The Star Collector

by Matthew William

  “Uh-huh, any progress on the scan?” Joe asked.

  “It has to check the entire galaxy, Joe. That reminds me. I know exactly what happened at the ruins now.”

  “Do you?” Joe asked.

  “It was a rumor going around the weapons industry that filled me in. I have contacts you know, because of the drill, since it’s technically the strongest laser in existence. Anyway, the Chinese Galactic Empire were after an artifact that can target people and they wanted to use it as a weapon.”

  “Well, you seem to be all caught up,” Joe said. “We had that artifact up until a few hours ago.”

  “Are you serious?” Deniz asked, nearly choking on his drink. His eyes bulged from his skull.

  “Dead serious.”

  “No wonder you’re in such a hurry.”

  “And as far as we know the targeting has already begun,” Joe said

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean it’s already targeting everyone. Maybe the Chinese did it, either by accident or purposefully, and when it’s done it’s going to zap everyone out of existence.”

  “I’ve never seen you in such a hurry in my life, this all makes so much sense now.”

  “And if we find out where Cassandra is, we also know where the artifact is. So...”

  “Yes?” Deniz asked.

  “Can we hurry things up?”

  The phone on Deniz’s display lit up.

  “Oh wait...” Deniz said. “It’s Toby Saturn, my lawyer. Mind if I take this call?”

  “We really need to locate Cassandra,” Joe said.

  “This is all part of that!” Deniz exclaimed and brought up Toby on the screen. “Tobaaay! How’s it going my man?”

  “Not too bad,” the bored looking man on the other end replied.

  “We’ve got a job for you.”

  “Shoot,” Toby said, seeming distracted himself, like he was doing paperwork while simultaneously taking this call.

  “Do you know of a Chinese research facility?” Deniz asked.

  “I know of a rumor of one.”

  “Well, do think you could look into it?”

  “Can do,” Toby said.

  “Cross reference it with anything you can find on a David Chen.”

  “Is that the long and short of it?” Toby asked, seemingly bored.

  “More or less,” Deniz said.

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Ciao!” With that he hung up. “See. He’s very effective. Now where were we?”

  “Cassandra,” Joe said.

  “That’s right, Cassandra. Sweet, sassy Cassandra,” Deniz said checking his computer. “So the scan is complete and there are no results.”

  Joe’s gut dropped.

  “That’s weird,” Deniz said. He turned the screen so Joe could see. “Think maybe you got a number wrong?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Joe said, staring at the blank page. It began to spin before his eyes. His head became light. “It means she’s erased it.”

  “And what does that mean exactly?” Deniz asked.

  Joe immediately got up and bolted for the door.

  “Hey!” Deniz shouted. “What does that mean?”

  “It means she didn’t want me to find her that way,” Joe said looking down at his starsailor’s compass. He yelped with happiness when he realized it was no longer pointed at Bolstra 5.

  He ran out of the office. Alma and Tammy sat in the lobby, sipping ming tea and thumbing through the glossy magazines.

  “How did it go?” Tammy asked.

  “I’ve got no time to lose,” Joe said, running towards the front door.

  “What about the artifact?” Tammy called out after him.

  “I don’t give a crap anymore,” Joe said.

  “Well, wait for us,” Alma said, straining to get out of her chair.

  “This is something I have to do on my own,” Joe shouted back, bursting through the front door of the complex into the cold polar air and towards his ship. Hopefully he wasn’t too late.

  Starsailor’s compasses were a valuable commodity for merchants out in the far reaches of the galaxy. A sailor could fix the compass on anything he chose, since magnetic fields and the concept of north and south are more or less useless in space. Generally, they were trained onto some landmark that could always help the sailor know which way was up, so to speak. Some affixed them to their home planets, some others to the Talashaa ruins, others still to the geographical center of the Milky Way galaxy. While others had theirs directed at less orthodox objects. Whatever the case, it helped them find their way home. If they had one, that is.

