Inclinations of the Solar Winds, by T. Fox Dunham

A clown, his face painted crimson, looked at Christian through a window.

He opened his eyes, and the nightmare hid in the shadows of his mind. An artificial sun boiled like a cauldron of molten gold over the abandoned ruins of the colony, searing his eyes. He looked askance till his eyes adjusted, then he searched the sky. Jupiter churned like a pot of boiling clay, dominating the heavens, weighing heavy on the lad’s shoulders. Burning wreckage rained from high, pummeling the cracked mud-plates. The sky wept.

He found no evidence of recent habitation in the concrete wilderness. He was alone, another derelict in a jungle of junk—forgotten buildings crumbling to dust, abandoned grav-cars rusting among piles of scrap metal, sleeping smokestacks reaching to the two moons.

He sat down in the mud for a bit and closed his eyes. The clown had been waiting in the dark, his red makeup dripping down his cheek. Christian could feel the roots of recollection beyond the image, but he buried them.

“Excuse me good sir. Might that be a violin in your hand?”

“Can’t be sure,” Christian said, opening his eyes.

The hobo towered over him like an ancient oak, his head blotting out Jupiter. He slipped off his frockcoat—torn and stained gray with mud—and clapped out the dust into clouds. Christian studied the exotic runes carved on the fellow’s walking stick but could not discern their meaning.

“My, you look familiar, boy. Did you run a pool hall called Little Egypt on the Mars’ run? Can’t be. You can’t be more than twelve sun cycles. What’s your story?”

Christian dropped his head. He had not been looking forward to this particular question.

“It’s not wise to share personal information with a stranger, especially one of questionable intentions and dirty clothing.”

The hobo eyed him up, looking through him. Christian had never been good at telling tales.

“So lad. You look like a cat that’s been sucked into a plasma engine. I’d say you’re a bit lost.”

“Might be,” Christian said.

“First you’ve got to figure out where you be, then you can sort out where you’ve been and where you’re going.”

“I have no need for your service.”

“You’ve lost something. Your life? Your memory? You’re gazing at the cosmos through empty whiskey bottles.”

Christian got up, wiping the mud from his trousers.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“Ganymede. Long forgotten and left to wane.”

“Hey. Lookie there. May I have a gander, lad?”

The hobo reached for the violin case, but Christian pulled it away.

“You are going to steal it,” Christian said.

“Calm there lad. I’m not going to steal your fiddle. We of the sacred order of hobos don’t purloin.”

“Aren’t all of you bums forced to steal to survive?”

“I am not a bum, sir,” he said, grabbing the frayed lapels of his jacket. “I am a venerated hobo.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“Considering your amnesia, I can excuse your ignorance as to the different, wandering species. There are three differences between a hobo and a bum: one, a hobo is always running from something; two, a hobo is a creature of sorrow; and three, a hobo has class.”

Christian willed his fingers from the handle. He held it over to the hobo, who gently lifted it from his hand.

“I played one in school, though I wasn’t a Niccolò Paganini. I played for the oldest of reasons: to woo women. Drawn by my violin, such a woman fell in love with me—my only love in this life. Never dying. The kind of love the gods punish mortals with.”

He opened the case, revealing a slick bow and a polished violin. In the compartment at the head of the neck he found a small set of tuning pipes and a photograph: a middle-aged man and woman, well dressed and smiling, a crimson horizon glowing behind them.

“Out of rosin. You must play every day. It needs it or the strings get brittle. Don’t fret. Got just the thing.”

The hobo took an amber crystal from his vest pocket and handed it to Christian.

“I’ve held onto this for years. Luck charm—not sure if it’s bad or good. It was made from the last pine tree to grow on the earth green. I’ve been looking for the right bloke to give it to. The cosmos is odd like that, full of destinies and inclinations.”

“Your parents?” the hobo asked, studying the woman with carnation eyes in the photo. He shook his head, refuting something. He grinned like wizened tabby cat. “Destinies and inclinations. Guess the cosmos is inclined for my debts to be paid.”

The women felt familiar to Christian. He recalled the scent of lilac in her hair, a soothing feeling when he smelled it. Then his gut wrenched, and he looked away.

“Beats me,” Christian said.

The hobo placed the base of the violin below his chin, set the bow to the strings and spun a spirited reel. The song summoned fuzzy visions. The clown looked familiar now like the man in the photo.

“Stop.”

The hobo resigned his playing and set the instrument back into the case.

