The Starless Sea

A letter to Erin Morgenstern

Erin.

Freedom and I fight about the boy.  I do not believe he reached for the door.  She says he did, that you said he did.  I say you said no such thing, I say that the narrator said he did.  I say that the narrator lied.  I tell her that the narrator, like the rest of the people helping that boy forward through his own failure as a person, also needs to help him, to hide a conceit in their desire for him to succeed.  That “IT” is what makes him a great villain; that he not only does not know that he is one, but that he also does not believe it, and how important it is for those around him to also believe that he is not.

I tell Freedom there is someone else in the basement.  She says there is not.  I tell her of course there is, that it is also probably not completely honest to call that place a basement, but I guess it feels like one at times.  We argue, a lot.  I see the plaster on the walls, she sees gray stone.  We hope we will understand which parts of our worlds our broken, and which are just air, neither of us wanting to be right, just to understand.

Freedom and I go there together, to the starless sea, on our intentions alone.  When she reads, she is pulled this way and that by the most beautiful and most tragic things about you.  She closes her eyes and reads, and in three words is as light as the air.  When we read together I am always stopping her, telling her why the door to his dorm room might be the most important door in his life, why I knew the door to that one place had a chain bolt on it before she read that the door had a chain bolt on it, and how strongly I felt about the evil of a chain bolt on a door, how anti-magic it is, how some dark thing invented a way to neither open or close a door..  We argue about how perfect a villain the boy is.  She says that he is not a villain.  And while with my entire life I have tried to put down the mirror in front of me to see it for the glass it could be, clear and complete, I still just see myself.

 

I am the other man in the cell.  I have watched the pirate for so long, and seen so many come down, afraid or full of longing but all just mirrors offering the same reflection.  I have watched how he does not care and how she does not care that he does not care.  How long I have spent down there in the hay and the dark, not seen.  How a strong voice could have kept me there.  How I thought my silence was a good thing, or perhaps a thing that could increase my worth, how I thought a question asked was for a question to be answered, and my whole life, how wrong I have been.

We argue about how the ducks have to be pulled around the pond not moved.  How everyone is a villain.  How well you shaded them with a pain they caused you or a hope they left unfulfilled.  We manage a paragraph an hour, maybe, and that is after rereading it, at least twice, when she will put up with me for that long.  There is more, as you know, there always is.  My heart breaks for the door that opened one last time.  I see you all over the story.  You are a great writer like she is. 

We are about a quarter inch along.   She reads ahead.  Of course she does, it’s the right thing to do, her hand outstretched, pulled this way and that, lovingly, thoughtfully by your words, made more beautiful in the trust of her reading.  Well spent time.  And then the two of us sit, and she reads aloud for the both of us, words she has heard before and enjoys again, words I hear for the first time.  I put down my brush and I stop her and tell her that’s not true, he did not reach for the door, that is not who he is, and then we fight back through long pages, as with wild eyes I try to prove a thing only I can see, to an audience just trying to close their eyes, trust your words and go where you have asked to take them.  We study it.  We weigh words.  I try to puzzle out where the bodies are taken after their ritual prick through the heart.  How well do the ones who chose the failure, wear their own failure?  And does a cold prick await them after the body is laid, undressed, used to decorate a dark place, and fulfill some new symbol.  Is there a symbol for a mirror, or for a boy who just is not there?   

She has said she could not read a book like that, take it apart and dismantle it as a writer.  I suppose she thinks that is what writers do.  It is what I think she wants to do with the poems I write to her, quite literally, and that is fine.  Off with the wedding dress, a poke here or there, then off with the skin, look for the big bones, the major organs, you know, the heart, the soul, the marrow, as I know in some room somewhere I sit and cry and hold the dress I made, red now in the blood of having to explain things I complicated intentionally.  “What does that mean?”  “What are you trying to say?”  “I don’t understand.” this is what she says.  “You must kill this.”  “We must eat it together.” “There is only blood.” this is what I hear.  I try to explain that I do not do that in the starless sea.  That I look, and touch too much, and stare too long, and take notes, and haunt the darkness between the words.  I recognize my life, my pain, and the pain of others, of loneliness, a longing for hair to be twirled through bars in a beautiful basement, or impossibly for a place beyond them that could be unlike what is behind them.  Like watching your lover read a book instead of your soul, while I sit and twist blood from the pages. 

