Behind the Sunset Veil
The quest to journey through Time to plunder the past of its human resources has turned into a scramble for possession of the remaining time-travel devices, as well as a struggle for the control of those humans who have already been brought out of the past. Behind the Sunset Veil tells the stories of eight individuals as the struggle to bend Space-Time for Man’s own purposes draws them ever closer to a war without end. They are:
-Mister Sigmund Shuei a 29th Century time-traveler stranded among the savages of the
hopelessly rude and divisive 21st Century.
-Jay Bracken, the most active time-traveler, is rapidly losing his mind due to Time Travel Psychosis. To make matters worse he is committed to conflicts and women in three parallel time-lines, and is liable to be recalled from the 21st Century without notice. All Jay wants is a month off to visit a girl he met outside of Charles Town West Virginia…and the really cute 17th Century Seneca chick he left with Miss Ann in Frederick Maryland.
-Charlie Robinson, designer of the time-travel hoops known as event capacitators, is a scientist surrounded by politicians and adventurers trying not to lose his relevance.
-Three-Rivers, once the angelic handicapped savant of the 16th Century Iroquois, brought forward by time-travelers in place of Hiawatha, lied, cheated and stole to get his hands on a time-travel hoop, and now it is stuck inside of him! Having morphed into a manipulative teenage alcoholic with a messiah complex, he prefers to be known as Thunderboy. He has the ability to bend Time, the companionship of a cunning pot-smoking pet squirrel, is haunted by the ghosts of the benevolent WhiteSkyCanoe and the malevolent Sunset Lady, is the adopted nephew of a Yakusa crime boss, and owns the undying devotion of the insane Whiteman he calls DeathSong. Thunderboy has decided that it is about time to turn the tables on the White rulers of the world he knows as Sunset—as soon as he and his squirrel cop some weed.
-Aristotle, father of logic and science and tutor of the world’s greatest conquer faces the threat of assassination following the death of his world-conquering student.
-Arlene Higgins, a time-hunter tasked with bringing Aristotle out of the past, or at least interviewing him and taking DNA samples, before he dies in 322 B.C., must operate in one of the most sexist societies in history which is presently wracked by a vicious war of succession.
-Sebastian de Canete, an apostate 16th Century Franciscan monk working as a translator on Arlene’s three-person team, longs to see the wonders of ancient Greece and solve the mystery of Delphi—almost as much as he longs for Arlene.
-Joan Henderson is a CIA operative consulting with domestic security agencies concerning disappearances seemingly linked to magnetic field anomalies. Her investigation takes a bizarre turn after the incarceration of a man that appears to be a genetic weapon.
Behind the Sunset Veil is at once a rollicking science-fiction adventure and a darkly illuminated fantasy that veers between 17th Century messianic conclaves, 21st Century drug deals and incarceration, to brutally visualized scenes of 4th Century B.C. Hellenic combat.
Contents
Protagonists in order of appearance 10
Composition Notes 11
Debriefing Notes 12
Ancient Hellenic Dialectical and Calendar Notes 13
Chapter 1: Half-past Forever 15
Particulars 15
On Deck 15
Nightfall over Marathon 24
Chapter 2: In the Year of Our Lord… 30
Chapter 3: Duty 36
A Broken Nose 36
Little Joey 40
Weird like That 44
Viral 46
Chapter 4: As The Screw Turns 52
In A Bleak House 52
Mister Consensus 58
Bury My Heart at the Laurel Exit 61
Chapter 5: AllPeople Town 73
Chapter 6: Wolf House [Lykeum] 79
The Circuit 79
The Muse House [Museum] 86
The Garden 89
Chapter 7: Polymara 93
Apostasy and Adventure 93
On Fennel-field 95
The Potter’s Plight 100
Chapter 8: Where Two Rivers Become One 110
Places of Power 110
The Way of the Thumb 118
The Vanishing Beast 123
The Bear Society Warrior 130
Chapter 9: The Inevitable Day 138
Chapter 10: The Policeman is Your Friend 145
Dog Shit Run 145
Eye-in-the-Sky 150
Chapter 11: The Companion 153
The End 153
Emerald Eyes 156
The Iberian Scholiast 159
Chapter 12: Four Horses 163
The Road to Eleusis 163
The Road to Megara 168
Chapter 13: The Road to Delphi 181
