Stars
Author: Eshet Chayil
Original post: https://arrowspeedfiles.wordpress.com/2018/10/18/stars/
Entry for the YC120 Pod and Planet Fiction Contest in the A Day in the Life category.
Remember to look up at the stars
Now and then.
They will give you peace.
Jeremiah stood on the balcony of his two-story cabin, gazing on the magnificence of his Temperate planet. Knowing that his eyes alone were the only audience to this view, he nevertheless found great satisfaction in what he saw surrounding him. He had built it over the course of 26 years occupying the planet, and now he breathed in slowly, satisfied that he had done a good thing here. Nobody would see this but himself and maybe the gods. But it did not seem wasted, the waterfalls, gardens, peaceful walkways, and hideaways for picnics and deep thoughts. The buildings were carefully architected to compliment the landscape, designed for effect from this very point of view. The tallest were placed far away for their subtle effect on the skyline, the smaller nestled up close for scale of detail. As an artist will paint for the beauty alone without regard for audience or admiration, so Jeremiah had created this planet out of dirt, stone, and sunlight, seeking only to make something beautiful from his own hands.
The heartbreak of leaving this behind — as he knew would happen soon — weighed on him and removed the joy he would otherwise have felt. It comforted a little to know that at last someone other than himself might see and enjoy this view, even as they took the planet from him. Someone new might stand here soon, would gaze on the paths and buildings, vine framed tables, and gardens of berries and flowers. Someone new would notice the careful detail of the design and would know the care and love with which it had been created.
Maybe.
Or maybe not — the Caldari were not known for their artistic sense, only the business of running an economy and a war machine. Realistically and more likely, no one would stand here after he left and recognize the beauty. That broke his heart more than the invasion had broken his spirit.
As the sky darkened, Jeremiah turned his gaze to the stars. It had been only last night, as they had talked late into the night, that his friend had said to him, “Go out and look at the stars. You will find that they will release to you some peace.” With all that had happened, it had seemed impossible and Jeremiah was reluctant to seek a peace that did not seem deserved after losing a war so quickly and ingloriously. And yet, now that he stood here under their light, there was something that streamed from them into his heart, gently quieted his worried thoughts, and settled his grieving soul. His friend had been right.
It seemed impossible that it was only a few days ago that Jeremiah had set out in the early morning for a normal run in a mining ship to an asteroid about to pop. He had noticed more than the normal number of hostiles about and then had lost his ship before finishing his coffee and fully waking up. Shrugging it off as bad luck and inattention, he then took a look at Intel.
An invasion of Caldari hordes was clear with a single glance at near panicked posts detailing growing gangs of capitals in nearly every system of the region. The alliance had a plan for this, of course, every region did. They would all be heroes, as they had agreed. And all quickly congregated to their staging systems, silenced their microphones, and followed instructions carefully. Nearly everyone was well-prepared with both ships and practiced discipline. Those who were not jammed themselves into whatever ship they could find, beg, or buy, knowing they would be facing stern consequences later for their unpreparedness. And despite the fearful view out every pilot’s window, every single pilot would fight to the end of the day, though the night, and on through the three days that followed until their store of ships was exhausted and victory admittedly impossible. They were outnumbered, out-played, and out-spent by those flying so many very expensive ships. At the end of the fourth day, there were only the stars to comfort, no station still standing, no complex remaining, and no ships still flying.
It was a quiet retreat, each pilot to the solitude of their own planet and a sleepless night.
“Hello, are you awake?”
“Yes, I can’t sleep either.”
“I worry about what will happen next.”
“Me too.”
“What will the Caldari do to us now?”
“I don’t know.”
“We have no defense against them”
“I know”
“I can’t sleep, I am too worried.”
“Me too”
“Maybe we could have done something different, maybe there was a way we could have kept our home.”
“Maybe. But I don’t think so. There were too many.”
“Try to sleep now”
“Yes, OK, you too”
And each one to their own bed and their own planet, found a way to suffer through the night and drag their feet onto the floor the next day.
The Temperate planet occupied and owned by Jeremiah was of a type highly prized for its flexibility to shape itself to the vision of an imaginative designer. Other planets were not so fortunately adaptive. The Lavas in particular left little that could be done, other than directing the lava flows around small living areas. The Gas planets were nearly as bad, though could be managed with good living enclosures in carefully surveyed locations.
Of course, some planet owners didn’t particularly care what they had to work with, and attempted little. No one was allowed to enter the atmosphere of someone else’s planet anyway, and so it seemed pointless to design something that would have no audience. It was forbidden, plain and simple, the unthinkable act of visiting one another. Regardless of desire or invitation of either party, it was not an option. A planet had exactly one occupant. And so, some simply carved out a place to park their ships, sleep, and eat meals, caring little for their surroundings or even their personal comfort. Loneliness had taken its toll.
