South of Maya - First chapter.

I

 

“All things in the world are like a dream, or like an image miraculously projected.” 

Lankavantara Sutra

       Marcus Mann extended his hand toward the sea of bare rock that reached out to the rim of the planet and beyond.  Somewhere on the far edge of the horizon the air quivered, trembled, gathered strength and blew hard across the face of the world. 

       The sky darkened, then exploded in lightning as rains poured down, gathering in rivulets, then rivers, then mighty cascades across the landscape, until the lowlands were filled, stranding mountains that became islands, and uplands that became continents. 

       Another gesture, and sunlight smiled upon the chastened world.  Small, warm puddles, natural petri dishes, nurtured a thin gruel of fragile carbon gossamer which congealed and reformed into myriad tiny forms that clustered at the sun-warmed base of the rocks along the shore. 

       Mann gestured again, and a mossy growth along the naked soil exploded upward into a thick cluster of cycads that spread their furry branches across the sky.

       Driving snow and warm rains alternately froze and thawed the earth.  New growth literally flew off the branches, scattering leaves as thick as snowflakes in a blizzard, followed by another leaf shower, faster than the one before, and again and again, covering the earth with a blanket of decomposing mulch that became soil. 

       Insects, some as large as birds, sprang out of the fetid muck and blurred the air with a muted buzzing that hovered along the lower edge of perceptibility.  Tentative sprouts of undergrowth climbed like snakes up thirty-foot trunks to extend their leaves into the great shimmering canopy overhead.  Others spread across the ground until the trees seemed to be standing ankles-deep in exotic shrubbery, which crowded against itself and each other in silent, murderous competition for life-giving sunlight. 

       After a moment, flowers appeared in full bloom along the edges of the forest.  

       In the dizzying blur of daylight following darkness, lungfish pushed and squirmed between shallow puddles, stretched out their fins and scuttled across the open ground, rapidly multiplying in number and form as they scattered across the face of the warm, moist earth.

       After a few moments, feathered creatures flitted across the sky.  Mann cast a few clouds into the sky, and with a gesture of both hands, drove continents into ponderous collision, raising mountains across the horizon, covering them with grass that provided food and bedding for new kinds of creatures whose blood was warmed by controlled internal fires.  

       Finally, the hands of time slowed down, the restless wind faded away, and everywhere the planet was silent. 

       Mann tasted the air.  He reached down to caress the loamy ground, and consider the peaceful orchestra of life here in the center of an endless pine and cycad forest that moments before had been antediluvian rock as bare and craggy as the surface of the Moon.

       It was good.

       Before he could finish congratulating himself, the world shuddered deep in its core, then again and again.  Frowning, Mann extended his hand in a forbidding gesture, but the shudder grew stronger, and the energy of the vibrations began to spread out across the world, opening up cracks in the rock, spewing volcanos, raising earthquakes that lifted the sea high up over the land and back again. 

       Through the chaos, Mann saw his delicate creatures morphing, adapting to the mayhem, some of them changing into predators of their peers in the ecosystem and adding a certain mayhem of their own.

       Mann’s hands moved quickly as he tried to unwind the damage that was spreading faster than he could track it.  Instinctively, he began to speed up his awareness, so that it seemed as if the world stopped moving altogether, the insects frozen in the air, the breezes halted, the tremor of the leaves arrested.

       In this state of hyper-speed, he was finally able to recognize the rumblings under his feet as a kind of speech, rising up from places so deep underground that his awareness was helpless to identify the source.

       “WHATEVER YOU CREATE, I WILL DESTROY,” the voice rumbled, and the sound echoed off the mountains and rolled up into the clouds.

       “I AM THE MASTER HERE,” Mann shouted back.

       “TAKE IT IF YOU CAN.”

       “WHO ARE YOU?  WHY ARE YOU?”

       In that instant, the sky darkened, and a hurricane the size of a continent threw torrents of rain and hail in Mann’s face.  The sky gathered itself, and then erupted with a blinding flash of light, blasting a jolt of power deep into every atom of Mann’s body, vaporizing the structure that held him together. 

       He felt himself dissolving into a cloud of agony, a mist, then a vapor, his awareness spreading out across the landscape and becoming fainter as it became more tenuous. 

