A Tall Ship and a Star

My office has no air. Okay, to be more precise, which I’m supposed to be to get paid, there's no air on the desolate, godforsaken, frozen rock where my office sits.

That's what happens when an anti-social, down-on-his-luck academic wises off one too many times at the boss. Last chance choices are a pain in the ass. This was mine.

Live alone in a semi-derelict, deep space recording outpost or look for a job flipping fake meat burgers.

Droids cornered the market on the fast-food dream fifty years ago, and that vegan soy crop makes me break out in hives.

I packed my books, my cat, and my coffee and caught a ride on a transport to the spot I lovingly call Outpost S-Hole.

As hab modules go, this one isn't half bad. The computers do the work, capturing data packets from long-haul probes and relaying them back to Earth.

I take care of the cat and the computers. In that order.

The rest of the time I grow food in the greenhouse, cook the food, wash the pans in which the food was cooked, and waste a lot of time on the Internet.

Yeah, that sprawling behemoth of questionable content and rampant conspiracy theory followed mankind into space.

I lived online back on Earth anyway, so not a lot has changed for me out here. Chess with Nigel in London. Social lurking to feel superior to people I knew in high school. Ranting under a fake name in forums.

Living the digital good life and not worried about sharing my address online because no one could get to me anyway.

Happiness is a red herring, brother. I make sure my cat's happy. Me? Im pulling winning numbers if I’m content. Which I was until last Thursday at 9 p.m. Central Standard Time.

The suits want me to live by the military clock. Screw that.

I was flipping through Facebook feeds when I saw her. A Pacific Seacraft 40 from freaking 1997. How could anything a hundred years old look so beautiful?

The owners, a couple of New Era Hippies, ditched tech and found a part of the ocean the bots have cleared of plastic and trash. Before they sailed away from modernity, they paid a drone jockey to photograph their boat.

She sat silhouetted against a flaming sunset on the horizon looking regal and clean. Never mind that toxic airborne chemicals created the colors in that sky. The boat floated above it all—the fragile sea under her keel and the poisonous air just beyond her sails.

As I stared at that picture a tidal wave of reality hit me. The only wind ruffling my hair comes from the air recyclers. There's no sunrise or sunset on an asteroid. And no place to point the bow of your terminally anchored craft. Six turns of the hab on foot equals a mile if I don't trip over the cat.

But that Seacraft was headed across actual waves. Going places before the places to see were gone forever. For the first time since the cat and I landed here, I felt lonely.

I screen-capped the image of that boat and projected it on one of the blank monitor panels. Started staring at it over the morning swill that passes for coffee out here where water is the by-product of a successful science experiment.

Some long forgotten poem bubbled up through my synapses. When I remembered the title I laughed out loud. Sea Fever by John Masefield.

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky. And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.

Stars I've got. Right outside the window. But I'm short one tall ship and the real reason men ever went to sea in the first place.

Hope lying just over that far horizon.