A Vast And Endless Sky 1

This is sorta a story I've wanted to write for a while. I've barely known how to START it, but since I moved the snakes to Hayven Celestia it started to fall into place very quickly. This is very rough and I don't expect it to be very long, but here is a story about a male montrose named Rees. As always, ideas, thoughts and suggestions are welcome!

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The scientific community has reported no significant findings after the “lights in the sky” incident last month. Both the Tannic Coalition and Unified Forsica leaders deny any new spy satellites, jets or planes, though the small nation of Yinzatica has boasted responsibility and claimed it will destroy all superpowers with its new intercontinental missiles, despite not having shown any capability of spaceflight. In the South, scientists have agreed that the incident was most likely the result of a rogue meteor shower—

The bell on the door jingled, and the door shut out the noise of the radio outside—a relief as Rees hated listening to the news.

Rees lived for these days. The sun sank lazily in the sky while not yet red, the wind outside was just below bracing but not yet cold, the air inside the bookstore was warm and quiet but not too stuffy. The picture windows gave view of the parking lot, stuffed with the vehicles of a somewhat polluted and overcrowded world, but just for a little while, Rees could cut himself off from all those problems and just pretend he was sitting quietly on the outside, observing the world as he would through a novel. One which he pulled from the shelf and paged through along with a tall cittr-sen soda as he sat at the cafe table.

He didn’t want to be home right now anyway. He’d have to be, eventually, but the longer he could put it off, the better.

Rees felt a little conspicuous, though the solitude of the cafe and the tight snug of his jacket was more than enough to keep him secure. Besides, his anxieties had left him the moment he started to read. She With the Xenon Stare was, in all honesty, trash, but it was the fun, mysterious, surreal kind of trash that Rees could lose himself in, even if the vast majority of the major characters were female. It was always the same, with the males being treated as tail candy at best and victims to motivate the female leads at worst, but it wasn’t repellent.

Well, maybe some parts were. The way the writer kept introducing male characters by how cute and supple their testicles were just made Rees’s eyes roll into the back of his head, but he tried to ignore it.

Rees didn’t dislike the notion of someday being some female’s tail candy, but the fact he read dorky science fiction was such a turn-off to so many of his classmates. He didn’t care. He didn’t know how to describe it, but he had something of a mental wanderlust—not necessarily to go discovering, but just to think like something else, something other than… well, himself.

Suddenly, a paw pressed his wrist to the table.

“You’ve been sitting there for an hour,” the bookstore clerk said, her eyes narrowing at Rees. “This isn’t a library.”

“Ow, gys!” Rees pulled his paw away, rubbing it. “I bought a soda, what else do you want? You don’t wrap the books, I can browse them!”

“Hmm.” The female looked him up and down, then ran her fingers through the clean fluff of his tail. “How old are you, anyway?”

“Fifteen,” Rees lied. He drove here; his nineteenth birthday was next month.

“Uh-huh.” The female clicked her tongue. “Well, meet me out back and we can call it square.”

“Goddess, lady!” Rees’s ears flushed bright green and he shoved the book back on the nearest shelf, nowhere close to the science fiction section. “You could just tell me to get out.”

The female laughed and pinched at Rees’s ears. “Relax, boy, I’m just playing with you. Don’t take it so seriously.”

Yeah, well, Rees felt to out-of-place to just let some random female even jokingly claim him as an easy prize. He was already out the door. He considered making a complaint to management, but it wasn’t much use; her-word-against-his wasn’t particularly compelling evidence to have anything done about it. He just made a mental note to not come back to this bookstore during her shift—or, more likely, at all.

He sighed and climbed back into his car, taking some time to check his tail fur, then his head in the rearview mirror, to ensure nobody jammed a wad of gum into it again, or something. He felt that slight twinge of guilt over looking so conspicuous. Why did things have to be that way? He liked being pretty, he liked being looked at, he wanted to be fawned over and admired, but all that extra damned baggage that came along with it seemed so unnecessary.

It was getting late anyhow. As he reluctantly drove back home, Rees kept the radio tuned to classic heart-thump, watching as the late-night streetlights turned on against the dark blue sky.

The radio crackled. Rees fiddled with the station’s tuning, thinking he must have passed through some interference, but the rest of the stations refused to come in either. Then the static got louder.

Rees’s ears perked. The static turned sharp and crescendoed, very much unlike most radio static he’d heard before, like all the little bits and pieces were connecting together to form some coherent signal. But before it got there, it all stopped, and the radio went silent, with just an occasional pop or crackle.

