Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
- Langston Hughes (1902–1967)
A preface is needed.
For one, it must be mentioned that, just as Gregor Samsa never meant to scare his family into entertaining the notion that his newfound physique may move him to violence, so did Kieran Cromwell never intended to cultivate that specific aura of abstract uncleanliness that led a worrying percentage of strangers finding themselves within a five-yard radius of him to immediately clock him as a risk factor.
It was unclear when he’d made the transition from the gifted, bold, though perhaps slightly out of touch adolescent to a socially deaf, tactlessly intelligent adult. If he had to bet money on it, he would say it was around the time he’d started attending social events in singed jumpsuits and overalls. When people asked, back when they still bothered to, the reason he would always give was a lack of time. This was true.
That is was a convenient excuse to wear what he wanted instead of what he felt ridiculously lanky and uncoordinated in was equally true.
There was a second theory, brought to the table by Anne-Elizabeth-Marie Cromwell, his sister. She claimed it was when he’d stopped talking to most of the people that he’d grown up around.
It was a possibility.
Therein lies our second elaboration; Kieran didn’t, doesn’t, and never will consider social convention a thing worth wasting time or effort on.
People lose their uses.
Overalls, if taken care of, do not.
Simple maths.
He was wearing green ones the day they travelled to Undersea. He wore them in the streets, wore them in the alleyway, wore them while Han Suyin, in the newfound complete absence of the virtuenet – the lines – hurriedly projected her intentions onto a letter and fed it to a golden pigeon, hand disappearing into its spherical body, retracting quickly as the opening began to close, fingertips sparkling with electricity as the orb flew off. Now, Lorenzo smirking at him and pointing to a farmhand with overalls of green tartan, saying they could be friends, Kieran allowed himself the space to fleetingly regret pulling them on the evening prior.
Though his admiration for Lorenzo was boundless in almost every respect, this instant was one where the Doctor was hopelessly wrong: Kieran was wearing bottle green, the farmhand sported a darker, army shade. Besides: tartan? Clearly, they were very different people.
A wide-faced madam was saying something to him. Olga? Yes, Olga something.
Seven minutes after he’d hummed and nodded, no idea what he was agreeing to, a mug of broth was slid into his hands. Lorenzo handed him a spoon – thank you, Lorenzo – which he took up gladly, and, suddenly very hungry, used to down the entire portion as fast as possible.
Halfway through, taking a breather to give his scalded tongue a break, he noticed a saint smiling up at him from the sides of the mug, blue cloak embroidered with leafy patterns wrought in yellows and oranges, head haloed by a crown of five stars.
He looked around the room. Everyone was silent, spoons clanking against bowls and deep plates. The madam who’s name may or may not be Olga stood frozen mid-sip, staring out of the window at the shattered horizon.
“Jan of Nepomuk is on this cup,” he said. “You have relatives in Proxima Centauri?”
Across from him, Marya swallowed and looked up, curiosity in her eyes. Next to her, Han Suyin stirred her broth with a fork.
“That’s who that is, is it?” Looking rather relieved for an excuse to look away from the destruction occurring in the world outside, Olga set the teacup on the table. She met the question in his eyes and let out a flat chuckle, “My niece’s husband is from there – I’ve never been. Kveta liked the way he smiled, so we kept him.”
“Who is he?” asked Lorenzo, leaning over, smiling at Jan’s amiable face. “He has a nice cloak.”
“A saint,” said Kieran.
“An old saint,” added Marya. “From Christian Europe. Tortured by the king, shoved into a goatskin, drowned.”
“Joy,” muttered Han Suyin.
Kieran frowned, “Europe.”
Marya looked at him like he was daft. “Yeah. On Earth.”
“A country?”
Now it wasn’t just her eying him with judgement. “A continent.”
“Ah. Tectonic.”
“No…” The look deepened. “Political.”
A beat of silence. Marya’s eyes were hazel, Kieran noticed, not brown.
Han Suyin coughed on his right and he turned instinctively. She looked like she was about to laugh, something unreadable in her eyes. “I wonder...”
She was interrupted by another cough. Lorenzo thumped her on the back, and she choked out a thank you before straightening, smiling at Marya, at Kieran, at Marya, at Kieran.
