Author: Jason Davies-Redgrave

Beginnings

from the Preface to Towards a New Grand Composition

“We did not sense the start of corruption.

Its tempo took hold so quickly and utterly.

We understood it too late”

City at the River Fort

12^th Dominant Glacial Overture

60552/24^th Fluvial Mineral Minuet 

It had been a cold, wet and fruitless night, Peck failed to suppress a yawn.

“Since The Beyond tasted their malleable wits the human-apes have been slaves to its perversity.” Jynn looked to the cloud filled sky as if her thoughts sailed the cold dawn winds. “They mutilate every thing that they lay their grubby paws on, it is like an addiction for them. Earth and rock and metals transmuted to their will? Unthinkable! They adorn themselves with trinkets made of Mother’s precious stones, use Her precious ores in their devices! As if they were born to such nobility.

And plastic, urgh, plastic! Corruption made manifest, infiltrating all Her living matter. They even putrefy their own bodies with the muck. It is a heathen bio-chemical nightmare that will one day, mark my words Peck, will one day suffocate every last one of them.”

Soon after her first hunt with Jynn, Peck had come to know this sad melody by heart. When The Many or The Heralds or The Fang beat them to a Prize these tired and indignant verses were hauled out, for anyone in earshot. A means to lessen the sting of defeat through the judicious application of medicinal words, like calendula on burnt fingertips.

“Of course, glass is their utmost abomination! The utmost audacity! A flagrant desecration. They think it possible to halt the motion of sand! Burn it, petrify it, make it immutable for eternity? The grains yearn to move, to pulse and to flow as they have done throughout time.

All this music needs to be heard, transposed and understood.”

“Everything you will need will be in this box…”

When you first go into space it is the most desolate and strangely beautiful thing you’ll ever see.  There are vast tracts of inky emptiness, pin pricks of light shimmering in the infinite distance but every so often you see something wonderful that sears itself into your consciousness forever.

 Now, I can’t even bring myself to look out of the window at the gaudy lights and boiling gas of the nebula beyond the station: it looks fake, like a bad holo-reproduction. The medical centre is a vast, cold tundra of healing. All the staff are methodical and pleasant enough yet at the same time brash and thoughtlessly noisy. My room is a painfully clinical, porcelain white cell with sharp edged lighting. Even the bed sheets feel hard and unforgiving, scratching against my survivor’s guilt at each slow turn of my tired body.

“Everything you will need will be in this box…”

When you first go into space it is the most desolate and strangely beautiful thing you’ll ever see.  There are vast tracts of inky emptiness, pin pricks of light shimmering in the infinite distance but every so often you see something wonderful that sears itself into your consciousness forever.

 Now, I can’t even bring myself to look out of the window at the gaudy lights and boiling gas of the nebula beyond the station: it looks fake, like a bad holo-show. The medical centre is a vast, cold tundra of healing. All the staff are methodical and pleasant enough yet at the same time brash and thoughtlessly noisy. My room is a painfully clinical, porcelain white cell with sharp edged lighting. Even the bed sheets feel hard and unforgiving, scratching against my survivor’s guilt at each slow turn of my tired body.