In the beginning...
Aug. 22nd, 2001 01:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alonewiththemoonI stood today on the deck of my ship, The Ehrengard, and took a good long look at the blue sky. It has a purity, that blue, even when you know it has been maintained for decades now by an artificial stratosphere. A couple of shearwaters and a cormorant winged purposefully across the sky, while gulls circled lazily, watching the water for schools of fish.
How can I leave this behind? Even with the artificial life support, it seems a perfect system, and on days like this, you feel like a perfect part of it as your ship sways under your feet. The gulls watch for fish, I watch the gulls, the fish watch the shadow of my ship and feed on plankton churned up in its wake. If I leave, what will the fish and the gulls do for food?
I sigh, knowing that I am trying to distract myself from my own resolution, because there can be no going back now. Everything is in order. I have the paperwork that says I am making a routine run through Georges Bank for fish, and then sailing up to Lunar Colony Prime to sell my fish, and then back to Port Boston, just as I have done dozens of times before. I own a moderately successful business, run out of my one ship. My Boston Irish father had plenty of contacts on the wharfs to ensure that his little girl wouldn't be run out of business, as might have happened without him. After the Gulf Wars of 2107, anti-Arab sentiment has run higher than ever in the United States, and I have my mother's features. My father and mother met when he was serving a tour of duty in Iran, a staunch US ally after the disco-loving, blue jean-wearing populace finally rose against the religious elite. It was still scandalous for a respectable Iranian woman of a noble family to have an affair with a commonplace US Marine, let alone marry him, but that's just what she did, leaving her family and schoolchums to enter the new world of old Boston. It was difficult for her, I'm sure. My father thought he was doing what was best for her when he said she'd never have to wear hijab again; for the rest of her life she felt profoundly uncomfortable in public, her head and face laid bare, and envied me my ability to be as outgoing in public as she would like to be. She told me many stories of Iran, taught me bits of Arabic and read to me from the Koran. Most of it seemed reasonable to me, and I've tried to live my life by those reasonable bits. Growing up I had Irish step classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, and middle eastern dance on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Fridays I went clubbing in places I had to lie about to both of my parents, and danced however I pleased to music that had been plundered from all over the world and set to electronic beats. Digeridoos were in one week, ouds and tablas the next.
I am reminiscing to avoid the present. I will go out to Georges Bank and fish with my crew, and we will take off on a flight path to Lunar Colony Prime. We will miscalculate our trajectory, however, because I am called as profoundly as my mother is called to prayer every sunrise by the signal from Tehran. I don't know yet what is calling me, or if whatever I hear even exists outside my own head, may my crew forgive me. I only know that it has reached a point where every flight becomes an act of will not to wrest the controls from my navigator and send the Ehrengard past Earth's moon and into the stars beyond, where the US-Euro Military Board has forbidden travel. I cannot give up sailing my ship; the joy of flight is in my blood, and I would wither and die without it. The calling has become almost inextricably linked to my joy. Every take-off feels like a mad leaping forward to embrace a long lost lover, and every landing feels like the murder of a friend. So I have laid my plans, and tommorrow I will take off knowing that this time there will be no landing, not until I have found what calls me.
The gulls cry victory and dive into the waves for tiny silver fish. Plankton have been churned up by the wake of another ship leaving for the Bank.
How can I leave this behind? Even with the artificial life support, it seems a perfect system, and on days like this, you feel like a perfect part of it as your ship sways under your feet. The gulls watch for fish, I watch the gulls, the fish watch the shadow of my ship and feed on plankton churned up in its wake. If I leave, what will the fish and the gulls do for food?
I sigh, knowing that I am trying to distract myself from my own resolution, because there can be no going back now. Everything is in order. I have the paperwork that says I am making a routine run through Georges Bank for fish, and then sailing up to Lunar Colony Prime to sell my fish, and then back to Port Boston, just as I have done dozens of times before. I own a moderately successful business, run out of my one ship. My Boston Irish father had plenty of contacts on the wharfs to ensure that his little girl wouldn't be run out of business, as might have happened without him. After the Gulf Wars of 2107, anti-Arab sentiment has run higher than ever in the United States, and I have my mother's features. My father and mother met when he was serving a tour of duty in Iran, a staunch US ally after the disco-loving, blue jean-wearing populace finally rose against the religious elite. It was still scandalous for a respectable Iranian woman of a noble family to have an affair with a commonplace US Marine, let alone marry him, but that's just what she did, leaving her family and schoolchums to enter the new world of old Boston. It was difficult for her, I'm sure. My father thought he was doing what was best for her when he said she'd never have to wear hijab again; for the rest of her life she felt profoundly uncomfortable in public, her head and face laid bare, and envied me my ability to be as outgoing in public as she would like to be. She told me many stories of Iran, taught me bits of Arabic and read to me from the Koran. Most of it seemed reasonable to me, and I've tried to live my life by those reasonable bits. Growing up I had Irish step classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, and middle eastern dance on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Fridays I went clubbing in places I had to lie about to both of my parents, and danced however I pleased to music that had been plundered from all over the world and set to electronic beats. Digeridoos were in one week, ouds and tablas the next.
I am reminiscing to avoid the present. I will go out to Georges Bank and fish with my crew, and we will take off on a flight path to Lunar Colony Prime. We will miscalculate our trajectory, however, because I am called as profoundly as my mother is called to prayer every sunrise by the signal from Tehran. I don't know yet what is calling me, or if whatever I hear even exists outside my own head, may my crew forgive me. I only know that it has reached a point where every flight becomes an act of will not to wrest the controls from my navigator and send the Ehrengard past Earth's moon and into the stars beyond, where the US-Euro Military Board has forbidden travel. I cannot give up sailing my ship; the joy of flight is in my blood, and I would wither and die without it. The calling has become almost inextricably linked to my joy. Every take-off feels like a mad leaping forward to embrace a long lost lover, and every landing feels like the murder of a friend. So I have laid my plans, and tommorrow I will take off knowing that this time there will be no landing, not until I have found what calls me.
The gulls cry victory and dive into the waves for tiny silver fish. Plankton have been churned up by the wake of another ship leaving for the Bank.
