CONTACT
I love the dawn - when the trouble-makers are still fast
asleep; when the dew hangs heavy on the blades of grass and your feet get
sopping wet walking through it. Or else it’s dry and springy and you can lie
down or roll around on it, looking up at the peeping sky when the light is
still soft and things are not quite there yet, but you can still touch them.
I was born on earth where the sunrises were magnificent
and magical. Here on this asteroid the dull red sun oozes up over the horizon
and reflects bloodily off the shiny hard substance beneath my feet. How it came
to this? The story of my brain or the story of my heart? Well the story of my
brain is tedious beyond words. The story
of my heart? Well, my mother left us at an early age and I just went off in
search of her, and this is where it landed me some twenty years later.
Admittedly I have looked for her in some very strange places and faces, though
I don’t even remember what she looked like. But I never stopped looking. I
suppose that’s why I never married or settled down. I have settled down now though; I’ve
been here for more than four months and starting to get worried. Two
reasons: the first is that my oxygen is running low, and that means I won’t be
able to go out and get food anymore. I tried stock piling those globs of goo in
the cave with me, but the heat and the oxygen causes it to ferment and go
rotten. It makes a pretty good beer though and after a few experiments I got
quite a nice little brew going. Helps to pass the time. Trouble is, I’m
starting to see things, so either the beer is more potent than I thought, or
I’m losing my mind from being alone too long and knowing I’m going to die soon.
The second thing is, there was another quake, or spasm I
suppose you could call it. The ground heaves like a bucking bronco but it
doesn’t crack open or break up. This planet, although the surface is diamond
hard, has a rubbery, pliable quality about it. All in all, I’m not too happy
about these quakes. There’ve been two of them in the last month, and getting
stronger. So, between the quakes and the lack of oxygen I’ve been going out at
night to take a final look at the stars because I know I’m not going to last
much longer. I’ve been saying my last goodbyes to my maker; if you believe in
one. A Maker always seems more plausible when it’s just you and a whole bunch
of nothingness surrounding you, especially if you’ve been alone for a long time
and do a lot of talking to yourself. Some people call that nuts but I found it
rather interesting because I started realizing that if I’m talking to myself
then there must be two of us here; the one who’s talking…and the one who’s
listening, right? It’s quite companionable actually. We don’t fight that much
anymore either. Sure, occasionally one of us will call the other an ass, but
then it’s because one of us said or did something stupid; which is usually me;
not myself. Myself is a lot more sophisticated than me.
Anyway the two of us were standing there wondering if we
could spot our maker amongst the stars when I saw an angel. I’m not religious
really, but I suppose I have been thinking about heavenly bodies and stuff
recently and there she was…this angel. Well at first it was wonderful, as if God had sent this beautiful messenger to me. I felt overcome with bliss, a little but scared, but all in all I was ecstatic. But then I noticed something. The longer she stood there, the more she began to look like
every girl I had ever fallen in love with and then dumped because they weren’t...my
mother. Suddenly I would see a face that I almost recognized but it would slip away beneath the water every time I fished for it…like narcissus looking in the pool for his own self-image.
I hadn’t ‘done well’ by any of my old sweethearts so this angel’s
tantalizingly familiar face was dragging some cringeworthy stuff out for me to
look at, a bit like the ghosts of romances past parading by...she
drew them all out of me like a poultice on an ulcerated wound. I didn’t want to
look, but I had to. And then I couldn’t stop looking. I began feverishly dredging through the
discards on the garbage dump of my desire, looking for a rock in the sea of my memories to
wreck myself on – someone close to the centre whom I had hurt very badly –
someone I had betrayed terribly…looking for a crime to stab myself with…some irrefutable evidence of my wrongdoing to feed to my voracious self-pity. Here we go again I thought; schizophrenia; going
from one extreme to the other. Turns out one of us is a bastard and the other
is a victim. One of us always suffers from what the other idiot does. At this
moment I was the victim.
