Red Vines

Give or take, they tell me Saturn is roughly 886 million miles from Earth.

Give or take, they tell me Iapetus is roughly two million, two hundred twelve thousand, six hundred and ten miles from Saturn.

So, on a good day, when Saturn and Earth are on opposite sides of the Sun, and Iapetus is on the Neptune side of Saturn, it's a fair bet to say I am over a billion miles from Earth.

But not the Earth in my head.

No. That remains terrifyingly and constantly close. They try to tell me black holes have commanding gravitational wells, but no gravitational well is deeper than that of the singularity in my head.

And aye, there be terrors there. Far worse than the choking almond smell of the leaky refuges I've blasted out of Iapetus' crust and mountains. Far worse than the funk of the space suits I use regularly when the memories of one refuge become overwhelming and I have to flee to the gravitational hell of another.

My therapist says I shouldn't write when I'm in such a mood. But I have to write something. That well is always seeking new information, new experiences it can dredge up and torment me with later on.

Oh, there are some beauties.

But I don't wish to dwell.

Dwell. That's a funny word. Dwell dwell dwell. It's like an echo. Or the sound of a slightly flat ball bouncing. Or of rabbits kissing, if memory serves.

If memory serves.

At the Alamo, ironically, is where I remember the least. But I spend little time there, maybe a few weeks a year, for fear that the memories will reach escape velocity and nest in the friable walls and leave no place on Iapetus free of Earth-shine. Only to settle in again. Again. To dwell.

There are a few things I miss. Conditionallly.

Dogs, I miss dogs. Not when they want to go to bed or need to go outside and bug me about both, mooking somewhere in the corner when I'm trying to get something else done. But I miss the *idea* of dogs, who like to run and bark and sniff and do the things that dogs do besides the mooking.

And the feel of sunshine. Oh, there's sunshine. But it's like Thursday. Out here, it has no feel.

Red licorice, I miss. It's extremely hard to come by in my corner of the solar system. I'm lucky enough to get fresh water that's not laced with the resident cyanide. So I try not to complain.

But I would kill for a theater box of Red Vines.

Again with The Hermit of Iapetus

NOTE: Trying this again. A new tack. New ideas coming. That's a good thing, right?

Only Nixon, the old Vulcan proverb goes, could go to China.

Just perhaps, however, he might consider crossing the wide Missouri with me, as I undertake a voyage.

. . .

"There's no chance of rescue," the bursar said. "Nor, of course, even a guarantee we could get you there. Not that it's far. It's just . . . uncommon. There's no one - nothing - there. You'd be alone."

"Yes."

The bursar was silent.

"If it's a question of money -"

"No," he said. "Hardly. Well almost hardly. The orbit surcharge is a pittance when the entire voyage is considered. Mathematicians go cheap these days. And freight, well, almost negligible, considering. Where it's all dead load, and you said - you did say - you'd gather it all up, no matter where it fell. But . . it's the -"

"Isolation, yes," I said. "That's the idea."

"Communication. Intermittent at best. Then we just don't know, as there's no one there. And the debris fields. The radiation."

"The solitude. The room for introspection. The possibility."

"The poisons. It's toxic enough - well, is likely toxic enough-"

"It's fine," I said. "We're used to toxicity."

"We?"

"He said he'd come with me."

"Yes," the bursar said, circling a finger around an ear, catching the planning officer's eye. "You mentioned him. Free on board, I believe we agreed?"

"Yes," I said. "The company is most generous on that point."

Silence, broken only by a sniff from the planning officer.

"And the ship is called," I asked after a moment.

The bursar tapped at the keyboard. "Shenandoah."

"Then the voyage has already begun."

I'm going to take some advice from some writing instructions given to our students this week -- set parts of my writing to different music. This song is for the first part of the book. Other parts will feature Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune" and "San Antonio Rose" by Patsy Cline.

Geography Lessons for the Hermit of Iapetus

 

I love that our knowledge of these worlds continues to increase. I might eventually get back to writing that book set on Iapetus.

As on Earth, they Key for Real Estate is Location, Location, Location

For fantasy/science fiction writers (or just those curious about the solar system): A toy to play with. NASA/JPL is calling this site "Eyes," and will show you perspectives from just about every object in the solar system relative to everything else.

