Today, we have an excerpt from the new epic verse novel Calypso, by Oliver K. Langmead: “A saga of colony ships, shattering moons and cataclysmic war in a new Eden.” It’s out now, published by Titan Books. Here’s the synopsis:

Rochelle wakes from cryostasis to take up her role as engineer on the colony ark, Calypso. But she finds the ship has transformed into a forest, populated by the original crew’s descendants, who revere her like a saint.

She travels the ship with the Calypso’s creator, the enigmatic Sigmund, and Catherine, a bioengineered marvel who can commune with the plants, uncovering a new history of humanity forged while she slept.

She discovers a legacy of war between botanists and engineers. A war fought for the right to build a new Earth – a technological paradise, or a new Eden in bloom, untouched by mankind’s past.

And Rochelle, the last to wake, holds the balance of power in her hands.

*

I have always thought you can tell a lot

About a person by their living space,

As if it is a kind of second skin

Scarred and tattooed by the life lived in it.

Ciara’s room is painted a burnt orange,

Which turns yellow when the sun is shining.

Pinned to the walls are pictures of places

With long beaches, palm trees and sparkling waves.

The floor is covered in discarded clothes:

Shimmering sequinned tops and pink sandals;

Her desk and shelves heaped high with magazines,

Sheets a crumpled, colourful, unmade mess.

Benson’s room is painted an eggshell white

And everything is arranged in order:

His treasures and tokens neatly aligned;

Exotic feathers and wooden puzzles.

The paintings on his walls are of space ships,

And his carpet is a perfect cream white.

I have never seen Benson’s bed unmade,

And often wonder if he even sleeps.

Sigmund’s office is full of old treasures:

His brass telescope, and shelves of trinkets,

Unwound clocks and ancient calculators;

A pair of compasses encased in glass.

The pictures on the walls are stellar maps,

Framed routes plotted without destinations,

Rendering them simple, elegant lines,

Slender curves, arcs and circles – light on dark.

Catherine works at Sigmund’s terminal.

“I can’t read this language,” she says, frowning.

It looks like English, but it’s not English.”

She leans back. “Someone’s tampered with the ship.”

One of the ornaments catches my eye:

A piece of torn tracing paper preserved,

Upon which a pencil circle is drawn;

A loop, a vacancy, an emptiness.

“Can you work out where he might be?” I ask.

Catherine types a new set of commands,

The shifting colours of the terminal

Lighting her face kaleidoscopically.

I stand behind her and watch the scrolling

Information illuminating her.

“He’s awake,” she tells me, eventually.

“He’s taken a shuttle to the surface.”

Departing the Calypso is a shock;

She is no longer a perfect circle.

Pieces of her have been worn and altered;

Evidence of her perilous voyage.

The landing shuttle shudders around us,

Its gravity shifting as we descend,

Trading the Calypso’s soft centrifuge

For the magnetic mass of the new world.

The atmosphere flares brightly around us

And our view of the Calypso changes,

She becomes a distant halo again;

A dark hollow suspended in the sky.

The shuttle groans, shakes and finally stills,

But there is little to see beneath us;

The edges of icy rock formations

Illuminated by the coming dawn.

The shuttle’s stabilisers start to roar,

Slowing our descent, so that we land soft.

Upon a dark plateau the shuttle stills

And the sudden silence is startling.

I free myself of all my harnesses

And try to stand, but I am too heavy.

I can barely raise my hands to my face,

And my lungs are labouring to draw breath.

“Take your time to adjust,” says Catherine,

Untroubled by the crushing gravity.

She is pulling on her survival suit,

And readying a second one for me.

It feels like all my blood is in my feet,

And that my bones have somehow turned to stone,

But I do begin to slowly adjust,

Until, at last, I manage to stand up.

With Catherine’s help, I don my own suit.

Its exoskeleton whirs into life

And I suddenly feel half as heavy,

Though my heart still trembles against my ribs.

I have always thought that survival suits

Serve as an expression of the triumphs

Of geoengineers: they are tiny,

Personal atmospheres – personal Earths.

After all, we have travelled to this world

With all the resources necessary

To build an enormous survival suit,

Big enough to encompass a planet.

