Letters to an Android

by Wendy Rathbone

  I read a lot. Thank you for sharing your lesson plans with me. I enjoy studying the subjects you are studying, even if I’m not doing it formally. You are way ahead of me, though. For one, I do not have a background in engine repair. And navigation confounds me. Despite my accounting experience, your gift for math is one I don’t share.

  On one of my days off I walked the length of this entire little flat world in eight hours. In the years you were here, had you ever done that? All alleys lead to the fenced edge overlooking the sparkling double force-fields. The further away from the ashy rocket yards you go, the clearer the air. It turns gold and rose, darkening to purple in the false nights.

  I never knew that.

  Love,

  Cobalt

  *

  Dear Cobalt:

  A large group of us went planetside, arriving at dawn on the main continent. I may travel far seven days a week but I don’t always fully realize it until I set foot on another alien world.

  From the main city of Dal Shihun, it was only a short hike through emerald sands to the Temples of the Falling Stars. We arrived well before lunch. Of course it was a tourist trap, but a stunningly beautiful one. The weather was cool but not cold, the sky clear as water, not a cloud.

  The temples are carved from the leftover debris of the largest meteorite impact. Most of the meteorite burrowed itself in the planet’s crust but huge sections broke off and flew in various directions. The temples exist within a small pile of that debris relatively close together.

  Looked at from afar, it is a rubble of black rocks.

  The temples are intricately sculpted on the outside with carved reliefs of animals, people, whole towns. The carvings tell myths and stories. The main one is, of course, the destruction of the cities and the mass exodus underground. Some carvings show scenes of war, others scenes of love both familial and erotic.

  The black stone is hollowed out and you enter through an archway to an interior of dark walls much like a cavern minus the stalactites. There are curved alcoves where people leave offerings like candles and flowers. The theory is if you honor the star it will remain full and strong with no need to fall. Keep the star-gods happy and their anger will not be unleashed. That’s the story of all religions, right? Appeasing the quick tempered supernatural beings. I’m not sure how happy it would make them to learn that one of the temples is now, in its entirety, a giant gift shop. Can’t say I didn’t glance nervously up at the sky before going inside that store.

  Lark bought a t-shirt studded with iron-ore glitter guaranteed to be meteor sand. He changed into it immediately and glimmered and glistened in the sunlight on our hike back to the city, with me and Tiri snickering behind him because, well, his collection of t-shirts is taking over what limited closet space we have, including mine in my own stateroom where he now permanently stores some of his clothes. And he has only ever worn each one once.

  He ignored us.

  Then we all had lunch together with a few other friends at a place called The Meteor Pub that served mostly hamburgers and fries. And alcohol.

  We caught the shuttle at twilight and ascended through a dark blue sky, home in time for dinner and the stars.

  I was so tired but got called in the middle of my sleep period to repair a major memory conduit that was failing to receive star-data causing half the ship’s consoles to go red.

  Now it is late morning. My forehead hurts and all I see when I close my eyes are crimson squares pulsating. I feel like I’m writing this blind.

  But before I sleep I’m sending this wave because all I think of is you.

  Love,

  Liyan

  *

  Dear Liyan:

  The weeks go by in flashes. Mostly shades of green.

  I have a lot of time now to read. There is so much! Information exudes from the very air, it seems. I read until the paragraphs blur. I peruse the libraries, the knowledge stores. I buy information as if it is air. I believe I’ve overshot my allowance several months in a row but Pel has never spoken a word about it to me.

  Of course I’ve had access to computer systems before. But never had much time to study. I used to watch newsfeeds to put me to sleep when I was amped up from working too many hours. Now I ignore them. They offer no real knowledge. Just more human politics. Nothing changes. Not for me.

  Funny how I’ve tried to learn to read your math. And failed miserably. I may be programmed for brilliance, but that subject is your gift, not mine. But I like all kinds of sciences. I’ve read about star-drives and the chemical compositions of star-hulls. I’ve read about true-Earth and cosmic astrology. Oh sure, mysticism mixed with physics. It’s ridiculously absurd. But then again, the best physicists courted both. It feeds my dreams. I’m not afraid of the abstract. I read a book about the vat yards where I was born. I read two on cloning. Full of myths, those. But they led me to less nonsensical texts.

  I’m no longer sad when I read or take my long walks to the fenced edges of this world. But I stay away from the old planetarium. I don’t look too long at pictures of galaxies. Because I already know you’re out there, passing through all that spark and flame. I see it always in my mind, your reflections in the burning, the scintillating ships.

  From you, now it is all about the words, the mind. Do you understand? I want to know the universe that way through your eyes only. Mine are not far-seeing enough.

  So I don’t look at star-maps. I don’t linger on astro-images. For once the jade curtain of the sky that bars me from all star-fields is a welcome sight.

  When you take your captain’s tests at the end of the year, wave me as often as you can. I will be with you every step of the way.