Two views here, one of the Saturn system from Iapetus, the other from Mimas. Clearly, for more dramatic Saturn views, the location to be is Mimas.

Here's the view from Iapetus. Now for the pedantic (and there are plenty of those in science fiction and fantasy) the views won't be perfect, but I think this puts any writer close enough for government work.

Amd from Mimas.

The webiste lets you scroll around all over, so you can see relative distances to other objects in the soler system. Ought to be a pretty helpful tool.

Despair is Do-It-Yourself

We live in a world where someone else's poor choices justify our own.

It's not good enough to live a moral life, do good things, be nice to others. If someone else -- just one person out there -- is not moral, does not do good things, is mean to others, that justifies the same behavior in us.

Were it not so, but it is.

This attitude transcends politics, religion, and whatever ism we hold dear. If we say I and mine don't do it, that is a lie.

"Am I my brother's keeper?" Cain asked the angel asking after Abel whom Cain killed.

We live in a fallen world in which not a soul wants to keep or be kept.

He shifted in his bunk. The uncomfortable thoughts swirled in the darkness around him like foul water.

There must be some light, he thought. Light somewhere. Light and darkness, light and darkness. Always together. Sometimes one is dominant, then the other.

Yes. They are the only things in the world that keep or are kept.

His pillowcase suddenly felt damp. He flipped the pillow over, longed for the fan overhead to move more air.

Keep or be kept.

Keep used to mean helping others, he thought. Raising barns. Raising children. But now keep means kept: Bullied, overseen, hindered. Taxed. He chuckled at taxed.

Kept used to mean being watchful for trouble, watchful for error in self and others. And assistance and love without judgment, or at least judgment spoken aloud. But now kept means keep: Stasis, the good old days which were good for some but not for all. Ground under. The pillow again felt damp at ground under.

They say the heart of man will run cold in the last days.

I have a cold heart, he thought.

Even me.

And warming it. Warming it. Too hard. Too much effort.

Keep or kept. Does it matter now, with the world as it is? It's all sunshine, but the lying, bitter sun shining on an Earth stuttering at 20 below zero. There is light, but there is no warmth.

Hearts are cold.

He shifted.

The pillow no longer felt damp.

"So this is despair," he thought.

Isn't it wonderful?

He pulled a blanket over his head.

Effortless, you see. And you get used to it, when you realize you don't have to share it with others because they already have it. Joy requires effort. Materials and blueprints. And other people. Despair is do-it-yourself.

Do it yourself.

"Go away," he said. "Go away."

His poor choices lined up in his mind for consideration.

Oh well, he sighed. He began to sort them, one by one.

Book Trailer: The Hermit of Iapetus

In the darkness of space, we hear the opening bars of "San Antonio Rose" sung by Patsy Cline. The music wanders with us through the stars until we see a brighter point of light enter our field of vision. The point of light grows until we see an odd walnut-shaped moon, its leading edge almost black as charcoal, its trailing edge a snowy hue. We descend to the surface flying over massive craters and an equatorial mountain range which gives the odd little world its walnut shape. As we soar, Patsy Cline's voice and music is occasionally scattered with static, but the closer we get to the moon the louder and clearer the music comes. Below we see the unmistakable tracks if a wheeled vehicle that has carved a trail up the mountains. In the shadow of a peak we spy the vehicle and the music us louder yet. We see a door in the side of the mountain and it opens for us and after the airlock cycles an inner door opens and we hear Patsy even louder. Inside in the dim light we see the form of a man, asleep or senseless on a cot in the corner if a cluttered room.

His eyes open.

"It's about time you got here," he says. "There's macaroni and cheese in the fridge."

We go to the fridge and there is indeed macaroni and cheese therein. Patsy sings the closing lines as we settle in for a snack in the home of the Hermit of Iapetus.

Hermit of Iapetus, Virus Survivor?

How bleak would it be if the Hermit of Iapetus, and various other stragglers in the outer solar system, were the only ones to survive a virus outbreak in the inner solar system?

