The Somewhere Sun: The Reefsong, #2

By Mark Belfry

In The Suncaster, Book One of the Reefsong, Teria Keats passes through an experimental device developed to transport sunlight: a suncaster. Now she is adrift in time, skipping through past and future while developing extraordinary capacities of mind to bring her home. Her father, Kieron Keats, leaves her bedside to undertake a compelling mission, where, he too begins to find himself, uncovering love and self-reliance under his polished New Age programming. Neither is aware of the cracks beginning to form in their utopian New Age. Nor are they aware that evil followed Teria through the suncaster—or that, under The Somewhere Sun, evil is getting a new face.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Reefsong Publishing
• Release date: Oct 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9780995021938

Mark Belfry

When the writing didn’t come when he asked for it as a young man, Mark Belfry accepted the career that offered, a joyfully eclectic leadership path through diverse industries, until returning eventually to where he’d started, sharing ideas in word form, now armed with the confidence of experience. Through it all there have been three constants: service to people; daily 4 AM meditation that brought him ever closer to the constant light, and from which the Farmer lately emerged; and his partner, Tricia, without whom, who knows?  The Farmer would say that we are one, and that our purpose is to discover this in a meaningful way and then live it. And there Mark’s work continues. Come share the way and follow the Farmer at www.markbelfry.com.

Book preview

Table of Contents

1. After and Before

2. Keats Going South

3. Seekers

4. Exposed Risk

5. Alien Love

6. Separation

7. Life In Fragments

8. Disconnection

9. Dark Clouds

10. Expansion

11. Starting To Fit

12. Various Angels

13. Puzzlework

14. The Solution

15. Falling Together

16. Homecoming

Sequence of Quotations

There will be a time when Teria will grasp the significance of the amber pendant, which she wore and lost passing through the suncaster. After long search she will replace it with one of familiar resonance and this she will hold dear, a reminder of having herself been lost, and of the journey home.

When she handles the stone she will remember being less than the gap between surface and finger, and recall the tree that first gave her scope. She will revisit particle-moments with minds along the way and be grateful for the links that taught her strength, and flexibility, and above all, how to see.

March 2104

1. After and Before

Darkness is the absence of light, everywhere in this universe except in the human mind. Only in the mind of ‘man is light the absence of darkness, yet we wonder what our purpose is.

—The Reverend Friend Farmer,

‘Garden of Light’ (2036)

▾

Theo Sluig lurched off balance into the suncaster so he fell coming out, tumbling over the great body he’d pushed before him. He landed on his face with his chest on the lump of Macado’s head, and when he tried to get up he was unsteady and fell again, onto his cheek and shoulder before rolling onto his back. 

Then the pain came, pain in his face and hands that hit hard, grew worse, flared, and consumed him. His eyes, nose and lips felt ripped away. Holes burned behind his eyes like acid pools and his hands felt pulled apart. Agony overwhelmed his mind, settled as if it would last forever, and then went away.

He didn’t notice the numbness spreading in his face because of the searing melting agony behind his eyes, and when that faded, the fireworks going off in his hands. But then his hands stopped hurting and he was aware only of a general ache, bile in his throat, his pounding heart, and the urgent need to get moving.

So Sluig rolled over and raised himself to his knees. The fall had disoriented him, and when he moved his head to different angles he could discern no shades of light. But there was sound, loud and getting louder, the noise he’d been hearing before he passed through the suncaster, and with this point of reference he moved, flailing to locate Macado’s head and shoulders and then scurrying off on hands and knees.

For surely he was where he’d left the back half of the suncaster, in the space he rented to Macado, in his own building below his own home—near the suncaster where he must not be. Sluig scuttled away, hands paddling in something sticky and knees catching on the shreds of his omnisuit, not stopping until his head hit a wall. Then the space behind him exploded.

There was a deafening boom-crash and searing heat as the falling moon shuttle finally hit the tower where he'd been standing moments ago. A great chunk burst through the suncaster, making the floor buck and ramming his face back into the wall before smashing its way into the night. Sluig heard it whine off and felt the cool night air flow in.