  Love,

  Cobalt

  *

  Dear Cobalt:

  I write to you in a cold light. I’m sitting on the observation deck and everything is pulsating blue/silver, blue/silver. My Pegasus emblem is dancing up the cuff to my sleeve. The tiny fluttering wings. He wickers. Call me Deep Cold he says.

  I am not working. Not able. Not in this foldspace. Too drugged to subtract. Divide. Who knows if the stars are even really there? Falling apart in Lark’s eyes. He laughed at me when I told him I saw you outside. Right outside. Standing on a fenced blue sphere. Watching our starship bend.

  So when I went to the shuttle bay to suit up and go outside to get you, that’s when they all came. And locked me in my room. When I cried for a view they brought me here to the lowest viewing deck and chained me to the bench. With a pillow. And a black Orion fur wrap. (I said I was cold.)

  They gave me my portable wave screen in case I got cohesive and wanted something to read.

  I know I am right. You are just outside these walls and to the northeast where I can see the warp-trails collide. It’s possible. In foldspace everything exists close together. The speed of space is being everywhere at once. You’re not that far away. If only I could reach out in the right…space.

  I need to make notes on this but all I can see is your smile and the elixirs of your eyes.

  I want to go home now.

  I want to wrap up in the void and sleep and not awaken until I feel your hand on my face. There. I’ve said it. Iloveyou.

  I cannot tap letters. I am trying to dictate and tap at the same time. It’s stupid.

  Sick on the cool floor and writhing. It hurts right here. Insert: my hand on my solar plexus. If you could place your head there and listen to see if I still have a heart I would appreciate it. I would owe you so many favors. Because I think I lost it somewhere out in Vega. Place your palm against my ribs. Let it sink into me. Tap your fingers. Make my heart form and beat again.

  I am just lying here looking at this strange white ship from the inside out and trying not to hear the singing outside of the unstrung and jittery starlessness.

  Shouldn’t our engines be called unstar-drives? Because we are not moving through the stars right now, that is for sure.

  I ca
n smell the ozone of all this machinery.

  It can’t happen.

  None of this is real.

  O hell I think the black fur from Orion moved a paw.

  This transmission is failing.

  When I crashland I will still be thinking of you.

  LoveLiyan

  P.S. Coming out of foldspace and looking at the mess I made (a shredded black fur blanket is the least of it) and at this letter to you…I cleaned it up and then decided to send it anyway.

  Tiri said, “Don’t send it. Send him something nice.”

  Lark glared at her, folded his arms over his chest and said to me, “Why should you be embarrassed?”

  Sometimes this is what it’s like in space. Even budding captains get the loonies. No one’s safe. Crewmates try to help, then look the other way and let you alone if it’s merely a drunken wallow. And they lock up the suits and helmets and shuttle-bay doors real tight!

  This has only happened to me bad four times in my career. Usually the tranquilizers in the water keep things level. But not always! Others experience the spacesickness more often or not at all. Lark seems practically immune. Tiri has had dozens of non-functional foldspace trips.

  P.P.S. Deep Cold is back on my cuff and definitely not animated.

  *

  Dear Liyan:

  Your letters and poems written in foldspace are among my favorites. Not that every wave you send isn’t special. But this gives me a view of another side of you.

  I should add that I’m glad you did not crash land.

  Foldspace is an interesting phenomenon and I have finally had time to read some scientific treatises on the subject. It is still not well understood even by the best of minds.

  The foldspace cults have written texts from the angle of mysticism. Also not well understood. Some call it Interstellar Halluci-gnosis.

  It is not unusual that you would think, in the mind of foldspace, that you are ever far from anything. That is the nature of the travel, as you well know. It is designed to get ships to far places by the swiftest short cut. The fact that these short cuts even exist for ships to navigate gives a different idea and definition to the term distance altogether. You could probably do an equation all about it 500 pages long. You probably have. The math proves the condition. But it doesn’t understand the mind trip.

  I’m probably repeating everything you already know. But the subject is fascinating.

  I know you are on the verge of taking your tests. Three days worth?

  You will do well.

  Then what? Do you wait for a ship?

  I’m excited for you as if this is happening to me. It is because your waves are so colorful and candid. I can well imagine everything you are encountering, seeing, experiencing. I do sometimes dream I am there with you, Lark and Tiri.

  Perhaps while you were in foldspace I actually was leaning against the fence at the edge of this asteroid. Thinking of you. Looking for you with my thoughts, my mind. Maybe we were very close to each other and if I could’ve reached out at just the right angle in space I could have touched the energy spark of your ship as it bent back upon the star-lanes.

  Having the time to store up knowledge inside me makes me feel strong. More free. I am also healthier for my long walks.

  For everything you have done for me, thank you. I am not the same weak, less fortunate man you left behind.

  Love,

  Cobalt

  *

  Dear Cobalt:

  Yes, the tests. It’s all I think about. Dream about. Talk about. Driving everyone around me mad.

