Science Fiction 2010

At first, the limits of his own solar system seemed hardly boundaries at all.

The course of his ship never took him beyond what had long ago seemed virtually limitless, but by now after all the years of back and forth within the tight and closely packed precision coordinates that marked and confined his route, Captain Yusef Mohammed felt himself to be little more than a futuristic milk man.

He was pulled by a horse, his ship, the Logaire Yusef, which not only knew which way to go and every stop on the route, but also was perfectly capable of dropping off and picking up without any help from the good Captain, thank you.

He felt the Logaire Company hadn't gotten around to perceiving just how unneeded he was. If they did come to that realization, he was convinced he'd be dismissed immediately.

You can be certain Logaire knew exactly what they were doing when they gave the ship his name and put up Yusef Mohammed as Captain of a top line freighter. More of a mendicant than a hermit, he was actually the perfect man for the job.

He was a very kind man. His thoughts were always far from cheating or taking advantage of his brethren. He acted honorably in every instance, and viewed each interaction (such as it was) as a chance to reassert and even pass along, perhaps, that very highest way. The way to which he believed, all aspired.

His very kindness came from the fact that he was deeply religious, kneeling and praying at every proscribed time, facing Mecca, carefully observing each holiday and fast, particularly Ramadan. He kept and studied the Koran, the Bible, even the Bhagavada Gita. Reading and meditating for Yusef Mohammed was only worth while if that study was about God.

Our Captain also studied philosophy, and he liked to recall the saying, "Religion without philosophy is fanaticism, and philosophy without religion is mental speculation." He'd forgotten where he'd first heard this, but he liked it very much.

In fact, this saying had been written over and over again in the log of the former Captain, a Hindu, called Jai Sri Loka.

Captain Loka, whose last name, ironically, is Sanskrit for "Planet," had attributed the saying to his Guru, in the Lord Caitanya Sampradaya.

Yusef Mohammed knew the Sampradaya word. It had to do with a living chain of handed down perfect knowledge.

Captain Mohammed knew too that one bright and shiny morning in space, his predecessor had arisen, and then killed himself, by deliberately stepping naked out into the starry void. Yusef Mohammed had a very good idea why.

That the ship had continued without missing a beat ... what to speak of her own captain, sometimes made Yusef Mohammed wonder about Logaire and their decision to immediately replace Captain Jai Sri Loka with another.

The company had apparently not considered any other course for even a moment. The Logaire run had to have a living human Captain, and he was it.

And more than any other quality, by normal Earth standards, Yusef was very strange ... he never favored communal pastimes. People, he'd learned, sought to argue and bicker. People generally, sooner or later, wanted him to assert the correctness of their path, whatever that might be, and come away from his own studies.

Yusef Mohammed subscribed to the saying, "To each his own," or as he believed he'd read from Lenin, "To each according to his needs ... from each according to his ability." He frowned and carefully closed the book for a moment.

The Captain was quite alone on the ship, and he loved it that way. He was aware that Logaire recorded his every move, and he'd grown, over the years, to eschew modesty. He had to do what he had to do, and he honestly no longer gave a second thought to the fact that they were watching.

Even his most private, whimsical and petty pastimes were up for grabs and subsequent distribution. Everyone had an agenda.

To him, the ship was his faithful companion, and there was no problem with gender ... Logaire Yusef was indeed a girl ... a princess ... a woman ... the queen.

The mundane cargo of Logaire Yusef was nothing less than thousands of tons of frozen food, kept at about 20 of the old Fahrenheit degrees. Vegetables: Broccoli, Corn, Spinach. There were finished foods for the commissaries; frozen Sarah Lee Cakes, TV Dinners, exotic vegetable mixes with cream sauce. And there were hundreds of tons of more basic fare for the chow halls.

In her current configuration, the Start Run Mode, the huge ship was nearly a kilometer in length. She became longer and shorter during her run as she dropped off and picked up modules at the planets along the Logaire Route. Each double module, easily the size of an old Earth side airplane hanger, was coupled side by side, and end to end with adjacent partners. When one was in sun, the other was in darkness.

The unlit, darkened modules needed heat. The sunny sides needed cooling. In adjoining walls, tandem sets of five foot variable pitch tri bladed propellers (three to a room; front, back and the walls between) switched and set themselves on or off to move the 15 lbs/sq inch atmospheres back and forth in virtual roaring hurricanes of man made machine controlled weather systems.

In the double coupled modules, cartons of frozen turkeys were five stacked twenty high. Six way ground beef, tons of it. Cloth shrouded haunches, shoulders, ribs, cases of precut steaks, all piled to the ceilings ... the one limiting factor for the colonists Logaire serviced was the amount of food in their stores.

The Logaire Company made certain those provisions were kept at the same and better levels than they had been upon old Earth. There were sections of member planets that did nothing but produce these vital supplies.

Fast rockets with dairy and produce were launched directly to client planets in the system. Then, when Logaire Yusef came trundling by in space above, there were not only fully laden modules to drop but empties to retrieve.

Many of those empties had in them the crusted remains of the produce rockets. Nothing was wasted. The big constantly changing ship took it all in stride.

Those mid 1940s speculators, the ones who said space travel was impossible because the 7 mile per second escape velocity was unattainable, had never the less, invariably gone on to pronounce upon the glories of weightlessness; "We can't do it, it's impossible! But if we did, then zero gravity would enable a single person to lift twenty times his (or her) own weight..."

