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# SARKO
Sarko (1994)
## FILES
=> gemini://informis.land/textfiles/magazines/SARKO/sarko-v1n1 [ 34874] Sarko Issue #1 (February 20, 1994)
=> gemini://informis.land/textfiles/magazines/SARKO/sarko-v1n2 [ 41672] Sarko Issue #2 (April 22, 1994)
=> gemini://informis.land/textfiles/magazines/SARKO/sarko-v1n3 [ 38487] Sarko Issue #3 (July 20, 1994)
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SARKO
Sun February 20, 1994 Volume 1 : Issue 1 ISSN 1022-1069
How much mass
is needed
to populate a world....
CONTENTS, #1.1 (Feb 20,1994)
001 <1.1a> Yue Lan - the 14th day of the 7th moon May 13, 1993 Shatin
002 <1.2a> pointing and grouting the Wah To Bldg June 11, 1993 Shatin
003 <1.0> "The vacuum whispers nothing" May 15,1993 Shatin
004 <1.0> the Barrows May 15, 1993 Shatin
005 <1.1> Tivot & The Bishop 1 September 2, 1993 Ha Wo Che
006 <1.0a> "Short-haired goblins" September 2, 1993 Ha Wo Che
007 <1.2> "transients and trolls" August 25, Ha Wo Che
007 <1.0a> Tivot & The Bishop 2 September 2, 1993 Ha Wo Che
009 <1.0a> "Whole Geosectors were left trashed" September 2, 1993 Ha Wo Che
010 <1.0> "network layer packets" July 5, 1993 Shatin
011 <1.2> "The machines were putting out another fire" Aug 25, 1993 Ha Wo Che
012 <2.1> Tivot & The Bishop 3 September 2, 1993 Ha Wo Che
Notes:
Yue Lan <1.0> December 15, 1993 Ha Wo Che
Prins <1.0> December 16, 1993 Ha Wo Che
Cisterns <1.0> December 17, 1993 Ha Wo Che
Collectors <1.0> December 19, 1993 Ha Wo Che
Ma Kok Riots <1.1> September 23, 1993 Shatin
Sarko is journal of works-in-progress published bi-monthly.
Subscriptions are available at no cost electronically from
sarko-request@mach.hk.super.net. Put "sarko-request" in the
subject and anything you want in the body of the message.
You can find me in Hong Kong by voice (852) 605-7212, fax
(852) 605-7238 or by snail mail at: d.i.h. press PO Box
1010, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong.
Unless otherwise stated Sarko is copyrighted (c) Brad
Collins. All Rights Reserved. This is not public domain,
it is Literary Freeware. You are encouraged to copy and
distribute these texts for non-commercial use as long as
this notice is attatched.
These are completely original literary works by Brad
Collins, who bears all customary responsibilities for its
contents and arrangement. The characters and events
portrayed herein are fictional; any resemblance to other
characters living or dead is entirely coincidental.
---------------------------------------
Yue Lan - the 14th day of the 7th moon.
in the Barrows
The gates of Hell would soon close,
the ghosts having eaten their fill and sent packing
for another year.
Scattered piles of smoldering ash
formed loose rings like necklaces round the cisterns,
dotted with the remains of apples, oranges and oblong purple prins stuck thick
like pin cushions with the burnt stubs of joss sticks.
People, still squatting,
fed money into the flames, the eerie
flicker projecting dancing shadows and shifting smoke
curling round the blackened limestone rustication.
---------------------------------------
pointing and grouting the Wah To Bldg.
in the Barrows
High above, the spiderwork was coming down, piece by piece
as each pole is cut free, and hand over hand drops to
clatter, muffled, onto a Mitsubishi flatbed bobbing gently
in low pockets of mist hanging in heavy pools, growing dim
in the fading light.
The first stars of the evening were fading into place;
another moonless night wrapping the weary figures moving on
the bamboo in pale blue hues, masking their determination
to fill the load and go home.
The floods kick in, casting oblong arcs of illumination,
giving the mass shape, welding the fragil geometry of pale
bamboo and green netting to the building together whole,
even as it's dismantled and left forever incomplete, a
labyrinth with no map to guide its way in or out....
For a few precious moments the scaffold balances, poised
between worlds. A willful arresting of entropy is at work
here, percolating the vast vanquished ether itself, both
revealing and concealing something...as yet unnamed and
terrible in its lack of actuality.
---------------------------------------
The vacuum whispers nothing. There are only clumsy blunt
stumps where once there were passions, pains and stridings.
No choice but to keep moving, keeping warm, keeping busy,
never able to risk stopping long enough for the exhaustion
to clear.... Every and all is bashed into submission by
the sheer size of the thing. It's part of the service you
see. Fiber-optic channels and runnels -- strung along the
underground weave, cover the planet in an upholstery of
glass, a data fabric of light.... The satellites and
sublights -- and the spooky transmitters, talking through
the stars... linking the layered gridwork of windows and
orphans, of redundant dumps and feeds. It can all be
spliced together from any one of a million couplings,
interfacing the network of data, of intelligence, of brute
mechanical muscle, of gossamer emotive resilience.... Gawd,
ain't it all grand, the whole silly organism, and ain't it
fried, fried, that no one can ever be alone again. Can't
even plow yer 'ol lady without a voyeuristic universe of
acronyms being in on it, the FRB, PLO, the BBC, CYO and the
NKOA all having it down, down to the exact moment you blow
yr wad -- temperature flux, calorie burn, fluid volume, the
precise dimension of the wet spot.... No need for death
rattles, faked climaxes, holding your breath, wiping that
large snot on the underside of your chair -- it's all been
recorded, measured, in infrared, ultraviolet and
electromagnetic, in precise atomic clumpings and lumpings
into and onto infinity. Big Brother? The Big lie --
cause yes he's watching, recording, measuring every
drop of saliva with a Pavlovian obsession, marking and
mapping the position of every clipped toenail even as they
fall.... But he doesn't care....
---------------------------------------
the Barrows
The upper galleries were choked with the stench of a
generational accumulation of organic detritus: goblin nests
full of chicken and rat bones, looted rubbish and grey-green
goblin shit, doper's shooting galleries speckled with drops
of dry blood and broken droppers, under shifting drifts of
used pump sticks and melt-blisters, suicides, in various
stages of decomposure or mummification, depending on air
currents or disposition, uncountable and undiscovered even
by the rats. . . all composting and fermenting, feeding the
wretched wraiths and barrow wight's insatiable desire to
become tangible, forever wandering the lower galleries,
taunted with the promise of substance. . . .
---------------------------------------
Tivot & The Bishop 1
"Continental drift my ass," thought Tivot as he
picked his way down a greasy wet back alley in the Barrows
behind the not inconsiderable stink of Bishop's bulk,
blazing a sweaty trail through the labyrinth of cardboard
and mounds of sodden, rotting ruffage that smelled like
shit in the stagnant heat.
"Where the fuck do you get off talking about
continental drift? Do you really think anyone actually
believes you know what you're talking about?"
"It's a known fact that girls go for, you know,
intellectual types," Bishop said flourishing a finger as he
kicked aside a massive chunk of snot green foam rubber.
"Girls aren't that stupid.... continental drift....
shit," Tivot said noticing a slice of mold-riddled white
bread that had adhered to his leg like a lesion.
High above the squat Soobish stonework rose a
scatter of Mooter spires braiding thirty-floors into the
humidity, interspacing and contrasting the sharp-cornered
colourless Swathu granite and disintegrating concrete
towers, encased in a rusting lacework of braces, brackets,
pipes and ductwork, he resulting lattice becoming a
corroding self-replicating loop. A makeshift patchwork of
aluminum cans and discarded wire of varying gauges, shore up
the equilibrium, providing grist to rust and molder,
precipitating out as fine black particles, coating and
coagulating with the acid rainwater then hardening to form
the cement holding the barrows together, obscuring and
maintaining the sophistry of conduits, cable-drops and
railholes, protecting the anonymity of fiber strung
haphazzard through and between buildings, masking surfaces
with an absorbant non-reflective grease, keeping line of
sight clean in the radio, micro-wave and infarred.
