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It is not because other people are dead
that our affection for them grows faint,
it is because we ourself are dying.
--Marcel Proust
Dazzling green peridots and vertiters, soft pink carnelians, deep indigo amethysts...Lott got
them all spilling into his taut net. Why were stars a cinch to catch, especially on moonless nights?
What were they and where did they come from?
"William Somerset Maugham, Chross," said Lott, nudging, for the time being, his questions
aside.
Chross obliged with a loud voice, "Popular dramatist, novelist, and short story writer,
English but born in Paris in 1874."
"Lucritius?"
"You need my help?" Chross now cried from abaft ship, a sirocco breeze wafting his crow hair.
"Your eyes must be hurting."
"Yours are blind," Lott called across to him, "you need mine?" Lott refused to teach him how
to weave, "The thread might cut off some of your fingers."
Lott wants access to the boy's visions since he does't have the feel himself. He piques the boy to
steelen him, he says, but also gauds him into talking saying more about the ships and the possibility
of returning on them back to Earth--which is his dream--because he covets his gift. Yet he is
becoming increasingly aware that little time is left for him, that one day soon he'll pass on without
seeing Earth. So the boy who is blind can see with his mysterious gift what Lott with his sight
cannot, while Lott can only see a world he rejects and constantly reminds him what he can never have.
"If I can read, I can mend," said Chross.
Lott had pin-pricked the shape of each letter through half a dozen books. It came as a
surprise when he discovered that the youth could read the words without the aid of the braille.
"Books don't snap back," Lott returned, "the net does."
Lott was a bibliophile and a literati to the extent his old eyes would permit it. His cabin
crawled with discolored or stained primitive volumes. A foxed tome with the rubric Bible, another
Michelangelo, others included Mozart, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Einstein, Tolstoy.
Lott, broad of shoulders, nose and chin, woolly-maned and stocky-limbed, lived with Chross
near New Sunderland, the largest of the planet's islands on the southern hemisphere, in Lott's sea
faring vessel. He might have been a wrestler but for a pronounced limp and a pair of runny ash eyes.
It was late evening, and yet the sun blazed as it set, searing his vision white.
He stopped netting and closed his stinging lids.
"Lucretius, Chross."
"Roman poet and philosopher," the boy responded. "Wrote a long poem, On the Nature of Things,
arguing that the human mind and soul can be explained by the laws of atomic structure."
"Marco Polo."
"Finished with the beacon?" Lott prodded, securing the anchor line at the hawsehole and
getting back to the half-done trammel.
They had distanced themselves equally far from the surrounding haze-shrouded shores and the
cliff walls of pumice-black and rust-red stone. Stars oddly enough did not take to the proximity of
land, although a few strayed at times and dug themselves into the eroded ridges and raw gullies of
desert badlands and an oasis bloomed.
Lott sat lotus fashion. The boy today feasts on his mood of silence, he thought.
He whisked his white hairs off the silky filaments of the starcatcher's net and espied
towards the large bulbus beacon fastened to the mast.
"Bo's'n Chross! Report!"
Chross, in his goatskin briefs, waved his sinewy arms over the lackluster dome. To Lott's
mind came caricatures of demons prancing around hellfire, the ones he had seen in the books.
"Checking the quantatron," Chross hollered back.
"Your `magic' touch no doubt," Lott said, catching his scruffy and fluttering kelembia under
his legs. "All I taught you gone to waste?"
The boy pantomimed with more gestures. Now his hands traced and his fingers pampered the
onion head of the beacon like a clinician practising the treatment of a pregnant woman.
"The pauper mystic," Lott mumbled under the snarled hairs of his fat mustache. Then louder,
"The exotic little Pan, complete with a manly, hairless chest."
"I prefer lost soul to Pan," said Cross.
Lott had called him lost soul once or twice before. Deservedly, he thought. In this land of
nut and spice the boy couldn't tell a nutmeg from mace.
He had found the boy vagrant and wandering on a outlying strand one day; a dainty pale-skin
moat plodding aimlessly on the hot white sand, all skin and bone with a gaping hole big as his thumb
between epicanthic, blue-black eyes.
