Young Writers Society

Infinite Moment

In this second just after nothingness and right before existence is the entire universe. Stars that disintegrate and become suns and life and spinning rocks surrounded by gaseous layers. Massive pinpricks of black that eat matter and time and light, then spit it back out in great plumes. Love affairs and dictatorships and a pale blue dot on a vast black and white field, microbes and parents and cats and alder leaves that fall off right before each winter. All of this, an eternity of this in the span of a single inhalation or heartbeat that seems like a time so long that it is incomprehensible.

Just as heaven is the gilded infinite moment just after life and right before death, existence is all time and no time at all.

She is disinclined to hold the pretty hands of fate. What good is it to drift? She lived that life, followed orders, kept her head down and felt proud to do it. She neither liked nor disliked that life while she lived it, there was simply no choice.

Fall out of night like a vagabond ship.

She is tired of being defined by her surroundings, her companions. She has to learn to stop drifting. That’s why she has to leave, she has to detach herself from her setting and become someone who knows she can stand alone if she had to. She wants to dip her fingers in the haze and light that is made of the last visible stars, even though she knows there is no last. She wants to roll the filaments of a nebula between her fingers to make yarn to weave herself with and to braid into her hair so that when she comes back here she will look like a holy saint or something else alien.

If she had been on earth she would have traveled the world to touch old things. They don’t have old things where she comes from. Starships, space stations, they don’t benefit from age, they don’t become mystical, they just become unsound. If she had been on Earth, she would have moved somewhere cool and green and learned how to carve art and grace and ugliness from slabs of granite. Granite because in the right light it sparkles with hundreds of white quartz flecks that would remind her of home.

She isn’t on earth, she doesn’t know where it is or what it is. She sees her reflection in the shining black of the inactive control panel, the face is one she recognizes, except the eye are oddly dark and the expression is not one she has seen herself wear before. Previously she didn’t understand the difference between lonely and alone. She has been alone before, but this is different, more visceral. She has her reflection -a mute mirror image of herself- she has her craft. She has the hope of infinity surrounding her with the confidence that she will never run out of interruptions in the nothingness.

Don’t think of it as parting, think of it as becoming complete.

Sometimes she wishes she could go back to the way it was before, before her first life was taken from her almost accidentally, because ignorance wasn’t bliss, it wasn’t even comfort, but it was stable and it was subsistence. Sometimes she wakes up and doesn’t want to make one more choice, just wants to be told. Sometimes she wakes up alone in her small craft and wishes she had someone to stand behind her and whisper the answers in her ear. Then there are the times when she realizes that there are no answers. Distance is time, but no matter how fast or long she flies she will never catch up to the beginning of the universe or the end of it. She realizes she lives in a place where there are no edges or sides or ends. She realizes that she lives in a place that has no center, no middle, or that perhaps everywhere is the center, which is almost the same thing. It isn’t a lonely feeling but a baffling one, awed and odd, like when she first heard of things outside of regulation and custom, things called free will, companionship, and identity.

When she tried to explain why she was leaving he talked about something called the process of individuation. He talked about it like it was something that related only to some abstract being in the second person, not her or them. She didn’t completely understand the theory but it felt right, or at least it seemed like a better explanation than what she’d come up with. How could she tell him that she was afraid of the time after she’s outlived him (and she will), but didn’t know if it was because she thought she would find that she’d only traded defining herself by her duty with defining herself by him, or if it was because she was afraid of being without him. Maybe it was both. Whatever the reason, she felt that she had to prove herself. And she felt that she could only prove herself away from him.

So she picked a direction. When her supplies ran out she begged a ride and then a job on a cargo vessel where no one questioned her when she told them her name was Ki’estra, but no one believed her either. Ki’estra was a quiet woman who hummed sad songs to the engines while she worked like she was lulling a baby to sleep. Ki’estra was the reflection-woman with the dark eyes who didn’t really know why she was being pulled away from the first real comfort she had known, but had no voice to protest. In her first language Ki’estra means mirage, empty, false. It took her a while to remember that when someone called to an illusion, they were addressing her.

The captain was a tall, pale being called Onoh, and she was more inclined to call Onoh female than male, but suspected that Onoh fell into some third category without a name. Onoh was apparently delicate but she had sharp, carnivorous teeth. She felt uncomfortable and fascinated when pinned by Onoh’s blatant scrutiny, unsure if Onoh meant to eat her of kiss her or simply see into her.

Onoh studied her hands, experienced, dexterous hands that could redesign the whole ship if she wanted, or defend them in battle. Onoh asks nothing so grand of her, expecting no loyalty, just assigned her maintenance that used the skill of her long narrow fingers but allowed her mind to wander.

Chance flows from a flipping coin. She sees all possibilities laid out before her like a spilled bag of grain. Chance is a crutch that she can’t help leaning on. Chance has been good to her. If Onoh’s ship hadn’t come along then it did, she knows she would not have lived. Some nights, while she ignores the rough thrum of the foreign engine, she runs her fingers through her hair very gently and remembers his fingers. She had been baffled by his tactile nature, his need to touch everything to be sure that it was real. Now she understands. She feels that Onoh’s ship is just a way station between here and the next place but she still doesn’t know what she’s really looking for or how to find it. She hasn’t figured out how to bathe in eternity.

There is a planet where people go when they fit nowhere else, home for the lonely, the mismatched and the dispossessed. Cyosa’ahn. It looked like so many inhabited worlds, water, land, clouds, cities, all of them created. It was a terra-formed world. Where once there was only bareness now there was a fertile womb. She remembered it in the middle of the day. She stopped humming to Onoh’s engine and straightened her shoulders, letting Ki’estra slide off of her. She wiped her hands on her pant legs and went back to work, knowing it was her last day.

Onoh had her craft stocked with fresh supplies before she left. The woman who was leaving the cargo ship was a different than the one who had been rescued. She is a straight-spined woman who will look you directly in the face. Onoh is surprised at her age, older than she had seemed at first.

“My name isn’t Ki’estra,” she said because she was grateful for far more than the parting gift of food and water but she had nothing more than honesty to offer in payment.

“Tell me your name,” said Onoh, “Your real one.”

She does not hesitate. “Ashan.”

Onoh stepped forward and grasped her hands firmly. Up close Onoh looked more solid than from a distance. Onoh’s skin was cool with small smooth scales. Ashan returned the grip. Onoh let go and stepped back with a respectful nod. Ashan left.

The infinite is a welcoming embrace, an old friend. Cyosa’ahn is back in the direction that she came. She isn’t worried about retracing her steps, though. Before she had been too worried about speed and distance to watch the stars go by. And she isn’t worried about running into them, him, she know they didn’t stand still to wait for her return.

*next part coming (hopefully) soon. Please review, I'd love to know what you think.