I know. Topical and cliché. It’s probably been done a thousand times before. Also sure there are a thousand monkeys pounding away at a thousand typewriters right now on the NEXT BIG CORONAVIRUS BLOCKBUSTER NOVEL, so by the time I got mine out on the street seventy thousand others will have gone live in that space.

And the more I think of it, the more I like the idea that the Hermit is on Iapetus just because he wanted to be. And because he’s probably a little bit crazy. Not enough pathos, I’m sure, but I still like the idea.

Most novels want to focus on the Big Idea. The Hermit of Iapetus, in its current form, does not. It’s just about a crazy dude who decided to go live on one of Saturn’s moons. Is that compelling enough? I don’t know. I haven’t shown it to anyone as Doleful Creatures, a Bigger Idea novel, has occupied my brain space, if not my writing desk.

One coronavirus bright spot: If it comes to social distancing with school and work closed (school, thus far for our kids, is staying in, but letting out Thursday, two days earlier than planned for Spring Break; BYUI is shut for the next few days as preparations go underway to take what classes can be online into that online space) maybe I could get working on the novel again. Or the chores around the house, now that winter is finally dying. Maybe both. Might even get new concrete underneath the master bathtub tonight as I prepare to re-tile everything.

Hermit Research -- Margueritte de la Roque

Man against Nature is a classic literary trope.

Woman against Nature, not so much.

But that’s exactly what Elizabeth Boyer’s “Margueritte de la Roque: A Story of Survival” is – a somewhat fictionalized account* of a French noblewoman’s survival after she, her soon-to-be husband and her nurse are abandoned on an island off the coast of Quebec in the early days of New France.

While briskly told, Boyer’s tale resembles that of Farley Mowat’s fictional “Lost in the Barrens,” which I read in elementary school. Mowat’s prose is more straightforward, but Boyer’s tale is the more remarkable in that what she tells actually happened to a real person.

I’ll keep this review light on spoilers – suffice it to say all does not go well for Margueritte and company on the island. But we see the familiar tale of survival: Finding and building shelter, finding and preserving food, and then finding and preserving sanity as nature and the elements of the fierce sea coast take their toll.

Almost as entertaining – though far less gripping – are the reminisces de la Roque has as she struggles for survival. She apparently grew up near or was familiar with the city of Perigueux, France, and the surrounding countryside, and spends some time there in the book as well. I lived in Perigueux for about five months as a young missionary, so the landmarks and buildings and streets she writes of are familiar, and for that I felt the same kind of longing de la Rocque felt for her long-lost homeland. I’ve been in the cathedral she recalls, walked on many of the same streets. Of the cities I lived in while in France, that’s the one I’d love to go back and see the most.

As with Mowat’s tale, there is survival, in building a temporary shelter, a more permanent shelter, and then finding a place of refuge to flee to when the elements grew too fierce. And Boyer’s telling of the tale through French eyes kept me running to and from the dictionary, trying to interpret some of the words used, particularly those describing the animals she encounters (puffins I was able to guess, thanks to the vivid description Boyer provides of them, along with the amusing sobriquet de la Rocque gave them: perroquets, or parrots.

Boyer, I think, captures the spirit and the madness of such tales of survival well. I could see myself reacting in the same ways in the situation de la Rocque found herself in, and probably performing better than I would have under the circumstances. Not having lived alone on an island in inhospitable territory before, I don’t know how I’d react in the face of death, but now maybe I have an inkling.

And reading this tale gives me a few ideas of the madness and spirit capable in those who live alone, something that’ll be a help as I work on finishing “The Hermit of Iapetus,” the tale of a man alone for far less noble reasons and in far less noble spirit than Boyer portrays in her historical re-creation.

*Boyer researched the story thoroughly and hews to what is written in historical accounts. The fictionalize parts come, of course, to filling in dialogue and details of what happened to the trio while on the island.

Boyer describes a building similar to this as de la Rocque recalls the architecture from her homeland as she seeks to make her logette on the island more impervious to the weather.

Read Everything. Write Everything, Part 2

Today I stumbled across this.

The topic immediately caught my attention – I’m kind of a fan of aviation, aviation disasters in particular. And then I saw the author – William Langewiesche. I’ve read him before and know him to be knowledgeable on technical issues and an excellent writer to boot.

So I read.

