OUTCAST

10

Dreamers who haven't been to space, fooled by adventure romance, Star Wars songs and movies, think that space travel is fantastically interesting and exciting. The life of a Jedi, they say, is filled with events and sensations, always something new ...

Space travel is a mortal anguish filled with nothing more than the vacuum of space itself. Only the average star wolf finds out about this too late, when his life can no longer be changed.

Two weeks of flight to the 45th - conventional or instrumental time. The materials of the machine will wear out for 330-340 hours, approximately the same time is estimated by the power plant. It is customary to trust these indicators, and not to climb into the wilds of the type of dividing the relative distance by the relative speed. And even more so, you should not trust the sensations. The psyche feels any flight longer than three days as an eternity.

The fourth day is a critical threshold, when you start to go crazy from inactivity and closed space. I sat staring at the floor, looking at the gray tiles. I didn't want to sleep, eat, shit. Thoughts stopped, and inside everything froze. During the flight, it doesn’t even make sense to turn on the “emptiness”, it is already around you. In the "windows" the stars also froze, not moving, like the thoughts of a flyer like me. I looked at them, and they looked at me, and we silently and immovably stupid, it feels like for thousands of years.

I remembered Lilith. Yes, once I did cross paths with these creatures of the Demiurges. Burning black haired slender and nervous. The buyer got rid of her - she picked up all sorts of viruses from the Internet and completely got out of subordination to anyone. So she hung out wherever she wanted, wandering around stations like 45th. For starters, she believed that she was more important than a man, even if she takes money for recharging and upgrading. She knew a lot about the Punalua family, which existed among people in the Stone Age on earth. The type of patriarchy was introduced along with agriculture and the manufacturing economy in general. And before that, everything was as it is now - an appropriating economy. It was difficult to argue with her - the last time I saw a live person directly creating something was a very long time ago. The galaxy lived precisely from some kind of gathering. I've watched stocks rise, wars rise peoples - they grew like berries and roots. I had to know where the mushroom field is and where the berry field is, know when to go there to harvest, which, of course, I did not sow and grow ... There are, of course, hunters, but there are definitely few plowmen left.

So Lilith thought that she should now be the main one, as in a matriarchal village, the keeper of the hearth, etc. Such a philosophy of hers was quite suitable for games in the femdom, and we had unforgettable sessions with her. But, when you don’t know in which cloud, from which sites she draws inspiration, it excites, but also scares. Each time it seems that she is now strangling to death or cutting with a knife more fun and deeper ...

Yes, now the cry will begin, they say, that's how we knew that all Jedi are perverts. It’s just that when you have been without sex for years, you want to use rare opportunities in such a way that it will definitely hit you, so that until the very brutality ... A woman on board with a space wanderer is prohibitively expensive, especially considering the payment for her way back. In general, there are almost no women in space, including at stations. Those women who fly themselves do not count, more precisely for an amateur. The specifics of flight work is such that these caps turn into hundred-kilogram shapeless bags with rotten fat. Rarely do they cause attraction ...

The probability of meeting a beauty in space is no higher than colliding head-on with a meteorite. This means that the natural process leads the astronaut to a brothel, and then you have to try everything there. Or to experimental samples like Lilith.

She did not take money for her watch, but she had to charge her batteries, buy clothes, pay for traffic. She offered me to sell the ship and all the property, give her the money, and get out myself anywhere - to die. If I'm not ready for this, then I don't really love her, I'm not ready to dissolve and disappear in her life. Now, on the fifth day of the flight, I loved her with all my heart. For some reason, he remembered her ear, and the void behind her ear, between the skin and lush hair. It seemed that there was a pulsating space in which the pressure changes, and it sucks you all into this dark depth, like into a cave. He remembered the soles of her feet, which he licked, the heels, which he carefully scratched with his teeth. On the feet were, like maps, small wrinkles - a dense network of mysterious signs and designations. There was pressure in my head now, my mouth tightened, I remembered the pattern of these lines and drowned in them.

And then I saw her eyes clearly in front of me - like death, like the end of everything. I stood on all fours in the bathroom, biting my teeth into the wooden rim of the washbasin, putting my left leg on the side of the bathroom with my knee, shaking and arching my back into a ring, with my right hand, as if shot, sliding my hand along the tile on the wall, it seemed that my eyes would now fall out of their sockets and fall on a towel lying on the floor.

Seeing a shaking gray cloud with quick sparks before his eyes, hearing ringing chaos in his ears, he crawled sideways along the wall and finally sat down in the bathroom and calmed down. Stupidly and aloofly, he sat and directed the shower jet at the soiled wall until he washed it off. I was pounding from the cold, and I lay down on my back in depth, turning on the full stream of hot water with foam. Warming up, he now looked at the ceiling above him, listened to the silence coming from the cabin, whether there were any alarm signals.

In those seconds, he seemed to himself weak, worthless, crushed, defenseless against any meteorite flying towards him, an insidious pirate. A speck of dust that "Bang!" - and no, that's all.

