Monolith Cocktail Blog

The Monolith Cocktail Serialises Andrew C. Kidd’s Tennyson Imbued Opus

Dabbling over the decade with showcasing exciting, sometimes improbable, intriguing work from new and aspiring writers, the Monolith Cocktail has played host to serialisations of stories by Rick Clarke (of Vukover and The Tearless Life infamy) and Ayfer Simms (the Franco-Istanbul writer was an integral member of the MC team for a good few years, offering various reviews and conducting interviews).

Furnishing the site since Covid with review pieces and the odd feature, Glaswegian-based writer Andrew C. Kidd now adds his name to this list, sharing his grand interstellar opus with the MC readers through an epic serialisation. Last month we published the Prologue and Part One of The Violin: the first chapter of this grand sci-fi story. We now continue with the concluding part of that inaugural chapter.

Andrew seeks inspiration from music and anything that chronicles the fantastical. And in Tennyson, he finds sentiment and solace.

Part 2

Half-aware in a half-dream, the young Commodore roused from her stupor. Tito was drifting silently beside her.

‘W-where… am I?’ Her speech was slurred.

Tito’s teeth took on a yellow hue through his white beard. He grinned inertly before his gaze slowly returned to the porthole.

‘Where are the other Commodores?’, she continued to enquire. ‘AURORA?’ Her voice ascended quietly.

‘Are you not able to hear their voices?’, Tito muttered after a short pause.

The young Commodore strained her neck forward, but a strap crossed over her forehead. She was being kept firmly supine on a board that had been secured to the living quarters wall. Her hair wafted around her head and face in zero-gravity.

Tito plucked at one of the thin cables on the box relic. His dry fingertips scraped against it in a coarse strumming motion.

‘They sing to us, melodiously!’ He laughed a little. ‘Listen…’

Loose hair hung limply from the straightened form of the longer relic.

‘P-please don’t!’, she pleaded upon realising that she was unable to raise her hands in self-defence. They were bound to the board she lay on.

‘Calm now!’, his voice rasped in command. ‘I implore you to listen–’

The straightened relic touched the box-like form which he had rested under his chin. A small clatter occurred when it touched a black board with cables that ran up its body. The young Commodore wondered if this was a simple circuit board. She had been trained in interstellar survival, yet nothing had prepared her for this. The pupils of her eyes remained pint-pointedly fixed on Tito. A mephitic musk clung to the air; it was nauseating.

The hair of the long relic made a wretched whispering sound as it glided across the cables on the box form. As he pressed down on these wires with his other hand, Tito uttered a sharp curse. Initially she wondered if this related to the indelible impressions the cables left on his fingertips. But she soon realised that another one of the hairs of the long relic had snapped. Its lithesome form collapsed over the box relic. Tito placed it down on a white surface next to where she lay. He floated thoughtlessly away into the darkness of the long passageway, mumbling indistinctly to himself.

*                      *                      *

During the earliest days of his depression, Tito did not eat. He remained unmoved in his living quarters for hours upon end, eventually only leaving his sleeping compartment when his bodily functions required servicing.

His muscles ached, and after a while, his body started to waste. His limbs disappeared. They flailed gently in his deep sleep like those skeletal satellites that floated endlessly in their tombs in the lower decks.

Long days became even longer months. AURORA had long been forgotten. Tito would have to service the ship and its systems manually.

Electrolysis, the running of electricity through water, had to be adjusted depending on the background oxygenation levels. Ambient temperature settings continuously altered according to the electromagnetism of his location. The wheelhouse manned to manoeuvre its circular form in the direction he wished to travel. These automated tasks had been inherited by Tito, yet he partook in none of these. The ship sailed onwards in its rudderless voyage.

Another cosmic storm had rocked the vessel on the day that he should have succumbed to his inadequate handling of the Pathfinder.

He lay face-down on the floor. The straps that held him vertically in his sleeping compartment had failed to secure him. He coughed into the pooled blood that blebbed around him. A scalp wound stung.

He managed to float to feel the narrow walls of the passageway that led down from his dormitory to the bridge. A red background light blinkered and hampered his vision. Critical warnings flashed in a lightshow of doom.

