In 2344, they were still creeping.
Today, we rule the stars. Now, while your average starship pilot may, upon hearing this, begin to beat his chest, thumbs out, and rant about the superiority of our kind of human kind, the fact remains that in the few documented battles between humans and aliens (the rest of the galaxy), even the documents themselves are loathe to reveal the results. So, while it is never said out loud, the majority of the galaxy know that the only reason humans rule is that they are the only ones who would ever try to. Others are content to get on with their lives, without the big guns and fancy titles.
But we are still creeping. Some things never change. The universe is not among them.
* * * * *
Part the stars, and into view comes the biggest spaceship you have ever seen. I know this, since the biggest spaceship available as you read this is hardly bigger than a politician’s restaurant bill. They can hardly be called spaceships at all. Space dinghies, possibly, or space rowing boats. But not spaceships.
Anyways, into view it comes. Slowly it fills the space between you, the arbitrary viewer, and Centauri III, moving with the absolute certainty of anything whose only worries in traffic are colliding planets and wayward suns. Impossibly it turns a hundred and eighty degrees and comes to a full stop, completely forgetting the enormous momentum it had just a few minutes ago.
A hatch opens somewhere on the vast upper surface of the dreadnought. Mankind then proceeds to put another unforgettable mark upon the universe by emptying its human and robotic waste into space. Human and robotic waste, and Polaris.
She takes in the view with the vacuum of a connoisseur, sampling the enormity of Centauri III. For some girls, size does matter. She then proceeds to rid herself of the recycled lunch of her officers. Recycling is everything in space (and it has been argued that everything in space is, indeed, recycling). It keeps food on the right plates, planets in their orbit and crew members at their stations. In more advanced civilizations than the people of Sol, research is already delving into the recycling of life. If Earth can develop recycling of natural and industrial waste from karmic religions, they reasoned, it should be possible to reverse the process (the so-called ‘reverse and reverse and then reverse some more’-engineering). Unfortunately, this assumption soon led to a drastic increase in trailer-trash believers, something any civilization can do without.
The arbitrary viewer, who has suddenly, following the rather insightful remark about the ship’s momentum, turned considerably less perceptive, might look at Polaris now, and assume that in spite of her half-walking, half-swimming about in a sea of stinking food debris, she actually looks quite content. A suicidal reader might even suggest ‘happy’. Don’t.
The truth is, Polaris knows where she belongs. Or rather, she is completely aware of all the places where she does not belong. Add a little deduction, and we have Polaris standing among robotic waste and wasted lunches, on the biggest spaceship you have ever seen. Polaris does not fit into many places.
There is even a medical term for it. ‘Dramathurgical Consistency and Continuity Displacement’, according to ‘1001 Diseases You Would Never Have To Be Afraid Of In An Ordinary And Ordered Universe’. Basically, it’s the inability to fit into any stereotypical role or archetype. While this might sound like a good thing, it will unerringly lead to the alienation and subsequent exiling of the afflicted individual from whatever society she so desperately wanted to fit into. The moral to the story is this: you are free to deviate, but only do it on your known. (Apparently, in many parts of the galaxy, sex follows the same set of rules.)
But there Polaris is, blending with her surroundings the way water blends with fire. In the end, one of the two will have to win, and extinguish the other. Currently, she is peering off into space, towards a point somewhere above and beyond the receiver dishes, grappling arms and thirty feet long ship-mounted all-purpose twentieth-sixth century Swiss Army Knifes. And as Polaris sees the sharp ends of broken metal and barbed points of a piece of a burned-out and mangled hyperdrive engine floating towards her, she thinks to herself, ‘something wicked this way comes’.
Twenty minutes later, she is down in the cleaning crew hold, turning the alien object over and over in her hand. There is no other word for it. The thing is plain. Polaris knows how a good hyperdrive engine ought to look. If ever a piece of it was broken off, it would be revealed sport a gaudy chromatic metal finish, or pieces of plastic knobs twisted in a perfect imitation of modern art (or ancient art really, as art of the twenty-sixth century is mainly holographic, and gives considerable credence to the old quote: ‘art is an illusion’). Furthermore, the single piece should be streamlined and painted with the kind of symbols which suggest that unless this ships gets moving really quick, now gettamoveon thank you very much, the engine might just fly away of its own accord. Of all the things it should not be, a boring slab of grayish metal, with hardly any buttons, chrome or comic-book symbols, ranks really high.
‘Now, what have you got there, Iron Maiden?’ says Monograph Mike, squeezing his bulk through the door, or, in deference to relativism, squeezing the ship past his bulk.
‘I wouldn’t know...’ says Polaris, succeeding, for the first time since her first day on the ship, in not looking at Mike when he’s talking. She turns the piece over and over, ponders how ‘revolution’ could ever had become a political term when it just brings you back to the same spot, and then she sees it. Inscribed on the back of the most common-looking tweak-modulator she has ever gazed upon, the letters AFoPSM completely fail to blaze in golden colors across the metal plate beneath. Instead, they unshine, or possibly antishine, in what must be the most boring attempt at engraving since the Dead Space Scrolls.
‘AFoPSM...’ she muses. ‘Now what in Adam’s beard could that mean?’
‘Aphorisms For ornographic People Seeking Machicolation,’ Mike replies, almost casually.
‘A bu hrm... what?’ Polaris raises her head in surprise, catching a good dose of Mike in the process.
‘Huh?’ Mike responds, bringing the wrath of a thousand theologies upon a small bench in the corner as he sits down.
Polaris stares at him for many drawn-out nanoseconds. ‘You know, Mike, sometimes, just sometimes, I actually think there might be stuff that you know and I don’t’ she says softly.
Mike raises his head slowly, continental-slide style, and looks at her. The dirty yellow light of the urine-coloured light bulb goes nova in his eyes, and distant galaxies are born in the radiance of solar eclipse as he speaks.
‘The truth is out there’.
‘What?’ Polaris stares at him, perplexed. ‘In the corridor to the diner?’ she says and gestures towards the cabin door.
Mike just shrugs, and polishes his boots.
* * * * *
Each man has his garbage. Most men would say each woman has even more. In the end, popular and never quite out of style sayings such as ‘to each man his own’ might have been vastly different had guys like Marx and Durkheim not been forced to take out the trash at periodical intervalls, each tuesday and thursday, for das der only times in der week der garbage wagon goes by, you know dat, now don’t make a fusch, Karl.
The ship is the largest you have even seen. I know this, as I have laid eyes upon no bigger. No one has, and there’s a reason for that. Firstly, large ships never last long. Prance about in your ‘Porsche Cruiser 4001 A.D. With It’s Own Gravitational Centre’ for long and some bugger will figure out there must be something of value in all those billions of cm3. This ship has a lot of stuff in all those small spaces. But all of it are things you might once have used, broken, wasted, eaten, regurgitated or thrown away. It might be the only place in the universe where you can steal the same stuff twice, and in spite of all the economic possibilities inherent in this, robbers seem to shun the notion.
Secondly, large ships never, ever last long. The higher you walk, the harder you fall, they say. Space has no directions, but in a world of planetary gravity, ‘hard’ can be really hard sometimes. You cruise by Polycon IV, trying to master the millenia-old ‘whistle-at-chicks-from-orbit’ trick, and just as you ponder how cool it is that your ship is too powerful to be drawn into the gravitional field of the planet, the planet hits you in the rear. In the words of a late [death by dating] philosopher, ‘personal gravity might be great for meeting girls, but when half of them are solar systems, you know yer out of your league’.
* * * * *
