Magellans

I. Deafening Silence

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. And so I used to believe.

I used to believe sound wouldn’t carry in space. Our ears are sensitive to the vibrations of air. When someone speaks, their voice vibrates the air in waves to whoever listens. This is communication, as we know it, here on Earth. Without air - or a medium for the sound to travel through - there can be no sound at all. But what is sound to a human? It’s an understanding based on sensation – a feeling. Could a feeling bypass the medium of air, going straight from one person’s lips to the ears without traveling through sound? Can the brain understand the preliminary motions and translate it to the end effect?

I don’t have answers. But I do know this much - her scream was real. It passed through no air, and yet I felt it in my soul. From my spine to my toes. Science meant nothing to me now; my heart only knew the pain she had just suffered. My eardrums rang in silence as I watched her face. Crystal sand glittered, floating between us. Her helmet light flickered red and all the lights on her suit shut off one by one. I watched her eyes frosting over as a torrent of rage and the most heavy, empty, cold, burning sensation came over my heart. A dry frost crept in on the edges of her eyes and the sparkle I had so long adored began to fade. Where her tears had been only seconds ago, icicles formed at her nose and eyelashes. My heart pounded despairingly against my suit. I knew it hurt, but I couldn’t feel it. I was numb. With a sob welling up in my throat, I existed there, paralyzed in space, staring endlessly. Every breath became slower and more forced, gasping for air without opening my lips.

The warmth of a tear filled my eye. With nowhere to go, it steadily burned. My suit’s conditioning fought to keep the visor from fogging up. I don’t know how I expected things to end, but somehow I had always anticipated failure or at least acknowledged the possibility of something going terribly awry.

In the minutes or hours or days that I floated there, with my heart ripped open and smashing into itself over and over, I thought about when I first met her. Our adventures together spun like a kaleidoscope through my mind. Conflict, invasion, training and war, the moments leading up to this. And then again, her sweet face… my now cold heart. Even though the end had come and nothing could stir her lifeless body, I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I wanted to die here with her, but I couldn’t even do that. Warm blood filled my ears. The scream just replayed itself over and over deep behind my temples. My mind rang with terror. My throat thickened, but I didn’t dare swallow. There was something so reverent and holy about the moment. Death was something I would have to come to terms with later, but for now, all comprehension of this reality came as bland shock. Pieces of metal drifted into my periphery. I focused on her suit. I knew every day I put on the suit, I accepted fate’s reality of low odds, slim chances, and impending doom. The depths of space are dangerous and unforgiving. I sensed she had drifted further away from me now. I kept replaying memories, as if they kept her alive.

When I met her, the world had been a simpler place. We (humanity) had just established a small community on Pluto and the first flights to nearby star systems were being planned and discussed every day. Mankind’s insatiable ego drove us further and faster toward the unknown. Technology and warp speed made the galaxy smaller and the entire universe inhabitable. We’d gotten word from our probes that a few planets in other systems could support life, and the Pluto outpost was the first stop on the yellow line to other systems. Dazzled with the boundless possibilities, real estate moguls forgot their lakeshore properties and started investing in spacecraft. Greed consumed all of us, but it was profitable. And me? I joined the Interspatial Flight Force.

Everyone who wanted to go to space lived in MITHs (Modular Interspatial Transportable Homes) These metal and industrial grade glass units were customized like real homes, with bathrooms, kitchens, bedrooms, and all the necessities. I didn’t own a MITH, but many friends of mine and their parents did. These space-houses were created to help people transition from their familiar habitats and homes on earth to livelihood defined by space. MITHs could be transported to a new civilization and planted anywhere, regardless of the gravity, sun conditions, and terrain. They were equipped with every gadget you could imagine, from artificial gravity, to air conditioning and heat, to entertainment and miniature nuclear energy sources. The technology had been perfected and made safe for everyone.