It had only been a matter of months since he had corrupted the machine learning algorithms of the murderous AURORA. Years of survival training on the mother ship kicked in instinctively. He went to the bridge and opened up a schematic view of the vessel. All systems were deemed ‘critical’.

His hierarchical assessment of what needed repairing made the reality even grimmer. The electrical circuitry would have to be salvaged. If he was without power, he was without life.

Next, the system that made oxygen from water. Finally, he secured the navigational platform upon which this hulking metal ship pivoted. This would come at the expense of other systems: radioactive protection; waste disposal; gravity.

All of the lights except one small lamp in the living quarters were switched off. This had been the blessing of a miswiring at the time of its creation.

The radio was kept disabled. He elected to keep the ship silent. The ambling and pregnant mother ship would have conceived and birthed his replacement by now. He or she would arrive in another 25-years, preserved in silence, ice-enshrouded inside their pod.

Relief pods would always find their respective Pathfinder. No storms or mutinies or mishaps could dislocate this tracking signal from the mother ship. The wandering Tito was aware of this. He also knew that once he had been located, a communiqué would be sent from the docked pod to its mother ship. This message would take years to reach her.

A few years passed after Tito had regained control of the now crippled ship. He had been gazing endlessly at the inky nothingness streaming past the vessel. He navigated himself in weightless movement to one of the store rooms located in the deck immediately below the one he inhabited.

It was a filthy space. He had been depositing his bodily waste in used ration crates. He wished to jettison these into deep space, however malfunctions in the air-locking system had meant that everything contained within the Pathfinder had been hermetically sealed.

Nothing could be released from the inside; the manual lever that opened the exterior doors was located on the outside.

Tito had stockpiled the soiled ration crates in various store rooms on this deck. As he navigated through the main passageway of the ship, the sickly fluorescence of his cabin light only provided faint illumination.

His eyes squinted into the tunnelling black. Using his fingers, he cautiously felt round the darkened hollow of the hatch that led down to the lower decks. He pushed himself off and let his body float weightlessly onto the next level.

Tito moved down the lower passageway to a new room which he had recently cleared to make way for more used crates. He laughed quietly at the irony in the microcosmic life cycle of these containers that had once contained his food.

As he entered the cleared store room to open a new crate, a smaller container floated into his field of vision. His attempts to catch it in the darkness had resulted in his arm striking it. His body leapt forward through the hatch to catch it before it floated down into the ghastly lower reaches of this vessel.

The old container felt like nothing he had touched before. It was old and bound in a taught hide. He was rendered fatigable after a mere few attempts to break open the latch to reveal its contents. The pulp of his hands had been long-wasted.

He eventually prized upon its lock after pressing it forcibly down on the corner of the one of the tables. This sudden downward movement had resulted in his palm catching its sharp edge. Life-blood spilled onto the casing of the old container which absorbed it immediately. He wiped the remainder of the blood onto his white spacesuit.

Tito peered down into its open contents. There, strapped down by two bands, was a box relic. White dust scattered across a black board that ran up its middle. An ornate headpiece curled at its peak.

The carbonised form matted against his bright torchlight. Unconsciously, his index finger pressed against one the cables that travelled up half the length of its ancient form. A catgut-sharp twang echoed even after its vibration had ceased.

He quickly closed the old container and took it to his living quarters.

Sound!

He had not heard a sound like that for a very long time. Deep in his cavernous subconscious, fragments of a melancholic G minor theme of an old canzonetta played out. He hummed it imaginatively in adagietto rather than its original andante tempo.

In the days that passed, Tito remained in a trance, a state away from the present.

Where have I heard this sound before?

He sought restorative retrospection, eventually finding an answer to his question.

He had been a child when he last heard this sound. It remained as distantly familiar as when he first heard it on his mother ship. Melodies played on box relics like this funnelled out through the many speakers during their teachings of the old ways.

Tito had never really listened to the mundane AI voices and their musings about these relics and those that played them. He had only ever cared for the melodious beauty of these ancient harmonies; they had echoed up the vast corridors of his mother ship as it carried him into immensity.

After this realisation, Tito had a joyous reawakening.

It can be played!

He re-opened the old container to find an accompanying stick-like longer relic. Its straightened form and taught hair could make the longer sounds, the sounds that floated endlessly in harmony. He remained awake for many days on end as he tried to work out how to recreate the sounds of his childhood.

