<div class="luna-Ent"><span class="me">spasm</span>  <span class="pronset"><span class="show_ipapr" style="display:none;"><span class="prondelim">/</span><span class="pron">ˈspæz<img class="luna-Img" border="0" src="http://cache.lexico.com/dictionary/graphics/luna/thinsp.png" alt="" />əm</span><span class="prondelim">/</span><span class="pron_toggle" style="display:none;"><span class="prondelim"> - </span></span></span><span class="show_spellpr" style="display:inline;"><span class="prondelim">[</span><span class="pron"><b>spaz</b>-<i>uh</i><img class="luna-Img" border="0" src="http://cache.lexico.com/dictionary/graphics/luna/thinsp.png" alt="" />m</span><span class="prondelim">]</span><span class="pron_toggle" style="display:none;"><span class="prondelim"> - </span></span></span> </span><br /><div class="body"><span class="pg">–noun </span>
<table class="luna-Ent"><tr><td valign="top" class="dn">1.</td><td valign="top"><span class="labset"><span><span class="ital-inline">Pathology</span></span>. </span>a sudden, abnormal, involuntary muscular contraction, consisting of a continued muscular contraction <span class="secondary-bf"><b>(tonic spasm)</b> </span>or of a series of alternating muscular contractions and relaxations <span class="secondary-bf"><b>(clonic spasm)</b>.</span> </td></tr></table><table class="luna-Ent"><tr><td valign="top" class="dn">2.</td><td valign="top">any sudden, brief spell of great energy, activity, feeling, etc. </td></tr></table>
He stood in the shade of the bank of the Seigen River, having walked yards away from the house, and family, momentarily weary of the company. He stood six feet two inches in height. His hair was a dusty white color, his eyebrows a darker shade of black. He had a well-proportioned frame and a suffuecuent amount of muscle, but he lacked any trace of fat; his muscles showed clearly beneath the skin, giving him an appearance of thinness.
The same leanness added intensity and, falsely, a hint of villainy to his face. When he smiled, it seemed he might be thinking something unplesant or planing mischeif. His voice did little to help this impression, as gruff and cold as it was. His clothes tended to be proffesional. His faveorite outfit was an old red jacket - he wore now - a black vest and matching pants. His shoes were sturdy military issuie boots, perfect for the harsh use they often saw in the feilds around his home. Wind hissed through the branches of a tree overhead.
Looking up, peering between the black silhouettes of leaves he saw the thick spill of stars. He knew all the constellations, knew how the stars were born (as much as everyone else did anyway) and how they grew old and how some died. Still, the stars were seldom more than lights on a deep blue velvet. Only once in a great while could he make them fill out and see them for what they were, far participants in an intricate play.
Voices carried over the woods. On the broad single story cabin's porch, vaulting on sturdy concrete pillars above the fern-and tree-covered bluff, a new visitor sat, looking at him curiously.
Below him, the river flowed with a whispering rumble. Still squatting, he slid down the bank on the heels of his thoroughly muddy boots and dipped his long-fingered hands into the cold water.
All things are connected to a contented man. He looked up again at the sky.
"God damn," he said in awe, his eyes moistening. "I love it all"
Something padded close to him in the dark, sniffling. He tensed, then recognized the eager whine. The three month old dog, Holt, had followed him down to the river. He felt the pup's cold nose against his outstretched palm and rumpled the dogs head and ears in his outstretched hands.
"Why'd you come all the way down here? Nothing intresting back home?"
Holt sat in the dirt, rump wriggling, tail swishing through the damp leaves. THe pup's moist brown marble eyes reflected twin-star glints.
"Call of the wild" he said on the dogs behalf. Holt leaped away and pounced his forepaws into the water.
Turning back from the river, he made his way back to the cabin.
Marty, his son; a bright, quiet boy of eight, spectrally thin; played with his cousin on the sward below and east of the patio. Becky, a pretty hellion with more apparent energy than sense - excusable for her age - had brought along a monkey hand puppet. To give it voice she made high-pitched chattering noises, more birdlike than monkeylike.
