Not Now: Death, Dreams, & Reasons for Living

By Sam Smith

Each of the 5 novels of the series Towards the unMaking of Heaven takes place within an intergalactic civilisation known variously as the Supreme Civilisation, or, more often, simply as Space. And the fourth, Not Now: Death, Dreams & Reasons for Living, is an sf exploration of desire, dreams and self-deceit. A clever and conceited young poet, Okinwe Orbinson, is recruited from his artificial city world - part of a moribund space civilisation - by a small mysterious stranger calling himself Leon Reduct. Only when Okinwe has accepted Leon's challenge is he told that his mission is to save a, by now, rumoured Hybrid/Human race, Talkers, from self-extinction.
This is what Anthony Lund said of 'Not Now: Death, Dreams & Reasons for Living - “Like 'You Human,' the book deals with interspecies love and desire, but it also comments on the self, on escaping regularity, on desires and on the dreams of beings. When a stranger called Leon Reduct asks poet Okinwe Orbison to undertake a mission to save the Talkers from extinction, Orbison does not know just how deeply he will be affected by the task he has been given. Full of many dream sequences, self doubt and self discovery, the story once again picks up the true novel feel, its short chapters pushing the story along quicker than the reader realizes. From its opening to closing lines, 'Not Now' is one of the best books of the series, contemplative and questioning while remaining continuously interesting and engrossing to the reader.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sam Smith
• Release date: Jun 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005210229

Book preview

Chapter One

I could claim deception. I could claim coercion. But, to be honest, I leapt at the chance of escape.

I was young, clever, and impatient. Eighteen years old, I’d had my own apartment and independence for the last year. It had changed nothing.

Intelligent enough to see what was wrong with my world, I was impatient with my peers and their no-solution solutions. Young, I was not without scruples, but I was certainly without loyalties. Better if we abandoned our city/world, I told them, better if we united with other cities, other worlds. This shrinking dispersion was foolish.

In that city/world, though, each of my peers believed themselves to be big names. And that was the trap they laid for me.

I have a literary bent; was, moreover, of that tender age when ancient poets talked to me about my to-be life. I therefore wanted to be a poet like those ancients.

On that city/world, though, the fashion was solely for experience-based poetry; and all poems had to be written in the shape of a right-angled triangle  with the apex of the triangle being the first line, the longest line being the base.

The other poets were all very clever, and there was much mutual back-slapping. The women, though, were neurotically sensitive to the point of quivering inertia, while the men sought to loudly impress their dullard women. All played safe, sought to titillate rather than to shock; and these were the poets who defined poetry as the distillation of raw experience.

But what new experience could be had on that outside-in world? None. And, with no new experience to write of, one ended up with a vacuum. Ergo  vacuous poetry.

All of the remaining population on that city/world (poets included) lived in clusters on the clement levels, a third below the outer surface. To manufacture experience, aspiring poets took themselves down to the curved and self-enclosing ceilings of the deeps. Whose rooms were lit on their arrival, and which were... empty.

Or the aspiring poets took themselves out to the surface, to the temperate forests and lawns of our outside-in world. Which, on their arrival, was light or dark and... empty.

The modern poets projected their imaginations onto this emptiness and wrote of the feelings imaginatively experienced. Very cleverly. With meaningful allusions and obscure words.

A few of my contemporaries, those I thought of as my friends, genuinely longed for adversity to test their mettle. They couldn't find, nor manufacture, any such test of their own characters.

The result of all this was that, with contempt for us all, I called myself a poet and I facetiously wrote,

‘I

breathe’

Instead of their taking offence the poetry-lovers praised it. Stroke of genius, they said, '...takes bravery to be that simple and direct...' '...poetry as the art of brevity here finds its summation...' 'Okinwe Orbison has the naiveté necessary to the simple vision of genius...'

At first incredulous, then aghast, then amused, then appalled, I found myself nevertheless enjoying the attention. Which lowered my self-esteem. So I wrote,

‘I

am

false’

This was heralded as absolute and consummate proof of my growing genius. I quickly wrote a second version,

‘I

am

so false

I can convince

myself I am honest’

Again I found myself flattered by the disproportionate praise. (In other cities, other worlds, eighteen might be thought rather young to be a poet of renown. But, as I said, ours was a diminishing population; for which selfsame reason our education had been crammed. Largely on our own initiative. There being so few of us, so little else to do.)

I thought to merit this celebrity by turning to prose. Contemporary prose I soon discovered, however, to be little more than the dressing up of the author’s perversions as literature. And I was too young to have any convincing fetishes.

I did have ideas circling at the back of my mind, ellipses touching the profound; but when words gave shape to those thoughts they came to the paper trite. Frustration was mine.

I confided that literary frustration to a few of my poetic acquaintances. They appeared, initially, to understand and to sympathize; but from the more they said the more it became apparent that they, although they said otherwise, didn’t truly want their work to be original, didn’t truly want to say anything new, only to be accepted.