  Enoch Applebottom - “The Talashaa – Architects of Forgotten Dreams” pg. 210

  0

  Joe hopped off the transport on a platform in Del Teros, the capital city of Alpha Centauri.

  He was a wide-eyed youngin’, fresh off the farm – where the air wasn’t recycled and the gravity was natural. Cocky and 19 years old, because those things generally went together, he thought the world was at his fingertips. In a way it was. In the early days of one’s freedom, there is so much time and possibility that the outcomes are indeed endless.

  Joe smiled as he looked up at the unfathomably tall buildings. Ralphie, a distant cousin, was there to greet him and help him get on his feet in the big city.

  “This air – is it recycled?” Joe asked.

  “Yeah… and?” Ralphie replied.

  “That’s just really cool!”

  “You’ll get used to it, I think,” Ralphie laughed.

  Joe got his own apartment, up 302 floors in a Plutonian neighborhood. The city was so big and bright and outside his window a thousand flashing lights kept him up at night. Was he simply too excited? Or were the lights too bright? The truth was, he was too excited because the lights were so damn bright.

  He got a job at the space port, unloading the goods from the incoming merchant ships. The freighters brought in spices and gadgets and drugs from far off systems. Joe used to wear a skipper’s hat in those days, which earned him the nickname Captain from his fellow porters.

  On nights after work they’d play Catan in the dimly lit port bars with whichever sailors were keen to join. One evening, an older Nigerian starsailor bet his compass in a game. Joe cheated and won with a spare card he kept in his sleeve. The truth was, the sailor knew Joe was cheating, he was just eager to be rid of the gadget for tax purposes.

  Joe trained the compass on Alpha Centauri 4, his home planet.

  The next night he won big again. It was an honest win this time, but his opponents didn’t believe in his newfound luck. They beat the living snot out of him. He was unable to work and used his remaining money to buy space weed to numb the pain. It turned out to be unlike earth weed, in the fact that it was highly addictive, and Joe got hooked.

  Desperate, he applied for an entry-level position an antique shop in Del Teros, a job that he found vaguely interesting and didn’t require any heavy lifting. The manager took pity on Joe and decided to give him a shot. Eager to repay the faith shown in him, Joe worked his ass off. That made him valuable. And once he got good at his job he began to pour himself into it, reading history books at night and antique speculation websites during his lunch breaks. That’s when he became irreplaceable.

  On one particular Wednesday, an older woman came walking into the shop. Her name was Alma Peterson. She required a particular type of person to smuggle a pair of star-shaped Egyptian Aluminum earrings across the border. Due to some bad experiences with idiots she wanted somebody who actually knew a thing or two about antiques. Someone honest enough to be trusted, but morally flexible enough to do something illegal. When she asked the manager which one of his employees fit that description best, he pointed to Joe Corbit.

  Joe smuggled the earrings across the galaxy in his backpack and delivered them to a dimly lit city square on Kiev 2. Two men came to collect on that frigid night. One a Centauri slumlord, the other a Kasmian fur trader. It turned out the earrings had b
een promised to both of them.

  Joe tried to call Alma but there was no answer. Due to the confusion, neither of the clients wanted to pay full price for the earrings, and neither wanted to walk away empty handed. They pulled guns on each other. There was an exchange of words, which led to an exchange of bullets. In the end, the Centauri slumlord laid dead and the Kasmian fur trader asked once more for the earrings. For his trouble, and since there would be no witnesses, he intended on taking the earrings for free. Joe refused, specifically because Alma said she’d kill him if he came back without payment. He was pretty sure she had been exaggerating, but not one hundred percent.

  As Joe was mulling it over a shot was fired.

  The Kasmian fur trader fell to the ground. Behind him was a woman with tears in her eyes. Joe was too scared to be smitten. He would later learn that the woman had tracked the Kasmian across three systems over the past three months to gather the bounty on his head. And now he was finally dead. With her empathic nervous system she felt a twinge of regret in the man’s heart as he died, regret that he would never again see his young daughter, the one to whom the earrings were for.