I would rise and try the bars, but I am not there, and I don’t scream because the narrator would ignore it, and my agony would waste a woman’s time and void my guard’s abdication.  And we must not awaken the guard, for his eyes are closed and he is soaring with the aid of your wings, and it is not he who keeps me here, in the hay, beside the pirate, in the dark, nor is it my ignorance that keeps me from reaching for the door.

Justin.

The Lady and the Spring

     He woke to the sound of her feet on pine needles, or a sound before that, fallen upon him sleeping, and gone now as if not existed, a thing in her alone, a greeting perhaps, a word or a cough, something she alone could know as he woke, stirring, standing, and soon awake, where before what were her words had woken him as a spell, to bring him back to this place, their place, the waking world.

     And he, in the first of the day, cold, shirtless, unguarded and numb from the magic wound of that same sleep, rose to see her there in the red of her clothing and the black of her sword that she carried in word filled silence where she stood, not settling the rope which held the sac and the things in it that she would, with him, bring to the spring high in the hills today, with Him, on their path, their journey, now in the blessing of their visible breath and dawns warning, headed now to where a way would be found, into that mountain, and where without those words, they both must go.

     She stood as a gift, and a warning.  Come as a storm displaced bird, or a deer from those crowded woods higher up, were it not for her calm and capable face, the hair brown, long and wound with red linen, her travel worn clothes, her skirt as if made from the earths gifts itself and her bare feet dressed in old paints and the new brown of these good low lands.  Seeing her there and he just awoken, he was back in the pains of the histories of days and years and times that live now only in the scars that cross his legs and back.  For there is a courage that arises in weakness only, born when the failure of the sword of night is revealed in the strength of some greater sword, the will of the day, not here, but coming, as a threat of death, even his death, is on its way, and near, and the almost lost, and the nearly defeated, and the weak beyond repair, and even the broken, find that thing that is repair, amelioration from a deeper wound; the fear of night, and what night is, and what night brings, and for a word, it is healing. 

     He followed her, and in it they walked, as though on new feet, though a flood of the old worlds demons worked slowly from them, down from drowning, to the touch of foot on stone where no stone thought could be, to where he was now, behind her in the failing dark, sewn with morning and that mornings light with that old darkness moving down to his waist, his knees and some strength returned, until that boot that had rested on his neck for the stones in his hands, was the damp earth now alone, as he walked past with as much love as he was able to hold for a world, following after her.  On they walked resting only when that failure of fear became the victory of some greater thing, a new courage or forgetfulness, a tardiness of vows, a work rested from too soon, and now too bright to see clearly and too warm to be real in this cold womb become their dawn.  A gift beyond the imagining of sleep is the sun on dew chilled skin.  And the world of things that woke also, standing, they too brought through what to him was a great and natural evil, and they without feet to flee a storm had been washed over by it, emerging with him, on standing feet, past and through the horror of darkness to live again, and he saw the world this way. 

     On a clearer place, some ways up the lower parts of the mountain that held the spring, she stopped them, and with small efforts a fire lit and a small pot boiled, and in it was placed a bag, tied tight with string, of herbs, of powders and soon, there was a tea.  And with it and her hand, his shaking stopped, and that dark blanket that was his wound so cruelly lain in him, was for that time, lifted away as a pain can be lifted away, and a deep rest filled him, and his breath slowed, deepened, and his shoulders fell, and his voice now able to be spoken thanked her.

     The scars on his back hurt now in some strange trade between pain and suffering.  The gourd looked warm in her hands, an offering, hers to him and for drinking it, him to himself.  A supplication.  The medicine calmed him from those things and sat him on an older stone, there at the small fire beside her. 

     We go to the weep and the well, he said to her, as if woken at last, as if the hour they had walked and all the time that had flowed between them since she woke him up, was also a part of that dream.

She nodded and smiled to herself, though he saw it.

     I don’t deserve this, he said and waited for her to see him.  She nodded and said that She did not deserve this, that everything was a gift in a way that made him, for a moment, grateful, even for the tears he now cried, impossibly.  I mean that it is wasted on Me, he continued.  She paused, relaxed, and said that, It was not wasted, if She did not waste it.  It is only wasted if You waste it, she said again, and rose pouring the warmed water on the bare earth, moving other earth over the embers and looked at him and placed her hand on his shoulder, and saw his grief.