Marty's giggle, excited and girlish, flew out through the tops of the trees. He had hopeless crush on Becky. Here, in isolation - with nobody
else to distract her - she did not spurn him, but she often chided him, in a voice full of dignity, for his "boogy" ways. "Boogy" meant any number of things, none of them good. Marty accepted these comments in blinking silence, too young to understand how deeply they hurt him.
They had lived in the cabin for six months, since the end of Raven's stint as science advisor to the President of Ubboth. He had used that time to catch up on his reading, consuming a whole month's worth of astronomical and scientific journals in a day, consulting on aerospace projects one or two days a week, flying north to Tuis or south to Segun once a more.
Charlot had gladly returned from the capital social hurricane to her studies of ancient nomadic peoples, whom she knew and understood far more that he understood the stars. She had worked on this project since her days at Tuis, slowly, steadily accumulating her evidence, pointing toward (he thought, rather obvious) conclusion that the great ecological factory of the steppes of Tuis had spun forth or stimulated virtually every great movement in history. Eventually she would turn it all into a book; indeed, she already had well over two thousand pages of text on disk. In his eyes, part of his wife's charm was this dichotomy: resourceful mother without, bulldog scholar within.
The Comm rang three times before Charlot could travel from the patio to answer it. Her voice came through the open bedroom window facing the river.
"I'll find him," She told the caller.
Sighing he stood, pushing on the corduroy covering his bony knees.
"Raven!"
"Yeah?"
"Riley from Segun, Are you available?"
"Sure," He said, less reluctantly. Riley was not a close friend, merely an aquaintance, but over the years they had established a pact, that each would inform the other of interesting developments before most of the scientific community or the general media had heard of them. Raven climbed the path up the bank in the dark, knowing each root and slippery patch of mud and leaves, whistling softly. Holt bounded through the ferns.
Marty watched him owlishly from the edge of the lawn, under the wild plum tree, the monkey puppet hanging loose and grotesque on his hand.
"Is Holt with you?"
The dog followed, ears and eyes locked on the monkey, which he wanted passionately.
"When can we get the telescope out, Dad?" Marty asked.
He grabbed Holt's collar and bent down to hug him fiercly. THe dog yelped and cranned his neck to nip air as the monkey's plastic face poked him in the withers.
"A little later. Tell Mom."
"She'll get it?" Marty was passing through a stage of doubting his mother's technical skills. This irritated him.
"She's used it more than I have buddy."
"All RIGHT!" Marty enthused, releasing the dog, droping the puppet and running for the steps ahead of Raven. Holt immediatly grabbed the monkey by the throat and shook it, growling. Raven followed his son, turned left in the hallway past the freezer chest, and picked up his office extension.
"Riley, what a suprise," he said affably.
"Raven, I hope I'm the first." Riley's voice was a higher tenor than usual.
"Try me."
"Have you heard about Tevis?"
"Tevis?"
"Tevis. Renal's fifth moon."
"What about it?"
"Its gone."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Theres been a search. The Realst's still strong out there, but it hasn't been aimed at Tevis for weeks. The Local long range satilites have turned cameras to where Tevis should be, but there's nothing big enough to photograph. If it were there, it would come out of occulation again in about ten minutes. But nobody expects to see it. Calls from ameuters have been flooding in for sixteen hours."
Raven couldn't shift gears fast enough to think how to react.
"I'm Sorry?"
"It's not painted black, It's not hiding, It's just gone. Nobody saw it go either."
Riley was a rotund, crew-cut, plaid sports-coated kind of scientist, shy in person but not on the Comm, deeply conservative. He had always been critically deficient in the humor department. He had never pulled Raven's leg on anything.
"What do they think happened?"
"Nobody knows, Nobody's even venturing a guess. Theres going to be a big press conferance here tommorow."
Raven pinched his cheek speculatively.
"Did it explode? Something hit it?"
"Can't say, can we?"
He could almost hear a smile in his voice. Riley did not smile unless he was faced with a truly bizarre problem.
"No data. I've got about seventy other people to call now. Keep in touch, Raven."
"Thanks."
He hung up, still pinching his cheek. The smoothness of the moment by the river had passed. He stood by the phone for a moment, frowning, then walked into the master bedroom.