A Ruinous Path 181
The Irythraen Gate 185
A Dusty Prize 190
Chapter 14: Old Tree Mother 195
Under the Trees of Dreams 197
Medicine Camp 202
Dream Trading 207
Chapter 15: The Big House 214
Radio Head 215
The Crossing Guards 217
I Shall Rule! 219
Mother 222
New-net-the-love 225
Chapter 16: A Lion’s Den in Winter 231
My Old Body 231
Of Things Un-guessed 240
Menander 251
Chapter 17: Brenner 260
Mean Meat-Puppets 260
Solitary 261
Chapter 18: A Fateful Stone 270
A Hard Master 270
Lion Strong 274
Chapter 19: Toys in the Basement 279
Dream Ride 279
In Bed with Quantico 285
Black Ops 291
Chapter 20: A Song at Seven Gates 297
The Hot Gates 297
House of Seven Gates 300
Labia 303
Chapter 21: Ravaged Sister 309
Painted Post 309
Before the Sacred Pole 311
Moon Beaver 321
Sorrow’s Timeless Song 327
Chapter 22: To See the Sun 334
In The Slit 334
Fresh Meat-puppets 336
That Smell 337
Blooming in the Dark 345
Meat Puppet Moonscape 347
Wong and Irvine 352
The Experiment 354
The Yule Tour 356
Agent Henderson 369
The Mighty Squirrel 376
Chapter 23: The Road to Dolphins 384
When Heaven Reaps 392
Chapter 24: Conclave 410
The Beast Achilles 410
My Fallen Lady 414
Chapter 25: The Sun’s Wanton Wife 422
Chapter 26: The Hand of the Unmoved Mover 430
Chapter 27: The Girl Sitting on the Event Horizon 438
Aunt Joan 438
Pocahontas 443
A Life in Beads 449
On Crossing Rock 454
Composition Notes
The unfortunate actions of Three-Rivers and his associates represent more than an entertaining tale of doomed yet defiant primitives. The contention of this perspective is that the Three-Rivers Insurrection and its inevitable demise offer CONSENSUS a true understanding of the chaotic and divisive elements of humanity WE have salvaged. Before developing CONSENT concerning OUR seeding options a thorough study of our stock is mandatory; OUR best hope for understanding the risks implicate in THE ENDEVOUR.
WE owe OUR most sincere thanks to PREQUEL and their 24th Century operatives for the diligent debriefing of OUR stock and detainees.
-Perspective Beta, 2113 A.D.
Debriefing Notes
Three-Rivers is debriefed through pulse-stream via the Division Core. Reconstruction of his thought process is laborious and certainly generates miscomprehensions and inconsistent threads. This adolescent male’s various handicaps and the cultural prism ingrained from his time-of-origin preclude his understanding technology. Everything from mechanically harnessed combustion to empathy-information-technology to automated-psycho-genetics, are absorbed into his consciousness through a fantastical mythological matrix. We are doing our best to present an empathetic depiction of his unique and unfortunate perspective and continue to work towards a means to customize his cultivation in hopes of an eventual upload.
Mister Bracken has been debriefed through auto-hypnosis from Sedation Omega at PREQUEL concurrent with physical reconstruction measures.
Aristotle willingly submitted to a narrow-spectrum field interview.
Frere Sebastian and Arlene Higgins have been debriefed at the Advance Facility.
Joan Henderson was debriefed remotely, possibly postmortem.
-Doctor Candice Wyeth, Psycho-Criminology Dept., Life Science Ministries, 2334 A.D.
Ancient Hellenic Dialectical and Calendar Notes
The actual dialogue between the protagonists and those they interacted with was conducted in Spanish, English, and at least four dialects of Greek, most notably the Ionian of Aristotle and the reconstructed version spoken by Arlene and Sebastian. The resulting reconstruction of these conversations is therefore riddled with unintentional nuances and inconsistencies, and no doubt lacking certain nuances and inferences that we have failed to correct, particular where Attic, Dorian and koine [military/trade pastiche] are concerned. None-the-less this transcript offers a valuable window into the deep past and a profile of renegade behavior, as well as a candid self-portrait of the time-hunters employed by CONSENSUS. Transcriptions from Aristotle’s perspective will use ancient spellings for proper nouns.
Hellenic ‘moons’ are not precise reflections of modern months.
-Professor Seneschal Tours, Prequel, 2334 A.D.
“We say then that the Unmoved Mover is an eternal living being, the best of all, attributing to him continuous and eternal life.”
-Aristotle, Physics
