Status: This is an online serialization of my novel Yesterday Was a Strange dream, which will be released August 21st, 2010.
Yesterday Was a Strange Dream
I
_________________
Extinction is a poor way to begin a novel. However, for the extinct, a story is one of the few ways in which they get to live again: dreams, memories, stories, and tales, like songs for the dead in the Roman Coliseum, or a rock show in Pompeii for the ghosts.
The most ancient of all known civilizations, the Mari, lived on an Earth-like planet one hundred thousand years before our Sun Sol was born.
The Mari never found a way to leave their little world and, as such, nobody noticed their existence until they began to disappear.
Their unnamed Sun above had drifted far away from them and appeared like a dime sized traffic light in the sky midday. The rainforests turned into lands of dead trees and the temperate zone was freezing tundra. The vegetation and the fruits had died and the foul began to fall from the sky. The land got colder and colder, the oxygen thinner and thinner, and this lasted for hundreds of years, and lasted until every species that ever lived upon the land had gone. The Mari were forced to retreat into the sea. They lost their paradise.
The Mari lived for generations in the sea, following that Great Migration, in the Northernmost—and coldest—island on the planet. Gliese is thought to have been a lavish land like Eden, before their planet drifted too far away. The rainforest was a desert full of dead trees.
The Mari were a primitive, yet sociable species: superstitious, and predominantly female. The females out-numbered the males a thousand to one, and the males were as rare as anything of value. The females, called the Vamari, differed with the males in two key areas: the males had a gland under the gills on the underside of their neck which allowed them, for brief periods of time, to walk on land and breathe the thin atmosphere of oxygen, and, had they lived on Earth, they would have gone to different bathrooms.
There was a period of peace and prosperity after the Great Migration. For a time the food was plenty, the games were lively, and the Mari got to enjoy being alive, in peace with one another and their environment. reign atop the food chain was short-lived. The Mari disappeared by the hundreds.
It was assumed that an invisible and highly intelligent hunter was catching them and killing them. Of course, no Mari ever saw the invisible killer, but they did get to see their children disappear leaving nothing but their naming necklace floating where they were standing. The males disappeared in greater numbers.
And in their most ancient of their literature: Sang’rea Dahl is abandoned at the dance by Atmi, and vows to never listen to the world again.
These are the stories the children heard when they visited the Temples of the Sang’rea Dahl in Transia. The skeptical, and cynical amongst the Mari didn’t believe the dance had ever taken place, and didn’t care if the mythical Sang’rea Dahl cared to listen or not. But the Mari continued to disappear. A lot of thinking was done—more thinking that had ever been done.
The wisest of their species took a rational, logical approach to getting the information right, and hypothesized. They believed that there could be another species on their planet, yet invisible to them: though integral colors in the composition of light, their range was but a few octaves of the universal chromatic scale, and somehow there were colors of the spectrum that the Mari could not see. Whatever it was that killed them, was of such a color, and it was killing them en masse. The wise, the men of science, they had no other explanation; so they turned to the church, where they sang to lull the Sang’rea Dahl back to sleep, and asked for them to address the matter. The highest cleric of the Araeosis order addressed the matter:
‘It is written, that our timeless Amari, lord of all, when he awakes, will adore his beloved; the waters will be full, and no one amongst us will suffer or worry. But there is another time, like the time before Araeosis saved the last of the Great Migration, before he heralded the era of Amati, these long and peaceful years have endured. But when Amati tries to sleep, the Sang’rea Dahl arises. This is the time of trial, the time of Sang’rea Dahl. Remember, the hero Irises said to his men: ‘God is not one, but too: Amati is our loving listener, who hears our songs and prayers, who bless us with peace and life. But there is another God, the mad God Sang’rea Dahl: violent, malevolent, who refuses to hear our words when we call, as he stomps our cities and takes our young, and it is said that Sang’rea Dahl will play for a thousand years before our friend Amati wakes again, and hears us, and lets the waters become blue again. We are living in the time of the Sang’rea Dahl. We are children of a blind God now, and no one will hear us when we call.’
