This is another tale of the Kennedy Space Center's multiverses, both in the distant past and the far future.
Follow ghosts, demons, gods, AIs, tourists, DNA experiments, vamps, and witches as they travel the multiverse only to discover their interconnections as allies and enemies across an endless history or future.
Every story is the true story.
Gods of the Nile
Music pours on mortals, pushing the boat up the Nile.
Excursions in the cool spring days and star-diamond evenings, sky turns to fire, dawn, and dusk.
Screened by rows of potted palms, the goddess and her mortal servant twined, momentarily baffled by repressed exclamations; wet gowns clung.
Eileen twisted and gazed upon her goddess, sinuous lines of her waist curved with promise, "I am thy devoted servant; isn't that enough?"
"My Husband Horus," said the goddess in beautiful disdain, terrified at the new secret understanding in her beautiful eyes. Muti-verse altered by their appointed rendezvous.
Eileen drowning in her goddess's eyes, curly lashes sweeping the flushed cheeks, sweet mystery, dangerous glean.
Ophelia lynx-eyed, wife-consort to the God Horus, brimming with emotion shadowed in copper tresses across her face and pliant figure.
Magical moment of breathlessness when eyes met with implied consent.
First kiss, pleasure close and easy strangely off-balance, cinnamon, wild rose thorn danger and promise of coming storms.
Their kiss, "That was nice," said Eileen, whispered in a state of panting wonder as she had been through a storm of falling ice or subjected to some beach-tossed rip current.
Ophelia's eyes danced with sudden amusement, empire of cinnamon curls in disarray, more witch-like than ever, with an uncontrollable smile twitching the corners of her kissable mouth.
Eileen trembled from head to foot as Ophelia placed Eileen's hand under her ear and leaned upon the warm hand. Copper braids tickled like static shocks.
"My goddess, I am a colt without a halter," whispered Eileen.
"Resilience in the face of special difficulties," said the goddess. "How you bewilder me."
Curious confusion of impulses and vexed questions conjured out of the river mists; they stood gazing, rapt in the contemplation and fascination hand in hand, as the barge passed another temple where priests in SCAPE suits chanted "CPU Forced reboot, Falcon 9 launch on Monday!"
Nile Crocodiles splashed into muddy water.
More kisses and proximity, the sacred hush of the cooling river winds.
Orange sun settled behind the river palms, and the firmament began to twinkle like night jewels. The women laughed and called for their coffee.
"You seem to understand women," said Ophelia with a puzzling smile and unquestionable admiration for the mortal's pretty face crowned by thick, gold plaits and luminous eyes.
"My Goddess, your presence, my rejuvenation, the sanctuary of forbidden affection, my promise," said Eileen.
Eileen dared. "My goddess, what is the bruise upon your nape?"
Ophelia wept.
Horus, the god whose head was a falcon, king of the sky and fertility, also wept. Tears leaked from his one eye, and viscous fluid leaked from his missing eye.
His eye, the price in the war to defeat his uncle Seth.
For Horus, disguised as the barge captain Marcus, rapt in the contemplation of love, tortured with perplexity, rage, jealousy, and love, his wife-consort, the sensual embodiment of art and poetry, lay with another.
His tears splashed on the decking of the barge, blending the DNA of any insect it happened to touch.
Diminishing fury, as it were, against the dazed and confused background of the war with Seth, he languished at his disfigurement. No creature ever created by the gods was as beautiful as a falcon, and he was now marred.
In shame, he watched the two lovers, and his good eye blinked. Even a god could learn something new.
A hawk's cry echoed across the muddy Nile.
Eileen and the goddess slept and dreamed the same dreams.
Spectral dreams, excursions in a field azure delicious climate of central Florida, amid the emerald magnificence of orange groves, sublime citrus flowers surrounded by fire-stained launch towers, Eileen and Ophelia walked alone, hand in hand. Cinnamon pheromones.
Two sonic booms echoed, and a space shuttle dropped from orbit, a glider towards an unseen runway. Two white chase jets followed.
They woke, embarrassed to talk of metal-sky birds.
"How you bewilder," whispered Ophelia.
