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Madison Scott-Clary
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<h1 id="codrin-balancastor-2325">Codrin Bălan#Castor — 2325</h1>
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<p>It was difficult for Codrin Bălan to reengage with the project at hand after what seemed to be an ever-mounting pile of oddities.</p>
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<p>It was not simply that ey had been finding piece after piece of new-to-em information about those that ey loved — though it was also that — nor was it that eir entire clade seemed to be entangled far deeper into something going further back than expected — though it was that as well — but that, by virtual of the twin launches and the L<sub>5</sub> system remaining back around Earth, ey was limited to reading much of this over plain text. Text that had flowed over sheets of paper in a comfortable font, bound itself up in books, and begged to be pored over, stood itself before em and said, “Read me, understand me.” It all added one layer of remove that, despite eir attraction to the written word and fine paper and comfortable fonts and nice books, left em feeling caught up in some dreamlike state of almost-understanding.</p>
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<p>It was not simply that ey had been finding piece after piece of new-to-em information about those that ey loved — though it was also that — nor was it that eir entire clade seemed to be entangled far deeper into something going further back than expected — though it was that as well — but that, by virtue of the twin launches and the L<sub>5</sub> system remaining back around Earth, ey was limited to reading much of this over plain text. Text that had flowed over sheets of paper in a comfortable font, bound itself up in books, and begged to be pored over, stood itself before em and said, “Read me, understand me.” It all added one layer of remove that, despite eir attraction to the written word and fine paper and comfortable fonts and nice books, left em feeling caught up in some dreamlike state of almost-understanding.</p>
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<p>As an example, there was this seemingly universal agreement among the Odists that no one of them should be the one to tell the entirety of the tale, and each for their own reasons. There seemed to be shame bound up in all of them, in some way, but beyond that, both instances of Dear had diverged to the point where the foxes were starting to come up with their own explanations for not providing that info to their respective Codrins Bălan.</p>
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<p>Why was it, for instance, that Codrin#Pollux had decided to simply interview Dear, where ey had not? And what was ey, Codrin#Castor, to do with the information that Dear had shared with eir cocladist? Hell, was cocladist even the right word, at this point? That seemed to imply a down-tree instance that one could still access.</p>
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<p><em>I want to die,</em> the fox had said. How had Codrin#Pollux even begun to deal with that bit of information? When ey read those words, in eir comfortable font on eir fine paper in eir nice books, ey had cried. Ey had cried much as it sounded Codrin#Pollux had.</p>
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<p>Ey had cried and closed the book and paced eir way out into the prairie outside the house, where ey had cried some more. Ey had not walked any new paths that day, simply walked to the outermost cairn that ey could find, sat down next to it, and watered the thirsty grass with a grief ey could not name.</p>
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<p>And that ey could not name it only added to that unnerving sense of remove. It wasn’t just sadness or grief. It wasn’t the type of feeling that one might experience at the actual loss of a loved one. It wasn’t the type of feeling that one experienced on learning that a loved one bore within its heart thoughts of suicide. Neither of those were true. Ey knew that, had ey been the one to conduct the interview, ey would have had much the same reaction as the other Codrin had (ey suspected, for all ey had was the transcript, incomplete as it was), but instead, ey had a cottony shield of time and distance that meant that ey could process it at eir own pace. Ey could go sit out in the prairie and cry and then come to an understanding of Dear’s desire that ey couldn’t have any hope of doing, were the fox sitting before em.</p>
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<p>And that ey could not name it only added to that unnerving sense of remove. It wasn’t just sadness or grief. It wasn’t the type of feeling that one might experience at the actual loss of a loved one. It wasn’t the type of feeling that one experienced on learning that a loved one bore within its heart thoughts of suicide. Neither of those were true. Ey knew that, had ey been the one to conduct the interview, ey would have had much the same reaction as the other Codrin had (ey suspected, for all ey had was the transcript, incomplete as it was). But instead, ey had a cottony shield of time and distance that meant that ey could process it at eir own pace. Ey could go sit out in the prairie and cry and then come to an understanding of Dear’s desire that ey couldn’t have any hope of doing, were the fox sitting before em.</p>
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<p>With this distance, both from the interview and from Dear itself, ey could remember its words: <em>“I just think we need death, or something like it, as part of the system. Death. Fear of death. Needs and reasons to survive in the face of an inevitable end. We need a way for an individual to end. We need a way to release those memories.”</em> Ey could remember those words and understand the sudden too-full feeling of discomfort that had come with them. Immortality came with its own costs, and it was not simply that one might grow bored, but that one might go mad.</p>
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<p>But ey hadn’t interviewed Dear, had ey? Codrin#Pollux had. Codrin#Pollux had that trauma in a way that ey did not.</p>