     At the weep she knelt.  The words she said he could not hear.  He rested by a tree grown white with the vapors of that place for being there, and he thought of how the sun could stain a thing and how life giving waters could drown, and remembered how the torches back then had crazed the light across the hay wild field, where he had stood with others, tried to stand, stronger and weaker for as many reasons as there were men.  The weight of his regret was all that was left to stand with him now.  That fear had melted away with time, and in its place a sadness and a love came, and filled up every scar and hole the fear of that night had wrought.  Heavier was the sadness then the whole terror of night, and though his pain alone might take the horns from the demons and fold and put away their wings.  If there was only one place, one real place, one place where he truly was, it was there, always, the memory of the field, that field, that night, when his failure to save, to try to save, to offer his own life up, to take another, all those decision’s who’s agency he felt divorced from by time now, and fate or possibility then, had found their only way to live on, to live in him.  Pain. 

     At the spring, high in the mountain, from under the those living white shingles of the tree, he could see her arms raised, the smoke from incense rising and swirling into the mist, the power of that place awaking to her, and then without climax, without a booming voice or show of form, she rose, turned and came down to him and brought him the water and painted his face with glowing loam, and said the words.  And he closed his eyes, and he healed.

     There is a spirit of the air, she said as he traced her steps slowly backwards around him.  And she loves a spirit of the water, but time passes and the things that do not stay the same will change.  He loves her and keeps her there inside this mountain.  His love is a love of holding, hiding and resting.  When he sleeps, she begins to forget that love, and she, in the silence of dark caves, begins to return to herself, and who she was, a queen of winds and airs, a confounder of treetops, a thief of kites, a maiden of ice covered peaks.  Though she is now a wind inside water, she was herself once, a wave of only air, alone, and though he drinks her now, he cannot swallow, and his love of her makes many selves out of the one, and those shatters of her immortal soul, shiver and rise through his depths, and up they run through the smallest cracks in the stone, to finally burst the surface of this spring of his forgetting, to leap into the air, a leave his spring, and meet with the sky again, and though they yearn and lean into the remembered winds, the greater winds break them, and take them in, and they are devoured, even the smallest of faces, and they are lost and are gone.  She stops to breath, her hand still on his chest.  He creaks inside as though he himself stretched up into the wind and was bent by it.  He thought she cried but not all pains can bloom, and may drown by their weight of themselves, lost within a heart that is too frail to feel them completely.

     She continued.  Deep below, he wakes, and before she herself is able to rise and escape, he loves her, and holds her and in loving drowns her again.  And she drowns, in him, until she remembers him, and her love for him, and in him rests again, and on and on again until in time, again, he sleeps, and she, a thing of air left alone in a world without it, walks, then wonders, and in his long sleep, begins to forget she is loved.

     Did you heal me, he asked.  She stops her slow tracing of a circle around him and turns to him.  His voice is deeper, his face somber, and no longer tortured, and a fatigue lays on him like knowing.

I did not heal you, she said, and her face betrayed her surprise that he did not know it.  It is the water that heals, and the prince of that spring that healed you.  But I heard you make your offering to the air, he said, as his arms chilled and leaves scintillated and shivered in a breeze now cold, as though the spirit of wind was loosed, and her domain was there above him now, and he held a gift that was taken from her without blessing.  A warning rose in him.  I would not stir the lover of the healing waters, she said.  We take but what is spilled, to be well again, is a symptom of his grace.  The gift I gave was for the queen of air, trapped by her love and by her lover.  Her lovers home and her prison is to forget, trespassed by my feet.  We take the cup, and drink from it to avoid her wrath, and we praise her beauty.  She leaned against him as though he could not fall.  His head was spinning, her hand, a wonder,came upon him again.  We kneel at her thrown to worship and to despair, she said, then began to walk away. 