My helmet clicks and hisses into place

As Catherine starts the airlock cycling,

And with the grinding of the shuttle’s doors

The barren new world is revealed to us.

Frost crackles sharply across my visor,

My breath pluming until the suit adjusts.

And like mist clearing on a winter’s day

The landscape comes into icy focus.

With the aid of picks and spiked walking sticks

We venture out among pillars of ice

Twisted like tornadoes frozen in time;

Agleam, crystalline in the suits’ lamplight.

The ground has a glacial quality,

As if we stride across frozen rivers,

Our sticks striking, cracking and dividing

The surface into shining diamond shards.

We climb up to a slippery plateau

And there we observe the oncoming dawn;

Mighty clouds, as tall and vast as the sky

Made dark silhouettes by the bright sunlight.

I struggle to adjust my perspective;

The horizons here feel far too distant.

I am dwarfed by the glittering new world,

Made miniature by its indifference.

Sigmund is encamped upon a plateau

Cracked into shards by his landing shuttle.

Upon a flat plinth he has made a throne

Of glinting ice, like a shattered mirror.

“You’ve come to see it, too,” he says, to us.

I notice that he has tethered himself;

Lengths of cable locking him to the rock

Buried beneath all the brilliant ice.

The advancing dawn towers over us,

Bright clouds tall enough to brush against stars.

I realise we have no time to leave;

We will be engulfed by those mighty clouds.

My suit contains a strong spool of cable,

And I draw it out quick, hammer it deep

Through the ice and into a rock pillar,

Planting myself like a flag in the ground.

A rushing, roaring becomes audible,

Drowning Sigmund’s voice and Catherine’s voice.

They are made silhouettes before the dawn,

And I reach out for their hands, to hold on.

I command my suit to give me silence,

And though the ground trembles beneath my boots,

Suddenly all is hushed, all is quiet,

Except for my breathing; exhaling prayer.

Dawn sweeps across me, all heat and vapour,

And the world vanishes; I am alone,

Slowly losing my grip on the others

As light floods in through my helmet’s visor.

Perhaps the light means that I am dying.

Maybe my suit and skin will unravel

And the light will fill me and become me,

And I will be lifted up to heaven.

The power of the new dawn shakes through me,

Bringing me to my knees, until at last

The rushing clouds thin and part in a haze,

Swept onwards by the perpetual dawn.

My suit whirs, adjusting to the daylight

And the powerful heat burning the rocks.

The last of the vapour rises in wisps;

All of night’s ice transformed by the new day.

The revealed rocks are a catastrophe

Of burned, blackened shards and tectonic cracks

Shifting uncomfortably as they adjust

To the sudden fury of the day’s light.

I notice that Catherine and Sigmund

Are squeezing my hands and tapping their helms.

I command my suit to let them be heard

And their loud voices collide in my ears.

We take our time, laughing, recovering,

United by our shared experience,

And Sigmund embraces us each, tightly,

His eyes agleam behind his dimmed visor.

Crouching, he starts to dig beneath his feet

With a trowel, to reveal a hollow,

Where the ground is soft under the black crust.

“Here,” he says, “is where we will sow our seeds.”

Strapped into our seats, we wait for the lurch,

Listening to the whine of the engines

As they build enough shuddering tension

To hurl us back up into the heavens.

Yet when the engines unleash their fury

And I am pushed back hard into my chair

It feels to me as if we are lifted;

As if the Calypso is pulling us.

The noise of the shuttle’s ascent quiets

As we break the blue, confronted by stars

And their crown: the glittering Calypso,

Solar panels reflecting the bright sun.

Sigmund releases his harnesses, stands,

Watching the Calypso grow as we near,

And for a moment, he is a giant,

Who might reach out and hold her in his hand.

“Where are the crew, Sigmund?” Catherine asks,

As our shuttle flies towards a dark dock.

There are windows alight, but they are sparse;

The Calypso has yet to awaken.

*

Oliver K. Langmead’s Calypso is out now, published by Titan Books in North America and in the UK.

Also on CR: Guest Posts on “A Few Words on Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger”and “Deleting Digits”; Annotated Excerpt from Glitterati

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