ulysses

Written @ night, completed 3am
Setting: the moon/Ithaca
Characters: Ulysses, Penelope, Circe, Laërtes (penelope's father), Antonioüs (rival for pelelope's love, son of Eupeithes)
Apologies to: Homer, literature


Ulysses.


“Hey, Mom? I'm home.” His helmet made a satisfied hiss as he pressed it over his ears, the same hiss that menaced when he put it on. He hated suiting up to go Outside. It took nearly an hour from his day, and he inevitably had to pee halfway through. Taking the suit off at the end, however, was a relief. It seemed to him that clothing always came off so much faster than it went on. Why? It's designed to be worn. You can't go without the hassle because people frown upon nakedness. Why did the easy way always have to be the wrong way? He unclamped his boots and left them on the floor next to the door, tossing his suit and helmet into the passageway closet. They bounced noisily, knocking over everything in the closet.


“Mom?” His voice echoed around inside the cylinder. She must not be home. Discomfited, he scratched his fingers. If his mother wasn't home, then the rations wouldn't be home either. No rations meant that his need for food would have to wait.


Food weighed heavily upon his mind for about a half an hour. He tried to occupy himself and failed. Then, he heard the airlock open and his mother come in. Running to the lock, he unloaded the packets from her arms. “Do I look like I need help?” she asked.


“Surely you do! You don't mean to eat all of these yourself.” He eyed her with mock disapproval and backed slowly toward the kitchen. She grinned and smacked him.






His mother warmed some paste on the heating element. He danced with anticipation. The Orangola paste was never as good as when he had been Outside. Out there, he seemed to shrink and the space inside his head got bigger. It was hard to explain. Colors were less colorful, sensations felt slowed down, and he could taste his tongue. Since his job was loading waste into the retrieval vats outside the Pod, he was glad he couldn't taste anything. He just wished that the dismal feeling would wash off when he came back inside. He only snapped out of the melancholy when the Orangola slid down his throat. It was real, and he could taste it. It reminded him that he actually existed independent of the wastes and barren nothings of the Outside. It was a wonderful feeling.


“So, what did you do today?” his mother asked.


“Mom, I . . .”


“Right. You say you don't like talking about the Outside. I understand. I still think it's better to talk about it. Get it out of your system.”

“You're wrong. You've never been out there.”


“You could be right. Your father used to talk his head off after coming back though, and I think it helped him. You should try it sometime. Find someone you trust and just dump it all out.”


“Whatever.”


“Okay, I won't bug you about it again. However, I will bug you about something else.”

They both knew what was coming next. He hated this part of every day.


“I need to talk to you about Penelope.”


He groaned. Maybe, just maybe, his mother would talk about a pipe that broke, or a rigged election, or a comet sighting, or something, anything but Penelope. He sat in silence, wishing that his fondest hopes would be fulfilled, and some catastrophe would change the subject. No asteroid hit the colony. He groaned inwardly.


“I know you don't like it, but if I can see the way you feel, then everyone can. There's a protocol for these sorts of things, and I need you follow them. You need to talk to her father and Jupiter to see if-”


“Woah, mom. What's this about Jupiter?” In the times she had brought Penelope up, she had never mentioned Jupiter. “Why do I have to talk to him?”
Her voice was unnaturally loud. “You know why. He's the elected representative of this Pod, and your father is dead. He needs to represent you in this. He'll do right by you and make sure that Laërtes doesn't ask you for more than she's worth.


“I never asked for dad to die!” he yelled and hit the table so hard his hand throbbed. “I don't even like Jupiter.” Jupiter had been the headmaster when he was in the cadets, first learning his alphabet. Jupiter had forced him to stand at attention for three hours for spilling his paste into Andronicus' shoes. That was when he was three. Jupiter had never let up, and he felt like he was still standing at attention. He had never liked how strict Jupiter was, and this was the final indignity.


“I think you'll find that Jupiter is just trying to hold you to a higher standard than the other boys. Imagine if you were wild like they are, out riding the craters every solstice like some crazy idiot. They barely get away with it because their fathers smooth it out for them. If you did some of the things they do, we wouldn't be in this Pod anymore. You need to respect Jupiter.” The creases on the corners of her mouth twitched, and her fingers worked restlessly over the fringes of her jumper.


He sighed and stood. Stopping in the doorway, he turned and looked at his mother.