Their skies continued to dim, and the Mari continued to disappear. The predator had encroached upon the Arabada—their breeding grounds, and began to take their young—the Mari fled deeper into the ocean, deeper into the dark, all running from something they had never seen.
When seals are born, they are thrown upon the loose sand of the shore. They progress slower and as they age closer to the Sea, and they stand on the rocks, struck down by the waves as they learn to walk. The Mari, as a species, were as a baby seal standing against the wind upon a wet rock on the shore before the waves.
Their earliest written accounts of history, in a pathetic sort of irony, recalled the tale of another migration, when the ancient species the Mari called the Here’e Yalov, migrated from the land into the seas to save their dying species from the danger of the land, the un breathable air. Araeosis, the hearing one, the only Mari to whom the Sang’rea Dahl would listen, saved them from the last time of Trial. And under the influence of Araeosis, the earliest scrolls were written and the order of the listeners were formed, to protect the literature, art, and essence of their people.
After the migration, the city of lights, the Holy City of Transia, was rebuilt on the ocean floor.
It was less populated than the city closer to the surface: Dorinia Prime, where the males lived, and Dorinia, for the women and children, where they lived outside the amber, glass-like walls that encircled the most fortified and protected city of Dorinia Prime.
The Mari, as would be expected of any species that slowly felt the hands of some strange clock wind down, sunk into a malaise, a period of mourning, a period that ended when the first male child to be born in seventy years was conceived outside of Dorinia Prime, to a mother by the name of Sari, and a father, name unknown, whose only presence was an X along the dotted line. And the mother’s signature, I accept. At the bottom of the mother’s page, a line was left blank for the name of the child.
Male children were revered as kings, raised by royalty, and treated as the species only hope; they lived in isolation, in the highest caste of society, and were afforded every luxury there was to have.
The last male had been dead for decades when the mother Sari would carry three eggs, a rarity to be sure but not unheard of, and gave birth to a son, a child who would one day bear the name Vasari the Last—once seen a the harbinger of the time of trial, and, to some, the child was foretold in prophesy: he would be the savior of his dying race, and, in doing so, make them immortal.
Extinction is a poor way to begin a novel. However, for the extinct, a story is one of the few ways in which they get to live again: dreams, memories, stories, and tales, like songs for the dead in the Roman Coliseum, or a rock show in Pompeii for the ghosts.
The most ancient of all known civilizations, the Mari, lived on an Earth-like planet one hundred thousand years before our Sun Sol was born.
The Mari never found a way to leave their little world and, as such, nobody noticed their existence until they began to disappear.
Their unnamed Sun above had drifted far away from them and appeared like a dime sized traffic light in the sky midday. The rainforests turned into lands of dead trees and the temperate zone was freezing tundra. The vegetation and the fruits had died and the foul began to fall from the sky. The land got colder and colder, the oxygen thinner and thinner, and this lasted for hundreds of years, and lasted until every species that ever lived upon the land had gone. The Mari were forced to retreat into the sea. They lost their paradise.
The Mari lived for generations in the sea, following that Great Migration, in the Northernmost—and coldest—island on the planet. Gliese is thought to have been a lavish land like Eden, before their planet drifted too far away. The rainforest was a desert full of dead trees.
The Mari were a primitive, yet sociable species: superstitious, and predominantly female. The females out-numbered the males a thousand to one, and the males were as rare as anything of value. The females, called the Vamari, differed with the males in two key areas: the males had a gland under the gills on the underside of their neck which allowed them, for brief periods of time, to walk on land and breathe the thin atmosphere of oxygen, and, had they lived on Earth, they would have gone to different bathrooms.
There was a period of peace and prosperity after the Great Migration. For a time the food was plenty, the games were lively, and the Mari got to enjoy being alive, in peace with one another and their environment. reign atop the food chain was short-lived. The Mari disappeared by the hundreds.
It was assumed that an invisible and highly intelligent hunter was catching them and killing them. Of course, no Mari ever saw the invisible killer, but they did get to see their children disappear leaving nothing but their naming necklace floating where they were standing. The males disappeared in greater numbers.
