The Stardrifter Grounded Read online

  -----------------------------------

  The Stardrifter Grounded

  by Bruce Boston

  -----------------------------------

  Science Fiction

  * * *

  Fictionwise, Inc.

  www.Fictionwise.com

  Copyright ©1993 by Bruce Boston

  First published in Figment, ed. J. C. and Jr. Barb Hendee, September 1993

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

  * * *

  In the sordid company of assorted off-world cronies, human and not so, stranded like himself, the stardrifter waits out one rapid day after another in the back streets of a starport city. Circling too close for comfort to a brilliant white dwarf, sweltering beneath the cloud-clotted skies of a seasonless alien clime, the stardrifter waits out the short years—six-and-a-half odd local to every solo year on Earth—though he has long since ceased to calculate the conversions. He knows that time by any world's standard is no longer on his side.

  His aimless anger, his fits of despair and restlessness, he combats with whatever intoxicants, legal or not so, happen to come his way. He relieves his boredom by an occasional tryst with some native courtesan, creatures blue-skinned and angular, their customs and language strange, but no stranger than he has known before. Creatures of a species nocturnal by nature, yet still humanoid, soft in the right places, passionate enough in like fashion to his own human passions.

  They can often be beautiful, he thinks, in their own blue and angular way. As slender and graceful, he tells himself, as the sentient saplings of ... Midas VII? ... Althor VIV?

  The stardrifter has visited so many worlds in his random passage through the light years that more than a few have become muddled in his mind: fauna and flora, cities, mountains and plains, superimposed upon one another like a series of shifting transparencies.

  In his higher moments, when his thoughts seem to run clear and vast as the limitless boundaries of space itself, the vistas and landscapes he has seen flit through his rising consciousness like a generic panorama that encompasses the essence of all that is provocative and alien, all that has determined the compulsive though ill-defined quest of his life.

  * * * *

  Each morning the stardrifter leaves the cramped quarters of his squat and blocky native hut. He treks through the ever-muggy streets, joined by others of his kind, to read the notices posted on a union board:

  Europa, Class AA, freight, Earth Registry,

  Inbound for Sol by way of Bryan's Star,

  WANTED: one mate, two mechs, one navigator

  Deepfarer, Class B, exploration, Centauri Registry,

  Extended tour of Klee Rift

  WANTED: second engineer, knowledge of Megan plasma drive

  His skills are as numerous and varied as the worlds he has traversed. His union dues are paid in coin, his spacer's dues in service. All of his papers are scrupulously in order. Yet again and again some bleak-eyed purser, some second officer still downy behind the ears, tells him—at times with a brief nod of sympathy, more often with brusque indifference—that he is too old to work the great C-ships and bear the rigors of stardrive.

  Too old to ride the spokes of light like fire in his thighs, too old to brave the vacuum.

  * * * *

  Over mugs of a vaporous and icy native brew that cold-burns the gullet and cool-trips the mind, Zenthyl, his friend from Nullé IV, tries to tell him that any world that is livable can also be lovable.

  “Take a steady mate,” wise Zenthyl counsels. “Forge a new life for yourself. Forget the foolishness of starlust."

  Yet Zenthyl is not of human kin—far from it—and his race is more adaptable to the fetid damp of this greenhouse world. His scales do not sweat like porous flesh by rapid day and rapid night. His lungs do not succumb to chronic infections short year in and short year out. Fungi do not sprout like manic verdigris in the crevices between his toes.

  So the stardrifter continues to plan and dream.

  He takes whatever work he can find. He saves whatever money he can manage to save. Up and down the crooked humpbacked streets of this sprawling port, distributing handbills he can barely read, bills imprinted with a blue native dye that leaves greasy ineradicable stains upon his fingers and clothes. Tedious midnight lessons in Altagerian, the lingua franca of the spaceways, to some local merchant with off-world aspirations. Day labor at the space docks, handling crates hammered beneath far distant skies, the stuff of many worlds passing beneath his increasingly calloused palms.

  If he manages to save the necessary fare for passage, his age will no longer be a problem. He will survive the wrenching mind/body trauma of deep-space leaps safe within the drugged coma of cold storage, cradled by the cushioned security of a gravity coffin. But exactly where his yearned-for passage will carry him remains a mystery, as much to himself as to Zenthyl or any of his other stray companions.

  He knows his only real home is in motion from one transient destination to the next ... a spacer's berth in the emptiness between worlds ... where gravity free he can dream the universe and its infinite possibilities ... the tachyon drive spitting at his back ... the roar of the fusion reactors like a base descant against the white static of the stars.

  * * * *

  Drinking in a spacer's bar is costly, so some nights he drinks alone. And when he has had his fill and his fill again, he staggers into the tepid night, bare to the waist, his belly gray-haired and round as a pot, still hard beneath the aging flesh. His eyes and thoughts are empty. In his heart there is a raging incandescence, a flagrant wilderness of light; above there is nothing but a vague gray blackness.

  If the overcast would part for just a moment. If he could know for one sure instant that the light years still await his passage. If he could once again see the night sky, the sidereal host in all its splendor: giant red Beltegeuse, bright Procyon with its wealth of planets, Alcor and Mizar in their flaming binary dance. But those are only names, and beyond the closely packed cloud cover, he can no longer be sure they remain.

  * * * *

  One evening, higher than usual on some reckless combination of drug and drink, he finds a stub of chalk among his meager store of possessions. Upon the dark slate walls of his hut, while curious children watch and others shake their heads at the inscriptions of a madman, he sketches the constellations of Earth as he remembers them. He draws lines between the stars he may never see again. He shouts out the names of fabled animals, calls upon the powers of ancient goddesses and gods. Yet when he examines his own handiwork by the damp and quickly rising light of a hungover dawn, he sees only the scrawled graffiti of a firmament that could be as mythical as its legendary denizens. He sees an abstract illusion without substance or form.

  A stardrifter grounded ... a stardrifter no more.

  In less than a score of short years, that seem ever shorter as they continue to pass, he will heed wise Zenthyl's advice. He will take a steady native woman, if woman you could call her. He will attempt to make a new life for himself. Instead of stars he will console his empty soul with the dream of a someday heir, an impossible blue-human child of his improbable blue union.

  * * *

  Visit www.Fictionwise.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.

 

 

  Bruce Boston, The Stardrifter Grounded

  Thanks for reading the books on Gra
yCity.Net