She nodded.


“I'll do it. But it's not because you asked me to, or because it's the right thing to do. I'm doing this because if I don't, I'll regret it for the rest of my life. Possibly for the rest of eternity. And that's too long to regret something.”


His mother laughed, and he left.






Penelope.


She fascinated him because he couldn't figure her out. She could make him angry one moment and happy the next. He had never understood how she made him feel. However, he did know one thing for sure: she could laugh. No one else in the whole Pod had ever laughed as freely or as fully as he had heard her laugh. That was what drew him to her – her laughter. Last solstice, they had climbed on top of a cylinder and watched the stars. He told jokes, and she laughed. For a blissful hour they were all that existed in the universe. Everything melted away: the waste reclamation plant where he worked, the Outside, the wastes, the schoolwork, and the depression from the death of his father.


They were alone both physically and mentally.


It was that day that his mother first mentioned Penelope at the table. It had been seventeen days since, and he still had done nothing. It wasn't that he was scared of a proposal. It was simple enough. He talks to father, father approves. Joining moves ahead. Happy couple lives for the rest of their lives. Though, he shuddered to think of what would happen if Laërtes disapproved. No father had disapproved of a union since he could remember, and from what he heard, the right of veto was reserved for extreme situations. Still, the proposal wasn't what scared him. It was the thought of the finality in it all. Sure, he had liked Penelope for a long, long time. But what if it wasn't long enough? What if he found out that he had made a decision in the folly of youth, what if she didn't even like him, what if he died tomorrow and she never knew how he felt, what if she was already promised to another? Too many doubts ran through his mind.


There was only one way to settle it. He had to find out, unequivocally, if he was making the right decision. “Okay,” he said aloud, and the sound of his voice startled him. It sounded more frightened than the thought he was. “I'm doing the stupidest thing I have ever done.” He opened the lock and stepped out into the open Pod.


The Pod's electrified field always kept in the air. It had the unwanted side effect of making the hair on his arms and legs stand up when he went outside his cylinder. The creepy oppressive electricity matched his mood today. He turned and walked to her cylinder.


“Hello?” he said to the lock. The microphone system crackled and buzzed.


“Who is it?” came the voice from inside.


“Don't play that game with me. You know who it is. I can hear you watching me.”


“What do you want?”


He looked down at the ground and coughed.


“Is something wrong? I'm coming out.”


The lock hissed open and she walked out. He avoided her eyes.


“Hey, I need to know something.” He hesitated. He had practiced what he was going to say on the way over, but he found his mouth drying up, metaphorically and literally. He wondered how people managed to say embarrassing things. His tongue felt stickier than dry Orangola paste, and he doubted he could talk. His fingers were colder than the Wastes and yet his palms were sweaty and slick. His pause lengthened into awkwardness. “I . . .” he stopped again and swallowed. She was so patient. He could feel her looking at him expectantly, so he hurried through his prepared speech and mangled it. He had prepared clever things to say. He had wanted to sound suave and together. He came across like a broken Rovercarr that was running out of battery, revving pathetically and never getting anywhere. “Look, my mother has been pestering me about you and I need to know – no, that's not right, I'm not her because of my mother, I'm here because of you, and the way you – aagh, if there was just a way to say this in one word, I could just spit it out and have it over with, look – I'm here, and this is why I'm here, see?” He paused to catch his breath. “I need to know if I feel the right way, because I certainly feel a way, and there's no denying that. I just need to know if I'm not the only one who feels this way, because – that sounds stupid, I mean you, do you feel this way, because I don't need to know if other people feel this way, I just need to know about you, I'm only interested in the way you feel because I'm only interested in you.” He stopped prudently. To go any further would be to make himself sound like an idiot. He looked up to gauge her reaction.


Her eyes sparkled.


He realized that he had been holding his breath, and he let it out in a big whoosh. “Penelope, I . . .”


She cut him off. “Look, I don't know why you came here first, instead of going to my dad, but I don't care. It's sweet, and I'm glad that you actually thought of me in this whole mess. I just want you to know that if I had my choice, I would pick you out of all the boys in this stupid Pod.” She paused, and then turned and went back into her cylinder.


He melted like butter in a warm pan.






Antonioüs.