Charlot reached high to rummage through the top shelf of the bedroom closet, Marty at her heels.
In their Seventeen years together, his wife had moved over the line from voluptuos to zoftig to plump. The physical contrast between Raven and Charlot, all curves and fulfilling grace, was obvious; equally obvious was the fact that what others saw in them, they did not see in each other. She tended to wear folk art print dresses, and much of her wardrobe was a stylish aquiescence to matronliness.
Yet in his thoughts, she was eternally as he had first seen her, walking up a sunny white-sanded beach in the southern portion of the continent, wearing a brief one piece swimsuit, her long black hair loose in the breeze. She had been the sexiest woman he had ever known, and she still was.
"What did Riley want?" She asked
"Tevis's disappeared"
"Tevs?" Charlot smiled over her shoulder and straightened, passing the bag to him.
"Tevis. Renal's fifth moon."
"Oh. How?"
Raven made a face then shrugged. He took the telescope and its painted grey metal base and carried them outside, Holt snorting at his heels.
"Uh-oh, kids. Dad's in robot mode," Charlot called from the bedroom. "What did Riley really say?" She followed him down the stairs and onto the lawn, where he pressed the telescope base into the soft grass and soil.
"That's what he really said," Raven replied, dropping the red ball of the reflector gently into into the three hollowed branches of the base.
"Its not secret or anything is it?"
"I truly doubt such a thing can be kept secret," Raven replied, peering into one eyepiece.
"Can you see Renal from here? I mean, tonight?"
"I think so, Tevis is one of the most prominent moons, spotted in the early days of telescopes-"
Raven had Renal in view, a bright spot in the middle of the grey-blue field. Stars formed a resolving fog in the background. Two pointlike moons, one bright and one quite dim, were clearly visible on one side of the brighter planet. The dim one was either Ioto or Vallio, the brightest probably Ganisto. The third was either in transit across the planet or in Renal's cone of shadow, eclipsed-- or behind the planet, occulted. He tried to remember the laws regarding the first three moons: The longitude of the first satellite, minus three times that of the second, plus twice that of the third, is always equal to half the circumferance... He had memorized that in highschool, but it did him a fat lot of good now. He murmured the consequences of the law to himself:
"The first three moons-that includes Tevis- can never be all eclipsed at once, nor can they all be in front of the disk at once... ah hell."
He couldnt remember the details. He would just have to sit and wait for the four to be visible all at once, or for the three to make an appearance
"Can we see?" Marty said
"Sure. I'm going to be out here all night, probobaly."
<table class="luna-Ent"><tr><td valign="top" class="dn">1.</td><td valign="top"><span class="labset"><span><span class="ital-inline">Pathology</span></span>. </span>a sudden, abnormal, involuntary muscular contraction, consisting of a continued muscular contraction <span class="secondary-bf"><b>(tonic spasm)</b> </span>or of a series of alternating muscular contractions and relaxations <span class="secondary-bf"><b>(clonic spasm)</b>.</span> </td></tr></table><table class="luna-Ent"><tr><td valign="top" class="dn">2.</td><td valign="top">any sudden, brief spell of great energy, activity, feeling, etc. </td></tr></table>
He stood in the shade of the bank of the Seigen River, having walked yards away from the house, and family, momentarily weary of the company. He stood six feet two inches in height. His hair was a dusty white color, his eyebrows a darker shade of black. He had a well-proportioned frame and a suffuecuent amount of muscle, but he lacked any trace of fat; his muscles showed clearly beneath the skin, giving him an appearance of thinness.
The same leanness added intensity and, falsely, a hint of villainy to his face. When he smiled, it seemed he might be thinking something unplesant or planing mischeif. His voice did little to help this impression, as gruff and cold as it was. His clothes tended to be proffesional. His faveorite outfit was an old red jacket - he wore now - a black vest and matching pants. His shoes were sturdy military issuie boots, perfect for the harsh use they often saw in the feilds around his home. Wind hissed through the branches of a tree overhead.
