Thin Line

It’s the horizon. Thin line of blue in the distance, slightly rounded more or less depending on what planet you’re standing on. Can’t see much past that point, nothing more than sky sinking down into the rippling surface of water, throwing any sunlight there is into thousands of glittering bits – if your planet’s lucky enough to have a nice and bright one that doesn’t fry everything on the surface with radiation. Maybe if you’d bothered paying attention in secondary school geography class instead of chit-chatting, throwing shit around, flirting with pretty little Janette with the big tits next seat to the left or just giving your teacher a little extra push to an early grave you’d know a lot more about what lay beyond that line – more sea, more water, and that stuff just keeps right on going and going way beyond that until eventually you hit some land or come right back to where you started, give or take a few kilometers. But if you didn’t know that, didn’t have that little bit of brain-food, didn’t have the opportunity to get lectured by some lanky smart-guy in a wool vest in a room of forty or more screaming kiddies who wanted to do nothing more than go home, go to the beanbag, go on the Weavesphere and look up the good hot shit for some illicit self-loving time, well, no wonder some people then and now could still believe that when you went past that point you dropped right off into nothing. Darkness and the fall into a void, forever, and no parachutes or magnetospheric anti-impact soft landing tech. Hold on to your hats, here we go.

If I hadn’t gone to a decent school, hadn’t seen more than my fair share of planets all over the Dominion and even further, and learned how planets and the laws of physics tended to work, I might just have believed all of that myself.

Little old me though, back in Atriarchus City, well, I wasn’t much of the type for thinking that you’d ever find something as boring and unimaginative as falling forever if you went too far. Sure I’d gone to school – as good as any the hoighty-toighty fuckers I used to call Mum and Dad could have sent me to – and it wasn’t long before I had some idea of how things worked in real life, the few and far between times I went to class and not into fights on the campus rooftops for bet-money. And it also wasn’t like we all didn’t already know what existed and where on just about every square inch of Atriarchus you could do a PLACE sweep and visuals on – when it’s the Dominion’s oldest settled world in the in black of space you could be damn sure we all knew exactly what was going on on it every moment of every day, Gaian Standard. Every land mass, every continent, every island even if it was a speck of coral three feet across, every mountain range and cliff and forest and plain. No surprises, no mysteries on Atriarchus. It all got taught to me, and even someone like the dumbass Doberman-nid kid I was could look it up on the Weavesphere any time and get high-def maps in just about any scale you could ever want, and some in real-time too, from all the mass of orbitals and stations we had sweeping overhead and in-atmosphere. But I still kept right on going to the beaches whenever I could spare a moment and the Overlev fare out of my pocket money, kept on standing on those shores with no one around and kept on looking and dreaming. Feeling the wind rush through the valley of my forehead between those pointed ears, the smell of the sea in my nose and the taste of the salt on the lips of my muzzle, stinging the corners of my eyes.

Wondering, imagining. Maybe even hoping.

Great and grand cities, maybe, larger than even Spearheart or Ambidion. Exotic civilizations who had never heard of the Dominion or seen our flag or even known just who the hell we were and what we would inevitably do once we came knocking. Wilderness that had never before been touched by anything that walked on two legs. Mountains, taller than anything you could have seen anywhere else, white clouds gathering around its peaks, forbidding, mysterious, and yet somehow inviting all the same, daring anyone with the fat balls and lack of sense to ascend it and find out what lay above and perhaps beyond. High towers full of ancient sages and supernatural knowledge, dwarfing any megascraper on Atriarchus or Luminal City, walls gilded with gold, voidsilver and other, rarer materials, a library of secrets within. Abandoned ruins, their broken spires and shattered buildings with stories as old as time, how they rose and fell. Or maybe ports teeming with a little more life, rugs and carpets dyed in exotic and strange combinations of colors draped over stalls and bazaars and merchants hawking wares in loud voices, pawning goods. Mysterious creatures in thick jungles lit only by slits of sunlight through the canopies, ferocious yet exotic, sinuous. Maybe even a paradise of supernatural beings, the sons and daughters of the gods themselves. The list went on and kept on growing, limited only by what I could dream of.

The sky’s the limit, as they say. But we all fall down to the mud below eventually.

