down to the innermost levels where the core of our little artificial wo
rld burned hard and hot. It rushed over the yawning solar panels stretching out like hands from the spiralling limbs outside. It was a cold wind, full of fury and frustrated bitterness. The mindtravellers were beginning to recognise it for what it was, but naming this demon could not dispel it. It was more than a wind; it was an infection. One that we’d unwittingly carried with us from Gaia, something everyone had overlooked, being too pleased with themselves, too confident, to wonder whether the debilitating soul diseases might be more difficult to eradicate than they’d thought. The society that came to inhabit Africa Plate had been groomed for its role; outworn conceptions cast off and left behind, old mistakes accepted and shed. We were supposed to be an enlightened society, free from the repressive hierarchical structures of the past, free from the restrictions of primitive fears and guilt. The scientists, the engineers, the mindtravellers, had all been training themselves; they had been hand-picked. Their lovers, husbands and wives had been given the choice to accompany them to this new horizon. This had seemed only humane and right. Hardly any refused the offer. After all, they were loyal to those they loved. Perhaps their training hadn’t been as meticulous. They were not hand-picked. An oversight. A vestige of patriarchal thinking. These people were not important. They would be carried by the bright stars who had married them and loved them. Wrong. Those bright stars misunderstood the responsibility, didn’t even recognise it. Some people are too frightened to live without external gods. So they created one, and called it an Alien.

  It was stupid of me. I can see that now. But she was out for the evening, you see. Said she’d be out for a long time. A meeting she said. More messages. I’d been clever enough to play down my leisure activities in her company, pretending to listen to whatever she came out with, asking questions. That satisfied her. So I asked the gang over to my place for a game. I wanted so badly to treat them to my scenarios - I’d secretly recreated them on the wallscreens when my mother was out, filing them and blanking the screens so she wouldn’t know. I thought it would be safe. The group was depleted, not because anyone had dropped out exactly, but it was sometimes difficult for some of them to get away from home for the evening. We were being careful, all of us certain something would happen soon to make things better. We knew about the contact with Gaia and it was rumoured some people were coming out to help us. How, we could not, dare not, guess. The Alien lovers were becoming increasingly violent and no-one else could handle it. We lacked the desire to fight back, even to save ourselves. We believed the key to survival was to make ourselves invisible, but that was difficult in the enclosed environment of the Plate. We could only wait for help. Perhaps the people from Gaia would take all the Alien lovers away. We were all so sad. We’d lost so much. It hurt. Anyway, I had this subdued gang over and got them tuned into an uplifting experience chain so we could all forget our troubles for a while. I led them dancing and spinning into ecstasy spirals, parting layers of the multiverse and letting the lightseeds spill out and over us. My mindmaps gushed over the walls, wrapping us in colours and unimaginable vistas; I really had excelled myself.