THE PLATINUM RAVEN

15 Planets hanging heavy

15   Planets hanging heavy

The Platinum Raven swings her head back down from watching the podium. She stands, steps ahead across the floor and sees the bodies parting like the Red Sea either side of her. A lane of space clears ahead, the bodies like the walls of a tunnel she is sliding down, and either side another space pressed in again to form a tunnel running parallel with this, then another and another, like lanes on a freeway. Rails whine, wires sing. A roadscape fans out, empty and vast on a slim black bridge above a frost-lit gulf. At her in the tunnel on the left comes a car, with the face of a fly and a roar like a burst of metal laughter—stretched out and lowered, as it shoots away behind, to a swollen single bellowed word NO-O-O-O-O-O-O... After the car has gone, the word runs ahead, ringing out among the struts of the bridge across the gulf, magnified through the shrieking of the caverns in the sky to a twang like an orchid blade stabbing out of dust folds. Up from the railing of the bridge on either side spring cables a metre thick, strung far ahead upon the tips of a bridge-tower, lofty and silver in the shape of a guillotine; next to descend rather slower on the other side, dip to pick the road up and soar to a second tower tiny in the air where it pricks the horizon, framed in the bottom of the frame of the first one; then to be lost in a curvature of shadow.

A flap upon the road ahead. Reaching it, she sees it is a cat—or half a cat, the other half a furry jam squeezed on the tarmac. Caught in the headlights, glassy eyes ablaze, fur on end, paws rigid, it recalls a set of bagpipes of muscle clad in velvet. Her cockpit rises, filling up as wine bubbles out from the pedals; and the smoothness of the rising is the smoothness of a blood-let in a warm bath. Moon and stars and fires burn, cruel as an ice-blink. Huddled in the stratosphere, planets hang heavy—tucked up, as if in bed, against a bank of livid clouds. Saturn seeks her out, dead blue eyes peering up from under thin rings. Tiny blind Pluto hisses, icy-black and bat-faced. Uranus transfixes her, with mirrored contact lenses and a smile both delicate and dangerous. But there in the middle of them, licked and caressed by a mane of pale fire, shines the vainest and most captivating beauty of them all: the planet Jupiter, the heavenly equivalent of amber-coloured lovers' eyes and angelfish in mirror mist, radiant in majesty of salmon-marbled bloodlight. It gazes upon her, from its churning red storm, through the mighty revolution of its cloud-belts, and winks, as if to promise she can one day come to live on it forever...

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For some nice reviews and interviews about The Platinum Raven, see http://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-novellas-reviews-media/

For a quick synopsis of it, see http://www.rohanquine.com/the-platinum-raven/synopsis-of-the-platinum-raven/

For some tasters from it, see http://www.rohanquine.com/the-platinum-raven/

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The Platinum Raven is triple convulsion whereby our heroine Raven escalates herself into the Chocolate Raven and then the Platinum Raven, from London to Dubai to the tower in the hills in the desert – then back down again, forever changed. A lot of its action happens in my favourite building, the fabulously flashy Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest skyscraper.