To Zachris: Landing

Landing

I look out over the dark stillness of hte lake as I do every night. Above me the stars sit, stagnant again. Over the smoldering of Mt. Perun, I watch the electric lights of the landing field waiting, like me, for space-time to fall. Waiting, in their electric way, for you.

You are late, Zachris. You are always late, but this is the longest it has been. I hear from you so seldom, even over the transmitter. Faster than light travel, you say, makes keeping in touch almost impossible but I wonder if you are not, perhaps, escaping me. I try to keep in the same time-line as you, going to the spinners to keep myself young, losing so much time wandering through relative space, doing research. Still, it doesn't help; nothing is perfect. You come back, as you sometimes do, and I find we have aged slightly differently. Your birthday has moved a few months, you are a year older than I expected; these things are difficult for us.
I throw stones across the water as I wait, watch them eventually fall. Some skip more than ten times before they sink.

The sky brightens, distracting me - your ship finally coming down. It plummets too quickly. I see the signal tower flash as your course changes, watch the waves crest and break over the bow of your ship in its fierce surface violation. Already, I am running to the evac-mech, thanking the stars for the training, for the watch. The metal of the suit closes its cold energy about me. I dive into the water, my body braced. I dive to your ship. My sheathed fingers claw the ash from your sarcophagus. I find hte seam then, grab the lock on it and swim upward with sweeping strokes. Urgent sounds are blaring in my head, sounds that mean you might be dying or are dead. The sirens pummel my ears with the dying sound, the wail. I pull your finned sarcophagus to the surface. It parts the waters, leaves its dark wake. A word play shifts unbidden through my head, and I contemplate the cruelty of gallows humor.

The waves of my passing break against the shore at the Dover slate mill. I leap, my mechanical self lifting high out of the water to the land. With metal sheathed fingers I tear at the seam. I tear open your sarcophagus and watch it spit you forth, watch your screaming face, the agony of new oxygen in your lungs.

Later, I love you, shudder with pleasure as I grip the place where your shoulder has grown a hump of hard metal and soft flesh, the place where the computer supplements the self. You stand, and I watch you hunch your back, and cradle your arm, touch the metal of your fingers, the fingers that had once been perfect, been pure flesh. I cry, watching you shiver, your back hunched over your deformity (hunched with your deformity). I too shiver, naked against the night, my back cold where it rests on the feet of hte machine which had saved your life.

"I am done with the stars," you say after some time. I sit silent, hiding my cautious pleasure, letting you think out loud. "I miss the smell of earth, of growing things." After a time you continue, "We can still work for the smeltery. The botany lab is open, and I can work metal to earn our keep."

"Yes, Zachris. It will be good to have you here." I caress the evac-mech's corrugated toe, and lean back into the softness of the lakeshore. Sleep envelopes us, sleep and the warmth of a past day's dawn, still trapped in the sand by the dark water lapping.

* * *

There are days we lounge in our gardens. Your skin is rough from the heat of the metal; the steel of your fingertips sometimes glows as you twist and shape the brilliant ore. The hair of your chest gradually bleaches blonde from the long days in the sun.

"Zachris," I savor the sound. these are good days, where you work the sheets of metal into fine tools, and we grow such things in our garden. The Daude machine cackles as it brings metal up from the earth; its swift pistons and clattering tracks provide a rhythm for our hours of work. Our world is one of music and rhythm, the smell of growing things, and the smell of heated metal.