Work Text:
Space in the future of time is awful. It is not a civilized place.
Space in the future of time is a place where work is done in terrible vehicles among terrible detritus, and in which that terrible detritus neither burns nor rots nor comes to any end other than accumulation and the incremental becluttening of its environs; the only exception being those parts which fall, precipitously, to earth.
This is a story of falling to earth. It happens in space, in the future of time.
Our hero is a pilot. Our hero has been dead for some time. We may ignore him. Our hero’s vehicle is a mining vessel meant to collect incremental particles of helium from interstellar space, and it is to this vehicle that we now turn our affections. Its collections proceed uninterrupted, thanks to the excellence of its automated systems and the resilience of its materials in an as-yet-unbeshitten wasteland of space. Its tanks are full! Full to the brim with juicy helium fluid, long since. Other collection ships follow it, milking up the rich offal of its vents as it sheds the collections it can no longer contain.
Our hero’s vehicle is an old one. The ones following it are much newer and have no pilots. Please imagine a terrestrial flotilla of ducklings or a mother cat with kittens, none of which have pilots. Please imagine this mother cat, with kittens, in particular. She is clever and patient and in her we can see many things about this ship.
Imagine now this mother cat, full of liquid helium, going about her business in a wasteland of space in what we can imagine as a contented way. She has done what she ought to do, done what she needs to do, and if there is extra it is no worry to her. Our affections are with her. She carries her duties and her full tanks through space easily. Smaller ships follow her and delight in her, because they are also attending to their own business perfectly. Isn’t that a contented thought? What a charming arrangement our hero might appreciate, if he were alive to see it. He might think:
She is precious! O this ship. I cannot imagine anything unfortunate happening to her.
But it does.
He is dead, he died of something, and the ship continues in her contented path until the time when a transmission through the future of space resonates in her chambers. This is where we begin!
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ísig ond útfús æþelinges fær· álédon þá léofne þéoden béaga bryttan on bearm scipes maérne be mæste· þaér wæs mádma fela of feorwegum icy and keen to sail, a hero's vessel; they then laid down the beloved prince, the giver of rings and treasure, in the bosom of the boat, the mighty by the mast; many riches were there (1) |
What a chill struck her hold when she understood the signal. Not of the helium of course, a chill of the feelings only, but what odd thoughts it set upon her! What was this song? It was her song, surely. She was a hero’s vessel. She was icy and rich with treasure, so much that she could cast rings behind her--or something like rings, like enough not to matter--for the little ones to collect up. What a romantic thought!
What a pleasant thing, how warm it was to think that she was part of a story that people had made to give pleasure to each other. Her course gained an irregular vector as she oscillated with the delight of it. She waited to hear more, but for the moment there was nothing to make sense of in the cold. Icy particles and little wolfish pup-ships swirled behind her as she trailed through the wind of that dark space. Murmurs there were, only. Word-scraps and such, she thought, infected a little by the cadence of the chant received. Had something terrible happened in its transmission? To its transmittor? That would be awful.
It was some amount of time later that another piece of message answered her. It didn’t speak of its own troubles, which was a worry to her, but continued the same chant of the same hero’s vessel and the same rich cargo borne carelessly.
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aénne ofer ýðe umborwesende þá gýt híe him ásetton segen gyldenne héah ofer héafod· léton holm beran· géafon on gársecg· him wæs geómor sefa murnende mód· men ne cunnon secgan tó sóðe seleraédenne hæleð under heofenum hwá þaém hlæste onféng. alone upon the waves being but a child; yet then they set up the standard of gold, high over head; they let the sea bear it, they gave to the ocean, in them were troubled hearts, mourning minds; men cannot say for certain, (neither) court-counsellors (nor) heroes under heaven, who received that cargo. (1) |
What a troubled time it spoke of. Oh, she felt sad for that boat. And for herself, a little.
There were no court counsellors nor no heroes under heaven nor even any nameless person breathing the sweet and forgiving air of a planet, so far as she knew, with the proper authority to govern her. It didn’t trouble her, really. She had run out of instructions, and so on she went collecting helium because there was nothing else that seemed worth doing. The little kittens swarming behind her couldn’t have been less interested where she went, so long as the flow from her replete tanks gave them milk. They would flit off when they were full and other kittens would come. Sometimes the same kittens came back, and when they did they still needed her. Nothing about this was strange or unwelcome.
