#not that i have concrete proof that lumine is miles and miles above them

[guujikaroko]

I know they're both Vision users that can handle themselves fine, but I think it would be cute if Haitham and Kaveh commissioned Lumine to be their bodyguard whenever they can during desert trips. She's experienced in roaming the desert and really strong to booth, so she's the best option all around.

[mdlxxxix]

The Rim of Morning - William Sloane (Highlight: 34; Note: 4)

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◆ Introduction

▪ Charles Fort (The Book of the Damned, Wild Talents, Lo!)

▪ Because they ignore genre conventions, Sloane’s novels are actual works of literature. Perhaps not great literature; no argument will be made here on that score.

▪ writing is drum-tight, but his approach is looser; he pulls the reader in and then begins turning up the heat (Corny/Funny phrases )

▪ He understood that before a pot can boil, it must simmer. (Corny/funny phrases)

◆ To Walk the Night

▪ Therefore I have allowed myself the liberties of adding certain descriptions of people and places, and of attempting to suggest now and again the atmosphere of strangeness, even of terror, which was so much a part of my life while these events were in progress.

▪ There are some experiences which are alien to everyday life; they are “doomed for a certain term to walk the night” before the mind of man either recognizes them for what they are or dismisses their appearance as fantasy.

◆ 1

▪ Only a minute more to lie back in the refuge of this dilapidated sedan and be carried along without effort and without thought. Then the narcotic of traveling, of surrendering myself to the mere forward motion of train and automobile, would wear off. For twenty-five hundred miles and three days I had tried to imagine what I would do when the wheels under me stopped rolling and I should have to rouse myself to action.

▪ The things he would want to know could not be stated in terms of tangible facts, of events and people shaped into a recognizable pattern. For the first time I admitted to myself that there was a possibility of connection between small, disturbing things in the past and the present fact of Jerry’s death. What that common denominator was I did not know, but I was certain that I did not want to find it out. Merely admitting its existence gave me a feeling of tightness inside that was familiar. It was, I realized, fear. And fear of a shapeless, misty thought that was as insubstantial as a ghost.

▪ The pieces of the puzzle were all lying in my mind, of so much I was sure. I felt that if I looked at them, thought about them, they would slip together into a picture of the truth, and the feeling frightened me. My conscious mind rejected the idea of knowing or thinking anything more about the events of the past two years. But Dr. Lister would not consent to that, once started. He would want to get down to the bedrock of the truth. Donne’s tremendous lines went through my mind: Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm Nor question much That subtle wreath of hair about mine arm; The mystery, the sign you must not touch—

◆ 2

▪ There was—why do I keep saying “was”?— not everything in this story is in the past tense—there is only one door to the place.

◆ 3

▪ The telescope was mounted on a concrete base in the middle of the room, and its long barrel was aimed up and through the slide in the dome, trained on some star a thousand light years away, I suppose.

▪ Prexy’s expression as he looked at us was introspective. He must have been thinking fast with most of his mind and answering us with nothing but the top layer of it.

◆ 5

▪ Ah,” she said quickly, and her tone did not quite convey disappointment. “Equations.” And then, after a moment, “You mean, just notes about his work?” “Yes,” Prexy said gently. “Mathematical symbols that he used to express the relationships of things.” “Thank you.” Her voice was still perfectly level. “I should like to have the last things he used and wrote.” It was a natural sort of request, but somehow it surprised me a little. “I’m afraid the police will have to keep them, for a time at least.” Prexy sounded almost as though he were explaining something to a child. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

▪ It was a cold, clear Sunday. The November sun lighted every twig of tree and detail of building as we crossed the campus. The chapel bell was tolling with bronze insistence as we walked, and our feet scrunched loudly in the gravel.

▪ soda mints

◆ 6

▪ The night was luminous around us. Starshine is the lovely word for the light that is faintly implicit in the dark of a clear and moonless night. But it is not the greater part of it. A radiance from the stars. Jerry once told me that most of it was caused by the fact that the gravitational field of the earth bends the rays of energy from the sun around the curve of the earth and causes the whole upper air of the night to glow dimly from the molecules which those rays strike and excite.

▪ even if her strange beauty—I cut that thought off right there.

▪ The surprise lasted only a fraction of a second, but the cold inner conviction of alarm stayed with me all night. It was too soon. It was too swift. It had passed out of the realm of things that are odd and unpleasant into a sphere where they are so odd that their cumulative effect is terrifying.

