Rats Live on no Evil Star

By James David Audlin

A retired skater is driven by guilt over her husband's death to return to the village where she was raised, lacking the will to live any longer. But oblivion will not take her; she begins hearing stories whispered to her from walls and floors – from boards of funguswood, taken from a species of trees long since rendered extinct by humanity.

A shill on death row somehow escapes prison by way of an old Leadbelly song; or perhaps it is a drug-induced madness. He comes to the same village and spies on the skater, out on the Suicide Flats nearby, talking for hours with something that looks like tumbleweed.

A tree, either the last or the first of its species, who is curiously familiar with Shakespeare, Blake, and Milton, and who bears humanity no ill will, is looking for a savior.

And the stranger, who might be someone long known and loved, must overcome his anger and doubt to bring these three and their stories together, changing the past in order to preserve the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James David Audlin
• Release date: Nov 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465733078

James David Audlin

James David Audlin is an American author living in Panama, after previously living in France. A retired pastor, college professor, and newspaper opinion page editor, he is best known as the author of "The Circle of Life". He has written about a dozen novels, several full-length plays, several books of stories, a book of essays, a book of poetry, and a book about his adventures in Panama. Fluent in several languages, he has translated his novel "Rats Live on no Evil Star" into French ("Palindrome") and Spanish ("Palíndromo"). He also is a professional musician who composes, sings, and plays several instruments, though not usually at the same time. He is married to a Panamanian lady who doesn't read English and so is blissfully ignorant about his weirdly strange books. However his adult daughter and son, who live in Vermont, USA, are aware, and are wary, when a new book comes out.

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Rats Live on no Evil Star

by James David Audlin

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 by James David Audlin

Cover art by the author-artist Carlos Aleman

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The main story is based on a dream dreamed in the late 1980s, with the story of Angelina based on another that came early in the morning of 3 April 2006, and the story of Raphael based on yet another from the night of 15-16 June 2007. The novel was written 18 July – 22 August 2007.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coïncidental.

This manuscript is for confidential use only – not for circulation, distribution, or publication, except with the express written consent of the author. All rights in this work are the property of James David Audlin.

Sources:

The epigraph, portions of which are also quoted in the novel, is Sonnet XVII, by William Shakespeare.

The flying creatures called chih-chihs were described to me by my daughter Katharine Manthei Audlin when she was a child; I am grateful to her for allowing me to include them herein.

The lyrics beginning Let the Midnight Special come from The Midnight Special, a traditional song popularized by Huddie Leadbelly Ledbetter.

The phrase the beaches groaned with the weight of the sea comes from the novel A Stitch in Time, by James David Audlin. Used with permission of the author.

The quotation "L’enfer, c’est les autres, translated herein by the author as Hell is the other people," comes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos (No Exit).

The phrase I am very dark, but comely comes from the Shir ha-Shirim (known in English as the Song of Songs, sometimes incorrectly as the Song of Solomon), in the Tanakh (the Hebrew Scriptures), and is given here as rendered in the King James Version.

The phrase many are called but few are chosen comes from the Gospel of Matthew in the Christian Scriptures.

The lines beginning Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? and Space and Time! come from the poem Song of Myself, in Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman.

The lines beginning The nature of infinity is this are from Milton, by William Blake.

The phrase the leaves of the tree shall be for the healing of the nations is from the Revelation in the Christian Scriptures.

The lines beginning Heav’n is for thee too high and But apt the Mind or Fancie is to roave are from Paradise Lost, by John Milton.

The lines beginning Come, my friends come from Ulysses, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

The lines beginning Unless I die thou canst not live are from Jerusalem, by William Blake.

The story about the trees needing to band together to prevent a betrayer from destroying them comes from the Sanhedrin in the Babylonian Talmud.

The lines beginning My mother taught me underneath a tree are from The Little Black Boy, in Songs of Innocence, by William Blake.

The phrase "À la recherche des temps perdus (which literally translates as In search of the lost times) is the title of Marçel Proust’s heptology of novels. The lines beginning We find ourselves walking by the Tree..." come from the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann.

DEDICATED

as am I

to my beloved wife

Andrea Melba Vargas-Vega

Love, ah, there, there you bring us something new.

Who will believe my verse in time to come

If it were filled with your most high deserts? –

Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb

Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.