---------------------------------------
Short-haired goblins, (proudly sporting tunics and breeches
crudely fashioned from mildewing yellow polyethylene weave
bags looted from a supermarket in Ma Kok during last weeks
blackout) and the odd lobotomized Mooter had begun to creep
out of their daylight nests and warrens and were picking
through the debris, dropping the already half-rotten fruit
into canvas sacks, talons clicking and scratching the cobblestone.
But it was all strangely quite. Even the obnoxious cackle of
Goblins that normally echoed throughout the city at night was
absent. The few gangs brave enough to come out this early,
moved nervously with muted tension. Occasionally, one would
break out in a short crack of laughter, throttled back into
silence by their fellows before warily peering this way and that
on the lookout for the odd malingering ghost, perhaps trying to
get in one last snack before the gates closed.
---------------------------------------
transients and trolls, wearing shit-stained trousers
and year old beards with more lice than hair,
slept on corrugated divans, dozing in modal chemical states,
as if the alley were a bunk house, molecular sparks
zipping through their veins, burping and farting
inflammable anthracite mineral dreams with erratic wait-states
---------------------------------------
Tivot & The Bishop 2
An old mangy tomcat sat in a puddle of light, it's
tail bobbed, lazily torturing a cockroach the size of a
small rat while an old woman, clumsily stalked the cat with
a rusty machete, her round leathery face punctured by a
fixed toothless grin, crooning, "Mao Mao, Mao Mao" in a
thick Swathu accent.
"Fucking old bag.... " Tivot mumbled as they
brushed past just as she brought down the blade in a smooth
deft arc neatly lopping off the cat's head, its mouth
stuffed full of cockroach legs.
"Tivot, did you see--"
"Fucking witch should be put down."
"Tivot, she's gonna eat that cat."
"Put down like a mad dog. The whole fucking lot of
'em."
Tivot picked up what looked for all the world like
a giant plastic paddle from a gallon sized Hoodsie-cup for
some fat little kid grown to gigantic proportions through
the intervention of some mad scientist... and proceeded to
scrape off the wet plaster-like slice of Wonder from his
leg.
"Can't be very safe," Bishop said.
"Huh?"
"That cat, can't be safe to eat--"
"No-fucking-shit Bishop," tossing aside the paddle
in disgust.
Behind them now, a group of Goblins had
materialized and were wrestling with the old woman for the
dead cat. Laughing and poking each other in the eyes, one
grabbed the cat head and threw it, hitting another Goblin
on the nose who in turn threw it at the old woman. The cat
head glanced off her ear, smearing the side of her head
with cat blood, "Pok kai, maw kwai!" the old woman
screeched, waving her machete.
---------------------------------------
Whole Geosectors were left trashed after the fracas --
it'll be a knock down, kick 'em in the balls fight to the
death brawl now. No room for measured responses or
controlled escalation -- this is a war of alembic tensions
where there is only the probability wave, a roulette wheel
waiting for the magic wand to tap thrice. Tap, Tap, Tap
Gotcha! Yr actualized sucker, bend over....
There are tears in his eyes, as the poor bugger, rubbing
his raw, red ass, slowly walks offstage, tiny prisms
fracturing the light, matrixing and actually correcting his
sight. Not just an optical correction but correcting his
very soul....
Suddenly, for the first time in his life he is sane. His
vision clearing even as his ass is still smarting, tiny
runnels of sperm mixing with the K-Y running down his
sweaty chill legs, but he is sane!
Like a mainline revelation the sanity hits home,
momentarily frying his brain before stabilizing, to float
high on an epiphanal cloud, starting to solidify,
separating from the wave, taking .... form
---------------------------------------
network layer packets
in the pipe
with a beginning and an end
---------------------------------------
The machines were putting out another fire,
in the Lam Kau Mow Primary School
abandoned in the '93 riots
just south of Ma Kok station,
no one was told --
the system was self-correcting
the building woke in time, to document its own demise,
each layer taking care of its own, cameras running
their spectral hash, recording rats escapeing through
corroded melt-sheets, sealing the windows, the grid
shutting down in increments, thermostats encased in
wire cages in classrooms, blinking dead as each
circuit is consummed, each drop ticked off, each loop terminated as they melted, mapping the topology
of the growing blindspot.
---------------------------------------
Tivot & The Bishop 3
Even at this hour, the crashing tumble of mahjong
tiles being mixed, filtered down from somewhere above,
bringing the reassurance of annoyance, like the single thin
stream of water breaking the tension in a diving pool,
staving off stagnation, allowing passage between worlds.
It was as if, if the silence were ever allowed to settle,
it would solidify and harden, forming another impenetrable
barrier that no amount of proximity could break, signaling
the final isolation by the demiurge, that ultimate of
control freaks, not understanding that it was loneliness
that always kills first....
The alley intersected with other alleys connecting
to one road or another, framing brief illuminations from
bright yellow lamps, the light capturing a jumble of
orbiting tiggers high above the occasional lone figure
pissing against a wall or gaunt, bare chested hawkers,
wearing white cotton shorts and plastic clogs, tapping out
a two-four beat with metal shears on the edge of boiling
pots of fish balls and various shards of internal organs,
shooting shadows to sweep and probe the alleys, forced like
ghosts and the light propelling them, to travel in straight
lines.
All of this cloak and scamper was starting to wear
thin with the Tivot who had just gotten word from Gothot
that they had to pack up the dig (three months early) and
move her precious rig, Yurts, power plants, alcohol and
assorted sex toys that Gothot's entourage of Grad students,
groupies, technicians and low-rent burglars had amassed to
yet another god forsaken hole, probably without the grace
of a decent pub.
Tivot didn't have much respect for archaeologists,
lumping them in with Tapeworms, Accountants and people who
ate with their mouths open on his shit list. But then,
nobody much cared what Tivot thought and Tivot had the
sense to keep his opinions to himself and take the contract
when it came along.
The Gothot job had saved their ass, no question,
but that was now a long time past and Tivot was getting
antsy. He wasn't running no goddamn trucking service.
Tivot was no company man.
It was times like this that Tivot kicked himself
for not getting a local interface. It's not as not as if
it was difficult, any of a hundred shops he walked past
daily sold them. Tivot'd had a socket job when he was a
teenager and it would have been easy to replace the hard
bump, matching his skin behind his ear with a local
splinter. He'd been on Canter nearly eight months and his
splinter was only able to pick up one feed.
The fundies up on the mesa, had set up their own
feed, blasting the entire geosector with a constant barrage
of preaching that gave Tivot a headache, and was designed
to drown out or preferably burn out any competing net.
He could have used a flasher, he had a lovely
Motorola model he'd bought off of an AWOL dit on Elwell,
which could have filtered out the fundie feed for him. But
Tivot never liked having the thing hovering behind him,
watching him like that all of the time.
It'd been weird, that first few weeks after they
arrived, not being able to get a feed on the street. Not
hearing Hector mumbling to himself just under the
threshold. Not having lookup or being able to close yer
eyes and plug into the local e-drops to see what was
happening down the street or knowing when it was gonna rain
or any of a million things flashing across yer retina,
competing with the outside world.
It was so quiet, so empty and lonely outside the
net. It was a quiet that Tivot hadn't known in decades, a
quiet that once you got used to, became difficult to give
up....
"Are you sure this is where Barf told us to meet
him?"
"Yup, this is where he bought those rice cookers and
ground dog meat last week."
"Fucking Barf."
"Why don't you lay off. It's been three, at least
three years now, since-- "
"Since he screwed-us-over is what. We almost got
stuck on this shit-hole fer good. And why? Because of
that dried up shit-fer-brains Barf and his get rich quick
schemes."
"Three years is three years Tivot. I think we
should give 'em another chance. If the tables were
turned--"
"He'd be outta here faster than he could blow his
nose!"
"No. He--"
"Faster than he could blow his nose Bishop."
"Not, I mean Barf isn't like that and you know, I
mean.... Three years Tivot. Let's hear him out okay? I
got a feeling he's on to something. Did you hear his
voice? He hasn't sounded so, that excited since.... It's
been a long time, you gotta admit. And Barf does have a
good idea once in a--"
"The man has a whiffle ball for a brain!"