Rather like an owlet, Marya’s head cocked in confusion. “You wonder…?”
“The doctor and I –” (Lorenzo rolled his eyes at this) – “are at an impasse about something.”
Olga stirred her tea with a sceptical expression. Outside – its heavy mother clouds drawn closer by the racing winds – rain drowned out the shouted communication of farmhands and gardeners, making way, once or twice, to the thundering bass of electric discharge, its innocuous patter like a giggle to flashes of lightning.
“If you met a clone of yourself,” Han Suyin said at last, “what would you do?”
Another crack: this one filled the room, too close to be distorted by the sheets of rain, blinding them temporarily with a brightness akin to the headlights of a tanker ship. Something crashed to the floor, and Olga cursed.
“Kill it, obviously.” said Keiran.
“Naturally,” agreed Marya. Kieran’s eyes flicked to her. All eleven of hers blinked right back. “There can only be one.”
Han Suyin stuck out her hand. Sighing, Lorenzo handed her a twenty yóla credit token.
><
They spent the night there. The second the starlight modifiers heaved their sickly way to a brightness that would allow the four of them to be reasonably capable of absolving a journey to the nearest pharaline station without any twisted ankles, Olga ushered them out and bid them a hasty goodbye, stuffing half a dozen unused standard-distribution tickets into their bags as they crossed the threshold.
“Don’t thank me,” she’d sniffed, waving off Han Suyin’s stammered refusals, “you’re the ones helping. Those things get turned into fuel when they’re slotted in. Us not using them just slows everyone else down. Iva’s been mad at me for months.”
“Why make the tickets fuel?” Lorenzo asked him once they’d left through the main gate, slipping and sliding on the hillside grass.
Kieran sidled past a clump of unstable-looking soil. “Social incentive.”
“Ah, right.” The ground beneath Lorenzo gave in, and he grimaced as he pulled a mud-covered foot out of the hole. “No worse thing than angry neighbours… Really wouldn’t work in a city, would it?”
“It doesn’t.”
Kieran felt a hand on his forearm. Lorenzo’s voice came right by him, around his shoulder. “They’ve tried?”
“Remember the mould crisis?”
A pause. A bitter sigh. “You don’t forget something you had to pull out of someone’s backside.”
Kieran blinked against the peculiar feeling of bewilderment coiling up from the crevices of his gut. “Who sticks train tickets up their anus?”
Lorenzo huffed bitterly, “People. Who else?.”
Kieran didn’t particularly mind people – they gave him good tips for manual work nobody else wanted to do. Judging by the softness around Lorenzo’s eyes, he, in truth, didn’t mind them either. Still, the Doctor’s hair was dishevelled, and he’d woken with a nasty curve to his mouth that morning, so Kieran said nothing.
After about half an hour more of the same, their breath clouds had become utterly indistinguishable from the fog. Like an office worker settling onto the couch after a long day of work meetings that could have most been mid-sized emails, the wet morning chill spread itself across the valley, cocooning them in threads of wispy, intangible frost.
“I can’t see a damn thing,” said Han Suyin, somewhere off to his and Lorenzo’s left.
“Wait,” came Marya’s voice ahead of them. “There. Grab this.”
A mumble from the left. “What…is this a scarf?”
“Pass it on to the others.”
A hand touched Kieran’s left upper arm. “Doctor? Is this you?”
Kieran hadn’t minded when it was just Lorenzo. Now, having Han Suyin hang off his left side as well was making him just about beyond the acceptable measure of uncomfortable.
“Yes,” he lied. Holding her arm as gently as possible, he switched places with his situationally indifferent friend, and settled the hand on the Lorenzo’s shoulder.
“Do you feel alright? You sound a little nasally,” said Han Suyin hesitantly.
Lorenzo laughed, accompanied by a sound like a pat on a hand, “No worries, no worries! Not used to the chill, is all.”
Golden pinpricks floated ahead – Marya. She’d seen, Kieran knew, but had stayed quiet.
“Cromwell, you have a scarf,” Marya said.
For pity’s sake. He knew where this was going. “It’s cold outside.”
“There’s a cliff path ahead. We’ll have to go single file.” A pause. “My scarf isn’t going to be long enough.”
