A steward hoists herself atop the pipe. She rolls from her stomach and perches. There are four walls and a floor of glass, and she doesn’t look down. Her back straightens into a curve. She sits. Her hands settle between her thighs. Rust reddens the uniform’s backside. Warmth spreads where her hands rest.
Inside her pocket are carabiners which hitch without issue, though she tugs twice on the cables connected to the pipe's harness and thrice after clipping a cable to her belt’s buckle, leaning her backside into view of a hovering camera. The recorder-red is on. She looks back at the camera.
She rechecks the entire setup once. She gives the thumbs-up. From orbit, she falls.
Still in orbit, the metal canopy from which the steward fell sits. There is a hole, a port, a widening aperture from which she fell. Upon a backdrop of starlight is the mothership and neon burns across her hull. There are residents in the mother's windows. They are in the care of other stewards, in their caress, or bent over a dinner of steak, Saturnian wine, and laughter; the steward falling earthways holds up a peace sign to the recording drone, and the residents clap before forks scrape plates.
Clouds whistle past, and the steward breaches a stretching whiteness. Then Earth. Little shade marks the ground, even within this veil, and what little shade there is comes from the shadowed surface of rocks facing away from the sky and those, half-stenciled, beneath what walks. And little walks. Humanoids stalk from caves, for time has looped and held them in place.
They drop to their knees, hands clasped, hollering. Some pick up those who are too overcome with emotion to walk. Some are picked up by no one and crawl across the pan, palms hottened. But their cries reach the ripped veil. They move toward the breach where a speck falls from. The speck in the sky is their North Star, a falling star.
"Normal," the steward—the speck—mumbles. She yanks the radio wire on her helmet and yells, "Situation, normal!"
A switch inside the helmet clicks, and gears inside the forefront, where it thickens, grinds. Rust snows across her eyelashes. The visor lowers, and the helmet reeks of metal.
"Send the time on haul."
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The radio-wire respools itself. Dialogue and symbols flash across the visor, then disappear; the guidance modules are loaded and waking. She looks up the cable, squinting to see what the camera sees, but she cannot—it is hidden view, shrunken, by dust and distance.
"I said, check time on the haul!"
More numbers blink across the screen. The number in the top-center measures the distance from the humanoids's reverence to their indifference—thirty. The haul is thirty seconds behind and above.
And those seconds pass. And the crowd cranes their necks. Up and up and up—from the sky, the haul bellows, shrieking, blistering the air with fire as it barrels through the world as a savior, a wonder, and a staircase to heaven—
The steward groans. "And now they're looking at the elevator. Dullards." She pinpoints a landing-zone with beads of sweat rolling down her back. "There. There. And there." She stamps the three target options again, validating the order. "There! There! And there!" The vessel's conductor fires the three anchors. Alice counts them all, and they all hit their marks. "Hit." She taps a button on her uniform, shaking as vibrations roll through the pipe. The cables whisk them up. The drone follows. They pass the haul, heated.
And that majesty hammers and tilts all earth.
Dust and dust and soil rise into the veil. The vessel is miles tucked inside the thick of this rising mushroom. The emigrants walk toward and through this quaking storm with scarves of bat-hide and lichen over their faces.
The shockwaves melt their legs to tar. Debris pricks at their eyes. Those who stop to rewrap their adornments do so with a quickened hand—drifting fragments of burnoff burn and scar what goes without covering. But people to a promised land, castaways to a lifeboat—these walkers make it through the storm.
And the storm settles into a breeze. Grit stays on the wind. The elevator before the people whines and blows smoke and it groans the groans of joints and ligaments and gears and industry, stiffened from a decade of disuse. The entrance spreads, then stops, and spreads some more. The gangway lowers, and the ramp carves a gash into the dirt. With a puff, the vessel slumps into its undercarriage.
A hum thrums through the claytop. It thrums through the bared feet of the crowd and up their femurs and ribs. Pebbles clack across the pan, breaking one another, making more pebbles which shatter into more. The crowd doesn't react to these little cataclysms. They are silent and still within their hides. Another layer of dust, another layer of dust, and another layer atop another. They wait, and wait, and the steward steps out under their sun. She tells them to shed their scarves and to wipe the world from their eyes. They do so, and then these and those of this dust fall, faces into the padded dirt, wetting the padded dirt.