"You're no great brain yourself Tivot."
"Hah! This from a man who. . . . you and your
continental drift!"
"Go ahead, laugh. You'll see, the next time we're
in a bar and all you can talk about is how big your--"
"Fuck off--"
"I, I'll start talking about plate tectonics and we
will see, We will see who impresses the girls."
"Yeah right.... Where the hell are we anyway?"
"Dog meat. During the day this is the biggest dog meat
market in Canter. You know Barf... he gets real
sentimental. Ever since he found out that he was Korean--"
"What the fuck does that have to do with eating dog
meat?"
"I don't know, something he read..."
"Barf can't read."
"He can too. He just doesn't... very often. When
was the last time that you. I mean okay so he doesn't read
very... maybe he heard it in a bar or something."
"Or something. Korean my ass. Barf ain't Korean.
He was born somewhere in the Jushrut."
"Maybe his ancestors were Korean," he said as they
rounded a corner, obscured by a congregation of stacked
toilet bowls and Mooter stink troughs, stained in yellows,
browns and greens.
"Bull shit... I tell yeah, he's got a whiffle ball
fer--" Bishop felt his foot splash slightly in something wet.
"Oh shit!" A headless body lay sprawled in a broad
expanse of blood and shards of brain and bone. It took a
second before Tivot recognized the clothes. "It's Barf."
"It can't be Barf."
"He's dead."
"No, no he's--"
"You gotta have a head to--"
"We could revive him."
"He has no fucking head. He's de--"
"He can't--"
"Bishop, his head was burnt clean off," he said,
grabbing his arm. "I know dead. Barf is dead." Tivot
looked around the alley, his heart pounding in his mouth.
But looking for what? There were only beer bottles, a half
empty jar of cheese whiz, a small mound of mouldy pizza
crusts and the frayed remnants of a cream coloured
acceleration couch ripped from a Mooter transport being
embraced by the widening pool of Barf's blood. The acrid
smell of burnt flesh and ozone hung heavy in the thick
still air. The alley, seamless slime-covered ceramic walls
with bricked up windows or doors, extended up into the
gloom. "We gotta get outta here."
"We can't just leave him here. It's Barf," Bishop
said, lifting one foot from the sticky puddle of Barf.
"They may come back."
"Poor Barf."
"The bastard almost got us killed with him."
"It's still Barf. Barf is still Barf Tivot. We
just can't leave him for the rats. It's not. . . decent."
"Barf musta been holding."
"I didn't think Barf would ever die."
"It musta been pretty big."
"God, it burnt his whole fucking head off!"
"Musta been holding something big to get popped
like that."
"You can't revive him without a head huh?"
Tivot shook his head.
They made their way down the alley, leaving bloody
tracks that quickly dried brown in the hot dry air. Tivot
stopped short of the end of the alley, peering cautiously
into the near empty street peppered with piles of smoking
ash. Several Floxies, in dark tattered robes, glided
silently through the puddles of light, their brown fur
looking grey in the gloom. A lone rice-paper banknote,
having escaped incineration, fluttered and bobbed above a
heat vent in the street.
There were always eyes in the barrows. It was the
eyes that got to you... glowing behind grates in storm
drains, from between shapeless piles of rags, cardboard and
plastic heaped in bricked-up doorways, from barred windows
barely seen over the drip and between holes in corrugated
eaves, flashing from turret slits and peep holes in
haphazard barricades and fortified doors and gates, through
a million cameras and e-drops that were little more than
flat matt squares above doors, ringing utility poles,
street signs and discarded bits of rubbish left for dead or
just to look that way....
"Tivot!" Bishop said in a stage whisper. It was
finally beginning to sink in that they were in deep shit.
"We're gonna die!" Bishop fell back against a wall,
gasping for breath. "Tivot, whatta we gonna do? What if
the net--"
"This is the backwash stupid. They don't have
hardware like that out here. Unless--"
"We're gonna die Tivot."
"It coulda been the local--"
"Slugs? The fucking police?" Bishop groaned,
dropping his head into his hands. "We're gonna die. Some
flasher will drop outta the smog and pop us. I just know--"
"Pull yourself together. We'll get out of this."
"This is not good Tivot."
"You hear me? We'll get outta this." Tivot took a
deep breath. "We just gotta get outta here." Tivot
squinted into the gloom, hoping it was clear. "Come on."
"Where are we going?"
Tivot hesitated, unsure of what to do. "The ship,"
he finally said, "Screw Gothot and her fucking Pebble
Boxes. We've got to get outta here before anyone finds
Barf."
"But we didn't kill him."
"You got any better ideas?"
---------------------------------------
Notes
---------------------------------------
Yue Lan
When Muk Lin's, mother died she found herself traveling
down the long road to hell. The road was lined with the
ghosts of people who had died of hunger. Every time she
tried to eat, the hungry ghosts turned the food in her bowl
to fire. Her son was distressed that his mother was in so
much pain and went to ask the priests in the temple for
some way to help his mother. The priests devised a prayer
called the Yue Lan Poon King , to be spoken on the 15th of
the 7th month, and give offerings of food to ease the pain
of the hungry ghosts.
On the first day of the seventh moon (late August or early
September) the gates of hell are opened and the ghosts are
free for two weeks to walk the earth. On the 14th day,
called the Yue Lan Fesitval, ghosts receive offerings from
the living. Fruit is offered and paper cars, paper houses
and paper money are burnt, and once this occurs these gifts
become the property of the dead. People whose relatives
suffered a violent death are particularly concerned to
placate the spirits, visiting the place where the person
was killed to leave flowers and burn incense. People will
not swim, travel, get married, move house, or indulge in
other risky activities during this time. There are also
lots of Cantonese opera performances -- presumably to give
the ghosts one good night out before they have to go back
down below for another year.
---------------------------------------
Prins
An oblong shaped purple fruit that looks like a waxy
skinned eggplant with a taste and consistancy simular to an
apple. Prins grow on high bushes and are thought to have
be native to one of the Dauk worlds washward from Bambi
along the belt.
The success of the plant in such a wide variety of
ecosystems strongly suggests some kind of genetic
alteration though this view is highly contended by a number
of researchers.
Prins are thought by many to appeal to ghosts and were
quickly adopted as good luck symbols and devices for
enticing ancestors into helping to the living pick a
winning horse or help in selecting a lottery number. This
can be seen especially during festivals like Yue Lan or Mid
Autumn Festival, the fruit often is sold in markets at 4 or
5 times the normal price.
There is a very old story told to children throughout the
Jushrut of a priest called Fan Lai Tai who had spent thirty
years working as a government hooker before renouncing her
crimes against humanity and became sort of a Johnny Apple
Seed character, who traveled through the Jushrut and even
up into the San Zi planting prin bushes near temples and,
as Zappa said, spreading prins across the land using all of
the frightening little skills that science has made
available as a form of penance to the thousands of souls
she had screwed.
Carp, barbel and trout love prins.
George Shea
Lace and Lures
prins are to barbel as catnip to a cat
no sooner does the bait hit the water
and a veritable feeding frenzy ensues
·
WWilma Mak
Journal of the Jost Angling Society
the use of prins as bait is banned by every
fishing organization known to this writer
as it is thought that prins are not a bait
but a narcotic to marine life and is not
used by any true sportsmen
---------------------------------------
Cisterns
Webster's Collegiate
cis·tern \'sis-tern\ n
[ME, fr. OF cisterne, fr. L cisterna, fr. cista box, chest
Ð more at CHEST] (13c)
1: an artificial reservoir for storing liquids and esp.
water; specif: an often underground tank for storing
rainwater
2: a well like structure at the centre of Mooter villages
which is thought to be a window into the world of the dead.
3: a large usu. silver vessel formerly used (as in cooling
wine) at the dining table
4: a fluid-containing sac or cavity in an organism
OED
1: an artificial reservoir for water, or other liquid; esp.
a water-tight tank.