And in their most ancient of their literature: Sang’rea Dahl is abandoned at the dance by Atmi, and vows to never listen to the world again.
These are the stories the children heard when they visited the Temples of the Sang’rea Dahl in Transia. The skeptical, and cynical amongst the Mari didn’t believe the dance had ever taken place, and didn’t care if the mythical Sang’rea Dahl cared to listen or not. But the Mari continued to disappear. A lot of thinking was done—more thinking that had ever been done.
The wisest of their species took a rational, logical approach to getting the information right, and hypothesized. They believed that there could be another species on their planet, yet invisible to them: though integral colors in the composition of light, their range was but a few octaves of the universal chromatic scale, and somehow there were colors of the spectrum that the Mari could not see. Whatever it was that killed them, was of such a color, and it was killing them en masse. The wise, the men of science, they had no other explanation; so they turned to the church, where they sang to lull the Sang’rea Dahl back to sleep, and asked for them to address the matter. The highest cleric of the Araeosis order addressed the matter:
‘It is written, that our timeless Amari, lord of all, when he awakes, will adore his beloved; the waters will be full, and no one amongst us will suffer or worry. But there is another time, like the time before Araeosis saved the last of the Great Migration, before he heralded the era of Amati, these long and peaceful years have endured. But when Amati tries to sleep, the Sang’rea Dahl arises. This is the time of trial, the time of Sang’rea Dahl. Remember, the hero Irises said to his men: ‘God is not one, but too: Amati is our loving listener, who hears our songs and prayers, who bless us with peace and life. But there is another God, the mad God Sang’rea Dahl: violent, malevolent, who refuses to hear our words when we call, as he stomps our cities and takes our young, and it is said that Sang’rea Dahl will play for a thousand years before our friend Amati wakes again, and hears us, and lets the waters become blue again. We are living in the time of the Sang’rea Dahl. We are children of a blind God now, and no one will hear us when we call.’
Their skies continued to dim, and the Mari continued to disappear. The predator had encroached upon the Arabada—their breeding grounds, and began to take their young—the Mari fled deeper into the ocean, deeper into the dark, all running from something they had never seen.
When seals are born, they are thrown upon the loose sand of the shore. They progress slower and as they age closer to the Sea, and they stand on the rocks, struck down by the waves as they learn to walk. The Mari, as a species, were as a baby seal standing against the wind upon a wet rock on the shore before the waves.
Their earliest written accounts of history, in a pathetic sort of irony, recalled the tale of another migration, when the ancient species the Mari called the Here’e Yalov, migrated from the land into the seas to save their dying species from the danger of the land, the un breathable air. Araeosis, the hearing one, the only Mari to whom the Sang’rea Dahl would listen, saved them from the last time of Trial. And under the influence of Araeosis, the earliest scrolls were written and the order of the listeners were formed, to protect the literature, art, and essence of their people.
After the migration, the city of lights, the Holy City of Transia, was rebuilt on the ocean floor.
It was less populated than the city closer to the surface: Dorinia Prime, where the males lived, and Dorinia, for the women and children, where they lived outside the amber, glass-like walls that encircled the most fortified and protected city of Dorinia Prime.
The Mari, as would be expected of any species that slowly felt the hands of some strange clock wind down, sunk into a malaise, a period of mourning, a period that ended when the first male child to be born in seventy years was conceived outside of Dorinia Prime, to a mother by the name of Sari, and a father, name unknown, whose only presence was an X along the dotted line. And the mother’s signature, I accept. At the bottom of the mother’s page, a line was left blank for the name of the child.
Male children were revered as kings, raised by royalty, and treated as the species only hope; they lived in isolation, in the highest caste of society, and were afforded every luxury there was to have.
The last male had been dead for decades when the mother Sari would carry three eggs, a rarity to be sure but not unheard of, and gave birth to a son, a child who would one day bear the name Vasari the Last—once seen a the harbinger of the time of trial, and, to some, the child was foretold in prophesy: he would be the savior of his dying race, and, in doing so, make them immortal.