Lorenzo stopped so suddenly, Kieran almost tripped over his own feet. Secured by provisory rope, Han Suyin jerked to a halt.
“I’m sorry – a cliff path?” blurted Lorenzo. The golden pinpricks blinked their affirmation. They were answered with (understandable) bewilderment, “In this century?”
With great reluctance, Kieran slipped off the scarf and tapped Lorenzo’s shoulder. The shoulder shifted.
“Pass me the end, then,” Kieran grumbled.
><
Kieran couldn’t in good faith call the cliff path a cliff path. Unfortunately, he couldn’t not call it a cliff path, either.
That is confusing. For clarification, let him draw you a picture.
On the picture, there is a proper, polite, well-mannered, adequately rocky cliff. Roughly copying the twists and turns of the cliff’s horizontal cut is a – once likely consistently spaced, now broken up in increasingly inconvenient places – hovering path off magnetically reinforced islands.
Now, in Kieran’s opinion, a cliff path should, as its name suggests, be built into its cliff, not hover alongside it like a confused birthday balloon. And as for hovering island paths, those should exist only for their intended purpose of connecting two, otherwise mutually inaccessible, areas, and not impede on the senior rights of their earthy predecessors.
Much like an advisor should not attempt to parade as a king.
They were not following a cliff path, then, but an acting cliff path. The regent to a kingdom without a ruler.
Someone’s hand clasped his shoulder and he jerked back.
“Watch out!” Lorenzo yelled over the wailing wind. “You almost went over!”
Kieran blinked out into the racing milky rapids of the cloud they had walked into, then down at his feet. Indeed, they were dangerously close to the edge. Pebbles plunged into the abyss when he shifted his toes.
Nodding in Lorenzo’s general direction, he focused on the band of light indicating the edge of the next island and stepped out over the yawning maw of nothingness.
On the bright side, he thought to himself, if I die here, I won’t have to finish that PowerPoint presentation.
Just as he had begun to cheer himself up with the thought, his foot hit hard ground. Instinctual relief accompanied a surge of disappointment. After taking a moment to ponder whether he should be concerned by that, the length of scarf connecting him to Han Suyin tightened and he was forced to move forward.
He could throw himself off a cliff just fine. Taking someone else with him, however…that would be rude, not to mention bothersome, and likely immoral. In the unlikely event that an afterlife in fact did exist, he would have to spend it dealing with the pissed off collateral damage of the swiftly deteriorating safety pin holding together the ticking time bomb that was his Will to Live.
Forget resting in peace, there would be no resting at all.
Thankfully, the ‘cliff path’ ended up spitting out right next to the pharaline station. Collectively relieved, they untangled themselves from the scarves and climbed up the stairs to the platform. The colour of the lamps indicated that the pharam was already there.
Invigorated, they sped up.
Just as Kieran’s head poked out above the final step, its centipede-like body shot away, leaving an empty station and a faint smell of pine sap in its wake.
Han Suyin’s air of murderous intent grew tenfold.
“Well,” – Lorenzo raised his eyebrows, – “that’s unfortunate.”
“My wards!” came a cry of enthusiasm from Kieran’s right.
Please no.
With growing exhaustion, he turned in its general direction. No one.
Frowning, he scanned the bushes, the rafters, the tracks, before something ginger moved near the wall and his eyes zeroed in on the opening leading to the public toilet, ears registering the sound of running water. It petered out as a tap was twisted shut and a woman stepped out onto the platform, smiling wide.
Marya blinked in befuddlement, lifted her hand in greeting. “Captain.”
“Marya,” Sofia met her eyes, lingered for a second before moving on to the rest of them, “Lorenzo, Kieran, Han Suyin.”
They burbled their assorted hellos, and she snorted, arm on hip. “Now, what’s with all of you? You sound like the world’s about to end.” Narrowing her eyes, she tapped her chin, adding, “Look like it, too, now that I mention.”
A nervous chuckle from someone behind him.
“The train just left,” Han Suyin grumbled. “In case you were waiting.”
Stretching, the captain laughed and fell into one three benches, draping her arms over the sparrow-shaped armrests. “Oh, no, no. That’s all right, I just like being here.”
She grinned at them. The clouds had taken to playing on some strange invisible carousel overhead, Kieran tilted his head to see them better.
