Charon Sunrise (5/5)
Living in the Shadow of Pluto
Ashleigh ran from street to street, pausing at street corners to scan, looking up and down the boulevards and scanning dozens of people, searching for the occasional organic in a space suit among the hundreds of synthetics. The sunlight glared off of buildings of glass and metal and blinded her when she looked east. It was Aurora, the day of the week of perpetual sunrise. She had moved for hours from street to street breathlessly trying to find where he had gone, but she couldn’t. Graven was gone.
She sat down on a curb and her head dropped. Who was she kidding? She had lost him hours ago. She had no idea where he was staying. And she wasn’t going to find him like this.
Her eyes went wide and large, but she couldn’t cry, for she had no tear glands. She felt the welling up of needing a release, pent up behind a well, but there was nothing to release it into. There was no catharsis. She just wanted to rock back and forth but she didn’t want to look odd in the street. Slowly, she picked herself up and started home to her apartment.
Again she was surrounded by others, some of whom greeted her, but she felt very alone, and replied only with weak smiles. She went past factory workers with their squat little bodies and extra arms. She walked past some people who had nothing skinned at all. Many people covered up their unskinned parts with clothing. But she also walked past those who showed off their robotics proudly; Old Gonzo, the town street magician, even had an exposed torso on display, made up of a clear outer case that showed all of the internal “organs.”
She also walked past Sars, who owned the local bank. He had adapted an elegant body with a slim frame and beautiful faux skin, elegant and poised. To her, he looked more feminine than masculine, but she knew from holodramas that this was how men looked in the Inner Planets.
But she had no eyes for Sars or anyone else. She only looked intently at the three people she passed who were walking about in space suits. She looked into each one’s visor hopefully, but always a blank stranger’s gaze awaited her, some tourist from Hades knew where.
She got back to her flat. She threw down her purse and kicked off her shoes and stumbled into the little sitting room. She slumped down on her white leather couch.
She started projecting into the air before her the recordings she had in her internal system from the last few days. She fast forwarded to the parts where Graven showed up and then watched him talking to her, laughing with her…she went back and back and back, through the long zip line ride. The recordings all seemed so far away, like a distant memory already, with a film over them as if they weren’t her own memories but only a dream. Maybe she had dreamed it all. She went back to their second date…
She stopped. They were at that café with the wooden beams. She was drinking a peppermint latte and asking where he was staying, and he said…The Rosencrantz.
She sprung up off the couch. The Rosencrantz. Bertha was the receptionist there. Bertha would help her, surely. Ashleigh grabbed her purse while jumping on one leg, fingering her shoes back on. She ran out the door while using her internal interface to pull up directions.
***
“No, he checked out two hours ago,” Bertha was saying.
Internally, Ashleigh felt as if she were withdrawing down into the pit of her stomach. Two hours ago. He could be anywhere by now. He could be on a ship destined for…anywhere.
“Thanks, Bertha…” she said as she turned away from her friend. She sat down absently on a couch in the lobby of the Rosencrantz and thought.
How had she not managed to get his contact information on those three dates? What was she thinking? How had she not thought of it? It seemed too silly now, such a blindingly huge mistake. She had been stupid, so stupid, and now he was probably gone.
In fact, he had said that he moved from place to place every two weeks. The two weeks was probably about up.
In fact…perhaps it had been that he was trying to tell her yesterday: that he was going to be leaving soon. The more she thought about it, the more likely it seemed. He had been strange, elusive. And adamant that he needed to see her sooner rather than later. And he had been saying something about needing to be weighed down…needing more gravity. Oh no.
She went back to the receptionist.
“Sorry Bertha, just one more thing…any way you could tell me where he went?”
“I wouldn’t even know,” she said, apologetically. “Our guests don’t tell us where their next destinations are.”
She nodded to herself.
“What about…can you tell me how long he stayed here?”
Her friend looked uncomfortable.
“We aren’t supposed to divulge info about our guests,” she said, cringing.
“I understand, I know, I’m sorry for asking,” she said, dropping down to a whisper, “It’s just that…we had a big misunderstanding and I just know that I could set it right if I could find him again…could you just let me know how long it’s been that he’s been checked in? It could be a vital clue.”
Bertha looked around and then whispered, “two weeks.”
She glanced around and then flashed a conspiratorial grin. “Good luck finding him, Ashleigh.”
There was a glimmer in her eyes.
“Hold on,” Bertha said, and then tore a piece of paper off a receipt and scribbled something on it. “See you later!” she said more loudly as she pushed it into Ashleigh’s hand and waved her off.
Ashleigh walked out of the revolving hotel doors back into the null atmosphere outside and looked down at the slip.
“Earth”
Blast it. He was headed back to Earth.
***
Ashleigh ran, ran, ran, her leg pistons firing out tat-ah-tat-ah-tat-ah-tat.
Ships towered above her like skyscrapers. She flew past the ships, scanning the destinations: Titan, Makemake, Varuna, Eris, Callisto…Luna!
She made a hard left, skidding and sliding. The dockyard was vast, dwarfing the rest of the small town that was just south of it. Ashleigh had never traveled to anywhere except Pluto, but she knew enough about interplanetary travel to know that ships headed for Earth always went to Luna first and then connected from there to Earth. If he was headed for Earth then he was going to Luna first.
