We all know I am never a fan of winter. Recently I started feeling my wintertime blues earlier than usual, brought on by an especially cold and rainy fall season. I could hardly stand thoughts of even more harsh weather in the days ahead. Normally my friends can pull me out of my annual sense of dread, but this time was especially rough.

Phyler listened to me complain like she did every year, but finally held up her hand for silence. Gnomy, she declared, the Round Woods residents are not going through yet another winter of you constantly sighing and yearning for spring. You think you suffer in silence, but you don’t! It’s time for a change.

You are not going to have to put up with winter at all this year. You are leaving on a four month off-planet assignment. And, Phyler added, I have already cleared it with the gnome council.

I was speechless but didn’t even try to argue. Once the gnome elders on the regional council decide something, they don’t change their minds. I knew my winter plans were set in stone.

I actually was more intrigued than upset, since I was happy at the thought of leaving Zelen’s winter weather. I also knew Phyler and the fairies would have come up with an interesting and novel way for me to spend my time.

The four-month assignment turned out to be a project working as a stellar cartographer. I would be mapping the gas giant Juno, which is located within the same galaxy as Zelen. Juno is so massive that it has its own barely studied asteroid belt. The mapping project was just a small scientific undertaking, but asteroid mining would be considered depending on the types of minerals found in orbit.

A complete mapping means counting and classifying every single ice clump, dust patch and rock circling a planet. It’s an important but not terribly exciting task. It’s completed by taking a runabout spaceship and simply moving from one space chunk to the next, determining each chunk’s composition by bombarding it with various x-rays and lasers. It sounds very time-consuming, but when you use a science shuttle designed for asteroid research it actually goes very quickly.

I was lucky with the runabout allocated to me. It was a large and shiny new Charlie S-class spaceship. It was a sentient ship, meaning it could talk to me and I could talk to it. It had also been given its own personality, so in many ways a conversation with the ship was like speaking to another humanoid.

The runabout may have been given too much personality. He preferred to be called Charlie the Space Cowboy. He had a huge database of Earth’s old western movies that he was always insisting I must watch. I think Charlie got his strange vocabulary from those movies. Phrases like howdy pardner, yee-haw, hold your horses, git along dogies, meaner than a snake. Yes, Charlie had a way with words.

Being in space with a cowboy-talking runabout for four months could get lonely and slightly annoying, but I was always in touch with my family and friends. Charlie and I spent a lot of time together, sharing some intense poker games and long discussions about life. I even watched some of those old cowboy movies that Charlie liked so much.

Just to humor Charlie, we discussed the movies, analyzing their thin plots and shaky story structures. We decided that Clint Eastwood was our favorite actor and acted out some of his scenes. We had conversations about driving cattle to market, sleeping under the stars, and enduring the isolation of living on the prairie. He talked about the drinking, fist fights, and the anticipation of trips into town. I listened to Charlie play campfire songs on his harmonica, and I learned some cowboy songs to play on my flute.

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If I didn’t know better, I would have assumed Charlie had lived through the cowboy era. Perhaps he had been there in some kind of incarnation, since his computer components were so complex that he had a type of machine consciousness.

What else did I do for four months? I can’t say that I actually worked. I had plenty of time to explore the ship’s catalog of hologram adventures. I spent time viewing constellations through the telescope. I spent hours sprawled in the ship’s comfortable lounge chairs, just looking at the hypnotic beauty of the swirling gases around Juno. I started writing stories about my many lifetimes, which was a project I had been wanting to do for years. I basically relaxed and shed my worries about everybody and everything. It turned out everybody and everything got along without me just fine for four months.

I invited my wife Jaal to visit as often as she could. We had not been so blissfully alone together, without children or extended family or work interruptions, for many years. It was actually quite romantic. That time by itself was worth four months of living on a spaceship.

Sure, I could have sneaked off the spaceship if I’d have gotten too lonely between Jaal’s visits, but I was enjoying my respite from real life. It was quite pleasant to have no responsibilities, no appointments and nothing much to do. Even the ship’s replicated foods were pretty good. I had fun adding a few gnome recipes to the database.

Unlike me on my extremely relaxed voyage, Charlie never got any rest. He was constantly busy with his routine of mapping and measuring rocks. He communicated with other ships for updates. He scheduled all of the mapping timetables. He compiled complex databases of the information he gathered.

I actually didn’t work on the project at all. Why was I needed?

Well, the main problem with a sentient ship is that it does not realize when it starts to go into a circular thought pattern. Its logic routine can become overloaded. When that happens, the ship refuses to move on to the next work item because it thinks there are errors in the databases. Charlie would become convinced that he must keep working on the same small equation, over and over again, to get a more accurate answer. It was a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

A humanoid can recognize that a spaceship is having problems and quickly pull it out of dysfunction. Usually just a few manual restarts of the onboard computer hard drives will do the trick.

This type of logic failure happened five times while I was on the ship. After resetting Charlie and restoring his impaired thinking pathways, I always gave him a pep talk. I told him how minor the problem really was, how well he was doing and how much we depended on him. I would even talk about cowboys, if that’s what Charlie wanted.

I could tell Charlie was working correctly when he started using his usual cowboy lingo. Then we would take up our normal daily routines until the next time the logic error happened.

Life on the mapping expedition was pleasant and low stress for me. I felt like I had been on a lengthy vacation when I returned to Zelen. I even brought home a woven straw cowboy hat that Charlie made for me.

Phyler and the fairies welcomed me with shouts of “howdy pardner,” “welcome home buckaroo,” and a scattering of columbine blooms thrown over my head. I tucked some of the sprigs into my hat band.

I thanked Phyler profusely for setting up the expedition. I felt energized and ready to start my springtime routine. Head 'em up, move 'em out, as the cowboys say.

I did stay in touch with Charlie for a bit, but it turned out that the logic problems were worsened by the database changes that Charlie had made to store his thousands of cowboy movies. Once some repairs were made and those movies were deleted, the space runabout worked better.

Unfortunately, Charlie’s personality was no longer the same. He had been updated with a boring accountant personality instead. He was no longer fun and quirky, and our relationship was not the same. We no longer had entertaining conversations or had anything in common. I was sad to see our friendship end.

I have started looking through my incoming emails to see what new scientific trips are being planned. I haven’t seen anything intriguing, but I keep checking. It’s probably fine, though. I think I will be much better at coping with cold weather after such a long break from winter. If not, Phyler will let me know.