The captain’s eyes twinkled, and she waved a finger in their direction. “Are you just going to stand there, hm?”
Kieran’s attention split for a second, away from the clouds and to his immediate left, to Marya’s right cheek, her eyes, the corners of her mouth. Twitching, uncertain, awkward. It turned swiftly boring. He registered that she had sat down next to the captain, had calmed down some, had beckoned Lorenzo along with her, and then his eyes were lost to the sky.
The next train came after the caravan of clouds had disappeared entirely behind the station’s dusty red eaves and was replaced by a violet strip rimmed on the far horizon by smoky black masses. He sat down by a window beside someone in a bright yellow jacket, watched the forests of the Undersea swing by, schools of airfish catching the light, bright pinpricks among the shaded trunks, glittering their way through the day under the eye of the artificial Sun. Up ahead now again, the clouds cast their voluminous nets, and once in a while Kieran would cast an eye upwards to marvel, with some resignation, at their devastating speeds.
They arrived at the airport around noon, judging by Lorenzo’s typical hunger-induced shoulder rolling. A café sat between two lines – one for a gate, one for a restroom, and Kieran slipped his papers into Han Suyin’s pocket before wandering off to sit there, staring at the menu long enough for the nervous teenager manning the till to ask him whether he wanted anything. And then long enough to finish half of what he’d paid for.
The crumbs from the croissant stuck to his sweater. He frowned at them.
A chair leg screeched against the floor. “God, Kieran, what are you doing here?” squawked Lorenzo, chairs tilting dangerously off their axes behind him.
One of them fell with an ear-splitting clang. The barista’s face passed through several stages of grief.
“Croissant?” Kieran dangled the pastry under the doctor’s nose.
Lorenzo gave him a look. Kieran blinked back.
The doctor pursed his lips. “We’re at the front of the line. Come on.”
And Kieran let himself be dragged away, finding some satisfaction in the way Lorenzo tore angrily into the proffered food muttering about ‘food restrictions on public vehicles’ and how its ‘so stupid, how do they expect people to get the right nutrition in this economy’, all the while the tension in his face lessening and lessening while a million parts of a single machine whirred peacefully around them…
“How’s that presentation going?” The captain kicked a leg at him from across the aisle.
Sighing internally, Kieran made a so-so gesture and pointed at his head. She giggled as he sank, irritably, with the feeling that a million ants or so were crawling under his skin, into the world beside his mind’s eye.
After that, his attention was entirely taken by font sizes and paywalls.
Thank heavens for academic piracy.
><
Whoever had designed the waiting room had chosen to fill it with tapestries and biogenic silver chairs.
Marya sat in one of them, a manuscript propped up on her knee. Her waxy hands fiddled with a paper finch.
Kieran leaned forward a bit, looked closer, zoomed in on its beak, its face, its tail.
Local brand of goldfinch?
Chaffinch, maybe?
No.
She saw him looking, rubbed the bridge of her nose, then arranged the finch carefully on the armrest so he could see all its important parts. With utmost care, she flipped another page of the manuscript. The bruised eyes of Argos’ necklace stayed closed.
Wait.
Where did she get paper?
The door to the right of the room, heavyset and wooden, cracked open. “Marya Elisabeta Novotná.” The voice was soft, gentle. “We’re ready for you.”
She stood stiffly, awkwardly. Organised her notes with a measure of reluctance, acknowledged Kieran with a tilt of her head, pointedly touched up the finch’s position on the armrest, and walked out of the room with the bravado of someone making their way to a badly paid job at the dismal crack of dawn. The door slid shut soundlessly behind her.
It was just him and the finch, then. And a dozen chairs and four tapestries.
He checked behind him. Right. Six tapestries, then.
The light glanced off a bronze plaque above the two on his side – a quick look-around confirmed that similar bronze plaques were attached above those on the other walls, also – with writing in… was that Mandarin?
Before he could spend too long pondering on who had made that decision – a woman, accompanied by a man with worry etched into the lines ringing his eyes – entered through the door between the tapestries opposite the door to the council room and solved his conundrum for him.
Frowning at the plaques, the woman, tall, with all the graceful properties of a spider swinging from one branch to the next, sniffed, looked down at the man. “It’s still the same here.”
