The Lover's Parable Through A Seven World Journey

The Lover’s Parable Through A Seven World
Journey

Copyright © 2013 by Brady
Millerson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

HARDCOVER ISBN:
9780989494809

PAPERBACK ISBN:
9780989494816

Cover and Interior Design:
AuthorSupport.com

To my wife and children...

what a journey our lives have
been.

Waves of fire glisten and spread across the surface of the fiery globe of the sky that the ancients of Planet Blue had once called the Savior. But through countless ages the meaning behind its name and its glorious history had become lost, relegated first to myth, then to random, natural motions. Although its primitive appellation would continue to be carried on through childhood dreams and stories of fantasy, the men of the world, growing ignorant and throwing aside the ways of their ancestors, would believe themselves to be nearing an age of matured reason. They began putting away their puerile past. Following in the footsteps of the masters of the age, the Savior would simply become an object known merely as the Great Star.

Like the wings of an infant bird, the Savior’s arms spread out and sway across the expanse of space. In due time, just as the bird matures and attains to flight, so too do the arms of the Savior lift from their roots to reach out towards the heavens beyond.

The illusion of this molten plasma, twisting and flowing, spreading out into the blackness of the void, conceals the true wonder in its bosom, the fantastical assumption that it is a single entity, yet it is composed of many: the beauty of a single particle of energy. In the Savior’s arms, they are more numerous than all the stars of the heavens. And each one has been destined for someplace, for somewhere and for someone.

Six spheres exist in a perpetual run upon their elliptical tracks within the Savior’s realm. Since the beginning of time these planets have orbited this most brilliant star. Behaving as the vultures of death skating across a desert sky, they ever gaze solemnly at their sustenance below. They must, for this age, continue to be pressed along by an invisible force, encircling continually around that fiery object of which some believe to be a dying
beast.

Of the six, there is one peculiar in its own right, as it appears to be illuminated with the radiance of the sapphire, bright and warm. But once again, the illusion has been granted, as nothing could be so beautiful without the illumination of the Savior to enlighten by way of reflection. And as it so happens, on this particular day, and at this particular moment in time, the Savior’s arms have, as it has done for so many eons past, reached out to lay the tip of His finger upon Planet
Blue.

A stream of heat and light blanket the shimmering world, filtering its luminescent particles through the dense layers of mist and smoke. Downward they flow, cutting through the thick atmosphere, dispersing the soft, pink warmth of morning upon the cold, gray covering of the City of Labor. Concrete pillars belch out their steam, rectangular structures decorated with dull, gray columns upon their faces that stretch up to the layers of pinkish-blue hues above. The Savior has extended his daily salutation.

Towering, concrete walls,
the
Corral
, twist and turn upon the perimeter of the City. Even the buildings tall enough to peek over it have not been granted the windows necessary to provide a view of the surrounding countryside. It is a most well thought-out metropolis. So tightly packed together are these abodes of man, so ominously designed that never does the gift of light reach into their inhabitants’ domains. The highest buildings stand closest to the city walls, then the next highest are layered within, then the next highest, then the next and so on. Each building’s rooftop extends across and over-reaches the building before it, acting as an awning for its shorter counterpart, preventing the natural light above from creeping
in.

For generations of workers, refraining from the glory of the Savior was the law, at first obeyed, and then embraced. He is not welcome to settle in the City, yet no one can recall why. As most inhabitants of Labor have never seen the world beyond their Corral, neither do they care about what is out there. This is what they have been trained into and conditioned to become. It is their duty to block Him out. So, buildings upon buildings are stacked in such a manner, shading all eyes from His glorious light.

Labor: the City of Work, the City of Drones, the City of Shadows and Perpetual Darkness. Ever moving, despite His unwanted presence, the Savior continues to paint the surfaces of all the City’s towering peaks with His brightness.

The streets are crowded with a population of strong, hearty men and women. They move along the dimly lit sidewalks carrying materials and goods. Manually operated transporters of various sizes are in abundance: white, sterile automobiles with low powered, pumpkin-orange headlights roll through the streets, owned by the masters of the planet, men of which no citizen has ever seen. All the vehicles, of which the public has free access to, are at their disposal so long as they are used for the assistance of helping to keep the City functioning in its perfect order. The hum of the engines never cease as the automated production lines pump out various products for the consumption of the inhabitants of the City proper, the mysterious others fighting in distant lands and those living at the end of the mysteriously enclosed road known simply as
the
Highway
.

High above the human automatons animating in procession and unquestioningly performing their duties, a youthful couple is perched at the lip of a rooftop. Their clothing colored with a deep contrast to the sterile whiteness of their surroundings. They sit with a warm and secure closeness. They are in a world of their own.

A gentle heat blows across Labor’s concrete covering. The destination of the particles of light has finally been reached thousands upon thousands of kilometers from whence they came. They fall like a warm rain, caressing the tender cheek of Sofia and settling upon the face of John.

Sofia peered down at her feet dangling off the towering structure, a death-falling distance above the edge of the Corral. Somewhere in the eerie dimness beneath her, the men and women of the City continued about with their daily business, unappreciative and willfully unaware of nature’s morning dance. They work. That is all they do, she thought. It is what has always been done, will always be done, and no one will ever question as to what the end result is that they are trying to achieve.