2: A natural reservoir or depression containing water, eg a
pong 1606
3: a pit at the centre of Mooter villages, thought to be a
window into the Spirit World. <date>
4: Applied to a cavity, or vessel in an organism 1615.
Also fig and attrib
1. Broken cisterns Jer. 2:13. A copper c. for the table
PEPYS Diary 7 Sept. 1667. a c. of punch 1815.
2. The dead hold conference in the village c. <Ref> <date>
3. Lakes .. are real reservoirs, or cisterns of water 1796.
Hence Ci·stern, v to enclose in, or fit with, a c.
The Bible
Ecclesiastes
Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be
broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the
wheel broken at the cistern.
Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the
spirit shall return unto God who gave it.
12:1
·
William Shakespeare 1564-1616
Othello
But there, where I have garner'd up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life,
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up; to be discarded thence!
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in! Turn thy complexion there,
Patience, thou young and rose-lipp'd cherubin;
Ay, there, look grim as hell!
·
Fargo Morris
Time and Endings
The mass, upended and hanging
above the cistern where souls depart
in the labyrinth that keeps us from hell
·
Brill Cheung
Barrow Song
the warmth of the walls
drawn from the lives
of Floxie offerings, screaming
at the bottom of the Cisterns
At the centre of every Mooter village lies a cistern always
with the exact proportions of 6x18x6 (one six being the
height of the walls above the ground. -- the depth of the
cistern is always thought to extend into hell, the depth of
which no one seems to know) through which the dead are
thought to keep a watch over the lives of the living in
their ancestral home. Advice is often sought at Cisterns,
as well as offerings given to the recently deceased to help
their transition into death.
When a Mooter village is moved, or abandoned, it is
possible to move this spirit window to another cistern,
even if that cistern in on another world. The empty
cistern is then no longer under the protection of the elder
spirits of the village and can be taken over by any
wandering spirit that wishes to take residence. For this
reason, the Mooter shun any abandoned village or cistern.
These beliefs remain quite strong even today, which
explains the Mooter's reputation for being poor
archaeologists but excellent archivists and historiians.
In a strange way it makes sense. They can never go back,
so they are careful to record everything so that they can
take it with them.
Mooter cisterns are not meant for trapping drinking water
and it is thought that those who drink the water from a
cistern will fall under the control of the spirits that lay
in its depths.
The cistern represents death something that traps and once
inside cannot be returned, the antithesis of a well, which
is the bringer of life. Death is a closed end, like a
cistern.
The Mooter word for Cistern means roughly, window of the
dead.
---------------------------------------
Collectors
Who washed her hands
in the smoke,
smoldering ash
and the trace leavings
of the dead
20 Years in the San Zi
Joseph Fong
in years of drought, the ash left after the festival,
in LoTsuen and other parts of the Barrows, formed great
drifts that clogged the air intakes on the collectors which
would overheat and start to weave and bump into walls like
they were drunk.
·
The burnout rate for Collectors in Canter has always been
quite high. The number of Collectors for the territory
varies between 120-195. As Collectors died, they were
canibalized for parts and kept going with little more than
tin cans and baling wire.
The mean life-span for most C Class Collectors during 24th
wc(Wongsha Calendar) century was supposed to be about 25
years. Canter seldom saw a Collector last a day over 10.
A common passtime, even a tradition, for youth in Canter
was to play kick the can -- kicking a Collector to see how
far you could make it slide on it's floaters before it's
speed dropped within it's brake threshold and stopped or
hit something.
Class C Collector Purchases ('230-240)
28 Philips Hobo-T9
14 Philips Hobo-T9
18 Ma Yuen Fa-B URC (Urban Rubbish Collectors)
8 Ma Yuen Fa-B URC
52* Gunther Waldaw 441+ (For hostile urban environments)
11 Philips Hobo-T13
20 Philips Hobo-T13
26 Gunther Waldaw 441+
18 Gunther Waldaw 441+
12 KaPok City Beauty KP-22
102** Gunther Waldaw 441+
+ Drought years
* The year of the Ma Kok Riots
** Typhoon Tinker
A wide range of the tiny Philip Hobo's (everything from the
old S80 on up to the T13's which were the last model before
the line was discontinued) were in use for almost 80 years,
especially in the Barrows where the little yellow bricks,
became integrated with peoples image of Canter
During the 230's new Hobos were being stolen, as soon as
they were set loose. The new flash boxes were ripped out
and sold in the shipyards to be installed on frieghters and
other small ship passing through the yards.
The government responded first with a ineffectual campaign
to catch the "Brick Kidnappers" which proved almost
completely fruitless. Subsequently, Marta Exodus who was
the head of maintenance at the Hui Lek Pui depot in the
West Barrows, out of desperation, began taking the shiny
new Hobo's, stripping off the outer bodies and began a
program of "pre-trashing" them, denting and artfully
scoring the bodies to make the new models virtually
impossible to distinguish from the older models. As soon
as this program began, thefts dropped by 85% in less than a
month and remained low thereafter, it was simply not worth
the effort to steal old units and new units just to find a
the small number of new flashcans which were not terribly
valuable in the first place.
Before the first Hobo's were bought, collectors were
commonly (and are still often) called flashcans a common
enough sight almost anywhere for nearly 800 years. However
the Hobo's had a personality of their own and were commonly
referred to as "bricks", "yellow bricks" or even "tin
bricks."
---------------------------------------
Ma Kok Riots
Rice Cooker Riots
Riots of '93
A shipment Ka Pok Rice Cookers got switched with a run
which used an odd chip set which were meant for
infiltrating civilian data networks during the Martha wars
in the mid '090's. The chipset was designed to insert a
worm into local nets. The worm's primary objective was to
manufacture events which would breed discontent and
misdirection in the local population. The worm would also
filter out all attempts to announce the existence of the
worm and any negative information about the MLA (Martha
Liberation Army) and even go so far as to skew all news
events towards MLA interests.
All of the rice cookers had been sold, in the Sha Gok day
markets in Lo Tsuen during a three week period in August of
'93. It's thought that only two weeks later, most of the
rice cookers had already been in contact with each other
(sending messages disguised as rice cooker reply receipts,
cooker repair requests, cooking schedule changes and rice
supply orders sent over the net.) and decided to target the
opening of a temple at Ma Kok in Shueng Hau. The feeds
were altered so that anyone getting information through the
net would be told that it wasn't a temple being built, but
a crematorium and underground mausoleum.
Unfortunately incident coincided with the torching of a
Majhong parlour in the same area by a group of teenagers
working for a local protection racket. Again, the feeds
were altered so that people believed that the torching was
really the work of the police to quiet the protest over
the mausoleum. The cookers then changed the profiles of
the teenagers, making them look like squeaky clean, model
citizens being railroaded by the police.
The riots that started as a demonstration in Ma Kok quickly
spread throughout the barrows. Dozens of buildings in the
east barrows burnt to the ground and some 150 people were
killed by both police and rioters.
The riots lasted nearly two weeks and only stopped after
the government was able to completely crash the net. It
was months before the real reason behind the riots was
discovered and the rice cookers hunted down and destroyed.
========End Sarko Volume 1 : Issue 1========
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SARKO
Mon July 20, 1994 Volume 1 : Issue 3 ISSN 1022-1069
In European countries, a common sight is:
bees with wings flapping and emitting a
bussing sound are joyfully watched by
people. Probably the bee-and-man
relationship has been one of companionship
since the advent of mankind.
Royal Jelly and Its Uses
Dr. Keiichi Morishita
CONTENTS, #1.3 (July 20, 1994)
[022] <1.2> Seen from the 18th Floor September 8, 1993 Ha Wo Che
[023] <1.0> "the ether is the skein" July 9, 1993 Shatin
[024] <1.0> The Infant Jesus International Landing Field. July 9, 1993 Shatin
[025] <1.0> Mola 1 July 9, 1993 Shatin
[026] <1.0> They July 9, 1993 Shatin
[027] <1.0> "Day dreaming in link" July 9, 1993 Shatin
[028] <1.0> "you can get nailed for saying anything" July 22, 1993 Shatin
[029] <1.0> "The consequences are becoming real now" July 8, 1993 Shatin
[030] <1.0> "Mola had spent a month in St. Gall" July 9, 1993 Shatin
[031] <1.0> Mola 3 Shatin
Sarko is a journal of fictional works-in-progress
published bi-monthly in ascii format by d.i.h. press.
