Post by Cy Otauna on Jan 12, 2006 7:15:14 GMT -5
Astra Quixote
as fleeting do the space lanes roll
rainbows stretch to encompass time
and breaking all the worlds that bind
the pilots find their Planet Soul.
Stretch out.
Find it--see it--take it ride it--
Slip.
Behind her mask Arbreil Rhea smiled, and into the blackness the gargantuan starship Pride Bantra began to move forward. She could feel the movement, her back against the soft material of her pilot’s chair pressing into the gravity well of speed. There was the sensation of falling to it, of thrill.
There was white all around--no need for color. Color in space was a commodity, a reassurance for the paying whoevers. Here there was white and black, and Arbreil’s helmet was brown. It looked, from certain angles in the cornerless triangular room, to be the only thing within the white, and to be floating, directing, itself.
People dressed in white and with white-ensconced faces turned their heads and moved, some with their arms as if flying and some their fingers moving over keyboards that seemingly only existed when they were touched, and some just their mouths and distinctly human eyes. Arbreil’s eyes were green.
“Set destination,” A cool, female voice, like the aintelligence of a taxi, said. Silence pulled up the echoes.
Arbreil curled her hands over the cool hand rests of her chair, and closed her eyes. White resumed, and the crested helmet turned.
Outside. Space was black, stars were silver and unflickering, the ship was brown and orange metal. It cruised on an invisible and perfectly straight track, and then continued in the same direction, while folding space in such a way that this forward was backward.
There was no Arbreil. Therefor, there was once some human of that name. Therefor, that human had a soul. Therefor, that soul knew it’s homeworld, because it as well was human.
In her thinking moments Arbreil describes it as a kind of poetry, a surrender of self, something she says one can not say without sounding melodramatic. Lines stretch between yourself and the myriad planets of the universe, like the Madness junkies in the 21’s, but instead of madness it is such a crisp, sane sanity.
And you take notice of one of those planets, and pull toward it, and suddenly there’s a track between you and there looping and curving sideways where gravity painted green by the visual parts of you/the computer marks danger in space.
At this point, her company that asked about her badge or haircut or planet-strewn wall says, “I could never do that.”
Arbreil nods and says, “Few can.”
She doesn’t look like a military pilot; short, stocky, pale skinned and dark-haired with glasses over Asian eyes. Young. But pilots were compared to militarymen only because they were elite, and elite in such different ways. Arbreil can pick a star out of a trillion, so this she does.
The star was called Poxy’s, like it’s third planet. The planets was made of red rock, water and metal-rich mud; its humans perched in terraformed trees surrounded by natural cliffs and ‘amphibian’ grass. Arbreil set down trees, foodstuffs, a family of bear, and many passengers, most tourists. A scientist-type told her they needed more plastics and saluted with a tug of his broad-brimmed hat; she said other people Earthside decided what went on the ship and she just flew it.
The return trip was quick and eventful. The matter scoops scooped a cluster of Higgs novas that coupled with the generated ion-static of the mechanism to cause enough drag to fishtail the giant ship through the equivalent of a minute (about 22 light-years) and warped personal time by half a week. The crew was not happy, but they survived, Arbreil sweating under her stone-and-gravity helmet. They took a glider down to the chutes at Montreal that crisscrossed beneath the earth and heated the ice of Antarctica so it could be collected and sold as priceless untainted water. Arbreil had to drop some of the Poxian cargo, but also hadn’t been Earthside for two years and wanted to see it again, to feel it with the new senses of a pilot master that still had a wonder to them. She walked out of one of the secondary chutes and off the base just to stretch her legs. Looking up at the grayish cold clouds in blue sky being blown by cold wind could keep her mind off of the Planet Soul so close beneath her feet.
She met an old college friend, one Jon Swayze, at the entrance to a mall with white pillars and tan fake-rock walls. They stepped inside; he was talking animatedly about the Pittsburgh Pirates. It was like they had never parted--indeed, like Jon had never left their far-off home town.
