Arthur Davis

Jordan's Journey

 

 

 

A wall of darkness stretched into the night making it impossible for Jordan to go on.

 

He knew the opportunity was lost. He looked around. He was alone. He'd come this far alone, but he could never get used to it. Still, he thought as the darkness crushed out even the faintest shadows below, once in a while a little companionship, someone to share his conquests with, would be welcome. It would have made the discoveries even sweeter.

 

A shearing gust drove him away from sight of the rocky snow ridge and another thousand feet into the heavens. The hundred-mile long escarpment jutted nearly a quarter mile into the murky gloom and at some points its jagged fingers reached five hundred feet higher. The sky was too unfriendly, the stone talons too far away to appreciate, and too dangerous to approach.

 

Maybe scouting along the seductive crest of the snow ridge was a bad idea.

 

It seemed that most of his ideas lately weren't so great. Maybe that's why convincing other first-riders to join him was so difficult. He settled out at about eleven thousand feet and relaxed. It was night. There was nothing more he could do.

 

The air in the fledgling Cumulonimbus—one of a dozen formations whose characteristics he had been rigorously trained to master—was thick with moisture, which started to form a thin film on the surface of his center and six elaborate tendrils. The visibility was down to the tip of his masterpoint, which he flipped from side to side, shedding the water vapor before it congealed. He sensed the presence of other snow crystals but couldn't be positive in the charcoal haze. If they stayed here long, they were doomed. If they thought they could sustain controlled flight in this turbulent formation, they were mad.

 

Though the cloud was undeveloped, he had been cautioned to avoid such formations on more than one occasion. The film spread into the detailing of his tendrils with an unremitting zeal. Super cooled raindrops were forming throughout the base of the cloud. Jordan knew he was taking another foolish risk. If he stayed any longer, he was both mad and doomed.          

 

Flying at night where updrafts were few, inconsistent, or weak was reckless enough, but tempting fate by taunting the erratic nature of a simmering Cumulonimbus defied even his definition of adventure.

 

There was a good chance he'd see lightning if he stayed long enough for the cloud to mature, or the base could rupture unleashing a torrential rainstorm at any moment. Or he could be caught up in a surge of hail and be instantly shattered into a puff of a thousand filaments and twisted tendrils and memories yet to form.

 

Definitely, mad.

 

"Remember what happened last time," Segus had mentioned with unaccustomed vigor, earlier in the sun-cycle.

 

'What happened last time' and the time before that—and for as long as Jordan could recall—was that there had been something that had discouraged the Elders. But after so many cautions and expression of concern and outright appeals they seemed reconciled to the fact that he was not going to be anybody other than who he was. That never gave Segus, his Elder, reason for pride. Rather, it was a constant source of consternation and irritation that his only Stellar was so resolutely disobedient and persistently reckless.

 

Jordan was sucked deeper into the Cumulonimbus and up another thousand feet. That meant he was over a mile from his colony in his own cloud. A mile from home in a dangerous formation that, from the beginning, enticed him and played ever so coyly on the magic of his imagination.

 

He could always smell lightning before it broke through a Cumulonimbus. But there was no guarantee. There was never a guarantee that he would know just when to anticipate the sudden blinding burst of a few hundred million volts that left a searing reddish-yellow tail of hot charged vapor. Jordan knew that was the thrill.

 

He'd never seen a snow ridge before and talk about one was usually dismissed with a peremptory reproach by the Elders. Snow ridges were the sirens of snow crystals and, in the whimsy of a down draft, could mean the death of a million colonies. That was the thrill.

 

And yet they let him go.

 

Maybe it was that they had given up hope. Life was so precarious and so short and there were so many others who needed to learn the wisdom of the Elders that to waste time with such an ill-behaved and uncontrollable crystal seemed foolish, even to Jordan. Was it possible that the modest warning was meant to cut him out of the colony once and for all and sound a clear warning to the others that they must heed the word of the Elders?

 

But were they willing to sacrifice one of their own? To Jordan, a Stellar, the fact that such a disturbing solution made sense had been creeping into his center for some time.

 

He could feel the air change. It was harsh, brittle with possibilities. There was a violence growing, waiting to happen. He flexed his masterpoint underneath his center, the powerful main tendril, which was the basis for flight control in Stellars, flipped him over into a tight loop. He tried another and another and nothing happened. He had tested the Cumulonimbus and won.

 

He relaxed the tip of his masterpoint, searched and finally caught on to the soft edge of a thermal allowing the tentative updraft to take him to thirteen thousand feet where he broke through the cloud-head to a clear ice black sky littered with the memories of other colonies. He was home.