These scientist's weightlessness concepts generally failed to account for the real law of inertia which states: "A body in motion tends to remain in motion."

Sharp turns were not in the repertoire of Logaire Yusef. Instead, minute course changes were implemented by little consecutive puffs along each articulated module coupling.

Without the gravitational pull of the consumer delivery planets, what appeared to the naked eye from the surface below as a great giant length of sparkling metallic blue bicycle chain overhead, would never have appeared at all, but gone sailing off into that real deep space beyond. And that after all, would have bothered Yusef Mohammed not one iota.

The delivery dialog between planet and ship was beeps and static, like the sound of an old modem connecting. All the ship wanted to say and know was about the drop off and pick up. Need was assessed somewhere else, calculated along with subsequent route, based on the frequency and type of returned empty.

This Yusef considered his interaction. The ship was his intermediary contact with the rest of the human race.

He turned in his bunk, away from the mirror kept close on the bulkhead there. Now he was on his right side, heart side up, no longer with his face inches from that mirror, where he often practiced making faces.

He knew it was crazy, but before the mirror, if he stuck out his tongue, not only did it seem to blindly sense its own reflected image, it responded to itself, undulating with strong, indecent ego and self life. The way it boldly and slowly preened, mindless, slimy and blind as a slug, was nothing less than obscene.

Over the course of years of mirror gazing, and tongue play, he'd observed that if his tongue was out, (as it loved to be) and he caused it to bend up at the tip, then, in the refracted fluorescent light from the corridor over his shoulder, saliva in the pocket created by this bending, actually appeared greenish and blue.

Down on the planets visited by Logaire Yusef, children fans had a fad candy which when taken, caused their own tongues to turn green or blue in the pocket. In a mix which was strangely appropriate, they called the candy "Loka Blue Gum."

Then, if you were a kid, and your tongue was blue, you were emulating the Logaire Space Captain. You'd be silent and studious, yet more than a little silly. You'd stick out your tongue, for yourself, and for others, and all would see the color and know ... Someday, a Logaire Space Captain.

You'd practice faces and tongue movements in the mirror, just like the Captain. You'd pray again and again during the day. You'd exercise, read and walk, and some day, someday, you'd be preparing for that time when you'd be called upon to become a Logaire Space Captain. Then one of the big Queen ships would carry your name among the dependent planets.

You would be unique as you liked, and all the little children below would just clap their hands and dress in your ways.

Those aspiring kids never thought to ask what ever happened to Captains who came and went before them. Men and women of the great ships, like Loka, Mohammed, Bellaway or Christian. Perhaps they were simply promoted. The mystery, if noticed, was no small part of the attraction.

Another aspect of the beauty was in the fact of separation. Yusef Mohammed lived his eccentric and solitary yet very public life. He did not dream he had so many admirers and emulators. His fans adored an innocence.

On the ship, you or I would have perceived only silence. With his back to space now, Yusef Mohammed could feel the humming of the ship around him. When a course correction was invoked, he sensed it with his inner ear. The only thing Yusef found hard to accept, the only pull of guilt in his ascetic world of personal enjoyment, was the delivering of dolmus: Pork. Pork Chops. Pork Loins. Pork Shoulders. The thin wooded wire wrapped long cases of smoked bacon, about 69 to 73 old Earth pounds to a case. The four / three interlocking seven stacks stretched all the way to the ceiling.

When Yusef went touring along his corridor, which was included with every module, and truncated at each drop off, he dreaded passing and looking in the pork areas. He could smell it. It was like death. And he was delivering it.

How could a good Muslim such as he ascribed to be, reconcile the act of delivering dolmus?

Jai Sri Loka, before him, had been a so called Hindu, and a Vegetarian. It was said Jai Sri had gone mad ... but Yusef Mohammed had begun to think of the former Captain's suicide as perhaps the only sane remedy to a situation untenable.

In Yusef's opinion, the copy cat suicides down on the planets were the crazy part of the story. Clearly the Captain had been torn between personal ethics and every day activity. Those down on the planet who chose to kill themselves "Just like Captain Jai Sri," were not like Jai Sri at all, but acted on the basis of ego in the form of perceived unrequited love, or ostracism.

During the 96 or so Earth minutes in which Logaire Yusef seemed to hang in the sky above, dropping and picking up links reconfiguring itself as it went, the denizens below danced and cheered. No planet in the cultivated system could thrive without this delivery of shared supplies from the other planets.

Logaire Yusef, and the ships like her, were the critical, solitary links.

Now Yusef Mohammed flipped back to his left, facing the mirror. He sensed a watching. He scrunched his eyes. The cunning tongue appeared, practically of its own volition, cupping from the bend at the tip. There was the puddle of blue saliva. Yusef laughed at himself, and made faces.

Below, thousands of watching, adoring children popped their Loka Blue Gum and pretended they were right along with him.

Overhead, reconfigured now and preparing to leave, Yusef Mohammed considered what he'd read in the Bhagavada Gita about the three modes of material energy.

Down on the planet, the descending sparkling modules cascaded like diamonds and tears. The great ship Logaire Yusef auto twisted and burped far up and away as she settled in the correct configuration for the next stop.

All the True Science about God. All the Might and Majesty. The tongues, thousands of them, alive by themselves, and blue. Yusef Mohammed studied and looked and in turn was watched from below and above as the ship, in his name, prepared once again to move on and on in forever.