So what if I am Brenton Clay Randolph? Then what? I’ll tell you one thing: My family’s been wealthy since Earth’s migration to the planet Haven. And my grandparent’s have controlled a majority of that wealth very closely and to their exacting pleasures. Eventually, their decisions started to slip with respect to Randolph Oceanic. They refused me the durable power of attorney, clung to what was no longer theirs. I did the necessary thing.
Their estate manager, Roger, said things about me: Emotional. Unfit.
He doesn’t realize, after four centuries, Alpha Centauri’s become a complicated place. A little over a six million colonists live on Haven now and most of them are idiots, believing the Alpha Sun is dark orange and the Beta Sun is red. They’ve never flown through the indigo sky to see the white brilliance of our stars. The only observatory has been closed three years--our leading scientists marginalized. Everyone’s New Age. Spiritual, orthodox, zealots--all those types. But I deal with it. I drink Scotch, chase tall women, tour the planets.
After I’d done it, I needed to stop thinking about things for a while. Roger followed me to the cruiser, wanting to have “our talk,” but he arrived too late, nearing the launch clearing as I attained altitude, just in time, I suppose, to hear the loud screech and watch me disappear in a ripple of indigo sky.
I didn’t care what he believed. Elderly people, like my grandparents, died from Haven’s rice pathogens all the time.
#
Stinging wounds in my neck awoke me and I found myself lying in my bed with sweat soaking my clothes.
I remember being out there, alone in space, when a ship appeared out of the blackness. It was dim and blurry and I didn’t recognize its shape--strange--octogonal, with archaic façades of nebulous tube groupings and oblong windows that seemed to glare outward in all directions.
I felt a woman inside that ship, in my mind’s eye, as if she had somehow bridged the gap between us, telepathically. The ship’s azimuth dampeners fluttered erratically as the thin, sharp features of her seductive face ignited inside my consciousness just beneath my eyes. Those canary and moss bead-string tattoos tracing symmetric waves over her brown cheekbones and brow. She climbed inside my mind from across the empty, dark space and changed me--told me we were the same now. I was one with her. And I knew that something within the stars--something beyond time--watched our kind with hate, with envy.
I returned at night, hovering above the volcanic island groupings of gray and obsidian, admiring those wavy black sand beaches of Halitone. As I lowered, Archer Island grew near the horizon from a tiny grayish dot. The dark ocean usually calmed me at that height but it felt different. It was alive with emotion, churning with the secret life--blossoming, darting, spinning with a fluidity in these fantastic conflagrations of innumerable sapphire tentacles, billowing kaleidoscopic skins and circles of nested ruby fangs, deep below.
I landed and drove from the launch clearing to one of our cottages on the shores of Halitone. In the morning, exhaustion set in and light from between the blinds burned my eyes.
A blanket tossed over them blocked it out as I slept all day, at some point awakening from a nonsense dream where a bartender served me this tumbler with ice cubes floating in human blood.
I had trouble getting back to sleep though the wounds on my neck were almost gone, somehow. I’d seen those bizarre teeth somewhere. Maybe an Earth comic book. Or some ancient movie.
A sharp sensation burned within my chest. I couldn’t tell anyone what had happened. That would give Roger ammunition. Heroic professional types like him loved jumping to conclusions.
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RandomThis is weird, unclassifiable stuff. Much of it centers around technical satire. There's some dream fiction in here also and a variety of experiments with the fictional writing structure and theme.