     I don’t understand, he said.  She smiled, and turned back to him, putting her arms around him, and bark for skin he knew, seeing her tears, he knew how her sword was the world, the journey was a hope, and as all words are, they were not meant for him.  And standing he fell inside though standing still as a tree, he saw her, saw how he was, who he was, how he was there, still, standing, and how he never left, how he had grown there, a tree, and how she did not pass by but came to him, and for her hand and her smile and her words, he was for that time, that short time, a man, and she with some great sadness only he might for a moment take away, for being there, and who he was, and the beauty she saw in him, and his sadness, alone now for too many years, the last in what was now a clearing, at the foot of where, she had made her way past him, upward, alone, and to that ancient spring.  And she sang there with her eyes closed, crying, on her knees by the tree who might have been a man if love could have lasted long enough, and if the sun was bright enough and the water strong enough and if the queen of air had been released and had reached down and pulled him into the world as a man, as he longed for as he pray to the prince of the waters for, as her voice longed for and he stood there, still as that stone, and he listened forever, to her, to her voice to her singing to that song, and he came home. 

Who can love what I can love

Who can say what I have seen

Who can sleep within his arms

Who can be where I have been

Who can hold him only I

who wept and fought and died

Who can fear him only I

who loved and lived then said goodbye

Who can tell me where I’ve been

and will they wonder why

Below the ground I live with him

though all I am is sky

Nowhere To Go and The Cave of the Old Offering

You were standing below me somehow, on the bent'ness of the falling stones, no longer falling, but reclined in a descent that must take years for them, to reach the egress of yearning, to requite the love of that slow strong arm of the deeper earth, pulling always, down, down, down. 

 And while with some effort, you retied your shoe, and repacked your bag after retrieving some article of comfort from it, I stood a little higher up, closer to the entry to the cave, frozen by it, and I could not enter.

The weight of its dark mouth, the terror of the nearness of that roof of stone piled so impossibly high and stung by an opening that would have otherwise been hidden by the rush and force of falling waters, I stood, with that cold curtain gone now, and that river that hung it long ago dried, diverted or just stopped from being altogether.  It was just a trail up to a cave now that you and I ended by reaching it, a bit of cliff, and hole beneath it.  The inside of it terrifies me, like death, like suffocation, and I am the one that wanted to come.

I stand as I always have now, at its mouth, at the beginning, having my guts pulled from me and thrown by those forces into the whirling wind, into the void of the cave, into some other world beginning here, inside of myself, and going where on such a pitiless wind?

I am just standing there.

I try to look around, look for old handholds for what must have been a hard climb when this was a river, worlds of time ago.  What could still be seen?  What could still be here? 

“This is it” you asked and said.  Your voice was more a taste in my mouth than an interpretation of those shaking hands, the tongue of dark children.  I could barely see, and could not escape the feeling of pissing myself, though I had no proof of it.

I could not walk into the cave, could not pass the mouth.  I could only stand out front, balanced and leaned against a peculiarity of rocks, too small to be climbed, too large to be disregarded.  Hampered by the sliding and shifting sand and dirt and gravels of the world dissolving, always dissolving and never done.

“There’s a place here, it’s like a shelf” you tell me.  You tell me that it is mostly flat and that he could have lain there or sat.  That it was a very low ceiling, that there were no bones, of animals of anything, that they were all gone.  You told me that is all there is, there is no other place, no deeper entry, no greater room.

What would proof look like?  What would the sign be if the thing I thought had been there, had been there, and gone now surely, but a hint remaining intact, to be seen by the careful eye, looking for just that, but I cannot go in.  I turn and face the way we came, my back the you and the cave, crouch to sit, and when hunched in that great direction that is down, feel a piece of myself again, return from the howling void in the mouth of that impossible cave, and for the briefest of moments, I am there. 

You found things of course, a weird shape in the sand of the cave, a jutting of a rock the size of your arm, an ant lion colony, all natural wonders and beauties of their own.  Mostly the cave smelled of unsettled dirt almost dust.

For all the convenience and wonder of our ship, we have no flashlight, and no cameras.  And after letting that thing go which is right before me, un-touched though the desire to do so brought me here with you, from unverifiable distances, I stepped back, and stepped down, and put that thing away that brought us here across time, to see, to hope, to wonder.  And though I was turned and sitting, I turned and sat again, and the thing that is not tears, but is still tears, was upon me, and I was tired, having met that thing inside myself that I had hoped would be found in a cave; a proof against the impossibility of it, an idol of a thing not man, but not different from one.  A desire to live, to not pass like memories from a world where i was, where we were, from the failure of its own authority over us, from the mouth of the cave I could not enter nor the threshold within myself that I could not cross, here on St. Anne, or in my bunk on the ship, when tears alone come to my own defense, against the evil of time, its way with us here, and me now, dying on a rock beside a door I will not open, a cave I will not enter, and under a truth I cannot honor with words.

