any summer programimplies
that summer program. God, this is still a terrible story.
The date of this rewrite is October 16, 2000.
Micha sat alone in the cockpit of his narrow craft and thought of other things.
He'd learned long ago that this was the essence of space travel: interludes of tedium punctuated only briefly by stops on the various planets. He sat in his molded chair and waited for the hours to slip by.
He didn't really know how it all worked; he didn't really care. It was good enough for him that he got from one place to another. He had a rudimentary understanding of energetics, enough for its practical uses. He could fix the cells if he had to, and he knew how to replace things when they went bad, but beyond that it didn't matter. All that mattered was the "bland obvity of the universal night."
His thoughts drifted to Fern Benzhar, one of the more distinguished poets among pilots -- perhaps the only one to be widely known among non-spacers. Micha had met him once, at a stopover. They were going in opposite directions, and Benzhar had been obviously uncomfortable under the blazing lights of the pubhouse. There had been no conversation. Micha hadn't minded. He didn't put much stock in the Evidentialist theories, anyway.
Micha leaned toward his readout; he had to, because the text wasn't clear from two feet away. The ship was junk from the low end of modern design, with no consideration for the weary pilot. The readout wasn't adjustable, the beams weren't angleable. Certainly no holograph to keep you busy. Everything was locked down in one instrument panel, as if the pilot was expected to sit in the exact same position for forty dreary hours of space flight.
He'd had moments of excitement to break up the tedium. Once, a rogue asteroid. Three times, pirates, which showed how long Micha'd been piloting. Pirates couldn't risk working near planets, so they always came in open space -- and in the vastness of space, to be even noticed three times was terrible luck. Then again, he was still alive, and that meant he'd beaten his share of the odds in the other direction as well. Good pirates didn't leave witnesses. Not alive, anyway.
But Micha still put up with it all. The job paid terribly. Newer ship models were highly automated, and their pilots were always bragging about how much work they didn't have to do, at least until they'd been out for awhile. Then it all became the same, no matter how much gadgetry you had. Any attempt at a family was futile, and few people, let alone women, would put up with the extreme introverts who always walked out of the cockpits of interplanetary commerce. But Micha still put up with it all.
Micha checked his instruments. Nothing. He leaned back, and relaxed as much as he could in the chair. It wasn't even molded to him. His company had balked at remolding it after the last pilot retired. So, Micha sat in a chair designed for a man at least six inches shorter than he, in a ship he'd been assured was a "singificant upgrade" from his last. He was uncomfortable and bored, and would be for another fifteen hours. But Micha still put up with it all.
"Consider the space pilot." Fern Banzhar once wrote. Why bother? He won't consider you. He sits in his desperate silence and ignores everything.
An alarm sounded. Micha moved into the same uncomfortable position that he always did and eyed the display. He was there, the first and only waypoint on the path to Earth: Mahatta Prime, a moderate-sized planet, almost exactly like Earth except that it wasn't. It was a bit smaller, and a bit less dense. The sun, Delta Pavonis, was a bit cooler, and a bit closer, and so Mahatta was only a bit colder. But where Earth had a core of iron, Mahatta had a core of copper. Earth had created steel out its abundance of iron; Mahatta created its own alloys out of necessity. The residents, about twenty thousand of them, had built their city and caves out of their beloved metal. It was, in an odd way, beautiful. The relative weakness of copper mandated a certain more curvaceous form, which could be seen in every building, no matter how impoverished or imperious. Nothing was ever built in stone.
Mahatta was a mining colony for the most part. It had some small strategic importance as a retreat-point from Earth, should the Halyons have ever penetrated that far. But it was the copper that brought Micha there, just like it brought all the others -- the Mad Hatters, as everyone knew them.
Micha touched his ship down and climbed down out of the cockpit into the spaceport lounge. It took him five seconds to authorize the transaction. It would take an hour at the least to complete it. He didn't want to spend any longer on Mahatta than he had to, but bureaucracy and unions moved for no man.
"Consider the space pilot." Fern Benzhar once wrote. "He sits alone in his craft..." But a pilot always sits alone. From habit Micha hardly even noticed the six other pilots in the porthouse, but as he walked in, one stood up and raised his glass in a toast. "To the space pilots, the loneliest men in the universe." he said with a humourous, drunken grin. "May we all lose ourselves in the 'blandness of the universal night'." Micha didn't even think to correct the misquote. There was no point. It was just another rookie pilot with a brand-new toy. Let him have his fun until it all sunk in, and then... vodka, served in a frozen glass. Micha sat at an empty table, and the waiter kept his alcohol coming in silence. This was the only way he could get through these terrible hours at rest.
A crash marked the rookie hitting the floor. Micha gazed blankly at the wall, avoiding both the telescreens and the other half-drunk pilots. He thought he recognized one, from a long time ago, but he never introduced himself. He just sat alone.
An hour passed in relative quiet after the rookie limped out of the pubhouse. Six men unconsciously avoided talking to each other, all of them intent. Some came, some went. A hotshot -- no, two hotshots strolled in. With a modern cruiser, and without cargo, they could probably launch with enough energy to make the Earth-Mahatta run in ten hours: a video game, a nap, and you were there. They probably did this sort of thing for fun. Designers were starting to give freighters room for more than one person, too, mostly for the longer hauls, but Micha knew he could never use one. He hated the idea. The spacejetters grew loud, so Micha paid, tipped, and left with most of the other pilots.
He eased out of the spacedock and headed towards Earth. He'd grown up there, had a home there -- a small one, in Germany, with a good view of the sea. Pilots tended to do that, to buy houses near vast expanses. It comforted them, made them think of home -- of space.
"Consider the space pilot." Fern Benzhar once wrote. "He sits alone in his craft, trapped with some cargo which does not interest him, would not, could not even if it were true love wrought in platinized ivory. Why does he do it? Why this sacrifice of time, of love, of life? In truth, he never knows -- and nor do I."
Micha knew, as he sat there in silence and gazed at the whole of reality, as he felt once more that old feeling. There he was again, floating, free in the expanse of the universe, an insignficant speck amid the colossus of creation. So Micha put up with it all, put up with the worthless ships, put up with the spacejetter jocks, put up with the Evidentialists. He usually complained for the first two or three hours after leaving forced society. Then, he would sit alone and stare at space, not at the stars like an Earthman might, but at the emptiness of the eternal black night.
It wasn't obvious. It was beautiful.