The Rich Red Earth -Short Story

The second prompt I've attempted from Becausewerepoets. This time, a short story. The idea? One of my favorites. A vision set to music. Music I'd never encounter otherwise. Specifically

A thrilling sort of movie-theme. I listened to it carefully and immediately knew there was no hope in trying to match it's rhythm. My original intention was to write something and record myself speaking it over the music itself. But, I couldn't time it properly, and I don't think it served the work itself. My voice distracts as it is anyway.

It was Sci-Fi from the start, that much I knew, and the chanting just seems so monkish that I've got to pull some Christian imagery in.

So here it is.

The Rich Red Earth

Light from stars and moons attended the breaking of the new day. Fingers of twilight and sun had their interplay over the bare ground. The air stretched thinly over dull brown heath to a harsh horizon only momentarily. In all directions were rock, ruin and a valley of ashes – breathing austerely.

 The sky grew thick with blooming clouds of sand and smoke, trailing their dark shawls. The sun and the stars were smothered. Groans escaped from under the dunes and the mountains, and the dry plains were spattered by black. Smokey wisps along the ground drew serpents through the sand. Tufts of darkening stains swelled to pools, and heaved to torrents. Ground gave way, and ground arose.

                New drumming attended the sight – louder and louder – with new light across the darkening sky in strange fissures extending. The pangs of the ground shook mountains loose – and mountains were drowned in sudden seas. The brine crept into the fissures, and drew itself to sting at the new wounds in the rock.

                Under the hills with twice bent knees stooped a low figure before a fire, rubbing the scales from his hands.

                “The door is bolted. My fire is alight. And you, sky, can rain as much as you like.” He bounced to the words, cupping the back of his short grey neck to snuff out the sound. This is how it was. This he knew. All the gardens had gone away, and the walls around them had crumbled. The silence would come back again sometime. The soft faces wept. He saw them once a while ago, but they couldn’t live on the world. It was his world.

                “Bad sounds hold on to the memory. But silence comes back round again in kind and kindly.” He bounced to the words.

                What once was parched was quenched. The unyielding rock gave up its strength and cracked. The last blisters came crashing apart. Temples of glass with domes over the last grey lichens awaited the rupturing world.  Around them the bleached white fungus which clung to the last dustings of clay. Cotton tufts of old tapestries scattered. The posture of statues slumped. Cellophane went dancing in the breeze, and husks of rubber and steel came falling from their piles – miles high. Sealed drums of excrement came bursting. A gray grid dispersed between the shells of lost buildings. Alongside the gruff sound of the water breaking – old gramophonics sputtered old protocol in professional sounding English and French. No sirens sounded.

                The world flushed white with each great searing of light across the red, smoking sky. The shell of a sun scorched world had emptied its pollution into its skies. Alone, suspended in an endless black, the globe’s surface writhed, seething with storms and fire from its bowels. The sound did not penetrate the horizons.

                A vast net of rusted debris fell to the surface in shining tendrils. Satellites long since exhausted were finally snuffed out. Corpses of men were vomited up from shearing land, and shells of steel fell brightly into screaming nightmare.

                A scattered ring of iron, dust, and grime trailing at the waist of the world was lit to a bow of burning gold across the sky. Stars in silence contemplated this affront. Writing was washed off walls, and great concrete obstructions, orderly and tall, came crumbling down. The twisted iron bones of tall towers were ripped from their foundations to play like desert birds across the sky.

                The crouched figure drew its tail in ceaseless sweeps across the ground. The smoke was not departing, a vent had been choked by debris, and now the smoke was pooling up above.

                “No more left to burn, no way out. So the soft faces won’t kill me but the world will. My world, whose dust has fed me.” He contemplated the rendered fat which made his fire, and the soft untextured faces from which he’d drawn it. The soft faces which built tall towers and complained about the heat. They didn’t know the way the world went round; they built things to topple them, and ate too much. They went up when he went down, and now they had all gone away. They had finally gone away and now he was in the deep places choking on the smoke from their skins. They would still kill him.

                The ring of light which burned so suddenly around the world as soon was shattered – leaving chariots of fire to scatter over storms. The last evidence of an old world undone. The softening light of stars looked on in silent discontent.

                And first to break its light through the noise and haste of the dying storms was a blue star – who saw this all in silence. In the sky of the blue star, a red star greened with nausea. Women struck the footsoles of great metal ships with bottles of champagne, and metal ships departed to riotous song.

                Down from Olympus Mons came men and women with hammers and scythes. The ground was greening with blooms of algae in the rich red earth. Long hoses spilt their seeds in a thick paste on the ground, turning and turning in circles to scatter the wet green all around. Great tines dug into the soft ground to pour cement for tall towers. Poppies gave back some red to the wide fields along with gold and aromatic resin.

                In the deep, everywhere was the sound of water. Above the lone figure vents had opened up, and more water came than he had ever known. His fire stayed for some time and the water wound its way to the caves he’d made his memory. The smoke could reach the air again. The creature gripped the book they’d given him to learn the tongue. He bounced to the words.