I couldn’t stop. I kept on coming back. Must have spent half my youth traveling to empty beaches a few good hours out, whatever time I didn’t spend fighting fellow students for pocket money, scraping by classes, pissing off my parents or risking my neck climbing to the roofs of megascrapers. Had to take the long routes. Anywhere closer, and the place would be spoilt by the hordes of bikinied beach-goers and their spawn in neoplastic arm-floats. Had to go further north by Atriarchus reckoning to find the places I was really after. Nothing more than the sound of the waves and the wind, just the way I liked it. No Kindred-style four-hundred-solites-a-night resorts in these places. Have to work hard for the good shit, as they say, though these days that isn’t much of the truth any more.

(truth)

Really hated that word as a kid. Still do now, but it’s dulled to a sort of bleak acceptance, like getting presented with a bowl of shit, but god-damn are you real fucking hungry and you know you have to eat something if you want to keep right on being alive. Gotta do what you gotta do, know what you have to know, accept what you have to accept no matter how bad it tastes going down. No escaping this one, try as you like. Chow down, baby, every last spoonful of the best. Don’t want to see even a brown smear when you’re done.

Dee-licious. C’mon, say it with me. There’s a lot of hungry kids out there, y’know. I want to see some gratitude on that fat fucking face.

So many years on I still couldn’t take my eyes off that Thin Line. Everything else about that other planet I was on was reasonably beautiful of course, all the more so that it was at least a good couple of thousand light-years from Bad-Memory-Central, Atriarchus, thanks Mum and Pop, but that line captured my attention more than anything else in that whole planet ever could have. I kept my eyes open, fixed hard on it with all the power of my oculars even as the salt off the spray stung my eyes, WYRM quickly sending agents to neutralize whatever caustic substances the aug thought was getting flung into my eyes and face. Felt the wind ripple on my mug and that hole in the left side of my muzzle, filling my mouth with a salty aftertaste and the strange flavor of oceanic matter. Couldn’t stop, no matter how much I tried. The smallest part of the whole scene, the most far away, and yet it was the only thing that could capture my eyes.

Couldn’t stop the memories either. The memories of the dreams I’d had as a kid looking out at those horizons on the shore, wherever they were. The dreams of what I would be able to find if I ever sailed beyond, a little Doberman-nid kid on some boat bound for adventures and fantasies, that sort of thing. Dumb dreams for a kid – we’d already had LANCE drives for a good century before I’d been born and what the hell were you thinking doing things the good old fashioned way in a boat on the sea when you could go up up and away towards the stars and see what else they had in store? But there was something I liked about the former more than anything else, some note of the old and archaic archetypes in the fantasy novels you could pick up for three solites on the Weavesphere as an Ebook or in your local holoflex mill. At the end of the day though, whatever I preferred, there always lived in my head a little piece of stark reality in the back of my mind that I could never quite get rid of no matter how much I’d tried. Like a little pebble that you can feel, digging into that little space between your toes inside that fancy new pair of paw-shoes from some equally fancy brand that cost you three hundred fifty a pair. Pricey as hell and looks the part too, but it sure as hell doesn’t feel that way. Hurts every time you take a step, and yet whenever you take your shoe off, turn it upside down and shake - nothing comes out. But you put it back on, and there it is again. And the whole thing, the whole pair, and all the appearances and approving looks from folks on the street and the effort you put into getting those two bits onto your feet in the first place, all ruined by that little fucking pebble.

It’s small, but it sure as hell digs deep.

Kernel of truth, you could call it, the knowledge that whatever I’d hoped I’d find over that line in the distance was all a dream. That we had already long charted what lay beyond ages ago with all of that fancy cartographic tech and orbitals and nothing close to what I had imagined or wanted lay beyond. And the more of that I knew, the more I sat in class as a kid and learned, read books that weren’t fiction, browsed the Weavesphere or just fucking opened my eyes, the bigger the pebble got. Bigger, and more painful.

That was when I was still a kid too. Fast forward a couple of decades to some Pioneer Corps asshole in his forties – young for someone living in the Dominion with all of the augs I got stuck in me, and yet I still feel old all the same – who’d been a lot further from their home planet of birth than most people ever did, who’d done it all and seen even more – too much – in my line of work, seen what all of those planets all over the Dominion and even further had to offer, and the little touch of Truth had withered up all of those dreams. Pebble had become a boulder almost, larger than it had ever been, and hardly a space left for anything but it now.