“The artist isn’t dead yet,” the man shrugged. His voice was gruff, and in combination with the thick beard covering his lower face, served to remind Kieran of a dwarf. “It’s intellectual property.”
“Can’t you just add another one under it?”
“Can’t do anything under new legislation,” he shrugged again. “It’s fine. Enough people can read it.”
As if having just noticed they weren’t alone, their eyes swivelled to Kieran’s.
“Good day to you,” the woman’s eyes lit up some (quite literally… in fact Kieran noticed that they had begun to glow yellow). She gestured around the room. “You know what’s written there? Neither of us can tell.”
“I don’t read Mandarin.” Kieran took a half-step away from the wall.
The woman gave the man a look, and he sighed, looked away.
“It doesn’t matter. We can probably put together what’s there anyways. Like here, look,” he pointed to the one hanging to Kieran’s right. “Little girl, great domed building, grey landscape, paper cranes. Hiroshima.”
A derisive breath. “That’s hardly fair, you chose an easy one.”
“You go, then.”
The woman looked as if she was about to agree, but stopped herself, casting a glance at Kieran. “Would you mind?”
Kieran shook his head, put his hands behind his back, and followed the woman’s line of sight to a tapestry on the left of the opposite wall.
“There,” above her head and gesturing hand, around the wiry frame of her body, Kieran could just about make out the white cloaks and emaciated forms of countless people, huddling under the merciless rays of the sun dominating the sky above them. “What’s that one?”
The man stroked his beard. One of his cheeks twitched. He hummed as he began, “White… doctors, I’d say. A great big star…” he trailed off.
They stood there in silence. Five seconds passed. Ten. Fifteen.
Kieran spoke up, “Luyten b.”
The man stepped closer to the tapestry, then further away again, then met his eyes. “Certain?”
“Yes.”
“Fine, then,” said the woman. Her head moved to the right, and she let out a pleasant, surprised laugh. “Well, ‘least I can tell one of them.”
“Hm, can’t we all.” the man chuckled, and his face took on a quality that was almost pensive. “The Little Blue Dot.”
Yes, thought Kieran, the Little Blue Dot, depicted by the tapestry’s creator as conspicuously green. The darkness he had long felt spreading in the muscles of his back deepened from dismal grey to an unbroken indigo. He had never felt himself moved by the poetic imaginings of others, and yet, staring at that stupid dot – that pointless spec of matter, really, be it a threaded image or the planet itself – he was overcome by the most peculiar feeling. At once heavy enough to stay forever rooted to the spot in the floor where he was standing and light enough to come undone at the lightest breeze, he felt an unwelcome urge to cry.
“Don’t know what that is,” the man continued, peering at a tapestry to his left. His heavy-lidded eyes traced the threads closely. “Never seen a spaceship like that before.”
“Course you haven’t,” mocked the woman. “It isn’t real.” Her feet scuffed the floor as she stepped forward. Her finger hovered close to the fabric. “Lucian of Samosata. A True Story.”
The man grumbled. “Never heard of it.”
“You wouldn’t have had,” her voice wasn’t quite patronising. “It’s science fiction. And old, at that.”
“How old?”
“Roman Empire.”
A mumble. “Christ.”
They turned back to Kieran’s wall. Kieran turned with them.
Next to Hiroshima hung a quite beautiful tapestry, more abstract than many of the others but reminiscent of reality all the same. A village, filled with Earthen cats and birds, wolves skulking along the sidelines, great block apartment buildings looming in the distance, broken things scattered across the vibrant ground, swirls and patches coming together to create the impression of a dusty pavement growing newly over with grasses and mosses and ferns. The clouds, great grey ships with rich sapphire underbellies, sailed across the matte red of the sky.
“Chernobyl,” said the man.
“No,” protested the woman, “there’s no way. Look at it.”
“Just because it blew up,” the man sighed, “does not mean life was impossible.”
“Why didn’t people go back, then?”
“I said not impossible, not that it was immediately easy or… predictable.” He shook his head. “People prefer to move when life starts demanding a certain number of unnatural deaths.”
Yes, thought Kieran, they do.
The door opposite Lucian of Samosata – the council room door, that was – cracked open, and the same gentle voice that had beckoned Marya called softly into the waiting room, “Kieran Cromwell?”