There is tea on the ship and we drink it.  Hours pass in silence.  At times, the soft plinking of projectiles on the hull of our ship become a light rain, a natural wonder made common in the experience of it.  The violent skies, just lights that cannot hurt us now. 

I see it.  I see it always.  I cannot turn away.  It is as though I have taken the mouth of that place within, and am struck dumb by it, and all of language is but an itch, all ideas a turn of the head, a meaningless focus of attention upon the starboard panel, a cushioned seat, where you sit, curled, reading, observing a vast emptiness filled with wonders, while I cannot tell the difference between all times, and this cooling cup of tea.  

She never looks dn.

She never looks dn.

Written by Justin Vasterling.

Inspired by the Short Story A Sea of Stars by Kayla Overkill

He had read all the logs he could find by the time he could hit her with the externals.  They were just magnetic echoes as her I systems were dark.  It was a bona fide derelict, a retirement party for the right vessel and crew, but he was not it.  9sic deposited 800k into his trade profile just to download their file and it went a long way towards him not getting any not-so-bright, bright ideas.  He was to, “board the derelict Sacrifice as an employee of Kada-IG, dark the AS Beacon, re-establish critical systems to Min-60%…” which really just meant lights and heat, something to keep the flies away, feign life if you know what I mean “...begin allswell transmitions & repel boarders as needed”.

There were four other ships enroot.  The Quiester was an OrionINC Jupiter Shuttle turned ABsalvage, they were a three man.  He had been chatting with their Intelligent Components crew, a girl, he assumed as I did from the chatter log.  They stopped talking after he posted read of the 3 files from Nine Planet’s Situation In Critical office.  Either he stopped getting “emails”, I don't know why we still call them that, when they no doubt saw his course correction, or she just grew disinterested with all his “what are you wearing now?” bullshit.  The Quiestar had been on Sacrifice’s six since 60HoursOut.  They must have been talking to the crew of the Sacrifice, or at least some of them, while some of them were still alive.  They would have been the hardest crew he would have had to repel and the first ones on him now at that time just 17HO. 

She was dark inside and out.  He made six complete rotations looking for telltales, hull breach, that’s what all the CS alarms hinted at and what he thought.  The Sacrifice had flushed 82% of its breathables in the last 13 hours before their Abandon Ship hit a blue-shifted Calisto Relay and proceeded to rain an “All Hell Is Breaking Loose” distress that no one this side of Mars new existed in code form.  Abandon fucking ship.  There must have been a real nightmare loose on that barge.

He had just picked his entry spot when he logged visual of a “body” tangled in the aft array.  It must have scarred him.  He had seen bodies before and has said he preferred them outside the ship.  It still fucks with you though, still makes you wonder what it feels like, like you could feel it, you know, hard vacuum, like they might turn to you and tell you how cold it was or that they couldn’t breath or would try to hold the air inside their blood with freezing arms.  It was a woman.  No one likes to see dead women.  He took a 3dburst of the body from one of the arms he had put on his sloop last spring then harpooned the aft hatch and went above to suit up.  The image has been sterilized with radiation but it sits in the uzby-Q as a pulse of black slides, testiment to the fact that a picture WAS taken.  He took a body bag with him. 

The body had dislodged by the time he had made it out there so he magnetized the mylar coffin and put it on the hull next to the Lock he entered.  Inside there was power and heat, the lights were just off.  He couldn’t get anything out of any of the panels in the lock so he geared back up and forced it.  In side there was no one home.  He had about 12 hours left to push this bitch back up on her feet.  That must be why he didn’t clear the ship, that’s what he must have told himself.  After checking the Changes log on his Lock he had to have assumed they had all done what they said they would do and did not check the other Lock logs.  Sacrifice had 43 when it left the Moon.  People.  Now THAT is a mining operation, hell, two of the bays were still full of those bitchin little orbiters and those babies alone were worth a retirement.  Just remote activate the little beast, paint your 8mil Ton iron Asteroid and off it goes, attaches and ferries it to a stable orbit around the nearest Brand refinery.