Lott simpered, "Remember how many days you were in that kiln, boy, with no food and water?"
"Enough," Chross came back.
"Huh!"
Enough not to yet have recovered, Lott thought. Lost still in inky holes and whorling dust
devils. He shook his head and spurred his knotty hands to tease away at the twine's snags and snares.
"Going to spend your share on the women? Billing and cooing them?"
The boy seemed to shy women. Lott didn't like it. Blind and branded would make it hard to
find a mate for him, without his fighting it further. Lott thought, stretching back his numbing
shoulder blades, got to teach him social rudiments, survival; awareness that dangers stalk a blind
boy--half dead he was on that sea of sand.
"Anything is better than guzzling that acid goat's milk raki," said Chross.
"Won't be long you'd be coming to me with the itch, little birdie. Your way with the feel
and touch can't cure it."
Don't give the odd buck the upper hand, Lott taunted. Ah, but how did the squirt manage to
pick up a still-burning star? With naked hands at that. And lived to tell about it.
"Raunchy wenches! Raki disinfects."
In due course, Lott thought: mending airy circuit nets, knitting kisses over a pretty velvety
body--Ruth, Ruth, such gentleness and pristine beauty, to lose a lifetime so early in life. Lott
reminisced fifty years past.
"--and dries your figs, old nanny."
Lott coughed and returned to the present with a pinched sour look on his face. The brat
learns quickly.
But, two seasons ago was it? Chross tried to un-net the active star with bare fingers. Got
him a month's time of bloated hands. Two charred balloons hanging down his sides. A useless boy you
had to feed and toil over like an old nanny.
"`Old nanny' indeed!" Lott pouted.
Yet during that month the youth in his restlessness betrayed an eerie flair.
Lott flinched. Chross had begun to read more than books.
Read things on the metal vessel using every exposed inch of his skin (but the puffed up
hands): the country's restless history of the ship's wall material; the civil strife and political
unrest of the continent the steel floor plating came from; of the net's fibrous origins and the worn
life of the slaving women sweating in sooted radio-active workhouses, who toiled for decades over the
machines and raw ingots that produced unimolecular twine. Lastly, the boy had touched his head upon
the beacon.
"Part of a great ship, the old arks that hang around our sphere. The beacon summons--" and
Chross had suddenly plummeted into one of his mysterious, catatonic silences.
"--the stars?" Lott had added excitedly, bending over and mildly shaking the rehabilitating
youth.
Lott had to wait.
"The arks are empty," Chross had dribbled out much later, "derelict like the net, the beacon,
this boat."
"Gibberish! They're supplied. Waiting to free us from this desert place. The Computers say
so. Where else can the stars, the spores of our livelihood, come from?"
The boy had faced the warmth of the sun, unblinking.
"What, boy?" Lott had gruffed.
"Our sun is an aperture," the boy had continued, "to networks vaster than the matrix of your
net. It has black counterparts--everywhere," he had raised a twiggy arm and Lott followed it as it
swept across the Galaxy and stopped at its other spiral.
Lott had allowed himself a crooked smile, "Sol?"
"And elsewhere. All anomalies, even those that fringes create, harvest all loose energies,
into separate super-condensed stuffs."
"The place of our ancestors? The stars come from there?" Lott's voice was low and shaking.
"Not stars, old man, and not only from there. They come from everywhere, from here as well."
Chross had clammed up after that.
The old fisherman scowled and squeezed his smarting angel eyes. He glanced at the beacon and
the boy. With the passing of the months he had come to know better. He challenged less and less the
youth's accuracy, or ask how he knew. The boy proved seldom wrong.
And was a beggar for trivia.
"Explain `arsis'."
"It is the accented or stressed syllable in a metrical foot," Chross spoke while he worked,
"as distinguished from thesis or the unstressed syllable."
"Sein und Zeit."
Chross, Lott saw, took a hefty breath. "It is the analysis of man's `being in the world'..."
"You read more than me," Lott grunted, "but I'm no dimwit, makeshift soothsayer."
