fallslikesnow

Even thus saith Hermes: Through long years I have not ceased to experiment, neither have I have spared any labour of mind And this science and art I have obtained by the sole inspiration of the living God, who judged fit to open them to me His servant, who has given to rational creatures the power of thinking and judging aright, forsaking none, or giving to any occasion to despair. For myself, I had never discovered this matter to anyone had it not been from fear of the day of judgment, and the perdition of my soul if I concealed it. It is a debt which I am desirous to discharge to the Faithful, as the Father of the faithful did liberally bestow it upon me. Understand ye, then, 0 Sons Of Wisdom, that the knowledge of the four elements Or the ancient philosophers was not corporally or imprudently sought after, which are through patience to be discovered, according to their causes and their occult operation. But, their operation is occult, since nothing is done excep...

Urraca, Queen of Castile and Leon (rf. 1126), by her marriage with Alfonso I. of Aragon united that crown to those of Castile and Leon, but afterwards made war on her husband and excluded him from Castile. She also quarrelled with her son and her sister, Theresa of Portugal.   Cassell's new biographical dictionary   alphonso I., king of Aragon, "the Battler," who married Urraca, daughter of Alphonso VI. (1104-1134), is sometimes counted the Vllth in the line of the kings of Leon and Castile. A passionate fighting-man (he fought twenty-nine battles against Christian or Moor), he wasjmarried to Urraca, widow of Raymond of Burgundy, a very dissolute and passionate woman. The marriage had been arranged by Alphonso VI. in 1106 to unite the two chief Christian states against the Almoravides, and to supply them with a capable military leader. But Urraca was tenacious of her right as proprietary queen and had not learnt chastity in the polygamous household of her fathe...

The Door Everyone gets a door, the question       Is do they open and walk through it or Do they turn away, afraid the action       Will take them to dead grass and endless war END

The first page of figures from Theoria Philosophiæ Naturalis from 1763. Figure 1 is the force curve which received so much attention from later natural philosophers such as Joseph Priestley, Humphrey Davy, and Michael Faraday. The ordinate is force, with positive values being repulsive, and the abscissa is radial distance.    Ruđer Josip Bošković (see names in other languages ; 18 May 1711 – 13 February 1787) was a theologian , physicist , astronomer , mathematician , philosopher , diplomat , poet , Jesuit , and a polymath [ 1 ] from the city of Dubrovnik in the Republic of Ragusa (today in Croatia ), who studied and lived in Italy and France

Like That Which Falls From the Sky They fly like doves in the wind like leaves in the storm like tears that you rip from inside me and I've never seen something so beautiful by Supa Fox

All is gray, green and brown. Any primary colours here are sucked at by the eye: a hazmat sign, burning yellow; the silvery blue of a vacuumed sealed meal; the red of Red in a mug, steaming from heating over a fire and smelling of spices. Down here the eye is starved. We begin our treck across no-mans land today. 50,000 kilometers down ever narrowing trenches. In the early stages by small trains, later on foot. To get to the oppositions trenches will take around three years, assuming no changes in space across no-mans-land.. My squad, here more to prevent me deserting than for any military purpose, will accompany me to the real front. And there I will have to exercise my power as the Tactician and take control of the whole offensive. My squad of puppets is a mix of men and women. I won't touch the woman I've decided. After Yelena I've become aware that what I do with puppet women is rape, no matter how willing they may seem. I still think that fu...

Even now, when Red makes it so easy to build them, we are obsessed with high places. A child's game is to build a thin skyscraper 300 meters high, then knock it down from a safe distance. I did it myself, the narrow lattice of crimson stakes swaying in the wind, then the controlled explosions at the base. It fell away from me, as planned, and I ran towards the toppling spire through the dust cloud, the gentle rumble of collapsing Red all around me. Some structures are meant to last, however. They have a purpose other than to fall. The East Atlantic Government Structure next to the old Houses of Parliament is one. The Front Observation Tower is another. Joe took me up there when the weather cleared, muttering something meeting the neighbors. The structure itself was around 400 meters high, a larger and more stable  version of my sacrificial tower. It was shaped like an air traffic control tower, a long stem with a flared control room at the top. We exite...

Joe took me to the camps to give me a feel for how the operation was run.  Perhaps the greatest initial impression was one of how haphazard it all was. It was a vast expanse of tents with unpaved paths between them. Varied tents of all sizes and configurations, some made of canvas, others from animal skin, others again from what looked like parachute material. The alleyways were filled with puppets and humans, immature puppets following the horses to scoop up great streams of shit. Small carts pulled by puppets, mixes of wood and metal, cut off One World logos occasionally visible. Some of them powered by electric motors or inefficient internal combustion engines. Under the smell of dung and half burned gasoline was the ubiquitous reek of vinegar and incense that puppets exude. As always they burned herbs to cover the smell, half aware of its offensiveness. The tiny sparkle of the flames, thousands of them everywhere one looked, lent the night a marvelous...

My destination was a bare concrete platform with no building other than a phone booth. The sky was a dull metallic grey and there was a faint directionless rumble all around. A man paced up to me, appearing from the booth. He was tall and rotund with legs and arms that were so thin they seemed about to snap with each of his enthusiastic motions. As he got closer I saw watery grey eyes with long eyelashes that gave him the look of some sleepy predator. "Good morning Alan," he said. "Ready to face the dark-side of our happy society?" He took me to dinner in an otherwise deserted restaurant. The food and wine were indifferent and I couldn't help noticing that the puppet serving us had a broken leg, poorly splinted with a thin length of wood. "Pay no attention to Igor. He or she is far better off here that where I found him or her. Standing orders are that there be no medical interventions for injured puppets. There are always more where they come from." ...