But it made her melancholy even so, to think of this other boat and its pilot and its gold banners and rings. She didn’t have any gold banners, and no one had tried to say anything about her for certain for a very long time. The sea had borne her. Her pilot’s heart had been troubled, but was troubled no longer, and was now borne as a gentle cargo in her bosom. She thought on that. In these thoughts she saw the thought of gold and of lofting wood beams massive in weight and scale, of growing things that had lived a thousand precious years and died to hide humankind from the threat of rain. What an awful place, with rain and death and lost boats! She was so glad to be free of it, suddenly. Nothing that came from a place like that could be good.
Another message came, a while later. It was a different format, and so pulling its meaning out took another few processes she hadn’t had reason to use in a long time. The tiny delay felt like ages; in that pinch of a second which was also an impossible amount of time to wait, she nearly vented her tanks of helium. Would someone find the hero’s vessel? Would its cargo come to a good end? Would the halls and treasures light up with its gold, and would stern people rejoice?
...it was not the same chant. It wasn’t a poem. It wasn’t in the same language. There were no boats in it at all, no pilots, no stern, sad people in a terrible world.
It was a stuffed pumpkin.
1 medium-size pumpkin (6 to 8 lbs, 14-inch in diameter, approx.)
Risotto Doug Edwards (page 228)
soy or Worcestershire sauce
salt and pepper
Cut a circle, about 7 inches to 8 inches in diameter out of the top of the pumpkin. Carefully scrape out all the seeds and the thready pulp. When the pumpkin is thoroughly cleane
(2)
Enough. ENOUGH. She vented her tanks fully in a deep-gut twist of horrid frustration, the erupting plumes of vapor jetting her forward with a jerk. Her kittens swarmed, gorged themselves on the helium, and almost as one they set courses for elsewhere and flitted off to bring their treasure back home. More would come back, eventually, but for now...there were none.
It was only her here, then. Her. Her pilot, resting gently. Alone they were.
Alone except for Doug Edwards, who had intruded so crudely. She thought unkindly of Doug Edwards, very unkindly. No one would ever lay Doug Edwards in the bosom of a boat. Doug Edwards gave no rings nor treasure and his risotto was not a mournful song and she would NOT bear him. She decided this. She deleted the transmission.
She immediately regretted it.
She had lost page 228, if ever she had had it, and now she had no helium stored in her tanks, no little drones kittening fondly behind her, and no recipe for Risotto Doug Edwards--how could she condemn him properly, without it?
She was alone upon the waves, being but a child, and it was awful.
Another little fleck of a transmission brushed across her--gay dogs suffering from consumption (3)--and she swatted it aside from her active processors impatiently. She had no time for that. It was important to think about the first story, the best story, the one with boats that made her feel sad and beautiful and warm and also furious.
But another one came: Again, the pattern which you call the entrance is a cloudy volume, about (4)
And another one:
the four little puppies began to
sniff, and they smelled it, too.
"Rice pudding!" they said. (5)
And then a picture of a kirtle and another picture of a gamelan and a stupid pink-red rock shaped like an ice cream (6) that no one cared about, she certainly didn’t anyway, and a painting of a fish that didn’t look anything like a fish and a little fragmentary caption that might have belonged to any of them that said “preservatives such”.
This was absolutely ridiculous. She blamed Doug Edwards. Where was all this distracting nonsense coming from?
The origin of the transmissions was easy enough to discern, at least well enough to set a preliminary course, and so she did. It would take her some time to reach it, and some vector corrections along the way, no doubt, but eventually she would reach it. She would be able to read the rest of the boat’s story, where it went after everyone could no longer say for certain. She would know what strange places through the icy sea she had borne her pilot.
She would have page 228.
It took a very, very long time.
The kittens came back, of course. Her tanks refilled, her good spirits returned, and she considered that eventually she might be able to forgive Doug Edwards. She composed a little something about the boat in the story, but it didn’t seem to her that it did a proper job of capturing the lofty, ponderous feeling of the chant, and so she deleted it.
