The Seven Last Days: Volume VI: The Stars Blindly Run

By James David Audlin

The Sun is sputtering and guttering with only a pallid reddish light. Dark night has nearly completed its victory over day. What few human beings are left cower in a last village awaiting the eventual death of the world.

Two Hunters struggle for supremacy over a female of a nonhuman race.

A noah builds a sailing ship to escape to the stars in an attempt to evade the end of the Universe.

And then a miracle; no one remembers the last time a child has been born, but here is one, a girl. She is beautiful, but strange, given to dancing weird rituals beneath the Moon and painting self-portraits in the nude. One of the two Hunters, Adam Winter, dares to confront her with his love, with disastrous consequences.

The other Hunter, Ikaros, consumed with rage, teams up with a noah to build an Ark - and it sails into space seeking a new world where humanity might yet live. But there is no miracle for Ikaros; again and again they come back to the same tired world and its darkening Sun.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James David Audlin
• Release date: Dec 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465939586

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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Seven Novels of the Last Days

Volume Six

The Stars Blindly Run

by James David Audlin

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2011 by James David Audlin

Cover photo and design by the author

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.

This novel is based on several dreams that came to me in the 1970s. The novel was begun in 1981, continued in 1990, and completed 17 September 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.

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All quotations from the Holy Bible are taken from the King James Version, or are translated, paraphrased, or parodied by the author. All materials quoted in translation are translated by the author. Many lyrics contained herein are from traditional children’s lullabies or spirituals of unknown authorship. The following sources with authorship known or attributed are referenced by part and paragraph numbers.

Part I, paragraph 13: Paraphrase from Sonnet LXXIII, by William Shakespeare.

Part I, paragraph 89: Quotation from Macbeth, II, I, 57-59 and 64-68, by William Shakespeare.

Part II, paragraph 12: Quotation from I’ll Fly Away, by Albert E. Brumley.

Part II, paragraph 27: Quotation from Row, Row, Row Your Boat, attributed to Eliphalet Oram Lyte.

Part II, paragraphs 69-70: The parable about the people who live on ice was originally told by William James in his The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Part II, paragraph 96: Quotations from Amazing Grace, by John Newton, but the last stanza (slightly changed herein by the author) first appeared in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Part IV, paragraph 20: Paraphrase of lines from The Merchant of Venice, V, i, 54-65, by William Shakespeare.

Part IV, paragraph 25: Quotation from Elektra, line 88, by Sophocles.

Part IV, paragraph 27: Quotation from Elektra, lines 54f, by Euripides.

O sorrow, cruel fellowship,

O Priestess in the vaults of Death,

O sweet and bitter in a breath,

What whispers from thy lying lip?

‘The stars,’ she whispers, ‘blindly run;

A web is wov’n across the sky;

From out waste places comes a cry,

And murmurs from the dying Sun:

‘And all the phantom, Nature, stands, –

With all the music in her tone,

A hollow echo of my own, –

A hollow form with empty hands.’

And shall I take a thing so blind,

Embrace her as my natural good;

Or crush her, like a vice of blood,

Upon the threshold of the mind?

– Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, III

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

– William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXIII

What links are ours with orbs that are

So resolutely far:

The solitary asks, and they

Give radiance as from a shield:

Still at the death of day,

The seen, the unrevealed.

...we pass

The breath of thought, who would divine

If haply they may grow

As Earth; have our desire to know;

If life comes there to grain from grass,

And flowers like ours of toil and pain;

Has passion to beat bar,

Win space from cleaving brain;

The mystic link attain,

Whereby star holds on star.

To deeper than this ball of sight

Appeal the lustrous people of the night.

Fronting yon shoreless, sown with fiery sails...

So may we read, and little find them cold:

Not frosty lamps illumining dead space,

Not distant aliens, not senseless Powers.

The fire is in them whereof we are born;

The music of their motions may be ours.

Spirit shall deem them beckoning Earth and voiced

Sisterly to her, in her beams rejoiced.

Of love, the grand impulsion, we behold

The love that lends her grace

Among the starry fold.

Then at new flood of customary morn,

Look at her through her showers,

Her mists, her streaming gold,

A wonder edges the familiar face:

She wears no more that robe of printed hours;

Half strange seems Earth, and sweeter than her flowers.