The boy turned from the beacon and blinked at him once.
"You think I don't know the difference of a rishon, a planet, an anomaly, a sun?" he said,
pushing himself up from the battered decking.
Chross hunched his shoulders.
"What else can you call them? They've been 'stars' since we were thrown here, three
generations time."
"They do not drop from the old ones," Chross said tolerantly and returned to pampering the
cylinder that was the beacon.
"Why do the seas and the nights attract them?" Lott stubbornly grilled on.
"Why the bottomless hollows so far below these oceans?" He had observed them gleam and glow
through the fathoms of the glassy waters for endless nights. "Why there, Chross, when they can
transform barren, blistered dust into fruitful soil?"
Chross worked mutely, unknotting the shrouds securing the beacon to the mast's cleats.
"Star-handlers boast that they can even kindle the force of life into a cold corpse, if only
a fresh star could be manipulated swiftly enough. Who but the old ones, the arks, wield such might?"
Lott sounded altogether pleased, in spite of the churning in his chest.
Chross did not turn from the beacon this time, "The ships help summon them to this place, but
do not spawn them."
Lott snorted, but deep down he was beginning to allow room for more reconciliation, without
further cavil.
He crochet gently with the thimble-tipped fingers over the last configuration on the gossamer
plexus. On good days a harpist could not render more grace. But this evening he felt apprehensive,
sapped and preoccupied.
The intertwining abruptly gave a rippling surge as the final sheers were restored into their
individual mesh. Lott rubbed his tearing orbs and his shoulder.
Shortly after, a jet acre scooped off the ship and billowed above, threatening to hoist them
up after it. Four tie lines twanged and stiffened.
"More slack," he shouted. The web rose higher still, spreading as it did, till it no longer
bulged. Now the oblique flossy quadrilateral hovered rigidly like a huge black slab ripped out of a
midnight sky.
Lott tugged testily one of the rising ropes, "The artefact is finally up high, Chross."
"It's no artefact," Chross returned, sauntering near.
"Correct. That's a trap. I'm the artifact," Lott jostled chortling.
"Before the night is out you too will see, fisherman of stars."
"More pauper's prophesies?"
The youth turned away, as though the faculty of speaking stung him. The shifting light
dissolved all color from his already sallow skin, robbed even the dimness from the hollow cheeks.
Lott did not like the shadow on the youth's face.
"Chross, what is Information Rate of a Source?"
Chross seemed to brighten a bit, "A number that measures the observer's average uncertainty
on what letter the source will produce next with regard to past data concerning the message and a
statistical knowledge of the source."
"Keats. Any verse or two."
Chross looked thoughtful.
"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."
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Lott detected clouds gather again on the boy's puzzling countenance.
While the seas and oceans and his beacon lured the stars, the expanse of net offered
protection by capturing them. Lott puffed as he and Chross together lugged the tarnished, grim mass
of the beacon directly under the net's geometric center.
Chross loped about barefoot. Lott regarded him with no less awe. The feel is guiding his
steps. Never tripping, never bumping. What more do those eyes see? he queried silently. Lott could
not quell his yearn to see, too. Curiosity conjured up all manner of visions in his burning mind.
A sliver of pearly sun lingered yonder on the horizon. Then just a cyan glowing. Lott
lumbered to the heavy steel taffrail around the stern of the boat. Leaned his weight on it. He gazed
over a measure of tranquil azimuth. He abided, waiting for dark to set in. Not long and the glum
dead waters will do the dance of light, he thought. His rumination then wandered.
Green and blue vistas of another world drifted his way. One so markedly deferent from this.
One his parents had nostalgically spoken to him about, had lived on before they and the arks passed
through the fringe, the open paradox in the warp and woof of the space between the vortices of the
universe, via the first man made anomaly, and were expelled here, at the Galaxy's other spiral. The
back of beyond.
But what of the world his kinsfolk had left behind; a world that was rapidly being depleted
of its life sustaining properties, robbed of the life force which made it wondrous and rare?