If I could write the beauty of your eyes

And in fresh numbers number all your graces,

The age to come would say ‘This poet lies;

Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.’

So should my papers, yellowed with their age,

Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,

And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage

And stretchèd metre of an antique song.

But were some child of yours alive that time,

You should live twice: in it, and in my rhyme.

– William Shakespeare

Walk around the Tree with me, children, and you can see the story is perfect and whole and eternal, without beginning or end. Yet somehow I must commit the sin of my ancestors on Old Earth, and once again steal the fruit from the Tree – I must tear this Tree down, so to speak, as if to pulp it and turn its eloquently living leaves into the symbol-swathed but dead leaves of a book. For such is our human nature, and even the nature of you young autochthones, that we cannot understand stories unless we put them into words, unless we make them finite creatures of time and space that we can pass through for a while, before putting them down and walking away from them and forgetting about them. But for the Tree the story needs no telling, because its irreducible, eternal being is the story, sufficient unto itself, and beyond past and future.

So, if I’m going to commit the sacrilege of telling you the story in this Tree, I may as well start with any leaf. Any leaf at all. See, the story is in all the leaves together; that’s the only way the Tree knows how to bear this story. I will make it seem to you like a human story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But this is not a human story at all, even though it is about humans; well, mostly. For the source of this story, this Tree standing tall before us, is also in the story. However, mainly it’s about two human beings, and they’re the bravest and dearest people I have ever known. I can’t tell you how much I miss them, even though I only met one of them once; this is why I come here alone so often, for their spirits live in this Tree. And I’m in the story too, and you can see I’m human, can’t you, though I can’t say the story has a lot of good things to say about me. But what I’m trying to get at is that this story belongs to the Tree, and there’s not really any way to tell it but the Tree’s way. So there’s no good way to begin the telling of this story. Look at this Tree. The leaves go all the way around it. There’s no first leaf. There’s no last leaf. The leaves aren’t lined up in a row like the leaves in a book. So the story in this Tree doesn’t have a beginning or an ending. Still, if I’m going to tell it to you, I’ve got to get going with it somewhere, so, for the sake of the human children among you, I am going to take one leaf at a time and tell you its part of the story. And you autochthone children, this is a good way for you to learn how we humans tell stories.

Okay, so let’s take this leaf, for instance. It’s as good a place to begin as any. This leaf tells about farmers out in the fields, not too far to the west of this forest. The day the leaf tells about was many years ago, but for the leaf it is today. The farmers, or gobbers, as they’re called, are working, but at the same time they are watching the sky. They have boxes beside them, filled with fungus cuttings – basically, the same species as this Tree here in front of us, and, yes, the same species as you young autochthones among the human children before me – and they are placing them one by one carefully in the sandy soil. One by one they scoop out a little well in the blowing grainy earth, place a cutting in it, and carefully scrape the wound in the earth closed again with their hands, tightening it up around the cutting, making sure it is positioned just so, so it will hopefully grow, if their Lord so wills, into a healthy fungus. See how the leaf is folded here? These gobbers are folded onto their knees, as their uncompromising Lord demands of them, pushing the boxes along as they place the cuttings one by one into the ground, then pulling themselves forward with their hands, then taking another cutting out of the boxes in front of them and sweeping the sand up against it with dry hands – in fact, if you can see the grainy texture in this leaf, it represents the hands of these gobbers, as dry as the arid blowing grains they cup around the cuttings.

So this leaf shows us a ragged file of gobbers across the field. This fold across the leaf pictures for us this line of dusty kneeling men, each one planting, over and over, with the same motions every time, each one clothed almost identically in their sect’s traditional bib overalls over white shirts smudged with streaks of sand, their bare hard-soled feet stretched out behind them. But all the time they plant the cuttings they are watching the sky. Their faces never look up; even though every one of them is watching, none of them would ever want his neighbors to know he is doing so. Though, to be fair, this is not conscious on their part, not a deliberate attempt to dissemble; it is just the deeply ingrained way they are, the way they are required by their stern Lord to comport themselves. They are not to express hope or curiosity or anticipation, but only the same unwavering nature that their Lord dispenses. So they keep their faces resolutely pointed toward the earth, their eyes rimmed with sand, their beards hanging heavy with sand, never any sweat on bare skin because the air is too dry. They keep their faces down, toward what they are doing with their hands. But yet from time to time their eyes seem to slip upward of their own accord, looking into the heavens the way saints do, peering briefly into the sky through the tangled confusion of their sand-choked eyebrows and past the brims of their hats woven from funguswood strips.