Well, I take that back. It wasn’t loneliness, exactly. It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of human contacts to be had. Yes, there were no shared meals, no perfunctory kisses on the cheek, no passionate embraces, not a single touch of one human being to another. But there were conversations, text or voice chats, discussions, arguments, negotiations, and bonds formed. And from that, friendships were found, kept, lost, renewed, or forgotten as was always human nature. Love could be found, too, loyalties held close and unbroken, betrayals and revenge plotted and boasted, victories celebrated, losses mourned. Even after a humiliating retreat from an unwinnable fight, most warriors found themselves soon gathering virtually to talk, rage, praise, and blame, as warriors have always gathered to review the hard events of the day.
And it wasn’t as if they were stuck on the planets themselves, either. Every day, ships were chosen, boarded, and flown for fun, fight, profit, or adventure. Waves to other pilots through their windows were the norm and expected by any with good manners. Most docked at the end of the day with adventures to be relayed, lamented and laughed about later in the evening with friends and foes alike. Laughter was not forgotten. Neither were tears or the sweetness of shared memories.
Yes, not forgotten. But still — tears without the brush of a hand close by, memories without the clink of a glass held by another, laughter without seeing your joy reflected on the face of a dear friend — these left it all a pale and vain attempt to take hold of something that could not quite be grasped. And even those who had never held the hand of another knew that something, something very important, was forever lost.
It would have seemed strange to those who had gone before, this isolation of touch without the loss of conversation. The absolute strictness of forbidden human contact would have been very odd even to his grandparents who had met in person at least a few times. How did this happen?
This state of affairs was, as most unwise rules written and unwritten, built on terror and fear. There had been a time when passions rose so high, rage exploded so unpredictably, terror reigned so unrelenting, that the violence became intolerable. It started with half serious threats of severed body parts and poisoned meals, then the threats were carried out with more and more abandon. Chaos caused most to shut their station doors and cut off all access to their planets and moons to outsiders. And then, when that was done, the chaos turned inward and more deadly, leaving friends and families strewn about their own homes, victims of the turning of humans against each other when driven to unexplained desperation.
Why this happened was still the subject of much discussion and debate. An invisible disease? The final and inevitable fate of fallen man? Simply human nature unbridled? Who could tell? But in the end it didn’t matter, it was happening and unstoppable, until the harshest of measures seemed the only answer. Absolute separation of human from human starting for everyone at age 10. On that birthday, each was sent to their own planet, each with complete control over their own world but no control on any other. Contact was now limited to that which stopped short of the possibility of a dead or mangled body. And even procreation was technology-driven and safely managed without contact.
Safe. Absolute. Locked securely.
And so it was that Jeremiah and Barnabas were best of friends but had never actually met, never even a picture exchanged. They had conversed only with words and voice, never a look into each other’s eyes, never the touch of a handshake, never a knowing glance of shared revelation. Only words were shared between them, sometimes spoken, sometimes written, sometimes just thought. Through many evenings of wine and jokes, many days of plots and schemes, discovering together how it all worked in a world without touch or glance or the holding of a weeping friend, through this a good and lasting friendship was found. It was a friendship built only on the sharing of thoughts, news, gossip, tips and tricks of the trade, a morning greeting, an evening’s goodnight. It was a name, a window of text or companionable silence, seemingly small things, yet now written large across the sky and the stars that Jeremiah gazed at from his balcony. Stars that spoke softly, quieted gently, and brought a measure of peace as promised.
The next morning was cold for a Temperate planet and Jeremiah had to locate his jacket at the back of his closet before selecting a ship to venture out in. He noticed Barnabas in local, flying a deliberately small, cheap, and uninteresting ship. They waved and flew on, each intent to discover, hopefully without much notice by the Caldari, what the region now held for them.
As he traversed system by system, Jeremiah found that the Caldari were everywhere. This was clearly not simply a fun and fly-away deal. They intended to hold the space, whether for themselves or for friends. The scenario did not look good for the current residents.
Well, it wasn’t like pretty much everybody hadn’t done this before. It was the nature of things. Wars won and wars lost, that was a constant here. Re-locations would need to be planned, assets sorted and managed, decisions made. It was just that it had happened so darn fast, one day drinking coffee on the way to a mining operation, and five days later planning an evacuation from a planet that had been home for 26 years. This was bound to put a strain on both state of mind and friendship. Difficult decisions did that to people.
Barnabas had friends in the north, who were offering marginal space for a rental fee. Barnabas mostly trusted them, Jeremiah did not. He did not have a history of good experiences with these guys and expected an eventual betrayal of both control and price.
“Why rush into anything quite so fast? Surely, there is time to plan a good exit. And a good place to go. We don’t need to take the first opportunity.”
“But, this is a good opportunity. Let’s not pass up something that will be a good future for us just because we can’t make a decision.”
“What decision, it’s only been a day. Come on, why are you so damn rushed?”
“I am not damn rushed, I am just being practical. We need a place to go.”
“Well, at least give me a chance to check in with some others.”
“Why do you need to? I already have as good a deal as we’re gonna get. Why are you being so stubborn?”
“STUBBORN? This is ridiculous. You are completely irrational, here. You are asking me to trust somebody based on your word only. I have no reason to think they will treat us well.”
