Take A Sad Song
Page 4

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Ahead the mountain ridge seemed shrunken and drastically serrated, a brittle and lumpy dry paste pouring in a diagonal from her course. Chiana had seen enough of high mountains to recognize that this was a glacier cutting through a valley. To cross it would mean a long struggle fraught with dangers from slips, slides and crevasse. But the path was covered by the glacier, suggesting it had grown dramatically since the days when the path was frequented by travelers. To continue meant blazing a new trail around the glacier and one glance around it told her that wasn't an easy answer.

Rhobos needed the money from travelers so desperately now but there was no one to maintain even the most famous trails and no one was trying to restore them. Not surprisingly no one except one beyond broke fharbots wayward Nebari girl was trying to take them. There were no easy answers for anyone here. Surviving for long on this world seemed as smooth of a path as walking over the glacier ahead. Her heart gave her no choice but to continue but that seemed insurmountable either way she tried.

Flight was a desire that had stirred her soul as far back as she could remember. Now the desire swelled, leaving her struggling to resist the push to leap as though she could soar across the glacier below. That wasn't the only urge she was suddenly struggling against. If she cast herself out to her desire, her fate would be decided by its futility when she crashed and shattered somewhere in the icy realm below, a fate known to no one but herself. The cruel game she lived in would be over.

Tears welled in her cold and dry feeling eyes, her throat tightened and she pulled back a few awkward steps. With sorrow and suffering overwhelming her, the cruelty of herself to herself both disgusted her and felt fitting. She had been here before. Another edge over another danger, pushed to leap for another reason.

A link between her beloved brother, the only thing keeping her from feeling truly abandoned, had been terminated and she presumed him to be dead. Throwing herself from her tenuous friendships on Moya, Chiana had journeyed to a cemetery planet meaning to mourn her brother. Instead she found a new life with a tribe of doomed youth about as frelled up as she felt and what really mattered to her, a chance to test her will. A leap into a chasm could result in death or, if she could keep up a certain hum as she plunged to the rock bottom of the chasm, a safe landing in a sound activated safety net. Although her friend John had come after her to take her back, he couldn't save her and had his own reasons anyhow. It was her challenge to face. She took the challenge and she had won, finding a new sense of self security and confidence.

Even then Chiana knew that one day the enlightening experience would be needed again. Perhaps it was all that saved her now. This wasn't the climatic moment she'd expected but there was still a ways to go to reach the summit. Nothing was going to stop her now. With her thoughts cleared if still in some aftershock, she began looking around for some way around the glacier.

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"Whoa."

Chiana uttered her awe at the spectacle feeding her hungry eyes with wonder. An almost inaccessible rocky path had led her through a mountain pass hemmed by gravel and ice to an outlook at a great height on the edge of a mountain peak, where she now stood to admire the grand vista before her. Severe rocky mountains splayed before her, ghostly bulks in the thick purple haze below.

But she had made the climb to this height in this range to see beyond the haze and clouds and behold the sight of the innumerable rocky satellites, massive brown, red or chalky fists, cookies and orbs crowding the sky overhead. Lifting her hands and moving them, Chiana felt as if she could gravitationally influence the bodies seeming to hang in the space over her using just her hands. She imagined mixing up the objects in the heavens, complete with imagined sound effects. "Sssschew whuuuu wheeet schuuu. Ha ha!"

Feeling free to be young again seemed to dissolve some of the poison hardening inside. Since her conflict at the glacier, memories weren't crowding her consciousness anymore. She sighed heavily while her legs gave out and she sank into a kneel. Cold, exhausted, starved and a little sprained, cramped and bruised here and there, her body certainly had felt better but Chiana considered herself lucky enough to have made it to the summit without any major wounds or broken bones.

It had been foolish to try this climb alone and without provisions and with an already very depleted body, she understood that. What she hadn't stopped to understand was probably at least as foolish to ignore. Like finding out before she climbed up the mountains whether the thin cold air now passing through her nose almost too easily would be safely breathable for her species. Perhaps the most impulsive and foolish thing she'd done her whole life and she was pretty sure that said something. The fact she didn't care scared her.

Driven by some need, she hadn't given herself a choice. Now that she had accomplished what she seemed to need to do and the panic that seemed to be gripping her mind faded, Chiana rested in place at the summit for many arns and tried to understand.

Many natural satellites orbited Rhobos and performed a dance measured in numbers of cycles that ranged from millions to billions. Some roamed the skies and others remained nearly locked in their orbits. Enough light was reflected at any time that the coming of night to the mountain peaks only brought a dimming and change or color and directions of light but Chiana's Nebari eyes had no troubles seeing the dim scene almost as well as a sunny day on a typical well sunned planet. So the arns slipped by and Chiana only became aware of time again when the primary sun of Rhobos peeked over a mountain range in front of her. In the meantime she'd stood to move around every so often, trying to keep warm. The warming sun was very welcome.

Chiana smiled through tears. Succeeding in making the summit brought a bittersweet feeling of accomplishment.

Bitter because of aching loneliness. There was no one to tell it to. John Crichton, wherever he was, would be glad to get what he described to her as a "post card" showing the scene and reading "I climbed Mount whatever the frell it was" but that was probably as far as he'd want to be involved. Her beloved brother, wherever he was, was better off not being distracted about her. Finally she was accepting that. Acceptence was bitter, but this time it felt like healing as well.

Sweet because she had risen to a very difficult challenge under very difficult circumstances and made it alone. It all vastly strengthened her confidence when she badly needed to begin replacing some sheer desperation with a greater share of genuine confidence. Feelings of need all but dissappeared. She felt a sensual, somewhat erotic pleasure at having controlled her body to such an extreme and being so confident of its frelling awesomeness. Right or wrong at least it felt like herself to be feeling it in that sensual way. The sweetest thing was feeling more like herself inside than she had for many cycles.

Making the journey back down wasn't something she'd given much thought to, disturbingly enough. Here she was at the peak equipped with the clothes she had on. Nothing else including provisions. Just as she was on the way up. Except after a long arduous climb and at least half a solar day hanging around this outlook and a cleft on the barren mountain peak. Now that she did think of having to make the return trip, she didn't find it particularly daunting. In a way she looked forward to achieving that challenge too.

The only problem was, Chiana had no idea where to go. One foot in front of the other was her start. For the first time in too long, a smile for herself slightly brushed her face with no tears threatening to appear. Because all she could think of to do was the functional task of getting off the frelling mountains before possible weather or other problems prevented her from going anywhere.

As Chiana began a slow trek back from the summits, she was still searching for understanding inside. Some peace was restored in her spirit and some things worked out, but no specific revelations that she could feel as any kind of inspiration. There was just another morning, a long trying day ahead and the same worlds of wonders and pains to seek or avoid with the same dances of lonely indifference and lusty eagerness alternating inside. Maybe that was the point, she considered. Breaking and resetting some broken structures inside so they could heal and support her again.

Or perhaps it was only another step in a journey that would have much more to be seen ahead.

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