Sarko is distributed on the net as Literary Freeware. You
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Unless otherwise stated Sarko is copyrighted (c) Brad
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These are completely original literary works by Brad
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portrayed herein are fictional; any resemblance to other
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snail mail: dih press PO Box 1010
Shatin, NT Hong Kong
---------------------------------------
Seen from the 18th Floor of Hang Tong Commercial Centre
in the West Barrows.
A broad bare lobby
of oddly proportioned mottled stone
polished to a dull shine,
a bank of lifts lending no coordinate
and a glass wall running perpendicular,
level with a merlin ((escaped from the Tung
slowly circling an updraft outside Wa Street Bird Market
defining the volume,
boundary and flux of the column
as it slowly banks and glides,
scanning for rats, tiggers
or an unwary pigeon,
between a checkerboard
of thirty-floor tower blocks,
their innards exposed
fer all the world to see,
wrapped in a skin of muted cream,
rust and tan tiles,
2500 to the square meter.
A rooftop patchwork,
of stratified residue, lay below,
rusting barbwire slinkies,
snaring anything airborne,
plastic bags, shards of cloth and old rags,
children's toys and drifts
of pigeon feathers and meep-fuzz.
Cracked and dried sheets
of asphalt roofing,
in various shades of fading blues,
reds grays and greens,
spliced together with splashes
of spilt tar over long crooked stitches
of galvanized roof tacks,
defining vents, stink pipes
and blackened, boarded skylights.
Clothes lines strung between
a leaning transgression
of corroded, corrugated tin sheds
surrounded by flower pots gone to seed,
stacked bamboo crates
with woven poly-bag grain sack roofs
serving as makeshift chicken coops.
A stone toilet bowl barbecue
marks the center of a litter
of tiny red and blue betting slips
inside a ring of folding chairs, stools
and beatup armchairs
fished from the rubbish.
Occasionally a police flasher
darts from point to point
along the grid, like a humming bird,
fishing for neutrinos
and scanning in the infrared
for anything bigger than a dog,
the zoning hash set,
looking for violations,
blinking blind for those
who paid the proper bribes. . . .
---------------------------------------
the ether is the skein
keeping Ariadne's thread
from unraveling
---------------------------------------
The Infant Jesus International Landing Field.
A cluster of ault-worn buildings sat at the edge of
a fenced field of muck, fused sand and refuse. Lunar
riptides tugged at the expanse, a topological spandex,
stretching and quaking like some tectonic jelly against the
huddle of sheds and hangers. The control tower, looking
for all the world like a giant granite jujube bean pressed
half-way into the mud by some enormous thumb come down from
the heavens.
Amid the perfect democracy of mud lay objects,
reference points to be neatly plotted and clocked.
Loaders, splattered with fungus and other natural snot,
crouched stiffly with a hodge of flits, floaters and the
odd truck waiting in the blank drizzle for instructions,
empty of tension or ambition. Three rusting Humpers, the
remnants of another generation's abandoned defense, lay a
meter deep in the mud, intakes choked with mozzarella moss
and masher barrels dripping green stalactites. No one had
even bothered to power them down. They just slowly faded
cool, spitting neutrinos at the bastards who'd left them
for dead. It took twenty years....
A decades accumulation of discards from a thousand
repairs lend texture, the piles forming a hierarchy of
refuse. Reactors and lift plates with long hot half lives
sit ostracized and alone, a leper colony for anything with
a deadly tik count. Twenty meters to the east, the rotting
remnants of an ornamental crucifix attempts to sanctify a
pile of desecrated clutter. Bulkheads and bone,
acceleration couches, toilets, rent sheets of insulation,
curled frizz fins and hydraulic casings lay about with
rusting springs, broken plates and plastic milk bottles.
The squat buildings hunched against the drizzle
like a tribe of huddled Visagoths, their sloping sides
bunkered against a blast that would never come.
It was a sequential equation buffered by the
elements, pierced only by the interspacial nausea of drive
fields messing with your digestive track, the very
molecules in the walls grasping to hold together or...
vanish!
After so many centuries of rain and wind wearing
the concrete, only the turret slit windows distinguished
the structures from the local rock squinting a willful
welcome to the machines that dropped from the sky to burden
the ground with their mass....
The concrete in the buildings had been poured
almost three hundred years before. Hard to describe unless
you've seen it, three hundred year old concrete. It's like
trying to describe colour to a horse, or Rice Crispies to a
Floxie. Three hundred year old concrete, it's... old, sort
of a ceramic molten angst, shiny smooth and mold pitted.
Molten Angst
Remember, we ain't talking about any of that Roman
Pozzoulana shit. And don't even try to pass off that
clayey limestone stuff as the real article unless you want
to be wearing it. People get real personal when it comes
to concrete. Make no mistake, we're talkin' Hydraulic
Cement -- Portland Cement.
Quick and Easy Portland Cement
Gently fold together in large mixing bowl, lime,
silica, alumina and iron oxide and heat at 1482C, till
mixture nearly fuses. While heating add dicalcium,
tricalcium, silicate and tricalcium aluminate.A solid
solution containing iron ore should form. Now grind
solution while adding the slightest whisper of gypsum until
powder forms. Now mix with water as desired using one
part cement, two parts sand and five parts gravel. Pour
mixture into mold. Shake periodically to avoid
honey-combing and let stand until hardening occurs.
1 : 2 : 5
It don't matter what mix, 500, 2,000, 20,000 we got
it all the way up to 47,000 pounds now, heading toward that
mystical goal of 50,000 pounds. Concrete Alchemists
believe something wonderful will happen when the 50,000
mark is reached. Concrete will transmute into granite,
lead into gold, water to wine. The heavens will split
open, rent asunder with a mighty matrix wasting clap of
thunder as God shimmies through the opening and sets up
shop, out the in the open air -- armageddon, spring
cleaning. The soap companies will make a fortune....
Some believe that the Civil Alchemists (as they
like to be called) are playing with fire, building a
reinforced concrete tower of babel. You just can't mess
with pre-Cenozoic theothermal lines of force without dire
consequences.... Granted, it's a stronger tower than the
original, able to withstand sheer forces of biblical
proportions, but still....
Of course these people weren't complete idiots.
Geochristian rites were mawkishly observed. Priests from
the New Jersey Archdiocese were given pagers and kept on
twenty four hour call in exchange for substantial donations
(anonymous and under the table) to the St Mary's Cathedral
renovation fund in Trenton. The work was conducted in
sanctified underground laboratories in Paterson and
Rutherford. Ornately carved mahogany stations of the cross
adorned the cinder-block walls. An enormous granite statue
of the Virgin Mother cast her beatific gaze as if frozen in
mid-miracle at the moment the Medusa caught her in the
open....
A near illiterate three hundred pound Sicilian
named Guido guarded the entrance. Guido, dressed as an
alter boy, gripped an Israeli Uzi, loaded with plastic, oil
filled bullets that would kill without desecrating the
laboratory.
Bibles in Latin, Greek, German, Italian and English
were kept at strategic locations around the room behind
glass doors inscribed with the legend: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
BREAK GLASS. Holy water was kept on tap throughout, on lab
benches and under ventilation hoods, next to the gas and
oxygen. Prayers were offered at matins, lauds, prime,
terce, sext, none, vespers, and compline with an exhaustion
of genuflecting, and invoking equations and leaving the
poor researchers with chronic knee problems.
An Empire Blue Cross actuary, who noticed the high
incidence of knee operations among concrete research
workers had to be bribed and later, permanently silenced.
If word had leaked that the inter-family ban on Concrete
Alchemy had been broken, the cartel would have collapsed
into open war. The stakes were that high, but so were the
rewards. Al Capone had been the last to make a grab at the
Grail. He had Alchemists working around the clock near
Boston in a front company called Methuen Sand and Gravel.