The water was warm, the shampoo-foam smelled and sparkled, the blue shone with reflections in the misted tiles and in the mirror. I lay down and tried to feel the water and warmth with different cells of my body, listened to how my legs felt it, how my arms felt it, how my stomach and back…

Warmed up, he got up and dried himself with a large terry towel. Without dressing, I went barefoot to the salon.

All this around - all this iron colossus, cunning and smart equipment, comfortable furniture - I created all this for Her. For the One with whom I thought to fly together into the universe, to the edge ... She was the one, I knew that for sure. When we walked together - every bush on the road, every bird on the tree, all the stars in chorus spoke, shouted to me that it was she. And the cars passing by winked their headlights, nodded their hoods on potholes, confirmed. The air next to us became solemn and crowned us, declared us created for each other.

When she did not want to fly with me, I was ready, I agreed, and then I could not buy a ship, but buy a house on some planet. We would live there together, even if only for a very short life, without any time loops, space distortions, without Jedi tricks with “save” and “non-killers”. Did I want so much? Was it really impossible? She refused not from flights, but from me. Didn't want to be with me.

All these silent ice stars, all this emptiness, all this cosmos - they are instead of her. All this endless throwing between hateful planets and stations, between different lives and worlds - instead of the house where happiness awaited us with her. All this time it seemed to me that she was somewhere nearby, very close, at least to one of the known dimensions. But in other dimensions it is inaccessible forever - in a different time, in a different ring of space, in a different variant of possibilities that has already disappeared and is no longer possible.

I felt emptiness and infinity pressed close to my face. The Jedi was lying on the floor in the ship's saloon, head to the plasma screen, sideways to the miracle chair-transformer. Eyebrow, cheekbone and nose pressing, that was the strength to the floor. Pressing his bruised ribs into the gray slabs. And pounded the floor with his fists. He hoped to reach through the skin to the void, so that she could hear how he hated her. Because she is instead of her. The star wolf's eyes grew cloudy, covered with a damp film, his shoulders twitched, he raised himself on his elbows and knees and howled. Slowly, loudly with all the strength of the lungs and back. Howled, from the fact that there is still more than a week of flight ahead, many more years of flights, still a whole infinity of meaningless flights from emptiness to emptiness. Howling rhythmically filled the interior of the ship, like an organ in a church.

The stars looked out the "windows" as indifferent passers-by in the big city. The blackness of the cosmos even seemed to be in harmony with this sound wave and extinguished it in its eternal quiet howl. And on invisible planets scattered around, billions of living beings did not hear how a lonely something howled above them, rushing past their worlds like a stone of despair and longing.

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He sat and looked at his feet. Some time ago I did push-ups from the floor, pulled myself up on the crossbar, pumped my legs, ass, abs on the simulator, ran 5 km on the track. Ate a couple of protein bars. I don’t know how long I sat and looked at my toes - carefully, without thoughts and emotions, until the speaker bleated and a green icon appeared on the screen. I was spotted by the control center of the 45th, I'm already in their zone.

The dispatcher asked me to connect my control unit to it. I pressed OK, entered my personal account on the 45th website, entered my login and password and allowed my ship to follow the instructions of the dispatcher for docking. Now the 45th with its magnetic beam will drag me out of my trajectory, and will pull me towards itself. Rapprochement and docking will take several hours, I went to put myself in order.

I rinsed in the shower, shaved off my two-week beard and stubble, cut my hair, as I liked, almost bald, like a soldier. He pulled a civilian outfit out of the closet. Metallic windbreaker over a hooded sweatshirt, pants with patch pockets, comfortable lightweight ankle boots. I did not follow fashion now and followed the classics, adhering to the correct image of a space wanderer.

Turned on the front view camera and brought the image to the plasma. 45th - two large balls connected by several flat panels. One ball is a reactor, the second is a hotel. In flat long panels-boards docking stations, parking lots, repair shops. This contraption was gradually approaching, the ball-hotel ceased to seem monolithic, chipped, cracks, protruding pins became noticeable. Living things are never flat.

At such stations as this, there were usually one and a half to two thousand passers-by and about seven hundred more personnel at the same time. The territory did not belong to any state, the order here was provided by its own protection. Therefore, anyone rubbed here, the station did not collect finished garbage, the guards could refuse to dock those who they did not like at all. But people with money were not denied. Security could only arrest you and hand you over to outside authorities if you were wanted by Interpol, but that would take too much to do. If you quarreled with the authorities of only one country or commonwealth, this did not concern the station ...

Also here they turned a blind eye to various psychotropic substances, to prostitution, to gambling. It was strictly with weapons and all explosives. In general, if you behave well at the station, you are always welcome here, and they will not soar with questions and checks. Such rules, by the way, attract here not only crime, but also quite good people like me (smiley). At least the best of my acquaintances happened at such stations. There is some pleasant atmosphere of freedom and security at the same time. The stations have their own unique culture of behavior and communication. There you feel exactly as you imagined space when you decided to link your fate with it, having watched Star Wars in your youth. Those you meet here may belong to the most exotic races, not only not like people, but not like anything at all