Welcoem to posts!!
in the future - u will be able to do some more stuff here,,,!! like pat catgirl- i mean um yeah... for now u can only see others's posts :c
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Gothic coordinateγThe Witch of Vanityγ
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LETTER I (fragments).
FROM ALCIPHRON AT ALEXANDRIA TO CLEON AT ATHENS.
Well may you wonder at my flight
From those fair Gardens, in whose bowers
Lingers whate'er of wise and bright,
Of Beauty's smile or Wisdom's light,
Is left to grace this world of ours.
Well may my comrades, as they roam,
On evenings sweet as this, inquire
Why I have left that happy home
Where all is found that all desire,
And Time hath wings that never tire...
Yes, such the place of bliss, I own.
From all whose charms I just have flown;
And ev'n while thus to thee I write.
And by the Nile's dark flood recline,
Fondly, in thought, I wing my flight
Back to those groves and gardens bright.
And often think, by this sweet light,
How lovelily they all must shine;
Can see that graceful temple throw
Down the green slope its lengthen'd shade,
While, on the marble steps below,
There sits some fair Athenian maid,
Over some favourite volume bending;
And, by her side, a youthful sage
Holds back the ringlets that, descending,
Would else o'ershadow all the page.
But hence such thoughts! β nor let me grieve
O'er scenes of joy that I but leave,
As the bird quits awhile its nest
To come again with livelier zest.
<...>
And now to tell thee β what I fear
Thou'lt gravely smile at β *why* I'm here.
Though through my life's short, sunny dream,
I've floated without pain or care.
Like a light leaf, down pleasure's stream,
Caught in each sparkling eddy there;
Though never Mirth awaked a strain
That my heart echoed not again;
Yet have I felt, when ev'n most gay,
Sad thoughts β I know not whence or why β
Suddenly o'er my spirit fly,
Like clouds, that, ere we've time to say
"How bright the sky is!" shade the sky.
Sometimes so vague, so undefin'd
Were these strange darkenings of my mind β
While nought but joy around me beam'd
So causelessly they've come and flown,
That not of life or earth they seem'd,
But shadows from some world unknown.
More oft, however, 'twas the thought
How soon that scene, with all its play
Of life and gladness must decay, β
Those lips I prest, the hands I caught β
Myself, β the crowd that mirth had brought
Around me, β swept like weeds away.
<...>
That night, when all our mirth was o'er,
The minstrels silent, and the feet
Of the young maidens heard no more β
So stilly was the time, so sweet,
And such a calm came o'er that scene,
Where life and revel late had been β
Lone as the quiet of some bay,
From which the sea hath ebb'd away β
That still I linger'd, lost in thought,
Gazing upon the stars of night,
Sad and intent, as if I sought
Some mournful secret in their light;
And ask'd them, mid that silence, why
She, glorious girl, alone must die,
While they, less wonderful than she,
Shine on through all eternity.
That night β thou haply may'st forget
Its loveliness β but 'twas a night
To make earth's meanest slave regret
Leaving a world so soft and bright.
On one side, in the dark blue sky,
Lonely and radiant, was the eye
Of Jove himself, while, on the other,
'Mong stars that came out one by one,
The young moon β like the Roman mother
Among her living jewels β shone.
"Oh that from yonder orbs," I thought,
"Pure and eternal as they are,
There could to earth some power be brought
Some charm, with their own essence fraught,
To make one deathless as a star,
And open to one's vast desires
A course, as boundless and sublime
As lies before those comet-fires,
That roam and burn throughout all time!"
While thoughts like these absorbed my mind,
That weariness which earthly bliss,
However sweet, still leaves behind,
As if to show how earthly 'tis,
Came lulling o'er me, and I laid
My limbs at that fair statue's base β
That miracle, which Art hath made
Of all the choice of Nature's grace β
To which so oft I've knelt and sworn,
That, could a living maid like her
Unto this wondering world be born,
I would, myself, turn worshipper.
