on
11/3/2001
Writer's Note: While animating, I began to ask questions of the Marboxian Raider. At first he was uncommunicative--he has no mouth!--but as the session wore on he began to speak, in his own way. The following transcribes what I dictated into a miniature tape recorder over the past few days.
"What planets have you seen, little Marboxian?" I asked. He said he'd seen a fire planet. The inhabitants were made of lava. Electric fields held them together. But the inhabitants could never finish anything. To form an object, they'd pull it out of the lava around them. They'd shape it, and let it harden and take form. Add on and subtract. But they'd lay it aside for a second and the thing would lose form, and melt again into the magma. And like their objects, sooner or later, the fire creatures' magnetic fields would give way, and they'd melt again into the lava. So too the continents, rivers, cities, mountains--all the features of the world--for, you see, the planet could never finish anything either.
"How many planets have you seen, little Marboxian?" I ask. None, he replies. I've seen a thousand cities, and hills, and cathedral forests, but I've only ever seen horizon to horizon. I've never seen a whole planet. A spaceship shows me only a hemisphere. On the ground I see only a present moment. Who are you? Where are you going? Where have you been? No, I've never seen a planet.
I never could.
He told me of a star system. In it was a planet, but the planet was too hot. It was going to spiral into the sun. He passed another planet in this star system, but the planet was too cold. Soon it would spiral out and away from the star, and be lost. I asked him if he'd passed a third planet, between the two. He said he hadn't yet.
Then he told me about the planet of Osiris, where the kettlerunds grow. Kettlerunds are large, edible plants. They taste and smell wonderful. Civilizations, for thousands of years, have flourished on the kettlerunds. But then one day all the inhabitants left. No one knows why.
Crashing stars together is no easy thing. The Marboxian's seen many attempts at this.
I saw Thireus, the planet that conquered time. They built machines they could look into and see any moment in the past. Time-watching became an industry, and then the biggest industry; a global economy built on watching what has come before. I asked the Marboxian if he had looked into his own past while he was there. No. He said he hadn't stayed long; Thireus is a boring place.
"What other planets have you seen?" Running out of fuel one day, I stopped on Johnus. They said they didn't have any to spare. They were building a large rocket, large enough to lift the entire population onto a new planet--the next planet in the solar system. I wandered through the strip-mines and smokestacks and dumps that radiated outward from the base of the rocket, and finally stole just enough fuel to lift off. I thought I might find more fuel on the other planet, but there wasn't one.
Taul is a garden paradise--a cellular web of slate and green copper houses, seperated by cool, meandering paths through thick glades of fruit-bearing trees, broken only by a bubbling, ancient aquafer that has long-since split its fountain. Indeed, there are no oceans on Taul. No highways or cities. The people live off the fruit of the land, virtual prisoners in their own homes.
Scholars debate whether Sanguine existed in the past, or never existed, or will exist in the future; but every time they colonize a new planet, the settlers try to build it like Sanguine.
Eight thousand years ago, the planet Zenobia was made a trash planet by several neighboring star systems. A civilization grew up in the refuse. Its bustling metropolises grew fat on trade, and banking, and aerospace. A percieved slight ignited a war between it and the other planets nearby. The Zenobians were routed. Their people moved off. Their soaring buildings, and broad avenues were crated off as plunder. The Marboxian visited Zenobia some years ago. He said it's been made into a trash heap, where the other planets send their garbage.
"Is this the end of our conversations, little Marboxian? Is this all you have to teach me?" I asked him a question he couldn't answer, and I regretted it. "I wonder, when I first asked you what planets you'd seen, did you mean to, to end by saying that you'd seen mine?" No, that's just your impression of me, he said.
Touch the Toast