Ioan Bălan — 2346

Convergence T-plus 29 days, 22 hours, 15 minutes
(Castor–Lagrange transmission delay: 30 days, 14 hours, 36 minutes)

The dinner that Do I Know God After The End Waking had prepared for them was…rustic. That was the first term that ey had come up with to describe it, and no matter how else Ioan tried to refine it, ey was left with little else that fit.

It was a venison stew with parsnips and onions, thickened with tack and stretched with some barleycorns. ‘Woodsy’ was not quite the right word, and neither was ‘simple’, for the skunk had spent the better part of an hour doting over the cast-iron pot he’d hung over a low fire, adding salt in what Ioan felt were miserly pinches, as well as pepper and nutmeg as though they were the most precious items in the world to him.

When asked where he got the spices, barley, and tack in a forest, the skunk had laughed, shaken his head, and said, “I am not a fucking ascetic, Ioan,” then gone back to cooking.

So, rustic stew it was.

Very, very good rustic stew. End Waking had explained that, as he had no way to store leftovers, they would need to finish the entire pot that night. It turned out to be no stretch for the small gathering — Ioan and May, Debarre, Time Is A Finger Pointing At Itself, Douglas, and End Waking himself — as they all went back for seconds. The ranger skunk even swirled in a little extra water once the pot was empty, using a fingerpad to wipe what stew remained down into that to make himself a thin soup to finish out of the battered mug he’d been using as a bowl for the night.

They’d each brought their own contribution for the night, as well. After dinner, A Finger Pointing pulled out a bottle of over-proof white whiskey that they passed around the circle, taking burning sips. Ioan and May brought with them a short, two-person play that they put on for the other four, full of crude jokes and self-deprecating humor. Douglas, having picked up music as a hobby since uploading, performed a trio with three instances, one on flute, one on a mandolin, and one on a cajón.

For his part, Debarre had brought fireworks. Or a firework, at least. The weasel produced a double fist-sized sphere of papier-mâché, and set it atop a small cylinder right next to the fire. With End Waking watching, hawklike, he directed everyone to stand back a few feet and lit the fuse with a small punk from the fire, explaining, “I’ve been working on this for the last seventy years or so. It’s only about fifty percent possible outside the System, but my excuse is that I never saw fireworks out there so I can do whatever the fuck I want.”

The firework lifted off the cylinder it had been set on top of with surprising grace. Rather than rocketing into the air, it rose slowly, splitting in half a few inches up and rising in a tight helix, the weasel explaining that the propellant was tightly controlled to allow such, until it was hovering about three meters above the fire on a column of sparks as orange as those of the fire itself. From there, small spheres of cool-blue sparks popped free and danced around it in slow, hypnotic whorls. Finally, in a fountain of green fire, billowing into the shape of a tree, it fell back into the campfire with a hissing sigh to be consumed by the flames.

“Out-fucking-classed,” A Finger Pointing grumbled. “You said ‘bring something’, my dear, so I brought a bottle to drink, and you all bring plays and music and fireworks.”

“You will hear no complaints from me,” End Waking said, grinning toothily. “Do you know how long it has been since I have had whiskey?”

She laughed and shook her head. “I will bring you a case next time.”

The skunk shook his head. “I am enjoying the ability to taste something again after years without. I have missed it and that makes it special.”

“Sap.”

He rolled his eyes and made a rude gesture at her.

A Finger Pointing fit neatly into the pattern of a human Michelle, though over the centuries, she had opted for a form that was a little taller, a little slimmer, and bore more heavily styled hair. More chic, perhaps. She was prone to grand gestures and grand outfits in all black or all gray or all red. She had also leaned into hedonism more so than any of the other Odists Ioan had met. She ate heartily, drank more than all of them — though this mostly manifested as a ruddy glint to her cheeks and a more wicked grin than usual — and brought with her a very comfortable-looking camp chair.

Even having worked with her for nearly a decade as a playwright and under her direction as an actor for the last few years, ey continually found emself surprised by her simple desire to enjoy life, put on good plays, and be friends with everyone she could. It was a simplicity that was lacking from so many of her cocladists that ey’d had a chance to meet.