The back of his head felt on fire. When he raised a hand to check he ducked forward and bumped the wall for a third time, this time noticing how little he felt the blow. The hand touching the back of his head didn’t seem as sensitive as it should be, although it seemed there were no flames. The skin of his scalp was painful to the touch but probably intact, and the loss of hair was of no consequence.

Once the echoes in his head subsided, Sluig’s first action was to reboot his ear-mounted intelligent display, but it didn't respond. Where his ear should have been was a great lump of something that his reaching hand was too clumsy to explain.

There was a spare eRing on his bedside an elevator ride above. With his display he could confirm that they were dead—if he could use it. So, still on his knees, he turned in the direction the cool air was coming from and thought about where the elevator must be. Then he stopped.

He must now be facing the hole the crash made in the wall yet he could not see. The city night was never fully dark. The wind cooled his face but the world was as black as if never born. He must be... He was blind.

His mind stopped working then for a little while, but eventually he began to think again. Such a short time ago he’d been whole and in control, standing behind the Marbillis on top of the tower, waiting for them to step through the suncaster into oblivion. He’d stood with his hand on the nephew’s shoulder waiting to see if the boy went through the suncaster by himself or if Sluig would administer the narcotic in his palm. A quick squeeze to release the drug, a subtle push and the boy would have followed his uncle into the device, with Macado waiting here, on the other side, to receive them—in the unlikely chance they survived. Then the falling shuttle would take out the tower, killing anyone still there and obliterating any evidence.

All he’d needed were a few seconds more—and his hidden flatbike, the one that arrogant bastard of a magician had stolen—and the world’s richest company would have been his to control. And then, such plans he had.

Instead the stupid girl emerged from the suncaster carrying Macado and everything went wrong. Nephew Napoleon’s girlfriend, Teria Keats, a name he’d remember even if she was now little but ash. Where had she come from and how had she taken Macado out like that? The man was a giant.

The Keats girl was dead. Had to be, she’d been on the tower like the Marbillis, destroyed by the falling bulk of the red-hot shuttle Sluig had just escaped. They’d had no means of exit other than the one that only he’d had the courage to use. So the Marbillis were dead. God bless Theo Sluig.

If the girl had lived he would have made her pay in every possible way. But the thief who stole his hidden flatbike, the illusionist, he was still around. Repaying that trick would be the first course of business once Sluig regained his strength. That time would come.

Anger stirring him, he crawled to the elevator, felt for the button to his floor and poked at it, his finger making a clicking sound where it struck. When the car rose to his condo he crawled to his bed and lay there panting, taking stock.

His sight was gone and there was something very wrong with his hands. He was weak and his body seemed coated with something coarse wherever the omnisuit hadn’t covered him. When he touched his face his insensitive fingers felt something like caked clay. He couldn’t tell what was happening with his ear, and he couldn’t find the courage to touch his eyes.

But he’d made the best of a bad situation. He'd escaped, despite Fox’s theft of his emergency flatbike. If he hadn’t acted as he did he’d be burnt cinders like the Marbillis, salting the city with their ash.

It had been clever to push Macado before him through the suncaster to take the damage, as he’d seen the girl do, although the girl may have been better protected, being hidden underneath. There was nothing he could have done about that. Placing the suncaster near the elevator but not facing it also wise, if more instinct than planning. His sense of self-preservation had carried him through once again. He was damaged, but damage can be repaired. Theo Sluig would rise again.

A light approached, rising so rapidly toward him that he raised his arm as a shield, whimpering when he could not see the arm and the light continued. Then he saw that the light was heading somewhere to his left, so he quieted and let it come.

The light paused, the elevator chimed and he understood. Someone was coming in the elevator, someone... that girl from the other night, the pretty one with the sunburned skin.

Oh, greedy girl, Sluig thought, feeling her fear and hesitant courage. She was coming for her prize, the tiny suncaster he’d denied her. It was a sample, nothing but a giveaway, but the fools would do anything to get one.

With the memory his sense of powerlessness diminished and he followed the progress of the girl’s light. When it paused he recalled the sunroom, the memory coming so hard he cried out, his voice harsh and rasping. In a few hours the room would be filled with sunlight so thick he’d all but breathe it. It must be possible to see that again.