And read.

And read.

I don’t pretend to understand everything, but I read enough to get curious about a few other things he mentions. Such as “Cockroach Corner.” That’s an appellation, as far as I can tell, given to a collection of cut-rate passenger and freight airlines airplane leasing agents, and airplane parts distributors that call a little corner of Miami International Airport home. It’s also called “Collision Corner.” There’s not a lot about either on the Internet, but I read a few things by the deeper aviation enthusiasts to know it’s a place where you can go see the history of aviation still trying to hold together and make people money.

I can find a United Press International article from 1980 that uses the term.

There’s also a blog about “Corrosion Corner,” but it appears to be pretty shiny about the place. Lots of McDonnell Douglas aircraft.

This one is a bit more, ahem, honest.

What does this have to do with me?

Well, I’m writing this book about a guy who makes his own spaceship, flies to Saturn’s moon Iapetus, and settles there. I’ve dodged the question thusfar about how he got there.

Now I see a way, or at least a starting place. A space exploration equivalent to Cockroach Corner. Sounds like it’s got a lot of potential. Potential for humor as well as drama.

So it’s important, boys and girls, for wannabe writers to read a lot. You never know where your inspiration is going to come from.

Read Everything. Write Everything.

I’m reading right now a little book that, in the wider publishing world, would probably never have gone to print.

Not that it’s bad. It’s entertaining. And educational.

But the storytelling therein isn’t a slick or polished as traditional publishing would have it be. So it wouldn’t be a go. It’s the kind of book some of the locals pick up and read because they or a family member or relative may be mentioned in it, but it might lack a wider audience.

Which is wrong. So wrong.

Because everything ought to be written down.

And even if the things written down aren’t as polished as they could be in the hands of another writer, what is preserved could be the germ of an idea. A springboard for a different kind of story. Or a mine for the little details that, say, a big-city writer might not know about small-town life. Or vice-versa.

The book in question is “Life Among the Lava Beds,” by Leonard Stephenson. I picked it up at a local thrift store because a quick glance showed me it was by a semi-local author (I live about two hours north of its setting, lava Hot Springs, Idaho) and I love to read bits by local authors. And in what pages I’ve read I can see a genesis of other Idaho writers, notably Patrick F. McManus, who made a great career retelling stories and exaggerations about his childhood. Stephenson, with a bit more practice and polish, could be southern Idaho’s analog to one of Idaho’s more famous and folksy writers. (The biggest flaw I can see is that there’s a lot of telling, but only a modicum of showing in Stephenson’s stories. With a bit more flair for presentation and a bigger poetic license, he could take his stories a lot farther.)

I’ve got settings and story ideas that could go somewhere. Except I don’t know where to take them. Looking at what authors like Stephenson write can open windows into a different world, one my characters could populate.

And I’m not talking about outright literary theft. That would be dishonest, and a disservice to this author. But I am talking about inspiration and ideas. What kinds of mischief could my characters get up to? So far, I’ve read about Stepehson’s experiences as an eight-year-old on a cattle drive, or being bored to tears helping harvest raspberries. Taken the general idea – cattle drives and berry-picking – gives my characters places to play and expand. Had Stepehnson not written them, and had I not been lucky enough to find his little book, I might not have thought of such ideas.

Is this theft? No. Because if drawing inspiration from other writers is theft, then Mr. Stephenson had better be ready to hear from a lot of other writers who wrote of cattle drives and berry-picking before him. Inspiration is drawing on the bigger ideas or themes. Theft is taking the little details.

It’s quite possible I’ll never be published. But maybe some writer will look at a useless blog posting of mine and find inspiration. That would be neat.

Seeing the Redwoods

They always ask for pictures.

Some are very precise. They want pictures from the Carcassonne Montes. Something from the wall of Basile Crater – as if both were just around the corner.

“Send me something spectacular,” many of them say, unsure of what they want, where on the moon I am, or what wonders they should want to capture.

So I send them something spectacular.

I send them a shot of my view from the toilet.

There, they can see – in most of my refuges – a cot, a cupboard, a robe on a hook. Maybe a spare space suit, some SCBA tanks and whatnot.

And they are, to a person, disappointed.

