The Wheel.

 
* Terrycloth:

 
Everyone in the village was gathered in the square for the ceremony, and they 
all leaned closer as the wheel began to stir. The ancient stone shed dust and 
grime as it shuddered to life, and rumbled as it turned. Arcane symbols, 
little squiggles in no known language, marched around the perimeter, and 
everyone was there to see which would end up on top.
  
Kiri kept her eye on the hateful squiggle that had ruled her life for the 
last ten years as it made its way around the wheel, again and again. At long 
last, the wheel turned, and whereever it ended up, things were finally due 
for a change.
 
The faint conversation of a couple next to her hovered at the edge of her 
consciousness. The man wanted 'that neat looking triangular symbol' (which 
Kiri knew was the symbol of Pain), while the woman hoped that it would end up 
back where it started, even if that had never happened in the history of 
history itself.
 
The chanting of the priests reached a crescendo as the wheel spun faster and 
faster, and then, with a crack so loud Kiri felt it in her gut, it stopped, 
looking for all the world like it had always been resting in just that 
position, with the star-in-a-spiral on top.
 
A chill ran down Kiri's spine as the crowd started talking softly to each 
other trying to figure out what it meant. What guiding principle would they 
follow in the decade ahead? What elemental concept would rule their destiny? 
They waited for the high priest, who hobbled towards the wheel, probably 
still too far from it to read it with his bad eyes.
 
 
* Tarka (Floppytail the Magnificent):
 
 
She knew what it ment already though. The one symble that she had been seeing 
in her dreams for the last ten years. Ever sense her mother had died in the 
last change. She watched the old man walk to the wheel and stare at it near 
sighted.
 
"It is the sign of starblazer! The ship must fly again this season."
 
The people looked at each other and blinked.. the ship was only a leagend. 
Then looked at the hill beyond the village. At the weed infested hulk of the 
old transport.
 
 
* Athalon:
 
 
The wheel had turned, and the ages had passed.  Nineteen millennia had made 
the old Starblazer more than legend.  Tales of its heroic crew, of their 
battles and quests, their flights and their fights - the story of the 
Starblazer was woven deep into their history.   Yet, history or legend, the 
Starblazer was as a ghost, too: haunting their view of the world, a subtle 
but constant theme.
 
In the days of the Final Imperial War, Admiral Johannsen skippered his 
flagship against the combined fleets of seven civilizations, it was said 
there was no better crew, no better master, no better vessel.  Yat Johannsen's-
 memory was not a pleasant one.  In a desparate move against the enemy, he 
employed a weapon of unknown power, recovered from a derelict battlecruiser 
found in the depths of space.  The results were devastating.  
 
Time and space suffered a brutal insult, and reality fractured.  The 
continuities between planets and stars - the stepping stones between the 
little bits of 'here' and 'there', 'then' and 'now' - were sundered.  The 
enemy was vanquished, you might say.  But at a cost:  there were no more 
lights in the night sky.  No more stars.  Earth was no finally and totally 
alone in the universe.
 
Not that the universe was gone, of course.  
 
But all communication - light, warp ship, everything - was useless.  The 
connections with the rest of the cosmos were destroyed.  Earth was absolutely 
cut-off, without hope of salvation.
 
 
* Dogfire:
 
 
The sun still rose in the east and settled in the west as always. As did 
Luna, shining large and with her pale green light. For as long as everyone 
could remember, there was the silent ones on the moon who had planted air and 
greener there.
 
The old priest raised his head and croaked, "A chosen one to revive the great 
ship must be chosen."
 
The crowd murmored, as Kiri bit her lip. The old turning had ended her 
indenturehood to the man and woman who had won her in a spin of Justice.  For 
her her parents had offended the priesthood by suggesting that the way to the 
stars lay not in the ship but elsewhere.
 
Years of slavery spun in the spin of the great wheel. But that spiral sign 
pointed to something else. The silvery haired priest turned and looked at 
Kiri. Her arms and hands roughened by field work and clearing stones. Face 
now prematurely darkend by tending one too many smokey cooking fires.
 
"Kiri!" 
 
Kiri turned to the priest, "Elder Brethern?" She replied, trying to stifle 
the urge to spit.
 
"Your indenturehood was ended by the wheel. And now you have been chosen by 
it's spin to help us in our task. Come with me, I'll take you to Brothers 
Einstein and Tackyon. They will say what is to be said."
 
The crowd whispered and muttered to themselves, "She has been chosen!"  
"Why?" Said another. "She's a heretic!"   "But don't question the priests." 
muttered another.  
 
