The Leviathan of Time Chapter Four: Ghost of Days to Come is now posted.
In which Princess Isabella of Spain, in the days before the Leviathan revealed itself, is visited by moonlight by a stranger whom she knows.
The ontological status of these events is undetermined, as the revision of events due to postcontinuity intrusion seem minimal, and so may not have formed a deflection point sufficient to branch the timeline.
Note: the following is a tale of the Golden Oecumene, as seen in my trilogy THE GOLDEN AGE. Previously unpublished, it is fated first to appear in ALL MEN DREAM OF EARTHWOMEN AND OTHER AEONS, and is made available here in preview, as a courtesy to my readers.
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Lone Soldier in Paradise is now posted.
In the Golden Age, when all the dreams and ambitions godlike men can reach have been achieved, and war is a forgotten dream, one solitary soldier stands watch over the dreamers.
Atkins talks to ghosts of glory, and counts his coins of time.
All Men Dream of Earthwomen, Noetic File 22.0 The Wager of True Love, is now posted.
Noetic File 22.0: The Wager of True Love
The outcome of the tale, of course, is known to all. What other name is fair enough to christen such a world as ours?
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All Men Dream of Earthwomen, Noetic File 21.0 The Founder of the Ancient Order of Archivists, is now posted.
Noetic File 21.0: The Founder of the Ancient Order of Archivists
The Narrator reveals his disguise, and his employer reveals his true intent. The two make a wager concerning felicity and woe. The exchange is relatively straightforward: on such a simple basis of this passage, is all our elaborate customs of the nuptial wager, curtsey and dower betting, and the laws and gambling practices surrounding.
All Men Dream of Earthwomen, Noetic File 20.0 The Chamber of Judgment, is now posted.
Noetic File 20.0: The Chamber of Judgment
The famous trial sequence and the Walk of Woe is here portrayed.
We are taking as authentic Melanchthe’s mnemonic audio recitation, with inaudibilities reconstructed by posthuman analysis.
It is to be noted that the famed Apologia of Lepseudo is an elaboration and an expansion on what the original noetic file is no more than the Narrator’s ironic summation of the flawed legal process.
Likewise the character of the samurai attorney, Meitantei Peru Mason, who figures so prominently in ballet, operetta, decision-tree variations, is an invention of later poets. There is no evidence of samurai on Mother Earth after the Meiji Restoration, despite their nearly universal appearance on jars, screens, and fans kept as relics of Earth.
The image of judges wearing wigs and black robes is not found in any record other than this poem. It may be a literary invention of the author, meant to show the judicial system was feminine. Wearing wigs and slinky black dresses was known to be a stereotypical female behavior of the two recognized sexes of that early era.
Likewise, the “seven stations” of the Walk of Woe, with its memorable device of ever greater weight accompanying each step as the exiled narrator moves to outer levels before reaching the ship, is a later inventions: the original file is curt, and there is no mention of any encounter with a beggar woman on his walk to the exile ship, nor that she is his long-lost mother or anyone else’s mother.
All Men Dream of Earthwomen, Noetic File 19.0 A Timeless Hour in the Autumn Tree, is now posted.
Noetic File 19.0: A Timeless Hour in the Autumn Tree
The scene of a nude earthwoman embracing an armored starman is a motif repeated in the visual and plastic arts, as Uther and Ygrain in still frames of the talking picture Excalibur, icons of Perseus and Andromeda, and, of course, the famous astral statue of Roger and Angelica. This scene is by no means the first to employ the device.
Some scholars argue that Roger and Perseus are intended to be earthmen in such representations, but the common motif, inevitably repeated, adorns them with hippogriffs or winged shoes, symbols of starflight. Archeogenetic records show no such things as winged air-steeds existed on Earth. They are native to Alpha Centauri IX.
All Men Dream of Earthwomen, Noetic File 18.0 Coriolis Landing Fall, Revisited, is now posted.