Angry at this sham that I was being made a part of, overcome by the smell of pseudery and the weight of gush, I wrote,

‘This

society

diseases me’

My plaudits were sung even louder still, and my reputation puffed out of all proportion. I subsequently wrote what was to be my shortest poem.

‘Help’

The applause was deafening.

Shortly after my nineteenth birthday Leon Reduct found me.

Chapter Two

My childhood was unusual (no childhood is usual) in that my mother stayed with my father until I was ten. By which time she could no longer stand my boyish energy and instant excitements and she moved across the city. Only to return regularly to visit my father.

Although to their children all parents are faintly ridiculous, I liked her. She held herself very erect, gave the appearance of contemplative calm. Until I came banging into a room. If I have one clear memory of my mother it is of her blinking at me.

Needless to say she was initially impressed by my public success as a poet. And not the least surprised when I was held to be overturning tradition  as I had overturned her furniture.

* * * * *

My father laughed at my every juvenile antic.

Okinwe Orbison, he shook his head, Okinwe Orbison. What is going to become of you? And picking me up he would swing me around, knocking over more furniture.

My mother left the two of us.

* * * * *

My father liked to play games. Physical games. He made of our city/world a maze, and he mapped out routes for himself, tracked himself through it, laughing in triumph when he arrived at his destination at the time set, laughing at himself when he got lost.

At home he amused himself corresponding with people throughout Space. Or he read. Or, when my mother called, he told her fabulous stories, made her smile. Or they both looked in wonder on me being quiet, reading with the hunger of the young, to fill my head with knowledge, to just know, to know, to fill all the inner spaces. And they looked on too with parental concern, guessing at the desperate blunderings taking place inside my head.

My father laughed. To break the silence, to sunder the mood, he laughed. After he laughed he said my name,

Okinwe Orbison. The laugh again, Okinwe Orbison.

My father was happy for me to be in his life. He was happy for me to leave. He was happy when he met me on one of his travels through the city.

Okinwe Orbison! he would shout. Then the laugh, Okinwe Orbison.

The blame, if blame there is to be for what became of me, is not theirs.

Chapter Three

We human beings have no intrinsic sense of identity. We become who we are by what is around us. Some of my identity came from my parents; the rest from larger groupings. And it is in those larger groupings where every new human generation now loses its self-identity.

Oh, we could revert to insular tribalism and in our ignorance we could be very certain of who we are. We, though, know too much to allow ourselves the comforting certainties of ignorance.

We are lost.

Young people always want to be  whether they are aware of it or not  something other than themselves, something more than themselves. Yet, a psychological paradox, they want to be neither their present geography nor their history.

My geography, my generation, my sub-group of a sub-group existed on that city/world  type thirty-four, deep core, external atmosphere  one of six extant throughout Space. (Type thirty-four living chambers are in the hollow between the spherical core and the surface. On the surface, within the tropical zones, is where all the city/world’s food is manufactured. Polar regions are reservoirs. Temperate sylvan zones are designated safe play areas.)

History I was born to was that my city/world was 450 years old. We educated young, though, could take no pride in it, or identity from it. Nor did we take any identity from our belonging to the collection of worlds, cities and stations that called itself Space.

History told us that the momentum of empire had long left Space, that Space did not now know what it was. Save that it was worth preserving in its present state. If only because, though we might not now like to remember them, there have been long periods of dissolution, when lawlessness was rife and for ‘safety’, people returned to organic planets and to the closed groups of primitive tribalism; and there succumbed to the cyclical descent into savagery.

After each period of dissolution, however, the rule of law has been re-won; and lost again. Brigands and other self-serving opportunists have existed, and will always exist, on the edge of Space, and will always creep inwards along the division lines.

There was also the Age of Experiment, when whole Space Departments were actually encouraged to become independent, to govern themselves and see what new social machinery emerged. None did; and all were reabsorbed.

There had been no such positive-thinking trends in my time. My generation, like the many before it, belonged to a civilisation whose dynamism had long expired. All that we owned was a vague, difficult to define for the individual, disillusion. A disillusion with ourselves and with all about us.

Moribund is the word best suited to describe our civilisation entire. Mediocre was the word best suited to describe my city/world. As on city/worlds elsewhere our diminishing population kept to the band of middle levels, middle thinking.

Faced with all that inertia the frenetic efforts of my city’s poetry groups to create identities for their members, all posturings and mispronunciations aside, seemed even more pathetic. As did I being feted by them.

Chapter Four

City evenings, killing time, I often sat in a small cafe and sneered at the passing promenade. As often alone as with others, I sat there waiting as well as watching.

I didn’t know then that I was waiting, nor what I was waiting for. From this distance I know that I was waiting for Life to happen to me.