The crowd parted, like a living carpet to allow the old Priest and Kiri 
passage up the hillside. The stone towers ringing the ancient ship wreck.
 
 
* Terrycloth:
 
 
"You can't do this to me again," Kiri hissed at the priest as they got out of 
earshot of the crowd. "The wheel doesn't say who has to suffer its whims. You 
decide that. Pick someone else."
 
"You should be thankful, young heretic, I could have had you burned with your 
parents. Instead the greatest glory will be yours. I wish that I could be in 
your place..."
 
"Can it," Kiri snapped, and the priest's words drifted off. He wasn't really 
all that bad, she knew. But she hated him all the same, almost as much as she 
hated the cursed wheel, and was sure to soon hate this thrice-damned ship. So 
in silence they reached the Tower of Ravens, the last of the towers that 
surrounded the ship that was still inhabited, albeit only by a pair of aging 
-- and many said mad -- priests.
 
"Ah... you have her, then!" one of the old priests, even older and blinder 
than the high priest, said as they came in through the door. "It was the 
launch, yes? The voices told me it would be the starblazer..."
 
"She is ready, yes? We trained her so hard for these ten years, she is ready. 
I'm sure she's ready. Hee hee hee," said the other, his somewhat muffled 
voice coming from inside a pile of furs and blankets.
 
 
* Tarka (Floppytail the Magnificent):
 
 
The starship slowly apporched the darkness in the far spiral arm and all the 
tourists lined up along the deck to look at the empty space. A huge area of 
space that sucked in anything that tried to enter. "Now ladys, gentalman, and 
others. To the port is the terren reagian of darkness. Some of you my ask 
what it is, but not a single tech has ever really been able to day. There are 
some theorys that it is a sheld that the Terren's were about too lose a war 
against the imperiaum. As you know..."
 
Goffic listened to the drivel of the guild and looked at the dark area of 
space, he was just booking passage on the silly liner so that he could get to 
the station. He scritched at the back of his furry palm idly. "That isn't any 
sheld. If so the humans would have come out of there by now."
 
He turned away from the window and went back to his cabin.
 
-- Three months later. --
 
"Hello Goffic. The sensors are online but we don't detect anything but dust 
particals."
 
"I know. We wait."
 
-- Earth --
 
Kiri scowled as she looked at the old control pannal. She was going to 
space... weather she wanted to or not.
 
 
* Athalon:
 
 
"It is your Destiny," the old priest moaned, enrapt with a spiritual 
fulfillment bordering on orgasm.
 
Kiri still wasn't impressed.  She'd studied day and night: plans, schematics, 
drawings, texts.  It was very simple, really.  Take a girl from a civilization-
 20,000 years in a dark age, and teach her to pilot a spacecraft.  Anything 
is simple to a priest, she thought.
 
"Kiri," the old man said, dropping his pretense for the first time since 
she'd known him.  "This is more important than you know.  Mankind once flew 
in ships such as this.  Made the technology  that surrounds us here.  It was 
ours, once.  Once."
 
But that was when there were still stars.  With the loss of space - the 
ability to escape the vicinity of earth - came a dreadful effect.  Science 
waned.  There was no challenge of exploration, of conquest.  Earth grew old.
 
And so too, as the images of tiny pricks of light adorning the night sky 
faded in the racial memory, did also man's fundamental hope.  The stars were 
the first source of wonder and philosophy and science and technology.  And as 
science died, poetry and art and the crafts of wonder.  With the darkness in 
the heavens came darkness of the mind.  Stone tools and skin garments, when 
only twenty millennia ago there were lasers and spacceships.
 
 
* Dogfire:
 
 
The priesthood needed workers and copiers to scriven the old manuals and 
recopy them to parchment. Kiri's parents had worked in the Lazarth tower. It 
was there that they had found the control panel and the words to make it live.
 
The priests, for there were many more in those days before the coughing fits 
had felled most of them, including Father Inre, who had single mindly tried 
to shift his corroded aclyolytes and priests to a more proactive role in 
learning more about the ship and especially what was called shuttles. 
 
Kiri's mother and father had worked long nights. She remembered being bundled 
in a carry sack, eyes watching her mother labor over the panel, while Father 
Inre muttered words from the manual.  
 
That one night, when the panel came alive and voices and static whistles 
muttered through the a screen had caused her eyes to almost match the glow of 
indicator lights. It was magic to hear voices, unknown words, but familiar 
rythmms in the aerther.  Inhre had fallen to his knees and blessed both 
parents. And for many following nights, always after the Inhre had finished 
his duties and had carefully closed the door to the little explored room deep 
within the ship. The room they had spent their hours laboring to restore what 
was called the 'communications' panel.  But the voices...they responded. The 
trio had found the source was close by...on the moon. 
 