“She’s a good violin with a sweet set of curves. She reminds me of a little dame I knew that used to sell her goods outside of the Zeta Fisheries on Lake Cerberus—but that’s a little too raunchy for you, my lad.”

He handed the case back to Christian.

A breeze picked up. A hint of sulfur like the scent of smoke from a burning match pricked his nose. Infant raindrops plucked at his face.

“Maybe you play professionally.” the hobo said. “There’s a celebrated music academy in orbit around Io. The Brahms Institute. You might be a student there.”

The boy shrugged.

“Can you remember anything?”

“Not even what I had for breakfast this morning,” Christian lied. The photo had triggered his memory. Images started to flocculate. He knew the clown, recalled the smoke grasping his throat, the murmur of sobbing, the thunder of something breaking up. He pushed the memories away.

“This sounds serious. Do you even know your god given moniker?”

“Christian.”

“Well it’s a start—march on Christian soldiers. Are you a soldier? No. You’re just a spring cabbage. I used to be a soldier. Does that make us anything special?”

Christian shrugged.

“Well please allow me to introduce myself, Christian-of-the-many-shrugs. I am known on the eight planets far and wide as Manny Hands—the Great Ash-Staff. I am a man of the solar winds, a traveling rambler seeking the sweeter side of the sun and lady-kind, on a quest for the silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the sun. Am glad to make your acquaintance, Master Christian, sir.”

Manny shook his hand, and he felt at ease, safer—his first friend on this abandoned world.

“Come on Master Christian. Let’s get some vittles. Then we’ll sort you out.”

* * *

“We have company for dinner, Knox old boy.” Manny addressed the gnome kneeling before a fire. The fellow stirred a green paste as it bubbled in a dented pot. The hobos had set up camp in an empty factory.

The little fellow with his toes sticking through holes in his boots dumped more roots into the stew then put on a pair of gloves that were cut at the knuckles. He wore a vest that looked like a worn carpet. Leaning on the wall next him was an umbrella with a cherry wood handle upon which were carved symbols similar to those on Manny’s staff.

“Christian, meet my esteemed colleague in the field of stellar walk-a-bout, Mr. Horatio Knox, former professor of Utopian University. You may have heard of him. He invented the zero-gravity yo-yo.”

Christian waved.

“Charmed I’m sure,” Knox said, bowing.

Christian realized how tired he was, and he sat by the fire, nearly collapsing.

“Are you going to play us something on that?” Knox asked him. “We could do with a little dining music. That would be downright civilized.”

“No.”

“Come on lad. Don’t be shy. I bet you play so grand that your folks are real proud of you.”

Christian looked at the violin, and the fractured recollections returned, smearing ink over his eyes. They were going somewhere, something to do with his music. The clown with dripping red makeup. The heat from fires. The keen of alarms. The ringleader, the captain, singing a circus song about abandoning ship.

“No,” he snapped.

Manny came over and sat down next to him.

“Let him be, you Philistine. It’s obvious that he only plays to classy audiences.”

Knox tasted the stew with a cracked spoon.

“The lad can’t remember anything before this afternoon,” Manny explained.

Standing up to serve, Knox’s leg trembled. He grimaced and rubbed it. His checkered trousers were torn at that spot, revealing a bruise.

“Knox got into a bit of a fracas with a pinky,” Manny said.

Christian nodded but didn’t have any idea what a pinky was.

Manny produced a set of collapsible bowls from a pack, and Knox ladled out the stew. Christian swallowed from the bowl. At first, its zesty taste was too rich for him; however his mouth acclimated to the flavor.

They ate and contemplated.

After dinner Knox dozed off, and Manny spent some private time with a jug of moonshine he’d pulled out from a hole in the wall. He gazed through cracks in the concrete, watching the synthetic sun dim for the evening cycle, watching another world, another time with wistful eyes.

They’d treated Christian like an old friend, fed him, and made him comfortable. Perhaps he had known them in another life. His father had always told him that souls travel in flocks from one life, one world to the next and always meet again.

The man in the photo was his dad.

Manny pulled a thermal blanket from his pack and gave it to the boy. Christian made a bed next to the fire.

“Go to sleep, Master Christian. You’ll need strength tomorrow.”

“What’s tomorrow?”

Manny took another pull from the jug then placed it back in its hiding place. More hobo symbols had been carved above on the wall.

“Tomorrow, at the rise of dawn, we egress, exit, sally forth and saunter off this world and into the cold, nether reaches of space, seeking our fair fortune.”