Looking up, peering between the black silhouettes of leaves he saw the thick spill of stars. He knew all the constellations, knew how the stars were born (as much as everyone else did anyway) and how they grew old and how some died. Still, the stars were seldom more than lights on a deep blue velvet. Only once in a great while could he make them fill out and see them for what they were, far participants in an intricate play.
Voices carried over the woods. On the broad single story cabin's porch, vaulting on sturdy concrete pillars above the fern-and tree-covered bluff, a new visitor sat, looking at him curiously.
Below him, the river flowed with a whispering rumble. Still squatting, he slid down the bank on the heels of his thoroughly muddy boots and dipped his long-fingered hands into the cold water.
All things are connected to a contented man. He looked up again at the sky.
"God damn," he said in awe, his eyes moistening. "I love it all"
Something padded close to him in the dark, sniffling. He tensed, then recognized the eager whine. The three month old dog, Holt, had followed him down to the river. He felt the pup's cold nose against his outstretched palm and rumpled the dogs head and ears in his outstretched hands.
"Why'd you come all the way down here? Nothing intresting back home?"
Holt sat in the dirt, rump wriggling, tail swishing through the damp leaves. THe pup's moist brown marble eyes reflected twin-star glints.
"Call of the wild" he said on the dogs behalf. Holt leaped away and pounced his forepaws into the water.
Turning back from the river, he made his way back to the cabin.
Marty, his son; a bright, quiet boy of eight, spectrally thin; played with his cousin on the sward below and east of the patio. Becky, a pretty hellion with more apparent energy than sense - excusable for her age - had brought along a monkey hand puppet. To give it voice she made high-pitched chattering noises, more birdlike than monkeylike.
Marty's giggle, excited and girlish, flew out through the tops of the trees. He had hopeless crush on Becky. Here, in isolation - with nobody
else to distract her - she did not spurn him, but she often chided him, in a voice full of dignity, for his "boogy" ways. "Boogy" meant any number of things, none of them good. Marty accepted these comments in blinking silence, too young to understand how deeply they hurt him.
They had lived in the cabin for six months, since the end of Raven's stint as science advisor to the President of Ubboth. He had used that time to catch up on his reading, consuming a whole month's worth of astronomical and scientific journals in a day, consulting on aerospace projects one or two days a week, flying north to Tuis or south to Segun once a more.
Charlot had gladly returned from the capital social hurricane to her studies of ancient nomadic peoples, whom she knew and understood far more that he understood the stars. She had worked on this project since her days at Tuis, slowly, steadily accumulating her evidence, pointing toward (he thought, rather obvious) conclusion that the great ecological factory of the steppes of Tuis had spun forth or stimulated virtually every great movement in history. Eventually she would turn it all into a book; indeed, she already had well over two thousand pages of text on disk. In his eyes, part of his wife's charm was this dichotomy: resourceful mother without, bulldog scholar within.
The Comm rang three times before Charlot could travel from the patio to answer it. Her voice came through the open bedroom window facing the river.
"I'll find him," She told the caller.
Sighing he stood, pushing on the corduroy covering his bony knees.
"Raven!"
"Yeah?"
"Riley from Segun, Are you available?"
"Sure," He said, less reluctantly. Riley was not a close friend, merely an aquaintance, but over the years they had established a pact, that each would inform the other of interesting developments before most of the scientific community or the general media had heard of them. Raven climbed the path up the bank in the dark, knowing each root and slippery patch of mud and leaves, whistling softly. Holt bounded through the ferns.
Marty watched him owlishly from the edge of the lawn, under the wild plum tree, the monkey puppet hanging loose and grotesque on his hand.
"Is Holt with you?"
The dog followed, ears and eyes locked on the monkey, which he wanted passionately.
"When can we get the telescope out, Dad?" Marty asked.
He grabbed Holt's collar and bent down to hug him fiercly. THe dog yelped and cranned his neck to nip air as the monkey's plastic face poked him in the withers.
"A little later. Tell Mom."
"She'll get it?" Marty was passing through a stage of doubting his mother's technical skills. This irritated him.
"She's used it more than I have buddy."
"All RIGHT!" Marty enthused, releasing the dog, droping the puppet and running for the steps ahead of Raven. Holt immediatly grabbed the monkey by the throat and shook it, growling. Raven followed his son, turned left in the hallway past the freezer chest, and picked up his office extension.