The legends described the cloaking of Luna in air and strange greenery 
crawling over the surface. How the air was kept on Luna, they had no idea. 
But the colonists...they had given up talking to EArth, but only to each 
other.  
 
They only had a decoder and a crude tranlsator. But soon, a few whistles 
became faultering words they could understand.  Radio to them was like speech 
in the air to the earthmen. But where they men?  The voices had legends 
themselves of once being men, but now hopped amongst vine branches of curled 
pillars of vegetation that crawled skywards in luna's thin held air.  The 
thin stalks acted as antenna to speak.        Inhre had hunted through texts, 
forbiddened ones called, genetic adaptitional engineering. Trying to explain 
why the sacred texts omitted mention of the flitting brachiating creatures.
 
They had to keep this to themselves, for did not the sacred texts say man was 
the only speaking creature and capable of starflight? 
 
The small rounded bodied craft held in various places of the ship were 
thought to be just sacred cloisters for meditaion. But the slow, faltering 
conversations with the inhabitents of Luna told them otherwise. They were 
spaceships! Tiny ones! How, oh how could this be, Inhre had moaned, for they 
had noted that one and only one true ship existed and could be the only one 
to fly.
 
It had been a cold wintry night, perhaps an aloylyte had noticed Kiri's 
mother bringing her bundled daughter into the great ruined ship corridors 
once too often; trackers from the village, known for their silent feet, had 
been ordered to follow.  And they crept up on a forgotten room, hissing with 
strange sounds with Inhre and Kiri's parents huddled around a panel. They 
fled and told the high priest. And that began the trial.
 
Inhre's symbol on the spun wheel, spelled out being drawn, quartered and 
rendered in the square. Kiri's parents to be buried under stone. And little 
Kiri's symbol, to be indentured to the village claysmith.

 
* Terrycloth:

 
But apparently, this had all been part of the plan, thought Kiri as she 
continued her work, waking up from her dozing remeniscence, pieced together 
from rumors, memories, and overheard snatches of conversation.
 
But the task seemed impossible. She had to be missing something vital in the 
carefully copied texts and manuals, some basic assumption lost in the 
thousands of years since they'd been written. How was she to send the signal 
to activate the engines, then run all the way to the rear of the ship to 
visually monitor the 'raktor'? There were a dozen -- a hundred things that 
needed to be done to activate the ship, and all of them needed to basically 
be done at the same time. It would take an army to get everything working, an 
army trained more carefully than she had ever been.
 
"It's impossible," she told the high priest, time and time again, but he 
refused to listen, threatening her with punishments of all sorts if she 
didn't make progress. The season was drawing to a close, he continually 
reminded her, and if the ship didn't rise into the heavens in a pillar of 
flame... she certainly would, in the village square.
 
But then, one day, when cleaning out the fireplace in the tiny cold room she 
was sequestered in, she noticed a loose rock, and looked behind it, not sure 
what she'd find. But... a book? A recent copy, not more than a dozen years 
old. And the title caught her eye, caught on something in her memory. 
'Shuttlecraft operations'. Looking carefully around to make sure no one saw, 
she opened the book and began to read.
 
 
* Tarka (Floppytail the Magnificent):
 
 
Kiri looked at the control panal in front of her. The symbles glowing softly 
in the dark. She smiled... they wantted to see a piller of flame leaping into 
the sky. That is what they would get. She left the attack shuttle and worked 
her way out of the old battleship. The attack shuttle was the only shuttle 
still fully working. 
 
"Elder. I will be taking the ship up on the morrow. I am ready now."
 
The old men all smiled at Kiri with rotten teeth. "Good! Good!"
 
Mornning came far to fast for her and she pulled herself out of the dark hole 
that was her room. The village was out to see her off. The murrmur of thier 
voices filling the chill mornning air.
 
"Everyone! Our little Kiri is going to leave today! The ship will rise above 
us and fly in the air again!"
 
There was a cheer from all around and Kiri turned away from them all and 
walked alone to the ship.
 
~Systems online~
 
Kiri held the head phones to her head and sat back... following the operating 
instructions by belting herself in. She watched the bay open out over her and 
smiled. "Finally.. I will get away from the village. Basterds."
 
It hit her like a brick wall as the shuttle lifted off into the mornning 
sky.... it was all she could do to keep her hand on the stick as she left the 
world behind her.
 
 
* Athalon:
 
 
Kiri expected to see the village below here, the throngs of shouting people, 
waving, cheering.  There was all too little of landscape, and aireal view.   
She hardly noticed at all.  Too soon the rush of engines and roar of the 
atmosphere was replaced by a deadness and blackness so chill she imagined she 
could feel it through the hull of the shuttle.
 