A flood of blushes swept Eileen's neck, cheeks, and forehead—clash of thought and doubt, wrong and right, intermingling sweeping passion.
"I have a gift," said Eileen, who presented her goddess with a pendant. "The jewel warns of the storm of approaching seizures. It will flash carmine, your forest shelter in a summer storm."
The goddess felt an uncontrollable smile twitching the corners of her mouth, of tenderness and divine emotion and bent her head to allow Eileen to place the pendant around her neck.
Sighing with the purest affection.
"How did you get the bruise on your neck?" Eileen dared to ask again.
A hawk's cry echoed from across the palm-lined river.
The goddess who missed her god fell to the deck, shaking in rigid convulsions.
Coffee, black, dark, and edgy sky, whispering rain.
Soft lies and laughter taste of flint and iron sparks.
Midnight lighting on the river, support of dangerous illusions
Electron chains of midnight stars, the innermost framework of neural connections settled, equilibrium regained.
The seizure ended.
The goddess opened her eyes, unspeakably charming but bewildered by the sight of the glimmering of dawn.
My Horus thought Ophelia.
Eileen rubbed myrrh oil and balsam to calm her fallen goddess, terrified at how the ground rumbled and the Nile river flowed backward when Ophelia shook, legs rigid, eyes rolled back, unseeing, unhearing, senses rocked, neural network shorting out.
A nearby falcon or hawk had cried in alarm.
Eminently raving in madness, Ophelia screamed at her servant Eileen and placed two powerful slaps to carmine her cheeks. A flock of Ibis flashed carmine eyes and fled at the sound of the double slaps.
"Your fault! Dung of a beetle! You pressed me about my neck when you have no right to intrude on such things!"
Her rage was like fine gold glimmering in beautiful eyes. Copper hair fell about her in nimble curls, god-rage an unforeseen twist of events.
Ophelia fell to the decking again, rigid and unseeing. Eileen whimpered at the cloud of cinnamon and hydrazine that washed over her.
"Break down, go ahead and give it to me, my goddess, neurotic, psychotic, lazy, spoiled, self-centered bitch, erratic and demanding in beauty. Servants clean my mess; my rooms are filthy, married to a freak bird-headed god," hissed Eileen, feeling her cheek swell in pain. "Play with fire, my love."
Intimate understanding of the cost of love.
Eileen could feel her own beautiful eyes marred by the slaps and scratches of sharpened nails. She whimpered, recalling their first kiss, salt, and taste of garlic.
Wild rose thorns did not make sense until the crimson of her cheeks burned like a candle flame, and a single drop of blood fell from her nose to splash upon her shaking goddess.
The crimson connectivity and pain called love.
Eileen tasted the second drop of blood from her nose and smiled faintly.
Overwhelmed by a delicious sense of happiness of watching her goddess shaking on the floor, half pleasure of redemption, half pain of concern.
The barge captain, a handsome peasant, had been staring too long at them. He would have to be beaten.
Eileen snarled at Marcus. "Peasant! Be aware of your station!"
Marcus lowered his gaze to the river and rudder.
Allurement out of the unseen, with a sigh and looking absently around, making the air rich with her breath, the wife of Horus woke, graceful in conversation, the curved sensitive mouth evoking power.
Ophelia had no recollection or concern about the disciplining of her servant.
Milky Way nights, the scent of jasmine sitting close to each other, susceptible to female charms, the goddess and servant resolved to kiss again under the whispering of the palms.
"Life, a single moment of precious time and reflection of keen suffering," said Ophelia.
The servant said nothing as she stroked cinnamon curls; a servant's life was keen suffering with no need to brood on the mystery of the gods and their servants.
Eileen kissed Ophelia's neck under her ear, light and gentle, suggestive.
The goddess tilted her chin back to expose her neck to more gentle nibbles and melodious whispers in the intimate evening.
"The bruise on my neck?" said the goddess Ophelia. "Horus, my consort, my love, is rough." She laughed impulsively, eccentric assertion.
"My hawk-headed god, his beak.