For a time it worked, rocketing him to undreamt of heights
until the roof caved in. The family said that he had
challenged God and lost.... If Al Capone could be brought
down, then what chance would the DeMarco's have? But the
work went on, as it must. Each new formula was mixed,
Gregorian chants booming in the background as they crossed
themselves ritually and solemnly intoned the holy name of
Saint Monier before that first drop of water... ignites!
The Patron Saint of Concrete
No, it's not Saint Monier, the fools, no wonder
they failed. Monier invented re-enforced concrete. It was
Saint Joseph Aspdin who blessed the world with the miracle
of Portland Cement.
It was the DeMarco family in Paterson, New Jersey
who instigated the disinformation campaign in the early
fifties that toppled Aspdin's place in the hearts of the
Families of the Tri-State Concrete Cartel. The resulting
chaos that ensued gave the DeMarco's the opportunity to
stage a coup, taking control of the Cartel.The DeMarco's
reigned supreme until the start of the twenty first century
when the ruse was discovered by an obscure Punjab historian
in Chandigarh. When word came down the East Coast the
DeMarcos were targeted and rubbed out within three
years.Dominick DeMarco caught a shotgun blast in the mouth
when leaving a dentist's office in the South Bronx. Luigi,
his wife Eileen DeMarco and two bodyguards died when thirty
pounds of plastique detonated in the trunk of their Black
Lincoln Town Car. The death of Carol Channing's Pekingese,
who was the only other causality of the blast was covered
on the front page of every major daily in the country,
except the New York Times which carried the story on page
two. Michael DeMarco was shot twice in the head in a
Trenton cinema, during a Clint Eastwood film festival.
Louise DeMarco's Calico cat was encased in concrete up to
its neck. The block, with the cat still crying, was found
on her doorstep the next morning. Anthony DeMarco actually
killed himself, clutching an M-1 fragmentation grenade
while jumping off the Throgsneck bridge during rush hour.
He was neatly bisected by the blast, each half hitting the
water fifty feet apart. No one believed it was a suicide,
it was too professional a job. His suicide note had been
thrown out by his Haitian cleaning woman an hour before he
jumped. Several bodies were symbolically entombed in the
pilings of mid-town Manhattan high rises with the knowledge
that they would remain for eternity, encased in concrete,
suffering eternal damnation for their sins against Saint
Aspdin.No one ever pieced together the whole story. It
would have made a great mini-series. . . .
---------------------------------------
Mola 1
Mola Bonecutter slowly moved away from customs and
into the open drizzle (a volume of atomized hydrogen
di-oxide) feeling her new heaviness, weighing the thickness,
the closed predictability of it close in on her. Mud
(becoming a new constant, a center and texture in this, her
new universe) stretched off into the drizzle on all sides,
leaving a record of her movements, like a bread crumb map
left for the birds to erase. Mola's lungs ached -- there
was no other way for it. It was this heavy air. After
months on ship with that fat twit from Nytglo, belching
obscenities in the key of C while he whipped that brass
zipper up and down his chest, playing it like a slide
trombone, hour after hour.
Mola had plotted his death a thousand times, recording
them and playing them back through her witness, flash cut
frames of his death, flashing on the inside of her eyelids
like some nightmare playing at the nickelodeon.... He was
twisting in the wind, from a creaking hemp rope, his fat
purple tongue hanging from his mouth like a spoiled piece
of liver, his zipper straining at the crotch, wet with
urine.... He was screaming as the ropes cut into his plump
tender wrists tied behind a white pine, his hair stuck in
the sap that bled from a severed branch as an Algonquin
warrior pulled his intestines from his fat gut as if he were
about to play jump rope.... Blinking in silent wonder at
the hole in his chest as the reverberations from the shotgun
blast echoed in the chamber just before he realized he was
dead.... As a lightening bolt hit his zipper dead full,
frying his brains blue, his blood boiling in his veins,
before he hit the ground. It was a hell of a way to spend
three months....
There was a sky, there usually is. On a clear day
it might even be a blue, this sky with clouds and air and
weight that she wished would go away.... Mola looked up,
wishing she were back on the launch, feeling not a little
marooned under all this huge unpartitioned sky, even though
it would mean being back with the zipper man. She could
always kill him, blow him out the air lock he while jerked
off just before second watch.... The prick didn't even
clean the sperm off the walls, leaving it to freeze into
white chunks that floated out with the crew when they left
the ship to ritually eyeball the drives before jump....
Mola's bag grew heavy in her hand while that fat slob
was probably still playing his zipper somewhere half a pec
distant by now.
The sky was grey. But grey is a colour too, a
featureless texture hiding a terrible empirical truth,
masking the void where wrinkles come from.... Surfaces like
a thick skinned pudding, a bowl of tomato soup, or the blanket
of a dit's cot that won't bounce a coin.... Texture, a
multifarious congress of elevations and imperfections,
permutations and perforations, a street lamp's glance, dancing
on the concrete's midnight cracks, the gaping rent in a
dropped pumpkin, the dark October canyon breaking the
faithless symmetry of a lemon meringue.... Signatures,
proportional imagery and the dance of an electron's votive
spin on the head of a pin, lost amid the angel dust and
wasted lives, sanity and faith somewhere during that third
of a life spent watching the boob.... Interest, the soothing
lap of water at ponds edge as the adolescent moon plays in a
puddle, the ocean shifting on its heals, removing the
imprint left by two teenagers fucking in a frozen summer
moment on the cool Scusset sands. The wet spot dissolves
with the first rush of foam, pushed gently by the moon's
broom, wearing down sand castles, beach houses and property
values... shifting, smoothing, removing, all moving back to
begin again, a clean slate... for the morning batch of
summer suckers decked out in loud and plastic, all transient
smiles and pee, on vacation from their houses of trash in
generic municipalities where faded paintings adorn city
halls with white tile water closets. There ain't much
beyond the cuddle and subterfuge, the furtive mumblings and
ice cream smiles. Everything here is a foundation of cinder
block and cornerstones of hollowed granite holding banal
treasures of teacups, crumbling comic books and illicit
contraceptives in textured latex for the amusement of future
generations.
Someplace a twig snapped, across time, it was all so
much plot and instance, a talk show host whose smile was too
tight, the guest too distracted, the audience. . . . looking
off camera. A twig snapped.
Hundreds of enormous metallic transport containers
waiting to be filled with two-row barley lay in great stacks
or toppled like toys with scratched and chipped logos
reading like a travel log from a thousand worlds. The names
read like a roll of ancient brewers, Martain, Anheuser
Busch, Carlton and United, Baadle Interworld, Hooker Ent.,
Arthur Guinness Son & Co., Toohey's Ltd. They had come from
as far away as Bozo, just spinward of the Bambi/Thralfell
pispint, a scatter of pinholes piercing the colorless fabric
of the firmament.
The Network had forgotten to arrange
transport for Mola to the tiny city of Promise, so she had
to walk. The dull dented orb of a Westinghouse Witness
floated behind her (still camouflaged rust red from the
endless carbon copy jungles of the Sark) silently recording
all. Mola pulled her brown hooded robe about her against
the cold and shouldered her bag, clenching her jaw as she
tottered in the mud, trying to think herself off this
forsaken pisshole back a thousand years, back to the
security and warmth of broad beamed monasteries where there
was naught else to do in Ermitage, Leffe, Westvleteren,
Grimbergan, Tongerloo, and Aulne than to tend the gleaming
copper Mash Tuns breeding bier amid divinities softly
papping in solemn vows of silence. . .
---------------------------------------
Wait a minute. What is really going on here? Just
a thought balloon feeding words like a teleprompter?
There are strings being pulled here that even the matrix
didn't know about.... They know what I'm talking about.
Though, to be perfectly candid, there is no They, that
great nameless paranoid catch phrase of all the furious
locked door lonely hearts and revolutionary masochists,
glancing nervously over their shoulders, palms sweating
while furiously pumping their harmoniums and whispering,
The Paranoid Mantra
Theeeey is here
Theeeey is there
Theeeey is fucking ev-ry-where!
