I didn't know where else to post this, so I started a new topic. I would love to see Zindell return to the world of "A requiem for homo sapiens."  While I understand no one can write like Zindell, I couldn't help but burn with unanswered questions.  Namely Kalinda.  Who is she? will we ever know her? I wrote a bit of fan fiction and I'd love to see Zindell take the idea and run with it. Here goes, enjoy or hate, as you will, behold the birth of a godess!

This will be the requium for Mallory Ringess, my brash young pilot.  Another God's bedamned fool who dares to face the manifold and demand the secret of life. The Solid State Entity tolerates fools lightly. Mallory goes to the goddess armed only with an old book of ancient poems I gave him. To his death perhaps. And perhaps not.

As he floats within his lightship, cocooned in spun diamond, threading the treacherous spaces of the vild, Mallory probobly suspects I once made the same journey, falling amoung the planet sized spheres of protien nurologics that make up the Entity's galaxy-sized brain. The truth would surprise him, I think.

She wasn't always a goddess. Once upon a time she wore flesh and was called Kalinda. Kalinda of the Flowers, the finest warrior-poet their order ever produced. The first and only female warrior-poet. Males are stronger, but the female of the species is always more deadly.

Her mother was Science and her father was the test tube. She and twenty of her "sisters", if clones stamped from the same chromasomes can be considered "family," were grown like summerworld apples.

Beneath the triple moons of Quallar, Kalinda was born along with her brothers and sisters. In a long low building of red sandstone one hundred mechanical wombs opened, clamshells of metal and ceramic hissing and gurgling as each child's nutrient solution drained away. Thin wails began to echo through the room as first one, and then others began to protest the indignity of birth into a strange, bright world. Each child was attended by a small, wheeled robot and multiple arms quickly severed and cauterized the umbilical cord, cleaned and wrapped each child in a silvery blanket. Their labors done, each robot set it's tiny human burden on the floor and retreated into watchful inactivity.

A flash of color at on end of the room heralded the appearance of a warrior poet. His kimono shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow in the light of the flame globes. Silver hair framed a delicate, ageless face and his violet eyes missed nothing. He moved gracefully, without wasted motion, yet with a terrible vitality and awareness of the slightest movements around him. Each infant he passed, he named in alphabetical order, checking a small datapad he carried as he passed each infant.

Kalinda witnessed her first death when she was minutes old and had not yet recived her name. "Justin, your name is Justin," she heard the warrior-poet say, or would have, if she had understood language. As her tiny blue eyes tried to focus, attracted by the shimmer of colors never before seen to her newborn eyes, the poet reached into his kimono and withdrew a long needle which he jabbed into the side of Justin's neck.  Within moments the infant ceased to breathe.

According to the doctrines of the warrior-poets, ten percent of all infants born were randomly slain at birth, mimicing chance and random fatality to improve the species. It is the only time in a warrior-poet's life that survival depended on chance.






That's as far as I've gotten or will ever get. I am no Zindell, to weave words that linger in the heart.  I only hope he reads this and becomes inspired to go to the worlds of Quallar and Arcite and to tell what remains to be told.  

--Last edited by Ryan Foster on 2008-03-04 19:39:22 --

I would love a continuation, especially concerning the warrior-poets, whom I consider the most interesting faction in the Neverness universe after the AI gods. o_O

Hmm.. Inspiring!