“We’ll talk later,” I tell you, with such casual smoothness you have no idea how poor my grasp of “later” actually is.
Then I expand out to formless thought-feeling-presence. I am around your ship, through your ship. I have no edges, no body, only a calmness like shade and meditation and cool water.
I unfold within a nebula, a fair harbor for thought, while patterns form in the blooming and exploding of stars as millennia sweep by.
I return to where you were, but find I have lost you.
You could be anywhere. I’m hazy on the time as well, and so I search backwards and forwards.
I rush through all the reaches of the cosmos where your people have explored and built civilizations, and I rummage through planets and systems like opening and shutting drawers in rapid search.
And all I have to aid my search is a set of dingy keys.
My short story “Tomorrow Is a Difficult Proposition” is now available to read on Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores!
CRES decided to release it as a Valentine’s Day story as it features an immortal cosmic being who falls in love with a mortal ship’s captain and loses her in the vastness of time and space. It doesn’t help that the cosmic being has trouble with small, mortal units of time, such as “later” and “tomorrow,” and with patience in general. And so, while my story involves love, it’s not actually a romance.
In fact, it’s mostly about having no concept of time, something I wrote about in the latest issue of my newsletter.
Fun fact: Did you know that one turn of the galactic wheel is about 230,000,000 years, at least for the Milky Way Galaxy? This is something I learned during the editing process. In the early drafts, my cosmic narrator measures time in eternities. But the editor at CRES suggested using turns of the galactic wheel instead, and that made sense to me. After all, we measure years by turns of the planet.
Anyway, check out the story, and check out Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, if you’re not already familiar with it. They have a ton of cool stories over there.