[Repeat]
as if They were a named, prim proper group with
storefronts, accountants and a tax status.... The
network is vast, with over thirteen registered logos,
Haystack bank accounts and embossed stationary. They plant
subliminal bumper stickers in religious organizations, slip
hidden cameras into the pubic hair of asian prostitutes,
place sentient towels with eidetic memories in executive
wash rooms, sneak hired gremlins and poltergeist into homes
through the copper tubing of air conditioners. . . .
Still not convinced? Did you know that They make it rain
during picnics, outdoor weddings, barbecues, invented spam,
leave the toilet seat up late at night, hire couples to
perform boisterous copulations in all adjacent hotel rooms,
purchase the last package of mallowmars in every
supermarket, make sure that only tall people sit in front of
you in the cinema, hide all the toilet paper in public
toilets, restock convenience stores with warm beer, leave
large sticky wet spots on bus, train and cinema seats, are
responsible for 68.2% of all hair loss, 84.6% of all
pimples, 48% of hangovers, 29% of all sour milk, 89% of all
snoring, 23% of burps, 22% of farts, 18% of all hiccups and
72% of split ends. You don't think that garlic breath
really comes from garlic do you?
They can be contacted in any major city throughout the
matrix, just write to:
THEY
P.O. Box 0000
Brockton, MA 02403
Skowhegan, ME 04976
Portland, ME 04101
Wapping, CT 06074
Gloucester, MA 01930
Woonsocket, RI 02895
Winooski, VT 05404
White River Junction, NH 05001. . . .
A Good Rule of Thumb
If the city has an American Express office, They will be
there. ((They don't exist, right?
---------------------------------------
Day dreaming in link is willy, random fantasy
augmented by an exponential babel of data -- an image
sheath of light and byte, floating and interweaving just
under the threshold -- sort of an information fugue state.
Some call it a link sausage high. No one knows why. . . .
i wanna be a data fiend,
wash a-lost a byte binge tide,
it's better than a mainline nod,
trip-linking so pure you cry.
you can pump my stomach, just try,
i'll heave dry while you scan
my trackless legs up my skirt,
hiked as high as that bad baud can pump
my shattered meat with perfect parity.
It wasn't always like that -- that first time you
link, like some strange hand feeling you up, crawling
around your brainpan, like ants, getting cozy with your
anxieties, riffling through your desires as if in search of
some tasty tidbit, a gossamer grain of gossip to use
against you. But as soon as the ants stop crawling down
your spine, as soon as you learn to disarm your ego, erase
your body, strip bare your femininity, leaving only a lean
mechanical soul, chemicalless emotion, a holy, kinetic
spirit thing, pure energy caressing your libido, loosing
frame, becoming the link, windowing into infinity, a
shatter of disparate information in pristine
disarraignment. It is then that you loose that exposed
feeling and make the worm do yr bidding.... Any logic
is a manifestation of faith sister. Don't they teach you
people anything out backwash?
---------------------------------------
Okay -- you can get nailed for saying anything, so
why not throw caution to the wind, throw back your head, eat
lettuce, go for a week without zipping your fly, spin a
prayer wheel every time you take a piss, (hey, ya know that
could really add up... When the words have piled up into
great driftlike dunes, a very slow fluid.
Dunes... you can apply it across the board; dunes,
sand, snow, words, feelings. It's all the same thing.
Planting strategic grasses can only do so much. One good
blow will bury it all -- pissing in the wind. And we all
know what would happen if you did that! Or do we? Who has
actually done it, actually pissed into the wind, felt it
splash back hot into yr face. Or, really sat down and
watched the shit hit the fan?
Now yr talk'n cowshit. You know that's what you
think when yr mom rolls her eyes heavenward, intoning in her
best Jack Nicholson voice, "it's gonna hit the fan when yer
father finds out." You know it's cow shit she's talking
about. It's cowshit that'll be hitting that fan when yr
dad gets home.
But have you you ever tried? Perhaps starting off
with a scoop of rabbit shit, little round pellets (hard to
discern from that Rabbit Chow) that just bounce around the
room like shiny bits of chocolate. Then, maybe moving up to
doves and pigeons with their stringy smear that might make
you feel like you're a bronze statue in a park but there's
no feeling that any real shit has hit the fan. You can try
chicken shit, tossing it into yer man-made maelstrom just
before you pass out from the ammonia fumes. Come'on folks,
chemical warfare has nothing to do with gettin' into deep
shit. Now try horse shit, just for a break, what a joy, so
dry and warm after those green, white-tipped atrocities the
hens contributed. But then, everyone knows that horse shit
ain't even real shit.
When your finished with the pigs, sheep, goats,
dogs, the odd raccoon, white tailed deer, field mice,
(throwing in an owl pellet just to see the bones shatter as
it hits the wall) you're ready.
Find yerself a good solid Sears & Roebuck 3 cubic
foot barrow and head down to Franklin Park. Go right to the
end, to Suzi's cage behind the night's embankment of autumn
leaves. Don't worry that she looks so old, those deep
wrinkles are camouflage, just look in her eyes... it's the
only way to go when you wanna get into some really heavy
shit....
So... what's so mystical, about an Indian elephant
and a red wheelbarrow full of brown shit 'mid a milling of
white pigeons? How much do you need, living on a concrete
slab enclosed by steel bars framing the seasons scrolling
past. The minutes marked only by an endless drone of little
kids, pointing sticky fingers... so that all meaning is
packed into that tight retention,thirty minutes each morning
and blink or so before watching Frank the Keeper roll it on
off, in a cloud of steam rolling through the crisp morning
air.....
---------------------------------------
The consequences are becoming real now, tangible
and stolid even as they congeal seemingly a lifetime ago,
lost in a field. There's no order here, only words. Ask
Phil, he knows -- left like a beached whale on the heavy
surface of it. Left to dehydrate and ooze puss onto the
white grains of words, existing on a plane of temporal
temperance, abstaining from any empirical high....existing:
((with a sense of humor. How else could you explain
Plato? They'd hid, crouched behind a metaphorical can of
Spam and giggled as Plato scribbled. You see Plato, that
vast totalitarian bastion, didn't wear any underwear....
((with a DNA, a phonetic double helix, inter-
twisting and twining, as syntactic objects in the matrix --
collecting -- through some smirk of physics, in Richard
Brautigan's waste basket....
Tell me, am I outside the field yet? Have I been
able to modulate and collapse in on myself, packing my
sentences tighter and tougher, stuffing the chapters like a
Christmas goose till it all collapses, from the sheer mass
of words and... vanish! Become a syllabic kugelblitz.
They say that escaping the field is more difficult
than shaving a Poodle, than sheering a sheep, than toasting
marshmallows on a stick of Sassafras, than eating Captain
Crunch quietly. Did even Hawkens manage to escape his
field? Did he feel the pea deep beneath the stack of
equations and soar on a numerical carpet outside the
field... outside that poor crumpled meat.
It's doesn't feel any different.
Are we there yet?
---------------------------------------
Mola had spent a month in St. Gall, a Benedictine
monastery in the balmy southern Geosector of New Dublin,
almost fifty years before when her transport, a connecting
flight to a major Ubbik shipping lane didn't materialize.
A low sprawling brewery and a cheesery hunkered
next the monastery which was described in travel brochures
as a "faithful reproduction of the Plan of St. Gall." It
was an ontological trap. This was the original. The
elegant plan drawn up in the eighth century had never been
built. For centuries, books had been written, models
constructed, bent plans hypothesized, as if they were
reconstructing Jericho or Troy. But St. Gall only existed
on paper until the Catholic church decided to finally build
it almost a thousand years after the plan had been drawn
up. The monastery was built exactly to scale, every line
and dimension was faithful to the holy plan. The shell was
pure, but inside it was souped up, a turbo-monastery. The
spartan interior was illusion. The horse shit, that
smelled just like horse shit should, wasn't even real, just
light and odor. Yr foot goes right through it. . . .
The pubs on New Dublin, vast halls dotted by a blur
of heavy brown hardwood tables, were not happy places. Try
as they might, the Dauk never could actually bring
themselves to actually like beer. They brewed it and they
drank it but they never enjoyed it. For the Dauk, drinking
was an act of contrition, an atonement of sin, almost an
act of self-flagellation. The suffering was palatable, a
thick abrasiveness in the air.
