Dust and Echoes/In the Immediate Distance - Chapter 2 (pt. 2)

Luckily for Brandon Cailan, large and shady corporations attracted a cloud of young Bounty Hunters with very fast ships. Of course, there were always those few that were intentionally designed in an all-too-familiar disc shape with two prongs protruding towards the front and a command capsule off to one side - not practical, but why be completely practical when you can fly the Millenium Falcon? The mercenaries were always looking for more money, so he didn’t have to pay much past a standard passenger fee to keep word of his presence from reaching the Ecosynth ships. He made sure to pick the most hot-headed captain and the most brightly colored ship, so the price was lower and there was no chance of the company being interested in it. Dangerous, but not enough to override his curiosity. He waited the rest of the week out, approximated advance notice with a couple of hundreds  and a thank-you note, and left Ione exactly as he found it - but for one Customer Service  and Complaints Representative.

*    *    *

Even with the intense and fast-paced rock that was mixed in with some old school techno blasting over the internal and external speaker systems, he had to admit that the interior of the ship was very cozy. It was small, but had numerous alcoves that were cut off from the main lines of the ship. It was splashed with bright and gaudy paint on the outside and made to look like a phoenix rather than the sleek hummingbird that it more closely resembled, but the interior was far more subdued. Rather than the bright reds and yellows of the hull, the interior walls carried matte combinations of black, white, and tan, with bright color only used for important panels and scattered pieces of art. It was the art that surprised Cailan the most as he toured the ship; most young adventurous types would sell it for some drinks or a night of company. The art didn’t consist of scattered pieces, either - they all shared a focus on some sort of frontier, some showing the American West and others depicting the familiarly wild surfaces of the first colony planets. Cailan had been to most of them.

“Surprised?” said the captain, approaching from behind. Brandon turned to meet him. “Don’t be. The art helps me appear a little more qualified than the average man. Not,” he added after some thought, “that my entire profession is male. It’s really weird how many dudes there are, actually; there’s no significant reason for it to be a gender-biased field.”

He beamed a huge grin, exactly the kind one would expect to see from a young bounty hunter with a bright, flaming ship. The captain of the R.S.S. Return was young and twenty-something, and had energy to match, but was as confident as any of the well-established competition that he was surrounded by. He was tall, not wiry but not overly large, and had an indent on either side of the bridge of his nose that indicated he had likely grown up wearing glasses. Cailan knew many people with those divots, having at some point finally decided to allow modern medicine to shoot lasers into their eyes so that they no longer had to slip some ancient pair of spectacles on every morning; it was a procedure that was just as terrifying with a ninety-nine percent success rate as it was with a seventy percent one.

"What did you say your name was again?" said Cailan.

"I didn't; I’m Captain Robert Thade. And you are Brandon Cailan... What, may I ask, do you expect to find on the deserts of Kurese? Actually, what do you expect to find in the forests of Kurese? The oceans? I'm assuming you don't care about the plains; they're garbage."

"It's not Kurese I care about," said Cailan flatly. "It's the 'Diplomatic Zone' that everyone's so eager ‘a find out about. I've heard all the rumors; revolutionaries hiding in asteroids, a ton of resources that the government wants free classified access to, maybe even bleedin’ gren-domed aliens. Either way, I think that if the Republic wants to hide it it might just give me some’n to do with my golden years."

"Ah," said Thade, "the DZ. Never been, but Ecosynth always happens to have lots of exotic materials every time they come back from it. Never sell it all, of course; if they sell it all at once it loses value, but that's just basic Econ. My guess is something out there would flood the market and make things go haywire for a while, 'gold from the New World' style. Well, I don't blame ‘em… Sorry, you didn't sign up for my musings on the private sector. I can't actually know what's out there, how do you plan to be any different?"

"I've learned how to hitchhike pretteh well over the last decade," Cailan replied, with the beginnings of a grin.

"Good luck with that," said Thade. "They check their proverbial ‘undercarriages’ pretty thoroughly nowadays.” He thought for a second. “How did you end up such a degenerate, buy the way? You don't really seem the type... Unless you don't want to to talk about it; that's fine with me. We don’t have too much time right now, anyways."

"It's fine," said Cailan. He had found over time that a good amount of transparency helped swing people his way, not that he really had many reasons to be secretive. "I was an interstellar pilot, one of the first, though there’s not too much to tell about that, really. My parents died from Gorrin's disease when I was about five or six; I'm sure your generation won't remember Gorrin’s at all.”

“Oh, so we’re starting from the beginning,” Thade interjected.

“Hush, let me tell my story.” Cailan stopped for a second.

“Now where was I…”

“Dead parents.”

“Right. By the time I was old enough to understand what had happened, this guy Mallas came and asked me if I wanted to 'serve my race.' I was confused and scared, so of course I bit off on it. They brought me to the Worldwide Interstellar Research Organization headquarters, which was conveniently plopped down in the Sahara Desert.”

Thade perked up. “Oh, WIRO! I remember seeing their announcements all the time growing up.”

“Yeah, they did like their press releases. Anyway, Mallas became my new father - the cliché tough type from the movies - without me realizing that I desperately needed one, and I was raised and trained to fly. They needed highly specialized pilots for the colony ships that would take citizens and supplies to the first fully terraformed colony worlds, you know. They put the base in the Sahara to get a better view of the sky without light pollution (which is something no one seems to care about when you can go ‘a space any time you want), but the physical instructors who whipped us into shape as soon as we were old enough for it to be ‘okay’ seemed bleedin’ giddy about the environment. We trained long and hard to withstand extreme temperatures, weightlessness, and above all hunger - before supply lines were established on a colony the winters were not pretty. Oh man did I love it; I pushed myself until I was one of the top pilots in the program. We were the first to spread the human population into the galaxy, and we did a good job; we were rockstars for a while before people had to worry about re-establishing their own lives. Now I seen myself on a ‘where are they now’ story here and there, but no one ever recognizes me. Not that I’m complaining at all; I really prefer it that way.”