“But I can’t go,” Christian said. “What if someone comes here looking for me?”

“Unlikely,” Manny responded. “This old moon has long since been abandoned. Once, the Ganymede Corporation had thousands of miners on the planet’s surface, genetically engineered to breathe its air while they terra-formed it. Then it was evacuated as part of the peace treaty between the Mars and Jupiter Colonies that brought the bloody Belt War to an end twenty solars since. Mars has neglected to settle here since it is so far outside the trade lanes.”

“Do you have a ship?”

“Dirty things,” Manny said. “Bad for the black sea.”

“Then how are we getting off this moon?”

“Leviathans, of course. Like in the Bible—swallowing up old Jonah.”

“You’re mad,” Christian said.

“Fire in the head,” Manny replied.

“Leviathans are colossal, hot-blooded creatures—if they have blood—like Earth whales,” he explained. “They’ve lived long before the age of man and will live long after. They dwell in a layer of hyperspace unknown to all but a few special travelers—us hobos. Legend goes one of the first of our kind—the venerable Farkwatts—discovered one that had been pulled into our plane by a solar flare. He tended its wounds, and studying the beastie, he found the means to adjust a hyper gate generator to slip into their layer of space. In thanks for this kindness, leviathans granted hobos passage to the stars. They travel in schools, going from world to world, feeding off the copious radiation left in subspace by fusion generators and natural sources. This time of year, there’s a pod of them that follow the ore ships that make the Io run.”

Christian would never have believed such nonsense, but Manny spoke with such love for these whales.

“Manny?”

“My liege?”

“You said that hobos are creatures of sorrow, always running from something. What are you running from?”

Manny gazed again at the dim sky.

“So enchanting, my Eliza. We grew up in the Elysium Province on Mars, went to school together—thick as thieves. My father owned the rights to a few mines in the Odin cluster, and I was going to work for him when school ended. We were to be married.”

“What happened?”

“When the Belt war started, I left on the first transport to Fort Baltimore on Phobos for basic training. My dad said it was our duty—and he owned rights in one of the contested sectors of the belt. Eliza and I planned to be married as soon as I came home. Foolish adults do things like that in wartime. If I had known that she was, I would have married her then, never would have left her.

“Three months later she stopped writing me. I did everything I could to contact her, but communications at the front were jammed. Then I got a written letter from her father. She had lost a baby—our daughter. Zeus! If only I had known. I couldn’t deal with it. Some of us aren’t made strong. We’re extras, made out of the leftovers the gods had after making the good men. The next day, half my unit was wiped out in the Battle of Aries Cluster. I also was a casualty, but oddly my heart continued to tick tock. So I volunteered for every suicide mission, but I had a terrible habit of living. Then came the armistice. I would have named our daughter Athena.”

“Why didn’t you go back to her?” Christian said.

“I don’t know lad. I just couldn’t leap. When the war ended, I never went back home, never returned to that life. I was done with society as were many of the soldiers who became hobos. I abandoned her. I’ve always hoped one day I’d be able to make it up to her.”

“I wonder if I’ll ever know love like that,” Christian said. “Why not try to find her now?”

“She moved on, got married and all that. I’m glad. I’m a hobo now. Sometimes walking away is best. Now get some sleep, Master Christian. You have to be at your best, or a pinky will do you an injury.”

“Manny, can I be a hobo too?”

“Not if I can help it lad.”

Manny dozed off, stirring only to scratch the bramble on his chin.

Christian dreamt the circus had caught fire. The crowd’s cheers turned to shrieks then went mute when their ears shattered from the force of the blast that breached the dome that enclosed the festivities. Several spectators were ripped into space before force fields flickered on, closing the breach.

The clown whispered something to Christian then shut a portal between them. He looked at Christian through glass with familiar eyes.

 * * *

They’d eaten a breakfast of beans and biscuits, and Christian washed up with a sonic-san kit. Then they’d packed up camp and hiked to a derelict power station, taking position in a circle of domes that contained dormant fusion reactors.

“You bend your legs at the knees,” Manny explained. “That’s right. You’ve got to close your eyes. Don’t worry cause you won’t be able to see anything anyway. Now this is the important bit. You’ll hear a low rumble, and it’ll crescendo like the beginning of a thunderstorm. That’s when to brace yourself—and you’ll be shaking in your boots. Be ready to leap into the air at the right time. You’ve got to wait until you feel it here in your heart—sort of like a little vibration. It’s hard to describe even for a brilliant poet such as myself. Guess it feels like the first moment of love. You’ve got to wait for it, trust it. Move at the wrong time, and you’ll be scattered to the solar winds.”