“Looks like my dorm room,” they say.

“You didn’t even put away your socks,” said another.

A few, they understand.

Had a long talk with a fellow from the middle of America somewhere. He knew.

“I’ve been to the redwoods in California,” he said. “I have hundreds of photos. But looking at those photos, it’s like looking at the world through a window the size of a stamp. The redwoods, they are everywhere. You look straight ahead: Redwoods. You look up: Redwoods. To the left or to the right, you look down, there are trunks, and branches, and roots, and leaves, and the little bits of brush that grow inbetween. You can take a photo, but you never capture a redwood. The only time you can experience a redwood – let alone a redwood forest – is when you’re there, when the dome of your eyes sees only redwoods in branch or trunk or root or leaf.”

“Yes,” I said.

“So Iapteus – “

I touch my head, and my heart.

And we both laugh and roll our eyes at the cuteness of it all.

I do it first – the time lag as we talk means we never do anything together – but I’m getting good at knowing if a response is spontaneous, or if the fart on the other end is just parroting what they see so they can get what they want out of me.

And he knew the line, spoken by a fictitious spaceman: “Space is small. Only the planets are big.”

A Good Source for Anthropomorphic Writers

Anyone hoping to write novels with anthropomorphic animal characters would be greatly served by reading a bit of non-fiction first, namely Temple Grandin’s “Animals in Translation.”

Grandin has spent her career helping make slaughterhouses more humane. That may sound like an odd place to draw from for cutesy behavior in a fantasy novel, but Grandin has focused on animal behavior in her work, and that focus on behavior, particularly the section I’m reading now on what makes animals frightened in ways that humans might not recognize, ought to be a great help for any author wanting to make their anthropomorphic creations more realistic.

That may sound like a contradiction in terms, But wouldn’t it be fun to read more books where animals behave more like animals, even if they’re being used to tell a story humans might be interested in.

Richard Adams, in Watership Down, succeeds at this. He drew on non-fiction in the form of “The Private Life of the Rabbit,” by R.M. Lockley, to write his adventure story of rabbits on an adventure of survival.

I’ve read a lot of these kinds of books, from the early Beatrix Potter and “The Wind in the Willows” to more modern takes, and most of them fall into two categories (which I love very much):

1. Twee animals with clothes on. They are animals, and have a few animal traits, but generally behave like humans.

2. Animals in Tropetude. No clothes, more animal traits, but still wonking along as if they had half-human brains plotting conquest and revenge and whatnot.

A sharp writer with Grandin as a guide could augment the second and make the animals more animal-like as they struggle with the bigger bits of philosophy the writer cares to toss into that particular salad.

I’m reading right now about what Grandin has noticed causes fear in livestock. Don’t know if this translates across the species, but it gives me some things to think about as I write Doleful Creatures, as fear is a primary presence in the book. Reading and implementing what Grandin writes could help me move the book further from Camp 1 to Camp 2. Not that Camp 1 is bad; that’s where the book started out in the first place. But it’s moved to Camp 2 gradually, and I think I like it better there.

The book also gives me a few ideas for The Hermit of Iapetus. The more I think about that character, the more I think he is autistic. And while I have an autistic son to draw inspiration from (and enough from my own life) seeing it in print will also help me better in the translation.

Bonus: Clair de Lune

Stokowski does a fine job with the orchestrations here (in this bit from Fantasia that was cut for time) but I think the original piano is so much better:

This is the one the Hermit of Iapetus would listen to.

The Hermit of Iapetus -- Clair de Lune

On the nights I can't sleep I listen to “Clair de Lune,“ because it relaxes me and stops me from sleeping.

As I listen, the light of Saturn pours through the porthole and leaves a moon-shape on the floor. Night into day and into night, the moon-shape stays the same shape, though over long periods of time it will dim and brighten as Saturn changes from a full squashed circle to a crescent.

The sun, too, casts a moon-shape that grows as Saturn wanes, but it is far dimmer.

Sometimes I put bits of crystal in the Moon-shape, and the light dances on the walls. Or with a mirror I set the light to bouncing off the ceiling, the walls, and through bits of cheesecloth I have hanging near the ventilation shaft.

As I listen, I try to remember the Moon and its light.