It happened on the third or fourth day after his discovery of the mysterious container. He had been hovering out its form, plucking frustratedly at the cables. This blunt sound was one of two sounds that the box relic could make. He wished to forge the longer noise, a sound that would reverberate around this vessel.

That day, his hand had grasped at the end of the long relic. Having moved it towards the box relic, the languishing hairs accidently slid across its cables. Tito listened to the sound that levitated up from the box relic. They travelled into ethereal realms. He bore a broad smile under his dark beard as his tired eyes settled to close after his endeavours.

Finally, in this dark and desolate place, he had found light.

*                      *                      *

Outside the vessel, galaxies spiralled, contorting into moving mountains that hung in crownless majesty. She dreamt of conquests and bold discoveries; of bountiful life on planets similar to the one her ancestors had vacated. Light soon blinded her visions. She woke to a man’s voice.

‘We have a need to personify everything’, Tito mused rhetorically. ‘Take the so-called Caryatid. A hand reaching out to touch the untouchable – as told to me in my infancy.’

He grasped at the empty space in front of him.

‘Hah! It is a void, merely a star formation in a multiverse of cosmoi. An asterism in a sea of stars–’ his hand compressed into a ball ‘–a simple trick of blue and yellow light ceding into the altered infrared of viewing ports. But its comparison to a hand is baffling.’

He sighed loudly.

‘What could a human hand possibly reach, never mind grasp!’, he concluded animatedly.

The pulp of his closed fist thumped the white interior of the ship. His hand, having now opened up, slid slowly down to drop limply by his side. He moved away from the wall weightlessly. The volume of his voice decreased to a deep rumble. His eyelids were heavy.

‘What are you going to do to me?’, the young Commodore slurred helplessly.

‘Why – I shall play you more music…’

His voice continued to dwindle. The young Commodore saw that his eyes were now closed.

‘Without it’, he proceeded tiredly, ‘I was but a grey shadow of a man. Lo! Its compositional form, its notation, its beauty… it is quite simply transcendent… outshining the very light of the stars… within which we dwell…’

His eyelids remained shuttered. He mumbled some more.

‘But alas… we must wait a while before we can hear such harmony again–’

The thrum of the engine quavered in the background. Above this, a quiet snoring sound grumbled along in unison. Tito had fallen asleep.

The young Commodore woke to the stiflingly heat of the living quarters. Her lips separated to reveal a dry mouth. Many hours had passed since she had last had fluids.

Unsteadily, and sleepily, Tito was fumbling at the table in the far side of the living quarters. He rummaged around in a locked box, eventually picking up a sharp object. Unmistakably sharp edges gleamed in a sudden show of brilliance.

He approached her slowly. Having failed in his first few attempts to secure his thumb and middle finger in the obturating handles of the object, he now held this steady. She felt the steely coolness of its metal on her warm face. Sobbing loudly, her chest rose up in panic. She thrashed and thrashed within the confines of the taught straps secured across her head, torso and legs. Above the loud wailing and panic, a faint sound next to her right ear went snip.

Tito manoeuvred backwards.

Breathing hard, he leaned over her, presenting her with a lock of her own hair.

‘You see, it’s too short.’ His head shook.

‘This is why we have to wait–’

*                      *                      *

The young Commodore lay laxly, still bound. Her muscles had made their long retreat inwards, leaving only bones and skin that veiled thinly over her body. A languid greyness masked her once youthful face. She stared vacantly at the ceiling. Tito had captured not only her body, but, finally, her spirit.

He plucked at the cables on the box relic mournfully as the vessel sank deeper into the vacuum of space. His gaze remained fixed upon the porthole. Out there, time warped, so much so that light shifted red in the endless abyss. These were the colours of stars that bled out in a slow haemorrhage as they reddened in their journey to eternity.

It was here, in this space, in these ungodly living quarters, that Tito and his prisoner had conversed only a few months ago. The young Commodore had interrupted his same, senseless contemplation when she asked him if he was going to kill her.

Tito had looked reposeful, reverential even, as he held up the thread-bare longer relic that she had once observed him press against the cables of the ancient sound box. His face bore a gleeful grimace.

‘My dear, if I were to kill you, how would your tresses grow to the length needed to re-hair my bow?’

Andrew C. Kidd