  Days away now. I can’t sleep. When I pass out my dreams are loud, filled with light and echoing universes of numbers.

  Yes, I will put in applications for ships after I am assessed (assuming I pass all the tests.) Then I wait.

  I can stay with C&C or put in applications with other companies. C&C does not own me. But they have been good to me. And I know their company technology backward and forward.

  I know you are anticipating this as highly as I am. It’s great to have the enthusiastic support. I have the best of friends. My reputation is clear.

  For a long time I worried about the incident with the android Koral. Not that I had done anything wrong. But I worried that he would somehow coerce his owner to sue me for some misperceived threat based on his strange anger toward me when I was only trying to be friendly. If you recall, the captain had dismissed the incident with little comment and I was afraid he thought there might be more to it and he just didn’t want to know. But nothing bad ever happened. The captain treated me in the usual fashion, trusting me with sensitive systems in complicated situations. And much to my relief, we have never transported those two passengers again.

  And Cobalt, I am so happy to hear that you are able to grow stronger, that your life feels freer. Knowledge is independence. But then that’s easy for me to say. I was not born a slave.

  Still, now you have the time to at least follow your mind if not your heart.

  You are amazing.

  Love,

  Liyan

  *

  24. The Captain’s Test, and The Windpoet

  Dear Cobalt:

  I cannot sleep.

  I cannot sleep.

  I can’t sleep.

  Love,

  Liyan

  *

  Dear Liyan:

  You’ll sleep when you pass out.

  Love,

  Cobalt

  *

  Dear Cobalt:

  An odd three days – the days I passed all my tests. We came out of foldspace on a Monday. I took them on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. By Friday I knew the results. All this on no sleep and a hundred heavily sugared coffees.

  Yes, I am drunk now. Yes I am waiting in all this darkness for my starship to come.

  Tiri gave me a necklace of trillium to mark my success.

  Lark just ruffled my hair…again. It meant everything.

  Too much. So I went off alone to…get hold of myself.

  I wandered onto c-deck, the lower lobby for the guests and it seemed one of our passengers, the famous windpoet Grfestielle, decided to give a public reading. It had already begun some hours before and his audience had wandered away. I was later to learn the performance lasted twelve hours.

  It seems Grfestielle suffers from stage fright so he has programmed a yellow metal robot – one of the old kinds with a flat-screen head and pipe legs on squeaky wheels – to recite his…concoctions. The tinny voice was so amazingly annoying, quoting his words of weirdness and all his ghost-poems.

  I caught an hour or so of it mainly because I was just trying to distract my jumping brain (and heart) before I could take no more. All I remember is that screechy voice and a lot of imagery of hands and buttocks. He described wonder as a rift of ages and I thought, well, okay. There was one I sort of liked about ghost-stars and iced tea. But not enough for me to stay. I left about the time the robot began droning the one where he took every 13th sentence of Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and put it altogether as a poemnovel.

  In the rec room they threw a party for me and Tiri kept putting spiced gold drinks in my hands. I didn’t even ask what they were…tasted of whiskey and cinnamon.

  I had to crash early. Everything was spinning, gleaming. I couldn’t stand upright anymore.

  I’m lying on my side talking into this wave screen and the only light is the silver screen and a line of pink under my door leaking in from the outer corridor.

  I’m going to send this now before I pass out completely.

  I hope it goes instant and does not delay across the fields of the stars I have traveled.

  Goodnight.

  Love,

  Liyan

  *

  25. An Aurora of Starliners

  Dear Liyan:

  There is no better news I can think of receiving than your last wave.

  Congratulations on yo
ur success!

  A captain now! I desperately wish I could be there to celebrate with you.

  I believe the drinks you were given by Tiri are called Orange Pulsars. They are disgusting. If you must partake, mine are the best.

  I don’t think I need to say this but I forgot in my last wave to you. If you ever see me standing in the strange spheres of foldspace please do not ever try to go outside to greet me. Better to let me come to you. Please promise me that.

  As I write this, I’m still digesting your promotion. Of course I had no doubt it would happen for you, but the reality of it is quite enormous. You were so very young and full of dreams when we met and now…this!

  I can at least share the thrill, the anxiety, the accomplishment through you. After I send this, I will get up and take a long walk to the edge. I will look across the fenced chasm to the flickering force-field; try to see past the tourmaline shields to the star-vistas you inhabit.

  And I will imagine you. I will imagine you all in white walking the decks of your own starliner, the crew looking up to you, the silvery space-paths the ship takes on your command.

  I won’t rest tonight. I won’t be able to.

  Love,

  Cobalt

  *

  Dear Cobalt:

  Under the crystalline dome of Spirika with the sun by day, then the stars by night hot against the ten foot thick glass, we rode tame, pink feathered dragons into misty caves where pale green water poured endlessly in great falls a mile high. All like a dream. Breaths like pink-tinged candy. The tastes of summer, of sweet rain. Dissolving sugared air stayed on my tongue two days after returning to the ship.