  The woman approached the Kasmian to take his wallet as proof of the kill, but the closer she got, the stronger those feelings became. She managed to retrieve her evidence, but overwhelmed, she dropped the gun and scurried off to weep in a nearby library. Joe followed. He found her curled up on a beanbag in the children’s book section. He put a hand on her shoulder to comfort her. To his surprise she pulled him in close. She wanted to feel what he felt. Confusion, arousal, pity. Those were nice feelings. Better than the Kasmian’s dying sorrow.

  Joe held her there, like a child in his arms.

  “It’s gonna be alright,” he said.

  She kissed his chest. It was intimate in the way that only two strangers could be – they didn’t know each others faults or weaknesses. Yet.

  When enough time had passed, and all the nasty feelings had been processed and filed away, she abruptly got up and left. Joe sat there confused and alone on the beanbag, with no one to pay for the earrings he had just smuggled halfway across the galaxy.

  “Why are you still following me?” she asked after he had tracked her into a nearby Cosmo’s Grocery.

  “I need money for the earrings,” he said.

  When the fur trader’s wallet provided no cash, Cassandra went to an ATM and gave Joe a stack of money equaling the price on the earrings – it was most of her payment for killing the Kasmian. This was an unprecedented move for her.

  Usually, her targets had a nasty feeling when they expired, and it felt good to be rid of them, like squashing a bug. But the Kasmian had been difficult and she wanted some sort of penance.

  She thought that by giving Joe the money she’d lose both him and the feeling. But she was only half right. Joe continued to track her through the store.

  “Why are you still following me?” she snapped.

  He handed her a box. She opened and inside found the star-shaped Egyptian Aluminum earrings. Joe had no way of knowing that that was her favorite metal.

  “A dead guy’s earrings, huh?” she asked.

  “They’re yours now,” he said, “Do what you want with them.”

  She admired both the honesty and the bluntness.

  Joe and Cassandra stayed more or less inseparable over the next year.

  They made love. They fought. She’d leave. She’d come back. They took drugs to get through their days. Electro was their drug of choice since it worked on droids too. It was a minty cream you’d apply to your back that caused an electric current to surge up and down your spinal cord.

  They smuggled items for Alma. They used the money to buy more narcotics. When Alma would try to intervene they would avoid her for months because of it.

  They turned to stealing. Their life was in shambles, their apartment a mess. They tried a therapist, but it just didn’t work. They broke up once more. That time Cassandra left Del Teros and flew off into the stars.

  Joe tried to live alone, but was miserable in the way that only someone who had become accustomed to a relationship can be. Sometimes he’d wonder if he and Cassandra were like two elements that reacted violently when introduced to each other. He was hopelessly addicted to that reaction.

  He went to Alma and asked if she knew Cassandra’s whereabouts. But Alma was reluctant.

  “I don’t think I should tell you,” she said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because she’s found something that’s given her peace. Can’t you leave well enough alone? You two were better off without each other.”

  “Please, just tell me,” Joe said. “I can’t relax with this unresolved thing in my life.”

  Finally she caved.

  Joe flew off into the stars and touched down on Bolstra 5. Cassandra had found a religion there, Talashism to be exact, the worship of the aliens that at one time ruled the stars.

  “You can stay, but you have to buy in,” Cassandra said.

  “I can do that,” Joe replied.

  Cassandra was happy to hear it, which made Joe happy in return. A positive feedback loop was established. A win-win situation.

  The belief was that the Talashaa lived at one with nature to please the Great Specter. So Joe and Cassandra tried to do the same. They worshiped the trees. They put spices into the ground. They attended all the celebrations. But they didn’t do drugs anymore. They didn’t need to – they had found a new one.

  They smuggled items for Alma once again. And this time it was a most rewarding enterprise. As Alma’s reputation grew, so did the commissions. Joe and Cassandra used their share of the money to build their tree house on Bolstra 5.

