HRVST, Ch. 9: The Price Of Avarice For The Sun
HRVST, Ch. 9: The Price Of Avarice For The Sun
Tantalized by the Sun since the first sunrise, the gods were at risk if they forgot themselves and tampered with such power. Old gods faded, Man's hunger remained.
The Sun possesses near 99.9% the mass of the Solar System, a quantity we felt long before we could calculate it, when myths about the sun were treated as reality.
Even the gods were at risk if they forgot themselves and tampered with such power.
The old gods may have faded away but man’s hunger remained.
In the Middle Kingdom long ago, they spoke of 10 suns, all sons of a Goddess, who followed their mother like hatchlings, across the heavens. Warned against gathering in one place, lest their light and heat destroy the world, they did just that, and as the world began to blister under their collective power, their father had no choice but to command a celestial archer to end them. One remained and was more than enough.
The world was saved, one sun remained but this same defiance remained everywhere.
The serpent god Rahu Ketu wanted to devour the sun, so Vishnu beheaded him. The head of the serpent, Rahu, was still alive, and at times managed to swallow the sun and the moon, casting them into darkness. The sun and moon would then fall out of Rahu’s bodyless head, in a never-ending cycle of greed and loss, eclipse and escape.
Avarice is just as blinding as audacity, it is a hunger which consumes gluttons.
If only Icarus had listened to his father, Daedelus, as they took to the air on wings the father designed to escape their prison. Daedelus was a genius prized for his usefulness to a King so much that he and his son were imprisoned in a high tower.
The son did not have the temperance and wisdom of his father, and flew so high, he was close enough to the sun for his wings to melt apart, and fell to the ocean.
Elsewhere in man’s memories, the opposite happened for the same reason - the audacity and brazen ignorance of youth without the patience of experience.
The Sun god, Helios, was not immune from this danger, betrayed by his heart.
He, like many of the gods, sired many children. He reached out to a son, Phaeton. Helios relented, to prove his paternity and win his child’s affections, when Phaeton asked to be given the reins to the Sun Chariot.
Helios piloted his chariot across the heavens to bring light and heat for each day.
The son was not ready for such a fearsome task, and almost destroyed the world by flying the sun too close to the world. Even Zeus, who respected the power of the Sun, could not allow this to pass. He hurled lightning, killed the errant Phaeton so that the sun chariot would not destroy everything, and that the world might live.
It is a recurring tale, a warning for the hunger for powers beyond man’s control.
LUNA, Aitken Basin, Armstrong, City Core, The Square
The crowd’s shouting, laughter, and chatter filled the underground storeroom.
No one heard what their host said, as he stood in the middle of a small empty circle inside the crowd, standing at attention, with a salute in the direction of a stranger.
Everyone resumed making bets, drinking bootleg brews, and distracting themselves.
The stranger broke eye contact with the man he was looking for, the host. The man who saluted the stranger did not wear a uniform, he was half naked, with unit and unit flag markings tattooed on his shoulders.
“TwoTwo” walked towards the captain. He pulled up the top half of his zipped open jumpsuit, which hung around his waist like a kilt, and put it back on. Tattoos on the shoulders, which marked his service, were hidden again.
“It’s been a while, Sir.
Nobody here will say anything about seeing you, they’re busy trying to forget how things have been these last few weeks. Everyone is blowing off steam from helping out in the relief and first-aid tents in The Square. I don’t let anybody down here anyway if I didn’t double-check.”
“TwoTwo, is there someplace we can go to talk?”
“Here’s good, Sir. I don’t know what there is to talk about. But Tommy made me, so if you want to talk, we can talk here.”
Tomassina tapped TwoTwo on the shoulder from behind and then grabbed an arm, to lead them away to find a quiet spot. TwoTwo pulled his arm back.
“TwoTwo, it’s important, I want you to listen to the Captain. You said you would.”
“I said I would say hello.”
“TwoTwo,” Tomassina looked TwoTwo in the eye, took him by the hand, “It’s not about doing a job. You’re always helping people here, they trust you. The rest of the unit that de-mobbed and went up the well to Luna are going to want to know too. A lot of them have kids, you know that. It’s not just us.
You’re going to want to do something about it, after he tells you why he’s here.”
TwoTwo looked at Tomassina, squeezed her hand, then let it go after he saw that the Captain noticed, then nodded towards a hallway at the other end of the storeroom.
“Over there.”
TwoTwo led the way through the crowd, down through the hallway, to a backroom.
“We can talk in here, I stayed here last night, you can talk to me while I pack.”
“Same TwoTwo, always on the move. Almost never a night in the same place.”
“Well, Sir, not tonight here for sure, now that you showed up. Why are you here?”
TwoTwo rummaged through a table covered with clothes and small items, and packed some of it in a duffel bag.
