With A Pharaoh's Chin

A Story by Velluminator

“I am that I am not,

Water and a burning bush.

Lead my people to Egypt,

I will fish a Pharaoh out again.”

I rose, and remembered the depths of Neptune, its deceptive heat. I rose, with my right arm in it. The Great Dark Spot on my shoulder and gun.

And how we were! Little footmen on the run. Communications with Shadow Earth always fell back to the impossibility that Neptune’s esteemed iron and silicate core could never be replaced by our Earth, our Antithesis.

We prayed to the slush, ammonia and methane; hydrogen and helium kept most dinosaurs away. Until we found a species of Floating Shark, we thought ourselves alone. We isolated one in our ship’s simulated environmental tank, newly mixed with oxygen. The shark spontaneously combusted. We’d never seen flesh and hot ice burn so well together.

I still couldn’t make sense of the pressure. And with storms sometimes blowing a few thousand km/h, swirling rotational edges together made our limbs minutes out of sync with each other. But we adapted, and found patterns in the gaseous fluid.

The pressure woke me from sleep. I was dreaming of an ostrich egg lying on my chest. Breath was coming out from it, going up my nostrils. Heat, and hyperventilation. Then the cold exhale of an eternity. At last, I kissed her forehead; yoke broke out from a long smile.

We were unevenly yoked. And was it fair to call her as equal an ox as I? Though we did plow the same field equally well, ours was eventually parsed by duty, made fallow by new pride. We appear to each other now much like Neptune’s rings, large yet invisible. I suppose, defeated love for warriors is the only defeat that comes from without.

The floor was spongy. Arcturus II was shifting differentially to another current. We were a large chessboard practically floating over electricity -- so it felt. Command wasn’t far from my bunk.

“Dinosaurs on board!” I kneed the back of the pilot’s chair, my hands gripping the top corners.

“Unlikely, we’re nowhere near the south pole. Methane can’t escape here.” I could never surprise J., though only he could move his chair. He had his own aura -- an orange bioenergetic field, that is. It was a little off then.

“Your pink is fuzzy today.”

“And your green is spikey.”

I pinched his ear at that, without worry. People were already examining the pressure anomaly.

T.P. was eating a chip with coffee in the break cabinet, one of our “reading rooms.” I know of no one else who can eat a chip so precisely. He holds it between two fingers, slowly nibbles at it from the top down. No piece ever breaks off in accident, no grain of salt falls unaware. I sat down in the artist’s cabinet and watched him while I ate breakfast. One chip in twenty minutes.

“Have your heard, Grabbel? There’s a Dark Spot approaching the Living Museum. We’re evacuating the animals.” T.P. spoke in the habit of pursed lips, due to chronic coffee ingestion via straw. He reminded me of an anteater.

“I’ll be sure to stay here.” I spoke, too quickly. T.P. spilt his terrible laugh: lips still puckered, but also a slight smile while he hyperventilated through his mouth, short bursts arresting his stomach, his eyes dead. It was even worse that he was lying back. The whole cabinet seemed to shake.

