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    The Soul Shadow and Other Tales of Tomorrow
    The Soul Shadow and Other Tales of Tomorrow
    The Soul Shadow and Other Tales of Tomorrow
    Ebook77 pages1 hour

    The Soul Shadow and Other Tales of Tomorrow

    By Linda Talbot

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    About this ebook

    The eleven stories in "The Soul Shadow and Other Tales of Tomorrow", are often rooted in reality. But they soon become improbably perturbing, droll or outlandish. However, in The Soul Shadow - the first story - we are already in a weird and wonderful future, whose equilibrium is threatened by former traits of dark ambition.
    In "Klein", a curious creature designed for a film set, begins to breathe, then takes off in a bid for freedom....
    And the ageing fortune teller in "Zizi's Last Wish", opts for her ashes to be launched in an urn into outer space where she hopes to discover, even after death, the secrets of the universe!
    People, who at first appear to be living an everyday life, are suddenly pitched into an unearthly element or terrified by events beyond their control.
    In "The Flood", why was a whole community borne away so rapidly by the rising water? And in "The Bell Flowers of Lymphos", how had malicious plants taken root so readily in humble homes and gardens?
    You won't find any answers but enjoy these deviations, even if they are the stuff of bad dreams. At least you can confront them while awake!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLinda Talbot
    Release dateJan 29, 2013
    ISBN9781301448845
    The Soul Shadow and Other Tales of Tomorrow
    Author

    Linda Talbot

    Linda Talbot has written fantasy for children and adults and for many years reviewed art, theatre and books in London. She now lives in Crete. She published "Fantasy Book of Food"; rhymes, stories and recipes for children and "Five Rides by a River" - about Suffolk, seen from a bicycle! She contributed a chapter to a book about Conroy Maddox, the British surrealist and features on art to "Topos" the German landscape magazine. She published short stories with the British Fantasy Society as well as stories and poetry in other magazines. And she launched "Wordweavers", an online supplement of poetry and fiction, published in conjunction with The Cretan International Community.

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      Book preview

      The Soul Shadow and Other Tales of Tomorrow - Linda Talbot

      The Soul Shadow

      And Other Tales of Tomorrow

      By Linda Talbot

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright Linda Talbot 2013

      ********

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes.

      Thank you for downloading this free eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

      ********

      ~~~~~Table Of Contents:~~~~~

      Introduction

      The Soul Shadow

      The Bell Flowers Of Lymphos

      The Song Of Selenus

      The Mission

      Klein

      The Mutant

      Zizi’s Last Wish

      The Time Twins

      Rollo, The Labour Saving Lover

      The Flood

      Shades Of Home

      Author's Note, other writing and contact blog

      The Soul Shadow

      And Other Tales of Tomorrow

      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

      Introduction

      These stories are often rooted in reality. But they soon become improbably perturbing, droll or outlandish.

      I have placed this book between Book One and Two of Time Trance Of The Gods to offer a change of pace and content - like a water ice to freshen the palate between the courses of a memorable meal?!!

      ~~~~~~~~

      The Soul Shadow

      One evening Shama would not be coaxed from her corner. The soul shadow had seeped in earlier, drawing her from the open door to crouch on the dark side of the shimmering house.

      She was an elegantly tall Limosian, whose hair like spun gold drifted in the light air and framed cautious grey eyes. She had Limosian attributes of patience, creativity, telepathy. But she lacked courage.

      There's nothing here now. Come into the light, urged Rhune, her consort who was also exceptionally tall and whose calm was marred by curiosity and a brittle lack of patience. He resented Shama crouching like some creature cowed by a malevolent master.

      Slowly she uncurled and raised her face as though testing the air for treachery and tentatively she moved towards Rhune. But her skin retained a palor prompted by the inner danger of disintegration that increased each time the intrusive shadow stole.

      The Limosians had no clear recollection before life on Limosia, the tenth planet that a former race called man had sought for centuries and failed to find. Occasionally the dim disturbance they had named the soul shadow descended; some unseemly hint of horror and irrationality, but it lifted as swiftly as the heavy dew replenishing the planet.

      Shama and Rhune belonged to the second generation of Limosians who were subject to fewer disturbances than their predecessors but were aware nonetheless, of a seeping sense of incompletion; of being related to some force stronger and darker than themselves and, momentarily, the brightness of Limosia dimmed.

      Rhune and Shama walked through the violet haze of early evening to Limos; the city whose reflective buildings, made from a clear substance found in a far flung part of the planet, gleaned faint warmth from the distant sun. There was no rainfall, but each morning, that dawned once every thirty six hours, a heavy dew replenished growth; flowers of fragile diversity and fine fibres that glinted, gold and silver in the soft light and were the staple diet of the Limosians.

      Like all Limosians, Shama and Rhune had the limbs and features of the old race of man. But adaptations had occurred. Their skin was translucent, their head and body hair finer. Genetically, they had adjusted to the rarefied conditions on Limosia. They were almost able to float over the spongy surface where clouds of dust generating new stars drifted to settle among the flowers. The finest forms emerged from a liaison of star dust and dew.

      They had entered like all Limosians into the three lives. For one hundred years they learned; with the first generation of their race had come a muddled knowledge of belief, speculation, creation.

      Apart from the soul shadow, Limosia was not threatened; the beliefs that were based on fear were superfluous and abandoned. Speculation was dead, since Limosia provided, with her flexible materials and staple strands of food, a gentle self sufficiency.

      Creativity was cultivated in the hundred years of the Second Life; fantasies were fashioned from a malleably fine material akin to the substance used for building; objects pulsating and reflecting abstractions, moving like moods too mysterious to otherwise express, in the shifting Limosian light.

      Among the flowers grew coloured strands related to the edible species which the people wove into a fabric that rippled with independent life, its folds finely shaped to their lithe limbs. They made flexible stringed instruments that like the Aeolian harp that once eerily caught the winds of Earth, filtered the floating currents of Limosia and to them the people sang with a wistful atonality.

      In the Third Life of a hundred years the Limosians fully existed. They had absorbed, participated and were ready to enter, in stillness, surrounded by their completed creativity, the experience of being. They were one with the rhythm of growth, the drifting star dust, the heavy dew. They ate, slept, communicated, but with a synchronisation that required no effort. They carried within them the essence of Limosia.

      Shama and Rhune had one child, Liana, conceived in the Third Life by concentration on the act of creation.

      They sat among the fiscus flowers

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