Read Online Child of Fortune by Norman Spinrad - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Norman Spinrad
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still descending, performed a slight roll, and a slice of black space appeared at the periphery of my visual sphere, forming a subtly curved edge to the chaotic maelstrom of colors, and at last I began to make sense out of what I saw, finally relating the raw sensory data to my prior astronomical knowledge.
Edoku was not a true planet but a satellite of a large gas giant, and it was the surface of that huge world, or rather the roil of its atmosphere, seen from so close on that the eye could not encompass it as a whole, which was the backdrop against which Edoku appeared. The discs of light, then, must be the orbiting luz redefusers, each illumining a small portion of Edoku's surface.
And indeed the onrushing surface of the planet was faceted like the jeweled eye of an insect or a mosaic window of colored bits of glass; each facet, each glass tile, each domain, illumined from on high by its own chosen quality, tint, and even hour of "daylight" -- noon, twilight, sunrise, pale lunar glow, und so weiter, and the whole shimmering and rippling as the luz redefusers slowly cycled through their changes like a forest floor dappled in a thousand colors beneath a windblown jungle canopy.
As the sky ferry descended swiftly from orbit, the view became more dazzling and disorienting still, as we flew through sunrises, sunsets, blazes of noon, islands of night, with the speed of a stroboscopic flicker. Mountains, plazas, buildings great and small, rivers, deserts, all blurred into each other to form a pointillistic landscape where the organic tints of the natural realm and the starker and more varied hues of the obvious works of men so intermingled, overlapped, and underlaid, that the whole appeared en passant as a single formless and colorless sprawl, within which were contained, nevertheless, all conceivable permutations of color and form, all conceivable transmutations of the organic and the crafted.
Thus I first beheld Great Edoku, gaping out the port in an overload of the visual senses and a rapture of the spirit, like a toxicate beholding the universe entire within the formless chaos of a single flame!
***
Moreover, my first vision of Edoku's surface proved to be more of the same, and if my description of it herein should lack a certain coherence and form, vraiment, the rendering thereof through hindsight's cooler and more mature eye still achieves more in the telling than the young girl I then was could encompass in the moment of quite literally overwhelming confrontation with the spectacle of the reality itself.
Our sky ferry landed and debarked its passengers on a noonday meadow nestled near the summit of a small wooded mountain, or so at least at the moment it seemed, and half a dozen similar craft also rested on this alpine lawn, three of them also disgorging travelers. From this vantage, Edoku lay spread before me, stretching away to dissolve into the horizon along an arc of nearly three hundred degrees.
What I beheld from this tranquil meadow was a chaos that not only took my psychic breath away but failed to resolve its baroque piling of detail upon detail into any coherent overall reality no matter how long I gaped and blinked.
For what I saw seemed not so much a vista on any planet I could have imagined but an immense holo crafted by an artist dedicated to the surreal or to the inner vision of the subconscious mind.
Half the sky and more was filled with the mighty sphere of Edoku's gas giant primary, and the rest was the star-studded black of deepest space.
Yet the illuminated air above the landscape below me seemed entirely disconnected from the sky above, as if what I was seeing was a diorama highlighted and brightened by beams of filtered light shining down through holes in a painted ceiling. From horizon to horizon, the landscape glowed and shimmered, brightened and darkened, beneath a complexly interwoven tapestry of light; noonday, sunset, darkness, sunrise,
Edoku was not a true planet but a satellite of a large gas giant, and it was the surface of that huge world, or rather the roil of its atmosphere, seen from so close on that the eye could not encompass it as a whole, which was the backdrop against which Edoku appeared. The discs of light, then, must be the orbiting luz redefusers, each illumining a small portion of Edoku's surface.
And indeed the onrushing surface of the planet was faceted like the jeweled eye of an insect or a mosaic window of colored bits of glass; each facet, each glass tile, each domain, illumined from on high by its own chosen quality, tint, and even hour of "daylight" -- noon, twilight, sunrise, pale lunar glow, und so weiter, and the whole shimmering and rippling as the luz redefusers slowly cycled through their changes like a forest floor dappled in a thousand colors beneath a windblown jungle canopy.
As the sky ferry descended swiftly from orbit, the view became more dazzling and disorienting still, as we flew through sunrises, sunsets, blazes of noon, islands of night, with the speed of a stroboscopic flicker. Mountains, plazas, buildings great and small, rivers, deserts, all blurred into each other to form a pointillistic landscape where the organic tints of the natural realm and the starker and more varied hues of the obvious works of men so intermingled, overlapped, and underlaid, that the whole appeared en passant as a single formless and colorless sprawl, within which were contained, nevertheless, all conceivable permutations of color and form, all conceivable transmutations of the organic and the crafted.
Thus I first beheld Great Edoku, gaping out the port in an overload of the visual senses and a rapture of the spirit, like a toxicate beholding the universe entire within the formless chaos of a single flame!
***
Moreover, my first vision of Edoku's surface proved to be more of the same, and if my description of it herein should lack a certain coherence and form, vraiment, the rendering thereof through hindsight's cooler and more mature eye still achieves more in the telling than the young girl I then was could encompass in the moment of quite literally overwhelming confrontation with the spectacle of the reality itself.
Our sky ferry landed and debarked its passengers on a noonday meadow nestled near the summit of a small wooded mountain, or so at least at the moment it seemed, and half a dozen similar craft also rested on this alpine lawn, three of them also disgorging travelers. From this vantage, Edoku lay spread before me, stretching away to dissolve into the horizon along an arc of nearly three hundred degrees.
What I beheld from this tranquil meadow was a chaos that not only took my psychic breath away but failed to resolve its baroque piling of detail upon detail into any coherent overall reality no matter how long I gaped and blinked.
For what I saw seemed not so much a vista on any planet I could have imagined but an immense holo crafted by an artist dedicated to the surreal or to the inner vision of the subconscious mind.
Half the sky and more was filled with the mighty sphere of Edoku's gas giant primary, and the rest was the star-studded black of deepest space.
Yet the illuminated air above the landscape below me seemed entirely disconnected from the sky above, as if what I was seeing was a diorama highlighted and brightened by beams of filtered light shining down through holes in a painted ceiling. From horizon to horizon, the landscape glowed and shimmered, brightened and darkened, beneath a complexly interwoven tapestry of light; noonday, sunset, darkness, sunrise,
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