He was at -8% in three hours.  It was easy really; it was like he walked into some rich guy’s house, started a fire, turned on the lights, locked the door and went into the living room to watch TV only the TV didn’t work.  He got some hall to hall stuff up but not even the securities would go live.  He was on his ship when he heard it.  He was setting up his allswell and piggybacking on the Sacrifie’s IFR codes when he heard it for the first time.  There are entries, now blank like living bleach had found the stain.  He should have emailed someone.  He should have sent something but he was not that kind of guy.  He wanted at least six minutes of transition.  He wanted to send a packet out that would show a ‘receive’ a good five minutes after mission accomplished.  It was his professional salvage signature.  He never got to send it.

When the Questar arrives they wait thinking the Privateer would pull some murder shit for the haul.  It has happened, the stories are all fictions really, it’s only happened once, still, everyone thinks it.  Vacuum is no place to fight.  She sends right at visual and doesn’t stop the live call for 99 hours when all three ships go dark at once.  Her shit gets to the AMLabAe8, one of the other “Four” responders the kid mentions.  Who copies the Navies IL8 Gaspra Class Belt Hospital Ship.   The BHS IL8 rendezvous with the the AMLab and they take the next 4 full “days” getting there, arrive, then litterally disappear.

Whatever shit the kid re-awoke was swarming as the Questar started to get Gravity pings from the NISMO Drive on the Sacrifice.  I watch all seven Lstreams from the Questars last 11.8 Live seconds like it is a movie though now it sits south left of some galaxy rendered a star by distance in my hud.

The truth is, there has not even been a sea disaster like this, it’s like a cross between a fog pileup on some nowhere interstate west that stretches for a quarter mile and wrecks everything, and a marina full of glass fucking boats getting fisted by a hurricane.  The “scary” part of the transmissions is watching the crew of the Quiestar in late Technical Retro just stop forwarding AQ’s or refreshing aperatures or TC's and just sit there.  You think at first that there is a freeze in the feed but you can see horizon displacements grow or move and you realize that they are all either paralized or completely distracted.  All at the same time.  Like as in within a quarter second of eachother.

It’s not even a question about sending a nuke, each of these ships is a nuke and the Sacrifice has like a golf ball of antimatter in her NISMO drive and that could put some fucking English on the moon.  Being the only boots on the ground I wanted to feed 9sic my thoughts so they would not have to say the stupid shit outloud themselves.  The bad thing about a decision was it required knowledge of the problem and the best answer available right now, for What Is The Problem?, was still "other".  

Why the fuck is everyone jumping from their airlocks.  That’s the question right?  How are engineers spending LONG technical moments writing software patches to allow them to pop the doors to their ships with creative and calm collaboration from other crew?  What turns suicide into a trip to the club with your friends?  Those are the questions and they export into the super-psychological quickly when you consider the variance of factors and the singularity of outcome.

I get a “Stand by.” Every hour and an “Update” every six hours, I suppose they do it just so I do not think they have all shit themselves and run.  I am 11 days in Observational hold before the BC Montero is visual.  166 crew.  It’s like a space station but mean.  I dock and board and spend 11 hours getting personal with some very young people in Medical, which is all the military is any more, kids.  I wear a collar for lack of a better word.  It will “turn me off” if it needs to; just until danger is over, they tell me.  "Yeah, well, I need to be awake to make danger go away." I tell them, one of them laughs and says no shit, and then they all laugh.  They drink.  When did that change?  They are apparently going to sleepwalk into vacuum, two of the very serious types are I guess, I also guess they keep them somewhere else because every kid I have seen so far is not seriouse at all, not even a little bit.  They volunteered is what Medical says.  They would report back if they could and one of the NCO’s nod while scroll-writing into the air..  That’s what they said.

I asked them what they thought would happen.  They were all silent then one of them started screaming and grabbing her throat and cut her G-tether and everyone started laughing while she tilt whirled stiff legged until her head brushed a chair and then they all just laughed and laughed.  They were like one person.  I started drinking too.

