4The Inevitability of Death in the Mind of the Living
An airship crawling over the sun-bleached salt flats of the North Atlantian Plateau, looking west to the promise of a haze-ringed star bleeding on the horizon. An Old World nightmare clawing into the lingering spindle-thin daydreams of a skull-faced love.
Anywhere these days is limbo. Mind-numbing hours waiting in the airship terminal while comms spooled from century's old satellites.
/message in transit/
The cold light wanes from the receiver screen and I brush my fingers against the face. Spooling, spooling. Sometimes it's only a few minutes. Other times, hours. Days. Weeks. The farther the airship traveled away from the Drammen outpost, the longer the spools. The receiver becomes a metal monolith in my hand, stranded by Old World tech.
/message in transit/
We're at the 90th longitude, 7000 miles, 12 weeks away from the last time I saw him at the terminal. We have reached the Pan American Sky Harbor, a cluster of rocket tower spires and turrets flashing red and silver, a steely romance flowered in rust. Ships that have run for over a hundred years, paths traced in strings of rocket fuel and ambition.
Are you sure?
Pyr echoes as I thumb the sharp edge of my passport, but he doesn't respond. Hasn't for the last month. My comms are trailing loose threads.
I'd love for you to come stay with me. You could live here, in Drammen.
Or you could go with me.
It's too late for me.
Anyone can go. It's not just for the young.
Pyr eternally shaking his head, because his world has five continents while mine only has four. He used to tell me stories from the Old World, myths of monsters lurking in the mountains of man's triumph. To touch the realm of the old ones, he would say on nights of the endless flight deck gazing, watching the blinking satellites above. Pursed-mouthed pulls off a half smoked cigarette, we both know he only says that because he's only cruised the moon, never got past the rings of space junk and ancient government protected satellites. A man a generation apart.
The automaton voice puckers over the intercom, cinched-in syllables that squeeze my guts. Boarding will in ten minutes. The hard edge of the passport digs into the soft bed of my thumbnail. My future is sitting in T-9, in a pressurized metal tube propelled from earth's gravitational pull.
I glance back at the receiver, smudge my other thumb over the face. It wakes cold white light, /message in transit/ it's reflex now. The last time our replies connected he said he loved me, and that was never going to stop. It had been four weeks since then, and Pyr's echoes become blurred with interference—business of every day life, the barren dust kicked up in pursuit of other dreams. He used to loop I am happy for you, I want you to do well.
I knew Pyr wanted me to stay with him, he had silently hoped that I'd fold, hollow-faced and bone-fingered in the airship terminal. The Old World's hold on us would have been our death /message in transit/ living in the Drammen outpost with my nightmares haunted with his wraith. Back in his world, the dead were turned around before burial to keep the lonely dead lost from seeking their beloved. That's what I was most afraid of, wasn't it?
I look out the dark tinted window. Endless dry flatlands, clay red and plumed in dust /message in transit/ slivered with spindly transformers, masses of steel cables playing cat's cradle between spires. My future will be launched from a bleak reality splintered by a gleaming will—the future of another thousand people waiting for their ship to punch them up through the stratosphere.
The automaton voice on the intercom plays again. Boarding has now begun.
Get me off this god-forsaken rock.
I look down again.
/message in transit/
Pyr said he could take me to the mountains, real mountains topped with snow and myths of other men who have conquered mountains. Not a day goes by that the loop crackles back to me/message in transit/ and I think to turn around and sell my permit, and climb the nearest airship heading back to the Old World. If he'd only respond, saying anything to make me wait for him, to change my mind—
/message in transit/
But his mountains are nowhere high enough to lift me on their own. If I had stayed with him, beloved, I'd forever be looking west, star-crossed. Had he loved me, he wouldn't have made me make a choice.
I left receiver down on the bench beside me, shouldered my satchel, and followed the string of people trailing from the boarding port.
The way he kept coming back, I should have turned him around in the airship terminal.
© 2015 InkWellWriter
The Review Game's November 2015 WCC Entry