The girl heard his noise and turned, passed through the hall and entered his room—and his awareness entered her like plunging into a wave. He felt the fear and determination of her mind, sensed it reflected in the muscles of jaw and shoulders and the upset in her belly. He itched with her sunburnt skin, felt the shape and structure of the bones beneath, and embraced her anger, the hatred growing in her light.

The hate buoyed him and he fought wildly until he sensed a kind of surface and pushed through, his thoughts again his own. There he rested, confidence returning, still in the mind of the girl yet aware of his separate self.

Then she fumbled for the seldom-used button for the overhead lamp.

Sluig’s head filled with blinding light. When it cleared he saw through her eyes a hideous man-like thing on bloody sheets like something unwrapped from a tomb and found alive. Between swaths of dead skin the corpse showed crimson, its inside workings exposed through pallid skin. Something white was visible through the hole of a nose. Eye sockets stared upward, full of decay.

The girl’s lungs pumped and they screamed together and then she wheeled and ran and he ran within her, sprinting to a stairway, falling, springing up and running through the pain until, in distancing herself, she again became a light.

Sluig stopped his noise—there was no reward in that—and lay panting, waiting for the horror to pass. When it did, when he could think again, he went back to considering. He needed to process new information.

His mind was unimpaired, so he’d maintained his advantage over those around him, and this new capacity promised to greatly extend his influence. In time it might also offer interesting diversions.

This might turn out yet. He’d need new eyes. And a new face, but there were surgical options for both if he could travel. Discrete flight arrangements would drain his bank accounts but were possible, and he had other resources to call on. But of two things he was certain: that passing through the suncaster had wrought great change, and that the coming months would be his most challenging.

Sluig was considering how he might stand when something new touched his awareness and he perceived a silvery glow floating before him. Beyond this first light was another, and another, and more. Sluig held his breath and looked about with new vision: lights were everywhere, thousands of luminous points crowding toward him as if eager to be seen.

He tried to back away but that was futile; he had no means to retreat. So he fixed on the light immediately in front of him, which was looking within itself, where he, too, was drawn to look. Its awareness was focused on... suffering, dying, a death... And then he was making that sound again, screams he could not stop.

The dead were all around him and he could not shut them out.

Through the night they came to share their suffering, their wisdom, their lessons learned. Some who seemed kind, even concerned, were pushed aside by the hungry and angry, those dominated by self-loving and self-loathing, the miseries so like himself.

By dawn he was an empty shell. When at last the lights pulled back he felt himself scraped clean, the rags of a mind that had endured too much.

In the unexpected calm he raised his awareness and saw before him one light only, the brightest of all. Or perhaps there were two, a second light hovering behind the first like a small, luminous moon. Then the bright light pierced him.

Sluig’s mind was overwhelmed, pressed to the edge of being, so small and powerless he could not even mourn.

And then, for the first time in hours, he felt his body rise and look around.

▾

At first light the blogger Andrida stood on the hovering platform of her bright pink flatbike, studying the hole the core of the shuttle smashed when it burst from the suncaster.

Which was absolute zero cool when she thought about it, how the ship went in one place and came out two. Most of the debris made an exit hole at Mindillico Tower while another man-sized chunk popped out here, through the other half of the suncaster, blocks away.

Here the hole was crude compared to the one over there because the tower was built out of the new, self-constructing meta-materials, while this old place was stone and stuff. In the tower the hole was the shape of the ship that made it, whereas here the edges exposed dangling plasterboard, twisted metal and burnt and broken stone.

Andrida had not the slightest curly how suncasters worked, but that was okay because nobody else did either. All anyone wanted to know was if they worked, whether you could step in one place and out somewhere else in one piece—to which the answer was apparently ‘not entirely,’ as proven by those who’d tried. HB Marbilli and the big Macado guy were both dead, and maybe the good Doctor Sluig, too.

The blogs would treat Marbilli’s death with respect it didn’t deserve, at least at first. Ugly little monkey that he’d become, Marbilli was still a great man to the people. Of course, he got only the best press since he’d scared the brass off every blogger in the business, Andrida included. It didn’t take cosmic math to figure those turkeys would be coming home to roost now that he was dead.