The Captain was a girl or as the ensigns in medical called her, a Lipstick Lesbian.  Something told me they were all gay or second gender or BioSterile.  I would not find a single woman to fuck on a ship of 166, 130 of which were women of one kind or another.  She invited me to the bridge and we talked, not entirely of anything relevant to the crazy madness waiting 18KNM dead center visual in the CIC.  It was comfortable there, looked like a basement office.  There was a drawing of a bridge beside the door as you walked in, it really set the tone.  Everyone was drinking, not alcohol but something.  They were all great friends it seemed.

Then a guy rewiring some feed in the floor looked up and asked the captain, how do they all know they won’t die?  A homely girl facing away from us said telepathy but the kid doing the wiring shook his head no and smiled pointing his finger into the air.  The captain smiled.  Then six very serious looking young men came in.  One of them had his uniform painted on, no shit, you could see his dick and balls and everything and no one acknowledged it but me.  The captain stood up and ran over and hugged one of them and called him Lyle and asked him how he was feeling and he said ready and she made and indescribably encouraging, excited and cautious look that infected the entire CIC, or just me, and at that moment I would have done anything to be Lyle.

Tell Lyle that, the kid who was finishing up securing the panel told the homely girl.  She stopped, turned and looked at Lyle and then me, then turned back to the display hovering in front of her.  The captain told Lyle to come stand by her and led him by the hand back to her chair and sat, took a sip of something and looked back at the conversation that had lost some steam.  Maybe the Homely girl was straight, would want to fuck.

They ended up “Sealing” Lyle into a Clear Carbon shell with 300Hrs air and a couple power bars.  Painted it with a very unique radiation signature and fired him at the confederacy of dead ships.  Anyone within 7KNM of the egg could see it and could call it with anything larger than an EnFinity drive.  They got him back in ten days after losing two LRF’s, the Ligeia and the Siopia.  Those were two crew FA fighters, EXPENSIVE, and the pilots were fucking beautiful..  I don't know what hurts more.

“Fucking mermaids” he says nodding when they get him cut out.  I remember thinking, He shit in the egg, that’s what they were calling it, the Egg.  I remember thinking it like he had done something wrong.

The Captain just told him that Medical needed him.  He was “shut off” and fired back at the moon like a human tape recorder being mailed back with the tape still inside it for someone to play back and listen to.

They got a woman out of the deal too.  The Ligeia spotted her suited up, swimming like in water.  The suite was old school and the twin Falcata Drives on the Montero just grabbed her ping and drug her 18KNM to the gravity pillow under the ship that awaited her insane velocity.  She said the same thing.  She was the star of the ship.  She wouldn’t let Medical fix her ears.  She just kept saying that she did not want them fixed "here" and asking if whatever room she was in led outside, like outside to the yard or whatever, thats how she said it.  "Can you get outside from here?"  She was hot of course.  Mean.  Strong.  I got a kiss and a boot in my balls becaause of it.  Shit, I should name this; a Kiss and a Boot in the Balls for trying.  Fuckin mermaids, and nothing from anybody like, she's crazy or, sedate her, or any looks of incredulity it was just, Mermaids, really, no shit.

I was EB so I took her; she was keen to forgive everything for a ride FastBack.  We talked a little.  I asked her why everyone in this fucking solar system was gay these days and she looked at me like I just told her that her favorite band just sounded like noise.  Whatever.  I never saw a Mermaid.  Never went back to the Scene of the Suicides.  It’s a big belt.  There’s no reason to go back there and I won’t no matter how many times they ask.  You see, the BC Montero came back empty.  The whole goddamn ship’s crew just walked into space.  I found out weeks later.  The truth is I follow her, the girl they found.  I watch her from the street in the rain, watch her through her window, got an apartment across the alley, our windows almost touch, Old earth is the real deal.  I listen to her scream in the night, sit up in the window like I am protecting her somehow by being awake but I am not.  I am just watching, listening.  She never looks up.

Outer Dark

"They crested out on the bluff in the late afternoon sun with their shadows long on the sawgrass and burnt sedge, moving single file and slowly high above the river and with something of its own implacability, pausing and grouping for a moment and going on again strung out in silhouette against the sun and then dropping under the crest of the hill into a fold of blue shadow with light touching them about the head in spurious sanctity until they had gone on for such a time as saw the sun down altogether and they moved in shadow altogether which suited them very well."

The greatest first sentence of all time, from the most beautiful novel I have ever read, Outer Dark.