*I don't need help with typos, because I'm really good at catching them when I reread, which I haven't done yet...but if there are any obvious grammar mistakes that I've made that I seem to not have understood, I would love to be informed. Otherwise, just advice for what could come next, weaknesses in the plot, the language, the characters, the transitions, the dialogue, anything. Thanks a bunch!*
Racing Within The Surf Of Spazming Stars
6-18-05
They raced for years, letting their ships sail on the solar winds of ten-thousand spazming suns, praying silently that they would make it through another run and even more silently that their opponents wouldn’t, and prayed loudly that they would win, and maybe get enough money to buy a newer, faster, less-protected ship so that they could race faster and hotter, win more trophies, gain more fame, then leave and claim a bride with money, an expensive ship, and a lifetime of stories.
It was in this verse that a young man grew up, praying for love and a way out, searching for it all among the metal trash heaps and metal sheet walls of the Red League Race Guild Hangar Ship.
This young man’s name was Trekflare, and he knew the place by heart, and he knew the people who frequented the ship; the bars, the hangar, the sickbay, the dance club, even the bridge. He knew who lived in the Healing Gel baths, heard the stories of the heroes, he knew the faces who spent the night in the hotels, in personal quarters aboard the ship, in their own ships. And he knew that at night, Hangar One was a nursery, the lights mellowed to a soft, inky orange, the noises silenced, the airlock sealed, the pilots sleeping until tomorrow.
He stood there now, just at what to a Worlder would have been dusk, and he heard the stories and the tales fall down around him rom somewhere between his ears and a thousand light-years away.
“The infamous War of the Clowns, ah yes. Yes, I fought in it, even raced supplies...”
“I fell in love with someone who isn’t who you see with me now, and Child, I’m sad. I don’t know how my sweet baby turned so cruel...”
“Yeah, I’ve fought. Three times in that war, I was in what could be called ‘deathmatches.’ The first time I was in one, my opponent was strong and young...maybe five years older than you are now and twice your bulk, and he was a mean fella...”
“No, I’m only seventeen, but you wouldn’t believe how old that is. I’ve seen things that would make you shiver and scream....”
“Ha. I’ve lived ten times your age son, and I know, I know for a very fact, there is nothing good in life at all...”
“Sure, yeah, I’ve been on planets. Yeah, of course you can feel ‘em turning when you’re on ‘em...that’s why you can surf on Earth, is that it turns so fast...”
The memories were painfully blunt, because they revealed to him the million, billion places he had never been and the million billion things he had never done...
Occasionally, kids would show up and he’d play with them. He was good with kids, even though he was now fifteen, because kids didn’t care about anything more than playing. Adults wanted nostalgia, and they wanted to impress each other and find out that they liked the same things, but kids wanted something simpler; they wanted to play and have fun. He could handle that.
“Hey, you,” someone said, and he turned around to see someone coming towards him dressed head-to-toes in black and brown piloting gear, his head obscured by a mask, “what’s your name?”
“Trekflare,” he said, and then he saw the stranger’s unobscured mouth smile deeply, as he pulled his mask off, and dark blue eyes exactly like mine looked into me from beneath brow and grey, messy hair.
“Trek,” he said, “I’m your father.”
Trek stared up into the eyes and he saw himself, as his heart fell through his legs all the way into the molten pit of the nearest star...
Growing up an orphan was’n easy, nor was hearing that your father and mother had killed someone and were on the run, nor was receiving the only letter Trekflare had received in his life, a letter from his father apologizing to Trek for his entire life, and then informing him heavy-heartedly of the death of his mother in a race against the police. Trek noted that the letter had been sent from a jail.
“But what a good man your father was,” everyone would say.
Trek didn’t see it this way, but he was quite loved by the ship’s crew; each night, he would sleep in the quarters of a different crew-member, rotating through all twenty-eight of them, growing fat by being spoiled until, on his thirteenth birthday, he had requested from the Captain his own quarters and it had been granted.