Their subtle glances do not notice their sky-fishing kites, familiar shapes raised here and there above the horizon into the distant indigo sky. Into these kites, made from leftover funguswood pulp flattened into a thin paper fixed to a frame of funguswood, and baited with a bit of raw goat or sheep meat, the gobbers pour unwonted artistry and competitive spirit, each seeking to keep aloft the most wind-stable, the longest-flying, the most attractive, the most high-flying of kites. They are supposedly up there to hook one of the mythical chih-chihs, flying creatures that no one has seen in generations. But in truth these kites are the gobbers’ only real sport, their only regular relief from the backbreaking tedium of raising their crops – except for the one event that they expect to arrive today.

They are watching for a slowly descending star, a star that will be visible in the indigo heaven above them long before the sound of the roar reaches their ears, or the heavy vibration of the craft’s engines shivers the ground around them. Only at that time would their Lord relent enough to allow them the luxury of looking up, since by that time there would be a sufficient reason: they would need to prepare for the shill’s arrival. Even then they will not express excitement as to what he’s going to show them. They will not speak to each other more than is absolutely necessary; does not their Book of the Law say Sand blows into an open mouth? And is not the truth of that saying apparent, since they need only to leave their mouths hanging open like fools for but a few seconds before the constant swirl of the wind flings grit into their mouths?

Nothing ever changes here. Day after day their lives are the same, with the only changes being those dictated by the slowly turning seasons. Once the winter snows are melted and the earth is warm enough to work the sandy soil, they plant the fungus cuttings, just as they are doing today. Then, day after day, they will slowly coax growth out of them. Eventually, when they are juicy enough to harvest but before they turn woody with age, the gobbers will pull them screaming from the sand. They’ll pulp them and press the pulp for the raw nog – some of them still have machinery to do this, machinery that has thus far stood up to the ravages of bitter winters and fierce summers, and the unexpected sandstorms that can come in either season, but most gobbers, or the nog wipers they hire seasonally, do all this work by hand with old mechanical shredders and presses. Then for weeks in their stinking kerosene-fueled boilers they’ll stir and skim the nog until it becomes nearly transparent and starts to congeal – what’s called the gob. Finally it’ll be ready to take to the distributor in the village, who pays them little and then turns around and makes a fortune selling the gob to the stars: for this is the main ingredient in stuff, the most expensive, the most sought-after compound in the galaxy. Besides this work they must also keep their truck gardens going to feed their families and their sheep – their carrots and beans and squash and corn, hybridded so they can grow in the difficult conditions here, but still descended from the vegetables of Old Earth. And they always have to keep up on the repairs to their farm machinery, which are constantly inundated and ruined by the conspiring grains of sand, and they’ve got to keep patching and repatching at their homes and barns if they are ever going to get some respite from the moaning sandpaper wind. And of course they must go to chapel each Thirdday and Seventhday to be reminded of the importance of devoted attention to every detail of their call from the Lord.

So now you can see why this leaf shows them watching the sky for signs of firing retros. For today is one of the two days in Disaster’s long year that their shill, Clarence Sayle, comes to show them his new wares. They’re lucky to have one come so often this far out into the desert. Closer to the planet’s one city, Bypass, shills visit all the time; they actually compete with each other over customers. But Sayle has this poor hamlet as virtually his very own. They will watch carefully, silent but enthralled, as he shows them elixirs guaranteed to restore health to their dried-out bodies. They will watch him demonstrate the new separators and nog skimmers. Their wives will look at the pots and pans and bedsheets, and they, if not their husbands, will cluck a little under their breaths with barely frustrated desire. Yes, they know that Clarence Sayle, like once a year Jack Shit, and others who come less often, is no more than a silvertongued swindler who comes in a silversheathed ship. They know that what their hard-earned money purchases is not his worthless preparations and unreliable machinery but the entertainment. Twice in the long year he comes, and in the preceding weeks and days and hours as they work hard to raise their crops they can feel the growing anticipation of his arrival, and it gives them reason to keep slaving. Sure, they can get necessities at the government commissary in the village, but the bland utilitarian items sold there have little appeal. And sure, each one of them has, out behind his sand-pitted funguswood barn, a motley collection of yesteryear’s machines bought from Clarence Sayle, which worked for a week or an entire season or not at all. But still Sayle offers them something worth their anticipation and attendance, and worth their money. He offers them faith. He offers them hope in something beyond the endless plains of empty sand that surround their community. It’s not the same kind of implacable hope in an eternal destiny vouchsafed by their Lord when they die, but one still in this tiresome, tiring world. He offers them not the ease of the unseen heavens above when this dusty life is over, but the ease that comes from the very visible stars above to make this dusty life a little more pleasant. It’s a promise of the delights of civilization, of shining cities they cannot name on planets they will never see, of a better life, of a more plentiful existence. It’s a promise of the utterly unnecessary to men and women whose Lord demands them to have and to do only what is absolutely necessary. It gives them reason to go on with this mundane grinding existence and not surrender to the gravity of hopelessness that every day drags them down further toward the dry crystalline soil of Disaster, toward death.