Home town. Not home world. It felt so good to be back.
She calculated the season’s total score in her head to keep out the growing sense of unease. The mall’s floor was tile patterning out across fresh concrete, and the lights were fluorescent strips in this part of the concave roof.
They sat at a table with an umbrella over it, in front of a café made to look like it was outside somewhere in the heyday of Europe. Jon folded his hands. “So. How’s gone the great outer space?”
Even casual talk brought back the images; of the stars, of the infinite reaching. “It’s been--”
She had never noticed it before. Never paid attention or opened her senses, never been to Earth since graduation and when she reached out in the back of her mind like she was wont to do in space just to check where she was, like a sailor glancing at the stars on the long night watch, Earth rushed up at her in a shock.
So close! Her surprised mind screamed. She stood up in a violent push that echoed the cracked-open emotions inside her. Sky--sky would help--it was like she was being crushed--
“Outside.” Arbreil said, and stumbled for the doors.
She sat down on a raised garden wall with Jon’s arm around her shoulders.
“You all right?” He kept asking. She felt herself nodding. Even now, the Planet Soul pulled her into a threat of psychic-claustrophobic panic...she understood the conversations now, of the Academy graduates who had always been sort of another breed of person.
‘Haven’t seen Emily in so long....
And I wanted to fly over the Grand Canyon....
...a side effect of the ESP-like “proximity detector” a pilot’s mind becomes
...the loneliness of power.’
Couldn’t endure this pinching, squashing any more! ”I can’t believe this!” She got up, began to jog toward the chuteport. “I can’t stay on Earth.”
Jon let his hands say confusion as he walked beside her. “What? What’s going on, Abby?”
She didn’t even bother to tell him not to call her that stupid nickname. The chutes would be bad...what had kept her from the...panic before? Stupid, evolved, blessed Human ignorance. Won’t ever be ignorant again. She closed her eyes and forced her brain into talking. “The Planet Soul is too close. I can’t have a pilot’s sense of direction because it’s saying like this great cosmic You Are Here and it hurts and I have to stay, get offplanet.”
“What about...us? Your family?”
“They must know. The military...must tell them.” The chute turned sunlight into florescence. “They must know.” Pause. “I can write.” She laughed, harshly barking disgust. Was she the only one who hadn’t known, hadn’t planned, hadn’t readied herself to be divorced from her very planet? There was no room in her for anger. The Soul took up her own.
The glider would go up whenever the ship’s pilot commanded it. Arbreil stopped beside it, with the backdrop of the sleek craft actually powered by its own gliding descent. For a moment, she looked down at her hands.
“I’m sorry, Jon.”
His face was black/calm. “I understand.” No you don’t “I’ll understand eventually.” He smiled.
“Look it up.” She said. Looked into his eyes. Sighed, nodded, turned away and climbed the ladder.
Inside, she sat meshed into the ship. There was no brown helmet; these things were conventional. She leaned back and relaxed away.
I can’t believe this.
There it was.
The distance....
wouldn’t touch her.
I’m leaving Earth. Forever
It meant nothing. Too much. Not enough.
She bade them take off.
Space fades to black from forests of cloud. As it did, Arbreil felt the Planet slip back into its niche where before it had taken over her mind like a veiling weed. Not malevolent no; just so incredibly there.
That was the power.
There was the great ship with its robots crawling all over the scoopdrives, the sun shining on the starboard angle, the rocky projections beautifully random.
Inside it was like coming back to an old friend. More friend than Jon, though sometimes she could read his thoughts. She moved through a corridor with bright eyes and firm step, and she paused by the slitted window the transceivers used, to do whatever they did.
Space. Stars and vacuum and open space limitless.
Home.
