Art: I think it’s time by Riikka Fransila
A SPACE FOR INCONGRUITY
Sartuum hurdled through nothing, enshrouded by a bright but empty sea of black. He had no frame of reference by which to calculate his velocity, but he could tell that with even the slightest resistance, such as the trace sugars that permeated galactic space, his internal stabilizers would be hard put to keep his limbs from being torn apart in an instant and ground into the finest space dust by the friction that would ensue.
Somewhere ahead, he saw a small galaxy sprawled out before him – a beautifully symmetric flat-ish oval that shown with a magnificent blue-white light and tugged, strangely, at his memory, though he was certain this was an inter-galactic suburb he had never really frequented. He considered briefly that he might be able to learn his speed in relation to it, but that would require an approximation of its diameter that would be much too loose, without more information, to really tell him anything useful.
Suddenly, wild fear and unparalleled excitement surrounded him like a raging hurricane as – seemingly in answer to his unspoken question – the gravitational field of the galaxy toward which he plummeted grabbed hold of him. He had been too quick to judge, and it was not a small galaxy at all, only a compact one, and, by comparison to the Universal Average Gravitational Acceleration, he could now measure his relative speed, which was almost ten times greater than he had thought. Unaided, and without piloting thrusters of any kind, he was traveling faster than the information sent by an Interspatial Messaging Array; faster even than any spacecraft, barring perhaps the most elite scout cruisers in the Great Queen’s army, and he was helpless to slow or turn his meteoric descent.
Until now, he had been worried only about running out of air before reaching anywhere habitable, but this presented several dangers perhaps even more dire. If nothing changed, he would pass right through this brilliant coalition of stars then, slowed too much by its pull to reach another, drift uselessly onward until, centuries later, his body’s momentum was finally overcome and he returned like a comet to the lights he now faced. In lieu of that, he had his choice of a frictional disintegration and an endless loop about the cosmos.
The galaxy’s outer shell of cosmic silt was rapidly nearing. Thinking quickly, he unstrapped an empty titanium oxygen tank in one hand and his signature shortsword in the other. Cutting a circular hole in one side of the tank, he activated a Gridlandish war-stone from his belt, and put it inside, curling defensively behind his new makeshift cannon. It fired, squeezing him a painful foot or so shorter and dramatically decreasing his momentum, but not nearly enough. He was about to fire again, when he realized that only two war-stones remained to him, which he would need for directional changes later on. He inflated his suit as he would for landing. This could be done only once, but he found himself bereft of alternatives.
Slamming into the outer layer of space dust was like hitting a brick wall, and the force stole his consciousness, leaving him as senseless as the dead.
When he finally awoke, full of pain and bruises, he was approaching a binary star system and was surprised to note that he had been here before; how could he have forgotten? A gratuitous stroke of luck had aligned his trajectory almost parallel with that of the second planet. It wasn’t hard from there for his Gridlandish mind to see exactly where and when to fire his next two shots: Now all he had to worry about was surviving the fall once he entered the planet’s atmosphere.
Switching to a nicely decaying orbit of the planet went smoothly, if a bit jarring. His high-tech silver-stone plated armor had no trouble resisting re-entry, as vibrant reds and yellows enveloped his view, but every trick he had was used. Even despite how far he had come, he thought, watching the planet’s one blue ocean creep away around its curvature to his left like an immense flat snake fleeing the detection of a weasel, nothing he knew of could save him. No knowledge of physics would help him now, nor any clever calculation; no softer landing, nor special maneuver; nothing that his utterly rational mind could guess would be of any practical assistance. And that is why, several minutes later, he found himself truly stumped for the very first time in his life.
He hurdled toward the green and white sphere, barely more than two travelgrids – or six thousand miles as he was now used to reckoning things – in diameter, mountain ranges rising first out of its otherwise perfect flatness, then the top branches of the Great Tree between him and the ocean above which the planet’s atmosphere stretched noticeably outward. As the sea completed its dive for cover, towers and the larger castles began to show, including one he did not recognize in some land off to his right, and finally, regular trees emerged, in such warm-season beauty as he had never yet seen. Of all the ways he had almost died in the past, he supposed this scene was at least one of the loveliest.
In the instant before he crashed, he saw something fly past him, then wrap around his chest. Out of habit, he immediately activated his internal stabilizers, though he knew it wouldn’t matter in the end. His mind was crushed by sight of the impossible as he began to slow and stopped, swinging from an ordinary rope, the end of which was held by an ordinary old man.
“How strange!” The man remarked, “I was fishing for sky-horses, but you’re the strangest one I ever saw.”
He had never expected to see this land again, nor had he ever been so happy to see a madman fishing in a tree, but as impossible as it seemed, he was alive… and home.
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