The Trophy and the Scar
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”
Book I Parturition Phase
Book II Apotheosis Rising
Book III Merchants of Blood and Sorrow
Book IV Weaponry of Faith
Book V Exculpatory Crimes
Book VI Children of the Dispossessed
The Trophy and the Scar is a science fiction series many years in gestation and reincarnation.
When Porfiry Esteban Suayd stands at the gateway to the stars, prepared to leap into the tumultuous labyrinth of interstellar trade and politics as an itinerant ship’s hand, he asks the cosmos to offer him a proving ground where he might become whatever his destiny ordains.
To his sorrow, the cosmos is about to answer.
From his first berth on what turns out to be an interstellar pirate vessel, to a tourist world where interplanetary politics stir widespread unrest, to a penal colony where his dreams are brutally eviscerated, he finds himself at a critical nexus of revolutionary upheaval. As chance and choice lead him inexorably into insurrection against colonial oppression, he has not only to survive but to transcend: because the fate of more than one species is at stake, and the parochial jungle war in which he finds himself ensnared, dissected by conflicting loyalties, carries profound implications for all of humanity’s future.
One day, before the dreams have suffered exposure to the elements of reality, he writes this:
This sheltered earth –
This shaded—or salted?—Earth
Is timestream’s eddy:
Not heart, not hub, but eddy.
You and I root shallow, but we root;
Trace tight circles in bottommud and call them life.
In restless nights, though,
In wild sweated dream,
Might press cheek, palm, ear
Against the shimmering border
—Press and pull—
Where wind, border’s sinew—
If you hesitate at interface—
Might rive bone from soul.
On the shimmer’s other side
Wind hammers, shears, spins
Or, sensuous, insinuates itself;
Might sing or sigh,
Might shriek, might cackle—
Dying cry or lullaby,
Funeral dirge or angel choir—A syncopating babel-throated anagram:
“Change”
Just “change
I am change
You are
All is
Change is all
Is life is
Creation
Is
The witless dance
We toe until we flee.”
If border’s wind torments us
Then stand clear—
Let loose the stanchions
Of seasons past and dead,
Too far decayed to change beyond decay—
Stand clear!
Arms wide in untrammeled yield
While wind wraps you in its electric freedom—
Stand clear!
Touch passion—
Embrace the myriad paradox
Of Then’s and Maybe’s groin.
--Porfiry Esteban Suayd
New Vegas