Sleep came then o'er me, β and I seem'd
To be transported far away
To a bleak desert plain, where gleam'd
One single, melancholy ray,
Throughout that darkness dimly shed
From a small taper in the hand
Of one, who, pale as are the dead,
Before me took his spectral stand,
And said, while, awfully a smile
Came o'er the wanness of his cheek β
"Go, and, beside the sacred Nile,
You'll find th' Eternal Life you seek."
Such was my dream; β and, I confess,
Though none of all our creedless school
Hath e'er believ'd, or reverenc'd less
The fables of the priest-led fool.
And who can tell, as we're combin'd
Of various atoms, β some refined,
Like those that scintillate and play
In the fix'd stars, β some, gross as they
That frown in clouds or sleep in clay, β
Who can be sure, but 'tis the best
And brightest atoms of our frame,
Those most akin to stellar flame,
That shine out thus, when we're at rest; β
Ev'n as their kindred stars, whose light
Comes out but in the silent night.
Vain thought! β but yet, howe'er it be,
Dreams, more than once, have prov'd to me
Oracles, truer far than Oak,
Or Dove, or Tripod ever spoke.
And 'twas the words β thou'lt hear and smile β
The words that phantom seem'd to speak β
"Go, and beside the sacred Nile
You'll find the Eternal life you seek, β "
That, haunting me by night, by day.
At length, as with the unseen hand
Of Fate itself, urg'd me away
From Athens to this Holy Land;
Where, 'mong the secrets, still untaught,
The myst'ries that, as yet, nor sun
Nor eye hath reach'd β oh blessed thought!-
May sleep this everlasting one.
Farewell β when to our Garden friends
Thou talk'st of the wild dream that sends
The gayest of their school thus far,
Wandering beneath Canopus' star,
Tell them that, wander where she will,
Or, howsoe'er they now condemn
Her vague and vain pursuit, she still
Is worthy of the School and them; β
Still, all their own, β nor e'er forgets,
Ev'n while her heart and soul pursue
Th' Eternal Light which never sets,
The many meteor joys that *do*,
But seeks them, hails them with delight
Where'er they meet her longing sight.
And, if her life must wane away,
Like other lives, at least the day,
The hour it lasts shall, like a fire
With incense fed, in sweets expire.
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By the bridge stood I
Lately in the dusky night.
From afar came singing:
In golden drops it welled up
Across the quivering expanse.
Gondolas, lights, music β
Drunkenly they swam out into the gloaming...
My soul, a stringed instrument,
Sang to itself, invisibly touched,
A barcarole in secret accompaniment,
Quivering in mottled bliss.
β Was anyone listening?...
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A poem by Ushiromiya Edgar Poe.
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There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in her life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment she leaves the nest she searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until she has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, impales herself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, she rises above own agony to outcarol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great painβ¦. Or so says the legend.
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The stars saw the ponderous movement of a steadily larger and more flattened mass, taking months and years before the deviation from its original track was significant. Not that the object whereon they shone was slow. It was a planet-sized shell of incandescence, where atoms were seized by its outermost force-fringes and excited into thermal, fluorescent, synchrotron radiation. And it came barely behind the wave front which announced its march. But the shipβs luminosity was soon lost across light-years. Her passage crawled through abysses which seemingly had no end.
In her own time, the story was another. She moved in a universe increasingly foreign β more rapidly aging, more massive, more compressed. Thus the rate at which she could gulp down hydrogen, burn part of it to energy and hurl the rest off in a million-kilometer thermonuclear flame β¦ that rate kept waxing for her. Each minute, as counted by her clocks, took a larger fraction off her tau than the last minute had done.
Inboard, nothing changed. Air and metal still carried the pulse of acceleration, whose net internal drag still stood at an even one gravity. The interior power plant continued to give light, electricity, equable temperatures. The biosystems and organocycles reclaimed oxygen and water, processed waste, manufactured food, supported life. Entropy increased. People grew older at the ancient rate of sixty seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour.
Yet those hours were always less related to the hours and years which passed outside. Loneliness closed on the ship like fingers.
Another Covenant Day arrived. The ceremonies and the subsequent party were less forlorn than might have been expected. Shock and grief had gotten eroded by ordinariness. At present, the dominant mood was of defiance.
<...>
Dark.
The absolute night.