Tales were around of disparaged ones who had chosen to leave it by dying; a creed of
believers that would thrust themselves without the protection of the arks into the shadow of
artificial anomalies, as that cast by the beacon, and disappear. It was said that they sought escape
in solitude and new frontiers; liberation from the people-swarmed, people-consumed continents, from
people packed together like drupelets, by siding with a conjecture of an old, unproven hypothesis.
It initially emerged as a bizarre coalition of beliefs in an ancient faith and a recent but
untested theorem: The archaic scriptures spoke of a life after, and the theorem had supported that all
information entering an anomaly is preserved--the code of life included.
Yet, computers too can be an insidious lot, Lott admitted. A life-sustaining planet the
computers had said of this cinder. But as the voyagers were soon to discover almost a century ago,
with no life.
Lott felt a tugging at his sleave and turned. Chross stood beside him sullen as never before.
"Eat before the shine rain comes."
Chross's eyes were straggly and melancholy. In his extended hand was a flat plate of
seasoned gri-gri meat and green herbs.
"I'm not hungry," Lott's voice softened. He watched by the lantern's glow the coruscating
speckles in the other's irises and it reminded him of the stars' lustre. "A heavy stomach does light
work."
Chross's other hand now fondle the plate.
What's eating the boy? It was not like him, this discomfiture. Lott could not explain.
"It is tin with a ceramic layer baked on." The boy commenced to scan the plate's history.
"It comes from a sky ship's galley."
"Read me its age," he asked, forgetting more important things.
"Older than you, Lott. Much older. The metal was mined on the other world. So were the
minerals of the coating."
"Earth, blind boy. Earth, the blessed."
"Yes, Earth." Chross patted the plate. "Gaea."
"Earth, Gaea, no matter--we are its seedlings scattered, by intention or not, here: a world
of parched dunes and sterile seas and contraband stars to harvest, instead--instead of--"
He lulled. He had not the gift of the touch to see the remarkable place of his roots.
"--of fruit-bearing green turf and pregnant frothing blue surf. They are coming, Lott!"
Lott amputated from his reverie and inclined his head back.
The heavens, as he examined them, held only the customary map of the firmament. But shortly
as his feeble eyes adjusted a shimmer spread on the sky. Pinpricks of flickers, vestiges of glints
and glitters.
Speedily a brilliant haze scattered amidst the empty tracts of the nebula clusters. The
ghostly grain grew more resplendent, till whispers of seared and violated air hissed asunder.
Lott quickly covered his nose with his sleeve, "The beacon, lad. Power it!"
Chross pushed the plate into the other's hand and foundered to the vessel's middle.
"Activate! Activate!" Lott shouted, disposing of the plate, and himself plodding to the
net's controls.
With the flat of his palm Lott threw his whole weight over a thick ebony quartz on the power
node at the topmost of a support pillar. A thin whine rose from the ship's guts. "Down, down," his
face buffed red, the eyes goggled.
The hovering square net over the ship and a stretch of surrounding waters flourished darker
still. A melanite regularity, whose sable sharp edges Lott could spot from where he stood, covered
them.
A quadrant of the Galaxy simply vanished. Lott could discern chaffs of palpable vermilion
and hear the crackle from the web as fields bent, coiling around the interstices in live mauve
lightning. A cataract of dense stench poured down on them. "Mutated oxygen."
Lott turned. He leered.
He'd never get used to the wretched sight, to what emanated from the beacon's sullied hulk.
His face slowly took on the cast of a weathered tombstone and his bulging eyes grew to puffy circles
of white.
"Things Chross cannot see," he moaned, rubbing an abused shoulder.
Above the boy towered a cone of viscous emptiness. A shaft so hollow of light that the
boat's dim lanterns seemed to careen to it; he felt his own sight being trawled from its sockets to
the abyss. Some long-forgotten nightmare tore at Lott's mind, but the only evidence of distress was
the worried tone when he spoke to the other.
"Chross, get away from that thing!" he shouted, his nerves thrumming wildly. He felt himself
being towed lightly to the humming beacon, away from the net's controls.
