Dark Star
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As the days drift by, I find myself falling into a persistent dream about a caravan making its way through Central Asia along the silk routes to China. My thoughts always settle on twilight, specifically on that crack in time when a crystalline mystic blue suffuses cloudless skies whose whispering stars intimate that they are the seats of gods too distant, and perhaps too reluctant, to have revealed themselves to us yet. Everything in this faraway place is rock, and mountains flank the horizons. I stand on a hard dry plain, always about a thousand feet from the travelers -– far enough away to muffle all sound and yet not so far off that I cannot see the flow of the journey, imperceptible though it may have seemed to someone in the mountains. Here, I am patient, and patience is the touch of a lover’s hand against my face after too long an absence, a touch that rivets me into the moment with its erotic mysticism. My vision in this place is clear, and soon my mind becomes clear in equal measure. Thoughts fall away. I am a lake reflecting the heavens and find within them depths of solace that I have rarely known. The blue without and the blue within deepen. A few stars quietly appear in the velvet sky. They are known to me and, I suspect, are known also by the travelers. Our modern understanding of these stars would have meant nothing to these people, but they did have names for them. Beautiful names. Aldebaran. Vega. Deneb. Alderamin. Alphirk. Shedir. Caph. Ruchbah. Mirphak. Capella. Menkelinan. Castor. Pollux. I too know these names, but most of them mean nothing to me; nevertheless, their lush beauty as they flow past my lips form kisses that beckon me into times far earlier than my own, into places I could not possibly have visited, into places where half-remembered faces dimly seen pass in the night, and eyes rendered black by the deepening skies gaze into me, through me, into places where whispers just beyond the range of my hearing beckon me like a long-lost lover. He draws me into a moist and mystical darkness that thrills me -– all of me -– as he quickens my womb with the seed of a million stars.
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About the Book
Barbara Llandry is a mystic, engineer, pilot, POW, leader of the first mission to Mars, and the next leap in evolution. Orphaned at five, Barbara is taken in by her grandfather, Dr. Richard Xavier Llandry, an influential art dealer. Before long, Barbara's genius attracts powerful people in the government, and they have ambitions for her. But this is not to be. Richard senses his granddaughter's uniqueness. He vows to let her have a normal childhood and the freedom to explore her seemingly genetic drive to embrace infinity and eternity. Barbara's quest takes an eerie twist when an artifact smuggled from post-war Hiroshima is clandestinely passed on to Richard. The object is too precious to destroy but too awful in its import to remain on Earth. Richard's deathbed wish is that Barbara lost the object on Mars. En route to Mars, Barbara encounters a priestess who was ancient long before the dawn of Man. She teaches Barbara to bend time and space with her mind. The revelations that ensue fulfill her childhood dreams and lead Barbara to her lover and soul mate. In many ways, Dark Star is a love story played out beyond the reaches of human imagination into the deeps of time and space.
About the Author
Howard L. Enfiejian holds a doctoral degree in neurobiology from Rutgers University and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He has been a science writer since 1982. His ghost-written projects have appeared in a number of peer-reviewed academic journals and independent publications, as have projects written under his own name. Dark Star is Howard Enfiejian's first novel. An early version of Dark Star was among the finalists in the 1998 James Jones First Novel competition.