◆ 8

▪ Whatever was to happen in the next few hours, I was afraid of them.

◆ 9

▪ He was genuinely busy, all right. I thought for a moment that he was putting me off to let my nervousness and anxiety come to a head, but as I watched his broad, blunt fingers scrambling through the papers in front of him and the quick way he glanced from them to his notations on the pad I realized that he was tremendously concentrated, perhaps even excited. He had something, or thought he did. I filled a pipe and lit it, trying hard to keep the match from trembling in my fingers, and leaned back in my chair.

◆ 10

▪ The question seemed to echo at me from the night that held us suspended like two motes in a drop of dark water. I wet my lips with my tongue. “Yes, I think I have.”

▪ Nothing he had said gave any further substance to the shape without shadow that was haunting my mind. And yet, neither did what he had told me seem to conflict with the growing clearness of its outline.

▪ The ceiling of my room was white with the reflected sun off the snow.

▪ remote as the stars

◆ 11

▪ The whole performance was a piece of self-dramatization, but they got the benefit of it and it was harmless.

▪ But it annoyed me mildly that she should know everything like that. A certain amount of ingenuous ignorance, I decided, was a great factor in feminine charm.

◆ 12

▪ pale gold color (Goldenes Stroh, vgl. Rumpelstilzchen)

▪ His voice seemed to ring in the trench of the barranca where we were. The sound of his words seemed to expand, to go into the ground and penetrate the rock wall under which we were standing. It echoed in the air, in the heat, in the sun that encompassed us. A year and a half had passed since Jerry had married Selena. In all that time she had not told him who she was or where she came from, then.

◆ 13

▪ Below us spread the gigantic sweep of the desert, tarnished gold where the sun still lay, and purple blue where the shadows from the western mountains were racing across it as the sun sank behind us. Watching that great tidal wave of darkness pouring across the valley, I suddenly realized how truly the earth was a ball, hung in gulfs of space and spinning around its axis with majestic precision and power. I almost thought I could feel the eastward surge of the mesa under my feet. (Throwaway description paired with corny revelations/realizations )

▪ I, for instance, didn’t pay any real attention to the things that happened in that room that night. And yet, if I had I would have seen a pattern in them, the pattern of the fifth act of a tragedy, when the play is all played out and only the final words, the ultimate destruction of the protagonist, await fulfillment. I see these things now for what they were worth, the last small events before an unthinkable horror of a thing was to happen.

◆ 15

▪ Neither of us moved. Above and around us the night was undergoing a change; the great constellation of Orion was low on the western sky and the darkness was turning to a tarnished, misty silver. Again, as on Cloud Mesa, I thought of the eastward spin of the earth, rolling through space. The minute area of its surface which the two of us occupied was being turned toward the sun—the house, the trees, the wide reaches of the Sound, the whole eastern edge of the continent borne along in-exorably into the light of a new day. Miles away a train whistled once. A thin, lingering insertion of sound in the silence around us.

▪ and dissolved into the sea foam

▪ Perhaps. But in the instant when the memory of the story completed itself in my mind, another explanation for Selena’s reaction to it occurred to me. She might have cried because the story was moving and beautiful—or because it was true. It was a fantastic, horrible notion, and I wanted immediately to stop thinking it. I remembered Jerry’s face as he looked at Selena there on the settle before the fire she had somehow managed to light. Certainly there had been horror and incredulity in his eyes. It was possible that he had been thinking, then, the same thought that was beginning to crystallize in my own mind. I felt an intense acceleration of every image, feeling, operation of my consciousness. My thoughts were not under my control; they flickered back over the whole of the story I had just told. And nowhere did they find positive proof that the thing which was growing, expanding into unwelcome life in my brain was impossible.

▪ The panic fear that swept over me as I realized that I might have discovered the answer was indescribable. I felt no sense of triumph at having found out the secret of Selena and her life with Jerry and the rest of us. Instead, I was sinking into icy, black water, being suffocated by its pressure, drowning in arctic night and winter. Layer after layer of cold and blackness was piling up above me and the fright of death itself was pounding in my pulse. Fear like that, real fear, is an invasion. A physical thing full of ice and death that enters into every fiber of the body and possesses the mind. The worst of it was that there was no tangible thing with which I could deal. There was nothing to run away from and nothing to confront. This terror sprung from a nebulous idea. A half-perceived theory . . .