The Captain had said, “your father asked me to watch you, satisfied that I would do what was right for you. He was always independent, too, so much so that everyone always thought he would be a bachelor for life. He did too, for that matter. But he was responsible, too, so...”
“So here he was, fifteen years too late to raise his son, and soon, his eyes were full of tears as he stared at Trek.
Trek stared at him, and all the hatred that built up over fifteen long long years made itself known inside his heart, having finally found its object.
“I hate you,” he said, and broke down into his father’s arms and said, “I love you, too.”
“Good,” his father laugh-sobbed, “because I’m free, I was found innocent, and we’ve got to get you away from here.”
“Okay, Trek, flip it!” Trek lifted a switch and heard the engine roar to life, “good!” his father called from the other room, “now, move it into the lock, just like the Cap’ said you had practiced.” (6-19-05)
“Yessir,” Trek slid one hand around the control stick and with the other he cycled through visual feeds from different parts of the ship, making sure he wasn’t going to hit something. When everything was aligned, he slowly let the invisible tractor beams from the Hangar Bay take over and slowly nudge them into the airlock.
Agonizingly slowly, Trek loved space, on a naked vessel, but he had only been allowed to go two times, mostly because the Captain hadn’t trusted almost everyone in his ship. He wanted to hear the ship break away, and then the silence, and then the crystal-perfect hum from the engine, bringing her into a slightly different sayer of space, hurtling forward...More than that, tough, he just wanted to leave, to be forever gone from the Red League Race Guild Hangar Ship, wanted to never see another Guild member, besides his father, ever again, wanted the Hangar Ship to lose itself in space so thath he could always know and say that his childhood was up there, reeling against the silent stars.
Then the airlock closed in around them, and as doors slowly closed themselves, he was afforded his very last looks of the nursery turned to the marketplace of day.
Zip, seal, and it was gone with a heavy breath of totality.
“Belt yourself in, boy!”
“Aye, aye!”
A moment later, the hatch opened and the tractor beams hurled them out into open space.
***
They spent a week in pure movement, and Trek let his father tell him his stories, about the races he had won, the ones he had lost, how he had received his trophies and injuries, and why he hadn’t been there for all of Trek’s childhood. His father cried when he told him the last one, with big, sad eyes that hurt because they contained Trekflare’s entire life in sadness. His father meant it, too, and Trek soon came to appreciate him.
Then, the day before they arrived at the mythically-grand Space-Trade Station California, Trek’s father floated up to him, and asked, “could you forgive me for one more lie?”
Trek stared, unable to fathom this, before asking, “what?”
“Could you?”
“Does it matter, now that I know you’ve done it?” Trek asked.
“I suppose not,” his father said, and sat down beside him on the velcro seat, “did you really, truly want to leave the Guild?”
“Yes!”
“Okay. I lied to you when I told you that I was free. I’m not free; I’m still being chased down. In fact, they’re really close now, the closest they’ve been since they caught your mother and I.
“Why did you lie to me?” Trekflare demanded, his face suddenly red and hard.
“I had to,” his father said sadly, “the Captain promised me to keep you safe when we delivered you, thirteen years ago. He swore to me that he would. Well, what we’re doing now isn’t safe; we’re going to run, even if they catch up with us, because we can probably make it to the station, and if they catch you, they’ll put you in a foster home until you’re nineteen, and then they’ll charge you as my accomplice.”
Trekflare stared, and he felt the weight of all of his future lying atop this moment and the last few days. He shook his head, and said, “so, if we don’t get caught, what’ll happen?”
“I’ve got you a fake passport; to everyone you meet, you’re nineteen. I want you to take body-hair serum until you’ve got some good, real stubble, and keep that stubble. And grow your hair out, like an adult, and grease it like we do. When we get to the station, I’m going to buy you some new clothes and a ship, and I’ll give you some coordinates for where to meet me next, assuming I’m not caught. Then I’ll leave and you can do anything at all you want with the funds you have.”
“I still don’t understand why you lied to me,” Trekflare said.