The more you see, the more you begin to know – and the harder it is to dream.

Wish it could have been anything else but this. Should have stayed home, stayed daydreaming, stayed blind. The ignorant live in paradise. The knowing descend the slow fall into hell.

Probably explains why I like these sorts of shores now, instead. People hear shore and beach and conjure up images of some resort town on any one of the thousands of islands on Kindred or wherever. Babes and boys in thongs and string bikinis, riding up their asscracks and the base of their tails, neon-colored cocktails with those tiny umbrellas, sun chairs, cream and glasses – if you’re one of those chumps that don’t already have automatic polarization oculars – party and a good fuck three at a time every night, and all of it on some place with alabaster sand, crystal water and hardly a speck of gray in the sky if you strained really hard keeping an eye out. That’s what the vacation mags on the stands in your neighborhood convenience joint and the ads for the passenger-carrier agencies on the Weavesphere sites when you’re just trying to look up a recipe for lasagna would have you believe. And maybe it’s not all that it’s cut out to be, but they’re not always lying either. They’re selling something, is all. They’re selling what people want – dreams getting fulfilled. Maybe my own – of exotic lands and fantastic adventures and all of that kind of turgid thirteen year old shit – was a bit higher on the scale of expectation than that of most average folks. But the principle was the same. We just wanted something different than each other. But in the end, no one lives a life like that.

In the end, we were all fools, every single one of us.

The chill wind off the roiling gray of the sea flipped the side of my coat away, wasting no time in invading every single joint and nook it could find in my body with fingers of ice. The suddenness of the cold hurt. No bikinis on this beach, baby, and that was just the way I liked it. Had to make the boulder a little bigger every day. Maybe when it got big enough there wouldn’t be any space left for anything else. And maybe then I’d finally stop being stupid enough to dream.

Bitter cold that made my fingertips numb, salt that stung the eyes and crystallized on the ends of my fur in the droplets of spray. Hardly a trace of real sunlight, just the roiling gray of the overcast thunderheads to match the sea, the soft patter of the drizzle lost in the impending roar of the waves, playing a staccato on my body I could feel through my coat. The drops were just as cold as the wind and the sea, little ones that felt like they hit harder than any falling drop of water ever had the right to. The force of the wind buffeted me, threatening to put even my PALATINA-augmented sense of balance over the edge, ripping at my clothes like a wild animal, desperate for the flesh underneath. For anyone who believed the ads, who dearly wished that they could be at one of those shiny white beaches, this place, this shore, had to be just about the shittiest place in the whole known galaxy, the antithesis of everything that they ever hoped and dreamed to see.

But it was what I needed. What this goddamned moron of a Doberman-nid and his childish, dumb fantasies needed to experience. Like a swift and hard kick up the ass with a SilTi capped boot and a bitter pill down the throat, yum yum. Hurts like such hell it makes your knees shake, tastes like rancid shit, but damn if it doesn’t get you up and moving. Leave all of the other stupid shit behind. You’re a man now, a big old Grown-Up in your forties who’s seen it all and more. Most people don’t even get up to half the shit you’ve done. You’re the last person in the whole world that should be wishing for the things you do, the one with the least right to have the dreams you have. The last who deserves the comfort of ignorance. C’mon. C’mon. Grow the fuck up already, gods above. This is what it’s like. This is what it’s all about.

Should know this by now.

I couldn’t give myself the luxury of the dreams anymore. Couldn’t let myself keep wondering what lay beyond that Thin Line Had to kill it, burn it out of me. No better place then, to do it but here. To really start breaking the associations. Flagellating myself like some Hervangian religious fanatic eight hundred years ago. Just a lot less blood, but all the pain.

Frigid winds, the endless blows of fat raindrops, the roar of the waves and the burning of the salt in my eyes and muzzle. And the endless iron-gray of the sky and the sea.

No fantasies here, mister. No grand dreams. PEEEEHHH-rish the thought.

This is what it’s like.