“A friend down the well asked me to follow a message she got, to go to Wellington.”
TwoTwo stopped and looked over for a second. “Wellington? Triumvirate? There was a copresident who took early retirement. Oracles with different stories about why.”
“Yes, he was the fall guy for something bigger, something out of the Houston office. My friend was in charge of evacuating Heavyville, before that Cat 7 hit Texas. She got kicked upstairs to Houston and next thing she’s in the middle of something, and got some card, a message, then she asked me to help. I owe her.
I’ve been on the go since then, and now I’m here.
After arriving, I find out someone nobody wants to talk about is running a rogue project up here, someone everyone thought was dead or missing.”
TwoTwo nodded, “I hear things, most of it stories. The only facts are don’t mess around or get close to whatever strangers are doing, so I don’t. I got plenty to do after that CME. A lot of people got hurt, and a lot broken and burned. No time for ghost stories, Captain. I don’t have time to reenlist, and work for the Cooperative either.”
“Well, TwoTwo, I’m not here for the Cooperative.
It might have started that way with my friend but it’s not court intrigue at the Triumvirate, it’s not cut-throat politics in the executive suite of the S.C. It’s all a double-bluff for something that someone, who everyone thinks is dead, doesn’t want anyone to know about.
We have to get close to something everyone else is too scared to talk about.
That something is the reason for all the hell that broke loose. Here on Luna, down the well on Earth, even as far as Mars. That freak CME was not bad luck, it was because of that rogue project.
That someone I’m looking for is the reason.”
TwoTwo stopped packing, and turned around to face the Captain.
“Who is this dead person who’s not dead, Sir?”
“Necker.” There was only one “Necker” when the name was mentioned in any conversation. A founding father of the Space Cooperative, who one day just disappeared, and was believed to be dead. He became the stuff of rumors and myth.
Tomassina turned to face TwoTwo, grabbed one of his hands and wouldn’t let go.
“We both know the Captain doesn’t tell stories. Everyone here, in that crowd laying bets on fights, up top on the Square, all over Armstrong, the whole Basin. Everyone’s in danger and they don’t know it.
We can’t risk getting the word out.
You heard the rumors about the last administrator, TwoTwo?”, TwoTwo nodded, “Well, he made the mistake of trying to stop whatever’s going on, only he didn’t have help. He didn’t have us. The guy who got his job is helping us. He’s got a family. There are others too. We have to help them, and then find and stop Necker.”
The Captain reached inside his vest, pulled out a dull black card, and showed it to TwoTwo, and gave it to him to examine. “The administrator gave me this. His predecessor, his old boss, left it for him, in case. It’s where we have to go after we help his family and others stuck in this.”
TwoTwo looked at the card and ran his finger along the letters etched on it,
”H.R.V.S.T.”, and handed it back to the Captain.
TwoTwo was quiet, he looked at Tomassina, then the Captain, and walked over to a couch that was by one wall. He stepped on top of the couch’s back, stretched his arms to the ceiling, and slid a ceiling panel open. With one hand, he pulled down a rack that was filled with equipment and weapons.
“I think we’ll need this.”
NOTES:
AI art Lexica Prompts
1
perfectly-centered-Portrait of a sun Goddess, intricate, highly detailed, digital painting, artstation, concept art, smooth, sharp focus, illustration, Unreal Engine 5, 8K, art by artgerm and greg rutkowski and alphonse mucha
2
beautiful illustration of a hong kong street in the rain and fog, trending on pixiv, artstation
3
a door at the end of a long dark staircase and corridor by beeple and kim jung gi, cyberpunk, trending on artstation
4
police station underground graffiti Tekkonkinkreet treasure town comics illustration digital art painting by fanart artstation depth global illumination GI AAA SSS
For those who have just read this and been dropped in the middle of things:
This is another chapter of “HRVST, the 4th and final part of a book, “Ledger Domain”, a mashup of history, mythology, and a Scifi.
We’re just 2+ weeks from the end of a book that I began writing a few months ago.
There’s a backstory to the “Captain” and his mission, which was explored in Part 1 and Part 2 of “Ledger Domain”.
“HRVST”, which is Part 4 and the finale, is being shared as it is written daily.
You do not have to read any of the rest of the book.
At the same time, in between, I will write pieces about the past and the future, (Such as one I wrote about the connection between William Blake, Leonardo Da Vinci, Daguerreotype photography, the Lumiere Brothers’ invention of moving pictures, and the rise of the open source early “Web” to the explosion in AI art, “You’ve Got That Infinite Feeling”.)
Great stuff Edward. I really enjoy how you break your story into bite-sized chunks like this. The inclusion of AI art is also a plus. I want to try a similar format for my next major piece of fiction.