Prologue
Home is a wonderful place.
Life flourishes around me. Fish glide through the clear water beside me, scales glittering a thousand different shades. Birds, and insects, and all manners of creatures, chirped and tweeted to each other in perfect harmony, as if they were singing a song just for my ears. It was a calming song, the kind only truly achieved by nature, though many had tried their hand. The mangrove trees danced gently to it, swaying backward and forwards to the beat, their silver leaves shimmering in the dim light. I swayed with them, laid on my makeshift raft, letting the night’s cool, refreshing breeze lead me wherever it wanted.
I laid in serenity: I was alone here. No one else came out here this late, why would they? There wasn’t anything to be done here at this hour, with not enough light for fishing. Everyone else was in the town, revelling the night away. If I strained my ears hard enough, I could just about hear them. I imagined what they must be doing. Perhaps they were all cackling at a joke Old man Koi has just made. Or congratulating Auntie Loni on her day’s catch. Maybe, they were discussing me. Why I never joined them in their evening fun like I used to, it’s all they asked me during the day. They didn’t understand. It was because I couldn’t see them there, with all those bright lights they got from the spaceport, it clouded my view. Here, it was so much darker, with only the hazy light from the luminous coral living below. That, and the light from above. Those brilliant, bright spots shining in the sky. Little beacons spread out across an endless black.
They couldn’t understand my fascination with them. We had it so good here. People came from across the universe to see our home. To see the bottomless deep, teeming with creatures like nowhere else, from the little windseekers, with their forever changing scales, from deep purple to luscious green to blazing orange, to the vicious merpeople that lived in the deep depths, with their green-tinted skin and piercing red eyes, always waiting for a chance to get a bite of flesh.
It was fascinating here, they said, and it was. With so many seas to explore, so much to discover, they said, and that was true. It was all so true. Home was a wonderful place.
Did that make it wrong? To want to leave so badly, to explore that sea of stars. I couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop myself looking, thinking, of everything that was out there, everything I had heard about, everything I wanted to see so much it made my heart pound.
I pulled out my crumpled leaflet. My prized possession. I had snatched it the first and last time my father had taken me to the local spaceport. There were so few on our planet; we weren’t a space-faring people, but a sea-faring one, my father always used to say, and we were better for it. We stayed away from all their politics, their conflicts, their wars. We were a peaceful people. I loved that, loved that about us, before I went with my father to deliver a shipment of fish.
It was like nothing I had ever seen before. Those great cases of glass, concrete, and steel. Some would claim they were ugly, blight spots on the landscape, but that wasn’t true. They rose from the ground in arches, shining, almost glowing, in the light, a beautiful contrast to the sky they were set against. And inside, inside they hid such treasures. Giant spaceships stood proud in every corner, made of polished steel and gleaming brass, and the people! So many people! I tried to count them all, in their streaming waves, but soon lost count. All those people, from so many different, strange homes, with appearances so varied and new, all in the same place, I’d never seen anything like it before.
While my father was speaking to the manager in his office, I waited outside. Across from me was a noticeboard, and being a child, the colourful posters caught my rapid attention. I skipped on over to them, where my eyes fell on a bright yellow leaflet hidden under some of the others. As I stared at it, my father exited the office and called me to follow him.
“Come on now, no need to stay in this place any longer. I want to be back for sunset.”
But my eyes were glued to this leaflet, I couldn’t look away. I could hear him growing impatient. Quickly, I ripped it off and shoved it in my pocket, before running towards him.
We never went back to the spaceport, but one time was enough. The leaflet I had snatched was an advertisement for a flying school only two stars away, the best in this galaxy. It enthralled me, so much so I read it every night, till I knew it off by heart. I copied the photo from it, a photo of a spaceship in flight, repeatedly till I could draw it perfectly, and stuck my drawing all over my secret den. Every rare visitor we had in the town was met with my barrage of questions, anything I could think to ask, till I was eventually dragged away by someone who felt sorry for the poor soul.
Over all the years, I had learned so much. I had made my decision. I knew what I needed to do, what my heart needed to do. Soon, I would leave. All my bags were packed, I was ready, I was prepared. I would head off to the spaceport and take a ship to the school, I knew how to do it, I had learned from my endless questioning. Once there, I would learn to fly, then, I could finally fulfil my dream, and head on and out, and explore that sea of stars.
