The Mad Scientists’ Glassblower: a Memoir of Service by Jess Moody
Shortlisted for the third Lunate 500 competition
‘Nothing on this shortlist spins quite so devilish a narrative web as this unsettling, episodic wonder. There are enough clues sewn within its knotty chronology to enable the reader to work it out. But, as satisfying (or frustrating depending on your point of view) as that enterprise might be, the story’s real joy comes from its impeccable characterisation, and the barely hinted at consequences of a scientific curiosity pursued so obsessively that, unshackled, it becomes little more than tampering: the kind that can end worlds. Superb.’
Lunate Editors
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Flux
You will call me old-fashioned (you have no idea).
One must move with the times, yes; but the Moon Base did not see my best work. Gravity was weak, slow. My pieces were all molten truculence: a brutalism of tubes, sterile screens, abstract gleam.
Backdrop.
No matter to my employer. Too busy: convoluted schemes in decaying orbits. He focussed on the Laser, not the heat of my furnace. Henchmen running like rats, artificial sheen on helmets of chrome.
His cackling exposition drowned in Beretta bullets. I smashed all regrets. Waited for the tuxedoed man to pass; for the world to return to Technicolour.
Crucible
Yet the glow tells more in darkness. Burning truths through London fog.
Those days with the Doctor, then the nights with Him; such exhausted, scorched secrecy. Always, more phials! Flasks! I replaced his furies, his fractured frustrations. Such a task: to contain monstrosity in vessels shaped to our desires (Mine. His. His).
Serums bubbled. My reflection glazed his two faces, his many terrors. This man distilled his demons.
I, too, was afraid. Wary my breath would become another scream amongst screams.
Always, before he drank, his fevered warning:
“Hide!”
Marver
Oh, Milan. Happiness, of a kind.
What he brought me: walnut-oil warmth, breath of wine, carbon-dusted fingers. He held my fresh-cut lens to the light, seeking refractions of possible futures.
“To your liking, Maestro?” (Politeness. I always met his specifications: brought clarity to his flightful fancies).
That lopsided smile. A look askance. Symmetry has no monopoly on beauty.
“Everything here is to my liking,” he murmured, roving my sinews, shadows. Such…appreciation for skill. My devices would make him a time traveller: distances to the stars closed with a wink, light frozen on canvas.
I watched him calculate breakage. My bench swept clear, an impassioned lesson in Vitruvian forms…
“Grazie, Maestro.” (Happy to serve).
He sleep-talked of war machines.
Gather
Beware the patient child.
History sat dense within this one: knees neat, toes curled in anticipation. His guards, bored, at the threshold. Caesar’s claimed son had no need of my wares: only, to learn my ways.
How far can one stretch liquid fire? What tension before a collapse? And what of enmity, Empire, a ‘Republic’: what are the limits of one man’s will?
What price, brittleness?
I heated, I breathed, I shaped, I cooled. He learned. (Scientia: knowledge. Of action, consequence, the fine balance of judgement. Steadiness.)
Later, one of the Three, he returned. Demanded my Phoenician fables, Alexandrian lore. Yes, those Egyptian sands most of all (forgive me). In my greying gold, he saw a living Goddess decay.
He thought himself obsidian: a conqueror cooling the heat of continents. A still rival to the glistening carapace of the scuttling scarab.
Some men must unmake the world.
Shards
In the beginning, before the blow-pipe […]
[…] stole Gibil’s torch, gifted [me?]
After […] crimes unwritten
[…] the Ziggurat
Vengeance […].
[…] the fall,
her band of beads broken: dancing drops
of fired fear.