Where I Can Fly
Joanni had a decision to make. It had essentially already been made for her, but she had to come to terms with it in her own mind. Her mind was a large canvas, a place where things were contemplated and where things worked out for her. In her mind, she was beautiful and she loved fully, without reservation; in her mind people loved her and paid attention to her; in her mind she could fly. Be anywhere, be anything. In her mind, she constructed intricate models of the people and the world around her, determined how they and it operated. She was usually quite accurate, for she had honed her observational and analytical skills; if anyone had asked her to name her greatest talent, if truthful, she would have answered ‘empathetic observation’. However, she generally kept her mental findings to herself.
For all this inward expansiveness, she had, in recent years, confined herself physically to small spaces, flying with Jackie’s band from here to there aboard cramped transport vessels, a lifestyle of ‘temporary living’ in starbase hotels. It wore her out. She often succumbed to staring out her hotel window for long periods of time, thinking back to summer nights on Earth, to summers with Lillian, when she and her sister were sent to summer camp and lived outdoors. There was controversy about this at the time, as most populated areas were enclosed by then, and running around in the wild picking up irrelevant knowledge and uncouth habits was broadly frowned upon. Besides, human occupation was bad for the remaining environment. The summer camps were closed not too many years after that.
If she sat and stared out into the void for too long, a state of hiraeth would come onto her, a desire for places that no longer existed, or perhaps were merely mundane landscapes romanticized in her mind. Either way, she could not go back. The memories of her past haunts filled her with a rising longing: the air used to smell of flowers and road tar and organic decay; there were beings in the air—insects, they called them—which would buzz around your head, sometimes landing on you, sometimes biting you; they could make you sick. Water—in the form of dew or mist—would come out of the air and settle on your skin. Things were warm, green, rough and muddy, and non-machine-generated. She should just return home, she kept telling herself, but . . . not yet. Her father’s love of exploration, the expectation of encountering something thrilling, of bursting alive into the unknown, thrived within her as well, countering these bouts of homesickness. So her body stayed in continual orbit, while her mind continued its protest.
And now she was being asked to enclose herself in that tin can world, albeit on a state-of-the-art constellation-class galaxyship, for a very long time (four to six months, at least), asked to journey through a space even more vast than that of her mind, to a world that was unknown and mysterious, and she was sure, beautiful.
After her briefing by the Department of Exploratory Diplomacy, Joanni felt she understood the reasons ISEA would go to such lengths—to so far away a galaxy—to return the clesig to the Oreanians, but she only understood part of the motivation. Radio wave as well as laser light communication between Earth and Oreana had not just been cultural in nature, but had ramped up to scientific as well, although ISEA was more aggressive in learning about Oreana than the Oreanians were about them. Samples from the empty mounting on the clesig, for example, were run through an atomic absorption spectrophotometer and sent on to Oreana for confirmation. And what ISEA learned about the mineral properties of this faraway planet greatly increased their enthusiasm for establishing diplomatic relations. The mission was termed Operation Tarrash, (“tarrash” being an approximation of the Oreanian concept of return) and the renowned galaxyship, ISS Eridanus, was assigned to escort the girl and her harp, picking up officials and ambassadors at various installations and planets along the way to form an impressive diplomatic delegation and head out toward Oreana. Once arrived there, Joanni would perform on the clesig for the Oreanians before handing over the missing piece, that eighth jewel of the Eight of the Origins, receiving a standard clesig as a thank you. In return, the Oreanian ruling governing body would sign an exclusive mining rights and export treaty with their new alien allies. The mission would last approximately six months and was more involved than all but a few thought. The treaty was the key goal of the mission. Joanni and the clesig were along for the ride, mostly as cover, or, as the more unkind might say, as bait.
Image: Flyby summer nights. Source: Untitled (bleed-through of previous page, left page); Untitled (winged insect with faint color transfer, right page). Otto Piene. Sketchbook, Lake Placid: Snow Birds, Minotaurs, 1978. Harvard Art Museums collections online, https://hvrd.art/o/373214.