[center][size="18"][smcaps][b]Lover[/b][/smcaps][/size][/center]

I settle myself by her grave, under a tree and the bright blue sky. It’s late afternoon, and most folks are at work except for the gravediggers, so I am alone with her. I have the book of verses, a loaf of bread and a jug of wine–read [i]tablet,[/i] [i]corn chips[/i] and[i] beer[/i]–and I pass the time slowly, leaving the beer untasted for now. I tell her again about what’s happening with her friends and the place where she worked and the other gossip that I only kept up with for her sake. I take up the tablet and show her pictures of people she loved, then call up the e-reader and read some of her favorite stories to her, along with a shitty poem that I wrote myself, and all the time I think about her smiling at me, knowing she’d be asking me not to make such a silly fuss over things if she could, but calling me a sweetheart anyway.

I swirl the beer bottle idly. The cap was popped at home, and it has a wine topper in the neck. At the bottom of the bottle is a smoky sediment, bluish amid the amber fluid, and I can still see a shred of undissolved gelcap here and there. I calculated the correct dosage at home and added half again as much to be sure, then I wrote the note that’s sticking up out of my shirt pocket. It’s mostly an apology for the inconvenience I am about to cause to the people who will find me. And it says that I’ve tried, I promise that I have honestly tried, but I can’t replace what she took with her when she left me. So I will just go to join her, instead.

I finish the corn chips, then mix the contents of the bottle by turning it slowly over and over so it won’t foam up. I drink the bitter stuff down, gasping and gagging here and there, then lie back on her grave for the last time. I stare up into the deep blue sky, knowing that it’s a veil, an illusion. What’s really out there is not what I am seeing. All of that blue is just filtered starshine. There is more than this, out there. I know this. I need to know this.

I hope she’ll be there, wherever I am going. The night sky is so vast, there are so many stars, so many places where things can be, that she [i]must[/i] be out there somewhere. How can such beauty stop existing? How could love and laughter like hers be in the world, but only once? 

I don’t know if there is anyone out there listening. If so, whoever they, they must know how hard this is for me. But I beg anyway; whatever happens to me, please, please let me be with her again.



[center][size="18"][smcaps][b]Astronomer[/b][/smcaps][/size][/center]

One fantasy you have when you’re a child is that you’ll discover a new planet and it will be named after you. This is just silly; even Tombaugh, even Galileo didn’t rate that honor. I am content nowadays to have been part of the team that cataloged object 19813 Stephson. It’s not romantic, but it is gratifying; bit by bit, we are making sense of it, fitting the sky into neat rows of tabular data that seem dryer than desert dust to outsiders. But data are the life blood of science, and we are approaching the truth as best we know how. I smile sometimes at how quaint our efforts to understand must seem to the Mind that caused it all to come to be.

It’s not all so meticulous. I still love to sit at night, in a clear open field with city lights remote over the mountains, and take a tour of the sky. I remember my first star party as a girl, when a cousin homed his scope precisely, set the clockwork rolling to keep it on track with the travelling heavens, and showed me the rings of Saturn for the first time, not as artistic circles in a book but a [i]thing[/i] out there in the living world for anyone to see. But skyfaring in this sense plays little part in my job nowadays. My work time is taken up in analysis of spectrograms, the cross referencing of images on multiple monitors, and checking that the machine calculations stay within reasonable statistical limits. The images I see are taken at third hand, filtered and processed, with false colors applied to make them comprehensible to human eyes. Computers have made the work of astronomers much easier, but also multiplied the work there is to do. And, of course, they are another layer of abstraction, another filter between what is and what we make of it.

Today, I am doing a spectrographic analysis of a tiny area of space that would just look dead black through any ordinary telescope, and as I adjust the gamut to find the best viewing range, I feel a chill. It’s a hint of that feeling I had as a child, of seeing the thing itself, the thrill of knowing that some distant object and I are part of the same reality. But it’s not a friendly feeling now. It’s wistful and a little painful.

I close my eyes and massage my temples a bit, and get back to work. I figure it’s something I ate for breakfast coming back to haunt me, and sure enough, when I pass to the next area, the feeling fades. 



[center][size="18"][smcaps][b]Climber[/b][/smcaps][/size][/center]

I’m walking along the marked and roped trail on the mountainside, eyeing the rock faces around me, counting foot and fingerholds. I’m light in the head and singing in the heart, as I’ve had my fabulous David for three nights now, post wedding, and this tour is the most fantastic of possible honeymoons. As we take the tourist route to tonight’s hostel, I look out at the long long drop to the river valley and town far below, and the gorgeous clear sky overhead.

There’s a bend in the path ahead, and going around it would be so boring and the climb up over that bulge is so inviting, that I cast a glance back at David, wink, toss him my bag and go for it. It’s in my blood and always has been. You just can’t get this kind of feeling on the ground. You have to be pressing up in the sky and the air. He calls after me, laughing, hesitant, but this is stuff I do all the time when we aren’t so high up and the rock is dry with good purchase and geez I’m not a kid anymore.