However, notice the dark cast to this leaf; it tells us that setting to the west, out past the featureless horizon, is Misery, as we humans named it the day we came here, for you autochthones do not strictly observe the human penchant for naming things – the same star that would be shining down on all of us right now if it weren’t for this rain – Misery is setting in the story, and these gobbers are beginning to realize that the shill is not going to arrive today. Always heretofore he has been as dependable as the arrival and departure of day itself, far more dependable than the shiny new machinery he sells, never a day late or a day early. The star is setting, and there will be no Clarence Sayle this day, or, they somehow know, any day in the future. Something has gone wrong; this they know as if their Lord had told them himself.

But not one of them will look up to the sky and sigh. Not one of them will remark to another that Sayle is not coming, or that he feels disappointment hard like a rock in his stomach. That would go against the dictates of their demanding Lord. No, rather, they will each of them continue to push the box of cuttings along, and scrape along the row and continue to plant until the darkness of night is too deep to do any more work. Then they will nod at each other same as always while they crawl on their knees up to their homes, and without a word they will get in bed with their tired, dried-out, wrinkled wives, and they will sleep like stones, and they will get up again at dawn and go back out into the fields, and they will not mention anything of this to anyone, but in their hearts every one of them will feel that life has gotten far more bitter if their shill is never again coming to visit.

You can see already, I’m sure, that the Trees themselves don’t actually tell their stories, they are the stories – the curl, the scent and color, the striations in each leaf, how it moves when the wind blows against it, how it chimes against other leaves, all these things help us to know the story and then to tell it. My responsibility is to show all of you children, human and autochthone, how to read the story in the leaves, and how then to express it.

Some of these leaves chime with the beauty of a lovely human woman, and their shapeliness calls to mind her exquisite form and spirit. Others peal with darker tones; they curl with the pain of the betrayals and anger which are so foreign to the species that here harbors this story. Quite a few carry ancient stories told by Trees long ago destroyed by war, which the human woman brought back to this Tree, and yet others, by a little miracle, even bear in them gleanings from the immortal tales of our own human creation, of Shakespeare, Blake, Murasaki, Xian, Norton, and the like, which this Tree got to know, and to make a part of his own story. Maybe some other day I will tell you the stories carried in those leaves; today I’m going to be sharing with you only the leaves that tell the story of the Tree himself.

How you tell this story will change in different seasons, weathers, breezes, or angles of starlight – come back another day when Misery’s light is bright in the forest, and I will tell this story a different way. Only this Tree knows the deep story beneath the tellings thereof, the spirit of the stories beneath the seeming of words in which they are robed, that unspeakable truth that is embodied in each leaf. The telling of the story is not in the Tree but in the world around us. Today, for instance, it is cold and rainy, and so the story will be told in a dark and rainy way, with many tears to be shed.

This leaf’s part of the story involves just two people, a man and a woman. Their names are known and loved and revered everywhere humanity has gone: Huw and Raphaela. You human children, you’ve probably heard of them yourselves. But, if not, ask your parents about Huw and Raphaela; I promise you they will remember them. They were the most famous pair of couples skaters ever. Their names and their faces were everywhere. If they headlined a show, it was sure to sell out. At first, they were loved because their story was like a fairy tale – how they had grown up together in the human town just yonder, how they all but reinvented the art of skating as teenagers having no teachers of their