Mirta Ana Schultz

         "Time's a prancing ninny, the practical joker of the universe," says the marriage merchant, the Matcher, to none of us in particular. He hasn't shut up once since we left Earth bound for Phlida. "Space, on the other hand, has no sense of humor whatsoever. It just broods out there like a lonely, tongue-tied bachelor. Well, see for yourself."

         We take the cue, all six of us who are stuck for the duration in the saferoom with the loquacious Matcher and his ceaseless attempts to spark conversation. We all look toward the single viewport overhead that serves up a slice of darkness pierced by pinpoints of light. The starview is meant to keep claustrophobia at bay during the journey. The conversation is meant to keep us sane.

         Really, what choice do we have but to look up? What else can any of us do, bound as we are by our seats, bound together by the stabilizers that keep us in a single timestream, bound by the yearnings that have driven us from the home planet? Tell us to look, we look. Tell us to sleep, we sleep. Tell us to press that spot in our earlobes to quell the space sickness, and we press. Tell us to sip nutrients, we sip. Tell us to forget who we are and we just may forget, if we knew to begin with.

         But don't make me talk, Matcher.

         I'm a novice to space travel, but I have read and heard the stories of what can happen once the gravity of the homeworld ceases to bind you.  Everything loosens. Things fly free. Secrets escape. And the only ones unaffected, so I've read, are the Loners, those genetically gifted few who live in the belly of spaceships, navigating, maintaining, recording. They fly without risk, immune to the strange effects of these outer wilds—yes, utterly free of any susceptibility to space madness—and they are themselves synchronized to the normal time flow by the complex mechanism implanted in their bodies. The operation, they say, is irrevocable.

         I find it easy to believe such tales of space and spacemen.

         This is who I am: a woman given to long silences and books. It is not what I want to be.  It seems insufficient. My parents dubbed me melancholic and introverted when very young, and later, anti-social. I couldn't find my niche on Earth, moving from job to job, always feeling half-alive and fully uncomfortable. So, I am in search of a place where I can fit in, a place that will drag me out of my silences against my will. I want to be normal. I want to stop being afraid of parties and crowds and the questions strangers are prone to ask, expecting answers.

         I don't let myself take the Matcher's bait that seeks to lure me into conversation. I fear speech, because I'm not sure what will come out if I do open my mouth.

         The lights gleaming from space seem to be a thousand burning periods waiting to take their place at the end of a thousand sentences that I have not yet spoken.

         What are they waiting for me to say? Do I have anything worth saying?

         I swallow, tasting fear and shame, but my mouth fills up again, and I can say nothing.

         "I don't see anything brooding out there," the young monk says, flipping back the hood of his gray robe to expose an unlined forehead, smooth cheeks, and the beginnings of a blond beard. He peers at the rectangle of universe that is our only sky until we get to Phlida. "I see nothing more than the fingerprints of God."

         Call me cynical, but I think he picked that up from some spacer's brochure. (I read all of them.) If he really spied divine imprints out there, he'd rip off the seat bindings and fall to the floor in awe, in terror, to adore, something.

         I don't see God's fingerprints. I see the bits of punctuation He left behind after He'd spoken everything into existence.

         Will I be able to do my part to fill the quiet places?

         My parents were—are—missionarians. I was nursed on breast milk dense with the taste of my mother's faith. Religion saturates my double-helix. I have no choice but to believe.  They are verbal people, my parents, and also my grandparents—expressive, sometimes eloquent. By heritage, I should be enthralled with speech. I should be glib.  My voice, however, always sounds wrong to my ears.

         I'm searching for my voice out here, and when I find it, I'll practice it on world after world until I find a home for all of me, voice and body and heart and soul.

         A coo slips out of the perfectly groomed lips of the daughter of the Interplanetary Minister of the Arts, and she says, "The stars are jewels scattered on black velvet, beautiful diamonds and opals and pearls." The delicate array of gems that circle her throat glitters in agreement. "Beauty. I'm all about beauty. I came out here to make the universe more beautiful."

         "I don't see anything out there that I haven't seen in any number of recent box office whiz-bangers, half of which I had a hand in," says the holoflick producer. "We can do the galaxy better than God himself, these days. Superimaging techniques, you know. Brighter brights, deeper darks, enhanced silencers. Not that I believe in a literal God, mind you. I'm speaking purely from a metaphorical standpoint. I'm a humanist. I believe in people, not deities. People are my god. Images are my altar."