I like to think Claude Debussy worked late into the night trying to capture the light of the moon with the ivory and ebony keys. Maybe many nights he watched moonlight slide across the floor over the hardwood and carpet to illuminate the dust bunnies in the corners without writing a note.

I like to think he watched moonlight crawl across lawns and cobblestones, sear through the leaves of trees wobbly in the wind, haunt the clouds on rainy nights.

Then, when he had the piece done, he played it late one night, coaxing the keys but long enough until Madame Debussy came into the room, pissed at her loss of sleep and his thoughtlessness of playing – even quietly – his new rolling tune.

Maybe as she entered the room turned and smiled impishly at her, finished playing, and played it again as the moonlight trickled in through the billowing curtains.

I like to think he played the music for hours, as the moonlight crept across the room and finally up the wall and then faded as the moon set. Maybe neighbors, also roused by the unusual noise, lay in their beds listening to the music and maybe they too watched the moonlight creeping.

Or maybe he and Marie boinked on the carpet on that dusty hardwood as the moonlight continued to play his melody and the neighbors slept lightly, wondering for a few moments if they had heard a tune or if it were just their minds playing tricks in the moonlight.

Either way, it’s only then I, the Hermit of Iapetus, can get some sleep.

And sometimes I wake and my player has nearly exhausted the hundreds of versions it has of the tune and is playing the one by the Russian on a theremin.

And I wonder how one might make music in the vacuum between Iapetus and Earth.

The Easter Bunny

I’m not a perennial optimist; I think I’m more the fatalist – what’s written is written and I don’t know what it is. On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong in acting as if things will work out. I mean, if I tell my wife I believe in the Easter bunny – well, why not? Either he exists or he doesn’t and I choose to believe. I think that is much more pleasant. But if you really cornered me, I’d have to admit reluctantly that there is no Easter bunny.

Michael Collins, p. 174 First on the Moon

“Bernie.”

“Yeah?”

“Ever listen to those old recordings?”

“Which ones?”

“Apollo.”

“The Moon landing? Yeah.”

The Hermit of Iapetus shifted in his seat and sneezed. A fine dust dribbled from a crack in the ceiling, particles floating in the Brownian motion of the chill refuge. “Not the Moon landing. That’s too dramatic. I mean the bits in between the excitement.”

“Can’t say that I have,” Bernie replied.

“You should. Did you know their air pressure was too low for them to whistle? Wally Schirra had enough air to play the harmonica, but Aldrin – he couldn’t whistle.”

“No whistling on the way to the Moon. Tragic.”

“We take it for granted,” the hermit said. He took a sharp breath – more dust shook from the crack in the ceiling – and whistled a long, sharp note.

Bernie, in the Mars/Titan express above, had to remove his headphones as the note blasted through space like an iron rock. “Mission Control probably did that on purpose,” he muttered. “You almost cost me an eardrum.”

“We’ve never met, Bernie.”

“That’s true. I don’t even know your name.”

They both laughed. Saturn joined in, buffeting their radio frequency with a burst of static.

“How do you know I exist?”

“I hear you just fine,” Bernie said.

“That can’t be enough. I could be a figment of your imagination.”

“No,” Bernie said. “My imagination isn’t this dull.”

“A charlatan.”

“Come again?”

“I could be spoofing you, Bernie. I say I’m on Iapetus, but I could be –“

“No, you couldn’t,” Bernie said. “Because when we talk – at least on this part of my milk run – there’s no delay. Communication with Earth, the Moon – there’s a delay. Noticeable, but bearable. A little less of a delay with Mars. But with you, when Saturn’s big in my window, there’s no delay. Maybe you’re not on Iapetus, but you’re clearly in the neighborhood.”

The Hermit paused.

“Clever,” Bernie said. “But you’ll never be consistent enough. I have an ear for it.”

The Hermit laughed. “Charlatans could do it,” he said.

“That I don’t doubt. But why?”

“Does a charlatan need a reason?”

“I guess not. But there is other evidence.”

All quiet on the radio.

“I have a telescope here. Just for fun,” Bernie said. “For looking at things. Sometimes when I’m close enough to a moon, the rings, or whatever, I watch. I’ve been close enough to Iapetus to see.”

