PARHELION CHRONICLES:
THE EXPLODING SUN DOG
ROOM WITHOUT A VIEW
OVERTURN DRIVE
NIGHT WITHOUT A DREAM
WE SEEK WHAT WE FIND
Characters:
Rash Sightings
Ariel Chance
Commander Michael Rexford
Forrest Warren
THE EXPLODING SUN DOG
The Hall of
Trinity echoed with his footsteps, and the generator hummed outside of the
orbiting space station. It was dark out,
and the Space Man went down the hall, opened a door, and went inside. The room was painted with blue, and it had a
blue trimming. He went forward slowly,
his mind sweeping the room, and he sat down, hard, on the recliner. Within minutes, he was asleep. His head leaned back, his mouth parted,
revealing spit. His eyes were blue, a
deeper blue than the bluest ocean, and everything about it was as vast as the
Universe itself. For, he was the First
Born of the Sun God, Minerva, and they were in a different part of the
Universe, conversing with space bugs and creating stars. The Space Man’s first Naming Day had come and
gone, and his name was Rash Sightings, a human name. The Space Station was old, and clips of it
were stored in the memory banks. He had
come here after his parents decided to kick him out of their house, which was
the House of Snow and Rain. There was
ice and rain in space, but it was mostly filled with oxygen. Oxygen in space was not known before by
Earthlings, but was such discovered by Jupiterians in the 23rd
Century. Sometime during the Third Cycle
of Trahn, two beings floated into his room-they had gray skin and black eyes
shaped like almonds, their mouths just thin slits in their faces. Their hands were long, like tree
branches. He had been in many parts of
the Universe, and he had never seen aliens like those before. He wondered dimly what they were in his
sleep. He thought he must be
dreaming. He felt he must be.
“What…?” he said sleepily. He turned his head sideways.
The female
Grey moved forward, her feet pattering on the cold floor. “We’ve come to see you, Rash,” she whispered
sweetly, like a nightingale’s song. She
didn’t have any hair. He thought all
women must have hair on their heads.
“Why?”
“Because you’re
the Last One,” she responded. “We need
to warn you. Danger in the
Universe. You aren’t safe. Your parents sent us, a long time ago, and we
were forgotten. We won’t forget what the
humans did for us-what their sacrifice is.
Nothing matters to us but peace and serenity.”
“I don’t
want to talk about peace now,” he murmured.
The male
leaned forward earnestly. “You will be
fine,” he said anxiously. “If you
believe.”
“Believe in
what?”
“Oh…everything. Nothing.
Logic. Yourself.” He waved his hand away. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve said all we had to say in your DNA.”
“What does
that…?” He started, but they were gone,
and he was alone, again, in the simple room with the recliner and the
television set, and the recorder that sat on the table. He jolted himself awake and stared at the
recorder, and got up and left the room.
He didn’t know what it was for, but he could probably guess. The aliens must have wanted him to recite
poems. He didn’t want to do any of
that.
* * *
“What are
you doing here?” he asked his parents,
bored. They had come from a party; his
mother wore a blue party dress, and his father, Sin Sahn, wore a red suit. He thought it was ugly.
“My boy, can’t
a father see his doting son?” he
questioned.
The large
sun orbited around a smaller, celestial star.
The star was cold, and vast, in the depthness of space, and it hummed
methodically. Finding a star that hummed
was an impossible find, and it was written in the records at the Hall of
Trinity, where the Hall of Records were stored.
It was not the human race; it was the race of Ellinians, who dwelled in
the coldness, and its divine eccentricities. The light from the star had gone;
the scientists watched it from the large telescope in the midst of space,
spinning consistently, and humming. The
scientists wrote down the information and it was sent to more Labs, and they
gave the star a name-Mr322xxz.
Rash
Sightings was not an ordinary being. He
had a consistency of being in trouble, and although he tried very hard to be normal,
everyone could see that he clearly wasn’t.
His overzealous need to succeed, was undefined, and other people thought
he was stupid and cocky. His mere
presence drove women to tears; sometimes, when they cried, their tears turned
to diamonds and fell, shattering, to the ground. He collected a lot of the diamonds and sold
them on the black market and bought a bicycle with the money. On the planet of Ellin, where he was born, it
was always cold-the coldness was in his bones, for he was a cold-blooded
creature, and his people crash-landed on the planet several millenia ago, back
when the dinoplads still lived on the planet.