Manny handed him a breather, and Christian attached it to his nose.

Knox kneeled in the mud and carved several symbols with a laser pen into the concrete foundation on one of the domes, making another line below existing symbols.

“Hobo code for a good place to lay low and the roots are good vittles,” Knox translated. “Scratches to any yahoo not in the know.”

From his pack, Manny took out a small poker capped with a crystal bulb. He flicked it on. It gave off an azure glow. Like a wizard with a wand, he touched Knox, who phased out in a blue flash.

“Got your Stradivarius?” Manny asked.

Christian lifted the case to show him.

“We’re going to need it.”

With a tap of the wand, the ruins around Christian exploded into sparks then washed away, melting, revealing a landscape painted beneath. Crimson streams wove like roadways through the midnight world, some traveling on forever. Buildings morphed into copper hills. The sky seethed fire. Christian’s skin tingled, feeling the rushing energy currents all around. The three of them floated in an orchard of crystal pillars that pulsated silver and golden blood. Christian’s nose tickled at the metallic scent, feeling the fizzy ozone nibbling at his nose, lips.

“The silver and golden apples—it’s what radiation looks like in this phase of space,” Manny said. “Reminds me of a poem by an ancient Irish poet. William Butler Yeats. The Song of Wandering Aengus. Here they come. Hold onto your knickers.”

With bulbous bodies like caterpillars, the mournful beasts swept down the crimson paths. Antennae ran along their husks, waving like a field of windblown wheat. Yawping as they approached the energy fields, their roar deafened Christian. He was amazed at their size—larger than a solar freighter. A pod of these whales could’ve eaten away a moon.

“Pray to Zeus,” Manny said. “They’re making their run. Get your legs ready. We only get one shot at this.”

The leviathans accelerated, diving at the orchard, opening their beaks to scoop up the fruit. Space quaked, nearly throwing Christian off his feet. His stomach filled with lead, weighing him down.

“I can’t do it!”

“Come on lad,” Manny yelled over the roar. “You gotta leap. Or it’s lights out.”

He gathered his courage, pushed it down into his legs.

Leap.

He remembered his father pushing him into the pod, his face smeared in blood. He heard his father say it. Leap.

The cosmos tickled his heart.

He leapt.

 * * *

Manny gazed out of one of the cracks that broke through the scaling on the creature, watching the flow and eddies of the spectral, quantum currents. His face kept changing expressions, viewing a private movie projected on the cerulean plasma. They’d found refuge in one of caves within the depths of the whale, among the stalagmites and stalactites, arches and bridges.

“These creatures grow like trees,” Manny said. “Only the outside is alive. The innards crystallize and are hollowed away. When they eat, the energy runs along their beaks and infuses into the scales on their surface.”

He beckoned Christian to look out at the pod—hundreds stretching far into the distance.

“Truly a magnificent universe,” Manny narrated. Then he called back to Knox, “Keep an eye out for pinkys.”

“What are pinkys?” Christian asked.

“Pinkertons—railroad dicks of old that drove the hobos off the trains back on Earth. Except out here, they’re amorphous, crystalline creatures that feed off the waste produced by the hot beasties. The whales keep ’em along because they act like an immune system, fending off any invaders. And that’s us.”

“What do we do if they find us?”

“The secret is in your hand, Master Christian.”

He looked down at the violin case.

“Vibrations agitate their crystalline structure, make ‘em itch. So we got to fiddle for our lives.”

Christian gazed out into the currents and for a moment caught a glimpse of his father and mother, listening in their cabin as he played his violin. He shut his eyes.

“What did you see?”

“Nothing,” Christian said.

“Ghosts,” Manny said. “Ghosts in the ether. This universe is a mirror to our hearts. Only hobos can come here and not go mad. What did you see?”

“My parents.”

“What happened?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Don’t start running lad. You’ll never stop. I can’t let that happen. I owe you something. Amazing the way things happen—the inclinations of fate. Souls flock together, driven by the currents of space-time. Now we’re here together, and I know what I’ve got to do. Whims of the solar winds. Tell me what you remember.”

He could face it now with Manny standing with him. He stopped fighting.