She approached a huge sign saying LUNA that hung next to a massive empty landing pad.
Oh, let that not be the one, she thought. The landing pad was still hot from a recent departure; her sensors showed in infrared the dangerous heat levels all over it.
She drew closer to the sign and saw underneath LUNA, in smaller print, the fact that it was a departure, not an arrival, and the day and time…it had left twelve minutes ago.
Her shoulders sagged. How had she been so stupid? Stupid to not get his contact info, stupid to not realize sooner about the hotel and track him here…just twelve minutes ago. And most of all, stupid to think that she was a princess and he was her Prince Charming, come to whisk her away. She turned away from the pad, dejected.
Graven was standing there. He was standing to the side, underneath the shadow of another towering spaceship, so that she had not seen him before in her mad rush.
He was there.
And he was looking right at her.
“Hey…” she said, approaching him.
He waved at her from within his pressure suit, and then initiated short-range radio contact so they could hear each other.
“Hello there,” he said in her mind.
She came near. She could see he had a big duffle bag on the ground and a backpack beside it. She seemed to have caught him mid-stride, as if he had been in the act of walking. She got the distinct impression that he had been pacing back and forth in that spot for some time, and her appearance had interrupted him.
“Did you miss your flight?” she said.
“Yeah,” he said.
She laughed.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and there was a funny tone in his voice, as if bemused at himself…or something else, she couldn’t tell.
“Hey, I need to explain something to you,” she said, and breathlessly jumped into explaining what she had done for the stranger on the street and why, how people with robotic bodies occasionally had seize-ups due to software malfunctions, how if someone had one on the street they could fall and damage their body and be stuck indefinitely, and it was the simple neighborly thing to reboot someone like that if you saw them in passing—it would be cruel not to.
“Huh,” he said, mystified. “How odd. To be suddenly vulnerable, to have to rely on the kindness of strangers for survival…you’re telling me this can happen to a synthetic person at any time? That sounds terrible!”
“It’s no different than being an organic,” she said.
“What? What do you mean?”
“There’s all kinds of glitches that organic bodies can have,” she continued. “Somebody chokes on a bone and needs someone to perform the Hiemlich. Or somebody stops breathing and needs CPR. It’s no different than that, really.”
“Huh,” he said, and he looked very thoughtful.
“There’s so much I don’t know about you,” he said finally. “Your body, your culture, how all of this…”
He gestured around at the other synthetics walking by on the concourse.
“How any of it works. I…when I saw you with that man, I was so afraid, I thought oh no, what did I get myself into? What kind of person were you? I ran. But…I admit, even then it didn’t feel right. I assumed the worst, but part of me believed that it couldn’t be what it looked like. I should have stayed,” he said, shaking his head.
“I’m sorry you have to leave,” she said. “I’ll miss you. I know you can’t just change all your plans on a dime but I want you to know that…I…care for you,” she finished, awkwardly.
Who was she to tell him that she loved him right before he hopped on a shuttle and left? But ‘care for’…perhaps that was alright? No, maybe that was too much too! She berated herself.
“Who says I have to leave?” he said.
“You did,” she replied, bewildered.
He laughed, “I said nothing of the sort.”
“Then what was all that about needing to be weighed down by gravity and all that?”
“Oh, that!” he said. “I understand now.”
He laughed to himself wryly. “I’m terrible with words. But Ashleigh…”
He stepped closer and she felt reminiscent of when they had danced together.
“I don’t need to be weighed down by Earth. I want to be weighed down by you.”
“Really? You aren’t yearning for home?”
“Yes, I am,” he said. “But I’ve come to believe, home isn’t merely where you’re from. It’s something you feel. It’s where you feel real, where you feel embraced. It’s where you acquire gravitas; it’s where your heart beats faster. And for me—that place is with you.”
They kissed, and for a moment, time stopped. They looked shyly at each other, and then Ashleigh picked up his duffel bag for him and they walked hand-in-hand through the concourse, crossing over the massive shadows of the behemoths arrayed all around. They looked at the headers, advertising destinations to far-off places and adventures.
“If you’re right about home,” Ashleigh said, gesturing at all of the ships, “Do you think that means we could take our home with us, wherever we like?”
He arched his eyebrow at her. “Maybe it does. Would you want to?”
“I don’t know,” she said, hesitant. “I’d have to think about it.”
Feedback
As always, feedback is welcome. Was the ending satisfying?
Book of the Week
This week I reviewed A Question of Values, a pop-philosophy book on establishing what the different value systems are by which people live their lives and contrasting them. I have a little story in here about discovering this book among my dad’s trove of philosophy texts and my love-hate relationship with philosophy texts in general. Read more here.
What’s Going on in My Life
Gretchen and I are closing on our new property and home by the end of this month! We are very excited!
It’s a beautiful log cabin set on 10 acres and it has two outbuildings that we can use for our artist retreat center, beautiful woods and a view of the nearby mountains. It’s perfect for us.
We are actually planning to live in the basement and rent out the top two floors (pictured above) as an AirBNB for some time. In a couple years, we plan to start adopting kids, and whenever we start needing more bedrooms, then we would move into the upstairs.
Know Someone Who Would Enjoy This?
Consider recommending to a friend. Every recommendation really helps the newsletter tremendously!
Until next week!