• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Exterminating Angel Press

Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

  • Home.
  • Our Books.
  • About Us.
    • What EAP’s About.
    • Why Exterminating Angel?
    • Becoming Part of the EAP Community.
    • EAP’s Poetry Editor Speaks!
    • Contributors.
    • EAP Press.
  • EAP: The Magazine.
    • EAP: The Magazine Archive
  • Tod Blog.
  • Jam Today.
  • Contact Us.
  • Cart.

Soad's Story: A Journey Into the Sky.

December 28, 2014 by Exangel

by Robin Wyatt Dunn.
I am Soad and this is my story. What I experience here is the record of my journey into the wormhole. Our Visitors, like the gods of the ancients, arrange for us poor humans various tests. This test of mine is one of escape; one I have undertaken for my people. For my family of Level Seventeen. To see if we can escape this dead Earth . . .
As an experiment to understand the metaphors and vestigial “terrestrialness” that makes up the human mind, my ordeal was arranged by our Benefactors. Within their simulation I was to take my journey into the sky, a simulation designed to control a satellite into the wormhole, even as I climbed into a wide blue vista as our ancestors saw, with my sister . . .
At first the blue sky took getting used to. But I no longer have time for adjustments.
I am walking into the sky, up the stairs. Like an old-fashioned journey into heaven, which in so many ancient languages is the same word as sky, going up, going up, going up, going up.
The clouds are broken by the sun and it shines through and I smile, wondrous thing the sun. I want to die here, today, under this sunlight.
“It’s pretty,” says my sister, but I say nothing, because I do not want to speak, only enjoy the view as I climb the stairs. Up the stairs and to the gate, so far above. I have brought my oxygen.
We are engaged together in this great task, me and my sister who I never cared for very much. Younger than me, but smarter. Always the negotiator, my sister, always playing the Devil’s Advocate, and now that we are beset with devils, I cannot abide my own blood being their damned lawyer but so it is, she defends them all the time, all the time, as though they are what she wants to be . . .
We are linked inside the immersal nutrient bath of the simulation, hallucinating our way towards the Great Gate.   Each experience here a metaphor, from meta pherein, the bearing across, the signal through the noise.
I and my sister are dreaming in the Redoubt, my body inside the tank filled with fluid the consistency of phlegm and I am climbing stairs into the sky.
As we climb, our decisions correspond to the movement of a telepathic and remote-recording probe, negotiating its way towards the LaGrange, where the wormhole is kept in relative position to this metal earth, the dead sun, and the largest craft of our Visitors, larger than our old gone moon, but more distant, colored like the darkness of space.
But I am able to forget that now, forget all I have ever known. The stairs are stone and metal and they extend upwards, as though forever.
As I said, the Visitors are like gods, and like the gods of old, they have set us with tasks. The only problem with this metaphor is that in the old histories of the divines the buck stops somewhere: Mama Goddess and Daddy God are at the top, manipulating everyone, and their mommy and daddy is long dead and no trouble to anyone.
But like K. knew inside the Castle, it goes ad infinitum, it is turtles all the way down, all the way up too, and we cannot see that far and so we need a way station, you see, we need the receiver for the metaphoric signal, something to encapsulate our awareness and give it the right edges, give it the force of logic, give it the womb it needs to grow.
For our minds are growing. Growing to the stars, but too slow, some say, too slow! Citizens, I burn too slowly! I burn too slowly, citizens! Please throw another faggot on the fire! For I am a heretic, it’s true. My gods are not congenial or quotidian, they are neither anthropomorphic nor ingenious, they are like the forces of science, gravity and electromagnetism, deeply impersonal and personal all at once. My gods are life and death, and they are coming closer together, here at the End, here at the Beginning.
But I digress. Suffice to say that, we’re all taking orders from someone. The Visitors take their orders from their higher ups, both known and unknown, and I take mine from the Redoubt. And the beauty of freedom is that while you can acknowledge your orders, you don’t always have to follow them, and when you follow them or when you don’t each decision to act and in what fashion is like the translation of a signal across time, moving through the aether, moving towards your brain into your heart.
This my transmission reaches you and you decide what it shall mean and so I who must go beyond, into the sky or down into hell, I am always selected for the job no one else wants to do, but more joyful for that, more joyful in my lonely fate (except for my damned sister . . . ) —
“It’s time to eat, brother.”
“Alright.”
We eat. The stairs curve a bit here and there is a dimple in the curve of carved stone where we can rest our backs comfortably and open our backpacks. I eat the fish sandwich and it is delicious. I have never eaten fish before. Our Earth has no oceans.
My sister is crying.
Orwell was right, unfortunately. Ignorance is strength. For a very long time. On the longer time horizon, knowledge is stronger, but that horizon must be long enough to cross the generations, you see. For knowledge and pain are almost indistinguishable from each other; I believe they are in fact the same thing. Although pain makes you stronger, in your will, it damages your body and your mind, and in this sense you grow weaker, more sensitive, for so often pain does not inure your body to that suffering, but only makes you even more sensitive to it, more “appreciative” of its gradations. Knowledge is this way too: with everything we know, we grow more in pain.
And so Orwell knew that so many choose to stop knowing, and try to be. They let others learn the hard things, and wait, like the follower for the shaman, for the evil poison to be translated by his body into urine which will be palatable for all.
It is the same thing, you see? Somebody’s got to go first. Up the stairs. Into the vein.
 
 
 

Filed Under: Exterminating Angel Press, Uncategorized

Primary Sidebar

Cart.

Check Out Our Magazine.

In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

Copyright © 2025 · Exterminating Angel Press · Designed by Ashland Websites