The Dream of the Circle of Life: Antarctica, 2108

By Marinella van ten Haarlen

A 402 years old woman is looking back on her life and the revolutionary experience of humanity. Everything starts in 2108 as the Territorials govern the Tuba Islands.

Humanity fears the near-Earth satellites, the Exodus tuber, the acoustics and the downfall of the torn civilization. So, the old lady travels through time and space.

• Language: English
• Publisher: kasaan media publishers
• Release date: Mar 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9783965931466

Book preview

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Marinella Charlotte van ten Haarlen

The Dream of the Circle of Life

From the Collection of Short Stories:

The river of life originates from the 13th moon on the right

Intermedial Fairy Tale - Novella

Sprokie Story

English Edition

Edition October 2021

Original

"Die Droom van die sirkel van die lewe"

ISBN: 978-3-96593-145-9

This book has been published with kasaan media publishers

All Copyrights by Marinella Charlotte van ten Haarlen, 1980-2021

In Cooperation with kasaan-media

Bremen, Nîmes, 2011

Hillbrow, Johannesburg, Transvaal Gauteng, South Africa

Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, Reino de España 

For my parents,

my siblings

A.A. and J.F.

Prologue:

On a sunny South-African Monday morning, somewhere near Kroonstad in the Freestate, I had the idea.

At a roadblock, a fortified barricade belonging to the SAP (South African Police) and SADF (South African Defense Force).

An unplanned circle of books developed, interconnected short stories intended for the theatre, converted to narrative, which I will now publish in this and in the next volumes.

Those were the days of a miserable dictatorship by a cynical class, not really of the white race.

I had become speechless, soundless.

A life did not mean anything anymore.

Or only little, on both fronts of the desperately fighting South Africans.

Marred both inside and out by unbearable misery, perverse hatred, by unfulfilled hopes for a better, more bearable future, I escaped into a world that I created for myself because I could not handle the real one any longer. Did not want to handle the real one any longer.

In the many years that followed, I understood the political window-dressing of those who tried to change us, to shape us for their purposes. Those who called and are calling themselves rulers.

From time to time, I escaped into my hide-away again.

Into the other, self-created, non-existing world.

The ruling classes on this, our one planet, turned out to be more and more the class of the ruthless winners; we, the people of the Earth, won only their indulgence.

Not the hoped for and so wished for happiness.

I dedicate this book to special people.

Everybody who fought the dictatorship of Pieter Willem Botha and his disdainful comrades-in-arms. Those who lost their lives, the lists are inconceivably long. Horrifically long. On the side of the victims, the list of the perpetrators is even longer.

They were forgiven.

May God protect South Africa and its wonderful people. First and foremost, for all the help that you provided me, in the immediate realization of this dream: It is priceless. For our ideals that we were hoping for but were never able to reach in life. Maybe we permit ourselves to dream about this oh so much better world.

For G.M. 1990: a cow and the dream about the little bit of luck in life that was lost.

For K.S.: The days in 1995 were unforgettable to me, even if life took a different direction. Were to take a different path.

I was dreaming, I keep on dreaming.

The author.

Johannesburg, Transvaal, 2018

Bremen/Nîmes 2010

Somewhere, sometime in the distant yet so near future if it existed or should exist.

Something, a quite familiar, common noise, wakes me.

It clanged tinnily, banging noisily. Monotonously. Stupidly, over, and over. Like the mighty steps of an unknown and feared giant who walks on an even and polished surface, striding slowly.

Sluggishly, insecurely, I twisted and turned. I opened my bleary tear-stained eyes and blinked.

The adaptable customized gas mattress whooshed and whistled. The antiquated and probably soiled electronic inductors once again loaded up the heat that I had wanted and adjusted for the night before.

Still slightly dizzied, sleepy, I shouted aloud, croaking huskily.

Light! Bright light!

The automatic halogen processor in the bedroom usually only reacted on the second call.

The hopelessly antiquated system that had been used for more than a decade, had been powered down during the previous night.

Naturally, this was also to subject the static bioengineering fluid inside the adaption ganglions of modified, stylized genes, to an orderly program of cleaning and regulatory maintenance.

Finally, it tweeted and clinked stridently, several times in succession.

The neon crystal wallpaper stretched across the convex sliding outer wall, which after decades of daily use still fascinated my small spirit, sprang on. It flared, flickered electronically, adjusted itself. Initially in different colors.

Blue-white-red-gold.

