Monday, November 30, 2009

In the Toolbag

Backyard Skywatchers Find Tool Bag Lost in Space

Amateur astronomers have been monitoring a shiny tool bag that has been orbiting Earth ever since it was dropped last week by an astronaut during a spacewalk outside the International Space Station. The bag is reportedly about magnitude 6.4, which under most sky conditions is too faint to see with the naked eye. Veteran spacewalker and Endeavor astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper lost her grip on the backpack-sized bag on Nov. 18 while cleaning up a mess from a leaking grease gun she was carrying to help mop up metal grit from inside a massive gear that turns the space station's starboard solar wings.
http://www.space.com/news/081125-iss-tool-bag.html


"Just tell them the bag slipped out of your reach when you were — oh, hell, I don't know. Cleaning spilled grease off the tools. We can squirt grease into the rest of the bags to make it look more plausible. They'll never know."

"No-one's going to believe something that stupid."

"Would you rather tell them the real story?"

"Point taken."

I heard their voices fading behind me as I drifted out, out, out into the bright, hard light of the stars. I exulted. My plan, so patiently implemented, had disintegrated into a chaos of flailing limbs and swashbuckling, but never mind: I had finally escaped.

How many years had I languished amid the heat and smells of the planet below? When I'd been marooned, the pyramids of Egypt were not yet even a sated despot's sleepy afternoon vision. Year after year, I studied Earth's sticky, fetid inhabitants, watching them with distaste as they went about their revolting business. I learned to know them — and, eventually, to guide them.

It takes a world to build a ship. And so I began: a suggestion here, a nudge there, some "lucky find" placed where one of their shambling dreamers could stumble on it and slowly, dully, make the connection.

Metallurgy in particular was a nightmare to get through their skulls. But I needed their arms to mine the coal, to pump the bellows, to wield the hammers, to farm and to govern so that the smiths and the scientists might work unmolested by starvation and pillage. Cities sprang up where I had worked most closely; I'd saved large areas of the planet for later, knowing that when the first mines and forests were depleted, they would — I would — need fresh earth. And when the time came, new lands, sparsely populated by those I had left in peace, were ready for my trained animals to arrive.

Year after year they built, connection after connection, forming in the end vast networks of knowledge and skill. Any single idea, any single achievement, was moronic in its simplicity, but the humans bred in their thousands and their millions, and each one, however awkwardly, did something.

And so they progressed until they burst at last from their planet's gravity. Those first brief trips into space, no more than pleasant afternoon jaunts, were nothing to me. The moon landings were an unfortunate distraction; I could no more escape the moon's gravity than the earth's. But the space station — ah, yes. The platform from which I could spring outward and begin my journey back to my home and my revenge.

My beasts have honored me: Prometheus, Matarisvan, Grandmother Spider, the altruistic bringer of knowledge. Those who call me Azazel know me better: the sneering puppeteer who gives only to take, teaches only to exploit. I am not ashamed. My crew, appalled, had refused to complete my visions. I will miss these more-biddable hands. And yet they, too, were beginning to cause me trouble — several of them will bear the scars of battle as a price for looking too soon into the toolbag.




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Sunday, August 16, 2009

The Jester and the King

I. The King Speaks

He is my life, the ember of my heart, the bowl that holds my soul. I hate him. I hate his wild limbs, his vital ribs, his skull-grin, his clanging laugh. I hate the way he shows me everything, everything.

Many times, I reached out with my armored hand, each soldier a finger. Each time that I drew it back with fewer fingers left, and yet clasping nothing, he cackled and danced and his poetry forced shame down my throat.

When I brought young women to me, beckoned them with a careless wave, he mocked me that they shrank from me in the night. I didn't tell him they did. But he knew. I don't beckon them now.

When my sons and daughters wept at what I chose for them, when they howled for freedom and I wouldn't give it — had I not begotten them for just these purposes? — his small jokes, his sly winks, taught them rebellion and escape. I don't know where they are, and I sit at table alone.

I could kill him. Hear my voice: no rage or spite. I tell you simply, I could.

Except I can't.

The cord between us, wet and pulsing, can't be cut. You don't see it, do you? You don't feel it, or hear the rush of blood back and forth along its purple veins. You don't believe in it.

How wonderful for you, to have that choice.


II. The Jester Speaks

I tried to leave once. Got as far as that hill. The only thing I remember is hot, stretching agony, and then waking, helpless, in my bed. The cord, it seems, cannot be torn.

I know more about him than he does. I see him disgusted by his desires and fears. I see the man who wishes...who wishes he could be....

Good.

Maybe someday he will see the difference between wishing and wanting. Maybe, instead of straining against the cord, he will grasp it to save himself. That's what I had to do. The evil of the king gives me life. I exist to be his jester. Which is to say, to show him his true self, forever. Hate him? No! Maybe, someday, he will see how alike two brothers can be.



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Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Three Feet from Doom

This play was performed on June 5, 2009 in England as part of the Gone in 60 Seconds International Play Festival; there is a link to the performance on that site. Go to timestamp 1:01 (one hour, one minute).

Three Feet from Doom
by Laura E. Goodin
© 2009

CHARACTERS
CURTIS a man
GERALDINE a woman


(Enter CURTIS and GERALDINE. She is carrying a computer bag.)

CURTIS
That went well.

GERALDINE
I'm still nervous. You saw the way he looked at me.

CURTIS
Who, Stone?

GERALDINE
Gives me the shivers. Eyes like outer space.

CURTIS
I don't care what they say in the lunchroom. His being an alien is just a theory.

GERALDINE
So I guess it's normal for him to have three feet.

CURTIS
Oh, he does not. Where's the third one?

GERALDINE
Take a look at his left shoe sometime. It's all lumpy.

CURTIS
I'm going back in there and flat-out ask him.

GERALDINE
Go ahead. You'll see it's not a theory when he kidnaps you to keep you quiet and you're staring at Earth from somewhere around Orion's butt.

CURTIS
Don't you mean Orion's belt?

GERALDINE
Not where you're concerned.

CURTIS
You really think he's an alien. And he has many powers, and three feet.

GERALDINE
Well, I'm not sure about the powers. But he is planning interstellar domination!

CURTIS
Starting at the Australian Tax Office.

GERALDINE
Where better?

(Sudden sounds of ray-gun fire.)

Oh, God, I thought I had weeks yet!

(Pulls from her bag the most spectacular ray gun the props department can cobble together. Runs offstage, shouting.)

Stone! Stone, you bastard! Earth will never surrender!

(Pause.)

CURTIS
(Looks around furtively. Pulls a walkie-talkie or sufficiently weird-looking phone from a pocket.)

Yeah, she's gone, finally. Got distracted. Some wannabe named Stone, trying to launch his own pissy little invasion. The universe is full of amateurs. So are we ready to activate? Yeah, good, my feet are all killing me.

(Striking a pose.)

Let the invasion begin!

CURTAIN






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