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<p>And Ioan! The wondrous hints that eir down-tree fork had been receiving! That their dream worlds worked in far subtler ways than imagined. That May Then My Name had told em, “I am worried that you will be unhappy with me.”</p>
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<p>So much bound up in that statement. By virtue of having lived with Dear and its partner for more than two decades, by having fallen into a less-eccentric orbit around the fox, accepted mounting feelings of love, and having found emself in a relationship with an Odist, ey could read perhaps more clearly than Ioan the signs that ey was well on the path to doing the same. The Odists loved hard and they loved deep and they loved fast, and it was hard not to become intoxicated beneath all that love. <em>She seems to have wormed her way into my life and made herself comfortable, all while making it feel like it was my idea,</em> Ioan had written in a clade-eyes-only message. <em>She says that it’s her role to feel, though, and I believe her in this.</em></p>
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<p>So much bound up in that statement. By virtue of having lived with Dear and its partner for more than two decades, by having fallen into a steadily less-eccentric orbit around the fox, accepted mounting feelings of love, and having found emself in a relationship with an Odist, ey could read perhaps more clearly than Ioan the signs that ey was well on the path to doing the same. The Odists loved hard and they loved deep and they loved fast, and it was hard not to become intoxicated beneath all that love. <em>She seems to have wormed her way into my life and made herself comfortable, all while making it feel like it was my idea,</em> Ioan had written in a clade-eyes-only message. <em>She says that it’s her role to feel, though, and I believe her in this.</em></p>
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<p>Ah, but Ioan, it is much more complex than that. With an Odist, it is always much more complex.</p>
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<p>And that, of course, was not even the main implication of the message. “I am worried that you will be unhappy”, even without the “with me” at the end suggested more of that guilt, shame, or distaste for the past that ey had picked up from Dear. From <em>both</em> Dears.</p>
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<p>Eir Dear: <em>I am…ashamed. Many of the first lines…well, no. I will not elaborate now.</em></p>
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<p>The Dear on Pollux: <em>You could interview any one of us about the entirety of our story, even me, and we would tell you, but we would also resent you for that.</em></p>
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<p>Eir Dear had said, <em>“You will doubtless tease it out of me, bit by bit, you tenacious fuck.”</em> But given what both May Then My Name and Dear#Pollux had said, ey no longer wished to try.</p>
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<p>And so here ey was, sitting in a dark field, looking up at the stars. Very dark. Well and truly dark, beyond almost anything Ioan had experienced before, even after uploading. There was a purity to that blackness, just as there was a purity to the red-colored flashlight that Tycho Brahe (not his real name, but he had requested the pseudonym) used to guide them both to the top of a — yes, pure — grassy hill.</p>
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<p>And so here ey was, sitting in a dark field, looking up at the stars. Very dark. Well and truly dark, beyond almost anything Ioan had experienced before, even after uploading. There was a purity to that blackness, just as there was a purity to the red-filtered flashlight that Tycho Brahe (not his real name, but he had requested the pseudonym) used to guide them both to the top of a — yes, pure — grassy hill.</p>
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<p>“I come out here on nights when I am depressed,” the old man had grumbled. “And that has been most nights, of late.”</p>
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<p>“It’s a beautiful place.”</p>
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<p>“Isn’t it? It reminds me of a trip to the west coast that I took long, long before I uploaded. This grassy hill in the middle of a wide ring of firs. You can’t see it, but the grass is not actually grass, but a sort of moss. When it’s freshly dried out after a rain, it’s delightfully soft, isn’t it?”</p>
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<p>There was a quiet lie in that admission, but Ioan let it slip by. “Can you tell me some more about what I’m seeing?”</p>
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<p>“Of course, Mx. Bălan,” Brahe said, audibly brightening.</p>
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<p>He pointed first to the brightest star, low on the horizon. “There, see? That is the sun. The launch arms let us go at such a point that we are traveling along the ecliptic, in order to use some of the existing orbital velocity we were already on. We have a disadvantage from Pollux, as we were released counter to that orbit.”</p>
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<p>He pointed at another star, one that seemed to be creeping slowly across the field of view, the source of that parallax sliding. “That is Jupiter, there. You can see it moving only by virtue of the fact that we used it as a slingshot several days into the journey. We are millions of kilometers away from it by now, but it is still one of the things that we are closest to. That is how you know that we are on Castor. Pollux will be using Saturn as a slingshot planet, a fortuitous trade-off given the orbital advantage I mentioned. There was a touch of maneuvering after launch to get the trajectories to work out.”</p>
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<p>He pointed at another star, one that almost seemed to be creeping slowly across the field of view, the source of that parallax sliding. “That is Jupiter, there. You can see it moving only by virtue of the fact that we used it as a slingshot several days into the journey. We are millions of kilometers away from it by now, but it is still one of the things that we are closest to. That is how you know that we are on Castor. Pollux will be using Saturn as a slingshot planet, a fortuitous trade-off given the orbital advantage I mentioned. There was a touch of maneuvering after launch to get the trajectories to work out.”</p>