“And WHAT exactly is wrong with my word? How long have we known each other? My word means NOTHING to you?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Yeah, sure that’s not what you meant. What ELSE could you have meant?”
“I meant I want to think about it.”
“GO right ahead. Think all you want. I will be moving tomorrow. Come if you want to.”
It wasn’t so unusual, friends parting in different directions at the end of a war. Most would still keep in contact, paths crossing and recrossing as situations changed inevitably over time. Still, Jeremiah lamented the fight and wished it had not happened in the way it had. It was such a fast down-slide into a cold ending and a divergent path that neither wanted.
Jeremiah had friends too and found a contact who still remembered him. The friend laughed at the dilemma of a lost war to the ungracious Caldari and offered to take them into a fresh alliance in good standing and many empty planets available. It seemed a good alternative. Maybe. Except for the fact that they were almost certainly in line for an Amarr invasion soon, convincingly rumored from many credible sides. And Jeremiah was only half-hearted about any plan at all, truth be told.
In the end, he simply stood again on his balcony, wine in hand, and watched the stars, hoping for a good plan to show itself. It didn’t. Just the stars. Just a friend probably lost. Just a touch that could never be. Just the hopelessness of a lost war, and nothing really to head toward at the end of it all.
His glass went over the edge of the railing, maybe accidental, maybe on purpose, falling more slowly than he had expected, splintering on the rocks below, glittering and shattering and falling and sparkling. He did not follow, though it was considered. Instead he called his friend.
“Are you awake?”
“Yes. Want to talk?”
“Yes”
It seemed odd to so passionately negotiate about where they would land together, when nearly any allowed contact held no dependency on proximity at all. There was no reason for them to be in the same space, other than an occasional wave when they passed each other in their ships. Otherwise, a virtual chat could be instantly had from anywhere. Yet, somehow it seemed important to be near one another, and each held tightly to the assumption that any decision made would be made together.
They agreed that any place they went would involve trusting people they didn’t entirely trust at the moment. Staying was impossible given that the Caldari had simply issued orders to everyone to evacuate by mid-month. A temporary move to an easier and less interesting region was a path many chose, but seemed an intolerable anti-climax to 26 years invested in building a home here.
And so they fought, not so much from disagreement, as from despair. There simply was no good answer. War is war. It does not generally hold optimism for the losers.
In the end, Jeremiah suggested the ridiculous. “Listen, I’m tired of all of this, and maybe I don’t really care that much anyway. All we are doing is picking among bad options. Renting from people we don’t trust. Joining with people we don’t like. Settling in a place likely to be invaded next month if not sooner. Sitting in a boring system mining low-value ores of little interest. Let’s simply flip a coin. Simple. Clean. Easy.”
The ridiculous resulted in numbered list, a random number generated, and a screen shot of the result. The answer was one neither liked, but neither had much liked any of the other choices either. So, they packed up their goods and assets, closed the doors silently on the planets they had built with such care, time, and pain, and started again with an un-trusted alliance who gave them each an ugly and unmanageable Lava planet to try to live on.
As it turned out, a Lava planet has some interesting challenges to it that, when overcome by imaginative thought, trial-and-error, and many late-night brainstorming sessions, led to a planet topography of delightfully colorful results. Well-planned diversions of lava flows, together with the introduction of a variety of well-placed microorganism beds made for sparkling rivers of color, showers of glittering lava-falls, and a view to be envied from Jeremiah’s new balcony. He went with the same design strategy as before, taller sparkling buildings far away with dramatic images outlined against the sky. Smaller buildings close in with detailed trim of many shades and colors, complimenting the glittering flows of lava. The lava then flowed away in rivers carefully designed in their paths to draw the eye to the edges of peripheral vision and emphasize the expanse of startling and unexpected beauty.
The stars were still there too, of course, un-created but planned into the whole to draw the eyes upward as darkness settled, and to give their always sorely needed comfort.
Eventually, the unwisely stringent rules about human contact came to an end. The skyrocketing suicide rate likely had a lot to do with it, along with growing outcries and increased discontent on the part of both lawmakers and citizens. After some trials in a few regions, it was discovered that the rage and violence that had triggered the harsh laws in the first place did not return as the terrifying hammer many had feared. Maybe it was the effect of the stars on those who had looked upon them with both greater despair and greater wisdom, maybe a form of repentance by humankind, or maybe simply increased caution from the knowledge that comes with experience. Whatever the case, many argued that the relative calm could be short-lived and the terror likely to return. This possibility could not be credibly denied.
Still, the terror of isolation outweighed the fear of uncontrolled rage, and at last the planet occupants were allowed to emerge from their exile. Friends and lovers met face to face again, sat at each other’s tables, and viewed with awe and exclamation the beauty created by one another. Hands touched again, grasped and held tightly, lovers embraced, the mourning were comforted, the joyous were kissed with happiness. And yes, of course rage was not erased and so returned too, measured but still hiding in the corners.
It was thought that if unrestrained cruel passions were to ever take over again, surely they would not again be met with such harsh measures. The price was simply too high, the outstretched hand of a friend too vital, to give this up again.