“I gotta be honest,” Thade said sheepishly, “I had no idea who you were.”

“Like I said, no one does. But then things picked up, which is the part you should be more familiar with. Blazes, it was fast. Within five years the first colonies were producing at unbelievable levels, becoming new centers of technology and culture because they weren’t completely tapped out for resources like the Earth was. Spaceships moved just as fast; in all of ten years they went from technical marvels only pilotable by a select few to personalized vehicles that anyone who had the patience to sit and wait at the Interstellar Vehicle Department for a licence could fly. We only used to have to go through the MVD for driver’s licences, which took long enough already... Anyway, the program I grew up in was discontinued, Mallas was reassigned, and I was offered a position back on Earth in the government buildings.”

“Wow. That’s quite the… tale,” the Captain said after a few moments. “So what, you turned it down?”

“Listen, Thade -”

“Call me Robb,” he interrupted.

“Robb, then,” said Cailan. “If you spent your entire childhood training to leave Earth and then ten years of your adult life traveling on the frontier of space, would you really want ‘a retire back to Earth to spend the considerable amount of time you have left filing papers away or some other useless task?”

“Never in a million years,” Thade nodded.

“Exactly. I turned ‘em down; took the money they gave me instead. I used it to keep doing what I loved most. Lads your age don’t realize how much time there is after the years you think are your best. Legal adulthood to typical retirement age, twenty-one to sixty-some’n, is a forty year period, twice as long as the entire educational system. Hell, I’ve still got a few years left of it - and I’ve been around the block quite a few times. So, now tha’ my tale is done, is there anything you want ‘a know from my extensive travels? Stories from some of the worlds in these paintings?”

“Maybe later,” replied Thade, “I’ve got to get back to the last pre-jump checks. I am curious, though - have you ever seen Mallas since you left WIRO?”

“Yes, and only once,” replied Cailan, still relaxed but with a hint of… something, something Thade couldn’t put his finger on. “But that’s not a story I tell.”

*    *    *

Thade had left to complete various flight procedures, so Cailan used the rest of the time he had before the trip began to settle into one of the more secluded alcoves nestled in between the engines - bringing with him one of his old favorite books. Not many people remembered the greats that he grew up with, but The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway gave any sailor, space or otherwise, a healthy respect for what he was up against; away from family, homeland, and even the unblinking reality of what you had left behind - that often crumbling hovel you eventually had to come back to. He had to admire the ship he had chosen; it was deceptively well designed. There was almost no wasted space, which was accomplished without the loss of comfort whenever possible, and it looked equipped to survive almost anything a civilian captain had reason to expect. There were numerous locked doors that piqued Cailan’s free-flowing curiosity, though he expected most were for storage of supplies and the like. Is Thade kind of person that would lock his cabinets just so I can’t get at the thin mints? This thought  led Cailan to a lengthy rumination on the wonderful cookies that had as storied a history as the recently-interstellar Girl Scouts, who taught little girls how to survive on many different planetary climates and how to sell to suckers - though everyone was a sucker when it came to those little girls and those cookies. It also led him to realize that they had expanded to the colonies at least a decade ago, which did not exactly qualify as recently.

Thade was sitting in the Captain’s Quarters, a soundproofed room with an independent speaker system and no surveillance of any kind. The music and atmosphere of this room, the location of which was somewhat hard to place even on the ship’s schematics, was quite out-of-touch with that of the greater ship as a whole. The plush couches and elegant décor were a bit cramped in the small room – though there was plenty of space for one or two people at a time,  and the ornately detailed decor was caressed with the great Romantic symphonies of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, betraying a taste unusual for the company the Return usually kept. The captain was reading The Old Man and the Sea, and not for the first time, from a surprisingly expansive collection.

Robert Thade was only mildly interested in the gold and glory that other bounty hunters were after, though he loved sharing one thing with them: the frontier. Thade’s frontier was not just the romanticized one children of the inner colonies and Earth grew up reading about, though he believed in that one as well; his frontier was the danger in tandem with the landscapes harsh as the personalities inhabiting them. He sought the lack of rules and tradition along with the lack of peace. The yearning that he felt for the new ideological conflicts and fights worth dying for came from a place deep inside himself, from stories of ancient opium wars in China and black slave mining on the tip of Africa. He couldn’t help but let his eyes and mind drift from the pages of his novel. I mean, every frontier has been home to somebody. While the new American government tried to carry out whatever new decision they had made concerning Native Americans, the people claimed land that had belonged to nature and nature alone regardless - but to the Native population none could own the temptress that nature had always been. The Native American saw the theft of that which cannot be stolen and the New American saw no deed. The process seems to repeat over and over again, and humanity has consistently treated itself that way. As far as humans have reached into space there are still no stories of new intelligence, but the idea is never far from people’s minds; it’s the same as when any disease spreads too quickly and people can’t help but be the first to shout ‘Zombies’. The crushing feeling of isolation, of moving outwards and expanding into a dead universe, leaves no room for the human spirit - an excitement and a hope that more is ahead of us than behind - but if there really is something out there could we even remotely understand how they think? One of Thade’s favorite novels called them Raman and Varelse - sentient species divided into categories based on whether communication with humanity was possible or not. Would they even care? Can humanity see the pattern through history in time to stop it, or will they only someday stop to look at the beauty of another culture long dead and past?