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Science Fiction and Fantasy
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| Raven's Edge - Alternate Intro | |
| By avodaith | ||||||||||
| 02 June 2008 | ||||||||||
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Raven's Edge is a novel I have been working on, on and off, for years now. Its main motivation is to connect the massive space opera with the massively mundane in the real world, and most of the action takes place in a small fishing port on the north east coast of England. What follows is part of an autobiography by one of the main characters who won't appear to become significant in the book until about halfway through. It may end up intercut into the novel, as alternate chapters, or it may simply be written as a character study for my own amusement. Whichever it is, I submit it here for your perusal. My name is Avo Daith, and I am twice born. I am both the hero and the villain of this book. However I was born, as most people are, as a blank page, and the life that was to be written there seems, looking back, like it could not belong to me. It is a part of me that pains me to think of, and I write it down now to purge myself of the feelings of pain and guilt that fill my every moment. My name is Avo Daith. To some I am a hero, to others I am the blackest villain ever to walk abroad. I am the saviour of the universe, the destroyer of worlds, and perpetrator of genocidal destruction. I have loved, and lost, and wept, and laughed like any man. I am nobody special. To tell the story of your own life is more difficult than it sounds. If it’s someone else’s life you can fill in the blanks by talking to those who were around at the time, or you can just make it up. If nobody remembers, then who’s to contradict you? Writing about yourself is different. Making it up is like cheating at patience. I could research my parents, I suppose, but it wouldn’t be the same. If I’m going to write about my life then it will be my life alone, and my parents were never very much part of mine. I was first born in either the year 4674 or 4675, I am not sure of the exact date. I’m sure I did know, we did celebrate birthdays, and as an eager seven year old I’m sure I had it memorised in letters of fire upon my brain. Somehow, however, over the last seventy or so years it seems to have escaped me. When I became President some twenty years ago my birthday was declared a holiday, and I made up a date, but truly I have no idea. My parents have disappeared into the fog of the past almost completely now. I know my mother used to read to me, and I remember some individual moments quite clearly, but of the real person they belonged to not a tatter remains. I used to have memories of my mother, though, real ones I’m sure. Nothing as extravagant as pictures, but sounds, smells, tastes even. Mostly oil. I don’t know what my mother did, but it must have involved bathing in the stuff. Black, thick, rust and dust laden. I have a particularly vivid memory of biting into an oil sandwich. It was supposed to be some kind of meat, but all you could taste was bread and oil. The oil was so pervasive it has now completely overpowered any memory of the woman beneath. On the other hand I have a clear picture of my father in my mind, a snapshot of a man I never knew. He is sitting in a high backed chair. A big man, dark and ponderous, dressed in heavy clothes, and in his hand he is holding a shoe, and staring at it intently as though it is a crystal ball in which all the mysteries of life were laid out before him. I don’t know why he is looking at a shoe. I don’t even know if it is a real memory, or just something my imagination has conjured up. I worry sometimes that the only reason I have a memory of my father is that it is, and always was, a complete fiction. A phantom, a man who never was. I was once offered a picture of my father that someone had dug up from some archive, a painting by a friend. But I dare not lose the fiction. If that is all I have, let me keep that, at least. My first real memories are of school, and even those are varied in consistency. I can remember the layout of the school very well. I can remember the long walk to my classroom from the huge entrance hall, which used to be some kind of factory, and where your shoes would make squeaking and clumping noises which blended into an intricate rhythm first thing in the morning, and which marked out your guilt if you were late. I remember the cramped dining hall where we were forced to sit in silence and forced to eat steaming lumps of various shades of grey and brown. Most of all, though, I remember the long walk down to the rim, where we were made to run past the shoppers in our baggy shorts and ill-fitting shirts. I remember it always made me terribly embarrassed, ashamed of my small, frail body and my general inability. We lived on Vitae Adorae, one of the big ships that were abandoned by the Gods so long ago. Vitae had been programmed to plough between the planets of Carmella and Resnia, and for a thousand generations had done so without any input required from its human inhabitants. Something had gone wrong with it now, however, and I know my mother worked hard to try and fix it, and to keep us going. The travel was without any transportation aim. Carmella is a gas giant, Resnia a harsh and forbidding world of acid and sulphur. Aside from convenient orbits for shuttling between the two had nothing to recommend them, aside from the view at sunrise. Vitae travelled between them for the sole purpose of giving us gravity. The acceleration of the flight between them kept us uniformly rooted to the floor, and made the everyday tasks of cooking and washing much more convenient. A dreadful waste of fuel, but at the time people had no idea that it might run out, or indeed that there was anywhere else reachable. We were an insular colony, but we were aware we were not alone. A Door, with a capital D, was at one end of the ship, part of the temple, and during turnaround at each end of the trip, when we floated free and the children used to chase each other upside-down along the gangways, travellers from other worlds would visit. We would gaze at them, goggle-eyed, these weird and wonderful people from places far away that we would probably never visit. Strange people. People with fur, with tusks, and tentacles, with scales and peculiar pale skins. The pale skinned people were always the scariest, full of pomp and ceremony, with hooded robes that hid their faces but every now and again you would get a glimpse of that ghostly visage. The travellers brought new machines, and books, and stories of the places beyond the Door. Father worked in the temple, I don’t think he was a priest, more of a janitor than anything, but he used to bring back tales to regale my mother with, and which mother told to me. I don’t remember the telling, but I remember some of the tales. In particular I remember how one of the white men had killed one of the lesser priests for a blasphemy. I was terrified of them after that. I doubt it was true, but I am still not sure. I remember little about my parents, but I remember every detail of my schooling, from the layout of the classrooms to the smell of the boy who used to sit in front of me, a mixture of sweat and rubber I have never been able to fathom the cause of. I was very small at the time, and I used to get bullied mercilessly. I used to cry myself to sleep every night worrying why nobody liked me. It seems farcical to me now. Almost every day I hear of another of the statues raised to the glory of my name has been dashed to the ground. I do not care anymore. Yet at the time it seemed everything to me. Indeed, everything about myself at the time seems pathetic now, and yet still the thought of the times causes me no little pain. It seems I have grown out of the logic but not the emotion of the times. The boy who caused me more pain than any other was called Gar. Gar used to be my friend, and used to tie my shoelaces for me. I had difficulty with knots, and also with reading. I was a slow learner, and was behind many others in our reading of the book of words, the scripture of the ancients. As I say, Gar fell out with me, for reasons I cannot recall, and used to send intermediaries to me, alone in a corner of the school hall, with words of bitter reproach and scathing deprecation. I would respond with, I’m sure, equally stinging words, and so it continued. There was also a girl, who I do not remember the name of, and who I had counted as a friend. She had sided with Gar, and when she came to bring me his latest barb, than stung me most of all. I used to wish them dead. I’ve felt guilty about that, more so than the actual murder of some of the thousands since. I’m trying to rack my brains for all the things I remember about those times. It is odd that, despite the years of wishing them back, I have so little memory. I remember the shop on the promenade I once, in an act of great daring, stole a sweet from. I remember how my teacher used to bob her head whenever she talked, like a pigeon walking. I remember a stuffed toy I had, called Bud, with a long nose and a broken eye, that I used to go to sleep with tucked under my stomach. I remember the taste of the cream that we were given at school break times. I have a rather random and peculiarly vivid memory of lying in my cot and looking up at the wall beyond where a red reflection of Resnia crawled towards the ceiling. And I believe that is all I remember, until the events of the day of the destruction of the Vitae. Those I remember all too well.
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