Something went wrong.
The voices on the comms-link were scrubbed out by static like a picture scribbled away by a child’s crayon-wielding hand.
“Your circuit’s dead …”
His spaceship took him away; far away from a crazed earth.
“Tell my wife …”
Orbit widened.
He was a seed in the fruit of the metal can floating in the void, hoping for purchase.
In one version of the world far away and long ago, they called him Major Tom as if they knew him; a man permanently situated behind rows of microphones bearing the logos of innumerable television and radio networks. He was in their lives, but not in their lives. The broadcasts and broadsheets blurred the lines.
That world sat at the very edge of itself, enraptured while counting invisible money as if there was any other kind.
“What shirts do you wear?” they bayed.
No one knew what his life was like. Not really. How could they? He did not know himself. He was trying to find out.
It was the same old and hackneyed story; not unexpected, but still true. Terribly true. Being in space was new for him as a literal reality, yet not new for him in his heart. It was inevitable, an expression of the one thing he’d always known; he was alone.
Launch Day was the Day of Execution from man to memory
The tin can tipped end over end in the void toward the spiralling arms of a bursting galaxy until it slipped into a churning center of compressed time. Decades were long gone. Somewhere and somewhen far away, there was Time, Life, Rolling Stone, then the internet, then interactive 3-D models that they could all step into, walk around, and live within if they wanted to. Then people forgot; about him, about the tin can, about space programs, about countries, about civilizations.
His second death.
A flash in the pan.
Colour and no colour through a tunnel of black and rainbow bursts, time meaningless, existence only a best guess.
At the edge of blue on the other side, they saw him waiting in the sky.
Far below and bird-like, they perched at their devices for spying out the inky black domain in which their planet swam. They had seen him emerge from the Other Side of Everything.
“The Blackstar.” they declared. “Come to Ormr.”
The tin can caught fire in the sky and tumbled down toward a surface ruined by war thousands of years before. They huddled in their low, shadowy cities.
The tin can rested on the very top of the temple as its new apex.
Major Tom awoke by a spark of truth that nobody knew. It was a thought, a memory of his wife far away and long ago as she was, and yet to him so close; loving her very much, as much as he was able. He could not remember her face.
The Blind Priest led the throng, parading up the grand stair to the top with a cloak of acolytes behind him to where the smouldering tin can sat dreaming of another world.
Major Tom slid out like a child being born.
“Light a candle,” intoned The Blind Priest to the throng below.
He trod on sacred ground. He cried loud into the crowd.
“At the center of it all.” The emerging man realized. “Again. As always.”
A span of eons across the musculature of time had not changed him after all.
Nothing had changed.
He took a breath and spoke. They did not understand him, but they loved the sound of his voice. It soothed them.
He took different shapes in their imaginations, growing older, speaking in new voices.
“You’re not alone,” he told them, and he thought to himself, by then an old man.
Soon there was nothing left to breathe, even for him. The specks of the world he’d brought with him were finally all used up.
The tin can atrophied atop the temple, still bearing the holy symbols:
UK Space Agency — Albion One … 08011947 …
His spacesuit stood waiting outside the rind of the ship like a statue. It suggested his form but contained only his bones. He lived elsewhere by then.
The Blackstar had come and gone.
In Ormr, the supplicants danced the snake dance and tilted their faces to the sky, pleading for another to take his place.
His spirit rose and stepped aside.