He walked into the office. The representative's office was the only square room in the whole Pod, and it felt foreign. Alien. He supposed that it was meant to feel that way – to throw people off balance, to help the representative find a weakness in his opponents. If that was its purpose, it was wasted on Jupiter. He was too big, too powerful. Larger than life. He wasn't the sort of man to exploit weaknesses. He created weaknesses. Critical system failures.


Jupiter didn't pause or look up from his desk, he just said “Are you ready, boy?”


It was disconcerting. “Um, yes. I guess so. What do we do?”


Jupiter finally met his eyes. “We go to Laërtes, boy. What do you think?”


“What, right now?”


“There is no better time than the present.” Jupiter stood, collected a few papers and strode out of the office.



They arrived at the cylinder he had just left. All the emotions were replaying themselves exactly in his head. “What if . . .?” scenarios looped through his brain and destroyed his calm. Again the sweaty palms and sticky tongue. Jupiter turned to him. “Look, I'm going to do the talking. Your case isn't very strong, since you have no father and nothing to give to Laërtes. I think that he'll listen to reason, though, because you're well behaved and because he worked with your father before . . .” Jupiter's eyes narrowed to slits. “Just let me talk, okay?”


He nodded vigorously. He didn't think he could talk if he wanted to.


The lock hissed open and they walked inside. He was surprised to find Antonioüs waiting inside, leering at him. Antonioüs was a massive brute, nearly a head taller than him and three times as large around the middle. Antonioüs worked on Rovercarrs. He was the one who always stole the vehicles when the Pod boys would go roaming the craters. And, for as long as he could remember, the stupid, hulking brute had hated him. It went back to the Cadets, when they were both young. He had made a fool of Antonioüs on every test and physical challenge. Their rivalry had continued unabated through puberty and beyond. Eventually, Antonioüs had gained the upper hand and had taken from him everything he had ever had or wanted, and now Antonioüs was here to do it again. Antonioüs and his father were already talking to Laërtes, so Jupiter impotently sat down.


He tried to listen to what the three men talked about, but he couldn't follow it for the longest time. There were a lot of stories and numbers and gross exaggerations being thrown around. Laërtes was smiling the whole time because his daughter was being honored by having two suitors at the same time – it was unheard of. The Pod was so small that aggressive competition over unions would lead to discord. No one risked it, and it never happened. Laërtes was trying to milk this honor for all it was worth. Eventually, the tide of the conversation started turning against Jupiter. Antonioüs father, Eupeithes, was second only to Jupiter himself in wealth and power, and Antonioüs had one of the best jobs in the Pod. Sadly, waste reclaimant did not rank very high on the social ladder. It seemed as if he would lose Penelope forever. The conversation wound down, and the men all stood and shook hands. He walked home with Jupiter at his side. He was despondent.


Jupiter turned to him. “Look, boy . . .” the man's voice echoed across the walkway. “I have always thought of you as a son.” A contemptuous snort broke forth, unbidden. “I know you don't think so, but I don't care what you think. You have grown tremendously since your days in the Cadets. I hear reports of you all the time, and I am able to say that I'm proud of you. Someday you will be a great man, and I, your unworthy teacher.”


Reassurances always came across as hyperbole to him. His mother always tried to tell him how handsome he was. It never worked, and Jupiter's reassurances didn't work either. He was beyond help - Antonioüs was going to steal Penelope away, and there was nothing he could do.


“I'm going to do everything within my power to help. Just wait and see.” Jupiter left.






He went to his room and laid down. He cursed at the ceiling for a while and soaked his pillow with unbidden tears. “Stupid! Why didn't I go earlier? Why did Antonioüs have to do this to me? Why is life so unfair?” Slowly, he fell asleep.






Hades.


He had always been told that the horizon was forbidden. Apparently, people who went out there came back changed. He wasn't a believer in spirits or fancies, so he dismissed the “changed” stories as suspicious nonsense.


Laërtes had to announce his daughter's marriage today. Antonioüs was sure to win. The depression was starting to settle on his shoulders as he thought about it. He reached for his sack and helmet, and opened the lock. He walked down to the garage to get a Rovercarr for the day's work, his shoulders slumped and his gait slow. When he finally got to the garage, everything was silent - Antonioüs and all of his mechanic friends were waiting for Laërtes to make the wedding announcement. He tossed his pack into the carriage of the Rovercarr, and checked to make sure that the solar panels were secure and functional. He slowly levered himself into the vehicle and turned it on. Suddenly, someone vaulted in next to him. The person was suited and already had their helmet on. Confused, he turned. It was Penelope. “GO!” she yelled. He heard a faint “mmmmm” from outside her helmet. He locked down his own helmet and switched on the helmet mic. “What?”


