THE RED CHILD

When I write, I just start typing. I don’t have a master plan, a theme or even an idea of where the story will go. The story unfolds naturally, just like life does. This means I am just as excited and surprised at what happens next as the reader is. THE RED CHILD is a perfect example. I thought “What is life like on the Sun”? The next few hundred pages are my imagination at work.

THE RED CHILD is about the birth of an anomaly, an aberration. A red child is born and it is not like the others. It knows it is different, and in that knowledge, it lives outside of the lines drawn by society. There comes the fateful day that it steps too far over the line and is exiled into the vast cold of space, far from the life-giving warmth of the sun. When the she comes blasting into the atmosphere of earth, she brings with her the question of whether she is good or evil. Her fate hangs on a single man. A man who shows her what loyalty, devotion and compassion looks like.

THE RED CHILD (an excerpt)

…The hatching was the most cheerful day in the Lords otherwise grim existence.  It begins as a tapping sound.  With the first tap, the Lord is on his feet scrambling up and down the corridors looking for the first hatchling.  When he finds it, there is already a crack appearing in the shell.  Soon, a flame darts from the thin space in the smooth oval.  Others are beginning to tap and move, but the first holds his attention.  Fingers reach through the crack, grasp at shell, and violently begin to pull and claw it apart.  It is as if the occupant is desperately trying to escape.  The sharp edges of the shell cut at the skin of the fingers and hand, leaving bloody blue streaks across the translucent surface of the shell.  When the fracture is wide enough, a head emerges, gasping and crying out for freedom.  The rage intensifies.  The Child is frantic to escape this prison that has held it for centuries as it awaited hatching.  When it finally emerges, its solid form falls to the floor of the corridor as it pants in exhaustion.  Within minutes, its solid form begins to lightly vaporize at the surface.  This vaporization creates a crust layer of skin which in moments oxidizes before turning to a scaly dust across the form.  It is a molting of egg-skin and the birthing of new-skin.  Other Children are flailing their arms as they seek to escape their egg.  Bodies are falling out of their eggs on to the floor, crusting and oxidizing.  Hundreds, then thousands of them are hatching and meta-morphing as the Lord watches.  He sings to them as they erupt from their shells, pacifying their anguish and fear.  His song tells them that they are welcome to this new life.  The Lord is overcome with love and happiness for this moment.  His cloak is no longer a prison.  His execution is set aside to welcome the new hatchlings.  His children, the Children of Mer and Zel, the Children of the Sun.

The Lord glided above the forms of the sleeping Children in the corridors.  Broken shell was being collected by the Damned and the walls scraped of any evidence of the nursery.   As he glided, the Lord sang softly to his Children.  He sang of the history of the Sun, of the solar system and of the cosmos.  He sang of the blessings of life and the terrible anguish of judgment and execution.  He sang of his desire to never visit them as executioner, that they should be kind citizens.  That they should be respectful and care for each other.  That their lives and their choices were theirs alone.  They could choose a life of happiness or a life of pain.  He sang of his well wishes for their choice of happiness.

One by one, the Children woke.  They stretched and yawned.  They flexed their new limbs and wiggled their new toes.  As they began to stand, they lifted off the ground and floated down the corridors to the vents that would lead them to the surface.  Like a torrent, they shot upwards though the vents by the tens of thousands, erupting into the thermocline to the cheers of the those who had been waiting for the new hatch.  As they settled to the surface, each was greeted with embraces and words of encouragement.  They were home.

When the last of the Children was gone, and the final scraps of shell and skin was cleared from the corridors, the Lord cheerfully returned to his place in the Core.  After the excitement and noise of the hatch, the quiet was deafening and peaceful.  The Lord closed his eyes and drifted into a sleep state of peace.  For the first time in centuries he was smiling and cheerful.  His heart was full, and his mind was a peace.  He pulled his cloak closer to his body, swaddling himself in a cocoon of comfort, only to feel the lump of egg in the cloak that was the Red.  In his excitement he had forgotten the red egg.  With a furrowed brow he removed it from the folds of his cloak and observed it in the incandescent glow of the suns core.  Nothing had changed.  It was the same milky-red swirling center that had existed for all these years.  No tapping, no cracking.  Worried, he returned the egg to his cloak and all but forgot it for decades.

†††

It was a grim time of tracking.  The Damned were spread out through the tachycline, crossing over into the radiant zone, looking for a Child who had been judged and convicted to become one of the Damned.  He had fled and was moving across the Star transferring between his physical self and his vapor self to avoid detection.  The Damned were not deterred, only slowed by this action.  This was his first attempt at fleeing, but the Damned had been tracking this type of evasion for centuries.  They were patient, as was their Lord.  As the Lord floated high above the tachycline, he sensed rather than heard a tapping.  It was a familiar sound, but one that he could not place.  It was not until he felt the fingers tearing at the egg in his robe did he realize that his red egg was indeed hatching.  He sent news to the Damned to bring the convict to him when he was caught, and he quickly descended into the core.  He floated rather than walked down the corridor to the very place that he had removed the red egg.  He gently removed it from his pocket and lay it in the corridor.  He then squatted low and watched it fight for release.  The fingers were far smaller than a normal Childs, but they were strong.  Where a normal Child of the Sun would tear small pieces of shell out fist by fist, the Red egg was coming apart in large sections. In short time, a face appeared in the shells break.  It was not frantically gasping and fighting for release, there was a look of intense and deliberate effort.  A determination and sense of occupation.  This Child was dismantling an obstacle, not fighting free.  When it at last emerged from the egg it stood on wobbly legs and shuddered.  As its body shook, the skin turned to a scabrous crust.  The Red Child fought back pain and weakness and tightened every muscle in its sinewy and thin body.  It remained in this tense state for long minutes as the scabs hardened.  At last, the crust fractured and dropped to the floor in dust.  The Red Child remained standing.  She was panting and weak from the effort, but she never dropped to the floor.  She never cried out and she never allowed the change to own her. As the Lord watched, the Child raised her large eyes and look straight at the Lord, no, she looked straight through the Lord.  She had no fear, no respect and no sense of awe or wonder.  At birth, this Child was the Lords superior, and she sensed it.  A fear ran through the Lord.  His intuition had told him to destroy the egg decades ago and now it had been allowed to hatch.  This was the beginning of something new, and dangerous.