Art Pact 134

Plentiful were the days, and long as we could want them, and bathed in the warming lights of the grow-arcs. We ran through fields of corn, chased by each other and by the machines that rolled up and down blindly according to their nature. The endless black skies of summer provided the audience, a million twinkling spectators hidden by the lights during out performance which suddenly appeared at the end of the night, fading into resolvable points as the grow-arcs flickered and died and our eyes grew once more accustomed to the endless dark of the space above the colony.

It was our game, started mid-summer by Johnny Q, to try to spot our home star. The quickest one to find it after the last arc died was the winner and king or queen for the night. Nature had balanced the game well - Sol being much brighter from the colony than Abraxus it was easier to see, but Abraxus was part of a constellation that lay above the main plane of the milky way, allowing the searching eye to cling on to that easier formation and work its way up (or down, depending on how late in the cycle it was) to the star itself. Rarelle was excused from the games, since the Bleak Star was not visible from anywhere on the colony, and although we did not at the time understand why, we accepted it in a rare display of solidarity. Although it did not play, I sometimes watched Rarelle when the arc went out, and saw it turning its featureless head from side to side, scanning in some arcane direction. Sometimes the gesture continued until we were called in and ran laughing back to our mothers and fathers and father-mothers. But sometimes - rarely - it would slow and stop, and I would wonder whether Rarelle had given up the hunt or whether it had found the home from which its elder part had once travelled.

#

You will have to excuse me - I have not thought of the game for a long time, and there are certain other emotions tied up with it. I just remembered Lexi N, who I have not thought of in a hundred years. She-he was the smallest of the Abraxans, the follow-on of a clutch, fast on Her-his feet and brought up by a father-mother who was a teacher of human languages. She-he could ape a human perfectly, so much so that over the radio you could not tell that she-he was Abraxan at all.

It was a tending machine that did for her-him, one of the man-sized things that we fled before in fits of nervous laughter. It had been reprogrammed to search for red-fleas after dark, but the programmer had made a mistake in his code, accidentally bypassing the safety routines that prevented the machine from colliding with unexpected objects in the fields. While she-he was looking for Abraxus, stood in the dark and staring at the sky, the machine rushed silent and swift through the ranks of corn. The farmers in their high towers must have seen the accident, but to them it was just a marker light atop a dark shape that rolled and rolled and rolled and briefly slowed and rolled on.

#

That was how it ended, of course. We were banned from the fields after that, I remember now and understand. At the time we were torn between selfishness and compassion, the way children often are. We understood that our parents (those of us who had them) were terrified by the prospect of another accident, and that it was better to play along just for a while than to work them into a still more restrictive frenzy of care. We also missed our playmate, the one who had more than any of us acted as a bridge across our differences (a revelation that came to most of us only years after her-his death, when we reached the ages that our troubles began). But at the same time we resented her-his stupidity - how could she-he be so foolish as to have allowed her-himself to be killed like that? We knew that the adults blamed their programmer, and that he had been put on trial for negligence, but we saw things differently - we had outrun the machines hundreds of times ourselves, each time successfully, why did she-he not simply jump aside? These were the things we said to each other, and perhaps they were the start of our schism, because when we said them to each other we thought nothing of it, but when we overheard others talking amongst themselves we allowed ourselves to become outraged on Lexi N's behalf. The adults had nothing on us when it came to believing two things at the same time - we were the champions of hypocrisy,

Eventually our boredom overcame our prudence, and while we came in early to avoid notice we nonetheless returned slowly to the fields that we had been forbidden. We went back to our games of dodge the machine, adding to the rules the extra wrinkle that we must also now give them a wide enough berth to avoid their sensors and any undue interest from the farmers that might get back to our parents. The great bulk of us, me included, forgot entirely about Johnny Q's game - we did not miss it, and perhaps in our minds it was so inextricably mixed with Lexi N's death that it would not have afforded us much pleasure anyway. But the bulk of us was not the all of us, and one at least, one who had had no real reason to comply with the restrictions placed on the rest of us, seemed to remember and long for the sport. Rarelle was its own parent, in a way, and although we assumed that it had been warned off playing at night it is only with hindsight that I realise that it had simply gone along with the crowd in staying away.

At least twice I saw it, even in the day, stop running suddenly and begin to scan its head from side to side; the motion slowing as it homed in on its hidden home on the other side of the warp curtain.