Part I . . . Notes, References, and Shoutouts (Prologue, Chapters 1-3)
(4MiM Supplement #1)
Before Joanni boards the ISS Eridanus bound for Oreana, a few notes, references, and shoutouts:
The title of this work, Four Months in May, is drawn from the confined feeling one might experience on a long space voyage, but also the similar feeling experienced by many during the recent pandemic lockdown: each day seemed a week long; each week stretched on for a month. Sometime in the early spring of 2020, after people began realizing that isolation from the outside world was going to last longer than their initial assumptions, I remember reading a conscientious but melancholy tweet opining that May had already been ‘four months long’.
Prologue. Into the Hands of a Girl
Part string instrument, part Rube Goldberg machine . . .
“A Rube Goldberg machine, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction–type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and (impractically) overly complicated way. “(Wikipedia)
Chapter 1. You Should Have Wished Me Luck
A chapter title taken from an episode of Star Trek TOS (the original series), The Immunity Syndrome. Spock and Dr. McCoy both volunteer for a dangerous mission: venturing out alone in a shuttlecraft to probe a giant amoeba-like virus that’s threatening the Enterprise. When Spock is chosen as best suited for the task by Captain Kirk, McCoy, bitter toward but also worried about his friend, refuses to wish him luck. Once inside the organism, his life in danger and losing radio contact, Spock tells McCoy ‘you should have wished me luck.’ In this chapter, it is Mrs. Neiswender who should have wished her husband luck. For the Enterprise crew, the mission ends on a happy note. For the Neiswender family, it does not.
. . . after finally securing the same type of tea and a reasonable approximation of Aunt Edna’s cake, he sat down at his kitchen table with the hope of a Proustian revival of ancient memories.
Quote from: Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time) by Marcel Proust. 1913-1927.
. . . but the ISS Hyperion returned to its base with no answers.
ISS stands for Intergalactic Spaceship. ISEA does not assign numbers to its spacecraft. The name Hyperion—in this instance—is taken from a moon of Saturn.
Chapter 2. We’ve Been Trying to Reach You
“Let us hold fast to mystery and persist in something exceptional, however inexplicable it might be to our peers and superiors.”
Quote from American novelist, Flannery O’Connor.
. . . unfortunately at the level of twentieth century translation programs.
As an example, the AltaVista Babel Fish online translation program (not to be confused with Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy babel fish) was the oldest free online language translator, and one basically got what one paid for.
If she sat and stared into the blackness for too long, a state of hiraeth would come onto her . . .
Hiraeth is a Welsh word for a profound longing for something, especially one’s homeland, or something long lost. For a deeper understanding of the term, see: “Dreaming in Welsh,” by Pamela Petro in The Paris Review, September 2012.
Samples from the empty mounting on the clesig, for example, were run through an atomic absorption spectrophotometer . . .
An atomic absorption spectrophotometer measures the concentration of elements in materials.
. . . and the renowned galaxyship, ISS Eridanus, was assigned to escort the girl and her harp . . .
Named after the constellation, Eridanus, which is said to represent a river.
Top image: “ . . .galaxy known as NGC 1487, lying about 30 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Eridanus.” Source: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt. Text credit: European Space Agency. Edited by J. Weigley