The Hermit looked up at his cracked ceiling.

“Tracks?”

“Greypeace is pretty upset about it. You’re a menace to Iapetean wilderness.”

“And how do they know?”

“They’re pretty anxious to buy the pictures I take.”

“Thanks for that, brother.”

“Hey, I do what I can. I tell them you don’t actually exist.”

“You do?”

“Sure. Because I’ve never actually seen you. You hide well.”

“And the tracks?”

“Aw, they could be anything.”

There was only one path he followed regularly. The one out to the plana. The one out to Her. He balled his fist and pounded the table lightly, making the microphone dance. “How much do you get per picture?”

This time, Bernie paused.

“Bernie?”

The only sound: Iapetus itself, where the moonquakes make the sound of fresh cheese curds.

“Bernie?”

Silence. Suddenly silent as the Easter bunny.

“Sorry. Talking with Titan,” Bernie said.

The Hermit jumped at the sound.

“What was your question?”

“Never mind,” the Hermit said.

Iapetus Sings

Is Iapetus silent?

No. Iapetus is not. Iapetus sings.

That is when people tend to gather ‘round, with that “listen to the madman” look on their faces.

So I oblige. I tell them a story.

Imagine you’re on a bus. A buss rolling gently on a smooth, straight highway through the dark. You’re seated near the rear of the bus, not surrounded by other riders. But there are other riders. Some, in these winter pre-dawn hours, are asleep. A few snore gently, some bathed in the gentle breeze of a blower from the ceiling, others not.

So you have snoring. You have the breeze blowing.

Others on the bus are awake. Some sit in the dark and stare out at the dark rolling by. There is little to see. Not even the stripe on the side of the road, as since it is winter, the stripe is mostly covered up by packed snow.

Add the rumbling squeak of tires on snow.

Those not staring out the windows are tapping away at their phones, their faces illuminated by the glow form their tiny screens. But as you’re at the back of the bus, you do not see faces. You see the diffused glow. Some of them are watching videos, others are listening to music. They all do so with their headphones on. But their volume is loud so from those nearest you, you hear the tinny sounds.

So add muted music, laughter, dialogue.

You yourself are sleepy. You’re not staring out the window, nor are you tapping on a phone or listening to music. You’re half asleep and sometimes you do fall asleep and snore – not gently.

Now add the sound of you snorting yourself awake.

Take away those sounds, you have the sound of Iapetus.

Add those sounds, you have the sound of yourself on Iapetus.

But there is no rolling bus. There is no blowing breeze. There are neither snorers nor listeners of music.

There is you. And the sounds you make or the sounds your brain brings to the silence of Iapetus so the long silence of Iapetus doesn’t cause you to become startled at the sound of your own voice.

Those listening squirm with the frisson of listening to a lunatic.

One skeptic speaks: “But you said Iapetus sings.”

“I did,” I say. “And it does.”

“But you just—“

“Here is the song.”

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight!

Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!

And I sing.

The crowd gets confused, but leans in even closer to the singing lunatic.

Sometimes there is a student of ancient television in the crowd who recognizes the song.

“Iapetus,” they sneer, “sings the theme for ‘Laverne and Shirley’?”

“Only in my head,” I reply. “Iapetus itself is silent.”

I may as well be on Trafalmadore.

That Lonely Hermit

There are days nothing comes out.

And I could say I feel empty, but there is something there. The stomach gurgles. The liver does what livers do. The heart pumps and the blood circulates and the brain, oh, the brain is never empty. The brain is a cavalcade of cartoons I watched when I was five, six, seven. Random bits of high school ephemera – Hey everyone! I’m reliving the day I failed that test in chemistry, watch as I fail to place more than 20 elements in the correct position on the periodic table!

Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon . . . then something about the noble gases in a column. Argon and xenon and such. And forget the transuranic elements in their neat, out-of-place rows. I certainly did.

The brain is never empty.

It’s a replay. It’s “What’s My Line.”

Why was Dorothy Kilgallen famous anyway?

Columnist, journalist, and game show panelist. A reality star before reality television.

She’s now a rising star in my post-reality television show, scrolling endlessly in my brain.