Rees was so focused on the strange sound that he barely noticed the brake lights on the car in front of his, and suddenly ground to a halt, tires screeching against the road, but stopping centimeters from the bumper in front of him. He sighed heavily at the near miss, only to wince hard when another car smacked against his rear fender.

He checked the rearview, hoping not to see an enormous female get out of the car, but no, it was a male, which made Rees feel at least a little less overwhelmed. Unfortunately, the other driver’s car had dented in the accident, and they needed to wait for a patrol officer to arrive, who did unfortunately turn out to be female.

“So you were distracted by the radio?” the officer asked, as Rees looked down and to the side.

“Yes, ma’am. I thought it was about to announce an emergency or something. It was acting weird.”

“Uh-huh.” The patrol officers used a different bandwidth so it was entirely possible that they missed the fluke signal entirely. Probably didn’t matter. He was just hoping this female wasn’t about to make a snide comment about ‘male drivers’ or note his appearance, or worst, ask for a ‘favor’… not that many did, most montrose were perfectly nice, cordial people, but well… experience and the state of the world seemed to indicate there were enough tailholes out there to be worth worrying about.

Better to be safe, right?

The patrol officer decided not to write a ticket, but the insurance was going to have a fit anyway, and besides it was well after nightfall now. Rees was expected to be home, and he wasn’t at all sure how he was going to explain the scratch on the bumper to his mom.

Ugh. His mom. She was probably still up waiting for him. Maybe he could stop by Haw’s house and stay the night? But the problem there was that Rees just wasn’t a pup anymore. He was just past adulthood, and suddenly his relationships with females became so much more complicated. So the question was: get hit on by Haw’s mom, or face his own?

Well, he did at least know Haw’s mom…

As much as he might have liked the idea of spending the night in an older female’s bed, Rees knew he wasn’t about to open that can of grubs between their families. He’d rather have kept his friendship with Haw, so he drove home, stopping one block from his house and parking on the side of the street.

Rees approached the front, and for a brief moment considered sneaking through the back, but the kitchen light was on. He decided to risk the front door, turning the handle carefully and popping it open as quiet as he could, then slipped inside.

The light in the front living room clicked on, and Rees’ mom was sitting in the easy seat with a dour expression.

“Do you know what time it is?” His mother asked.

“Gys, mom, just wanted a bit of space.”

“Prowlers are out after dark, Rees!”

“I didn’t run into any!” Rees exclaimed. “Seriously, mom. You make it sound like I’m going to get jumped. Nobody’s looking to steal me.”

“You know that doesn’t stop some females.”

Rees hated this. He felt like he’d had the talk every month since he turned twelve. His mom, affixing her reading glasses, gestured for Rees to sit, and he supposed he had no choice but to obey; it wasn’t like he could just go to his room. When his mom wanted to read the Book of Life to him, she was going to read the book of life to him and only get more angry and frustrated the longer he passively or aggressively put it off.

His mom constantly spoke to him like she were teaching Life Lessons class. It was her job, certainly, being headmaster of the local Temple elementary school. But Rees in all honestly liked his mother better the few times she managed to turn off that side of her personality and acted like a real person rather than a scripture-dispenser.

“…Listen children, the Goddess Above admires in you your faithfulness; let he who is without mate join himself to a female in sacred—”

“Hard when nobody really wants me like that,” Rees interrupted.

His mom looked at him over her glasses. “Rees…”

“Well it’s true.”

She snapped the book shut. “Hon, you barely even look at any females at the temple. They’re all nice girls.”

“There’s barely any my age who aren’t already mated,” Rees said, knowing that wasn’t really a hindrance. The truth was, Temple Followers were all just so… stuffy. Rees had faith in the Goddess, sure, but if the rituals they practiced were the Good and True Rituals, well…he certainly had some questions for the Goddess when he reached the great beyond, hopefully not for a hundred years.

But he barely even knew what questions he wanted to ask. He felt something was just offabout the way that his life was treating him. Was he just being too self-centered? Was he a snob? Was he being unrealistic? His mother had accused him of all those things at one point or another and he had a hard time dismissing that maybe he was just too picky, with his head in the clouds reading books all the time and wanting his life to just be a fantasy rather than the reality that he needed to endure.

“Hon, I keep reading to you from the Book of Life in hopes that you’ll absorb it,” his mother said, placing a gentle paw on his knee. “You can’t keep living a fantasy.”