Arbreil said to her ship, My place is here. Earth behind me, the stars before me, the Planet in my mind where it was planted ingrained always. Onward, brave humans--take with you your world
as fleeting do the space lanes roll
rainbows stretch to encompass time
and breaking all the worlds that bind
the pilots find their Planet Soul.
Stretch out.
Find it--see it--take it ride it--
Slip.
Behind her mask Arbreil Rhea smiled, and into the blackness the gargantuan starship Pride Bantra began to move forward. She could feel the movement, her back against the soft material of her pilot’s chair pressing into the gravity well of speed. There was the sensation of falling to it, of thrill.
There was white all around--no need for color. Color in space was a commodity, a reassurance for the paying whoevers. Here there was white and black, and Arbreil’s helmet was brown. It looked, from certain angles in the cornerless triangular room, to be the only thing within the white, and to be floating, directing, itself.
People dressed in white and with white-ensconced faces turned their heads and moved, some with their arms as if flying and some their fingers moving over keyboards that seemingly only existed when they were touched, and some just their mouths and distinctly human eyes. Arbreil’s eyes were green.
“Set destination,” A cool, female voice, like the aintelligence of a taxi, said. Silence pulled up the echoes.
Arbreil curled her hands over the cool hand rests of her chair, and closed her eyes. White resumed, and the crested helmet turned.
Outside. Space was black, stars were silver and unflickering, the ship was brown and orange metal. It cruised on an invisible and perfectly straight track, and then continued in the same direction, while folding space in such a way that this forward was backward.
There was no Arbreil. Therefor, there was once some human of that name. Therefor, that human had a soul. Therefor, that soul knew it’s homeworld, because it as well was human.
In her thinking moments Arbreil describes it as a kind of poetry, a surrender of self, something she says one can not say without sounding melodramatic. Lines stretch between yourself and the myriad planets of the universe, like the Madness junkies in the 21’s, but instead of madness it is such a crisp, sane sanity.
And you take notice of one of those planets, and pull toward it, and suddenly there’s a track between you and there looping and curving sideways where gravity painted green by the visual parts of you/the computer marks danger in space.
At this point, her company that asked about her badge or haircut or planet-strewn wall says, “I could never do that.”
Arbreil nods and says, “Few can.”
She doesn’t look like a military pilot; short, stocky, pale skinned and dark-haired with glasses over Asian eyes. Young. But pilots were compared to militarymen only because they were elite, and elite in such different ways. Arbreil can pick a star out of a trillion, so this she does.
The star was called Poxy’s, like it’s third planet. The planets was made of red rock, water and metal-rich mud; its humans perched in terraformed trees surrounded by natural cliffs and ‘amphibian’ grass. Arbreil set down trees, foodstuffs, a family of bear, and many passengers, most tourists. A scientist-type told her they needed more plastics and saluted with a tug of his broad-brimmed hat; she said other people Earthside decided what went on the ship and she just flew it.
The return trip was quick and eventful. The matter scoops scooped a cluster of Higgs novas that coupled with the generated ion-static of the mechanism to cause enough drag to fishtail the giant ship through the equivalent of a minute (about 22 light-years) and warped personal time by half a week. The crew was not happy, but they survived, Arbreil sweating under her stone-and-gravity helmet. They took a glider down to the chutes at Montreal that crisscrossed beneath the earth and heated the ice of Antarctica so it could be collected and sold as priceless untainted water. Arbreil had to drop some of the Poxian cargo, but also hadn’t been Earthside for two years and wanted to see it again, to feel it with the new senses of a pilot master that still had a wonder to them. She walked out of one of the secondary chutes and off the base just to stretch her legs. Looking up at the grayish cold clouds in blue sky being blown by cold wind could keep her mind off of the Planet Soul so close beneath her feet.
She met an old college friend, one Jon Swayze, at the entrance to a mall with white pillars and tan fake-rock walls. They stepped inside; he was talking animatedly about the Pittsburgh Pirates. It was like they had never parted--indeed, like Jon had never left their far-off home town.