“Yes, you will.” And, for once, the muscles of his face pulled back, his eyes light. I only thought, “Is it momentary, is it rictus?” and left the cabinet.

~~~

The entrance of the Living Museum was as vast and dark as a star chamber. Electric sconces dimly lit the open doors to the Terrestrial and Aquatic exhibits, and high above was a bulbous chandelier.

We separated, and I chose the Aquatic chamber. Management was telling us there was no rush. No rush, from management? They were explaining to us that there was nowhere for the animals to go, and that the Museum could handle all known wind currents,.... Some military wants here then.

Knuck, knuck; there was glass on either side immediately past the double doors. The water was black. I stuck my head into a nearby Thin Pillar, the outside of which was darker than the water, but inside, was a warm green. Murky, an old model, low contrast. I had about fifty signal-views available within the aqua, almost a hundred meters of clarity at each before vision became fuzz. It had been a while since I last used one, my head kept slipping through even though I had the wheel hugged.

“It could happen by chance.” I muttered. “One, two, three, four,….” Nowhere. Up against a wall, perhaps. These old signal-views picked out walls worse than the water.

Further down, the quartz finally shined more strongly beneath my feet. They were swimming out there, then. I stopped, and the quartz dimmed to nigh nothing, and there with my face on the glass, the same.

I had descended, and the quartz was still a mild red rose. I took my flashlight out again. It didn’t penetrate far on either side; no cows our snakes were huddling at the nearest corners out there. A door slipped open.

“Captain, how are you feeling?” He asked, holding onto the door knob.

“What am I feeling, M.T.Q.?” I confused him by emphasizing feeling, even more M.T.Q.

“Uh,”

“It’s confusing because not only did I change your how to what, but my pitch raised on those last five syllables. Relax, your only tense because I used the “ng” sound. Do you feel that, in your jaw? What do you want?”

M.T.Q. began shifting his belt three centimeters to the left and right.

“I had heard you were feeling ill. I’m glad to see you’re doing better.”

“Yes, thank you. But how are you?”

“Captain, my name gets longer everyday, everybody notices…” M.T.Q. sputtered.

“It’s going to be okay, it’s because you’re doing the military proud.” I interrupted.

“Someday, you may have a name as long as mine.”

“Not possible, sir, not possible.”

Side-by-side, I put my arm around his waist, then pulled down on his bicep. His hand slid reluctantly down from the doorknob. The door fell back. I turned him and I so both of us were facing the ascension, to which I swept my arm, right to left, to our cotton-rubbing shoulders. “Up there is pride, here is love.” I said, callusing the last half of my statement.

M.T.Q. said nothing for sixth of a minute. “You mean the ships, captain?”

“I mean the whole fleet, just past a couple sets of doors. We swim well in wind, not so much in water. But imagine our entire fleet here, on either side of us, swimming, some tapping their noses on the glass.”

“Yes, our aqua rovers, engineers, division 3.” He nodded slowly, pupils going with the movement.

“Yes, but also 4, 5, and 6, the Crawlers, Dragonflies, and Buzzard Beetles. All in the water.”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

“Then you need to start thinking with a Pharaoh’s chin.” I twisted his obliques. “My rule curls around you, long and golden.” I let go, his side arcing away from me. I bent down and spoke to the cavity. “We meet the worm in man.”

When he went to the wall opposite me, when he drooped his head, hitting the glass, the floor burst with a blinding red-white flash. I saw spots, then spots of her, A.L.I.A.S. I rushed to break the spurs from her shoulders, but grabbed her hands instead. Was my head low? I spoke through my nose, though my teeth wanted to clench together.

“Where did you come from?”

“From Silva III.”

“Of course, of course.” Though it came out like a whistle, “Of coase, o coase.” I let go of her hands, the swirling had almost stopped.

“Sir, there’s water leaking.”

“That’s true, M.T.Q. And soon, the water will be leaking glass, but with the volume, for less than a minute.”

“Engineer at aqua, south exit.” A.L.I.A.S. pinged out.

“Hello, A.L.I.A.S., I’ve already asked M.T.Q. how he’s feeling today; you know my rule, one person per day.”

“You always were a gracious man, capable of packing a day’s worth of superficialities into one nice, surprising present. Hello.” She ended with a dry confidence.

“There never was an embargo on trivialities here in the military. How is your research on Silva going?”

“Well enough. I heard that you slept in a Dark Spot. Would you care to be our participant sometime?”

“I could be your compound.”

“Just questions.”

“Certainly.”

M.T.Q. was ascending the pathway. He had his arm pitched back, and rolled it forward.

I called, “Off?”

“With my marble, sir.” He replied. Then I could hear it tumbling back over the rough quartz.

“Have you been wondering where the lights are at for the tank?” A.L.I.A.S. asked me.

“Not recently, no, I’ve been wondering how that glass cracked.”

“What, you’ve never been here before? It’s more a walking thrill ride than anything, they would keep engineers every few meters here, less so for Terrestrial.”

“Should we turn the lights on?”

“The approaching storm should have them more docile.”

“Or maybe they’ll trick us, like we trick them.”

She wiggled the cartilaginous skin between her nares with thumb and index for a couple of seconds. Her hand popped back.

“No tricks between us, Captain.” I took it as a blunt surprise, like being hit by a filled water balloon, its skin aluminum foil. She left through the door nearby. I followed.

B.G.R.P. had just left unit 2. “The lights should be on now, sir.” The door had closed behind me a second before. I turned on my left heel in anger. I also couldn’t make a grand entry back into the aqua exhibit with those doorknobs. My shoulders were angriest most of all.

“I’m all tucked in, stupid prisoners. You’re hunchback is here.” I announced when I opened one of two doors.

There were rows of them at eye level on both sides. Swimming, as they should. A Floating Shark was at the glass. It’s long nose, like the Goblin Shark, hooked back into its mouth, dividing the throat, from which came the split, curling tongue having a wasteland of spiraling, broken teeth.

It’s clouded eyes never quite betrayed wisdom for hunger. When it blinked, there was only one eyelid to cover the lower half of its eye. Its fins were, fins, not too significant underwater.

I could make out a Bobba Ray eight meters behind it. And the signal-views were distorted. No, a distortion about as wide as its range globed each. That the signal-views were either planted or chained like ancient mines gave the spherical distortions an impression of being barely connected.

They were swimming in the clear parts, not quite tunnels. All I could think of were star fruit, but that wasn’t right. A shark in star fruit? Minus one point, captain, bulge the center!

~~~

“How was it, Grabbel?” The anteater asked as I walked by his cabinet.

“Nobody smiled.” I didn’t check to see if he was.

~~~

“The seed of the Son

Is before the eye

Of the father,

In the womb of the mother

In the mouth of the daughter.”

What trash! But a cycle of trash, to encapsulate the dream. It’s impossible to write great poetry upon immediately waking up. Memory and dream are too similar; the loss doesn’t ache, it only serrates the open air. I smell upwards, next to, nothing.

Though I remember A.L.I.A.S. We were in the aqua exhibit. She was squatted above, on the crystal walkway. She let marbles roll out from her sleeves down towards me. And all the creatures were there, in their fruit cells, swimming back, then gently battering glass or tails. A.L.I.A.S. had the best nose.

A marble had almost reached me. A.L.I.A.S. called out in a laughing wonder, “Your name is?” Her accusatory finger was not too crooked.

“P...D...I...K...T...Ma...A….”