She’d had a look at what was left of that big guy this morning before they brought him out through this exact hole. He’d been pretty much cooked by the flaming piece of moon shuttle zipping past him, but you could see how going through the suncaster twice had ripped away most of his face. Andrida shuddered again with pleasure. What a segment that had been! Her agent was in bliss.

At a sudden gust of wind she sat down on the seat of the flatbike. She was hovering all by herself somewhere around the fifteenth floor, well above the stabilizing interbike fields where a flatbike couldn’t fall. At this level the wind wasn’t bad, but it still puffed and swirled and she didn’t want to stumble. Her brand could handle a misstep or two but still, it paid to be careful.

Her new flatbike was a finger-thin deck with a curving vertical steering wand behind the windscreen, a lightweight seat with a small compartment behind, and a levitation mechanism that stuck out about the width of her hand on the bottom of the bike. The deck was programmed to match whatever omnisuit style she chose that day, and today that was shocking pink. Every square centimeter of surface reflected photons like a dielectric supermirror so it shone like a shocking pink sun.

Life was ironic. Andrida’s public persona began as a way to distract attention from her lantern jaw: the omnisuit styles that got her sent home in high school, the breast enhancements to give people something else to look at, even the core aggression. All this she did because her parents couldn’t afford to fix her jaw when they should have. And now that she had the dollies to spend to trim the jaw she wouldn’t think of it. Her profile was her brand.

She let out a deep breath and stared at the hole in the wall. Focus, woman, what’re you doing here?

The other bloggers left once the body of the big guy had been removed. Most were back where the ship struck Mindillico Tower or hovering around the home of that Keats girl who’d popped out of the suncaster like a kitten from a cake, and at a moment so perfect it could have been directed. She was even pushing a dead guy, or rather, pushing a guy to death. That slim child practically carried him and he had to be three times her weight. Andrida would give half her memories for an entrance like that.

And then came the feast of great images that were already dominating the blogs. The first shot was of the girl rising from behind the huge dead guy, tall, lithe and butt naked for a flashing moment in her damaged omnisuit before the billionaire boyfriend threw a coat over her. So far no one had found a good frontal—apparently as she stood she turned away from where everyone was looking, and all the stationary cameras behind the building had been diverted as part of the illusion.

Of course, from a publicity standpoint the bum-shot was faraway better than the frontal would have been, although the poor child wouldn’t understand that even if she had her wits.

Partial exposure was Andrida’s core strategy. People could never get enough of the naked human body but these days there was so much of it around—half the young world threw a quick out-of-the-shower nudie up to the grid, if not several dozen. It was like, what did they call it? De rigor? And so very frag-me sad. Well, the girls were tragic. The males could occasionally be worth viewing.

Didn’t these young women realize how terribly weak that was? You have to make them wait for it. That’s what keeps the audience on their toes and your thumbnail image live in their bookmarks, not to mention keeping Andrida’s personal juices flowing. They were lucky to have her, these sad, achingly dull people of the Farmer’s new Age, desperate for a little tickle in the furry undersides of their minds.

Andrida was at the Miracle Event, of course, broadcasting and hoping for a miracle very different from the one Marbilli planned. She wanted something unplanned. And she got it, but in such terrifying proximity she’d almost made a liquid bubble in her omnisuit.

Everything happened so fast she’d had to scan the vids later to straighten it all out. The show filled with music, powerful images and erotic undertones, the work of the brilliant illusionist Fox. And then the golden girl appeared out of nowhere against the sky’s red glow. Tall and slim, wearing Marbilli’s trademark coat like a thigh-length woolly tunic fastened way down low—she might have been a goddess sprung from a breach in the fabric of time. Or so Andrida had described her this morning in her blog, which she thought was rather good.

After that Andrida was fleeing like everyone else and lost sight of her in the screaming crowd and flashing brilliance. Then she was rocked by an explosive boom, followed by endless after-crunches as most of the debris went flying one way while the rest came racing right back at them. That was the flaming hunk that came through the suncaster where she now was. And were those Marbilli’s eyes on the front of it? She didn’t think so, but that didn’t stop her from reporting it.

