Stars (Draft 3)

"[The heavens] is more the domain of science than poetry. But it's the stars as not known to science that I would know, the stars which the lonely traveler knows."

--Henry David Thoreau

Bradley cried as he stole the rocketship. The world had all become too, too much, and now it was time to demand some answers.

            He wasn’t so sure that his head was meant to bounce around inside his helmet this much. His eyes flitted toward the rearview mirror to see if anyone was trailing him…except there was no rearview mirror. This is a rocketship, genius. It wasn’t like stealing a car. He just hoped it would be as easy to park as one.

            Best not to think of that. Better to focus on what would come after.

            What would the aliens tell him when he got there? What would they look like? Would they come at all?

            Three months ago, only an hour or so after he’d gotten word that his best friend of 27 years had been killed in a war that nobody could explain, Bradley had sent the aliens a star chart marking coordinates and a time. Three months should be enough time for the aliens to receive his transmission, select a committee to make the journey, pack supplies, and reach the marked destination. Definitely should be.

            His rocket ripped out of the atmosphere and into the vacant universe surrounding the Earth. He yanked off his helmet and hit some buttons, some of them the right ones and some of them the wrong ones—his hands (and indeed his entire body) were still quaking even though the ship had stopped jiggling around. He set the rocket to drift.

            He wiped his tears on his nylon space sleeve. “Aye, my life,” he moaned, leaning against the back of his seat, looking up to where the roof was riveted on. “Just make the emptiness stop.”

            The emptiness. The meaningless.

            He’d felt since he was a child that the world was meaningless, but he knew that couldn’t be true because then why all the bother? There had to be someone who had the answers to the universe, knew what life was all about, and since that someone sure as hell didn’t seem to be on Earth, at age seven, he began asking the stars for answers.

            You see, there are other stars, stars not known to science, stars that only the loneliest of little boys can see. And around them orbit handsome worlds, and around those, vast space stations and starcraft docks.

            Well, okay, so that may be science fiction. More likely, their worlds were like nothing anyone on Earth had ever imagined. And any aliens able to pick up and translate his message from across space would be supreme to his own race. They probably knew all about Earth and its confused little people. With such emotional intelligence, on top of their intellect, they wouldn’t hesitate to dull the pain of futility they all felt by imparting on them their understanding of the universe. They probably looked out their bedroom windows at the Earth and its yellow sun and wished there was a way to tell them just one little thing that would make life seem less empty. If only they had the opportunity. It only made sense.

            Bradley’s map pointed the aliens toward a specific spot on a moon. The Earth’s moon, to be exact.

            All right, so the rendez-vous point wasn’t exactly the halfway mark, but the moon was as far as Bradley could make it on a tank of gas in a stolen rocket. Surely the aliens would understand his limitations and view his attempt to get as close as he could as a kind gesture.

            Bradley fired some thrust out one side to pivot the rocket so he could view the moon in his window. It wouldn’t take long to get there in this machine. He flipped a switch to turn on some Brahms and he pulled out a packet of chips he’d stuffed under the seat as soon as he had gotten safely off the base.

            He hummed all the way to the moon.

Landing a rocket with no atmosphere but just enough gravity to irritate turned out to be about as difficult as Bradley foresaw it to be. The rocket did something of a skid and, with little friction to slow it, carried on skidding nearly forever.

            When he finally parked, he pulled on his helmet and went to the airlock. He’d landed quite a hike from where he’d meant to, but he had plenty of time before his meet.

            There was no sound on the moon, not even that desolate wind sound. There was no wind. Things only blew around by inertia, and right now there was a whole cloud of colorless dust escaping into space, kicked up from his landing.

            There was no such thing as one small step on the moon because every footlift was tethered to some invisible marionette string, yanking his knee toward his chest. The bareness of this world saddened him. Why was something as pointless as the moon here? A waste of space, like most of the other rocks orbiting the sun, the Earth no exception, really.

            Finally, he reached the crater he’d marked on the map. He sat down to wait. He wished he could eat more chips.

            He looked out into the sky, at the stars, at the Earth, and thought of Joanne, and Darren, and Robbie, and Susan, and Rory, and Nick, and Jessica, all the people he had left behind, but mostly all the people who had left him.

            “I got to know,” he told the stars. His voice bounced back at him inside his helmet. He turned a dial on his wrist so that he could broadcast outward on all wavelengths. “You don’t know what it’s been like, to go about our lives, losing everything and everyone day by day and not understanding why. My wife left me last year, the one person in the whole world I thought I understood. I thought she was happy, but I don’t know anything. I don’t think I ever did.” He sniffled and wished he could wipe away the tear inside his helmet.

            A shape blacked out the stars. Bradley gasped and stood up. Was it a spaceship in the distance?

            He moved left, trying to make out its shape against the sky.

            The blackness covered the ground. Shadow? No. The shape was close. His eyes were playing tricks. It wasn’t a spaceship in the distance. Something had already landed. Something was here. Right in front of him!

            “You came!” Bradley stepped back, unsure if the creature, if it was a creature, was moving toward him. He couldn’t get his eyes focused on its shape. “Why can’t I see you?”

            The alien’s emptiness blocked out the ground and the sky behind it, but it showed no features of its own. Bradley wasn’t even sure it was facing him.

            “Can you see me?” he waved his arm out. “Oh, I’ve heard about this in quantum mechanics. The brain can’t see anything it doesn’t understand. You must look so different than us! Can you see me? Look.” He stepped forward and thrust his arms out, but the alien didn’t respond.

            “Can you hear me? Are you picking up my transmission?” Bradley asked. “If you can hear me, I, uh, just want to tell you how much I appreciate you coming. It means a lot to all of us to know, you know…everything. You can hear me, can’t you?”

            The shadow made no indication.

            Bradley dropped to his knees, or rather, leaned himself down into the sparse gravity. “Please. I’ve been crying out to you since I was seven. I came all this way. Please tell me you can hear me.”

            His ears tingled like he’d been listening to loud music.

            “Was that you…speaking?” he asked. “Please try again. I’m sure if I concentrate—” He stood up. This was going to be it. All the answers mankind had been searching for. What was worth all the pain?

            More ringing in his head, and then “All.”

            “All?” Bradley asked, stepping forward. “One more time, please. I’ll listen harder. I’ll hear you this time.”

            Then through the tinnitus-rattled sound waves vibrating in Bradley’s speakers, he heard what the alien had come all this way to say, what it had whispered at the Earth for years from its bedroom window, just hoping an Earthling would hear: “Please, what does it all mean?”