S1E6 - Into the Wanderers' Library - Episode 6 - Hunted from the Shadows

Recording number 278. I've moved to the second wing now, wing two from the first wing. Something was not right in the in wing one, so I've moved to wing two. Hopefully it's no hopefully. Hopefully it's It's a little safer, but yes. So recording number 278 recorded by Izariah CB severity member of the Serpent's Hand, in a mission to create an audio archive of the Wanderer's Library from wing to wing to where am I again? Hold on, let me just I'm gonna do a bit of a wander to find the end of this shelf. Come on. Ah, yes. There. There we go. Wing 2, the DAO of notorious shelf SW 0.00 twin notions of catastrophized time by who are we by doesn't say so Unknown author. Let's see the story begins. She dangled her legs over the edge of the building, looking downwards. The lights echoed up, sparkling from the metal surrounding her, enclosing her, crushing in on all sides like great pythons sliding up to God. I didn't want to go, you know. His sullen voice was crushingly dull. She continued to stare at the cars flying high in organized streams, invisible lines keeping them in place. It was a bad life, but that's the only way I can feel anymore. Slavery is a kind of respite from a world like this, from Utopia. I don't want to think of new ways to feel pleasures over and over again. I want to feel something. She listened idly to the shit spewing out of his mouth. When she last found him, screaming and laughing as the blood bubbled to his throat, there had been 30 others just like him strewn across the floor. It was a story she had seen so often recently as his lives became more and more predictable. There was a burger place below, a hundred yards off the eastern quarters. They had infused the steak with a spice from New scutari dug up in a slag farm off Suluk. Her mouth watered at the thought. The sun tinged the sky red. She could close her eyes and smell beneath the fine chrome. Endless curves, the meats burning, changing, morphing in the summer air. Don't you get it? Don't you feel the same? Are you even listening? She sighed, raised her gun and shot him in the face. Then she leapt from the building, swooping down below. Once, many centuries ago, she'd been hunting him in what would be and now had once been been Texas. He'd been a white colonist and she a Comanche girl. She'd enjoyed that life. The horses reminded her of home. Was that when the change began? He'd been eager enough for the first few decades, eluding her over and over again. It was difficult moving around in a white man's world, but she'd managed worse in other times. The particularly galling moment of that life had been the Man o War from Portsmouth 1. He'd whipped his hat aboard the ship and waved it at her, grinning ear to ear, while she'd been left to scream in fury on the quay. She'd watched the ship slowly, inexorably turn to the west. It bobbed up and down, swaying in the wind and waves. That was the hunt. That was the moment when the blood pumped hard and the vengeance took hold. She spent the rest of the day plotting her revenge, the inevitability dragging her once more to America. When she reached him, out on the wild steppe just south of Oklahoma, he hadn't even run. He just sat there, exhausted, staring at his hands. He was dressed in fine clothes, top and tails. They'd barely been damaged in his escape. As this is, he'd asked, is it really over already? She'd been 60 then, he 75. Not a bad run compared to some. Once she'd managed to strangle him in the cradle, a coup she delighted in taunting him with for many lives to come. She hadn't known how to respond to this, so she stabbed him in the throat. She glided gently to earth between twin slats in the road. Nobody walked there anymore. The vehicles rushed past, taking people to restaurants, shops, department stores, financial traders, jewellers, soul risoners, chocolate cafes, chain restaurants, scrying orbs, auto repair workshops, travel agents, epicurean orchards, malls, Tesla farms, tanning salons, torture centers, remembrance purgers, insurance agencies, pleasure homes, sunshine captures, landlords, retreats, slave markets, beauty parlours, consort mines, Faraday nightclubs, escort farms, cloning hubs, banks, orgasm clinics, transport exchanges, sterility museums, nightmare merchants, body shops and flesh bazaars, dizziness corollaries, lipos veins, crucifix replicators, daydream stitchers, the weavers of time, the auguries of nine Fates, the starlight brigades, the crusts of stellar pastry, the hundred songbird fires, the techno cinemas of Rigel xi, the ashen Cross, the meat pumps that over and over again expanded and retracted the cordes for the giggling sexual kicks of strange and terrible masters and human homes. She slipped into the cracks, through the metal, the burnished remains of past cycles, and into the tarmac. After Texas, things shifted again. He'd stopped letting himself become rich. There was no more fortune building, no more phalanxes of bodyguards. He learnt subtler strategies, stranding himself on the wastes of far off Greenland, meditating in a Tibetan monastery, plying obscure trades on Amazon tributaries, far away from the networks of power and exchange in the most remote places he could find. Did you hear something? Huh? Must have just been. Must have just been a librarian or something. Anyway, where was I? At first she was elated. She went to places they hadn't gone in centuries. She hadn't seen Greenland since 1393, when she had been one of the last Norse settlers of the old colony. There had been someone there. Ingrid Ada. She didn't remember anymore, but she had loved her. Her ferocious and