Alongside them, a mysterious truly soothing indigo. Blurring in a matter of milliseconds with a blazing, obtrusive carmine, to end in an almost glistening, pure white. Everything was framed within the given constants, by a convoluted, curved, strange yellowish strand of silver. This warmed me deeply, and at the same time tremendously aroused me. It was, of course, definitely wanted. By myself!

What was a human being, a woman without a blazing, urging sexuality? Without the endured physicality of her own, shy desire.

And without the necessary and never quenchable craving for just that.

Good morning! Today is December 21, 2108. It is 4.43 o’clock Southwest African standard time. Outside temperature is measured at 29.8 degrees Celsius. Current air humidity is at 91.9%. Ultra-violet radiation is at 71.4% on the Jerret risk scale.

There was crackling. Again, and again. Louder and louder. The monotonous, forever repeating noise was still familiar from the days, weeks, years before.

My own personal hit parade, compiled over more than a century, played on this, another remorseful day. After Roy Orbinson’s In Dreams, I listened piously to Sam Cooke’s You Send Me, deeply lost in my thoughts, in my lived-through memories.

This adored music made me systematically melancholic. However, in the sentimental mood that came across me very suddenly and found me unprepared, seized me, it was a pertinently depressive start.

So was it not better than the last days before that. Like the ones beforehand, the uncounted weeks, endless months, the many past, and repressed years.

The infinite, physically and emotionally draining, paralyzing mugginess began anew. Like in a never-ending, sluggish, circular flow.

Like a boiling, overflowing pot, it did not even subside in the short, excruciating night hours. It was increasingly causing me serious health problems.

The friendly buzzing male voice announced another couple of temperatures:

Neo-Windhoek: 42 degrees Celsius, they were not having it any better, worse rather, it just occurred to me.

I smiled, lost, maybe just mischievously. I pulled the wine-red quilted blanket made of algae fibre back over myself. I stretched out and snuggled back comfortably underneath it. Indulged in one of the few pleasures that I still feel. Was able to feel.

In the metropolis of Mariental, an estimated five million people – nobody was able to tell exactly how many, or even wanted to know – were permitted, in temperatures of almost 60 degrees Celsius, to search in the yellowish clay, pyramid-shaped, gyroscopic satellite-neighborhood for adequate shelter from the torrid burning sky. They were sweating, they were hungry, and they were thirsty. Starving. Torturing themselves. Vegetating.

In the wildly mixed neighborhood, there was no fresh clean water anymore. Everything regenerated and synthesized from energy-intensive dehumidifiers. It was possible, for those who could afford it, to live in great and comfortable luxury.

Otherwise, the only still abundantly available sources of food were monstrous, thick, naked, bred worms, that had been outlawed for a long time, and whose individual, neatly structured limbs, were genetically conditioned and weighed 1.6 kilograms.

Three weeks, 21 days, and nights, from careless insemination to machine-based maturation, the cruel slaughter of the abnormal, callous, dead yet alive animal, offered by the monopoly merchants.

It screamed, twitched, and whistled, and rattled in this martial machine process. Well-trained geneticists have enhanced and exponentiated the absurd genesis of the many million eggs that a genderless adult animal laid after only three days.

Like the used, over-expanded inner tubes of bicycles, firm, pumped up to bursting point, these bizarre, artificial creatures grow fast, up to a weight of 160 kg, although the food chain, well-known and sufficiently researched, have transmitted several epidemics, such as the devastating and always deadly pilonic fever. However, indifferent regional authorities, through their all permeating but denied corruption, constantly holding still, looking away, tolerated the undignified breeding on the narrow special breeding mats upon which the creatures crowded.

These worms were thriving in deep, inscrutable basins, enormous unearthly lakes, eating each other up, voraciously, their own kind; or else they were cultivated and nurtured with salty, sandy, stony food. Without nutritional substance. Even for this species the coefficient was sustainably calculated, with extraordinary maximum gains.

Dead, sooty tar trees throve in an abstruse, unexpected symbiosis together with changing, pointy teethed hyena bushes that housed themselves amongst the neat camouflage of their gloomy shadows and caused countless victims to hallucinate by means of a potent, yellowish powder. These strange, finely branched plants, always brown, turning black in the blooming period; an insidious biological warfare agent from the First Gene War, which led the safe catch to dream a wonderful, abnormal dream that ended with the death and consumption of the unfortunate prey. These unnatural, destructive life forms were increasingly spreading. For the courageous inhabitants, however, they served as a cheap and welcome intoxicant and made the harvesting of the seeming spice plant particularly profitable. A military bred strain from the early 21st century makes the greedy brute dealers rich overnight.