“GO.” Obliging, he drove into the main airlock.


Why was she with him, he wondered? Women were never allowed into the wastes. Women were too valuable a resource. They reproduced, continuing humanity one child at a time. He had heard of a census fourteen solstices ago that estimated that there were only seven thousand women in the Pods. The scientist who conducted the census said that at current reproduction rates, humanity was at a balance point – too few children, and it would die out from underpopulation. Too many children, and it would die from overconsumption. They needed every woman they could get. That's why women didn't go out on the wastes – the wastes were dangerous. People died all the time when Rovercarrs failed or once, when an asteroid fell too close to a Pod and devastated the resource farming operations. Men were expendable, so they worked the wastes. Women were valuable, so they stayed in the Pods.


Why was she coming?


He reached a conclusion: he didn't care, as long as she was with him.






They drove for what seemed like forever. Penelope must have had no idea where they were going, but he knew exactly. Drive straight west from the Pod, and reach the horizon. What was over the horizon? Change. Apparently, people who went out there came back changed. Drive straight west from the Pod, and reach the horizon. He drove straight west.


The Wastes of the Outside stretched before them like a vast plain. The craters here were small. He had heard that there were craters so big that an entire Pod could fit inside of them, farther south. Much farther south. They were the most western bastion of civilization, built over the last tenable resource bed on the western plain. Their Pod was at subsistence level, and had not reached the splendor and overcrowding of some of the southern Pods. Since their Pod was on such nice terrain to the west, he could drive at top speed. He planned on reaching the horizon while still under cover of the sun, charging the solar batteries all the way there. The sun would soon set, however, and pass away. If they didn't reach the horizon before the sun went down, he was going to turn back.


Soon, he realized that he had passed the horizon. The sun set. The waste felt exactly the same – there was no difference. Why did people come back changed, exactly? He didn't know. He wasn't sure he cared to know. His started yelling in his brain, “Stupid people! I should have known that there was nothing but superstition out here! Stupid me, I should have fallen in love sooner. Stupid mom, for bugging me for so long. Stupid – ”


It felt good to scream.


He slammed on the brakes and the vehicle skidded to a halt, sideways. He threw himself out on the ground and started running as fast as he could, yelling the whole time. He got a good ways away from the car before he calmed down. He walked back.






Walking back, he had a long time to think.


He got into the car and looked at Penelope. “I'm sorry,” he started. “I should have done a lot of things sooner . . .” his voice trailed off, and he realized that she wasn't looking at him. She was looking past him. He turned, and saw a blue orb hanging in space. He had seen the stars before – every time he looked up, they were there. He had seen the sun, rotating around the edge of his world in wide arcs. But he had never seen anything blue in the sky before. Ever.


It was massive, as big as his fist. It was so big that he could see details and variations in its surface—colors, swirls of white and green.


It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Why had they never told him about it? What else were they keeping from him? Why didn't they live there, in that sweet looking eden, and why did they live on this horrible grey wasteland of danger and hardship? Why didn't they at least live where they could see the celestial heaven?


“What is it?” He crackled over the headset. “It's amazing.”


“Ulysses,” she started. “I have something to say.”


He turned to face her, and he could see the orb reflected in her visor. Her eyes shone out past the blue. “What?”


“I love you. I don't want Antonioüs, and” her voice broke


“I love you too, I can't live without” his voice broke






“Do you see that thing?”


“The blue thing?”






“Yeah, the blue thing. It's ours.”


“I don't think we can take it back with us.”










“Not like that. Like . . . whenever you think of it,”


“I'll think of you, and I'll think of this moment.”


“Right.”






“Ulysses, I love you.”


“Penelope, I love you.”






Their air supply grew dangerously low before they turned back and drove to the Pod.






When they arrived, they took off their helmets and walked separate ways. They didn't look at each other. Ulysses got to his cylinder. He took off his suit, and for the first time it was harder than putting it on. And it was the first time returning from the Outside when he didn't feel empty. He couldn't taste his tongue.


He wasn't surprised when they announced that Antonioüs would join with Penelope. He wasn't sad, either. He had a part of Penelope that Antonioüs never would.














Earth.