Okay, stop dreaming, big girl. Focus on the nowness.

Leave it to the million or two other blogs to talk about the mess, Andrida sought the mind, the motive, the underlying reasoning. Because, let’s face it: the truth had to be that someone else in this conformist hell of an up-fragging, backstabbing, two-faced town couldn’t stand the boredom either—couldn’t stand it so bad they blew things up for fun. Andrida more than sympathized, she fragging cheered!

There was no chance that moon shuttle came down all by itself, exactly on top of the tower at the very height of the show. So who gave it the push? Marbilli was the guy, maybe, the old shit, but if he schemed all this then something went badly wrong for him.

Or maybe it was the too-good-to-be-a-blogger, Theodosius Sluig, the ex-blogger who’d risen so high. The man was a slime ball and in all the wrong ways—there’d been hints and rumors and yet no one had been able to catch him actually doing anything, which was faraway pissy.

This second site had seemed random until someone discovered Sluig lived in the building some thirty floors above where he’d come out the other side of the suncaster. He wasn’t here where the hole happened, they’d checked this morning. One long-range vid through his window caught him exiting the suncaster, and illicit radar images posted for sale to the blog market showed him moving even after the crash. She’d bought a share in one of those herself. So where was the fragging little toad?

Andrida coaxed her bike back out through the hole and up towards Sluig’s apartment many floors above. Maybe Marbilli was dead, turned into a molten metallic mass—hey, maybe she could use that, too—but where was Sluig the Smug?  

She arrived at the apron of his apartment, stepped off and found the door unlocked. Maybe he’d been in a hurry. On foot she entered a wide crimson hall lined with golden objects in glass displays, feeling self-conscious and thinking about possibilities.

Having entered his private dwelling she’d need a permit to broadcast, which meant hours of delay waiting for permission to bypass the privacy protocols. But her ear-mounted cameras could vid what they saw, and if there’d been a crime she’d be obligated to upload her evidence immediately to the public record. One could only hope.

This Sluig was quite a collector, she thought, looking around, before reminding herself not to count her chicken balls so quick. He could be watching her even now, which would explain why she felt so self-conscious.

But look! Oh, glorious sun!

She closed her eyes against the astonishing sunlight, then spun when she could see, looking under her cupped hands to make sure he wasn’t behind her ready to pounce. When he wasn’t there she relaxed, looked around and enjoyed the moment. Suncasters mounted to the ceiling filled the room with pure hot sunshine and mirrored spheres on the floor bounced it everywhere.

There wasn’t sun enough to go around anymore, not with the skyline blocked by the houses of the super-rich, not a single one of whom had yet proposed to Andrida, a proposal that she would accept with, what was it, alac... elac... electricity. A terrace in the sunshine, that’s what the whole world wanted. Or the next best thing, a room like this—and here the sun would shine every day.

And was that a hookah? O my zero, there was a story, an unreported detail in the life of a famous slug. Chemicals weren’t for the congruent, as the publicly funded saying went. Andrida sniffed but the mouthpiece smelled only of wine, which wasn’t surprising but a pity. But then, everyone would believe what they wanted to believe, and they’d want to believe what she’d tell them. She’d come up with whatever else might have been in that pipe—something new, powerful and illegal. Oh, what fun.

As she was in his private space she couldn’t do anything until she had evidence of some kind of non-personal crime, but still she stood, raising her face to the nearest suncaster. She crooked a finger in the neck of her omnisuit and tugged it down a few centimeters, breathing deeply as if to suck the sunshine into her lungs. She held the warmth in her chest for a long moment before letting it out slowly, which was surely as pleasurable as whatever Sluig might have been using.

Finally, she turned slowly to let her cameras capture all for future broadcast. The world had to see this.

There was something else the world liked a peek of, and if there’d been a mirror in the room she would have been sorely tempted to record it for them: an ‘accidental’ reflection of her catching sunlight on parts of her they weren’t supposed to see. Even without the mirror she was tempted—but no, first she had to search. If she found him and how she found him would decide what she did next. Unless he was sitting around scratching himself and listening to his vmails this would probably all soon be public and she could do what she wanted. But