Voyagers Read online

  meet the beings that tomorrow is built on

  here you are now in person reading every word

  16

  Alan Brunton

  F/S

  All of the sun’s radiant debris passes through us

  and neutrinos on a voyage through the universe

  that lasts millions of years smash through us

  and we don’t even blink, it takes all our time

  to live our lives. It’s over.

  The intergalactic beings talked about everywhere,

  the reps of Planet X, have rendezvoused

  with Earth to prepare us for the trip to Nowhere.

  Not for the fi rst time. They came before on

  such a night as this, before the zero-zero era,

  to meet the priests of a fungal cult

  with whom they had been exchanging

  inter-planetary emissions. That meeting

  with those Homos in their cold catacomb

  35,000 years ago was the birth of the sacred.

  After that hot night, weird old ant-men

  fanned out among the population in their rags,

  lighting lamps of mammoth fat

  that fl uttered like matches do

  when you take a shortcut through the gloom

  and in the fuzzy beams drank blood

  in their fury straight from the hearts

  of wild animals; they ascended to galaxies

  you can only see from ladders,

  other worlds with fragrant pastures.

  Survivors of the cult contacted me personally

  in September, 1987. They clutched me

  though we were strangers – You have come back,

  they wept, for another night of mushrooms!

  Somewhere between Bordeaux and Paris.

  There will be fragrant pastures, they cried,

  and nights with you

  on the journey to the Fourth Age.

  17

  Harvey Molloy

  Nanosphere

  The Enemy of the World

  watery eyed, unkempt,

  fi nally captured after months in a hole.

  A lab coat prods his back dentures

  with a disposable spatula. How

  slow and compliant the prisoner moves

  like a rest home inmate.

  In this cosmos his capture

  shall be eclipsed by news

  of the accidental discovery of the end of time

  as weightless above this earth

  from the station console

  Irina checks the Doppler shifts

  from the Sombrero, Andromeda, closer Tau Ceti.

  Aware of the pressure of the moment

  she pauses to gaze at the withered fi ngers

  of a passing river delta

  then tells Control her fi nal confi rmation:

  the expansion is over and the big crunch has begun

  the slow seven billion year retrenchment

  from universe to nanosphere.

  Her news crosses the twittering

  of the only known radio intelligence:

  18

  0800 chatline numbers

  psychic advice lines

  impending Serbian elections

  weather updates

  body counts

  Chinese operas

  Marilyn’s slow turn in a hall of mirrors

  Chico & the Man.

  The day’s journeying calls roll out

  within the bounded horizon of a vast contracting dot.

  There is only so much time. And time is running back.

  The children watch television in the dark.

  19

  Meliors Simms

  Two Kinds of Time

  In some universes

  time is experienced as linear.

  Individuals move through their lives

  cutting a track into their possibilities

  and paving it into permanence behind them.

  Aware only of the winding road they have chosen,

  looking backwards down the line from now to birth

  looking forward into the obscure thicket of the future

  sometimes, peripherally aware of a bare hint

  of what if’s as what isn’t.

  In some universes

  time is experienced as a plane.

  Beings move around their existence

  as an intimate landscape

  treading and retreading every possibility.

  Learning their lives as a farmer learns her land,

  choosing every choice

  exploring every opening,

  until through preference

  a rut is worn in the familiar

  a dwelling in just one favourite moment or cycle of moments a resting place from their endless wanderings.

  When you sleep

  these universes meet in your dreams.

  Time leaks across the boundaries

  so you can know a little

  of the strange ways of linearity or planearity;

  whichever is most unfamiliar to you.

  20

  Jack Perkins

  Out of Time

  A long time ago

  in another dimension,

  there wasn’t enough time

  to let the future happen

  at normal speed.

  So everything kept happening

  faster and faster until all

  the future was nearly

  happening at once.

  Imagine living a lifetime

  in a split second

  no wonder there was a big

  BANG

  When everything did happen at once.

  In no time, the future exploded

  creating our universe

  and it’s taking time

  to space things out,

  14 billion years so far.

  Trouble is,

  my birthdays

  keep getting

  closer together.

  21

  Jacqueline Crompton Ottaway

  Black Hole

  Massive objects distort

  space and time

  weighty problems obscure

  the present moment

  time coordinate t is infi nity

  wind rustles the trees

  She hovers on the brink

  of a frozen star

  horizons are sitting still

  the singularity lies in her

  future

  there’s no way she can

  avoid it

  22

  Tim Jones

  Good Solid Work

  We’ll laugh at this world one day.

  It was all a simulation, we’ll say –

  nodding our virtual heads

  smiling our virtual smiles –

  why didn’t we spot it before?