Had to punish myself, feel it all, to wake up. Was like finding both nipples under your buddy’s T-shirt and fur at the end of your weekend pub crawl or whatever and twisting real hard until his head shoots up from its drunken stupor muzzle first on the bar table. Because you gotta get up, man. Time to wake up and go home. Tomorrow’s Monday and you gotta wake up for work at six. Back to the real world. All it was was something a little more personal than some dumb stag party wake-up routine.

I dragged a tongue through the torn flesh of my muzzle, tasting the salt on the soft pink surface of the scar tissue. The salinity of the spray was making my gums hurt, the surface of my exposed teeth sticky. The wind rushing wildly through the gaps of those pearly-whites felt like it was whipping about in the inside of my mouth, filling it with lumps of ice. My throat felt dry and sore. Every swallow of saliva seemed to bring a wave of cold saltiness down my throat that burned hard on its way down. Not for the last time I wished, almost desperately, that I could close my mouth all the way, something so simple for most people yet the object of almost desperate and impossible need for someone like me.

That was all the Thin Line was to me too, back then as a kid. A need. One I could never get, could never achieve no matter how hard I’d tried. The need to escape, the need to take a boat over that horizon and see what lay beyond, the need to escape from whatever life those who called me their son had laid out for me. A representation of all my childish wishes, not just for grand adventures in faraway lands, but all my dreams and hopes for the future, the life I’d thought I would live. All the things I’d done so far, in The Business with the mobsters and underworld crooks, smuggling, piracy, in the army all the way across the galaxy from Diadem to Mjord, to the Pioneer Corps and Eyrie, well, most people would have called that a life of grand adventure and experiences already. For them, maybe even half of that would have been enough for a lifetime.

But for me, it was nothing more than a bitter reminder of that Impossible Need. I’d had my adventures, seen and done the things I had. But they were nothing like I’d imagined, nothing like what they would have imagined, nothing like the dreams I’d had as a youth on some shore three hours out from the furthest suburb in the outskirts of Atriarchus City. And the more I’d traveled, the more I’d discovered and learned about and known, the more I knew that there was nothing like what I’d so fervently wished for so long ago out there, nothing but the harsh reality and the bitter pain of every waking moment of every living day knowing that I would never have what I so desperately needed.

I’d seen all I’d ever needed to see. I’d been over the horizon, in a way, and further beyond. I’d crossed over the Thin Line in the distance, again and again, more times than I’d ever bothered to count. And every time was just as painful as the first, the stark reminder, the agony of the truth.

Maybe what those ancient folks had believed so long ago really was true, in the most perverse ironies only the gods could manage. Beyond that Thin Line you fell forever into an endless pit. Beyond that Thin Line there was only the darkness of an empty void. Beyond that Thin Line of the horizon, shimmering in the distance, there was nothing.

Nothing at all.


END




As you can probably tell from this and a couple of my recent stories, the subject of broken dreams and wishes and the erosion of childish fantasies is something that has recently fascinated me (don't ask why, I don't know either). I suppose it fits into the constant theme I personally enjoy writing about and just engaging in general - that of decay, ruin and a slow erosion and degradation of once beautiful things into nothingness and darkness (sounds pretentious, huh). Add on a touch that this was something I experienced personally too, albeit on a much less intense level, of the inability of my own mind to overcome a sort of realisation that all of my fantasies and wild dreams (including of Great Gaia) are all not real and never will be, and all of it decaying into a sort of sad acceptance. Guess that's what crossing the horizon is, to find that everything past that point has long been charted by the hordes of people that have gone before us, and that I am an utterly unexceptional person destined to walk a simple path in life, nothing special, nothing unique, before the short drop into an eternal dark.

After all, what did we ever hope to find?


Side note: I tried to be a little less...wordy on this one. Think I might try to break out of my comfort zone a bit and try something a little more action-oriented for my next story. Also, I just like writing stories like this. I'm actually fine.

Another beautifully done piece by  teragabba~, who, as always, did an exceptional piece of art for my sake. I've always loved dark clouds, overcast skies and windy beaches, and she captured the atmosphere I adore perfectly! Check out her page, and send some commissions her way! :>


Art ©  teragabba~
Story and Characters ©  AWandererfromtheEast