         The producer notices the menacing expression on the missionarian's face and is reminded that this is a holy ship—the newest cruiser of the League of Native Faiths.  He says, quickly, "Not that I don't have the greatest respect for people of faith."

         "What?" cries the Matcher. "None of you see the surliness out there? The cold heart of nothing? Its depressed muteness? It's an unmarried and unfriendly blackness."

         "Your brooding bachelor?" the producer says.

         "That's right. The melancholic traits of space are as evident as the sanguine characteristics of time? Time is more interesting, I'll give you that. It skips about, it jumps backwards and springs forward, it slows, it speeds up. It positively capers! If we weren't all gathered into and tethered to this tiny stabilized zone—oh, my, the things that might happen! I might grow old as Methuselah right before your eyes while this young lady here"—he gestures with some gallant flair at the minister's daughter—"would keep her own perfect bloom of youth. And maybe, just maybe, our fine representative of the Offworld Missions Board might revert to a blessed, innocent state of rosy-cheeked childhood."

         The missionarian looks horrified at the possibility. "We are what we are, Matcher. I do not believe God would let us turn backwards when there is so much ahead of us to do, so many frontier worlds to convert. He has made me for my purpose. I do not revert to anything, thank you very much."

         "A fine sentiment passionately expressed, madam," the Matcher concedes.

         "Perhaps I might devolve into an aphid," the exobotanist suggests with more than a smidgen of irritation.

         I assume he's been having weighty thoughts about the pestilential algae on Cordana, Phlida's sisterworld. Or perhaps he occupies himself pondering the rumors of sentient fungi in the swamplands of Lirus, which is one solar system away from our destination. His sour face suggests his thoughts are more likely on plague-related matters.

         Maybe he regrets boarding a flight sponsored by the League of Native Faiths, an organization generously supported by the minister whose very pretty daughter sits to my right.  An affordable fare always has some kind of hidden cost. For the exobotanist, I guess, it's putting up with us true believers all the way to Phlida.

         I figure the Matcher's earned a discount on his fare because of his gregariousness. All flights must have one designated talker per saferoom. The Matcher's our talker, a babbling sun that we can orbit mentally, anchoring ourselves to him so that we don't go whirling off into space madness.

         What cost have I yet to pay for this trip?

         I focus on our burly, middle-aged, round-faced sun.

         "An aphid?" the Matcher says to the exobotanist. "That would liven up your examination of plant life, now, wouldn't it? You'd never want for a snack while you worked." He laughs raucously, while the producer smirks, and the missionarian faintly smiles.

         "I'm getting a headache," the exobotanist announces. He flips down his privacy hood, obscuring the upper half of his body.

         "Devolve. Evolve. Nonsense, all of it," says the missionarian. "We are what we are. Always have been."

         "But not always will be, eh, madam?" the Matcher asks.

         "Well, one would hope not. Refinement of character is to be desired. But the person is who they are, even after the fire that purifies."

         The monk hums, then says, "Contemplation leads to transformation. The goal is to stop being so much ourselves and become much more of what the Ultimate One is."

         "Your destination is the Phlidian Cloister, young man?" the Matcher asks.

         "Yes. I seek to be other than who I am. I seek to become lost in the One."

         "Well, that's hardly a position I can champion," the missionarian says. "I'm about finding, not losing."

         "It's all the same. When you lose, you find. When you find, you lose."

         "That doesn't make sense to me," says the minister's daughter.

         "Should have been an actor," the holoflick producer tells the monk. "No better opportunity to try out different selves. I can hook you up if you ever get tired of contemplating stuff. You've got good bones and great hair. What you left of it on your head, anyway."

         "Contemplation is my life," says the monk, his face placid. "And I wish to die in a state of perfect meditation, lost to myself, found by God.  May God's hand erase me and draw His own face over mine."

         "What a waste," says the minister's daughter. "I don't want to sit and think. I absolutely do not want to be erased." Her shudder is delicate, charming even. "I want to meet important people and host great events and wear bright clothes and dance with handsome diplomats and artists. I want to make everything around me beautiful. That's what I was born to do. It's what my mother was born to do. She's my hero." I watch a shadow fall across her bright eyes. "I wish my friends could have been here with me on this trip. I hate being alone."