><
I will not bore you with descriptions of the council room. Compared with the rest of the building, which Kieran had the benefit of operationally sleeping through, it was something quite unremarkable. Most of the Star’s matters were decided in distinct departments – delegations and other assorted distinguished guests were entertained in the Dining Room (constructed more for talking than dining) or the Fishbowl (where mood was set with the help of an array of sharks, squids, and jellyfish, and violent assault was dissuaded by the inconveniences of diving attire and the natural buoyancy of water).
The council room was there for whenever one of the Star’s high-ranked civil servants – of which Sofia was one such – called in their once-in-a-lifetime audience card. Janitors took it as a venue for Friday poker games. One of the accountants from the fifth floor used it as a lunch room.
Backlit by his hastily put together presentation, Kieran Cromwell stared into twelve shadowy eye sockets boring into his face and his work from behind an equally hastily put together semi-circle of desks.
“So,” he said, ten seconds into the startled silence, “are you going to ready the ships?”
A shadow shifted around the centre.
“You are certain, then?” it began cautiously. “There is no doubt?”
Kieran felt a spike of irritation. “Of course there’s doubt,” he said. “There’s always doubt. Frankly, at current, there is just more doubt that the Eye will hold, than that it will not.”
Earrings glistened to his left. “But there is doubt?”
Kieran hadn’t made a proper plan for this scenario, had somewhere within him still held out that he wouldn’t be met with absolute idiocy, and so, in lieu of answering, he simply made a point of frowning at the room at large.
The shadows began to murmur.
“Business is going up,” said one. “The profit could balance out the costs of maintenance, surely.”
“Besides,” sighed another, “this is all very nice and good. But how are we supposed to move an entire star worth of people? This is a key interstellar hub, we can’t just… give up on it. Surely, there must be another way.”
“There is not,” Kieran found himself saying. His voice cut through the murmurs, the room went as silent as it had been during his dreary doomsday presentation.
Inside him, veins long dried up filled with new emotion, and, uncertain as he felt, having them running through him again, the images burned into his mind’s eye – that fascinating model with its gears and its light and its corruptibility – forced him to fill his voice with its power.
“If you listen and I am wrong… yes, you will lose money. A few business deals will have to be revised. Mass migration and relocation will have to be dealt with. But –” he stared past the sockets, into the glistening whites of their eyes, and a few squirmed they felt his eyes raking passed the security of their dark, silky wards, “ – if you don’t listen and I am right, then we all will die within the next…” he checked his watch, “…ninety-six hours.”
He blinked, smiled, and the thing, already crooked by nature, twisted further in its mirthlessness. Turning around, he studied the great festival of ruin he had modelled, the way it span out of control, over and over, chaotically beautiful.
He felt his shoulders shrug and murmured, “It’s up to you.”
A turn to the right, an awkward salute – half to the wall, half to the floor.
The Esteemed House of Cromwell has spoken, as you wished, he thought to himself, and, because he felt a few of the shadows start raising their hands or bodies in protest, added, with a gesture to the corner where Lorenzo, Marya, Han Suyin, and the captain were taking refuge, “All information is in the presentation and in the attached files, you can handle everything else through those four. I’ve got stuff to do.”
He ambled out.
Rushing through the waiting area, Kieran pretended not to see the guilty way the bearded man and the spider-like woman jumped away from the door and then rushed through the open entrance into the council room. As he left, it exploded in sound and voice and movement.
Not my problem – came a relieved thought – my part is done.
Tell me what they decide, he sent a golden bird to Lorenzo halfway down the many flights of stairs. A shark sailed past him on the other side of the glass wall. I’m taking Sofia’s craft. Tell her I’m sorry.
The Crust was a silent, cavernous place. Strangely peaceful to the eye, with rivers of glass floating between the rounded structures attached to the walls and Southern cousins of the same glowworms found on the underbelly of the Lantern tunnelling through great sheets of stony soil. Mammoth earthworms peaked out from ridges around him as he let the captain’s craft bumble along with the current, their pale heads stark against everything else.
Studying them from above, Kieran thought they looked a little sickly, a little droopy. But perhaps that was bias of expectation.
He sighed, shifting in his seat, and turned to stare ahead, into the dim red lights of weak midnight traffic.
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