Instruments, straining magnification and amplification, reconverting wave lengths, identified some glimmer in that pit. Human senses found nothing, nothing.
It was, in truth, a flitting of ghosts, the absolute exiles. One had thought of space as black. But now one remembered that it had been full of stars. Any shape had been silhouetted athwart suns, clusters, constellations, nebulae, sister galaxies; oh, the cosmos was pervaded with light! The inner cosmos. Here was worse than a dark background. Here was no background...
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β Poul Anderson β Tau Zero (1970)
β Genre: Hard SF
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In theory an individual could Sublime, but in practice only solitary AIs ever did, successfully. It took something as complex and self-referentially perfect as a high-level AI to have the cohesion to stand up to the Sublime alone; no normal biological individual could β you just evaporated in there. It was not utter annihilation β all the information you brought with you remained β but the persona, the individual as a functioning, identifiable and distinctive entity β that was gone.
<...>
Parcelled, rolled, compressed and enfolded into the dimensions beyond the dimensions beyond the ones you could see and understand; that was where the Sublime was, and it was a maze-like series of right-angle turns away from this, from normal, three-dimensional reality where she stood on a high platform at sunset, thinking about it.
Cossont had a hard enough time really comprehending hyperspace, the fourth dimension, let alone the next three or four that somehow encompassed the Reality and allowed for nested universes to climb away from the universe-creating singularity at the centre of things and either circle back round some immense cosmic manifold to be re-compacted and born again, or radiate away into whatever it was that surrounded this mind-boggling ultra-universe.
And the Sublimed lay in dimensions beyond even that; unutterably microscopic, unassailably far away but at the same time everywhere, shot through the fabric of space-time not so much like the individual fibres of this metaphorical weave, or their tiniest filaments or their molecules or their atoms or their sub-atomic particles but β pointedly β <...>
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β Iain Banks β The Hydrogen Sonata (2012)
β Genre: Fantasy SF
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The largest of the probes was really an automated factory, but its single output was very unusual β monopoles. It had some monopoles on board already, both positive and negative types. These were not for output, but the seed material needed to run the monopole factory. The factory probe headed for the first of the large nickel-iron planetoids that the strong magnetic fields of the neutron star had slowed and captured during its travels. It started preparing the site while the other probes proceeded with the job of building the power supply necessary to operate the monopole factory, for the power that would be needed was so great that there was no way the factory probe could have carried the fuel. In fact, the power levels needed would exceed the total power-plant capability of the human race on Earth, Colonies, Luna, Mars, asteroids, and scientific outposts combined.
<...>
The job of the smaller probes was to lay cable. They started at the factory and laid a long thin cable in a big loop that passed completely around the star, but out at a safe distance, where it would be stable for the few months that the power would be needed. Since a billion kilometers of cable was needed to reach from the positions of the asteroidal material down around the star and back out again, it had to be very unusual cable β and it was. The cables being laid were bundles of superconducting polymer threads. Although it was hot near the neutron star, there was no need of refrigeration to maintain the superconductivity, for the polymers stayed superconducting almost to their melting point β 900 degrees.
<...>
With the power source hooked up to the factory, production started. Strong alternating magnetic fields whipped the seed monopoles back and forth at high energies through a chunk of dense matter. The collisions of the monopoles with the dense nuclei took place at such high energies that elementary particle pairs were formed in profusion, including magnetic monopole pairs. These were skimmed out of the debris emanating from the target and piped outside the factory by tailored electric and magnetic fields, where they were injected into the nearby asteroid. The monopoles entered the asteroid and in their passage through the atoms interacted with the nuclei, displacing the outer electrons. A monopole didn't orbit the nucleus like an electron. Instead, it whirled in a ring, making an electric field that held the charged nucleus, while the nucleus whirled in a linked ring to make a magnetic field that held onto the magnetically charged monopole.
With the loss of the outer electrons that determined their size, the atoms became smaller, and the rock they made up became denser. As more and more monopoles were poured in the center of the asteroid, the material there changed from normal matter,
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β Robert L. Forward β Dragon's Egg (1980)
β Genre: Hard SF
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Do not disturb my casket of recollections.
Discord: @liserotte