Stars

Part III (continued) - Sol

The sky was exceptionally clear. The air would soon begin to loose the warmth it had gathered during the late summer day. The sun had been down for nearly two hours as the young woman gazed into the night sky, picking out patterns in the brilliant lights speckling the heavens.

"There! If you take that real bright one right there, and follow to the left just a little... Then look over here." Dawn had been painting pictures in the sky for as long as anyone could remember. Her companion, however, seemed unenthused. Still, he paid attention and at least feigned interest. "Now look at the way those three curl around. It's a dragon or a snake maybe. Isn't it beautiful? Do you see it?"

"Well, I guess I do. At least I see the pattern you're looking at. I don't understand why you always see animals though." Robert May was a very pragmatic 16 year old. He could usually follow Dawn's description's of her night creatures, but he preferred to track the paths of the Arks, or pick out the stars where other colonies had been seeded.

"I don't see them, Robert, they're just there. I don't know how you can stare out into space every night and not see them." Dawn was a dreamer, more of a romantic than her male counterpart. "Anyway, I just think they're beautiful. And the sky is so clear tonight! I swear I can see all the way to Terriana." Her gaze swept thought the panorama before them as she imagined the lush, almost mythical world of her ancestors.
She always thought of Terriana as a garden, rich with flowering trees, softly waving grasses, a place where the animals weren't afraid of you and you didn't have any need to fear them. Her dream world filled most of her waking day and she lived there nearly every night.

It wasn't that anything was lacking here on Terra II. It just seemed that it was a young woman's lot to long for some far away, romantic land. Robert supposed it had been that way since the beginning of time. Actually, he sometimes envied her. He was always stuck right here in the now. Try as he might, he never actually escaped their predictable daily life the way Dawn did. It didn't seem to matter to her what was going on around her (though no one could call her neglectful). Any time she wanted she could call upon her private little world to come and carry her off. Meanwhile, Robert would envelope himself in his studies. A world of numbers was his escape. Astronomy was his passion. Perhaps it was his deep understanding (in his opinion) of the stars that made it difficult for him to see the fanciful figures Dawn imagined. 

In his musings, he almost missed the fact that she had coiled her body gently around him. The air had taken on a slight chill and she was obviously making a play for some of his body heat. Taking her shoulder firmly, he pulled her closer and silently they contemplated the vast sky above them.