The youth staggered, his face impassive, his hair on end, ploughing under the vacuous shadow
towards him.
"What do you see?" he asked. Lott braced him by the arm.
"Lights, the size of fists--no one alike--all glow, no body, sallying down," he spoke and
rubbed his chest.
"The net?"
"Ah, the net holds, high and mighty, boy. Blacker than a raven dipped in pitch, but it tends
to its job. To left and right, all around, the light-spores are being baffled and sluiced into
streams, are listing out of course and snared like birds of fire," he stammered breathless, until his
knees sagged.
His bones and muscles seemed to be melting. He sank on the iron deck trying to remember
something. It was urgent.
"The waters, Lott?"
He brushed a wetness from his forehead and cheek, tried to focus, "The waters are a dancing,
green jewel tonight. The lights go deep. These are not shallow seas..." his look lingered briefly on
Chross. "We float on liquid radiance laced with sparkles where the stars smash and break its
surface." Such lightheadedness, he pondered dazedly, and blinked in an effort to clear it away.
"Are there many to catch?"
"Enough for our needs, eh, and--if they persist--plenty to trade at the Bazaar..." He lost
himself in his words.
His fingers numbed. He was becoming disoriented among the syllables and their articulation.
The silent rain of lights around him somehow made all utterance redundant.
"Boy," he breathed heavily, "help me--"
The boy kneeled beside him. His narrow face was now drawn.
"What's happening?" Lott gasped.
Chross fidgeted, his eyes glistening, wise. "They're calling for you," he tried to soothe.
"Calling?" He struggled with the pain and to understand.
"Share with them--"
"Whom, boy?"
"--be born from your shell again, Lott."
Lott listened mouth agape, his nape tingling.
"The black stars, like the beacon, allure all life force," the boy wooed him and rocked
gently holding him tightly in his arms. "The spirit energy, Lott. It is in their design. They
reclaim and forge it into spores of sustained consciousness," he waved his hand over his head, "and
sow them throughout."
"Our souls?" Lott blurred.
"Not a soul is lost to the Universe, old man."
He subtly remembered. The boy's head gash was another eye that saw all that other eyes could
not. Lott's emotional tenor changed.
"--star-struck, not wounded," he dribbled and clutched at the boy's hand. His expression
smoothed. He began to see.
How divine a plan. He was instantly astounded by the lucid images taking shape in his mind,
as clear and obvious as a remembered dream.
The atmosphere: the spores broke more of the water's chemistry down to its elements, and
quicker than the primitive indigenous algae, so impending life could breathe. Their partiality to
darkness and the deep: to protect sensitive, neonatal life forms evolving into full bloom.
A tiny star flowed, guiding, in the boy's veins, too. "You will live for ever, boy."
"We all do, Lott. We just don't know it."
"Antonio, Chross," Lott whispered, while his eyes begged to close.
"Which Antonio, the old master wrote of five?"
"You learned well, lad."
"You teach well, Maestro."
There was a blur. His shoulders heaved. A stinging-hot, bone-splintering agony crushed Lott
and swept to his hands, down his crotch, toes. He strained for a shallow breath and--"Whoosh!"
The pain dispersed. The last of the maelstrom in his mind cleared away. Everything appeared
different, more comprehensible than he had ever perceived them before, as if he had looked at life
through a veil, until now.
He regarded the reclining, motionless boy next to him. A trickle of blood stained the bridge
of his nose.
"The star abandoned you, fool boy," he blustered. "You're going to die--"
While the words still spilled out, he ran to the beacon. His body no longer weighed him
down, forcing him to drag along like a sloppy walrus out of water. Discovered his limp was not there
either.
Suddenly his awareness exploded. He thought he too was going to be left blind until his
senses told him differently. Yet in this increment he saw around him what his otherwise simple sight
could not have beheld in a lifetime. Lott gawked, utterly bewildered.
The boy stirred and lay still again.
Lott yanked his stare free from the uncanny iridescence of the net. Got a firm grip on the
beacon. He put both shoulders to it, "Move, clambering junk pile."