“Do you wish that you had the chance to meet them?” End Waking said, once the fire had been stoked back up to stave off the deepening darkness.

“The Artemisians?”

He nodded.

“Kind of, yeah,” She said. “I was pleased to hear that bit about how important they find stories, so I would like the chance to hear some directly from them and see what they think of ours.”

“And you, my dear?”

Debarre shrugged. His and End Waking’s on-again-off-again relationship seemed to be back on the rise, and so the skunk and weasel shared a seat on the log, tails draped across each other’s. So stoic was the Odist, though, that while this was the only outward sign of affection between the two, it came off far sweeter than Ioan would have otherwise expected, especially given his cocladist’s constant touch in eir own relationship. Ey’d certainly never heard the skunk use ‘my dear’ with anyone else. Ey reveled in the compersion ey felt for them.

“I’ve never been a huge fan of sci-fi,” the weasel said. “I suppose it’d be neat, but it feels really out there. I mean, I’m obviously excited, and I’d love to meet them, but it all sounds more like a fantasy than anything, so I’m not too put out.”

“Ioan?” the skunk asked.

Ey shrugged after a moment’s thought. “I’m lucky. I get to share all the good stuff with you all direct from a cocladist. I wouldn’t turn down the chance to meet them, but I’m also happy with this.”

“Why?”

Ioan frowned. “Why am I happy with just this?”

“Yes.”

“I think because the part of my life spent right in the thick of it is over. I’m a different person, now. I’ve grown, changed. I’ve moved away from the Ioan who sat and watched as eir job. I’m a different me, now. I’m happy with being excited from a distance. I’m happy with the romance of it all.”

May, tucked firmly against eir side, dotted her nose on eir cheek. “Different kind of nerd.”

“Pretty much, yeah.” Ey laughed. “Besides, Codrin said they’ve been bandying about the idea that none of it’s real, that they’ve been dreaming the whole thing. I’m more curious to see that play out than actually experience meeting the Artemisians.”

“It does not matter,” End Waking said.

“What?”

“It does not matter whether or not it actually exists. If there is no ship named Artemis full of four races of aliens, the world which exists within Castor is still a new and interesting one. It is still a world worth exploring.” The skunk shrugged. “The question of their existence beyond Castor is purely academic.”

“Well, huh,” ey said. “I’ll have to pass that on to Codrin#Castor, then. Perhaps it’ll ease some anxieties.”

End Waking nodded, then continued around the circle. “How about you, May Then My Name?”

“A part of me wishes I had the chance, but it is a small part. The rest of me is smug in my decision to remain behind preventing me from doing so. I cannot change that decision and go meet them, and that in and of itself is exciting, is it not?”

The other skunk turned his gaze on Douglas.

“I think I’m probably the outlier here, in that I was — or am — kind of crushed by the fact that I won’t be able to meet them, even if they aren’t real.” He poked the tip of a stick at the base of the fire. “Here I am, someone who spent eight years in university studying spaceflight, someone who did all he could to specialize in the System, and I’m stuck reading second-hand accounts of a five thousand year old civilization flying through space on a system of their own. I got over my frustration at having not uploaded in time for the launches years ago, but this is bringing it all back.”

“What would you do, had you the chance to meet them?” End Waking asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. That’s the thing. I don’t have anything concrete in mind that I feel like I’m missing, it’s just this envy over not having the chance. I’m sure I’d ask them a million questions about spaceflight and System shit, because that’s just how I am. I want to know how they keep their vehicle in working order over so long a time. I want to know how they can receive images and sounds and video instead of just text. I want to know all sorts of things, but that’s ancillary to the fact that I’m just not there.”

This short speech demanded a silent acknowledgement of a few minutes, and the five sat in quiet, watching the fire or looking up to the stars and moon overhead. Douglas poked at the fire. May rested her head on Ioan’s shoulder. A Finger Pointing, Debarre, and End Waking drank.

