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Authors: G. L. Adamson
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slew an angel.
What then?
The Scientist must be dead.
His social experiment forgotten.
And Author—
What means it, then?
Author is dead.
Why share the words, the methods, the reasons?
Shall I play this game?
I should not.
The Artists must be beyond help,
and I have grown above them.
But I am childish and hate to lose.
Involuntarily, my eyes glance about for paper.
The other side of each letter is torn by impatient hands
and written on the back of a page of Edicts,
the same as the others.
I will reply.
I write in human ink in margins,
like this other, with all my little tricks.
And yes.
It is better to remember.
Remember, than to risk forgetting.
Let it begin again,
to the charge, there is nothing,
nothing left to take away from me.
Your move.
–Descartes.
PART THREE:
Blossom (Cont.)
COMET
----
For a few weeks more
they tested my mathematics
in application to the stars.
I braved the last exams,
but here there were few gunshots.
I had never seen a world such as this.
It gleams like the birth of the world,
it is perfect and silent,
the hush of a church on less than holy ground.
When I passed my last exams to their satisfaction
I was reassigned to Health Corps
to play with the pretty toys in the labs.
First, development.
I was staring at a slide, carefully gauging
when a slim cool hand came around to grasp mine.
“Careful not to lower the scope too far.”
A soft voice whispered in my ear
and I hesitated on the dial.
“You’ll break the glass.”
I shook off this stranger, defiantly,
turned and faced
Galileo’s adolescent,
smiling at me with eyes as black as dying.
He was astonishingly inappropriate for the setting
in a three-piece suit,
casually toying with a piece of equipment
worth more than I would make in a year, in ten years.
And I could only start and stare.
“Boring work, isn’t it,” he murmured lazily,
and smiled again his rehearsed little smile.
I turned to my work.
“It is…not…not really… all that boring….”
I babbled idiotically.
“No need to lie to me,” he replied.
The son of the king shook his gleaming head
and gestured with one hand.
“Follow me.”
I jogged behind him, an ungainly figure in oversized whites
trying desperately to keep up with his furlong strides.
“What will I be working on—” I questioned,
not knowing his name.
“Darwin.”
“Darwin.”
And considerately, his steps began to slow.
He led me outside in the snow
where a Palace car was waiting
and told me:
“Lives.”
I remember.
I remember the cold.
The marks our footsteps made in the snow,
and how the falling snow glittered like diamonds
in your dark hair and lingered like a lie.
Your black eyes were shining
and you smiled to see my confusion
as I shivered, watching the sleek car pull up to meet us.
You never felt the cold,
and as we waited,
pulled your suit jacket from your lean shoulders
and draped it over mine.
“Where are we going?” I questioned through chattering teeth.
But you only smiled again
your empty, mysterious smile.
You and I climbed in the back of the car
and I heard you whisper directions to your driver,
directions that must have led to the Camps.
I had never been out of the Hives, Darwin.
None of us in my Hive had.
I lived in ignorance of how it might have been for the others.
Life in the Camps had been a vague thing, a warning.
A nightmare upon waking.
But lives, Darwin?
We had been lucky.
For outside, the gates,
they closed behind us.
BREAKER 256
----
Descartes.
Memories of you,
the first time I had written
it was your hand guiding me.
And once, there was music,
music from the minds of men long dead.
Descartes.
Yours were the first kind words
that I had heard from your kind.
I had grown to hate the pale face of the aristocrat
and the dark eyes,
and the lips that gleamed
like blood in the snow.
Until you.
No one ever asked me
what it was to be a Breaker.
We do not
What then?
The Scientist must be dead.
His social experiment forgotten.
And Author—
What means it, then?
Author is dead.
Why share the words, the methods, the reasons?
Shall I play this game?
I should not.
The Artists must be beyond help,
and I have grown above them.
But I am childish and hate to lose.
Involuntarily, my eyes glance about for paper.
The other side of each letter is torn by impatient hands
and written on the back of a page of Edicts,
the same as the others.
I will reply.
I write in human ink in margins,
like this other, with all my little tricks.
And yes.
It is better to remember.
Remember, than to risk forgetting.
Let it begin again,
to the charge, there is nothing,
nothing left to take away from me.
Your move.
–Descartes.
PART THREE:
Blossom (Cont.)
COMET
----
For a few weeks more
they tested my mathematics
in application to the stars.
I braved the last exams,
but here there were few gunshots.
I had never seen a world such as this.
It gleams like the birth of the world,
it is perfect and silent,
the hush of a church on less than holy ground.
When I passed my last exams to their satisfaction
I was reassigned to Health Corps
to play with the pretty toys in the labs.
First, development.
I was staring at a slide, carefully gauging
when a slim cool hand came around to grasp mine.
“Careful not to lower the scope too far.”
A soft voice whispered in my ear
and I hesitated on the dial.
“You’ll break the glass.”
I shook off this stranger, defiantly,
turned and faced
Galileo’s adolescent,
smiling at me with eyes as black as dying.
He was astonishingly inappropriate for the setting
in a three-piece suit,
casually toying with a piece of equipment
worth more than I would make in a year, in ten years.
And I could only start and stare.
“Boring work, isn’t it,” he murmured lazily,
and smiled again his rehearsed little smile.
I turned to my work.
“It is…not…not really… all that boring….”
I babbled idiotically.
“No need to lie to me,” he replied.
The son of the king shook his gleaming head
and gestured with one hand.
“Follow me.”
I jogged behind him, an ungainly figure in oversized whites
trying desperately to keep up with his furlong strides.
“What will I be working on—” I questioned,
not knowing his name.
“Darwin.”
“Darwin.”
And considerately, his steps began to slow.
He led me outside in the snow
where a Palace car was waiting
and told me:
“Lives.”
I remember.
I remember the cold.
The marks our footsteps made in the snow,
and how the falling snow glittered like diamonds
in your dark hair and lingered like a lie.
Your black eyes were shining
and you smiled to see my confusion
as I shivered, watching the sleek car pull up to meet us.
You never felt the cold,
and as we waited,
pulled your suit jacket from your lean shoulders
and draped it over mine.
“Where are we going?” I questioned through chattering teeth.
But you only smiled again
your empty, mysterious smile.
You and I climbed in the back of the car
and I heard you whisper directions to your driver,
directions that must have led to the Camps.
I had never been out of the Hives, Darwin.
None of us in my Hive had.
I lived in ignorance of how it might have been for the others.
Life in the Camps had been a vague thing, a warning.
A nightmare upon waking.
But lives, Darwin?
We had been lucky.
For outside, the gates,
they closed behind us.
BREAKER 256
----
Descartes.
Memories of you,
the first time I had written
it was your hand guiding me.
And once, there was music,
music from the minds of men long dead.
Descartes.
Yours were the first kind words
that I had heard from your kind.
I had grown to hate the pale face of the aristocrat
and the dark eyes,
and the lips that gleamed
like blood in the snow.
Until you.
No one ever asked me
what it was to be a Breaker.
We do not
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