Swaying rainbow trunks, naturally grown ashore; black-blue coral banks still existing, but mutated into breathing, rapidly crawling clams above water, above successive sand crests lying on shore. These animals were driven by an unbelievable, always deadly dangerousness.

The once so wonderful, inexpressibly beautiful world started to be invariably hostile and aggressive. Live sea anemones, inflating into voluminous balloons, colored their traces iron-rust red, cross-bred with wild rhubarb that circulated through the air like feather-light rotors, and grew immediately into regular, movable trunks.

A wandering monour forest stretched out like a crippled cloud before the volcanic, pleasantly warm, heat-requiring mountain top, the stony cone. The doughy resin, pulverizing and stirring up dust like coal at the surface, promised a heavy drunkenness lasting for months, in the remaining, so-called drinking caverns. Dirty plazas stretching for miles, smelling of sweet pus and foully moldering excrement; where wild, almost inconceivable, excess took place. Re-invented time and time again. Often the addicts died of thirst, the skillful drug traffickers, beyond all legal provision, constantly established new fields, which, within hours, blossomed and thrived, beautiful to look at. After the rich profitable harvest, they moved on, those human, those squalid earth rats. The desperate, sociologically degenerate addicts perished in their thousands in the glowing, unrelenting heat of the endless desert, dried up to become sandy, limp, wrinkled mummies, admonishing memorials of the destabilized culture of a common yet tolerated drunkenness.

To make the maximum amount of money, realize a greedy steady profit on their cruel end, but also to cultivate the final, obviously enjoyed experience of death, the criminal and unscrupulous operators of these very mobile plantations - that sell at different locations every day - promised that the lethal drug prevented any possibility of natural aging, even combated it, reversed it. In minute, homeopathic dosages, ingested daily, this crazy herb made people very beautiful and attractive for some time. The mainly female clientele developed, according to their empathetic thoughts, a very individual perfume, produced naturally in the body, which accumulated into a pungent, foul smell. The manor herb served and aroused the inborn vanity of individuals, so many, who then, after an initial, clearly perceptible reversal of the ongoing aging process, dried out alive. Eventually, after a couple of weeks, the many victims were lingeringly sick and died in agony, from total dehydration. Incurably ill, they literally corroded internally. De-bodied. Entire limbs mummified, the face became a rigid dry mask, like that of a conserved pharaoh from old and long gone Egypt.

There were young and old women, plagued by a consuming, tantalizing love sickness, or a nagging and disarming lack of perspective; in the midst of the helplessness of the totalitarian system, allowing themselves, in the wandering suicide bar, to be adorned as old Egyptian mummies and killed.

They, who generally saw it as a welcome, longed-for salvation, greeted with joy the near, creeping death. Like an enraptured, ecstatic cheer, in the midst of the other like-minded people, the synthetic final shot from the designer drugs, greedily absorbing into them, completely dissolved the human body in a matter of seconds. In the end they danced without a motif, their bony arms and legs scattered; ultimately their body becomes ash, black dust, as though at a bizarre, confusing masquerade ball. In the deep drunkenness of the last delirium, the victims of these peculiar processions proclaimed their own insignificant, factitious kingdom, listened to Bobby Goldsboro, a singer from the previous century; cynically they loved "See the funny little Clown" the most, while they were gliding along, slowly, and blissfully. To wherever.

Small, light, floating sandboats, so-called "EMPA Vorstadtmulis" (mules from suburbia), rode over the steep, swirling wave crests, the craggy, uneven desert coast, the dunes of which looked like the gutted art of a lost culture. Wave-like circles, shaped by wind, storm, and sand. The open, uneven terrain had become uncontrollable. Behind each of these silted objects, it was to be feared that the swiftly operating, professionally acting environmental terrorists were hiding. Camouflaging. On the path of the mummies, which was getting longer and longer. Thousands, even millions, rested there, over there, or here. Characteristic symbols of the awful, inevitable flight from all possible countries into the nowhere of a merciless history. Countless despondent, hopeless refugees were housed there, literally in the middle of outright nowhere, alongside unscrupulous smugglers who, with an abundant supply of goods from all over the world, were conducting successful and profitable business up and down the country.

Vegetating in the legendary ruins of the abandoned, eerie double helix cloisters, designed like a hilly,