And blackness it was.  No stars shone in the void.  The emptiness was painful 
to her eyes, and she had closed them without thinking.  Absolute nothingness 
out there.  The old legends were true.
 
Kiri's predicament came to her, suddenly.  She realized she'd have to steer 
the ship.  But where?  She'd actually never considered that part.  Down 
again, it was obvious.  As obvious as anything.  As obvious as a stone-age 
woman rocketting out of the atmosphere in a craft made so long ago that even 
the heavens looked different then.   
 
The blackness stung her eyes when she forced them open.  To look out upon the 
damnation that her people had brought upon themselves - banishment from the 
cosmos in which they once did traffic - was still almost too much to bear.  
Yet she'd have to look to be able to navigate, to find her way home again.  
 
The blackness wasn't empty, and she screamed before she could stop herself.
 
 
* Terrycloth:
 
 
The blackness in front of her was covered with glowing lines, and letters, 
all red and yellow and green, crawling through the void just outside the 
window. Some moved gradually as she sped on into the blackness, others sped 
by rapidly, still others seemed to stay still. As she calmed down, she 
realized that the spelled out words... and as she read the words, realized 
that they weren't fiery letters hovering in the void at all, but a display, 
like the console she's worked at for so long, projected outside the ship by 
some ancient magic.
 
And she recognized some of the words, from the books. They were dangerous 
words -- words connected with destruction and certain death, if she didn't 
turn back. And to turn back... she knew how to do this.
 
But as she wiggled the stick to control the shuttle, it began to spin out of 
control. Kiri screamed and cowered, and thought she'd be sick, but the 
tumbling slowed and stopped on its own. Kiri looked up to see a glowing box 
in the middle of the screen, reading 'autopilot engaged'. And a box below it, 
'please designate target'.
 
It was a diagram of the earth and the moon. She'd seen this in the books as 
well. Maybe it would take her home? She touched the earth, and it brought up 
a map... with a line, showing just where she'd come from. She recognized the 
outline of the lake near the village, and the river. It would humiliate her 
to go home, but she was obviously almost as unqualified to fly the shuttle as 
she would have been to fly the ship itself. So she touched the base of the 
line, to indicate the place where she'd taken off from, and mouthed the 
words, 'take me home'.
 
The lights in the cabin darkened, and the whole display changed. 'Beginning 
attack run', the words in the corner of the window now read. But Kiri didn't 
notice, so eagerly was she staring back at the beautiful globe of the earth 
that the ship now sped back towards.
 
 
* Tarka (Floppytail the Magnificent):
 
 
The attact shuttle screamed down toward the earth like a bat from hell... its 
wing stubs glowing red hot as it dived through the muck that was earths 
air... she came down faster then she had gone up and the chiar under her 
bucked like a wild thing.
 
Kiri looked at the window as the lake she had always known grew larger and 
larger, then the inpossible happened. The shuttle bucked and two streeks of 
flame and fire shoot out with a swish and headed toward her village. Then the 
shuttle turned hard to the right and started to climb up away from earth 
again. She only just saw two huge fireballs rise out of the village, blowing 
most of her home to bits!
 
It was several days later when she was able to look out of the screen again. 
The shuttle continued in its drift away from earth and far out beyond the 
moon. She looked at the screen again at last.
 
She reached out to the screen... then withdrew her hand.. she wouldn't touch 
that again. "No. Not again."
 
-- Months later --
 
"Goffic! Goffic! Wake up!"
 
Goffic blinked sleep out of his eyes and looked at the intercome with a less 
then happy mood. "Open! What is it?"
 
"Sir. There is something there."
 
Goffic was fully awake in only a moment. He slipped into his harness a moment 
later. "I will be there in a moment.
 
Goffic looked over Nesa's shoulder and hour later. "Yes... there is something 
there. It is getting near. Are the tractors ready to bring it through the 
darkness?"
 
Nesa nodded. "Yes sir. The darkness has never been this thin before. I think 
we can bring it through. Whatever it is."
 
Soon the bowels of the station turned with power and four beams blasted down 
into the darkness surrounding what was once Sol. They sucked and pulled at a 
mode deep withing the haze....
 
Goffic waited quietly in the control room as the object was pulled out of the 
haze. It was only a small shuttle... but it was intact.
 
Nesa looked up from her panal. "Sir. This is strange. The computer has an 
ident on that ship."
 
"What? How could that be?" Goffic looked over Nesa's shoulder again.
 