"Riley, what a suprise," he said affably.
"Raven, I hope I'm the first." Riley's voice was a higher tenor than usual.
"Try me."
"Have you heard about Tevis?"
"Tevis?"
"Tevis. Renal's fifth moon."
"What about it?"
"Its gone."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Theres been a search. The Realst's still strong out there, but it hasn't been aimed at Tevis for weeks. The Local long range satilites have turned cameras to where Tevis should be, but there's nothing big enough to photograph. If it were there, it would come out of occulation again in about ten minutes. But nobody expects to see it. Calls from ameuters have been flooding in for sixteen hours."
Raven couldn't shift gears fast enough to think how to react.
"I'm Sorry?"
"It's not painted black, It's not hiding, It's just gone. Nobody saw it go either."
Riley was a rotund, crew-cut, plaid sports-coated kind of scientist, shy in person but not on the Comm, deeply conservative. He had always been critically deficient in the humor department. He had never pulled Raven's leg on anything.
"What do they think happened?"
"Nobody knows, Nobody's even venturing a guess. Theres going to be a big press conferance here tommorow."
Raven pinched his cheek speculatively.
"Did it explode? Something hit it?"
"Can't say, can we?"
He could almost hear a smile in his voice. Riley did not smile unless he was faced with a truly bizarre problem.
"No data. I've got about seventy other people to call now. Keep in touch, Raven."
"Thanks."
He hung up, still pinching his cheek. The smoothness of the moment by the river had passed. He stood by the phone for a moment, frowning, then walked into the master bedroom.
Charlot reached high to rummage through the top shelf of the bedroom closet, Marty at her heels.
In their Seventeen years together, his wife had moved over the line from voluptuos to zoftig to plump. The physical contrast between Raven and Charlot, all curves and fulfilling grace, was obvious; equally obvious was the fact that what others saw in them, they did not see in each other. She tended to wear folk art print dresses, and much of her wardrobe was a stylish aquiescence to matronliness.
Yet in his thoughts, she was eternally as he had first seen her, walking up a sunny white-sanded beach in the southern portion of the continent, wearing a brief one piece swimsuit, her long black hair loose in the breeze. She had been the sexiest woman he had ever known, and she still was.
"What did Riley want?" She asked
"Tevis's disappeared"
"Tevs?" Charlot smiled over her shoulder and straightened, passing the bag to him.
"Tevis. Renal's fifth moon."
"Oh. How?"
Raven made a face then shrugged. He took the telescope and its painted grey metal base and carried them outside, Holt snorting at his heels.
"Uh-oh, kids. Dad's in robot mode," Charlot called from the bedroom. "What did Riley really say?" She followed him down the stairs and onto the lawn, where he pressed the telescope base into the soft grass and soil.
"That's what he really said," Raven replied, dropping the red ball of the reflector gently into into the three hollowed branches of the base.
"Its not secret or anything is it?"
"I truly doubt such a thing can be kept secret," Raven replied, peering into one eyepiece.
"Can you see Renal from here? I mean, tonight?"
"I think so, Tevis is one of the most prominent moons, spotted in the early days of telescopes-"
Raven had Renal in view, a bright spot in the middle of the grey-blue field. Stars formed a resolving fog in the background. Two pointlike moons, one bright and one quite dim, were clearly visible on one side of the brighter planet. The dim one was either Ioto or Vallio, the brightest probably Ganisto. The third was either in transit across the planet or in Renal's cone of shadow, eclipsed-- or behind the planet, occulted. He tried to remember the laws regarding the first three moons: The longitude of the first satellite, minus three times that of the second, plus twice that of the third, is always equal to half the circumferance... He had memorized that in highschool, but it did him a fat lot of good now. He murmured the consequences of the law to himself:
"The first three moons-that includes Tevis- can never be all eclipsed at once, nor can they all be in front of the disk at once... ah hell."
He couldnt remember the details. He would just have to sit and wait for the four to be visible all at once, or for the three to make an appearance
"Can we see?" Marty said
"Sure. I'm going to be out here all night, probobaly."