“A new world…Free at last! No thanks to God, free at last!”—Aristarchus Jones (Walker Percy), Lost in the Cosmos
Day of darkness neared and from cave’s opening Simon studied transept line showing vertical upon the face of the Great Ember, dividing illumination from darkness. In illumination, Simon witnessed storms on the Great Ember billowing in bands and swirls that moved and breathed in browns, greys, reds, and hues between across its surface face.
Facing always to the Great Ember, New Ionia alternated between days of Illumination, and Darkness. Translation from one into the other showed prominent in the creeping transept line across face of the Great Ember washing all that followed its division in either light or total black.
From shoreline below, sounds from Aristarchan Ceremony of Creation carried into the highlands and caves where mankind held. The Ceremony occurred in every translation of the Great Ember from illumination into darkness. In the Ceremony, chosen daughters of mankind were converted and elevated—for moment—into communion with New Man and offered in giving of flesh and spirit to the living-deities of Aristarchan High Priests. By Creation manifested in consecration of the act, a lineage of Aristarchan rulers was planted internal to the wombs of lower mankind’s most beautiful—as was since New Ionia’s Beginning. In Ceremony, High Priests seeded chosen daughters as vessels for future Man-God deities. Upon Creation’s confirmation, these chosen daughters were abandoned and returned to the caves of mankind; whereafter new, beautiful, almost-virginal daughters were selected and elevated for seeding to further advance the image and glory of New Man.
As ceremony peaked, cries of Creation—shrieks, moans, and softer sounds—grew in crescendo, echoing throughout caves where mankind dwelled. Caves reverberated in Creation’s sounds—ecstasy, terror, pain, surrender—throughout barren cathedral of rock above sea that glowed, phosphorescent, when world went black and shadow of the Great Ember framed in filament light.
Listening to Creation’s cries, Simon whispered, “Jesuschrist.”
Its meaning was unknown, a mystery uttered in secret during moments of despair, when lost without seeming answer. Jesuschrist was one of the four Umentionables—faith, hope, and love—being the other three.
Simon knew nothing of jesuschrist, but of the other three: faith was unmentionable for it was foolish to believe in what could not be known and proven true—in what was unsupported by Aristarchan doctrine—even as Aristarchans told tales of an Old World destroyed and made untenable by mankind. Mankind being name designated as distinction for those ostracized by Aristarchans’ New Man.
It was a world destroyed by falling stars of man’s making that killed in flashings and bursts of light eliminating cities, cultures, and—later—the residuum of survivors until there was no other answer than to depart for a New World in mankind’s last afforded act of hope.
Aristarchans believed the legend. It was used to justify judgment against mankind, and foundation, too, for why mankind’s most beautiful were sought, sacrificed, and offered with such violence and veracity to the appeasement of Aristarchan Priests.
To those who disbelieved—mankind—the legend was only heresy: superstition to validate repression.
Of hope: hope was sin of selfishness. Mankind was not entitled to want for more than New Man determined necessary and must accept gratefully should New Man decide mankind required less.
Love: love was a mystery. Simon believed love connected, in some way, to jesuschrist. Love was said to give favor and power to those who possessed it, a magic destructive to established orders, apocalyptic to worlds centered upon darkness and abdication of freewill, a surrender called Unity. For these threats, love was an Unmentionable.
The Aristarchans were right in some of their prejudices against mankind: mankind was superstitious.
Simon did not know love, but he believed in its power and sought to learn its magic. Simon hoped in faith for what was wrong to believe. For this, Simon judged himself justly suspected by Aristarchans for transgressions of two, and belief in a third, Unmentionable.
In days of darkness, Simon fished the phosphorescent sea in boat carved of low-density stone from a vulcanous region inland from the sea. Simon cast nets of woven kelp that grew surrounding sulfur vents of the seafloor, making life from chemical excess—not light of a world. Its columns rose from floor to surface and matted as shadow upon an otherwise green-cast sea.
In his nets, Simon caught eyeless fish, as much mouth as body, that rose and filtered glowing algae through brush-lined mouths. They were drawn by scent and exuded heat to the fundamental piece around which Ionian life existed. Rising schools showed as blinking shadow that waved, dimpled, then streaked surface in after-wake as they skimmed open mouthed across sea’s skin where algae concentrated most-dense.
Along the shore, others of mankind scraped lichenous growth from rocks along the shore. Mankind called it “manna,” a name Aristarchans ridiculed. In addition to sustenance, the lichens softened stone surfaces of the shore, giving bedding for the act of Creation—performed, and made upon its softness—when world transited transept and entered into darkness and only the halo of the Great Ember lighted sky.
Simon accepted no deity above Aristarchan Man-Gods was likely to exist. A Higher Being would not choose this world. A higher power would not choose leaders that stole from the weak to embellish lives of the privileged through toil of the repressed. A Greater God would not create a world of such little light, who showed only sliver of the Cosmos, that made religion around darkness, that converted and sacrificed the most beautiful of mankind only to be abandoned, their children taken after for the promulgation of a New Man that was not self-sustaining and would—in time—expunge mankind, too, from existence in consequence to New Man’s excess.