“We were going to the Brahms Institute for my training after graduation. My mother—a music teacher back home in Elysium Province—bragged to everyone that I was going. She had me learn the violin when I was five, told me it made her think of love. Mary-Elizabeth Rutledge.”

Manny nodded.

“My dad went with us. George Rutledge. There was an explosion, the sound of gas escaping. I heard one of the crew say the ship had struck a mine leftover from the Belt wars. Screaming. Pushing. Dad got me into a pod. He said leap.”

Sobs pinched Christian’s throat.

“I wanted to go to that school so badly. Maybe if we had never left—I was so excited, couldn’t wait.”

Christian tossed the violin case. It stumbled, banged.

“It wasn’t you lad. It was the war. It killed many friends—if not their bodies, then their souls.”

“Pinkertons ho!” Knox called.

The pinkys oozed over the scales, into the cracks—blobs, spilled ink, the size of a man or a very tall dog. They pulsated, bulging over like globs of paint—clear lacquer and pink glitter suspended within.

Knox and Manny got out their harmonicas. They twittered out a tune, forcing all the air out from their lungs and through the pipes. Christian tried to stay still.

The blobs stopped in the airy music, entranced, but they quickly lost attention and slid forward.

“There’s too many of them this time,” Knox said.

“Need a little help here. Come on Master Christian—do your Mozart!”

Christian hesitated then took out his violin. He played Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

Drunk from the music, the creatures stopped. Knox kicked the stunned creatures through cracks in the bark.

 * * *

“Here we are, Master Christian. Home sweet home. There’s no place like it. You grew up in my old neighborhood. Our destinies were intertwined from the start.”

Phobos and Deimos hung in the air, suspended from puppet strings.

They stood at a public transit stop, looking at Christian’s family compound—three domes, partly built into the hillside on the bank of the river Styx. Obsidian boulders filled the yard around the building, and rust-daisies some over ten meters tall held their petals to absorb their heat.

“Let me go with you,” Christian said.

He patted the boy on the shoulder.

“Can’t do it, Master Christian.”

“I have no home anymore. I want to be like you. I want to roam space without needing someone, never hurting.”

“Oh and don’t forget always being alone, drowning in your own remorse and wishing you hadn’t wasted your life. Your life is here. Every night, whether I’m sleeping in another universe or in a luxury suite at the Lunar Arms, I’ll be haunted by my decision to leave her and will be until the day I ride a leviathan off this mortal coil.”

From his pack, he pulled an antique pulp-book: poetry by W. B. Yeats.

“It was a gift from Eliza,” he said. “I want you to have it.”

He hugged Manny, breathing in the smell of sweet vermouth and ozone. Never forget.

“Go on, Master Christian. The circle is complete. I’ve gotten you home. I’ll see you again in the flock of souls.”

Christian took a step forward, and the world pushed back. He struggled with his legs until he was moving down the path to his house, though the rows of rust daisies.

He wondered what would happen to Manny and considered how lucky he had been that Manny had been in the right place at the right time to help him: the inclinations of the solar winds.

He unlocked the door with an eye-scan and stepped into the hall. He was surprised to see a nurse there. When she saw Christian, she grabbed him with and dragged him through the subterranean halls and over the catwalks above the steamy botanical center into the bedroom chamber.

“Mrs. Rutledge!”

His mother lay in bed, a cast on her leg, her arm hooked up to an infusion bag. The nurse pulled him in, nearly yanking off his arm, and his mother woke up, looked him up and down and sobbed.

“Chris! Oh thank god—just thank god.”

They embraced. He heard the gentle pounding of her heart. He looked at her, drawing in her face. Her carnation eyes, slim, pale lips and blonde hair looked as fresh as a seedling.

“Your father got me into a pod right after you, but the explosion pushed me off course. I ended up going into orbit around Jupiter until a military shuttle picked up my beacon.”

“And dad?”

Her eyes fell.

“But how did you get here?” she asked. “Did the rescue team find you?”

He didn’t answer, sat down on the bed and ran his fingers over the blanket. He dropped the book between them. She picked it up and studied the cover, eyes wide.

“I met some hobos. They—he helped me.”

“Manny,” she said. Her eyes gazed at the cerulean plasma buried beneath our layer of space.

She opened the book, caressing the worn, pulp pages. She showed him the inscription on the inside cover, written in her lovely calligraphy:

Dearest Manstien. Always remember poetry like music must be played from the source. I love you always. Your beloved Eliza. 

—Mary-Elizabeth Row.