PIRATES ALWAYS TALK ABOUT THE POWERS

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The Baroque Star Swamp Incident

Pirates always talk about the Powers. Nobody knows exactly what they are, but everybody wants a piece of the action.

We had figured out how to navigate the Abyss Superhighway. Open it here, step through, and suddenly you’re over there. Sirius, the Pleiades, or some forgotten celestial backwater where the laws of physics have been suspended pending investigation.

My involvement began in childhood, manufacturing enormous words I didn’t understand. Later, my alchemy guru suggested babbling nonsense until it organized itself into language. He’d attended a mediumship program where people contacted something called a Higher Power.

Higher Power! Good heavens! It sounded like Alcoholics Anonymous had taken over the occult establishment.

Meanwhile, I’d been investigating grimoires. The Black Pullet, the Lemegeton, Abramelin, the Necronomicon. All terribly disappointing. Their authors wanted gold, obedient demons, revenge, and occasionally somebody else’s wife.

Such miserable ambitions!

My desires extended across geological epochs and innumerable universes. I wasn’t interested in murdering anybody with psychic artillery. I wanted to investigate infinity.

Then I discovered the Al Azif, supposedly the screaming of insects in the desert night.

Magnificent!

Break those screams into syllables, give each sound a sigil, and arrange them into a little choo-choo train of power.

ZAX ZAX ZAZ ZAY!

Repeat the symbols until pictures emerge from the accumulated marks.

I’d already abandoned Tarot cards for piles of words, experimental poetry, and dictionary collages. I even programmed poetry in BASIC. Eventually DDG arrived, producing extraordinary visual accidents that became the raw material of my Baroque Star Swamp.

Then things got complicated.

I possessed a Master of the Temple Intergalactic Pass, which permitted unrestricted travel along the Abyss Superhighway.

One afternoon I returned from the Pleiades carrying a small piece of cosmic lint in my pocket.

I tossed it into the laundry.

Two weeks later the laundry had developed seventeen eyes, several hundred teeth, and the appetite of a bankrupt insurance company.

The creature occupied an enormous wicker basket beneath the golden arches of my apartment. Its tentacles crawled through the furniture while galaxies spun overhead. The cat watched from the windowsill with the professional indifference of an experienced metaphysician.

This was serious.

I opened the Abyss directly behind the creature.

A tremendous violet vortex erupted, swallowing shirts, socks, underwear, and the entire unauthorized biological experiment.

I slammed the portal shut.

Somewhere between Sirius and the Pleiades, a monstrous laundry basket was now travelling without identification.

The cat continued watching the moon.

And I finally understood the fundamental problem with ceremonial magic.

Everybody worries about losing their sanity.

But sanity was never the issue.

The real danger begins when the universe starts taking your experiments seriously, and you discover that your imagination has been operating without adequate customs inspections.