A to Z Lies in Space - Ephraim

It was the greatest day in Zala's history, and it was all thanks to an alien named Ulysses.  I don't know if anyone ever even came up with an adequate reason for how he ended up here in the first place, but the fact is he did, and he defeated the tyrant Reeve, and the whole world celebrated.  I bet you could hear us all the way in the citadel of Wasp.

But there was at least one unhappy person on Zala, and that was Harlow.  My brother.  To understand why requires a little explanation.

Harlow grew up as the golden boy of my family.  I don't know how much jealousy had to do with my telling Ulysses about him, when I finally had the chance, but even if it was that, I can't say I'm ashamed.  Whatever gifts he possessed, my brother let them go to his head.  And it was jealousy that consumed him.  He viewed himself as the one who should have been Zala's savior.  For all intents and purposes, if Ulysses hadn't swooped in, he very well could have been.  We'll never know.  What's not in dispute is that Reeve ran the world with an iron grip for years, and not because he was completely unopposed.  It's just, none of us were good enough to stop him.  That's just fact.

I talked to Harlow about this, many times.  Perhaps too many times.  Eventually, he stopped listening.  He shut himself off, surrounded himself with those who believed everything he said, never questioned him.  And as a result, threatened to become a new kind of tyrant, or at the very least a new threat to Zala.  He saw what Ulysses had done, and his response was hatred.  He felt as if the whole world had, in fact, betrayed him, repudiated him, turned their backs on him.  He didn't even see what Ulysses had done as a good thing, despite the fact that he had dedicated his whole life to the same goal.

So he plotted his revenge, and I couldn't let him do it.  To describe my relationship with Harlow now is more complicated than it ever was.  We started out life as close as brothers can get.  Then, I don't know what happened.  Maybe he let his early successes go to his head.  Maybe, because he was a few years older, he just got sick of hanging out with his kid brother, wanted someone more mature, to spend his time with, which is to say, I guess he began to see me as a waste of his time.  I did notice, by the way.  I carry that like a scar with me.  No doubt it affected the course of my life.  Yet I know I did the right thing, in the end, not because he hurt me, but because I didn't want him to hurt anyone else. 

Do I consider my brother evil?  No.  But evil takes many forms.  Maybe I'm not even the one to be talking to about this.  I'm too close.  I'm not objective.  I grieve for him, for the brother I lost long ago, and the one I lost again, the one who betrayed me.  And the one I betrayed.

I'm sorry, I don't want to continue talking about this.  The fact is, on the happiest day in Zala's history, there were actually two unhappy people.  My brother, and me.  I waited all day for my chance to personally congratulate the great Ulysses, after the long line of well-wishers had shaken his hand, posed for pictures, all the trivial things I couldn't even think about in that moment.  I used it as my chance to warn Ulysses.  That was the day my brother's future ended.  What else can I say?  I spent so much time in the shadow of that future, I don't know anything else.  What do I do now? 

"But this is not the story," says Kindly. 

A to Z Lies in Space - Drexel

Deep-space salvage is a thankless calling, but someone has to do it, otherwise there would be junk floating everywhere.

Every now and again, you make a startling discovery, and that's exactly what happened to me when I found the android, about halfway to Antares if you're approaching from Plague.  (I try to never make the Plague run, but sometimes it can't be avoided.)  It seemed like scrap metal, switched off and never likely to operate again, but I have my contacts, and eventually, the android came to life again.

I'm still wondering if that was a blessing or curse.

But undoubtedly, Kindly was a revelation, a piece of living history that could very well explain some of the deepest secrets of recent history, such as what exactly happened to Ulysses and how the entire Sapo Order came to an end. 

Ulysses, you'll understand, was never officially a member of the Order, more like an honorary one (although the more people you ask, the more likely you'll hear that it was the Order's honor to have him, even among the likes of Greer and Lark).  Yet the tales of his exploits are legion, impossible to escape (just ask my good buddy Crew).

Still, Kindly is unsettling, and the more time I spend with him, the less I want to hear what he has to say.  He speaks of Zuri as if...No, I don't even want to think about it.  Better to take up Vaughn on his offer, and let him take Kindly off my hands.  It'd be better for everyone involved.  I didn't ask for trouble.  I was just doing my job.  But this deal's getting worse and worse all the time...

"But this is not the story," says Kindly.

A to Z Lies in Space - Crew

Drexel says I'm the best crew he ever had, but that I've got a lot to learn.

He says that with alarming frequency.  He doesn't seem to respect me, either, says "Crew" was a stupid name to choose for myself.  I've never had the nerve to explain to him why I did.  You see, the story of Ulysses inspired me.  Until I heard of him, I'd never even known humans existed.  I understand now that this was pretty common, when the legends first started to circulate.