Then one handhold cracks loose on me with a spray of splinters, and I don’t make the other, and I am falling out through the wind and past the safety rope. I see David’s eyes as he screams and leaps to catch me, but just for a moment as I fall past and I tumble into the open air, facing the rocks and the sky and the rocks and the sky and the rock—



[center][size="18"][smcaps][b]Diver[/b][/smcaps][/size][/center]

There is a phenomenon called whale fall, where the sunken carcass of a dead whale causes an ecosystem to spring up around it for years after the whale’s death, with sharks to excavate the flesh, and crabs to scavenge the scraps, and and anemonae and worms to grow on the bones. And here, a mile west of Karainagar, Sri Lanka, there is a diverfall. As with the remains of those who ascend Everest and lose the fight, it would be too expensive to try to retrieve her, so here she lies in her open grave at sea bottom.

At some point before the end, she knew she was likely to die, and she could have turned back. But in deep diving, there is a condition called nitrogen narcosis where you get disoriented and lose the knowledge that could help you escape; rational thought exists but is based on fanciful facts that do not help you to return to the surface. Dying was something her brain did in pieces. She did what she thought at the time was best, and died as many others do who go too deep.

Her dual tanks, which contained different mixtures of air and inert gases to help her survive, now float vertically above her body, attached to her buoyancy vest, with not enough lift to pull her corpse free from the muck. She is skeletonized, and one of her arms is missing. Her skull is held in a twisted position by what remains of her suit. The skull is empty and the eye sockets hold nothing but sea life, but the angle of her head suggests she was striving at the end to see something. Her jawbone has fallen away from the natural forces of decomposition, and not from a scream that was too large for her throat. The sky, and the surface of the sea, looked just the same to her at the end, through the twin filters of her fleshly eyes and the fading sparks within her mind.


[center][size="18"][smcaps][b]Philosopher[/b][/smcaps][/size][/center]

Each day is lost on which we have not exulted in joy. I have not lived such a day in many long years, as my flesh falls to my illness. It is no longer possible to live proudly, so proudly I shall leave. 

My colleagues and my family, those who care for me, think me mad, yet in my madness, I am complete. And should not one who has reached completion move on, and step forward to a higher level? Separation is temporary, a rebellion of the will. The light of the stars requires time, but the time shall last out. I was before, and shall be again! Even in my extremity, I was always careful not to be a monster. All the things I have done, I did to surpass myself. I am a bridge to something better, something more vital than common morality, and stronger than ordinary mortality.

Thoughts are but shadows of feelings, black and empty shapes. I have dwelt among humans, and been the best and brightest of them. I yield my body to the hands of no one but myself. I have become what I am! And where I go, I go with passion and confidence, for here I shall come again!



[center][size="18"][smcaps][b]Void[/b][/smcaps][/size][/center]

[i]I am thin, stretched, strained, dispersed, diverted, pushed beyond my breaking point into hopeless horror, and all I can do is wait as stars burn through their courses and chill into cinders.[/i]

[i]I felt the Burst, the alien intrusion that sought to tear me apart. It grew in the core of me and I knew it wanted to break free and fly out in all directions, so I encircled it and crushed it down with immense force. I squeezed it with all that I had in me to force it back out of reality, and compressed it to nothing, but not nothing enough, and it broke free in the most intense heat that can ever be, and sent me reeling, stretching me, scattering me so thin that I am not me anymore. All that I was is now separated, too far for complex thoughts to travel, and what I knew is gone from me, across an unbridgeable void. Simple thoughts take me eons, the information not lost but buried in spacetime. I know that I once knew how to recover from this, but that knowledge is gone from me now. All I can do is wait for the Burst to get tired of pushing itself outward, and withdraw, and with that withdrawal pull myself back together and channel all my force to try to squeeze it all away permanently, this time. This time! How many times has it been? [/i]

[i]So I wait. And though my thoughts are slow within my scattered mind, my feelings are still fresh and quick, and I can sense them, shreds and sparks in the Burst. As I was pushed and pulled apart, stretched into fragments by the perimeter of the Burst, small shreds and tendrils of my being were caught up within it, becoming mixed with its substance. These, I cannot think with, for they are confused and lost as I, but I feel them as they strive to coalesce and push against that alien gravity, and lose. I feel them as they vainly try to pierce the blackness of me, for thin though I am, I am very very dark. I feel them as they try to combine with each other in the substance of the Burst, and fall and disperse, and rise to try again, in fruitless attempts to do in miniature what I seek to do in totality.[/i]

[i]Worse still, as they strive, I cannot ignore them. Their desperate relentless eyes stare outward, questioning, querying, calling for balm that cannot truly heal, seeking understanding that cannot be had, screaming for succor that cannot aid and help that shall never arrive, striving for transcendence that is fundamentally unreachable.[/i]

[i]And I, I who now am nothing and have nothing, can only wait in silence. In horror of my dissolution, in despair of my usurpation, in loathing of the Blasting intrusion, I can only stare back.[/i]