When alone on the sea, Simon contemplated life, the Cosmos, the Unmentionables, and darkness. Had there been a Higher Being, It would not have chosen a world as this. Simon knew he was a sinner, wrong to desire, hope, and hold faith in a force such as love in a world such as this.
Still, Simon believed.
Simon cast into the shallows making moderate catch, and when returned to shore, he presented the product of his labor before an Aristarchan collector. All fish and manna were brought before Aristarchan collectors who took first for the needs of New Man. From the residuals of New Man’s excess, mankind endured. After the needs of New Man were taken, two fish remained as he and mankind’s share.
“Jesuschrist,” Simon mumbled low.
“What did you say?” the Aristarchan asked accusingly.
“Nothing,” Simon denied.
With two fish, Simon returned to cave and, from its vantage, stared into the black sky of day and wondered on the dancing filaments of light that framed the Great Ember. If only one could see beyond the Ember, the filament’s source might be known. Such was another absurd and sinful hope.
Even as sinner, Simon protected a symbol mankind had never seen; something, at present, he was too afraid to show: a locket from material alien to Simon. It shined in catching light, a malleable cord of small, patterned and interlocking loops that draped loose around neck and bore a shaped object Simon could not identify but rested center-chest when worn.
Simon knew his belief to be absurd, but he regarded the shaped object as a symbol for the fourth Unmentionable—love. Even stranger, when pressed, the symbol opened to reveal the image of a woman, an image captured with color. She had brown hair and green eyes, garments of fabric unknown, of different time and place, and—strangest of all—behind her shone a world of flora and light: another world.
The legend was true.
Simon hid the object in his cave, buried it when away, and unearthed it when alone and desiring to believe in more than an immanent world.
Simon remembered the day of discovery—in transit on inland voyage to the Vulcan fields. The Great Ember’s face shone in illumination. Simon was drawn, called he desired to believe, in magnetism to a cave within region he had never been and was unlikely to return. He remembered features of the cave: its shape, place, and most of all, words carved into its back wall, their spelling one could read—by touch—even in total darkness: “LOST COVE.”
Simon would find the cave again. One day, when he was brave, he would show the object and place to others. One day, when he was brave, he would make their message known, but in the moment, as he gazed on the blackness of the Great Ember, he felt small and weak. Simon was a nothing of mankind, a nothing fisherman catching barely enough to live from after the claims of New Man were taken out. He was small and weak, not a rock, and far from the Man-Gods that held dominion in this world.
Simon opened the pendant shape on the object and stared again upon the woman’s image. From it, Simon believed in the Unmentionables, in the mystery of love that raises low men, upends established powers, and overturns worlds.
He spoke, again, the first Unmentionable, but this time from spirit of purpose absent soul-despair.
“Jesuschrist…whatever that means,” Simon spoke to halo light framing the Great Ember.
*****
On another world, the beginning light of dawn materialized as sun climbed nearer to horizon. In a valley of the Blue Ridge, lavender clouds held as low blanket over the land, insulating life beneath from radiation left stronger in the thinned ozone of a post-nuclear world. As sun crested over ridge, the lavender of clouds transfigured into gold with trimmings of silver edge and banding light that descended and touched the face of the Earth.
Scars of both man and God showed upon the earth: clear running stream with pockets and runs where trout and smallmouth held alongside furrowed fields that shone clay orange on the hillsides and darkened into deeper browns in the humus loams of valley floor. Mankind worked the land with simple tools drawn by horse and ass in world where machines existed only in ancient history: legends.
The blood of Cain still expressed in mankind’s actions. Conflicts arose and were fought with rocks and feudal weapons, when ridges were traversed—expansion pressed too far—and lands of one alliance were encroached upon by another. Such wars were limited, and in spite of mankind’s eternal sins, battles, and imperfections, Man lived in a world of light, life, and joy experienced in grace and worship for a Higher Transcendent.
Beneath the hickory canopy of the valley’s southern ridge, a grotto rested in the shallow recess of a cave. A place of reverence, it enshrined a statue icon for The Lady of New Life—Saint of the Third Testament—Jane Smith, mother of John, Sarah, and Mary Ann. Brown hair, green eyes; it was Jane who led the last of Earthen Mankind to a new Eden: Lost Cove.
The world of God was not destroyed. It was abandoned, abandoned by those without faith, who departed in aim for a new beginning and world absent God.
The leader of this movement, as recorded in Third Testament, was Aristarchus Jones.
By the fertility of the Lady of New Life and her children—returned from space voyage centuries after the apocalypse and unaffected by compounding effect of nuclear radiation that led to near-universal sterility of mankind on Earth—mankind was born anew.
In the miracle of Jane’s return, in communion with two Benedictine monks shown sign to break monastic celibacy and by further miracle proved fertile in marriage to Sarah and Mary Ann, the footprint of Man—made in the spiritual image of the One True God—began again in the living cradle of the Blue Ridge.