The Subtle Taste of Midnight

An Ordinary Life Among the Stars

What do ye see when ye look up at the stars?

Do ye see balls o' gas burning bright against the black o' the sky? Comets galloping from one end o' the Helio to the next as they run away from the solar winds chasing them? Do ye see the Gods o' Anthemusa themselves twinkling in the shapes o' the constellations? The Ram and the Bull? The Scorpion and the Snake? The Siren? Do ye know what I see? Hope. Fortune. I see all the things I left behind up there almost five aions ago: the Irra as it crashed and burned and took my life down to Haides with it. I see my past cleaved from my body just like the leg I'd hacked off to save my own life, left to rot in ice and stardust next to the bones o' the tormented dead. I see my future up there in the skies, printed out in the trail o' comets, woven in the black silk o' space. But most importantly, I see money sitting up there all impatient, tired o' waiting for its turn to be made either by the handle o' a dozer or the barrel o' a gun. 'Cuz up there between the stars, life doesn't just sit back and let things happen. It hurls itself at ye, churning like those miserable solar winds that nip relentlessly at the black sky out in the Heliosphere. It stabs ye in the eyes and chokes the breath from yer throat. It sends yer gunpowder heart all a-banging and a-shooting. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat! Like Reapers on repeat-fire. Yet here I am, simmering in the stillness under the Martian sun, being chicken and useless. Glory faded. Dreams abandoned. Now only reality remains, only the unstirring silence that surrounds ye when ye finally come to realize just how ordinary ye truly are. 'Tis tiring, I tell ye, being so ordinary in all this quiet. A Nobody among Nobodies, all o' us huddled together like herds o' sheep beneath the endless sky, safe against the wolves and all the uncivilized things that live out there in the belly o' space. Sheltered and protected against a past that haunts me and a future that doesn't want to be caught.

"Ain't ye got nothin' better to do than day-dream?" Bonny's voice chimes into my neural Vine. He's sweet and all, but sometimes, I wish he'd just shut up and leave me be.

"Why ye can't hold yer tongue, Bonny?" BioJacks strung up to every nerve ending in my brains push their signals into the wireless Vine that links his brains to mine. An internet o' gray matter and neural wavelengths, squawking and talking at each other. A modern miracle ever since it got perfected back in 2344 AD.

"There ain't no good reason to be subjectin' the rest o' us to yer brain-farts this early in the mornin'."

"Gods! Not this bullshit again!" Bonny sucks air through his teeth. He's hopping mad at me, as always. It seems there ain't nothing I can ever do right in his eyes.

"I'm tired o' tellin' ye that there ain't no future in the stars, Jane."

I point down to that blood-red dirt at my feet. "Ain't none here in the mud, neither."

"At least ye won't lose another leg down here," he claps back. Pity, he doesn't know I'd give my gods-damn soul to the sky if the black wanted it. Bonny doesn't understand. He ain't never tasted the stars, ain't never been able to do anything other than hold his head down in the mud and plant arukabess and plagiem. Ye can't blame him, see? He's mud-bloodied, through n' through. He doesn't know any better, can't know any better. Can't be anything other than the sheep in the middle o' the herd while I'm a straggler barely hanging at the outer edges. He ain't never risked it all before, ain't never had to gnaw off his own gods-damn leg to save his life.

We both take a step forward, well, 'tis more like a shuffle than a real step. A step implies that ye be progressing. That there's some measure o' moving up and on in the world being done, and 'tis all the better if that movement is done handsomely. But this thing that Bonny and me be doing right now doesn't feel like progress in my book. It just feels like a shuffle towards the grave. One foot before the other, sliding in the endless ocean o' Martian mud towards the arukabess and the plagiem and that joke o' a paycheck that comes when ye're done planting yer day's quota for the Government. 'Tis the shuffle o' sheep, and I'm anything but.