       Somewhere, a part of the expanding cloud realized that if he wanted to survive, the thing that was rapidly becoming no longer Mann would have to reassemble itself before its component parts drifted too far apart.

       And at the same time it realized that every movement back toward density would also reassemble the pain that was easing as he diffused.

       Collecting itself with an immense effort, the expanding cloud willed itself, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, structure by structure, to draw itself back toward a central location.  The expansion halted and, like the film of an explosion run backwards, the pieces began to coalesce into an increasingly dense cloud, the meta-awareness gritting against the mortal agony that its immortal body was suffering, more with each moment.

       More…

       More, pain beyond comprehension.

       Finally, after a million years of effort, the cloud collapsed back into the god of this world.  Mann flexed his hands and straightened, triumphant in the pain he had achieved.

       Then he turned his full, focused attention downward, and felt, for a moment, the thing below him tremble, whether in anticipation or fear he would never know.

       “SEE IF I WON’T TAKE IT BACK,” he spoke quietly, though the words rolled out across the landscape with the power to create continents.  “EVERYTHING YOU DESTROY,” he whispered, “I’LL CREATE ANEW.”

       Mann extended his hands, gritted his awareness and adjusted breeding capacities, raised the efficiency of ecological adaptation and ultimately the conservation of sunlight energy across the varied ecosystems from the depths of the sea to the lichen at the top of mountains, across deserts, plains, jungles and tundra.  Where the other sought to kill individual creatures, he sought to preserve the continuity of life.

       For age after age, eon after eon, the struggle between adaptation and extinction continued until, at last, Mann and his adversary had achieved a rough equilibrium, and Mann dropped his hands and allowed himself a tired sense of triumph. 

       Deep below the ground he stood on, there emanated a tired sense of frustration.

       The pain was gone.

       The world moved on, and Mann stopped again to consider the creation.  The balance was precarious, and he had the sense that his adversary had sown seeds that would tip the global ecology back toward extinction somewhere down the line.

       He was deciding where to carve out a trout stream when a woman’s face appeared in the sky, covering half the horizon.  A thousand woodland creatures evolved, stared up in terror at the animated sky, and vanished into burrows.

       Mann looked up in annoyance.  It was a curiously peevish God with tension concentrated around the mouth, muscles clamping the lips strangely, unpleasantly rigid in perpetual disapproval.

       Mann resisted the temptation to cover the intruding presence with a sky-blackening swarm of locusts.  He felt a hint of regret at his impending demotion from godhood. 

       “Can it wait?” he asked.

       “You’ve already wasted too much of my time,” the voice rumbled out of the sky, scattering the clouds.  “And my time is infinitely more valuable than you realize.”

       With a sigh, Mann extended his arms to the horizon, and with a mental leap, shifted his body into, through and beyond the sky.  In an instant, he was sitting upright in a chair in the basement of the laboratory, surrounded by white-coated engineers who were fussing at dials and computer screens.  One of them walked over to disconnect the headset.

       “How did I do?” he asked.

       “For a first try?  Not terrible,” the technician said, holding the headset and examining it as if he were afraid it was now infested with fleas.  “We store all of them.  Dr. Washington says that these creations, when we learn how to transfer stories and characters into them, are destined to become the primary art form, replacing novels and movies.  Instead of watching the story, the audience will live in it.”

       Mann hesitated.  “There was something else down there,” he said.  “Can you tell me what it was?”

       The technician looked at him curiously.  “You don’t know?” he said.

       “Would I have asked if I did?”

       “Could we possibly waste more time?” the peevish god’s voice called out from the far side of the room.  The face in the sky emerged from another helmet in the last of the row of chairs, stood up and shifted impatiently on her feet.  “I’m Emmaline Witch,” she said brusquely.  “For the next few days, you answer to me on everything.  Understood?”

       Mann looked her up and down, and swallowed a comment about her name.  He nodded.

       “Now that you’ve had a taste of the simulation, we can discuss your assignment.  If it’s convenient for your godship,” she added acidly.

Author's Note

I'll post more if anybody is interested... How is this normally done? Would I post the whole manuscript, or just add chapters?

Reviews

[andyandrew1313]

The description was phenomenal, just like the plot you've laid out for us! I'm really interested in seeing more of this.