I woke next to her at sunrise.  Her hair was a glowing halo around her sweet face, the sheet barely covered her breasts. As with many fair women her eyes seemed to be a slightly bruised as did her temples. I punched her in the throat and held a pillow over her face until the struggle ended. Gathering my things I rapidly left the house. I felt no remorse over killing her. She was such an advanced puppet that the only way to stop her breaking through to full autonomy would be to give her a bath in pure liquid Red. Doubting that this would be done by her owners, all that expensive surgery and training would be lost, I'd taken the step I thought necessary. I reached the tube station and found a platform empty of puppets and humans. Just a single capsule with it's lid up greeted me. I climbed in and pulled the lid down. As the capsule filled with Red I took several deep breaths and began to drift asleep.

Yelena was one of those beautiful women who seem to walk with a slight but visible hunch. Shoulders kept high as though to ward off the gaze of all the men who pass. She was a treat to look at however. Long blonde hair with misty blue eyes. Tall, but not too tall, with a figure that filled me with longing whenever she walked in front of me. The fact that she pushed all my sexual desire buttons should have been a warning. The city itself was built on many islands with a huge number of bridges connecting them. The buildings were a complex mixture of baroque and neoclassical, their empty cleanliness reminiscent of a painting by de Chirico. The effect was diminished by the huge, out of context, skyscraper stabbing the sky in the city's downtown. It wasn't until we were in some large, chilly square surrounded on all sides by impressive Romanesque buildings that I made a move on the, until then silent, Yelena. "Why do you hide yourself in this polished ma...

The Standing Stones But all we see behind are the twin rows       Of standing stones, broken like rotten teeth An avenue to no-where, only crows       Over the dying grass, the blasted heath

{Placed here because I somehow deleted the original version} I flowed up the Thames, across the Channel and up the Western coast of mainland Europe. Flowing was beautiful around there with clear un-polluted water run through with refreshing threads of natural Red. It was horribly dangerous of course. A good storm and one could end up thoroughly diluted, consciousness spread out over cubic kilometers of ocean. This time, however, I raced to Rotterdam safely and swiftly. After re-constituting myself I reported to a dull, temporary looking structure in the port area, There I met a transport nerd by the name of Michael Stevens. "Why can't I use normal methods? Flow up rivers and across lakes? Drive? Even get a pilot and fly?," I asked. "It's too far. We've been told to get you as close to the front as possible. It's a quarter of a million kilometers. This is the only method that makes sense in terms of speed and logistics. Get in." ...

The rest of the journey was dull. Staring through the safety-Red at the silvery capsule walls. Listening to the low roar of sparse air molecules being displaced as we raced through the incomplete vacuum. Many hours later I arrived at my interim destination, a place called New Petrograd. It was at 2457 degrees east and for me represented a change over point from one tube to another. I had an overnight stop so I exited my capsule and went, with my guide Yelena, to the surface. The huge city, pristine and barely inhabited by humans, weighed down on me. I wasn't familiar with the original, thousands of km west, but this version seemed to me to be a place for fogs and rain. A place for sudden and pointless deaths. Of course this thought lead naturally back to something that had been plaguing me for months. What was my position in the rigid and unchanging hierarchy that Red had gifted us? Despite the power Red gave me, the idyllic life granted by being one of onl...

Raeburn, Sir Henry (1756-1823), Date: 1792

  "Lingua Cosmica." A language for extraterrestrial communication developed by Hans Freudenthal, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Utrecht. Details of it are presented in Freudenthal's book 1 published in the Netherlands in 1960. LINCOS represents an extension of the logistic language of mathematics developed by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. It is intended to be conveyed by unmodulated radio signals of varying duration and wavelength which represent phonemes. The signals would be combined to make up concepts or words. Lancelot Hogben, who himself described a code for communication with alien intelligence, called Astraglossa , discussed Freudenthal's work. The Internet Encyclopedia of Sciemce Chapter III: Behaviour 3 00 1. For the time being it would be premature to try to describe  human behaviour by a system of general rules like the mathematical  and chronometric rule...

"Fare-thee-well sweet prince," came Stevens' voice from every direction simultaneously. "Enjoy the Trip. You won't enjoy the destination I'm afraid". His habitual sneer seemed to be replaced by sadness at the end of his little speech.. Before I could think about that, however, the capsule accelerated like a bullet in the powerful magnetic field now surrounding it. The Red filling me turned to something resembling steel as it reinforced me internally and the capsule, in maglev mode, passed into a tunnel evacuated of air. Moving ballistically at 15,000 kph I let the Red massage my muscles. We may be built to withstand high accelerations but, unassisted, none of us could take the 750g I'd just been through. I was sore.

The Illusion In desperation turn round, hope to find        The mall again, the comforting illusion Of self-control, of a place that is kind        Where we can have what we want, with options

The Ocean And down below Ocean battles Land        Plumes of white rise, crash on rocks like razors Drain from slimy black stones, journey to sand        To a sea, dull dark grey that rages and flows