Copyright (c) 2001 Matthew Lowes
First Published in Anotherealm 2006 Vol. 4
*****
Jani was fourteen when she saw the stars for the first time. She never forgot it. Years after the fact, whenever she sat outside on warm summer nights and looked up at the luminous sky, she still thought about the stars. She pictured them up there in the blackness of space, beyond the billboards and the big screens that lit up the night.
Being from the surface it wasn’t surprising that Jani never saw the stars for so long. She grew up in Wisconsin. Her mother was an executive farmer for Gentech, Fast-growth Multipurpose Cattle Division. She liked to sit out on summer nights too. When Jani was young they would sit on fold-up lawn chairs in the parking lot of the cloning facility, sip Galey’s Ginger Ale and watch the Coke screen rise.
Colorful billboards filled the night sky like jewels, flickering and flashing. Corocom, Senkai, Dharmacon, Mitsubishi…thousands of them covered the firmament like a brilliant mosaic dome. A huge network of interlocking grids and platforms surrounded the Earth. The night side was so cluttered with advertising that it formed a virtual ceiling that covered the sky. Sports highlights played on the Nike screen. World Report was on Sky Span. Stock prices rolled across the Nascorp big board.
They would just sit there and take it all in. The sound of crickets filled the still air. Once the Coke screen rose, they channeled its audio and watched for hours as it moved toward zenith. An armada of lesser boards clung to it like suckerfish to a shark as it swam across the sky. Jani grew up watching the Coke screen. It was always there. Watching the Coke screen wasn’t at all like channeling video. There was something real and reassuring about a giant screen in the sky.
Jani’s mom told her that when she was little there were only a few billboards up in orbit. The early ones were just huge pieces of Mylar. You could still see some of the stars from the surface then. A lot of people were upset when the first boards went up. Jani never understood that part. Without the boards the sky would just be blank…except for the stars anyway.
Jani’s mom told her all about the stars too. They channeled photos on the Net. “But there’s nothing like seeing them in person,” she said. There are millions and millions of stars. If you connect the dots of the bright ones she said, they make pictures from old myths and legends.
When they took a trip to one of the orbital platforms Jani finally saw the stars with her own eyes. It was the first time she had ever left Wisconsin. They took the maglev down to the Illinois Spaceport and caught a shuttle up to orbit. Jani channeled two movies in transit.
Once aboard the platform, She spent hours tumbling weightlessly around the hotel room, literally bouncing off the walls, off the ceiling, and off everything and anything, giggling with delight. When her mom finally got her to calm down they looked down upon the Earth through the window. “So that’s the Earth from space,” Jani said.
“Isn’t it incredible?”
“It’s okay,” she said, pushing off the window and pitching backward across the room.
The next day they went up to the outer levels, where tourists could look out into space and see the stars and the paths of the high orbit colonies. They floated in the dimly lit observation room, holding hands to keep themselves from drifting apart. A bright white object traced an arc in the distance. “Do people live up there?” Jani said.
“Many people live their entire lives in the high orbit colonies.”
“They’ve never been to Earth?”
“That’s right.”
“Have you ever been up there?”
“No.”
The colony passed out of sight. It was sort of like the nights they spent out in the cloning lot, but there wasn’t a board in sight. There were no crickets either, and no Coke screen. There were just millions of luminous dots, the stars, those distant suns that were sprinkled across the heavens.
“See,” Jani’s mother said, “that’s Orion the Hunter. Those three bright ones make up his belt.”
“I don’t see it,” Jani said flatly.
“That polygon makes up his torso. Then you can see lines that form his arms and legs.”
“I still don’t see it.”
“Well keep looking,” her mom said. “Maybe you’ll see your own pictures.”
They just floated there in silence, looking out at the stars for what seemed like a long time to Jani. After a while she channeled some music.
“Well, what do you think?” her mom said finally.
“Of what?” Jani said.
“The stars.”
Even years later, she remembered that moment so clearly, so vividly, holding her mother’s hand, looking out at those stars, way up there weightless and floating at the top of the orbital platform. “It’s neat,” she said. “Can we go back to the hotel now? I want to check out the zero-g gym.”
As they left the observation deck, Jani saw the disappointment in her mother’s eyes. What could she do though? It just seemed kind of boring. You’d have to be a little whacked in the head, she thought, to see pictures up there in the stars.
When she got back to Wisconsin, Jani looked up at the boards in the sky and was glad to be home. That night she watched the Coke screen rise, cracked open a Galey’s, channeled in, and thanked God she lived on the surface.
Jani never forgot that trip though. Every time she looked up at the luminous checkered mosaic of the night sky she couldn’t help but think about the stars, and about the depths of space. There was something about it that haunted her, something terrifying about all that dark emptiness, that black logo-less void punctuated only by the stars, those strange pinholes of light that were scattered across the sky like lonely pixels, too spread out to form a cohesive picture of anything at all.
