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 are encouraged to copy and distribute for non-commercial purposes. Unless otherwise stated Sarko is copyrighted (c) Brad Collins. All Rights Reserved. Sarko is registered in Paris as ISSN 1022-1069. 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 attached. 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. Back Issues of Sarko are available via Gopher or ftp in etext.archive.umich.edu :/pub/Zines/Sarko If you don't have have ftp access. Send a message to sarko-request@mach.hk.super.net. and in the subject line put: Sarko-Announce -- to be added to the announcement list Sarko-Distribution -- to receive each issue by mail. Sarko-Request X.X -- if you want to be mailed a specific issue To paraphrase the Prisoner, I am a man, I am not a listserv.... These messages are not automated so don't hesitate to say hello. Brad Collins [brad@mach.hk.super.net] 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========