Has my pretty-eyed Eileen seen how the sea hawks mate? Or the common rooster? My Horus cannot help himself when his beak grasps my neck," admitted Ophelia. "Making love to a god is not the same as a mortal, and his DNA is so powerful it crosses boundaries set by the gods."
Eileen gasped at the implication, "You birth nestlings?" And she winced, prepared to receive another stinging slap of brilliant and varied hues.
"I meant no interposition, my goddess," begged Eileen. She noted Marcus the peasant was staring again.
A precious hoard of tears leaked from Ophelia.
"Quantum mechanics!" wailed Ophelia. "Quantum biology, sperm, and ova, Horus's very existence, his power causes the hydrogen bonds of the double helix DNA strands to shred, and protons to jump, tunnel, and skip across thermally activated cells, errors pass through the replication machinery in the cell, resulting in chimera!
My children, double helix cursed, magical quantum mechanics the curse!"
The god Horus, disguised as Marcus, the boat captain, leaned hard on the tiller of the barge to avoid a hippopotamus and considered his wife's wail.
"I disagree," hissed Marcus. He was eminently proud of his children.
Pageant of life, disregard the divinely fixed limits of DNA, increasing exuberance of fatherhood, scented storm clouds of cinnamon. Pride at the exquisite modeling of his children, handsome features of feathers and furs blended with the artist's exclamation of surprise and admiration.
Divine emotion of parenthood! Exquisite falcon feathers, his pride a tumultuous tidal flow of sweet eccentricities worthy of a sky god.
Eileen gazed at her goddess in stupefied fascination; Ophelia was also a servant, celestial fashion, consort to a hawk-headed god susceptible to twisting the double helix at will and curiosity, DNA a simple tangram, plaything for the gods. Perambulate through eternity producing mutants?
Fledglings. A rare glimpse of Ophelia's pain: how does one breastfeed a beaked fledgling?
Eileen, her eyes quizzical, envious, glowing, half blushing, smiled deeply, ingenuity to improve one's station in life.
Entry to the star systems of the Galactic, inhabitable worlds smothered in the luscious sweetness of heavy datura bells floating among enhanced hemp-dark leaves in ancient rocket gardens, marble temples dedicated to the powerful, embodiments of twisted DNA, the glittering sanctuaries inhabited by divinities, chimeras, special mortals and failed humpback mutants.
Cursory illusion of the hawk-headed god imperiously pinching her neck, fever-rate gymnastic effort to create handsome hawklike fledglings, a conceivable consideration?
My God.
Slip the blade into the shaking goddess and place the guilty tool in the grasp of the impertinent barge captain?
The enchanted night was warm; ravens circled, flashing carmine eyes.
The stars were temporarily blocked from sight as a red-headed Harpy passed overhead screeching, "Wip-por-will-I-am free," "Wip-por-will-I-am free!"
"Freeee!"
Other tails of the Space Center:
Vampires of Kennedy Space Center
Demons of Kennedy Space Center
Demons of Kennedy Space Center, corpus callosotomy
Ghosts of Kennedy Space Center
Dreams of Kennedy Space Center
Aliens of Kennedy Space Center
Director of Kennedy Space Center
Hitchhikers of Kennedy Space Center
Witches of Kennedy Space Center
Cave Bears of Kennedy Space Center
Chimeras of Kennedy Space Center
Gods of Kennedy Space Center and the Nile
Dinosaurs of Kennedy Space Center
Kayakers of Kennedy Space Center
Remembering Kennedy Space Center
Shadows of Kennedy Space Center
Starman of Kennedy Space Center
Gate Jumpers of Kennedy Space Center
Allies of Kennedy Space Center (Pt 2 of Gate Jumpers
Savants of Kennedy Space Center
Gene Splicers of Kennedy Space Center
State Security of Kennedy Space Center
Rescuers of Kennedy Space Center
Ferals of Kennedy Space Center
Return HOME from Gods of Kennedy Space Center page
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Author Bruce Ryba at Kennedy Space Center Launch Pad 39B & Artemis 1. "We are going to the Moon!"
Author's discussion (that's me) on You Tube of a book review on Amazon
For the video versions of information, please check out my YouTube Channel (Turkeys, Flintknapping, dive stories etc.)
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