– George Meredith, from Meditation under Stars

The inhabitants are sick to death: they labour to divide into Days

And nights the uncertain Periods, and into Weeks & Months. In vain

They send the Dove & Raven & in vain the Serpent over the mountains

And in vain the Eagle & Lion over the four-fold wilderness:

They return not, but generate in rocky places desolate:

They return not, but build a habitation separate from Man.

The Sun forgets his course like a drunken man; he hesitates

Upon the Cheselden hills, thinking to sleep on the Severn

In vain: he is hurried afar into an unknown Night:

He chokes up the paths of the sky; the Moon is leprous as snow,

Trembling & descending down, seeking to rest on high Mona,

Scattering her leprous snows in flakes of disease over Albion.

The Stars flee remote; the heaven is iron, the earth is sulphur,

And all the mountains & hills shrink up like a withering gourd

As the Senses of men shrink together under the Knife of flint

In the hands of Albion’s Daughters among the Druid Temples …

Ashamed to give Love openly to the piteous & merciful Man,

Counting him an imbecile mockery, but the Warrior

They adore & his revenge cherish with the blood of the Innocent.

– William Blake, from Jerusalem

what if a much of a which of a wind

gives the truth to summer’s lie;

bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun

and yanks immortal stars awry?

Blow king to beggar and queen to seem

(blow friend to fiend:blow space to time)

– when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,

the single secret will still be man ...

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream

bites this universe in two,

peels forever out of his grave

and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?

Blow soon to never and never to twice

(blow life to isn’t:blow death to was)

– all nothing’s only our hugest home;

the most who die, the more we live

–E. E. Cummings, from what if much of a which of a wind

PART ONE: THE HUNTERS

Once upon a time there will be a village. This village will be quiet, and more than quiet. All one might ever hear in this town will be the silent wind, the infrequent cry of a bird, and, very rarely, the gentle whispers of the townsfolk. Voices in the village will hardly raise themselves above the wail of the wind. Banished from it will be the expression of lamentation and sorrow, the voice of joy and gladness, even the sounds of conjugal bliss, for the old order of things will long since have passed away.

Indeed, the village will be more than quiet. In every sense it will be of a peculiarly muted character. Clothing will not be dyed, houses will not be painted, and pottery will not be pigmented. Foods will be bland and unspiced, of a soft consistency for easy chewing and digestion. There will be no knives or forks but only spoons, no saws or axes; weapons of all kinds will have been completely unknown for the longest time, and rarely will anyone’s mouth sing, or laugh, or cry.

Even Nature will for the most part comply with these silent ways, for these will be days when the whole creation will have grown tired. The ancient Sun will be tired from his endless rounds, and, though the Earth will by then have so slowed on her axis that days will last half a lunar month, he will hang hardly above the horizon during the sallow day, bloated and watery red, lacking the vigor for climbing up to the zenith to blot out the stars that will shine even at midday, so pale that he might be directly looked at by the naked eye without any discomfort. Even at high noon there will only be a ruddy grey twilight, and throughout the day candles and lamps will be kept lit indoors, and outdoors more distant objects will sink into gauzy shadows. Many there will be who will think that the Sun might some day cease to shine, for already three times within living memory he will have flickered and gone out for several seconds, causing great (but unvoiced) consternation among the people below him. Indeed, the Priests will read aloud from the scriptures as affirmation of this expectation: On that day, says the Lord, I will make the Sun go out at noon, and darken the Earth in full daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning, and your songs into mourning, and end them like a bitter day. And I will banish from among you the sounds of mirth and of gladness, the voice of bridegroom and of bride, the sound of the millstone and the light of the lamp.

And the Earth too will be tired, her soil depleted of all energy to make things live. The cultivated plants in their simple gardens will no longer bear in copious quantity the fruits and vegetables they will once have borne. And the trees in the wilderness likewise will not grow to great heights any more, but will be stunted and bent with arthritic age, and the passionless winds, asthmatic though they will blow, will bring forth groans of pain from the trees’ heavy sagging branches. Animals will move slowly, with none of the vigor or ferocity once they might have owned. The Sun and the Earth, the father and mother of all life, both will be spent, their organs long withered, senile and unaware of their offspring, no more bearing and raising up the children of life they once rejoiced over in their younger days.

However Nature, which will surround the people of the village, still will have the image of being wild, unpredictable, and vaguely dangerous. It is true that for much of the year long winter will lie