                “And yea by the rivers of Babylon we sat down and we wept.” He read the footnotes with the same reverence. “Rivers – features of Earth, where water’s abundant, the water rolls down hills. Weeping – the falling water from the eyes of soft faces, caused by sadness or great joy.” 

Review:

The first word had to be light, as in "let there be" it is both the Genesis of this planet and the Genesis of the story itself. The plural moons is the first signal that we are not on Earth. It's also meant to depict the multiple tidal forces that are acting on Mars - the natural and the manmade.

"Rock, ruin, and the valley of ashes" a call to both Fitzgerald's "Valley of Ashes" (I saw the film and reread the book, so it's been on the mind) and the Valley of Gehenna, one of the original inspirations of the Christian Hell where children were burned to Moloch. Unpleasant.

The second paragraph is an attempt to depict the look of rain on dry rock - something I observed the other day. You don't even see the rain at first, it's just little speckles - the world grows suddenly, violently polka-dot. Then the dots swell and swell and then you've got puddles and rivulets winding their way through the street.

New drumming - thunder, lightning. At this point I realized I was way overdoing the description (I originally intended to make the story simply the story of inanimate Mars being made ready for human arrival). I added the (admittedly cliched) native life to give the story a... story. Before it was just violence. The violence is supposed to call up the idea of childbirth, what with the heaving and the crashing and the moaning and the fissures and the I don't even know.

We've got our protagonist. I figured describing him would just be overemphasizing his alien-ness. Who needs that? He's got ears on his neck, grey scaley skin, twice-bent knees, and a tail. Alien enough. My inspiration wasn't anything from Sci-Fi, but the snake in the Garden of Eden.

We see the signs of habitation. I thought you could technically take this piece to be Earth after some devastating climate change. It was going to be for a while, specifically Canada, hence the French. Some terrible future Montreal. That idea got scrapped.

Gramophonics isn't a word. Sad. I find it very evocative of the sound - that lovely scratch.

"You sky can rain as much as you like." A reference to Zorba the Greek, a well read alien? Specifically, an analogy given of the difference between a Christian Priest and a Buddha. I thought this was very heavy. I can think of three or for ways it could be interpreted. I think it lends the poor guy quite a bit of richness.

"The soft faces wept." I was very proud of that. It comes back around, of course, but in the moment it's also the faces of humans which wept the fat as he rendered their skin. He hopes for silence - a return to that "breathing austerely." Mars is normally a dry and quiet place for this little guy.

We get a little context. It's silent out in space, the planet's swirling (the image I recalled was the opening scene of The Thief and the Cobbler - a favorite movie of my youth).

Calling the ring of old satellites a "bow of burning gold" is a reference to the unspeakably beautiful hymn "Jerusalem" as in "We will build Jerusalem, in England's green and pleasant land." I think that image speaks for itself, and speaks volumes.

"Desert birds" is a very loose reference to Yeats' "The Second Coming" my very very favorite poem, and fitting here.

The local life eats dust. Because when I go for a Biblical Reference, I beat it to death with a stick. It's also supposed to imply that the native life can live on the meager bounty of Mars. The soft faces "complain about the heat" - they're warmblooded humans after all. 

The women on earth specifically beat the "footsoles" of the metal ships - the arks bearing human civilization to a terraformed Mars. This is another of my so-slight-as-to-hardly-count references to poetry. Because why make imagery when you can steal it? Anyway, the poem being referenced is Sylvia Plath's "Morning Song" one of my favorites by her, which I suggest to any new mother. It summons up ideas of post-partem depression. It goes along with the other birthing symbolism such as the not-so-subtle "gruff sound of the water breaking."

"A red star greened with nausea." This was the "one true sentence." Hemmingway said that when you've got writer's block, you should write "one true sentence" to break through. I didn't know the direction I wanted to go - but I knew that a red star would green - and it would be nauseous.

"Down From Olympus Mons" like greek gods, of course. Also the definite symbol that we're on Mars. Hammers and scythes have a nice communist feel, which I hoped would bring an odd dichotomy. In the future - equality and bounty for MAN. Humanity couldn't be happier about this colonization. The "White Settlers disposing of Natives" is cliched, but, much like the actual Genocide of the Native Americans - it's there whether we want to believe it or not.

I figure even in the future we won't be free of evangelists handing out Bibles. We'll of course need one with footnotes - and I feel the implications would be clear. I think this image sufficiently brings this home. Though this is Sci-Fi, I'm not concerned with the facts and the science of terraforming. This is an allegorical piece - a vision set to music.

I should mention. "The Rich Red Earth" is a reference to a poetic translation of the Hebrew pun that is the name of the first man. "Adam" mankind, "Adamah" earth, "adom" red, "dam" blood. There is no other title, that much I know, I can scrap the rest, but the title at least says what it needs to say.

I had more fun with this than I thought I would. Now I have to learn how to "pingback" properly.