 

"I thought there would be more," he once said to one of the Elders, the first time he saw them dance and sparkle. The tiny yellow dots embedded in the distant blackness were a constant fascination to him and he would leave the colony at any opportunity to gaze wondrously at their soft, curious beauty.

 

Over the horizon he could see tall, dark gray formations and heads of newly formed Cumulonimbus clouds changing, weaving inside and out, and growing as the updrafts and crosscurrents tossed the ice particles and the higher-evolved snow crystals along at breakneck speed. The forest of mounting clouds was moving as the front of a large storm that had been renewed by energy from the Canadian Rockies doubling the size of his colony many times over since Jordan had become a newly formed Stellar snow crystal.

 

The memories that covered the night sky saddened Jordan and implied a foreboding he had felt for some time. There were his ancestors, and his ancestors’ ancestors, and he wondered if a common snow crystal such as he had ever reached such a lofty station.

 

There were those snow crystals in the colony he knew had great potential and, while he was modest about his abilities, he had been overlooked at every point. No one had ever taken notice of him and matters had only gotten worse in recent sun-cycles. After he became a first-rider his burning fascination for exploration and adventure were the only evidence he had that he existed.

 

The more he ventured out on his own, the more he was shunned. The more he was shunned, the more he felt the need to venture out, if only to soothe the loneliness that flew just over his center as his shadowy seventh tendril.

 

"We must stand together. We must stay together," one of the Capped Column

Elders said echoing the core of the colony's conviction.

 

"...stand together," he repeated as he floated a few hundred feet over the gray cloud bank.

 

And yet they let him go.

 

The sight of mountains of billowing white foam for hundreds of miles in every direction marching like an endless column of soldiers ready to do battle filled him with awe.

 

Ever since his first wanderings from the colony, fear had been a constant companion waiting just out of reach of his six sharp latticed points. But it was only an hour ago when he twisted his long crystal masterpoint, allowing him to pivot on the updraft and move out beyond the edge and safety of the colony, that he experienced real fear.

 

The voices of his Elders, the memories of his few friends, the yet unclear inherited instincts, and the cold embers of tradition that had been drummed into his head before hewould graduate from ice crystal to snow crystal were drowned out by fear as he lurched up and sideways directing his masterpoint toward the snow ridge that was the last bulkhead of the Canadian Shield passing under him.

 

"...the thermal vortex that guards snow ridges can reach up ten thousand feet into the clouds and drag down a lifetime of colonies," the lesson ran.

 

He'd been a poor student, believing instead that learning came with doing and doing came with a deeper desire to learn. He explained this to Segus one afternoon and wondered if any other first-riders shared this conviction. The youthful crystals lacked experience, and required rigorous tutoring and were notoriously ignorant of much.

 

He remembered the Elder's advice, his hopes for his future and admonitions for his behavior and knew, as he floated alone, that he'd misjudged the distance. Getting back to his colony would be difficult with the headwind that drove the Cumulonimbus across the face of the snow ridge below.

 

Jordan watched as the cloud disc of his colony spread out over the horizon. It was now over three miles away and disappearing into another layer of darkness as part of a formation that was breaking off from the main storm front and heading toward calmer air. Even with the limited movement and control that he'd been able to master, Jordan knew he'd already taken on one adventure too many.

 

He tightened his six tendrils and waited. The air shook and the sky cracked open beneath him with a violent explosion. The discharge of energy sent him hurtling upwards as a salvo of thick, blinding yellow bolts of lightning flashed down from the haze of the cloud cap, hammering the snow ridge below.

 

The snow ridge had bested him.

 

Jordan had bested the lightning.

 

But he was alone. The sirens had won.

 

 

 

Arthur Davis is a management consultant and has been quoted in The New York Times, Crain’s New York Business and interviewed on New York TV News Channel 1.  He has taught at the New School University, lectures on leadership skills for CEO’s and has given testimony as an expert on best practices before United States Senator John McCain's investigating committee on boxing reform and appeared as an expert witness on best practices before The New York State Commission on Corruption in Boxing.

 

He has written 11 novels and over 130 short stories. Over 50 stories have been published in 35 magazines online and in print. The Amsterdam Quarterly (the Netherlands) hosted their 2014 Yearbook East Coast launch party on January 17th 2015 at the Anne Frank Center in NYC.  He was one of the guest authors and read from Roy’s Desert Motel, which they published in September 2014.

 

The editors of Calliope, the official publication of the Writers' Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. nominated his story, "Conversation in Black," for the 2015 Pushcart Prize.