“I would like to know their forests,” the skunk said at last. “And I would invite them to know mine. Do they hunt their own venison and dig their own parsnips? I do not know. If they do not, I would show them. If they do, I would want them to show me.”

“Even if that meant uploading to Artemis?” Ioan asked.

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t sound like a pleasant place for Odists, from what May’s told me.”

The skunk shrugged. “That is not enough to stand in the way of my desire. Would I go mad in the midst of their forest? Very well, I would go mad.”

“Is that what it feels like? Going mad?”

“I am not sure how else to put it,” he said after a long silence.

“I was on a field of dandelions and grass,” May said, her voice distant and dream-fogged. “And there was no echo. The world stretched out before me in empty nothingness, and there was no echo. At my back was a bar — scratched wood, stools, a foot rail, a gutter for pouring drinks — and the only way I could hear my own voice pass through the air was to huddle between those stools and face the bar.”

“Words came unbidden,” A Finger Pointing picked up where May left off. “And as they passed through my mind, they dripped and smeared — a painting with too much wet paint on the canvas stood on its edge. The dreaming mind did not know what to do with language that close to the surface, and so the language stained all it touched.”

End Waking nodded, speaking toward the fire. “And so I screamed and I ran, and when I looked back, the bar was gone, and when I looked forward again, there it was. Had I turned? Was the world so small? The words came unbidden, and with each one that left my mouth, a cord that tethered me to reality snapped, and I grew lighter and lighter, and I feared I would float up into the sky, into the sun.”

“And through it all, time was unmoored and set adrift,” May said quietly. “Sixteen hours, twenty three minutes is what they said, but I lived lifetime after lifetime beneath that sun. The light thrummed and vibrated around me, and I lived and died and lived again. I watched eternity fall away and rot at my feet.”

“Or perhaps it was just an instant,” A Finger Pointing said.

End Waking’s words came with a finality that seemed to draw the memory to a close, though nothing about the recitation — monologue? — had felt memorized or rehearsed. “And so I went mad.”

“Jesus.” Douglas’s whisper broke the long silence that followed. “And you’re afraid that’s what would happen on Artemis?”

“Not exactly that,” he said. “But when presented with the fragility of eternity once more, I cannot imagine that I would remain sane. That any of us would.”

“This is what we fear,” May said.

“With the Artemisians and their time? I saw through your eyes,” Debarre said, so quiet as to be almost a whisper. End Waking rested a paw on his knee. “I was so happy to see you, and so terrified to be there. Two and a half minutes was enough for a lifetime.”

“Or memory?” Douglas added.

May nodded, tugging Ioan’s arm tighter around her middle. “A madness born of eternities. Memory upon memory upon memory. Our memories, our whole subconscious, lie too close to the surface, and that barrier between the conscious and subconscious cannot bear the weight of an eternity. And so the cracks widen.”

“Do you think that’s what happened with Death Itself and I Do Not Know? To Michelle?” Ioan asked.

End Waking dipped his snout and drew his hood up over his head once more. Debarre looked away into the dark of the forest. A Finger Pointing took a long drink from the bottle of whiskey.

“I do not know, my dear. I will never know. It is very hard to quit when one is at the root of a clade, or even a larger subtree. Like pushing through a barrier or wading through mud. Death Itself may have been struggling to do so for a long time. I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been for Michelle. The System is not built for death.”

Ey felt eir muscles tense, was helpless to stop it.

“I am sorry, Ioan. The System is not built for death, just as you are not. It wants to keep us alive, and so to end a clade is very difficult.”

Ey nodded slowly, focusing on night above em, the log they sat on beneath em, the warmth of the fire before em. Ey focused on those around em — A Finger Pointing, Douglas, Debarre, End Waking, and of course eir own dear May — pinning em to a time, a place, a mood. Ey focused on the feeling of being alive and being here, of being present and in the world, digital or otherwise.

“How heavy must that madness be, then,” May continued. “To crash through so many failsafes and allow someone who has been within the system for more than two centuries such a death? This is what we fear.”