Home town. Not home world. It felt so good to be back.
She calculated the season’s total score in her head to keep out the growing sense of unease. The mall’s floor was tile patterning out across fresh concrete, and the lights were fluorescent strips in this part of the concave roof.
They sat at a table with an umbrella over it, in front of a café made to look like it was outside somewhere in the heyday of Europe. Jon folded his hands. “So. How’s gone the great outer space?”
Even casual talk brought back the images; of the stars, of the infinite reaching. “It’s been--”
She had never noticed it before. Never paid attention or opened her senses, never been to Earth since graduation and when she reached out in the back of her mind like she was wont to do in space just to check where she was, like a sailor glancing at the stars on the long night watch, Earth rushed up at her in a shock.
So close! Her surprised mind screamed. She stood up in a violent push that echoed the cracked-open emotions inside her. Sky--sky would help--it was like she was being crushed--
“Outside.” Arbreil said, and stumbled for the doors.
She sat down on a raised garden wall with Jon’s arm around her shoulders.
“You all right?” He kept asking. She felt herself nodding. Even now, the Planet Soul pulled her into a threat of psychic-claustrophobic panic...she understood the conversations now, of the Academy graduates who had always been sort of another breed of person.
‘Haven’t seen Emily in so long....
And I wanted to fly over the Grand Canyon....
...a side effect of the ESP-like “proximity detector” a pilot’s mind becomes
...the loneliness of power.’
Couldn’t endure this pinching, squashing any more! ”I can’t believe this!” She got up, began to jog toward the chuteport. “I can’t stay on Earth.”
Jon let his hands say confusion as he walked beside her. “What? What’s going on, Abby?”
She didn’t even bother to tell him not to call her that stupid nickname. The chutes would be bad...what had kept her from the...panic before? Stupid, evolved, blessed Human ignorance. Won’t ever be ignorant again. She closed her eyes and forced her brain into talking. “The Planet Soul is too close. I can’t have a pilot’s sense of direction because it’s saying like this great cosmic You Are Here and it hurts and I have to stay, get offplanet.”
“What about...us? Your family?”
“They must know. The military...must tell them.” The chute turned sunlight into florescence. “They must know.” Pause. “I can write.” She laughed, harshly barking disgust. Was she the only one who hadn’t known, hadn’t planned, hadn’t readied herself to be divorced from her very planet? There was no room in her for anger. The Soul took up her own.
The glider would go up whenever the ship’s pilot commanded it. Arbreil stopped beside it, with the backdrop of the sleek craft actually powered by its own gliding descent. For a moment, she looked down at her hands.
“I’m sorry, Jon.”
His face was black/calm. “I understand.” No you don’t “I’ll understand eventually.” He smiled.
“Look it up.” She said. Looked into his eyes. Sighed, nodded, turned away and climbed the ladder.
Inside, she sat meshed into the ship. There was no brown helmet; these things were conventional. She leaned back and relaxed away.
I can’t believe this.
There it was.
The distance....
wouldn’t touch her.
I’m leaving Earth. Forever
It meant nothing. Too much. Not enough.
She bade them take off.
Space fades to black from forests of cloud. As it did, Arbreil felt the Planet slip back into its niche where before it had taken over her mind like a veiling weed. Not malevolent no; just so incredibly there.
That was the power.
There was the great ship with its robots crawling all over the scoopdrives, the sun shining on the starboard angle, the rocky projections beautifully random.
Inside it was like coming back to an old friend. More friend than Jon, though sometimes she could read his thoughts. She moved through a corridor with bright eyes and firm step, and she paused by the slitted window the transceivers used, to do whatever they did.
Space. Stars and vacuum and open space limitless.
Home.
Arbreil said to her ship, My place is here. Earth behind me, the stars before me, the Planet in my mind where it was planted ingrained always. Onward, brave humans--take with you your world