There it was again. Rees didn’t know exactly what he wanted to ask the Goddess, but there was a burning question he’d been wanting to ask his mother for years, and yet held his tongue. Well, he was only a month away from leaving for trade school, so if he was going to say it he needed to say it now.

“Mom, you don’t… know that.”

His mom sat back and took her glasses off. “Oh? What don’t I know?”

“The world today is a lot different than it was when the Book of Life was written. There might be… different stuff out there than the author could have conceived.”

His mother narrowed her eyes. “Is this about aliens again?”

“No!” Rees protested. “Well, not specifically! I’m not saying aliens exist, they probably don’t. But the Book of Life just feels… narrow.”

“Narrow?”

“I don’t know how to explain it. Like, remember when Mrs. Awwo said something like, the Book of Life is the guidebook on everything we as mortals ever need to know, and I asked why there isn’t any math in the Book of Life, and she pointed to that one passage about how King Expi commissioned the building of a great dome. Then I pointed out how the passage didn’t even calculate tau correctly—”

“Hon, I told you about that,” his mom explained patiently. “The calculation given was for the inner ring of the dome, leaving the outer ring to have the correct measurement—”

“No, see, this is the problem,” Rees tried to explain. “You can explain it all as much as you want but it still doesn’t account for why… why…”

“Why what?”

“Rrgh!” Rees groaned. He didn’t want to have this argument. He didn’t want to feel like an apostate. But there wasn’t any way to get to the argument he wanted to make, so he just blurted out the thing he was thinking anyway.

“Why did the Goddess give us a book for the entirety of our lives that’s very obviously incomplete?”

“Hon, it’s not divination. It’s not supposed to tell you every last detail of what will be—”

“I know that, mom! I don’t know how else to explain this! I know the Book of Life. You’ve been reading it to me since I was pink and hairless. But if you told me that every important lesson I’ve learned in life is derived ultimately from the Book, well, that’s just not true. You can say that all consciously moral and good art and philosophy ultimately comes back to the Book of Life but if that was the case it feels like it should have been the Book of Life that said it and not the derivative works. And, if you’re saying that the derivative works are fine for learning moral lessons, well, then, what exactly is wrong with me reading science fiction?”

His mom gave him a long look, then said, “Because most of that is utter trash and you know it.”

“You don’t know that! How can you possibly know that when you don’t want to read any yourself?!”

Rees suddenly realized he was shouting. His younger brothers had come out of their room to hear what all the yelling was about. When his mother turned her attention to usher them back to bed, Rees, his ears green with embarrassment, slipped away, pointedly shutting the door to his room.

He sighed and, removing his jacket that was getting thoroughly stuffy, tossed it aside and climbed up onto his bed. He’d only had a room to himself for the last year and a half, and already he was getting too used to it.

Then he realized he forgot to brush his teeth, and considered getting up, but he didn’t want to bump into his mom in the hallway. She knocked on the door anyway.

“Rees?”

“Mom, I’m done, I want to go to sleep.”

“Okay. But I want to talk to you about this in the morning. We should make a lesson out of it.”

“Goodnight,mom.”

“Goodnight, dear.”

Rees didn’t go to sleep, however. He was still fuming. He didn’t have a computer in his room, so couldn’t just play video games until he was tired, and besides, it’d have kept him up until the early hours if he started. On a whim, he decided to pull out a pack of squares and dealt himself a game on the floor under the lamplight.

The night got late anyway. Rees wasn’t sure if it was insomnia or what, but he simply felt wired deep in his chest. He hadn’t spoken like that to his mom ever. Well, he’d gotten close once or twice, they’d certainly fought, but not over religious matters. Was it him being arrogant again? Telling his mother he knew better than her, when she’d been studying the Book of Life her whole… er, life? He felt like he had a point but he was always just one step behind his mom from making it.

He didn’t know. He didn’t feel like he belonged in the stuffy temple where he was frequently told the world was different than the one he experienced, and he certainly didn’t feel like he belonged in the beautiful but often disappointing world outside.

There just needed to be a third option.

He was startled when a bright blue light flashed through his window. It was gone in an instant, but he could see through the open panes something still shining like a beacon down in the backyard.

Rees peeked outside. His brow raised and his jaw dropped. Something was there, hard to see in the dark, but reflective and shaped like an egg. A thin rod poked out of a hole in its top, blue light sweeping around and around from its tip, touching all the houses in the neighborhood.

It hovered impossibly a meter off the ground.