“That Savior-rise was beautiful, wasn’t it?” Sofia spoke in her still, soft voice.

John held her hand gently. For a moment he did not say a word. Then, as if a sudden joy had overcome him, he exclaimed, “Look! A wishing star!”

Sofia’s eyes barely caught a glimpse of the hair-thin slash of light that split across a patch of deep blue. It was a wishing star: an unusual morning phenomena witnessed only by the free of heart and those willing to turn their backs on their economic captures. Neither she nor John knew anything about the cause of these rays of light that would appear and then suddenly vanish away. They were a most rare occasion so early in the morning, but quite frequent during the darkest moments of the night. And, although very few inhabitants (if any, as far as they knew) were aware of such a common occasion when the stars were lighting up the sky, she and John had kept it as their little secret that there is a time, when most of the city lies in slumber, that the wishing stars fill the firmament with a dance second in beauty only to the rise of the
Savior.

As the dim slit faded into obscurity, Sofia leaned back on the cool, white surface of their Labor Apartment: Building 1A. With a sigh, her soft, blue eyes gazed upward into the sky. She was only fifteen, quaintly dressed in a plaid ribbon-topped dress with a white undershirt. Oddly enough, she wore cotton pants beneath her skirt. For despite her feminine appearance, she was clearly a tomboy at heart. But nevertheless, climbing up the pipes and cables that decorated and interconnected all the buildings in order to reach the differing levels of Labor’s rooftops in only a dress, she believed, was still quite unladylike.

Her eyes were colored as the heavens themselves and John often commented that looking into them was like looking through her and seeing the sky beyond… but he meant it in a polite and endearing fashion. Although she understood what he meant, she quite often played the fool and pretended it offended her.

John shielded his face from the Savior as half of its body arose above the distant hills. It was now too bright to look into, and burning red eyes would be a dead-giveaway that he had been Savior watching… and with Sofia, no doubt. Carefulness was de jure when exposure was occasioned, as sun-baked skin was all the evidence needed to prove their disobedience.

John was just as soft spoken as Sofia. At sixteen years of age, the features of change, of which all boys must bear, had not made the appearance in even the slightest of hints. His dark hair was cut short, a
military cut
they called it. It was the style of which all the men wore. There was no other way. He was appareled in his usual dark, school-dress pants with a button up shirt. His black leather boots were tightly laced-up, ankle-wrapped and bow-tied… again, it is what all the men wore.

He glanced at his watch and said, “We’d better be getting to school.”

“Already?” Sofia asked.

By the disappointment in her tone, John knew within his heart that she was just as desirous as he to stay on that rooftop all day. Going to the Education Building day in and day out was not how he wanted to spend his youth. Thousands of children crammed into the cold, sterile rooms to hear lecture after lecture. The exhaling of coldness, the lack of emotion and the fear instilled by their instructors: it was a process of breaking down and building up. John often pondered as to why it was that they were the only two beings in existence with feelings of uneasiness about all of it.

Although it was quite out of place considering his strict, regimented upbringing, at such a young and tender age the concepts of youthfulness and aging were very real processes for John’s contemplation. How scary was the idea that there was to him an obvious, conscious effort being forced upon all children, so that the boys and girls of Labor would grow up to become like his own parents: the Monster and his wife. John shuddered at the thought of lying in his bed at night: the screaming, the cursing. How often he would slip out the front door without drawing anyone’s attention, meet up with Sofia and lead the way silently down the hall to the Forbidden Room which housed the stairwell that would lead them to the rooftop. There they would breathe sighs of relief. Nobody would miss them, neither would anyone be checking in on either of their empty beds. What joy would fill their hearts as they freed themselves from those corridors of hatred: so many unhappy couples shouting and slamming, crying out in despair.

John’s parents, like most adults in the City of Labor, were spiteful, always bickering and gnashing their teeth at one another. But the Monster was different than most of the other male adults. Perhaps it was John’s close proximity to him by relation that made him feel this way, or even his direct dealings with the man that gave him that impression. Whatever was the cause for his consternation it did not matter, as he was a most frightful sight to behold. Having spent a considerable amount of time on the Red Plant, the Monster was notorious for his outbursts of violence. Whatever the Red Plant was, it had given him a remarkable temper of which he was unable to contain.

John had never inquired about the arena in which his father conducted his business. It was only by a sheer mishap that he had overheard his mother speaking to a neighbor about it, and even then he could not make out much detail. All he could gather was that his father had some direct hand in the ongoing wars taking place somewhere in the distant lands, somewhere at the end of the tunneled road that interconnected the City with this mysterious
place.

The Monster was one of the several Labor inhabitants with access to that Highway: the heavily patrolled, asphalt road, which stretched from the edge of the City entrance to the distant unknown beyond the hills. Its entire length was covered over with concrete walls and ceilings, preventing anyone traveling it from seeing the grass and the trees of the surrounding world. The transporters that exited the City were filled with finished products that had been designed and assembled at one of Labor’s many production facilities. The vehicles entering into Labor were loaded with raw materials gathered from unknown lands.