the solar windmill - concluded
The Solar Windmill - part three:
They say that nature abhors a vacuum and man is but a part of nature and so as Eva tumbled out into the dark of space her mind amplified the sound of every breath, every heartbeat and as she watched the silvery material spreading out below her, watched its glistening ululations, she heard again the sound of sails.
"It's ghosts of course," Leb had said matter-of-factly, "people are scared of them."
He waved a dismissive hand and Eva scowled since in the confined space of the cabin he could just as well have been waving at her.
"Ghosts?" She turned on her side awkwardly in the stickiness of the bunk where they had made functional love just before, proving to themselves that they could still fit well together like pieces of machinery. The blinking fluorescent lights breaking their movements down into a weird hebephrenic stutter.
Leb ran a hand through the gray shock of his hair and Eva knew by his expression that he was missing the guilty pleasure of a cigarette. Contraband that risky was just not an option on the Cardenal.
"There was an ancient saying you know," Leb continued, his eyes unfocused, "behind every man stands thirty ghosts..."
Eva poked him, "How many for a woman?" She asked.
"Hmm?" It was Leb's turn to scowl. "Pretty academic in this day and age," he said, "gender division like that."
"A man would say that." Eva sighed. "But - did you have a point? Ghosts, what fucking ghosts?"
Being short had advantages, she was on the inner side of the bunk and curled as she was could probably send Leb sprawling if she chose to.
Wouldn't be the first time.
"People…" Leb chose his own cue, "are followed by ghosts - the fear of them, the past, its guilt or failures. How many times have you read about 'the haunted space station, or whatever, even today - I mean, still?
These sorts of lurid tales spread like..." he considered for a moment, glancing at the rumpled bunk, caught Eva's 'let's not go there' expression. "Like a wake." he concluded, "I mean the vapoury kind, not the, you know, funerals."
Eva sighed again. And Leb knew her attention span was reaching its limits.
"Well but it's true," he gabbled quickly, "people on the beam are always saying 'I saw my dead wife, I met my mother, my dead... dog - whatever. And that idea scares people and attracts them. We all have ghosts." He angled his head looking down at her, "Even you Eva."
Ghosts.
“The past?” Eva was hunting for her vest burrowing into the sheets.
“Yeah, the past.”
“I don’t believe in it,” she said.
The past was just another electronic fiction; she'd seen that well enough in the pictures and holograms in the station, none of it real. Certainly not to her, time was distance, a straight forward equation - but from where, what was the starting point when you had no past? She could remember only hazily, the blank yards of the correction centre and the orphans’ college. The irony was that her hard won scholarship had bought her ticket out of the state machinery, and into a world that she’d done all she could to pull away from. She missed the blank clarity of before.
And yet -
sails -
something was... and her mind kept tracking backwards, remembering Mars, remembering the city.
But hadn't she made them both into fictions?
Maybe, maybe... but they could not be so easily disposed of.
Was that why she was here? Was it really that simple, that ordinary? She felt embarrassed to be so normal, so average and so introverted.
Distractions.
Out here distractions could be lethal, a million dangers that she wasn't paying enough attention to, Air lines, suit pressure, watching that she didn't snag herself on an aerial or other sort of projection, taking care not put a foot into an open wire port or split the sail she was testing, snap one of the delicate spindles - or just move wrong and find herself sprawling into that infinite she was so resolutely not acknowledging around her.
Concentrate.
The smell of creosote, the smell of peat, the lapping of water… a pair of warm calloused hands and a voice just as warm, murmuring, incomprehensible.
Concentrate!
Her mouth was set in a line. There was a pain in her jaw from clenching it. Good. Use the pain.
Carefully adjusting the air flow into her respirator and adding more coolant into the veins of the suit.
That helped too.
Staring down at the ridged edges of the solar sail and then along to the remote arm. It's fine. The test was fine - just like the practice sessions, the hours put in were paying off - almost too well if she wasn't being 100% committed.
It's fine. The test is done. Go back inside now. Keep it simple, don't think, glob glob glob... Go back inside.
Using her left hand as steering aid Eva turned herself about and slowly climbed back down and in through the open iris of the observation area.
She reached out and pulled the lever closing the portal.
Done. First test over.
Her hands were slithering over the control dials and she watched red lights turn green. Forcing herself to do every action slowly she removed her helmet, next the lining and at last the respirator. She took deep shuddery breaths of the newly pumped air (thank the Nanos!) and ran her hands through her sweat matted hair.
God. What had happened to her?
It doesn't matter, there’s a job to do - so do it. She looked over to the glowing units by the main desk, the jewelled glitter from the monitors and panel boards transforming the stark place into a grotto. She was aware now of a rising ambient hum, computers coming on-line, the whir of servos and relays.
The station was active, she and the nanos had done their work, done the work well -Eva told herself, trying to hold on to the sense of achievement.
Just the Nanos and I.
She went over it like a list, the training, the flight, and the hoops she'd had to jump through at every stage just to get here.
Came in at the low airlock, worked my way up the maintenance shafts to the core and then control.