The people were simplistic in nature, and did not have any craft except
for submarines and bicycles. Most people
lived in trees, for their arms were long, like spiders, and their mouths were
thin. The trees were long, thin, gray,
and had crooked branches, and the shadows from the trees fell upon the ground
every sunset. Unlike Earth, the sun was
very close to the planet, and many of the people were lazy and rude and did not
want to work. They complained every
single day about their jobs, and some often quit, without warning, and
disappeared forever.
They were
enticed by adventure, and went to go on vacation in submarines and ended up
dying because they didn’t bring enough provisions. They were stupid creatures, stupid and needy
and relied on technology instead of their own brains. It grew so tiring, that the President of
Ellin, a human being, wanted to end his life.
His name was Maruc Kerin Andon, and he was fifty-three years old. He had brown eyes and brown hair and he lived
in the Embassy, because human beings could not live in the domed cities with
the Ellinians-it was against Ellinian law.
All human beings on the planet were criminals; being human was their
only crime, because that was the cheapest law they could put into
practice. The building was very large,
and made entirely out of gold, for they had sent satellites to distant planets
and brought back different chemical components and turned them into something
useful, like a television set, a car, and a broken radio.
They did not
understand the ways of human beings, and copied some of their ideas, but they
were used in ways that did not help them progress to where they needed to
be. They had sent satellites to Earth
and had seen the images of human beings at work. One of the scientists built a teleportal,
which allowed beings to travel from one place to the next. The President of Ellin ordered several human
beings to be kidnapped, and after they arrived safely on the planet, the
teleportal was destroyed, and the scientist disappeared. Maruc’s real problem was his bald head. He wanted to have long hair, like the other
Eillinians, and he had many surgeries to fix the problem and the hair always
fell out.
Most of the
time, he spent his days at the office looking at himself in a holographic
mirror that could shape his face into any way he wanted. Sometimes, he chose to have blue eyes; one
time, he made his nose so big he looked like a horntensheik. He called many businesses and asked them
if they had real wigs; they always called back, and shouted they didn’t.
Businesses
on Ellin always shouted at each other, because they thought that was how things
were supposed to be. The businessmen
usually only worked until lunchtime, and then they went home to be with their
partners.
Maruc
received a call from the smartest man in the world, a
scientist/doctor/lawyer.
His name was
Ariel Chance, and he had blonde, curly hair, and pointed ears. He was two hundred years old. He said they had found a planet that was made
entirely out of an ocean, and did they want to inhabit it. He replied, “No, we don’t,” for he
represented all the beings on Ellinian.
He was chosen by a group of beings called Elected Representatives.
Maruc did
not like Ariel, and thought he was a busybody-he was always calling about
something or other, and it drove him crazy.
He paced back and forth in his office, stroking his beard, and looked out
the window. He wished he could get off
the planet, but there was no way out.
The man who invented the teleportal was missing. Maybe he went to another planet; maybe he was
dead. Maruc decided to find out. He
called his secretary, and asked her to find the information he needed, and she
called back and gave him the address where the scientist lived. Maruc put the piece of paper in his pocket,
took his bicycle-he got one with rockets on either end-and pedaled down the
street, happy to finally have found something to do. He was going to go to the scientist’s house
and find information, if he could. He
stared down at the paper in his hand, and returned his attention back to the
mansion. It was old. Spooky.
He swallowed hard, and walked up the stone steps to the front door and
rang the doorbell. No one answered;
maybe he wasn’t home. He put his hand on
the doorknob and the door swung open, inward.
The door creaked when it opened.
He scuffed his feet on the carpet in the doorway, and went through, down
the hall. The door swung shut behind
him, with a loud bang.
He went up
the stairs to the second floor, and looked around. The mansion looked empty, as if it had not
been lived in for years. He went into
the second room on the right-it was Ariel’s office. A computer was on the desk, and it was still
on. Maruc went over to it and pressed a
button and the computer flashed. “Stop
it!” it screamed. “I’m busy!” It was a talking computer.
Maruc
crouched in front of it. “Have you seen
Ariel?” he asked it.
“MAYDAY,
MAYDAY, MAYDAY! Intruder alert! Intruder alert!” The computer was sobbing. Maruc expected it to break into tears at any
minute-he didn’t know computers could do that.
Maybe it was a new invention.
Ariel was an inventor, also.
It took a
few minutes for Maruc to realize the computer thought he was the intruder. He reached over and flicked it off. He rummaged through the scientist’s desk, and
pulled out a map and several files, tucked it into his shirt. He went down the stairs. It was nice and quiet. He hadn’t had a lot of peace and quiet. His mind was in a muddle. Where could the scientist be? Last week’s mail was on the table in the
kitchen. Maruc looked around the place
once, twice, and hurried down the front steps to his bicycle and went
home.
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