On my world, we have a dearth of great stories.  Yet I grew up in a home that gathered them like precious stone.  I'm not even sure my parents understood what they had, but as a child I devoured these stories greedily, reading them over and over again.  When I was young they were my best friends, and as I grew older, I didn't stop to think how peculiar this made me.  Yet I suppose I've been peculiar, because of it, all my life.

So to hear Drexel talk to me like that isn't so strange.  He's the best friend I've ever had, regardless.

As I grew, I came to realize just how few stories there really were on my world.  I'm not talking good ones and bad ones, but the sum total of them.  I don't know if it was a tradition that died too early, r was simply beyond the ken of my kind.  When I began to learn the stories of other worlds, when I stowed away on my first alien freighter, I discovered there were such things as bad stories.  I guess it was both blessing and curse that my people had grown so limited.  The stories I'd known, for the record, remain among the best I've ever known.

The thing is, the legends of Ulysses were better.  They were intoxicating.  I learned them at the same time they were spreading throughout the galaxy, soon after the events themselves had unfolded, or so they say.  I don't know, and frankly, I don't care.  I will never meet Ulysses.  I don't have that kind of luck, and as far as I know, he's dead now anyway.  The newer legends are more fanciful, more refined.  Which is to say, they have no basis in reality.

But they still led me onward.  I learned all about Earth, and began feasting on its literary bounty immediately.  I say, have you heard of the writer named Albert Drexel?  Secretly, I think that's how Drexel got his name.  But he'd never admit it.

The thing is, it wasn't just the literature that consumed me, but the culture.  I learned to speak English without the benefit of a translator patch.  Every word of it I speak drives Drexel crazy.  I particularly liked the sound of "crew," and how it pertained to the skills I acquired over the years, so I adopted it as my new name.  The old one, as they say, is mostly unpronounceable by outsiders.

Drexel is a fair captain, and it's an honor to serve alongside him on his salvage runs.  The Republic is a decent ship, besides, but I'm not taking kindly to, well, that lunatic robot Drexel took aboard a few weeks back.  These days I'm feeling uncomfortably superfluous.  But I guess time will tell?

"But this is not the story," says Kindly.

A to Z Lies in Space - Birdie

Stop me if you've hard this one: A little birdie told me.

"Birdie" is not my real name.  Birdie is what I call myself now, someone Flynn and Ophelia can still believe in, still respect.  Why?  Because a little birdie told me.  And what did the birdie say? 

"Ulysses is coming home."

I've wasted years of my life believing that.  The man I fell in love with vanished without explanation, and what do I have to show for it?  A shattered life.  That's what it amounts to, isn't it?  I believed in that man, and the sad part?  I still believe in him.  I don't even know why anymore.  Maybe it's because I really do believe he'll come home.  But what am I supposed to do in the meantime, just pretend as if he didn't ruin me, mock everything we built together...abandon me?

I try to tell myself, I should have seen it coming.  I mean, I know the man I married.  I know him better than anyone.  Right?  Or maybe, I was too close to him to know.  Maybe I spent all the time I had him with me telling myself what I wanted to hear.  Of the proverbial lovers and fighters, I knew which one he was.  Maybe I should have looked closer.  Maybe I was wrong.

But I can't give up.  I can't.  I have to hold out, hope he'll return.  Right?  I can't be selfish.  Maybe what we shared was meant to be ethereal.  Maybe I'm making a big mistake.  Maybe I made a big mistake.  Maybe I should move on.

But I can't.  It would break me.  Who can truly understand my plight?  No one.  Too many have tried.  I find their sympathy trite, misplaced, insubstantial.  Like betrayals.  I've had enough of that.  Either I'll find the strength within myself or...

Or what, I don't know.  But the real question is, if he does appear, if he does return...What next?  They never tell you that your heart's desire can ruin you.  Only in fairy tales.  And they're all tragedies, aren't they?  I never thought of them that way...

"But this is not the story," says Kindly.

A to Z Lies in Space - Alexus

I am the queen of the planet Zala, and by all rights, everything here belongs to me.  Including saviors who fall out of the sky.  No matter what else you may have heard about him, that includes the man history has decided to call Ulysses.

It is true that when he came we were in the grip of the tyrant Reeve.  Those were dark days for my people, and for me, obviously, the rightful ruler living in the times of a usurper.  I survived only because I chose to humble myself.  Rather than cower in some rat hole, I agreed to be Reeve's consort, his lover...so that when the day came, I could stab him in the back.  Which is exactly what I did.

There are those among my people who celebrate me as the Purple Crown of Lagercrantz.  Ballads have been composed and grown, as I understand it, quite beloved over the years.  Yet I relish none of it so much as the time I had with Ulysses.  He was unlike any man I had ever known before.  As an unwed sovereign I experienced pressure for years to accept a mate, and yet there was never one equal to the task until Ulysses.  He was truly magnificent.  Of course, he claimed that his heart belonged to another, a woman on a distant world he claimed to have come from, another life.  So far as I was concerned, this meant nothing.  And in truth, for a time, it slipped from the mind of Ulysses as well.