With Earth’s climate on the mend, everyone hoped to leave and start afresh, leaving the planet mostly alone to do the same. The government encouraged this; they had given incentives for people to lead groups and organize the migration. Strangely enough, nobody wanted money. We all were ready for a new chapter, and we wanted to be at the end of our space journey already. Government and politics were wonderful, because nobody wanted to be a politician. Power became exploration, knowledge, the discovery of a new thing, an unknown element, or a planetary scientific law. Nobody wanted to reign like a king; everyone only wanted to become the next Magellan.

How could such a world be simple? Direction. For the first time, the last place anyone wanted to be was here. It was a race to get off the ground. But the ground was where I met her. In a craze for the future, everyone rushed to leave the past and present behind. I met her in the wheat fields. I would go there to think when the blur of the city drowned my thoughts. I wanted to go to space, but a part of me felt it was inhumane. The land I grew up in was just going to be a distant rock, invisible to the eye because it wasn’t burning hydrogen at the rate of five million tons per second. Waterfalls, mountains, plains, deserts and rivers would grow irrelevant, a distant memory. With the universe ahead, the world behind felt like an old teddy bear that had been played with, frayed, discolored, flattened, and now discarded because something new and pristine existed. Now, humanity would be able to reach out and staineven the untouched nothingness with our own imperfection. But we moved like a hoard towards utopia, thinking that a clean slate would somehow erase our past mistakes, conflicts and insecurities.

The fields, though, were already perfect. The land was flat, the grain of equal height from the ground. Thousands of golden grain acres in the undesirable land that wasn’t somehow fueling the colored Bullets to space.

Spacecraft were color coded for sections of space they would go into, the type of missions they would accomplish, and the capacity they carried. They also had numbers painted on the smooth sides for other purposes I won’t go into for now. The colors were always reds, yellows, blues, purples. Never gold, never green, never grey. Those colors reminded people of the world they lived in already. It was a curse word to speak of anything but the future. Possibility was a buzzword, potential, advance, evolve. They all lived for something they didn’t have. I somewhat resented this but it was impossible to go against the flow. The herd was overwhelming. The undertow of wild expansion drowned me. The metal walls of the city always seemed closing in. I was in the wheat fields though, the only place I could breathe. The wind gently brushed the wheat. It was a flat gold shimmer. I waded through slowly. The city behind me, getting smaller and dominating a thinner stretch of a horizon. The other horizons I noticed were the horizon of farming silos and the horizon of warehouses. Everything had to be enclosed. Everything had to belong in its given zone. It wasn’t that we wanted it like that, but people were afraid their neighbor would be neither reasonable nor predictable. We fenced ourselves in. We belonged in some places and nowhere else. Was I the only one who had sorts of mental crises because of this? The warehouses were small buildings to me but massive buildings up close. That’s how I knew I had space to think and feel. The fields just went on forever…until they hit a wall. But as long as the wall was far away I didn't worry about it. Farming was the biggest and oldest industry and farmers were the last normal class. They were sentinels and just did the same thing day in and day out. We had consolidated the cities to allow for efficiency, leaving more space for farmers to grow the food society needed. Sun, and dirt; gold and grey this was the unwanted space of the world, but only by new and changing standards. The farmers were happy to have the world back. I walked further into the field.

The sky was grey and cloudy, maybe about to rain. Every couple hours another Bullet would launch. To save on the fuel, as efficient as fuel science had become, space launches consisted of two stages. The Bullet Ship would descend down into a vertical shaft, miles long, where it would then be magnetically charged and then launched into the air. Stage two would begin as thrusters kicked in halfway through the atmosphere and help escape gravity. It saved on fuel dramatically and increased what people could pack for the journeys.

She was sitting on a blanket in the middle of the field. Her hair gently blowing in the breeze. It took my breath away with how beautiful she was. She was just there –no rushing to get anywhere or be anyone. She made my heart race yet my mind felt calm for a moment. She made me feel like there was no one else who existed but her at that moment. It didn’t feel right to interrupt her so I just watched her as I softly walked through the grain – heart throbbing against my ribs. I didn’t feel in control but somehow I wanted this. No matter what happened, I just wanted it to happen with her. I opened my mouth to say hi. “Hello there.” I somehow managed.

She turned and the most beautiful eyes looked back at me.