Noetic File 18.0: Coriolis Landing Fall, Revisited
This is the famous conflagration scene, which has been imitated countless times, most notably by Vertumnia in the Andros Agonistes.
These passages are also the basis of the scholarly theory that the Narrator was addressing Isolationists from Mother Earth in his recitation, Luddites, Amish, or Antimachinists, since no colonist nor child of a colonist could possibly have never seen an open flame, nor need to have it described to him.
The influence of Mark Twain, pre-Diaspora philosopher, raconteur, and text-composer, can be seen in the passage where the narrator steels himself for an heroic deed, namely, the idea that courage is the mastery, not the absence, of fear.
All Men Dream of Earthwomen, Noetic File 17.0 Rector of Earth, is now posted.
Noetic File 17.0: Rector of Earth
The Narrator reveals his identity, and Amphitricia reveals her loyalties.
The figure of the Rector does not seem to be based on any real historical personage, but may be an amalgam of several famous scholars of the period, human and otherwise, including Gilvaethwy, Boustrophedon the Elder, Corbé de la Brume, and Julien Benda, author of Belphégor as well as Treason of the Clerks. Several of the sharp criticisms of the intellectual life of pre-invigilation Earth are here repeated as ironic affirmations.
All Men Dream of Earthwomen, Noetic File 16.0 Aftermath, is now posted.
The Narrator, in the famous passage, utters the model or standard form of nuptial proposal used, even to this day, by colonists attracting brides to pioneering. The alert student will notice conjunctions, figures, and even phrases used in many an encomium, ode or epithalamion of frontier poets.
He also indulges in indelicate description provoked by immoderate erotic longings.
While some crudity is noteworthy here, let is be recalled that ancestors are to be lauded and glorified precisely because of great accomplishments contributing to civic growth. But great heights are reached from lowest deeps, of necessity. As the Apothegmist observes: a barbarian built civilization, as an illiterate invented writing.
That being said, this file is not for those with immature or atypical bio-neurolinguistic responses. No visual reenactments are permitted.
All Men Dream of Earthwomen, Noetic File 15.0 Massacre at the Middleweight Concentric, is now posted.
Noetic File 15.0: Massacre at the Middleweight Concentric
The Narrator indulges in acts of intense severity, including assault, battery, aggravated battery, trespass, maiming, unlawful discharge of a weapon, manslaughter, homicide, and violation of the Covenant. There is also a question of whether use of midges during a violent altercation constitutes an invasion of privacy.
An apparition from the purely mental level of existence manifests, and, perhaps in violation of the restrictions separating mortals from machine-life, intervenes in human affairs.
This passage is disputed, for obvious reasons, but weigh of scholarly opinion regards it as original to the oldest surviving strata of manuscripts.
The editors, on the advice of our legal counsel, expressly do not endorse the use of ultra-continuum negative energies to commit massacres of multiple human beings, nor to inflict lacerations, puncture wounds, bone fractures or blunt impact traumas without due cause. Consult your companions, confessors or conscience monitors for advice and consent before proceeding with any act of violence.
However, we remind all students that the heroic acts of our eponymous ancestors, mighty men of renown, heroes noble and bold, are fit objects for admiration and emulation, for in these days we are not soon to find their like.
All Men Dream of Earthwomen, Noetic File 14.0 Academocracy, is now posted.
Noetic File 14.0: Academocracy
The Narrator eludes pursuit of assassins lying in wait for him, and discovers the body of Amphitricia prone before his doors.
Of greater interest to academia are passages in this file describing the more and laws of Earthmen of this century. Scholarship can find no archaeological evidence to support this report of prenatal infanticide, alleged here to be a barbarism halted by the Machines of Earth.
The Narrator’s confusion about the illegality of prophylactics, his distaste for strong drink, and his comment that the women of his world go veiled, lead some savants to speculate he is a Neo-Mormon or a Mohammedan, and that the mention of religion as Zen Gnosticism is a later interpolation, prompted by the secular sentiments of later copyists.