He pushed, tipping the issuing onion head off to one side. The black funnel slowly pitched,
leaving the net's center above and crawled to the net's edge.
Two passing streaks at that moment deflected violently. They swerved into the jet spray of
the beacon and dashed on the steel deck, splintering and showering an umbrella of sparks. Lott let
the beacon down.
"How big a piece?"
Gingerly, and with the aid of his net-picking thimbles, he culled a loose fragment and
trodded to the boy. He leaned over Cross's head ready to release it in the breach of the wound.
"It's not necessary."
He jarred back, dropped the star morsel, which slithered away to its core, became one with
it, took on an etherial form and shape, rose from its knees and walked away.
Lott's head turned from one to the other.
"Did you see that?"
"No, Lott."
The other sat up and studied him dazed-like.
"You are not Chross, are you?" Lott said.
The other nodded.
"You're a star."
The other nodded.
"He's gone."
The other shook his head. "Stars are symbiotes, not usurpers."
"Where is the boy?"
"Where do you think he is?"
Lott grimaced, his face becoming a checkerboard of emotions. Reluctantly, he wiped a quaking
hand over the numb soreness of his own forehead--and quickly brought it back down.
It was bloodied.
"Inside...me!"
"He will soon finish re-orienting your body to accept your new companion. Then return. He
knew that you were slowly dying today. He must love you, Lott, to do this. Another's body is never
easy work."
"Who are you?"
"A heart that loves Chross too. But my body lies in the depths bellow," a hand showed the
sea, "while his wandered the seven Great Deserts, for years, searching. He has little need of food,
water and `the women'. Chross is a star-handler, Lott. I'm Olivia. I was his bride-to-be."
Lott's cheeks chagrined. "I don't understand..."
"Nor do I. Perhaps not Chross fully even--"
Lott's eyes turned over, only the white was there. He staggered, his arms groping. "I'm
blinded!"
"No, old nanny, I'm the blind one."
"Chross!"
"The same. Other than loss of sight, how do you feel?
"Fine, but how--"
"No time for explanations, Lott. You do feel well?
"Yes. Matter of fact, I haven't felt like this since...since--"
"--since your figs were plumbs?
Lotts face blazed cherry red.
"Don't fret, Lott. Olivia can only hear `you'. Not me. And that because you're talking out
loud. Just think your words, I'll hear them."
"You're trembling" Olivia, Lott discovered, was holding his outstretched hands. "Are you
alright?"
"I think so."
"I too was afraid when I was drowning, and terrified after, when Chross found me and I
discovered that I was still aware of everything.
"Not afraid. Eh, just, surprised." "Chross, you there?"
"Yes, Lott."
"What's happening? Why do I feel the way I do?"
"Doing some surgery...you'll have your sight back."
"Answer my question, Chross.
"I've set a trimming reaction through your DNA. About fifty years worth."
"Who is to be my symbiot?"
Olivia looked up.
Down, down through the night. Down, down into the fibers of Lott's net a deluge emptied.
Brothers and sisters, recently lost. Parents and grandparents, not long gone.
"That's...it can't be--"
"Yes, Lott?"
"She was--is young. I'm..." Lott looked down and away. Into the glossy back side of the
plate Olivia now held. He gazed at a bracing, red-haired youth, staring him back with pert sapphire
eyes.
The star in Chross's body smiled kindly, "Not any older than Earth-born Chross--would you
believe one hundred and fifteen."
"Chross, why all the secrecy? Why not tell me from the start?"
"Would you have accepted it? A tot of fifteen telling an old nanny like you that the
universe had chosen, out of the billions of years, this very interval of its history, our lifetime, to
desegregate the corporeal and the incorporeal?"
Then, "A verse, boy. Any verse."
He grimaced at the sprite tone, made a lemon-licking face, and finally guffawed.
Lott did not remember the poet, just the poem:
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace..."
Down, down drifted Ruth, undulating greetings to Lott in cottony white opal, warm
chrysoberyl, scarlet almandine, in haunting lapis lazuli, emerald olivine....
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