  They had dinner at a fancy Titanian restaurant on Calypso for Alma’s 55th birthday. Alma had too much to drink and told her surprisingly funny war stories the whole evening. At the end of the night Joe raised his glass to signal the waiter to bring out the cake.

  ‘Happy 65th’ it read.

  Alma gave Joe the finger.

  After their dinner, while walking back to their ship, Cassandra spotted a tourism advertisement for the Talashaa Dyson Sphere Ruins. She convinced Joe to go for their upcoming anniversary. It looked expensive, but they had the money now. He reluctantly agreed.

  They visited the ruins as pilgrims. There were lines for miles, it was hell. They flew around the Dyson sphere in little tour shuttles. The egg-shaped vessels were newer at the time, but still old even then. Joe noticed a book in the gift shop, written by Enoch Applebottom, “The Talashaa – Architects of Forgotten Dreams”. Cassandra didn’t want him to buy it, but Joe said it was just for fun. He bought and read.

  Doubts about Talashism began to creep into his mind. Was it really just naturalism with an intergalactic twist? Was John Merger merely a money grabbing pot farmer? If the Talashaa were so wonderful then why were they all dead? These thoughts merely simmered beneath the surface for a while, but when the church asked him for a portion of his earnings to rebuild a temple for the umpteenth time, things finally bubbled over.

  “All this,” Joe said. “It’s all lies.”

  “What does that have to do with rebuilding the temple?” Cassandra asked.

  “It’s a waste of our hard earned money.”

  “Well, I want to use it for this.”

  “And I don’t.”

  “You can’t stay here if you don’t contribute.”

  “Maybe, we should leave then.”

  “You can leave, but I’m not going anywhere.”

  “You need these lies?”

  “They’re not lies.”

  “They’re stories without any proof. What does that make them?”

  “There is proof, you’re just too dumb to see it.”

  “Too dumb?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You know that’s very mean.”

  “But it’s true.”

  “Well… you know what I don’t understand?” Joe asked.

&n
bsp; “Quite a lot, I imagine.”

  “What does a robot need religion for anyway?”

  That was the beginning of the end. Joe tried to say sorry, but the damage had been done. He hoped it would all blow over within a week or two. Once she calmed down she’d see reason and realize how things would fall apart without him around.

  Instead, Cassandra gave him an ultimatum. Either go with the flow or get out. At that point he had become convinced she had been cheating on him, since that was the only explanation that made any sense to him as to why she wanted him gone. His bet was on Jonathan from her astro-yoga class. And if Joe could only prove it then that would clear things up as to what the real issues were.

  One day, when she was allegedly going to ‘go to the store’, Joe covertly targeted his stairsailor’s compass on her. But she could sense what he had done.

  “I don’t want you targeting me,” she snapped.

  “I was just seeing if it would work,” Joe replied, now more certain than ever of her infidelity. Who wanted privacy more than someone with something to hide?

  “Target something else.”

  “Okay, I will.”

  “Now.”

  “Why don’t you want to be targeted?”

  “Because it’s demeaning,” she said.

  “What do you mean it’s demeaning?”

  “You can’t target a human – it doesn’t work on organic things, only objects.”

  “Okay,” Joe said rolling his eyes. He pretended to turn it off.

  “I can tell its still on me.”

  “Is it really the worst thing if I know where you are?”

  “Yes, it is,” she said. She waited in the kitchen for him to deactivate it.

  “It was more of a romantic gesture,” he said, deactivating the targeting.

  “Try flowers next time,” she said and stormed out the door.

  Joe stood there alone in the house, with his starsailor’s compass aimed at nothing. Undaunted, he looked around for a potential target. Anything would do, really. Once he moved out he could check in from time to time to see if she had moved in with Jonathan. Then he would be vindicated.

  Just what to target? The hairdryer? No. Too disposable. A painting? Too fragile. Her wallet? Wait a minute. What kind of trip to the store didn’t involve her wallet? Joe looked inside. Money, ID and all her credit cards. She wasn’t going to the store – she was headed straight for Jonathan’s penthouse.