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!H508X.HbJ6 01/13/11(Thu)03:16 No.13503408It was old. Unimaginably old. Shot sighed, pulling out a single, strange box. A headset from the same compartment. Into the slot it was plugged, as he walked up to the window that stared into space. He took a deep, shuddering breath, looking up at the stars. Every year. It was tradition, he could not abandon it now. His son stood beside him.
"Can you see it, dad?"
His fingers touched the window gently as his eye looked from star to star. He took off the headset and sighed, reverently placing the old box back where it belonged.
The same lie. The same hope. But this time, there was no way to say it. His fist banged against the side of the ball of steel.
"I can't see it." he said quietly. "The sky's dark with 'em." he said quietly.
Every year, they would look to the skies and look for that blue speck. Every year, the child would ask if they could see it. And every year, he would lie, and say, it's right there, boy, are you blind?
History was not well taught on his planet. Earth, the old Earth from which they all stemmed, was less a fact and more a myth, a sort of heaven, or dream for the people who never saw a rain, who never knew what it was to swim in a lake. So, like Santa Claus, they pretended it was there, that someday, they would go. But Shot was one of those that knew the truth, like all the old folks. The player in his compartment held the final transmission from Earth, to the nearest shuttle. When he told his son, every year, like his father told him, and his father told him, and so on, that the earth still hung in the sky, he knew the truth.
He knew who took heaven from them.
Shot climbed into the Gyro, a grimace of anger and rage upon his face. It was time. Time to die, or time to be a hero.
Of course, for Shot, those words were essentially synonymous. |