If you want time to pass slowly, be alone.

Have plenty of things to do. Because in ideless, being alone doesn’t make time pass faster.

Have things to do. And do them. You’ll get them done, alone.

And time will pass slowly.

There’s never enough to do when you’re alone. So you invent things to do, often to the detriment of the things you should do. That’s why, in part, some of my refuges have crumbled and are no longer habitable. But I am the best organizer of unimportant paperwork in the outer solar system.

Oh, paperwork finds you, even in the digital age. And just like the transuranic elements, they cry to be ordered properly in the ur-space where they should not exist lest they push radon and the supposed oganesson out of their tidy columns. Organize your papers, you organize the universe. Einstein said that. Or at least should have.

Or maybe it was Mr. Waite, the chemistry teacher, who said it. He may have said it to me, after grading that quiz on the periodic table.

See me now, Mr. Waite. My life depends on others’ knowledge of chemistry in making the machines that make my food and air. And lucky I am that they knew where to keep their transuranic elements. But I repair the machines and sometimes tweak the code, trying to find that right mix of chemicals to feed me but not give me space-gas, which I’m told is a problem not uncommon in the outer solar system where I live.

I owe a great deal to Wally. Wally lives on Titan, and repairs the food replicators there. He passes on to me bits of code of his own invention, and updates from the corporate mongrels who refuse to help me because I stole one of their machines rather than bought it. He speculated the deuterium-heavy water I produce on Iapetus may contribute to my excessive gassiness. But he is no chemist. He is a fiddler, a coder, and tinkerer, and organizer of paperwork like me, except he falls to either side of the crack, not into it to dwell with me.

“There are worse things to smell than fart,” he reminds me.

Yet there are still days nothing comes out.

“It’s all in the code,” Wally says. “Sometimes the best thing you can do with the code is to futz with the numbers. It’s only food, so what can go wrong? Get too farty, unload the Sulphur, or stop eating the eggs.”

He also sent me Hanna Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. “You’re in danger of becoming a cult of one,” he said. Though he didn’t say why. Because I have not cut myself off from others. Except by distance.

And there’s that pesky matter of time.

Because even Wally, not far distant on Titan, is still millions of miles away physically. But save he construct or commandeer a craft, he may as well be in the Trappist system, orbiting Betelgeuese, or in heaven or hell for that matter. He cannot get to me except via radio waves, which still take minutes to arrive.

And they limit his free radio time.

I point out he’s likely member of a cult, too.

“At least my air doesn’t smell like a fart,” he replied. “Most days.”

Loneliness, Arendt says: “the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”

Yet I was alone on a planet populated by billions.

Life Held Home

On February 22, 2017, all eyes turned to TRAPPIST-1.

And then squinted a lot. Because this star, you can’t see it. It likes about 40 light years away in the constellation Aquarius.

The water-bearer. Remember that.

Because orbiting TRAPPIST-1, NASA has identified 7 planets, three of which may be warm enough to be home to liquid water.

The planets orbit in a tight group around their star, all well within a circle representing the orbit of the planet Mercury, in a clumpy, resonant configuration similar to that of the Galilean moons of Jupiter.

And I’m not surprised at all.

And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose; and by the Son I created them, which is mine Only Begotten.

Moses 1:33

We know there are worlds out there. That some have been found is exciting. But not surprising.

And yet so distant.

Who can visit them? No one, not form our solar system. Not with our present technology, not with our present lifespans. We haven’t been back to Earth’s own Moon for more than 50 years, and it lies a mere 248,000 miles away. The fastest objects ever created – the Voyager and Pioneer Probes, along with New Horizons – are barely beyond the orbit of Pluto, or barely beyond the shock wave that marks the beginning of interstellar space.

We are no closer to these planets than were our ancestors, starting up at the lights in the sky and watching them dance.

And it does not make me melancholy. Because they are not ours to have.

Nor are our planets for others, perhaps looking up at our distant star, much bigger than theirs. They may imagine life in a hostile solar system, where the light and energy put out by our star is so much more intense than theirs. Maybe they look at that third, possibly the fourth planet, as places where water and life may exist.

But they, too, never will visit. All life is held home by the vastness of the spaces between the stars.