  Nature could never

  have come up with the emu

  and the hammerhead shark was clearly a clue.

  We talk without moving our lips, mind to mind.

  Quantum theory’s the clincher.

  Don’t sweat the small stuff, so those in charge

  left the edges fuzzy

  let the smallest particles

  roam where they may.

  Still, they did some things well –

  the roots that riddled the ground

  the rush of wind in the pines

  the pressure of our children’s hands.

  Good work, we’ll say, good solid work

  nodding our virtual heads

  smiling our virtual smiles

  turning our eager faces to the soft electron rain.

  23

  Apocalypse Now

  John Dolan

  The Siege of Dunedin

  Katyushka volley from a launcher on the Hocken

  Arcs out toward their lines

  On the black slope of Cargill.

  They always answer

  Promptly. Fireworks tonight –

  Anoth
er free performance of interactive,

  Monumental art.

  The city lives for these late shows,

  Red and green tracers lacing

  Christmas stitches on the slopes. Every

  Random horror makes Dunedin

  More beautiful – the black djinns of smoke

  Rising from what was once Barnett’s,

  Hit last week, still burning. Somewhere

  On the back slope of Roslyn, a villa

  Has become this fi ne black scarf

  Tossed over the city’s shoulder.

  And love, love has come at last

  To the dank alleys of Dunedin.

  Love is everywhere: the big clouds

  Sink gently like a penguin female

  To meet the pillars of smoke. Birth-rates rise

  To meet the casualty climb; we sing more

  And drink less. Lonely crones smile

  Every time a shell seeks them.

  Couples fi lling sandbags on the Brighton trenches

  Mate and marry

  Overnight. The gulls hurry

  Along like couriers, urged

  By the warming wind. It gets so hot

  In a city besieged! Dunedin

  27

  Was cold – we struggle to remember

  That now. Everyone inside the perimeter

  Is warm and quick, roaring out

  ‘Stand by Me,’ that song the All Blacks sang

  In Gore’s last desperate week.

  No one needs beer or rugby now;

  Enough for us the songs, the coupling

  In rubble, and the pillars of smoke –

  So beautiful! Half-mile-high

  Battlefl ags, billowed in the wind!

  28

  David Eggleton

  Overseasia

  The soldiers of fortune now gathering

  at Tropical Motel, President Drive, Boot Hill,

  have been denounced as war criminals

  by the new manager of the Buddhist

  Ice Cream Parlour, whose FRO-ZEN

  is a bestseller amongst steroid dealers.

  Seizing on Inuit intuition,

  venture capitalists, phoning in the performance,

  invest aggressively in a fi scal epic

  of titanic whale blubber futures, primed to go ape

  and eating away at global nose cartilage,

  on a journey to a satellite in meltdown.

  El Niño’s swoosh mark caresses islands,

  squeezes Scud missiles out of Africa,

  vaporises a trillionaire,

  before coming to rest on internet’s home-page

  for fertility drug octuplets and fetal abuse survivors,

  The Spermicide Girls: Posy Rash and friends.

  In the City of the Plastic Tits,

  in the Suburb of Golden Pompadours,

  as fl uorocarbons mist the atmosphere,

  Joggers of the Apocalypse don’t turn a hair,

  when a bulging breastduct drips

  on shimmering haystacks of milkshake straws.

  29

  Beneath Milan Station’s vaulting cupola,

  with glossy endorsement by the blushing parquetry,

  Ebola models a straitjacket by Versace,

  lately ascended to Heaven, a beatifi c surf Nazi,

  pursued by a fl ying wedge of paparazzi,

  who, falling, splinter the fi ne inlaid marquetry.

  Fruitbat terrorist CHE Guava’s bloody fi st-print,

  glue-fumed, laser-fi xed, bar-coded, is logo’d

  onto the collectable plastic carrier bags

  of all respectable blood banks,

  as, while splatter fests fl ex their can’t-resist muscle,

  Healthcares greet the new Lord of the Corpuscle.

  30

  Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

  Looking at Kapiti

  Sleep, Leviathan, shouldering the Asian

  Night sombre with fear, kindled by one star

  Smouldering through fog, while the goaded ocean

  Recalls the fury of Te Rauparaha.

  Massive, remote, familiar, hung with spray,

  You seem to guard our coast, sanctuary

  To our lost faith, as if against the day

  Invisible danger drifts across the sea.

  And yet in the growing darkness you lose

  Your friendly contours, taking on the shape

  Of the destroyer – dread Moby Dick whose

  Domain is the mind, uncharted, without hope.