"Its a human attack shuttle."
 
 
* Athalon:
 
 
Kiri had been nodding, fighting hopelessly against the mindlessness and 
numbing boredom that had become her daily routine.  Sleep was even boring, 
and little enough escape.  And so she took it for a dream, one of the 
recurring nightmares in which she watches the fiery immolation of her 
village, as the shuttle's console came suddenly alight again on its own.  Yet 
it was not a dream.
 
She strained her eyes peering into the blackness outside the viewport.  Kiri 
had gotten used to the hallucinations, the phantom colors and lights that 
first plagued her whenever she could finally bring herself to look out upon 
the emptiness of the final void.  And so she didn't take the wispiness, the 
streaky, cloudlike taillings, rather like the hem of a sheer black negligee, 
as anything real.  
 
Goffic's vessel seemed to come upon her from out of nowhere, and her knees 
hit the underside of the console painfully, as she drew her legs up 
protectively.
 
This couldn't be.  It just couldn't be.
 
 
* Terrycloth:
 
 
The station hung in front of her, a glowing spindly assembly set against a 
backdrop not of endless black like the night sky, or the void she'd been 
flying through, but of faintly glimmering lights. Writhing tentacles of light 
shot out from the station towards her, as if holding her shuttle in place... 
or pulling it in to be devoured. A maw opened up on the side of the station 
as she approached, a sphincter slowly irising open.
 
And then the screen lit up, and the terror of the memory of her villiage's 
destruction was subsumed in the greater horror, as the image of a THING not 
of this world appeared on it. It was almost human, only its face was twisted 
into an animalistic visage, with pointy ears and *fangs*. It's mouth opened, 
and it spoke, but what came out was not words -- not any words she recognized.
 
Surely, she had flown past the void into the very land of death itself, and 
now the demons would capture her and devour her soul along with her shuttle.
 
With shaking hands, she fumbled with the controls, but the memory was too 
fuzzy. She cast about the cabin and found the manual, lying discarded in the 
corner. As she frantically flipped through the brittle parchment, the hideous 
demon devourer grew larger and larger, its arms spreading out around her.
 
Here it was. A step by step procedure. Flip this switch, push these buttons, 
move the slider all the way to the front (for maximum effect), then grab the 
stick and pull the trigger. Kiri followed the instructions quickly, barely 
glancing up as the maw of the monster finally engulfed her shuttle.
 
Then she pulled the trigger, and everything exploded.
 
 
* Tarka (Floppytail the Magnificent):
 
 
The station rocked as fire filled the landing bay and Goffic fell to the 
floor as the station rocked under the blows the old human attack shuttle spit 
out. The station continued to rock as Goffic picked himself up nad looked to 
Nesa... "The sheilding down there is holding?"
 
Nesa was bent over her display intently. "Yes sure. The weapons are no 
differeent then what is recorded. A little weaker really. Did you see the 
hull of that thing? It's damn old!"
 
Kiri finally let go of the trigger and blinked... there were black marks all 
over the wall ahead of her... but she was now inside the maw of the station..
she franticly went back to the manual to look for her salvation.
  
Nesa switched on the communications gear ago. "Let me try sir. I learned the 
old human langage." She looked up into the camra.
 
Another horrid beast faced appered on the sreen above Kiri and she looked up 
at the horrid fangs. Only this time... it said hello.
 
 
* Athalon:
 
 
- And Then -
 
The war was over, of course.  Not many places in the galaxy can the belligeren-
ce that sparks interstellar battle consume the passions for two hundred 
centuries.  Kiri loved spending time at the enormous vacuum ports of the 
space station, gazing out upon - stars!  Even the oldest of tales told by the 
grannies (and remembering, she always dropped a tear for them) didn't do 
justice to the beauty of the lights in the darkness of space.  How she longed 
to see them from the summer twilight on a hill overlooking the lake.
 
Yet the blackness, the chasm that separated Earth from the rest of the 
cosmos, remained.  She had gotten out, true.  Yet try as they might, Goffin 
and crew couldn't manage to pass.  Yet.  Yet, she assured herself.  And with 
no little joy.
 
It seemed to her that joy was more and more a part of her day, as once toil 
and drudgery under the taskrod of her master had been.  It wasn't just escape 
from her former life: she missed it, sometimes.  Parts, anyway.  
 
It wasn't just the opportunity that living and working with Nesa and Goffic 
and the crew.  Their technology was greater than anything she could imagine.  
Maybe greater than Earth's had ever been.  It was all open to her, now.  But 
that wasn't what filled her heart most.
 
She gazed out the window again.  
 
"We were born to see stars," she whispered.