I prefer to remember it that way, and many of my subjects do as well.  There are countless stories about our relationship, some of them quite a bit fanciful, I am forced to admit.  No matter the truth of his origins, Ulysses did eventually leave Zala, to where I could not care less.  I still have the memories, and the hope that one day he will return. 

Does great beauty truly fade?  I find myself looking into the mirror and hoping that it does not, increasingly...

"But this is not the story," says Kindly.

A-to-Z 2016 Theme Reveal

This will be my fifth year participating in the A-to-Z Challenge, although second here at Sigild.

Last year I did what I called A-to-Z Lies.  This entailed me pulling random words from a dictionary and giving them nonsensical new definitions, mostly by taking them far more literally than originally intended.  (Thank goodness for the English language!)

This year my theme is A-to-Z Lies in Space, but otherwise has nothing to do with last year's efforts.  (I originally intended to include my dear friend Captain Julio.  But he's been coopted by a different story entirely.) 

So this time, the lies will have to do with a sci-fi story (somewhat...obviously) I've cobbled together from two previously unrelated things I'd previously written but are otherwise not already extant here at Sigild (so don't go looking).  They will not be lies, per say, but separately, they will be incomplete pieces of a greater puzzle, a kind of Rashomon in which different perspectives come together. 

And, conveniently enough, as of 3/18, the whole thing is already written. 

The Lost Books of Victor Frankenstein (Monster/Frankenstein) Chapter 2

The man called himself Sabin, but Henry could never bring himself to call his would-be employer by that name.  He would have chosen the much more brusque "Monster," not necessarily by choice, but because that's what everyone else called him, certainly behind his back, all Henry's fellow students in the program in the archives department at the university.  As he understood it, this was the only university to have such a program, and it was  at the insistence of Sabin, who had cultivated tenure long outside the memory of the current faculty.  As to how old Sabin was, Henry couldn't begin to guess.  His features were inscrutable, and at any rate hidden behind a thick beard and an unruly head of hair, both graying noticeably and masking wrinkled skin, but there was a youthfulness to Sabin's movements that was hard to reconcile, as if he were still in the spring of life and finding it just as fascinating as the day he was born.

Henry sat opposite Sabin at a long table strewn about with every manner of books nestled between them and the notebooks Henry juggled as he attempted to follow Sabin's by-now usual labyrinthine logic.  The enigmatic department head was both demanding and compassionate toward Henry, and had been since the day they met, ostensibly by accident but in hindsight, just as clearly, via some calculated design.  Sabin immediately began discussing a particular set of books, none of which represented now at the table, a secret library, he'd said, the lost books of Victor Frankenstein.  He'd called them that with a distinct hint of menace in his voice, or one of hate.  Henry didn't have the guts to ask why.

The more Sabin shared with him, the more he seemed to retreat from Henry, as if imparting something terrible that both liberated and diminished him.  He became increasingly remote even as they spent more time together.  He hovered over Henry in that secret library, filled with perhaps a hundred volumes, all of them hand-written, by the same hand, presumably Victor Frankenstein's, who was some obscure ancestor of Henry's, someone the family never talked about, someone who clearly had done something remarkable with his life, but whose accomplishment was subsequently, deliberately forgotten.

What was it?  The more Henry read in the books, which he had begun to think of as journals despite every indication that they had been published, retaining their hand-written quality as if in tribute, the harder he found it to find out.  Because the words changed.  He'd discovered this by accident, in an attempt one day to reference something he'd read previously, to confirm some emerging insight that had since escaped him.  Not only had the words changed, but they were no longer remotely what he'd read, as if introducing an entirely new subject.

Needless to say, he was baffled.  Sitting before Sabin, he wanted badly to ask for an explanation, but he knew one would hardly be forthcoming, not from this man, not from the Monster.  He found both his riddles to share an elusive quality that he wanted nothing more to do with, so that he would sooner resign from the program than continue, except he knew this was something of a last chance for him, that he had burnt all his bridges already, and what was worse, he felt compelled to persist.  Powerless, really, to do anything else.

He opened a book at random, and it was a random book, too, and sat staring at Sabin instead of it.  Sabin stared back with his tired eyes.  The eyes were the one element of the Monster that betrayed something real about him. 

"You must tell me something," he implored.

"The books speak for themselves," Sabin replied, meaninglessly.

"They're filled with nonsense," Henry protested.

"Nonsense has its own logic," Sabin insisted.  "Yours is to discover it.  And then it won't seem like nonsense anymore.  At any rate, we're not being productive today.  You are free to go.  Enjoy the rest of your day.  The books will be waiting for you when you're ready, as always."

Henry had no choice but to acquiesce.  He gathered the worthless books in front of him, nodded at Sabin idiotically, and left.  Where he was going he had no idea.