The face of the angel in front of me filled me both with
joy and terrible pain. One of me felt humiliated and unworthy in front of her,
and the other felt found and cherished. It’s just I didn’t know which one to
choose. And there she was, standing out on the plains; no space-suit or wings,
just a shining robe of sorts, her skin as white as virgin snow, and her smile
was the most wonderful and terrible thing I’d ever seen. It made me feel like
running away. It made me feel like falling at her feet. I waited for her to
strike me dead or kiss me, I don’t know which. It was far too a portentous a moment
for a friendly chat so I never said a word though I dearly longed for her to
love me. We just stood there looking at each other for the longest of times, my
heart hammering home the nails of my sins. Would she be able to forgive me? For all the things I had done to her sisters? She stood still and heavenly, and I
knew she had come to take me away. And I would have gone with
her but in the next instant she simply wasn’t there anymore and then I wanted
to die. There was no more point in living. I simply sat down on the ground and
waited for my oxygen to run out. It was more than I could bear.
However, I soon got tired of wanting to commit suicide and
was also feeling a bit hungry, so I called it a day and went back to the cave to
drown my sorrows in goopy beer. After that I went out constantly but didn’t get to see her
until one night while I was sleeping in the cave and she came to me in a dream.
I got such a shock at seeing her that I woke up. Then I got an even bigger
shock because she was still there when I woke up, standing in the cave right in
front of me. I must say at that stage I knew I was losing my mind. I lost
complete control of myself and, like a gibbering lunatic I shouted at her, “Who
are you? What do you want of me?”
Then she opened her mouth and music came bubbling out.
N
The great white bird shot out of the wormhole, screaming
like a banshee. The klaxons were going crazy – warning lights flashed all across the
board, and everyone was thrown forward against their harnesses as if they had
run into a brick wall. They would probably have been seriously hurt had they
not all been strapped in. The computer had warned them that the wormhole-ride
was coming to an end and for them to secure themselves. Even
so there were more than a few bruises from the impact of the straps and Sweet
Mary had bitten her tongue when her chin had hit her chest. There was nothing
ahead of them that could have caused the sudden deceleration; nothing to see,
just the stars. But even though the ship’s drive-engines were running at
cruise, their actual speed was decreasing at an alarming rate. Something was
pulling them backwards. Dutch took a look behind and saw that the entire
horizon was filled with a giant red sun – its great gravity-well dragging them
back into its fiery mass.
“Hold tight,” she shouted. “This is going to be rough!”
She keyed in more thrust and felt the ship buck and sway
as it fought against the deadly pull, but made no headway. It was like one of
those dreams where you are trying to escape but your legs just won’t run no
matter how hard you try, like you’re mired in molasses. She looked around at
her little crew and found that they were all staring at her with wide expectant
eyes. There was just no way she could answer the question marks on their faces.
She knew they probably weren’t going to make it but there was no way she was
going to admit that out aloud.
“Hang on. We’re going to get out of this,” she said and
began increasing the power until the G-force in the ship was making it
difficult for her to retain consciousness. Still they were caught in the suck
of the seething sun behind them. The engines whined and roared and the ship
bucked and lurched and strained at the leash but all to no avail. They were
held in a vice like grip. Dutch knew that neither she nor the ship could take
the strain any longer and could feel the darkness creeping round the edge of
her sight. She knew that by now the two women, and possibly the men too, had
blacked out already. Soon it would be her turn.
Now she was confronted with a problem. Normally full power
wouldn’t be dangerous: there was a built-in limiter designed to keep the
G-force within acceptable human parameters; but there was no way of calculating
the G-force they were being subjected to because the gravity of the sun was
adding to it exponentially. So she couldn’t just open the throttle and hope for
the best. It would kill them all, no doubt about that. And she couldn’t just
keep slowly increasing the speed until they broke free because she was just
about to pass out herself. She had to take a gamble and hope that it came off.
She had to rely on her years of experience and instinct as a pilot and make a
judgement call. She keyed in three quarter power, set the maximum safe time
limit for cut-off, and closed her eyes.
BE SURE TO WATCH OUT FOR THE NEXT EPISODE.
