The Empty Head

Brief Interlude

In The Glass Desert

So far it had gone by the numbers. He was the ace pilot and space junky, mixing it up with star cowboys, women in tight vinyl spacesuits, wormholes, death rays, whatever. But he was getting careless and the stars don't forgive—it's not in their nature. So one day they catch him—throw him down with freezing kisses. Once they belonged only to Van Vogt, to Heinlein, to Asimov. But they've grown since then. Now they betray him, deal him out of the game, and he fish-flops, waterless, stunned...

Dauntless wakes to blue dawn and a weird electric hum in his ears. The hum is constant and Dauntless, semi-conscious, hates it. It's ruining a very dreamlike and comfortable death spiral. After a moment he realizes it isn't going to be that easy. He blinks, grit shifting into his eyes. Sprawled on a hard smooth surface, the noise comes via bone conduction and vibrates in sympathy with the wind, the endless bitch-moan of solitude.

Holy shit he is lying on a sea of glass.

Miles of shimmering transparency, a white hot glare. Huge twin suns. Vistas of unending flatness giving way to orange mountains in the far distance, ending in pale rose peaks. He is naked and hungry as hell. He sits up. A very tiny part of him still wants to live. Being an Earthman, he suspects it's the part that wants to have sex again someday.

The last thing he remembers is the warp and thinking the red-shift looks all wrong. Then everyone is screaming and punching controls, and what sounds like his mother's voice, or a thousand voices of people he'd known all swirled and stuck together. Seems like they are laying down some pretty heavy shit but Dauntless, he just can't fit his mind around it.

A shriek like the scream of tearing metal but maybe that is him.

The cargo is 10 kilos of Verve, a rare drug much prized by the colonists of a certain planet in the Sirius sector. It carries such a ridiculously high price that he cuts corners, charts a course through unknown space. "You fucked up, asshole!" he tells himself. The thought cuts him like a knife. He almost never fucks up and that's why he is the fucking Captain.

Now his ass is on fire. Sunburn. He wonders how long he's been lying there and why it's just his ass. He sighs, gets to his feet, starts walking towards the nearest of the mountain peaks. An hour goes by and it looks no closer. He spits orange. The dust is everywhere, like a fine skin over the glass. His lungs begin to ache. Oxygen, oxygen. The pressure is too low. This planet is trying to kill me.

But I don't fucking do planets anymore, he argues.

Much later: A purple dusk. Burning thirst. His throat like sandpaper. A single sun now, drifting lazily toward the horizon. He is crawling, slithering like a snake for some damn reason. He giggles, a thin sound. "I'm going crazy." He briefly considers contacting the Justice League. No problem, he figures. They'll probably send Green Lantern. He knows Green Lantern can survive in space—that his amazing power ring, properly charged, has a thousand useful functions. Except that Dauntless can't remember how to go about it, or if he needs a signal device or something, which he doesn't have. They are probably all dead now anyway. All except Superman who is a Kryptonian.

He gets to his knees. The mountains are closer now but not close enough. A theory begins to coalesce in his brain like the drying skin of a chocolate pudding. It's a theory he fervently believes in for no apparent reason: that he is an afterimage, a snapshot the universe had taken, a sort of cosmic computer file. Eventually he will be deleted in favor of more important data. It comforts him somehow because it makes absolutely no sense. This is the end, he thinks.

“Hello, Captain.” It is the cyborg, Pew. Chromed studs on his face and arms like metal acne. On his back the ROM lozenge gives off a faint hum and the smell of hot plastic.

“What happened?”

“Anomoly of some kind. Guidance went offline and you threw us into stasis; landed on this rock okay, minimal damage. Think you inhaled too much of that crash foam, Captain. Must've wandered off while the rest of us were unconscious, that's what I figure.”

So Pew is his new Green Lantern. And Dauntless is still young, alive—still wants everything. He plunges down corridors of memory, thinks of the day when a Rocketship first stole him from Earth, orange flame spurting from it's tail, rising like a giant silver penis tearing the soft airy folds of blue sky and white cloud to deliver him into the black womb he now calls home. But oh hell he must remember not to trust the stars anymore.

Return to Micro-Fiction