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<p>He pointed over to the fir trees opposite where the star that was the sun shone. “Beyond those trees — really, the reason that they exist — is the solar sail, which blocks the lens. It was only recently deployed, you know. We could have deployed it on our way to Jupiter, but, as you know, we have all the time in the world, and there was no sense in risking it during the gravity assist.”</p>
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<p>He pointed at something else, and it took Codrin a moment to discern in the dark that he was pointing at himself. “And here I am, some nobody, some shithead who loved everything about this idea, but who can only view it in a very approximate way, like this.”</p>
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<p>“You don’t seem particularly happy about your situation.”</p>
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<p>Brahe’s laugh was bitter. “Of course I’m not happy. I mean…I <em>am</em> happy, but that happiness is tempered by the whims of reality more than I had expected.”</p>
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<p>“What would your dream experience be?” Codrin asked, enjoying a secret smile at the phrase couched within the ultimate dream experience that was the System.</p>
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<p>“To see it all,” he said, and ey noticed that the bitter edge was slowly leaving his voice. “I have all the perisystem processing that I can ask for to give me a simulacrum like this. You must know that this naked-eye astronomy is all but useless in the grand scheme of things, other than to give us a sense of where we came from and where we might be going in a way that allows us to tell ourselves a coherent study. The rest of astronomy is all math.”</p>
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<p>“To see it all,” he said, and ey noticed that the bitter edge was slowly leaving his voice. “I have all the perisystem processing that I can ask for to give me a simulacrum like this. You must know that this naked-eye astronomy is all but useless in the grand scheme of things, other than to give us a sense of where we came from and where we might be going in a way that allows us to tell ourselves a coherent story. The rest of astronomy is all math.”</p>
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<p>“I suppose that’s why this place feels so much more romantic to me,” Codrin mused. “I’m a storyteller, not an astronomer. Still, I imagine that that need for stories runs deep, and I can see the allure to possibly being able to actually look out a window at stars whizzing by.”</p>
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<p>“Yes.” Brahe sighed, then lay down on his back, with his arms crossed behind his head. “Yes, to see it all.”</p>
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<p>There were a few minutes of silence as astronomer and historian looked out into the night sky, there in the simulated pacific northwest, there on the simulated moss surrounded by the simulated trees while simulated stars shone still above them.</p>
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<p>Ey did so, and when Brahe instructed em to open them again, the sudden change in the sky was, indeed, a little dizzy-making. The entire field of stars had changed, and where there had been warped but familiar constellations, there was now a deeper blackness, brighter stars, and far more of them. Far, far more. “What is this?”</p>
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<p>“A different view. A more powerful telescope looking at a patch of sky that we’ve never had a chance to see from this angle. One compounded from hours of exposure. I have no idea how exact it is, though, as it is all interpreted through the perisystem infrastructure, but it is still doing a slow sweep of the sky at a high enough magnification that the star field is completely different from what we’re used to.”</p>
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<p>“I wouldn’t have thought thought that that would’ve had such an impact on me,” ey murmured. “I felt like I was falling for a moment.”</p>
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<p>Brahe sighed. “I did, too, the first time, and even now I’m not sure why. I think it is the mix of contexts. Here we are, looking out to space from the westernmost edge of the Western Fed, and yet all of the stars are different, and they progress in such strange ways as the telescope searches on its automatic pattern.”</p>
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<p>Brahe sighed. “I did, too, the first time, and even now I’m not sure why. I think it is the mix of contexts. Here we are, looking out to space from the westernmost edge of the Western Fed, and yet all of the stars are different. They progress in such strange ways as the telescope searches on its automatic pattern.”</p>
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<p>“It’s uncanny.”</p>
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<p>“A good word, yes. It’s like looking out on an alien sky, but even that misses the strangeness of so many stars. An alien sky, but as seen from the context of Earth. Firs, moss, a light breeze, dampness soaking into your trousers, and an alien sky. Did you have the chance to visit the L<sub>5</sub> station before you uploaded?”</p>
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<p>“Goodness, no.” Ey laughed. “We were too poor for that.”</p>
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<p>Eventually, even Codrin lay back in the grass. Ey knew not for how long. Lay there with Tycho Brahe in all his sadness and happiness and wisdom and romanticism. Lay there, and looked up at the stars.</p>
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</article>
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<footer>
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<p>Page generated on 2021-10-13</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2021-10-17</p>
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