         I almost smile at that, except she sounds so sad. Our seats, these semi-reclining nests that form-fit us for maximum comfort and protection, are arranged in a tight circle. If I reach out my hand, I can touch her girlish chin.

         Alone? Hardly.

         A sensation very much like a jump, a quick spasm, catches me inside. Some idea startles awake, and I have to reconsider my judgment of the minister's daughter. Yes, I do understand. I've always understood, haven't I, about feeling alone, alone on a whole planet or in a small room on a large ship with strangers. They don't frighten me as much as they do the minister's daughter, the solitary moments. I want them to bother me, but they don't. Perhaps I have more in common with the monk.

         "Can't travel with family or friends, my girl," the Matcher says to the pretty young woman. "Time isn't the only untrustworthy companion on hypertravel. Emotional bonds get shuffled briskly and cut decisively out here. This broody fellow called Space likes a bit of chaos when he plays with humans."

         "I know about that," says the minister's daughter. "My education is not lacking, sir."

         The Matcher goes on, undeterred. "This is why the psychological guild won't let us exchange our true names or speak the names of our loved ones. That much might set off the chain of emotional associations that would crack the heart, leak out the innards and serve them up scrambled. We must take precautions against losing ourselves out here."

         "I choose not to contemplate that image of scrambled innards," the monk says, shutting his eyes.

         "I feel as if I were one big nothing without my beautiful friends," the minister's daughter confesses, and tears well up.  She turns her face into her shoulder, hiding from us as best she can without resorting to the privacy hood's claustrophobic shielding.

         I realize what is happening.  The force that I've heard of, the one that loosens tongues, has come upon us. I feel the change in the air, not in the air around me, but the air inside me.

         My companions fall silent for a moment, even the Matcher.  I have kept silence all along, and it is easy to remain mute.

         They feel what I feel, I know it—the pull, the prying.

         "Yes, well, we all manage much better with good friends around us," the Matcher says, unsteadily. "We need to have people around us, do we not, to feel fully oursevles?"

         "I don't," said the monk. "People only distract me. I prefer to be alone. Completely alone with the One.  Even the cloister at Phlida will be too crowded to suit me. God made humanity too fertile."

         "Well, that's a fine thing for a man of God to say," the missionarian says, then adds a tsk-tsk.

         "I agree with you, Matcher. Phlida couldn't be crowded enough to suit me," says the producer. "No such thing as too large an audience or too big a profit. What am I without ticket buyers? Nothing."

         The producer clears his throat and glances around uneasily.

         "I agree as well," said the missionarian. "The bigger the field, the more bountiful the harvest.  My trip would be wasted if I couldn't get a great many converts. I like nothing better than filling names into the Registry of New Believers. Every time I fill in a line that is blank, I fill up something inside of myself that's empty."

         The missionarian flattens a hand against her chest, eyes widening.

         The exobotanist flings back his privacy hood and I see the pain in his eyes. "I want my name in the Registry of Breakthroughs. I want to be remembered as a great discoverer. I don't want to end up in a dusty classroom. Why does everyone insist I teach. I'm not a teacher! I'm a great scientist. I mean, I want to be... a... great..."

         The exobotanist scratches his face.

         I say nothing. I listen.

         The hyper-engine shushes the whole ship. Hush. Hush. Don't speak. Hush. Hush. Quiet. I am the only one paying attention to the ship. Or perhaps it is speaking only to me.

         Space has reached through metal and glass and torn off our masks. I wish I could see myself. What do I look like unmasked?

         Or perhaps I am once again forgotten, invisible. Perhaps space passes me over, as so many humans have.

         I survey the unmasked faces. The monk who entered the saferoom with an inscrutable countenance reveals his annoyance at having to sit so close to us. I see that he hates us, and he didn't know he had this darkness inside him. The elegant and poised minister's daughter that I watched board the ship is now a cowering clump of insecurity held together by a top-of-the-line travel suit, a string of gems, and little else.  She's afraid of us. It doesn't matter that her father is one of the most powerful men in the galaxy or that she's armed with an abundance of beauty and affluence. She feels helpless. The missionarian and the producer mirror each other's need for greater and greater validation through greater and greater numbers of followers and supporters, and they begin to understand that they will never be satisfied. The exobotanist's assurance in his own intellect deflates into an arrogant man's terror at being ignored and forgotten, and worst of all, ordinary.

         I study the Matcher. He holds his hands over his mouth—the professional chatterbox afraid to speak.