His father shrugged, “I thought that Cap’ would’ve been a father figure to you, and that you might feel uncomfortable leaving against his will or something. I didn’t want to put you in a position where you would’ve had to lie. And I knew that, no matter what, I had to get you out of there.”
“Okay,” Trekflare said, “and when I see you again, what’ll we do?”
“We’ll leave, my son,” his father grinned, and it could have been Trek in twenty years; face stubbled and lightly salted by age, hair exactly as Trek always wanted to wear his hair when he was old enough, the same nose with light and small cybernetic glasses implanted as Trek was going to have done when his face had sopped growing, wearing the same toothy smile and eep eyes and the same...something. Essence, perhaps. In every important way, they were the same person; they talked the same, despite having almost no contact with each other, and the sadness in his father’s heart and eyes was just like the uncomfortable nervousness that Trekflare carried around.
“How long will you be gone?” Trek asked.
“A year,” his father said, “and then we’ll meet.”
“I...” Trekflare began and sighed, “I want friends, dad.”
His father stared at him, sighed and said, “then win races.”
The red-alert light hissed Trekflare three hours from their arrival, and he heard his father curse from the cockpit and call him up.
“Trekflare, we’ve got company!” His father shouted back, before adding, “do you even know how to star-surf?”
“I’‘ve never done it, but I’ve heard everything about it, at least a million times,” Trek yelled back, as he swallowed a caffeine tablet, downed a can of lime soda, and climbed to the cockpit.
“Well, from here you’re going to; I’ll eject you with it and then I’ll speed away. Don’t worry, I’ll make it look like you were ejected by accident and its auto-systems are surfinf you to the station.”
“You can do that?”
A new light came on, and his father sighed, “They’ve got missiles! Go now; all the information you’ll need once you get to the station is in there.”
“Thanks, Dad. I love you...” Trek said.
“I love you too–now git!”
Trek nodded and ran into the surf vessel. He sighed when the door closed, and he knew that he might never see his father again.
Then came a moment-shattering but otherwise innocent beep, and he looked around the new cockpit, recognizing what everything was. He hailed his father on the trans-ship commlink, and it automatically turned on, revealing his father speaking to someone on the other end.
“Self-destruct set for: thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven,” an electric voice sang. Trek wanted to cry out for his father, curse him and make him stop it, but his father noticed that his commlink was open and stared for a second before muting it. The stare somehow did silence Trekflare, but when the sound cut, he shrieked.
His father spoke on, and Trekflare saw what he was saying; a lifetime of listening had endowed him with the ability of reading lips. He said into another video feed, “yes, I’ve got it. And I’ll give it to you if you get closer. Of course, that’s in exchange for my freedom. Otherwise, I just let this tick down to explosion. The strength of the explosion would, of course, disable all electronics in your ship, essentially stranding you to die. You choice; you hear how much time you have.”
Then, for the longest time, an hour, a day, a year, a lifetime or ten seconds, he read nothing, just stared at the inscrutable face of his father. Then, suddenly, “okay, fine. Bye,” and a terrible sound.
The vessel fell suddenly into normal space, and a moment later, it was slapped by a wave of hydrogen, and Trek was slammed against a wall. Then another one smashed the ship, and he screamed and picked himself up and in the same motion buckled himself in. Then he looked out the screen to see the sigh he had heard most about in his life; a star, swollen and red, belching out its innards into a wide, rotating and revolving circle that he now sat in the midst of.
“FUCK!” He shouted, and repeated it, just because it tasted sweet and the action of cursing took his mind away from what the actual reality of the situation was. He had hardly ever cursed before..
“He flicked to the navigation screen, saw both that the station was on the other side of the sector–a good five hours away–and that there was an asteroid floating right beside him; he flicked the screen again to let its electronic workings reveal to him that it was the paralyzed police-ship. Trek sighed at the sadness of everyone in it dying, before he flipped the sail and opened the hydrogen collectors to fuel the engine. Then he slowly, slowly let the sip float to port, and tried not to get lost in the sickness he felt by thinking about what had just happened...
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