The Dauk brewed a high gravity bottom fermented,
heavily hoped lager called Gree with an impossible clarity.
Gree was known throughout the sector and had become
something of a legend beyond, as far away as Wastglo and
Mercanter and was often drunk in conjunction with a stick
rolled from cragg leaves or (as is often seen washward of
Wastglo and the Mitsu) sipped while chewing sour Remington
gum, a hold over from the Tagji Gene Brokers in their
velvet vests and watered down colored breaches of soft
gauze and high laced organic calk boots, polished raven
black. With a slapping of thighs they stomped the woodish
dance floors and the feet of unlucky prostitutes, peppering
both with tiny holes.
Mola met Gosper in a pub called the Ball and Cock
the day after she'd made landfall. His dark hair was kept
shaved to a fuzz, and he often sported a olive green, army
surplus skull cap that kept him in-link with the local
matrix. The dark prostration suffusing the fabric had
driven them to drink almost despite themselves. Bozo
prospectors filled half the hall, raising hell and
erections as they tornadoed through the pubs, a brief,
intense grasp at contact before heading back into their
solitary, sweaty coffins of plasteel and bone to rip apart
asteroids and moons with their psychotic tools sending
quivers of terror through the spacecloth. Enormous Dauk
waiters, the floors creaking from the weight as they
walked, trays a sloshing gold of fried food and pitchers of
beer, their massive amber eyes glowing below their
blowholes, wound their way through the cross dressers of
both sexes, lace bras stuffed with Ubikk pomegranates and
crotches padded with Ukrainian sausage, flirting with regal
S-curve gestures awash in a creeping bank of dry ice smoke
to the sounds of Smokey Robinson, Johnny Cash, Ornette
Coleman, Verdi and Bob Marley heard only by those in-link.
Mola and Gosper had gulped three jars before getting
around to introductions.
"Gosper," said Gosper after Mola had asked.
"Mola," with a nod each which was all that was
required of either. The next pitcher was served without a
word by an ancient pudgy Dauk wearing its green red
wrinkles like an expression. The apron it wore looked
absurd, but then nothing looked right on New Dublin.
Two jars later Gosper was looking a bit green,
and excused himself to puke. Mola looked about the hall,
through a thick curtain of beer. Dauk, scattered
throughout the hall, drank solemnly, without joy or any
sound but the occasional clink of heavy tankards. Gosper
came back a moment later, looking much better and ready for
another round.
Mola was thinking how nice his skull cap looked, as
if it had been screwed onto his skull with six stainless
steel phillips head screws. It was exactly six, no more,
no less. She could see the slotted heads gleaming even in
the dull light of the pub. She smiled, thinking about how
they must twist into the bone and the sharp white threads
that would be left behind when removed. The thought was
starting to get her excited but it was only her turn to
puke.
When she returned the screws were gone. Their
absence made Mola sad, after all she had just turned three
hundred and fifty years old and little things like
stainless steel phillips head screws meant a lot.
Gosper lifted the pitcher to empty the last third
into each stein. Carefully draining the warm foam he
slammed it back down with a solid thud to stew empty in a
puddle of its own juices. They lifted their steins to
toast, almost missing each other before drinking in a
single slow-mo draught.
Mola wiped the foam from her mouth with her sleeve,
shuddering violently, as the warm sour dregs hit home.
Gosper stood up with a burp that said, enough. Mola's head
was spinning clockwise, Gosper's was spinning counter
clockwise. Between the two of them they almost stabilized
as they weaved through the geometry of heavy tables and out
into the night.
The two eighty five meter stone towers of the abbey
church loomed above, bathed in the blue of New Dublin's
twin moons. A queer fluke of the lunar phase provided both
front and back lighting, an eerie banishment of shadow.
Gosper mumbled something, tripping on his own feet
and toppling the two into a heap. Gosper giggled with
another belch while Mola starred at the towers in an
attempt to ward off the spins.
"They look like salt and pepper shakers," Mola
finally said.
"Damn," Gosper said, looking up sharply.
"Which is which?"
"St Michael is right, Gabriel on the left."
"No, which is the pepper?"
"Which one has the bigger holes?"
"Can't tell," he said after a pause, peering.
"Let's find out."
Getting on their hands and knees, grunting to their
feet, barely keeping upright, they made for the heavy front
door of the church. Monks, returning from Matins and Lauds,
glided through the cobble-mist narrowness of the night,
their heavy hoods leaving only turret slits to navigate by,
blinders to better see the way. Lamps glowed warmly in
rainbow halos, lighting nothing but marking boundaries of the
gloom.
The heavy oak doors must have weighed several tonnes
each. They stood eight meters high and almost thirty
centimeters thick, but opened at a touch. They slipped
inside, thinking themselves silent and turning left to
stumble blindly in the dark for the door to enter Gabriel.
"What are we looking for again?" Mola said, looking
at the dimly lit stone staircase winding up in front of
them.
"Pepper."
"Oh, yeah," she said, wishing she had something to
drink. As if by magic Gosper pulled a fifth of peppermint
schnapps from his jacket and handed it to Mola who was so
happy at the miracle that she gave him a big hug and bit
his ear. Gosper just stood there with an idiot grin on his
face and rubbed his cock against her leg.
They both took a swig and started up the worn stone
steps. It was a common form of penance at the Abbey to
climb the towers, pausing to say a prayer at each of the
one hundred sixty steps before praying at the alter at the
top and then repeating the process on the way down. The
tower appeared to be empty as they began climbing the
steps.
Gosper Takes a Piss
Gosper stopped at a turret window just short of the
top and stuck his head out. "Glory be to the Father," he
solemnly intoned as he opened his fly, "to the Son,"
pulling out his cock, "And to the Holy Spirit," and hanging
it out the turret window before letting loose, "As it was
in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. . ." the dark
yellow stream sparkling as it vanished into the black, ". .
. World without end," as the last drops dropped with a
wiggle.
"Amen." Mola said as they continued up.
The stairs ended in a circular room with a simple
stone alter to Gabriel in the middle. There were dozens of
candles on gold pedestals flanking the alter where a frail
looking Dauk, in a well worn robe knelt. Gosper and Mola
stopped dead, surprised to find anyone there and turned to
leave.
"I would speak with you," came the rasped address
to their backs.
"Good morning Brother," Mola said as she turned
around to face the wraith-like Dauk, its loose dry skin was
almost grey with age.
"I am Brother Trßßgkl keeper of the alter of St.
Gabriel."
"And we are humble Cagots," Gosper said with a
straight face, "Come in search of pepper." They nodded,
watching Brother Trßßgkl expand and contract through the
beer-veil. It was all Mola could do to keep from laughing.
"There is no pepper here."
"I see," Mola said and started back down the steps....
---------------------------------------
Mola 3
A small pack of children, caked in mud, darted and
screamed, running about the containers. Mola stopped to
watch. There were no nervous glances skyward, muffled
voices, hollowed stares or missing limbs. These were
children, Mola thought. Reality, the ubiquitous "real
world" had not infected them yet, smothering their
imagination, dismantling their curiosity, leaving only a
directionless passion to be warped by Mother Church, state
and hormones.
"Got all that?" she said to the familiar hanging
above her head, "Kids, playing."
The mud quickly seeped into her shoes, squishing
between her toes. Without thinking, she tried to call up a
scanning menu before realizing that she wasn't plugged into
a combat link anymore. She only had the late model
Westinghouse's limited array. The familiar didn't have
sonics, it was a helpless feeling.
Mola suppressed a shiver, feeling blind and tried
not to think of what might be living in the mud and kept
moving, townward. The roadway dried out a hundred meters
further, gaining elevation amid the stiff grey Ash grass
standing three meters high, partially concealing a
congregation of abandoned equipment.
Mola peered at the wreck, feeling uneasy in the
silence, before shuddering and continuing her cold trudge,
her floating familiar recording all.
---------------------------------------
========End Sarko Volume 1 : Issue 3========