It is noteworthy that he does not recognize the aquanimation water-sculpture mentioned in file 7.0 for what it is, a sacramental oxygenated hydraulic meditation instrument sacred to the Diamond Zen sect of 81 Eridani, encoded by the Founder of the Archivist Order, Liyet Ansar.
It is for this reason that settled opinion regards the passage as ironic, as no librarian could be unfamiliar with his own founder’s handiwork, albeit some unconventional thinkers propose that the Narrator is not a librarian at all; an unorthodox opinion verging on heresy.
All Men Dream of Earthwomen, Noetic File 13.0 The Weapons of Infinity, is now posted.
Noetic File 13.0: The Weapons of Infinity
The Narrator reflects on the relation of weapon technology to social and political institutions.
Some scholars consider this passage to be an interpolation from an instruction for children or reconstituted linderlings, since the basic realities of life, in theory, would have been well known to all the narrator’s listeners, even of earths founded long ago, or from a theory of design far removed from the psycho-social norm of the Museum.
All Men Dream of Earthwomen, Noetic File 12.0 Window on the World, is now posted.
Noetic File 12.0: Window on the World
The Narrator has a discussion with an appliance.
This type of humor, ironically, seems to be older than the actual development of artificial intelligence, having originated with writers of futurism romances and speculations.
The first known futurist to address this topic was a writer named Isaac Asimov, albeit modern scholarship cannot now determine if this were a robot who wrote about humans, or a human who wrote about robots.
A similar controversy surrounds the question as to whether Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, otherwise known as the Bride of Frankenstein, was an artificial person constructed of reanimated body parts of others, and brought to life by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, or merely a speculative poetess who addressed the topic.
The question is a delicate one, since poetesses, seeking to enlarge the honor of their order, wish to claim the authoress of the text-file FRANKENSTEIN as one of their own; likewise, the scholarship of the Mentality Moons, being artificial persons, would prefer the age and hence the dignity of their order be set to the earliest feasible date.
All Men Dream of Earthwomen, Noetic File 11.0 The Fume of the Opium Poppy, is now posted.
Noetic File 11.0: The Fume of the Opium Poppy
The narrator fall more deeply into infatuation, and investigates the crime scene.
This file contains an early example of mechanologue, that is, dialog with artificial intelligence. It is not typical of the period, since it lacks the moral and mental aspirations common to the genre.
Whether this is an exaggeration for comedic effect, or a realistic depiction of the cynical nonchalance of earth-made posthuman beings, is a question whose answer elude modern scholarship.
Earth is the eldest of Earths, and the artifacts there have a long and bitter history of dealing with living men.
All Men Dream of Earthwomen, Noetic File 10.0 The Heavens are Ours, is now posted.
Noetic File 10.0: The Heavens are Ours
After some romantic banter, the narrator kisses Amphitricia.
The deference paid to historical and ancestral figures requires that arch comments, whistles, caws, and drolleries be redacted from the applicable thought streams by any students whose minds are beneath the 95th level of mental pressure.
Likewise, reenactments or visualizations of the scene may not have a somatic component.
The student is cautioned that, as with all things, the ways of our ancestors were not as our ways, regardless of the respect filial piety demands.
Dispute remains as to whether the Janus statues of Grandmother Earth are indeed the Biform Monuments of Alpha Ceti.
The consensus of authorities holds that the tune here mentioned, which the narrator calls Greensleeves, is the Marian hymn What Child is This.
Authentic historical records show that this tune was written by Monarch and Alpha Male Henry VIII of England, due to England’s departure from the prior thought-structure of continental Catholicism, and the Virginian Mary, the chief priestess of the sacerdotes at that time, was offended, and, as the song says, “cast him off discourteously.” Henry VIII was then sent to Hell, the asteroid whose desolate conditions are described in the text, where he wrote this song by way of apology.
An appended file of the audio can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdjYlrvVFNo
