Letters from the Spiral Arms

A Campfire on Mundis

Brightly colored flames danced in the oxygen-rich air of Mundis, attracting wide-eyed pseudomoths whose wings reflected the orange light of Iteren, the parent gas giant of the isolated garden world.

A small camp had been assembled in the woods, with nets and beams linking together the clearings harboring three Open Source Orbiters. Iteren silhouetted their shadowy tips against the swirling storms. Four explorers sat around the campfire. The oldest-looking one wore a colorful saree that seemed to blend with the inky q-augs meandering under her dark skin. Next to her was a middle-aged pilot, harassed by three moths that had seemingly taken her orange flight suit for a giant flower. On the other side of the fire sat a grizzled Earthbound investigator lost in the outdated typography of an ancient sci-fi book. A six-wheeled exploration rover closed the circle. They were busy cleaning the lenses of their onboard multispectral camera with one of their four manipulating arms.

"So, Jyothi, how old are you, exactly?" asked Moreena as she brushed one of the moths away from the flight suit. The woman with the saree gave her an enigmatic smile. "Take a guess."

"Let's say...hmmm...hey Bubbles, what do you say?"

The rover slowly turned its camera towards Jyothi, blinked then followed with a confused beep before going back to their clean-up operation.

"Thanks, Bubbles, I love you. Hmmm. That's a wild guess but...I'd say you're no older than one hundred years old."

Jyothi chuckled.

"Any answer would have been correct, actually. My qaugs are twenty years old, my outer skin cells are thirty years old, my eyes are sixty, most of my bones are between one hundred and one hundred and fifty years old, and the oldest parts of my brain have just celebrated their third century. The rest of my body is anywhere in-between."

Moreena whistled with admiration.

"I'm impressed." The investigator interjected without taking their eyes of their book. "So you were born during the Low Age?"

Jyothi nodded.

"And what brings you here?" asked the reader before adjusting their glasses.

"Ah! I am not the right person for this question, my dear Mosiya. At my age, you tend to stop doing things for a reason. I just let the ripples of history carry me wherever they want to. Mundis is a new world, a new isola deep in the void, it's an interesting place, so here I am. I don't think I need a reason. Does Bubbles need one?"

The rover beeped. It was busy chasing a seven-eyed moth at the edge of the shadowy underwood.

"See?"

"Don't underestimate the little AI. There isn't a single person around this campfire who has seen more of the galaxy than them. Except you, maybe."

Jyothi warmed her hands over the flames.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in, time like tears in rain."

"Is that a quote from the Outer Church?"

"No, it's older. I've never seen C-beams and I don't even know what they could be. I did see dancing regolith once, though, during a proton storm in Finistelle."

"Oh, I've never seen those. Only regolith fog on the Moon."

Another pilot entered the clearing, grabbing Moreena by the shoulder.

"Mori, we're having a problem with the engines on Marguerite, Vangelis is requesting your presence in the cockpit."

"But we are getting nowhere tonight, or even in the next month so I am not certain that..." she didn't have time to finish and Jyothi chuckled while watching their best pilot getting carried towards the orbiters by her lover, whose brightly colored bow tie attracted a variety of moths. Bubbles had disappeared in the underwood. Mosiya closed their book and removed their spectacles to rub his eyes. Then he sat closer to Jyothi, who was still warming her hands by the flames, making her q-augs ebb and flow like an organic tide.

"Your actual name is sister Jyothi Asarala, sister of the Gray Moon, veteran of the last Terran war before the Flower Age, witness of the coronation of the sky and founder of the Finistelle outpost. You are three hundred and twenty-eight years old and have twenty-five children, eight of which are still alive."

"And you are Mosiya Odhiambo, Solar Envoy of the Union of Socialist Republics of the Earth who once killed a man under their Retribution Licence, albeit it is still unclear whether or not it was intentional. You took part in several unsactioned operations on Sequence worlds, as well, albeit this doesn't appear in your USRE records. See? We both know each other quite a bit."

"You know, for quite a while I thought you were actually Rani. Some of the dates and locations checked out rather well. You seemed to appear in pretty much all the places where I had leads about her. Elora, Finistelle, Mundis, Phi Clio...but after a while I understood. You're looking for Rani, aren't you?"

"I...wouldn't exactly put it that way. I have never been actively looking for her. Following in her trails, maybe. Seeking for Rani is a fool's errand, anyway. It's pointless."

"Yes...she's been running away for what, the past century? She's become an expert at this. She's always ahead of us. Always one step forward. So many times I thought that I was going to finally get to her and son many times I found either a dead-end or the bitter realization that my new direction wasn't even an actual trail to begin with. Hell, sometimes I wonder if Rani exists at all, if she's not just seven scientists in a metaphorical trench coat. Wouldn't be the first time it happens."

"No, no, you don't get what I'm saying. It's not a physical problem. We shouldn't stop looking for her because she can't be found but simply because I don't think there's any point. If you were to meet her, what would you ask?"

"Well, the question everyone has. Why? Why did you put FTL travel in the public domain, offered it for free to humankind, then vanished? What was the point? She knew that she would create a world that in the long run would either blow itself up to oblivion or turn into an interstellar anarchy, but why?"

"I am fairly sure Rani fled precisely so that she wouldn't have to answer that question."

"That's cowardice."

"No, that's wisdom."

Jyothi looked up. Iteren shone bright beyond the orbiters and pseudo-pines. The light of its parent star scattered through its upper atmosphere, outlining the carbon threads deployed by a spaceship refuelling in its planet-sized storms. At the edge of its rings something gleamed for a split-second, the blue-shifted signature of a geometry drive translation. Moths played in the wind, pursued by winged squirrels.

"It's a question we have to answer ourselves."