  Without hope, I watch the dark envelop

  You and like a light on a foundering ship’s

  Masthead the star go out, while shoreward gallop

  The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  31

  Bill Sewell

  The World Catastrophe

  when the clouds began to

  gather on the seventh day

  the people knew a tremendous

  thunderstorm was on the way

  so they hurried (and why not?)

  under cover till it was over

  when the water edged up

  to their necks on the tops

  of the highest mountains

  they knew there was a future

  for aquatic creatures only –

  all this came to pass

  in the days before rainbows:

  but what signs to expect

  when fever sweeps the world

  swollen glands & putrid boils

  corpses heaped on wagons

  rats slithering everywhere

  and a muffl ed bell tolling?

  when huge metallic spiders

  stride across the land

  over pub & church & corner-shop

  incinerating in an instant

  all that’s organic & in motion?

  32

  when the trees revolt at last

  pull themselves up by the roots

  and advance (a camoufl aged army)

  out of their parks & squares

  to hoist us up with their branches?

  and the self-infl icted wound:

  a cowboy astride a falling drum

  the possibility so long sustained

  that men can even bear it:

  on the vast illuminated map

  the moving dots move closer:

  no rainbow but a monstrous cloud

  accumulating into space

  the fountains of the deep

  and the windows of heaven

  fouled & dusted forever –

  (yet even now a ball of fi re

  may be quietly altering course

  to cut across earth’s orbit).

  33

  Rachel McAlpine

  Satellites

  I’ve been thinking about the migraine

  as a game of Space Invaders,

  or something jazzier, say Phoenix or Galaxians.

  Mission: destroy all aliens, no matter how cute.

  Those lights on the angular move

  through tunnel vision,

  that droop in the energy level and that sense

  of stumbling, and all that jagged prettiness

  lasering in on you alone,

  a social worry in a secret club.

  And nothing beats the migraine psyche

  when your fi nger’s on the button:

  you push and push for a better score

  and when you hit the top, you’re so

  ashamed, it’s just not good enough.

  Four thousand four hundred

  satellites

  are slung around the earth.

  It’s now offi cial: over the rainbow

  there’s a lot of military stuff.

  Now wouldn’t that give you a headache?

  The city’s electric profi le waits

  for bombs to turn into birds

  who will bomb the beautiful skyline.

  We’re all set up to invade

  ourselves from space.

&n
bsp; 34

  We who suffer love the drama.

  We wouldn’t give it up for health or peace.

  And think what we’ve achieved –

  how nearly perfect we’ve become

  before the twenty-cent bits run out

  and the game is over.

  35

  David Eggleton

  60-Second Warning

  The President pops one off

  and the Pacifi c goes nuclear,

  you cannot sound the all-clear,

  you must obey this nightmare.

  Hot fl ash, cold sweat, no, no, not yet.

  The hottest holiday you’ve ever had.

  Executives execute their orders,

  a cryptic message from a birth controller.

  No time for a funeral director,

  no time for a quality coffi n,

  vaporised as you walk the dog,

  incinerated as you saw that log.

  Quick exit for a tormented teenager,

  fi nal curtain for a Frank Sinatra impersonator.

  Red Alert. Reject. Danger. Danger.

  King Kong is pounding on his tits

  as the world gets blown to bits.

  The Girl From Ipanema meets the Man From Rio

  for one last samba beneath the sun.

  It cost a bomb for that plutonium blonde.

  Televise that face, watch this space.

  Scrape the skin off the walls.

  Phenomenal! Phenomenal!

  Radioactive Tahitian miss,

  on the face of it she’s hit, she’s hit.

  Moruroa you evil genius,

  your hell’s teeth mouth spews fried fl uorescent fi sh.

  A love song turns to a hate story,

  all God’s children in the car park are bound for Glory.

  Go-getter grannies shoot up an atomic brew.

  36

  Chain-smoking, chain-reaction existentialists cease to exist.

  A home computer terminal spells zeros;

  there are no nuclear holocaust heroes.

  On another planet,

  across a universe of voids,

  are the megaton ruins of the Aucklandoids.

  O, it is I, Neutronhead.

  O, it is they, the dehumanised dead.

  Major Accident and General Emergency,

  like some mistake of the brain,

  dance on the graves of the Kids from Fame

  in a South Island Landscape Still Life with Acid Rain.

  Angels turn to angel dust,

  baby rainbows burst.

  Close to home and closing in,

  the impossible dream is doing its worst.

  37

  Meg Campbell

  The End of the World

  The shining cuckoo sings,

  ‘It will surely be like this.

  Just an ordinary day

  suddenly turned nasty.

  Grey sky and an oily sea.

  The sun will suddenly move

  in a crazy fashion.

  You

  won’t

  believe your eyes. But, then,

  free falling you’ll die

  without a murmur.

  The end

  of the world is brief, ’ sings