A fable-like tale of a small community afflicted by a mysterious plague   Juxtaposing barbarity and whimsy, Brian Conn’s The Fixed Stars is a novel that has the tenor of a contemporary fable with nearly the same dreamlike logic.   At the novel’s heart are the John’s Day celebration and the interactions of a small community dealing with a mystery disease. Routinely citizens are quarantined and then reintegrated into society in rituals marked by a haunting brutality. The infected and the healthy alike are quarantined. In a culture that has retreated from urbanism into a more pastoral society, the woman who nurtures spiders and the man who spins hemp exist alongside the mass acceptance of sexual promiscuity. Conn delivers a compelling portrait of a calamitous era, one tormented by pestilence, disease, violence, and post–late capitalism. An unflinching look at a world impossible to situate in time, The Fixed Stars is mythic and darkly magical. “Brian Conn’s wonderfully perilous crossbreeding of Science Fiction and innovative prose reads like what might result if Dhalgren and A Canticle for Leibowitz engaged in salacious acts with The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Fixed Stars is a funny, absurd, and beatifically strange book, one in which you simultaneously have the feeling that not one word is out of place and that everything that language brings to us opens onto a void. The Fixed Stars is the future of the future, and it is a truly outstanding debut.” —Brian Evenson, author of The Wavering Knife and Altmann's Tongue “With bits of machinery culled from post-apocalyptic science fiction, gothic horror, and ancient myth and ritual, Brian Conn has built a beguiling puzzle box of a novel. The Fixed Stars is a thorny, disjunctive fable that unfolds like a nightblooming flower. This is strange, intoxicating stuff.” —Jedediah Berry, author of The Manual of Detection   Brian Conn studies mathematics in southern Rhode Island. He is coeditor of the journal Birkensnake . THE FIXED STARS Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season By Brian Conn FC2 Copyright © 2010 Brian Conn All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-57366-153-9 Contents 1 THE ROPEMAKER'S DAUGHTER.....................................................92 ABLUTION IN HELICAL STRUCTURE................................................533 THE GREEN DOOR...............................................................834 JOHN'S DAY...................................................................1375 THE SNOW PAGEANT.............................................................2036 MERCURY......................................................................265 Chapter One THE ROPEMAKER'S DAUGHTER 1.1 The Speech of the Old Man I am a humble servant of people. In this world we work together. You are a woman of fierce intelligence and I can see that you have been thoroughly educated; I need hardly explain to you why we people can survive only together and never apart. There can be no more devouring of one another in those prisons which I shall forbear to name-you know the prisons of which I speak. The race of people does not have it easy. There is not much luck for us. The race of people finds trouble where we ought to find trouble, for trouble purifies us: the philosopher reminds us that person is the animal that is purified by striving. But you distrust me, Molly, and not without reason; for have you not stumbled upon me sleeping beside this crossroads, with neither partner nor visible handiwork, with hair on my head and a velvet girdle round my body, and with the mien of one untutored in the love of people? And therefore perhaps you think that, disdaining the labors which civilization requires, I occupy myself instead with concealing my scalp under hair and my form under velvet. But discard the notion, Molly, even as we discard certain other notions which I shall forbear to mention; for enigmas of every description surround us, as fog surrounds the sea: even a head covered in hair may contemplate essential labors; even on the hearts of the garishly clad may be graven the image of darkness. We people were born to strive, and there are none who strive more than I. Even when people lived in those deranged collectivities the name of which offends decency-even then they hardly strove more than I now strive. Just as the chemist compounds elixirs, just as the beekeeper nurtures bees, just as you weave these ropes which I see here in your wagon, so too do I strive on behalf of our civilization, with this difference: that my striving surpasses that of all others. For the charge laid on me brings me each day into the greatest imaginable peril. You scoff and harden your heart against me-and rightly, Molly, rightly. "This old man," you say, "thinking himself what he no doubt calls an intellectual, will end by presenting to me a dream of those towers and homes of depraved design which for so many centuries he