Inyanga's Star and Other Constellations

Bay's Star Continues - Part 2

Sometimes in the Story, Bay played a female character, Princess, who lives on a futuristic planet in a galaxy with a whole population ready to take flight, in great exoduses, from an incurable plague.

Sometime she played Roland, a male space scoundrel who falls in love with Princess.

The Story jumped around in time and chronology; it was a gamble when and where in the storyline Bay would go, and it must depend on which pill she took. Each little sphere contained a pre-programmed little nexus in the Story web.

This one seemed early in the sequence. It was one of those times Roland was nowhere in sight, and Bay wondered if she would spend the entire halfer just trying to find him. The tension was dreamlike in that way. Frustrating.

Yet she seemed to be addicted to the frustration.

Bay found herself in Princess's body, which was running down the enclosed streets of Mars Crimon. She recognized the surroundings from the many times she had left and arrived at Bar Volo. The narrator voice described the same setting she could see with her own eyes.

"Outside the bar it was night. A starry, starry night illusion that had been cast on the outer hull of the space station, and Ela Ray was grateful whoever was in charge of the sky didn't go for something more apocalyptic. Storms or impenetrable fog would have worsened and amplified the panic in the streets."

One of a mob running along the gangway bumped Princess's elbow at precisely the moment that best illustrated the point. Yes, the sky was calm, and the people in the streets were insane. Ela "Princess" Ray moved fast, racing past storefronts and under a pedestrian bridge and through a tunnel, but so did everyone else. Despite the massive hoard that darted in unpredictable directions at strange and unexpected times — or stopped suddenly without looking back first — Ela had an ability to stay out of anyone else's way. Her body's reactions were as quick as Bay's mind when she was on top of her game, and she loved playing optimization games. Which lights to stop at and recover, how to jaywalk efficiently and safely, anticipating the sudden movements of the idiots with whom she shared the road. She dodged, pivoted, and maneuvered across the station while the narrator kept up his commentary of distracting reflection:

"Sometimes Ela wished humans could be more like ants. Just a little bit more orderly, more aware of each other. Not that she would make everyone march in rows, say, if, say, she were made a dictator who would enforce such rules. But a general sense of decent traffic conduct would be nice."

Ahead of Princess some marching technicians in slate gray engineer's jumpsuits with matching youthful ponytails were marching a little too slow for her. A split second before the person in front of Princess dropped suddenly to the ground — as if to pick up a dropped coin or magic device — Bay had been ready to dart right and accelerate to get around the slow-moving pair, while the right lane ahead was open. And Bay still enacted the maneuver, speeding around the technician in a spacer engineer's jumpsuit — who had dropped, but when she glanced back over her shoulder she caught a glimpse of a mass of pedestrians trampling right over the trchnician who had been in their blindspot before Princess had moved out of the way.

The narrator chimed in, "Someone was going to get hurt, and it wasn't going to be Princess."

Wow, cutthroat. But Bay had no intention of redirecting Princess to go back. Onward might lead to Roland eventually.

And it wasn't like this was real.

The narrator kept on describing what she could see with her own two eyes. "Plenty of stores were abandoned, boarded up. Inside both the defunct ones and those with the lights on, desperate tribes swiped what they could and went to battle with each other over boxes of cereal and chickpea cans. Ela had learned a long time ago to stock up, and not just nonperishables. When you could get fresh produce, tomatoes and potatoes, leafy greens and the occasional bushel of apples, you ate heartily and stored it cold.