An Atmosphere Of Angels

by H C Turk

  Up and around and down and along in quiet curves they traveled the ribbon road, long having felt that in all the universe of similar peoples, true aliens would be those who considered this passage unpleasant. At the parlor, they passed through without touching the panel. In this high, rounded room, they found no disintegrated materials, smelled no spreading smoke, saw no unsettled aggressors.

  During their time in the vessel, only now did they travel the vertical lift up to the personnel airlock without danger. This small space, this foyer, contained no dark, dead ends.

  To freed spirits, all of space is small.

  Since the vessel no longer suffered dysfunction, the Earthers readily exited. Not to any aliens are airlocks meant to lock people in air.

  The air they encountered continued across the island, through the forest of yellow leaves, across pink sand, past tinted waves, not ending until arriving at space. Parno and Kathlynn entered the island. At any moment, crisp breezes blew warmth, or rain fell in torrents that crushed sprouting plants, or light from the nearest star dehydrated leaves, or people felt emotions they manifested as life and death, the two greatest decisions in the universe of humans.

  Starlight allows life while never having lived.

  The air sled remained, untouched. Of course, the Earth staff would not remove the personal transportation of Parno and Kathlynn. They had arrived via this sled, and disappeared at this site. What if they were to exit? How would they return?

  Seen by only stupid creatures too simple in their brains to comprehend the psychology of disguised vision, a ground senser waited, relaying information, vapid data emotion that would cause no person to act, decide, or feel, not until recalled in the future as recording.

  Spirits of the dead bless the living with the machination of memory.

  Parno and Kathlynn could not make the air sled move. With no batteries to expire and no fuel to expend, the difficulty might have been malaise, the equipment having lost interest from waiting too long, passing to that inertial state of despair.

  Having no batteries to expire, no fuel to expend, Parno and Kathlynn would never suffer that failure of the heart.

  They would move without mechanics. Feet had been invented before the wheel. Along the lahar with no rubbery feel, having the solidity of petrified mud. Past uncountable microorganisms, unseeable insects, unnoticed birds, and one knee-high grass shoot rooted in a crack of the lahar. Up and down and around, akin to the ribbon rug only to poets.

  Metaphysics is the poetry of nature.

  Inside the matter hold, the staff awaited. They did not wait for Parno and Kathlynn, but for their peers. One day, without the director’s instruction or the technolists’ awareness, a similar vessel would arrive. Since humans could not communicate across the ether lanes, the Earthers would have to wait for desperation.

  Not being peer to these people, Parno and Kathlynn had expended that state.

  Arriving at the airlock, they did not deliberate entry. This box had once been their home, a temporary home, now a temporary cemetery for their friends.

  Even mausoleums can be moved.

  If truly extant in the corporeal world, spirits of identity might have recognized the ashes. Stacy by the food hopper, preparing a snack. The Pacettis in their cube, both suggesting sex. Ward in the cargo bay, entering notations in the mining log. All of them waited for Parno and Kathlynn, but not long enough. All of them failed in their waiting for the alien vessel to exit the planet. Though having vacated the planet, the ship had returned, not having vacationed long enough.

  Nowhere in their world would Parno and Kathlynn find their friends waiting in another guise. The staff did not exist as uncomfortable, discorporate forms seeking peace through murder, having misplaced tranquility. These people had found repose, and would not reject it.

  Humans with spirited religion believe that after death, personality, anima, soul, core of creation, continues as though a glint from greater energy gleaming against their world.

  In the universe of humans, no light penetrates life more perfectly than peace.

  Parno and Kathlynn would not leave this world. They would continue together because at their end, they had not released themselves of life, but clung to each other. Had they clung to a demonic death, the universe would thereafter have contained more demons. At the end, Parno and Kathlynn had recalled their finest feelings, and would never forget.

  In the realm of metaphysics, memory is the repetition of emotion.

  They would find no torment, no pain, no struggle, no release, no need, no desire, no failure, no doom. They would share the air with spirits of peace. Finding only each other, they would require no more, endlessly engaged in a tryst on the beach, new indigenes inhabiting an atmosphere of angels.

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