The windmill was shaped something like a tooth brush with an oversized grip where the temporary generators and maintenance areas were. The core was a bump on the side, something like a switch and right now Eva was sat just below the 'head'. When the sails were unfolded they would spread across that top area before lifting on the main arm out from the body at an acute angle and once they were working the internal generators would go off-line, the nanos would sleep and Eva could send the signal bringing up the mechs and their feed lines to start the transfer of energy.
It would take a while but Eva had stressed that the station held the potential to be more than just anther interesting museum piece, it could regain its former functionality, could be useful.
And so could she.
Moving more naturally now - and with a building sense of exhilaration - Eva began to flip the key manual switches that would allow the sails to open fully, her eyes scanned the flow of information coming in, noting the forecast speed and density of radiation pressure, the calculation of lightness.
A few more minutes and it would be time for the final spacewalk to set the sails in wide motion.
Achievement.
Taking a hypo from a lining pocket she shot the nutrient content into a patch on the back f her hand. After all the exertion, the climb and the effort of straining over long disused handles and levers, not to mention the exhaustion caused by her own wayward mind, the nutrients were needed.
She took a saliva gel and rubbed a little on her gums until she could feel spit in her mouth once again.
She swallowed gratefully, but her throat was sore.
She wondered where Leb was, just quickly, but he was most likely busy being entertained over at the star-house among the astronaut hopefuls and the media crew. Maybe he was already sleeping with one of them. She wouldn’t begrudge that, never did. It was an uneasy thought suddenly that perhaps she should try to care more. Anyway, he'd be enjoying himself; the specifics of Eva's mission meant little to him.
Or he hid his enthusiasm well.
Could he actually be looking up over the rim of a tumbler and out through some viewport watching the appearance of a new bright point in the stellar black and knowing it meant Eva had done what she set out to do, reactivate the solar mill.
It wasn't typical of her to wonder about these things but all the same...
Maybe he'd come back with some treats, brandy or cognac and cigarettes. That would be perfect. She wanted a cigarette now so badly.
And she deserved one. She felt, finally, deserving. And this was why she shut so much of herself down. Deserving... compared to whom exactly? And useful - to who?
She had no feeling of belonging to the people, certainly not as The People, humankind in some removed sense.
Selfish then? No, it wasn't that. Or rather just - semantics, everything ended in words and she didn't like words. Language. She was still trying to escape that, to find some silence from -
Enough, Eva. Enough of this going in circles and circles. She rubbed her face. It was warm, alive, the flesh on the side of her neck jumped at the pulse.
There was still some exhilaration there - some adrenalin. Good.
She picked up her helmet and checked it was dry. The mechanism for draining and capturing perspiration worked better when it wasn't being worn. Cool. Ok.
She struggled back into it, layer by layer.
And she was ready.
Once more she opened the eye of the station. Reaching out she caught the edge and shifted her body, rising upwards, out. And she was in space.
For a moment Eva expected to panic - but the vertigo she might have worried about never came, even though she could no longer blot out the reality of what was around her, the emptiness. She was not engulfed.
Instead, and just as she had done in the training pool, she hoisted herself onto the carry frame and moved slowly to the centre of the dish where the main sails lay folded like the wings of some fantastic moth. Peering down she could see the long manual rod and stretching caught the end pulling it upward toward her.
Releasing it she also let go of the frame control and the mechanism retreated avoiding the tips of the expanding sails by a whisper. Eva watched them opening, silvery patches of dark.
The frame caught the buffer and she inched herself around using the momentum to carry across to the upright external console, checking that the sails were timed right, that everything was in synch as the man arm extended from the station and the sails rose up and out beyond her.
She was looking at her gauntlet covered hands, there on the controls when she remembered her dream, her memory - the hands. It was a realisation so obvious that it took her breath away.
Her Grandmother’s hands.
It was as if a door, an airlock had opened wide, the past beckoning to her as the stars had done. And it was no longer into darkness for there was the sun now, rising precisely as it should to flare brilliance over the sails, washing everything with light, rippled and reflecting. Eva was bathed in it.
And suddenly there was a song on her lips, a song in her ears,
"When the sun comes up..."
Those old words no longer incomprehensible, no longer alien, that old nursery rhyme in her Grandmother's tongue, her voice like the wind between the trees, her face and its kindly furrows lit by the first rays of morning as the sun touched her.
"When the sun comes up, comes up, comes up
We'll go a-riding when the sun comes up."
Singing to Eva and Eva singing along.
"And it's a giddy-up Horsey, giddy-up!
We'll go a-riding when the sun comes up."
The old song and the old face together suddenly remembered, rescued and repaired.
Done it then, done it and smiling - with each unfurling sail, done it and smiling; and for an instant she might catch her reflection, beautiful upon the silvery foil, beautiful in the mirror of the sails.
..............
The End.
..................
about this story:
This story was originally supposed to be a quick riff written to the one-word prompt 'windmill' and was supposed to accompany two others. However as i started trying to scribble it down i could see it was turning into something else, Babylon Dutch in Space' maybe, or 'The Sleep Facility Returns!' - and so i tried to make some of the links between this and the other stories clear.
For this reason (and many others), i apologize for not really saying anything new - but it was a chance to clarify some of the elements i thought had maybe been lost in the previous attempts.
I hope it has been worth reading. And thanks again to those who inspired or encouraged this. It's your own fault - m'wha ha ha! *evil laugh*