Chapter 0. The Funky Fox on Fire
Astarte is thirty-four meters high. In dating terms: 1640C/1380/1920 centimeters, or 645C/543/756 inches. A redhead with deep blue eyes, that can turn green, grey or any hue of the rainbow. Athletic and naked, she has no notion of clothes in her home world.
À propos, this huge beast of a woman has been manufactured inside a star, a pulsar with a two milliseconds rotation rate. That is why she counts time in seconds, milliseconds or even nanoseconds, this being the finest resolution at which she perceives reality.
But!, because people understand dimensions in football fields, data in Libraries of Congress and time in years, Earth-years to be more specific, the casual chatter of Astarte could be a hard sell, a deal breaker.
The woman, or the monster-woman, is what humankind calls an alien. No!, not an ugly scary one, but a nice sexy one!
From this simple perspective, humans will know that aliens do not have twenty-four-hour long days; no months, because there's no Moon in Alienland; no 365 days long years, because other planets, or stars, rotate at different speeds, and rates, around different stars, or whatever.
And because no one could measure her age in football fields, and because mathematical exponents are meaningless next to seconds, let's assume that she is about twelve billion years old, as in Earth-years. Billions! Sounds cool, eh?
Did I mention that she never ages?
Besides being a literary deal breaker, Astarte is also a paradigm breaker. Impatient, panicky, frivolous, a perfect nincompoop.
This being, or should I call her a character?, has been many things to many of her kind and is about to become one thing to many people.
Before you begin reading through, here's a short preamble, like a users' guide to Astarte.
Any world is based, and built, on a set of paradigms, or else it won't be consistent with itself. It won't last.
The way we measure time and seasons on Earth, the way we drive on the right side of the road (unlike the Brits, Japs, Aussies, Indians and some Africans - quite a few), the way we are rushing to make a religion out of precious stuff, from golden calves to silvery iPhones, we live, and die, under our own planetary paradigms.
Astarte couldn't care less.
So, if you are allergic to galactic thrillers, please do yourself a favor and fast-jump to
Chapter 5. The French - it's earthly, or undergroundly (not sure if this is a word in English - another paradigm breaker).
Ancient people have heard of Astarte, various rumors mentioned even visions of her, and they wrote her names (there are more than one) into a particular genre of paradigm: "the goddess of sex and war."
Imagine another deed of the ancients. For instance when Samson put some fire on the tails of foxes before releasing them into enemy crop fields.
What paradigm would fit a funky fox with her tail on fire, running like there's no yesterday and no tomorrow?
Meet "Astarte, The Adventure."
Oh, did I mention that she looks very similar to Lady Liberty from Liberty Island, New York City?
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi had a vision too.