         Space is stronger than he is. Or the God whose spirit moves in the void.

         The Matcher drops his hands and stares at me. "I've matched hundreds of colonists to hundreds of homeworlders. I've attended too many weddings to remember them all. I do this work because I need to believe that a woman can love a man. I need to see the proof of it every month, every week. I don't believe my mother loved my father. I do not believe she loved me. And I doubt my own wife's heart. But I need to believe this thing exists between men and women."

         His eyes beg me to make him stop, to say the single word that will shut him down, but I press my lips together. I have no idea what space will drag out of me or, worse, will not, so I keep my barrier. And I have no holy word to silence him.

         The stars above me are periods, are half exclamation points, are colons, are half of semi-colons, and they are waiting for me in the darkness above.

         The Matcher is babbling on about love and women and doubt and fear in between gasps of surprise at his own revelations.

         New sounds arise:  Quiet sobbing from the minister's daughter who's weeping for her distant friends and her lost composure. A repetition of gentle there-theres from the missionarian whose voice keeps breaking as she comforts the girl.  The deep inhalations and exhalations of the monk as he slips away from us into the nothingness he loves more than people. The privacy hood sliding down again over the exobotanist who can't face his own truth. The producer coughing and coughing as if choking on words he doesn't want to dredge up.

         I pity them. I envy them. They have spoken with their true voices. They are recipients of a strange and painful blessing, but it is a blessing. They know what drives them and what they fear and who they are.

         I know nothing more than what I knew when I stepped on board.

         "You haven't said anything the whole trip," the Matcher says to me, his face red. "That's not normal. We're supposed to talk. All of us. You'll go insane if you don't."

         His judgment hangs over my head. Gazes turn toward me, some suspicious, some expectant. The exobotanist keeps to his hiding place. I sense the stillness of a trapped animal under his hood, and I know his ears remain alert to any sound that signals a way out of truth and back to ignorance.

         I have the urge to say, "I'm sorry. I don't know how not to be silent. I hate being this way. I want what you have. I want to know."

         "Why are you here?" the Matcher asks. "Why are you going to Phlida? Why don't you say something?"

         I don't answer.

         The Matcher repeats his questions. And then he asks one more.

         "Who are you?"

         Who am I?

         I think I may scream.

         I've been waiting all my life to know that, to hear the answer in dreams or to see the stars form words that solve the mystery of my self. I came to this ship, into this controlled timestream, out here to this irresistible wilderness, hoping to feel my soul vibrate and shatter into shining specks of light that would guide me to where I should go and who I should be, and now, now, I feel something happening at last. I look up and the wild spaces are singing to me, telling me to give in, and I do until... I am breaking... and scattering... and coming together again into this shape that I'm forced to acknowledge as my own.

         And it's the same shape I had before. Only I see it clearly now as my own, and I claim it.

         This is who I am: I was made to listen and to observe and to analyze. I was created for silence and solitude. I was formed not for land or sea or blue sky, but for this black and starry realm, the bleakest in God's design, and the one closest to His face. My place is here, on ships where I can hear the engines singing, "Hush."  I can do this without effort. I can be still and I can be quiet and unafraid.

         I was made for space.

         I have found my true voice and it is one that must dwell in silence.  I will listen to the engine's lullaby and the secrets God whispered to the deep for those of us who are made of more than Earth dust, but also of dark matter and starfire.

         The Matcher asks me again, desperately, his face so red that I imagine a giant sun ready to burst and consume this solar system. "Will you say something?"

         "Yes, I will speak now, but only to say that I have no need to speak."

         And I say no more.

         Only one star rushes to punctuate my revelation, leaving all the others in place to mark the wide spaces of my happy silence.

 

 

Copyright 2006, Mirta Ana Schultz

Mirta Ana Schultz is a married, Cuban-American, Southern Baptist, South Florida resident. She holds two bachelor degrees, one in English, one in Health Information Management. She's 45 and has a large library full of wonderful books. Mirta is writing a Christian apocalyptic urban fantasy with the working title of AGE'S END: CHILDREN OF SORROWS. She belongs to RWA and ACFW, and fiddles occasionally on her two blogs.

 

 

Cover: "Double-Edged Sword"

Copyright 2006, Double-Edged Publishing, Inc.

"Double-Edged Sword" is an original illustration created for The Sword Review by staff member, Bill Snodgrass.