genocide of Dromdrevc

The tension inside the bubble of Dromdrevc was exhilirating. After years of painting portraits of politicians and rulers I was alive. My natural artform of landscapes, based only on images created by others on Zylmor or still images captured by what you would think of as photographs but with more depth was despised in the city. My family lived on the far continent in the open, I communicated through mind-talk weekly, mother complained about the dust, father moaned about poverty and my sibs, Tessina and Zeuteronomy chatted about friends I had known, at the time of the genocide I had been exhiled from them for seven of your years and had grown from the child prodigy of eight to an almost fully developed female of fifteen. The last year had been particularly fraught with anxiety to escape as my time of captivity was over as soon as I reached sixteen. Credit-bars were delivered monthly to my life-parents as payment for the enslavement of their youngest child. As a small child Dromdrevc was awe-inspiring, a giant atmospheric bubble guarded against the elements, tall towers of housing units, business blocks and in the centre, a tower of shiny metal that reached up to the very tip of bubble, it was in here, the Royal Campus that I was to live and work. Work, I discovered was not to use my natural talent of reproducing vast canvases of landscsapes from memory or mythology, but was to catalogue an ever increasing number politabubs and the ruling charters. Charters were families who could prove their lineage back to the beginning of time, there were usually three or four clans living in the campus, they were a vain bunch, each portrait was proudly hung in the main concourse and because of their jealousy, repeats were frequent. One man-crown had a portrait booked every season, every colour found in Dromdrevc had been used in his costumes, each one more extravagant than the last as his girth also expanded. It was in his chamber I first heard about the Concavity, and the Galymonter people who yearned the power of Concavity. Galies as they were known had come from the neighbouring planet of Prusson, at first wanting to trade and as the polit-bubble was on seasonal break the Charters met with them and thrashed out a trade route between the peoples but their vanity made them show off the Concavity Orb, and exaggerated the properties of the laws of the index of refraction, with the wave velocities over-rated. I had never believed in the power of the concavity orb and had joined with other non-believers, we met in the concourse only three of us at a time and discussed possibilities. We were the brightest minds on all of Zylmor, punished we felt for being so intelligent by enslavement as children. We pondered on if this was to knock our inquisitive minds to an imaginary block as the tasks we were given numbed us. Piotreya, an inventor of vast electrical circuits spent her time making and changing light sources for the Charters and Yandryl was poet and playwright, he voice could lift you to the highest peak, he wrote ditties for the politabubs and their families so instead of being stirred by his words we slept by them. We had all completed our formal education in our early years while our sibs were still studying, attaining levels of expertise we had mastered at three or four. The Charters did not like us meeting together, so we kept the meeting light, with fake linguistics to suggest a frothy impromptu tryst rather than the reality of theoretical discussions on propulsion, experimentation and the politabubble. Each of my portraits contained a symbol of rebellion to inspire the unruly. Piotreya linked systems together until she had voyeuristic control over the whole subsystem within the bubble ans within each ditty that Yandryl created was one phrase that did not fit but was code for our mini rebellion.

more Zylmor

i write about death dying and murder all the time, my nickname is slasher suzie among my writer type pals.
knowing i have always had the capicity for such a violent act, going back to the zylmor wars but on earth my world has been around peaceful movements, not rocking the boat and going with the flow, allowing violence to happen to me and those closest to me but without raising even a whimper of dissent. this has changed and i am finding little solace in my zylmor past. things i have not done for an age are becoming increasingly enticing.
i find myself in contemplative mood, haven't spoken to a single person in four days the tenous hold on my sanity is again ebbing away to the dark deep recesses i last experienced more than ten years ago.
some thirty years ago i was on the peripherary of a drug fuelled chaos that maintained itself in the house i resided. being younger than most involved i could have joined in but some hold kept me out, so i could record the bad trips, the fabulously outrageous voyages that those around me travelled on. now i wish for some oblivion, some unfeeling unseen calm that those in euphoria sensed, they say H is better than sex, but what is better than life. some of those that were there found out, blind pete who sold his sax for one more hit, angelina who chased her own demons across continents and now rests in peace.
others like ruth and simon survived in unique ways and neither remember the nights in fields above the village hounded by wolves snakes and spiders, revolving around space invaders playing kiss and tell with moon....

Zylmor rambling 1

Having lived in many towns and many cities, in many countries on many planets I find it strange to find a "home town". But within the archaic regime of rural Kerry life; drawing the water by hand at dawn, drawing in the turf on warm summer evenings, drawing a fire and sitting listening to pipe and fiddle I find a peaceful calm descend over even my most tumultuous thoughts. It is at this moment I feel at home, on Zylmor I was an hermitically sealed artist; I drew portraits of politicians and higher order fellows, I knew much of the impending war - they did not see the artist - a mere servant to their glowing pride. I was not allowed outside to feel rain on my face, the rush of wind whistling past my ears, I did not see the first blush of Spring, the dance of the satellite moons, I was not allowed to draw anything. Here in Kerry we draw everything but my abilities with a pencil have long since receded and I am left only to imagine how the sweep of charcoal on paper would show the willow bending double in this summer wind.

This home is hard work, back bent over stacking turf, fighting nature pulling weeds, fixing the genrator every other day but the rewards are tremendous; watching storm clouds gather, chasing foxes away from the hens, working with the dogs, laughing as the cats try to follow, rhythmically weaving the willow into ever more extravagant shapes, harvesting the first earlies. This is life, this is where we make or break, there is a power here that will never be found at the tip of a nuclear warhead, there is a bond of love with the land that binds a spell twisting and turning and making us return to this place we call home.