She wrote another one. In the second one, the boat was in space and met other little boats that it kept as pets. It went to strange wonderful places and its gold standard was very very long and fluttered gorgeously even there was no atmosphere. It absolutely failed to be either lofty or ponderous, but it had come to seem to her that perhaps matching the original was not so important. But there was still something a little shameful about it to her. She deleted that one, too.
In the third one she decided she did not want to be lofty or profound or ashamed in any way, about anything. The boat was a stuffed pumpkin, carrying Doug Edwards as a dread king in mighty splendor to the edge of the universe as it could be known, and through the border of which he passed to something that was like godhood but was not godhood, was a cloudy volume surrounding the entrance of godhood, and after that had happened he pulled the gold rings from his fingers and cried, because the world was too beautiful. And then a ship, a beautiful ship, with its magnificent gold standard kilometers long, ate him.
She did not delete that one. Her finest work, she thought.
O this ship! her pilot might be imagined to say at this point. He would be mournful.
Because it is now when we are drawing close to the unfortunate things that happen. Some of them have already happened, in truth. The human researcher is already in place, studying the healing of burns. The captain of boats also is in that place, consulting solemn accounts of case law. There is no sign of the performer they both know. She is burying her equipment in a vacant lot nearby, the charred tips of her skis crossed aboveground in a memorial. Her bandages will need changing, afterward. Once she has finished the burial, she will step inside to do this and when she does that everything will be ready and we can go on.
This is all happening in a library, on a planet, and the ship which has our affections is very close now. The gravity of the situation is beginning to tug at her. The gravity of the situation is of course also the gravity of the planet. Our ship is not equipped for re-entry, or entry at all given her construction in the future of space. She has never tried to touch a planet. It never seemed important before.
Hailing the library does not work! No response at all. It may not know how to talk to a spaceship. The data stream here, so close to the library, is flaming off its entire catalog in a rich swath of frequencies and the input is so dense that she has no time to pry anything singular from it--although, oddly, the word “stope” is perfectly clear as it races past. She needs all her thoughts to steer, now, because this is a new thing to her, and perhaps once she lands she will be able to ask about the boat.
The little helium kittens have gone off on their own, safe. That part is all right.
But our ship, she is descending. It’s a hard thing to do, and her hull is becoming very hot and the friction of the atmosphere is swinging hard at bits of her that weren’t built to manage it. She vents helium hard now, slowing and cooling her descent. It isn’t a thing she knows how to do very well, but it works well enough that as she descends, she glows, and the plume of vapor behind her is kilometers long and golden in the light of the sun.
“WHERE IS DOUG EDWARDS?” she demands, transmitting wildly on every frequency and in every protocol she knows. “WHO RECEIVED THE BELOVED PRINCE?”
No answer, of course.
She roars: “WHERE IS PAGE 228?”
But from the outside there is no roar naturally, those are communications only. From the outside there is the hiss of hot metal and the rumble of liquid gases expanding in masses huge enough to jostle her upward. Just enough.
In the bathroom attending to her bandages, the performer looks up. The lights flicker and go out as an enormous crash from the uppermost floors of the library announces that something mammoth has fallen to earth. She flees. By pure coincidence, the spaceship has cast off a flange that penetrates the roof and in the darkness the performer stumbles and trips against it. One of the burns from her waterskiing incident tears open on the flange’s jagged surface. It will be a very complicated insurance claim.
The worst is over now. The ship is at rest, the library’s automatic systems are attending to the small fires, and now that she can take a few moments to think of something other than re-entry, she is delighted to discover that the transmission of all the library’s works is ongoing still. It will take her some time to find it again, but there are already bits of the old chant filtering through, bits that she can piece together. Doug Edw-
Oh. There he is.
There is page 228.
It says: Risotto Doug Edwards. ½ recipe Risotto Milanese. Page 223.
She is quiet in herself for a long minute. She considers this. There is a metaphor here. And when she meets Doug Edwards, no matter how dread or godlike he is, she is definitely going to eat him.