And Life found me there  in the small undistinguished shape of Leon Reduct.

I didn’t see him approach the café. He may already have been sitting at one of the tables when I arrived. Or he may have sidestepped out of the parade, a particle of the passing stream depositing himself in the café.

Whatever... I became aware of someone standing at my table, moved my eyes from the promenade to him.

Okinwe Orbison? His eyebrows were raised in polite inquiry, The poet?

A slight, brown man, bald; I categorised him as the self-effacing type. Except that he was standing and looking down on me, the initiator at ease in the new situation.

This was no nervously sweating aspirant to the new poetry.

So-called poet, I smiled without humour at him, my aim to unsettle. (I had been young and lonely, had wanted fame. Now I despised those who had conferred my small fame upon me. And I was still as lonely. And as young.)

Yes. He recognised my anti-poetic stance, gave my smile back to me; but with humour. That is what interested me. Are you brave?

Brave?

I let go eye-contact to look at the word. Brave?

The word held no meaning for me. There was no circumstance I could imagine in Space that might require me to be brave. Nor any way that I could test, without the scenario being knowingly artificial and therefore inconclusive, if I was brave. Bravery had been on none of my syllabi.

Why?

He sat down before me.

My name is Leon Reduct. He offered his hand, a big gesture not to be ignored, but unusual in our city.

Reaching out I clasped the hand, but briefly and blushing  the remarkability of those touched hands making me wonder who might be watching, what they might say. And I was immediately angry at myself for being so provincially self-conscious.

The self-effacing citizen of the universe, Leon Reduct, was not at all put out.

You are now nineteen years old, he told me, Look at the people passing here. Look at the people sitting in this café. Some are now in their fifties. Are you, in thirty years’ time, going to be sitting in a cafe somewhere like this? In this cafe even? I can save you from that.

I was so surprised by his instant plunge into seriousness that I, celebrated anti-poet poet Okinwe Orbison, was at a loss for rapport. As a poor substitute I, who two nights previously in that same cafe had complained of tedious small talk, gave Leon Reduct the benefit of my father’s large laugh. It did not convince me.

How can you save me?

I can offer you a future whose beginning only I know. I can’t tell you its end. Only you can decide that.

Recognising a sales pitch I was properly skeptical.

On one level.

Because Leon Reduct had chosen well in targeting me. For whatever it was he had to offer I immediately wanted it. I wanted saving from myself. That life of mine held nothing for me, except more of the same. I wanted something other. And his was the only alternative on offer.

What does it entail?

Traveling from here.

He paused, time lengthening, parade passing, awaiting my response.

Realising that Leon Reduct was not going to proceed without my agreeing that I could move from that city/world, I nodded.

It also entails secrecy, he said. It also entails deception. Your friends and relatives will be given a bogus address. One through which, nevertheless, they will be able to reach you. And you them. Do you want to come with me?

Leon Reduct had the kind of eyes of which the black pupil had no discernible edge between it and the brown iris. My father had once told me to be wary of any person who appeared to know everything but explained nothing. He, though, had been talking of pompous play-safe bureaucrats. Leon Reduct, so patently unsafe was he, for certain he was no bureaucrat.

Yes, I heard my mouth say.

The urge came again to laugh my father’s laugh. That, though, would have been artificial in me at that moment. Instead I grinned at him, glanced to the promenade; and I wanted to shout at them, Free! I am Free! I was free of them. Free of ever being like them. If for no other reason than I had just gladly, for no readily accountable reason, for no reason I could then have told friends and acquaintances, I had, while the crowd passed oblivious, agreed without compulsion to do a very foolish thing.

Chapter Five

From our meeting in the cafe to our leaving the city Leon Reduct was with me.

His presence was not intrusive, he was not overpowering, he was  as he had been in the cafe  simply there. To all my questions about where we were going, where he had come from, he simply held up a calming hand and said,

When we’re on the ship.

I packed about eight changes of clothes. (Younger I was vainer.) Six of my favourite books  two poetry anthologies, two works of philosophy, and two classics. I also packed two notepads.

Why two? Leon smiled. One, they say, will last a lifetime.

Never wholly trust machines. And if I can’t write it, I rattled my fingers on one of the lids  finger-rattling a habit of mine, irritates even me  then it isn’t real. Clickety, thump, stop.

Leon Reduct seemed to approve my distrust, my skepticism confirming his selection of me. The tapping fingers, though, he regarded with a look of concern.

Before packing the notepads I went to drop a mail-slot to my parents.

Best leave it until the docks, Leon said. Secrecy really is an imperative.

So that my walking with my suitcase wouldn’t attract comment, Leon had it sent on ahead by machine. He then led the way to the lift, took me by routes other than that which I’d have used. He was a stranger to our city, didn’t know even the well-known short cuts.

You may wonder at my docility in going with this complete stranger. But with every lift I stepped into, with every new upper