catlike ways had run with her when fires came and the fish ran out, had spent decades by her side in an Inuit camp, scraping the blubber off seal bone. But there had been nothing of the colony. By 1979, IDA was born under grassy earth. It had been very, very hard to track him down between the painted wood of the godlab and the concrete lines of Nook. The ice was cold, the distant vasts. The snow got in her eyes, but she had set her sights, scraped her skis along silently, letting the body die, letting the history of it collapse in white, until she came upon her quarry and release. The burger joint glowed neon green, flickering whatever cheap gas lights would draw in the crowds. You could still see a few brief flashes of sunlight through the upper eaves. She ordered quickly, tapping her fingers on the counter. Snakes suspended in some pink liquid hissed through insects in the wall. Hard, tattooed men watched her, sizing her up, then, drawing their eyes back to their drinks. She grabbed the burger, tossed some coins over, and sped into the night. She weaved through houses rang, ravenous, desperate, the smoke coiling around her. She jumped from one to the other, grappling and slipping on the concrete and stone, stumbling and laughing on rooftop huts and window boxes. Nobody could catch her. She was the hunt. Eventually she found what she was looking for, a tiny parapet overlooking the halogen rails far above the flashing lights below. She sat, the wind rustling her ears, looking down at the trains weaving through pink and emerald and crimson. She watched her mind's eye inside them, looking through each carriage at the passengers with downcast faces, grey overcoats dulled by the colour, the brightness, the leering, stinking flashes of the infernal engines around them. All of them were somewhere once and soon will be somewhere else, knotting themselves in this place, this weave, darting in and out of one another's Spaces and Boundaries. It was a very good burger. She held the wrapper up, watching it be battered this way and that and let it go to flit into infinity. Eventually she realized he was trying to avoid her. He would never say so, of course, he'd rather die than admit reluctance, but he had given up on the ecstasy of being prey. He was trying, he believed, new things, new ways of being as the world turned and changed, as the sky darkened under a thousand vessels of light. He went to new worlds and new quarters, the pleasure pits of Rigel 4, the fight arenas of Ganymede, the slave pens of New Icarus. And she followed because he never said anything. This was how it worked. She hunted him, he ran on. It's the reason they existed. How could he now hide himself in asteroid yards so far from home? Space travel had been no fun in those days. Stuck in a metal box, iron clamps around the doors. There was no hunting there, your food parceled and rationed in little chunks, sharpening your teeth over and over again, dreaming of oblivion. Once she found him dead, he had punctured his own space suit. She'd had to kill her own body to find him, far out from any civilized outpost. His face was a monstrosity, a cold and frozen thing sneering in tessellating blood as the ice rocks whipped and battered him. In Athens they had spent long nights talking, arguing, drinking. The hunt had been more relaxed then. There had been no hurry to kill, none of the frenzy in which she now found herself. Was that why he was doing this? Did he miss the conversations? No. It was him who had stopped them. One night on the Gambia, where he spat into the water. She raised her rifle to her shoulder. Then, eventually, with Earth stratified and pixelated with the sky, kettle pot of scar with the sky a kettle pot, scar of nations and kings. She'd found him in the slave pins, laughing at her already dying. His blood spattered her brand new dress. She leapt, arms spreading, not knowing what to do, where to go, into the crisscross light below, whooping and laughing at the faces of the nearly dead, staring up and screaming at the body careening down towards them, dissolving into iron, into non existence, into rebirth, slicing its way across the eyelids forever and ever. She will see him once again, two centuries hence, when the hunt is forgotten entirely in the trenches of Navau Calamar, in the basis of the resistance. She'll hold a gun and point it over the line, waiting for the enemy, fingers scratching on the trigger, baying for it. She'll lick her lips and hold her shot firm. He will come up behind her, gaunt and alone. Why did you stop? You will ask. She won't say anything. He'll touch her shoulder and she'll move away. I'm sorry, she will reply. Don't have time for my fans. He'll move away and slink off. She won't bother to look for him. But here and now, in the presence, in the light, in the dancing squares of colour and time, in the dissolution of her body, she laughs and smiles because she will soon be flesh and mire and a twisting thing above. I like that one. That's a good one. Okay, okay. Seems that whatever might have been nearby has moved on. I think so. I'm going to put this back and duh bit the library ado for now. I believe there's just over there. Yes. All right. Thank you for listening. Please be sure to return the tape after rewinding it. Thank you for listening to into The Wanderers Library SW 0.00 Twig Notions of catastrophized Time was written by Tufto. All Wanderers library content is shared under Creative Commons attribution share like 3.0 license. Izariah is played by me, Izze Sykes, who you can find on scpra, the sister podcast to into the Wanderers' Library playing Bertrand. But over here I play Izariah. Thank you guys. Sa.