You Have Not Yet Arrived

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For forty-three years, the next horizon had always won. He crossed systems, woke
beneath unfamiliar suns with blood thick from suspension, walked salt flats where
blue lightning hunted under the glass, entered cities dead so long their doors had
forgotten hands. Each wonder hit him cleanly at first. Then came the measuring, the
notes, the route beyond it. Before the dust dried on his boots he was already leaning
toward somewhere else.

People fell away. Some married. Some turned back. Some died in places he
remembered by coordinates before faces. He kept going. Forward had acquired the
authority of hunger: no argument, no defense, just the next mouthful. Arrival lasted
exactly as long as it took to discover a farther point.

Then the red valley opened below him and made forty-three years look small.

Black cliffs shouldered out of a plain bright as fresh blood. The sky burned yellow
through a haze that turned the far mountains to hammered copper. Pale spires rose
miles away, too thin for their height, and between them a white ribbon of ground
wound deeper into the basin until distance swallowed it. His body answered before
thought did. Range glass up. Wind checked. Grade estimated. Nine days of water,
eleven of food if he cut portions, shelter under the eastern wall, first spire by
tomorrow afternoon if his knee behaved. The old machinery inside him had already
begun leaving.

A gust struck red dust against his shins. He glanced down and saw the split seam in
his boot, the lace repaired with wire, the tremor in a hand that had once been
steadier. Sweat cooled under his collar. His left knee throbbed where a fall twenty
years and four suns ago had driven bone into stone. This nameless sun lay warm
across his knuckles.

Nothing summoned him from the valley. No beacon lit. No gate opened. No buried
intelligence stirred to congratulate him for having wanted something badly enough.
Wind went through the white road and kept going. The spires stood where they
stood.

He sat because his knee hurt, and because for once there was nobody near enough
to see him stop.

At first his mind clawed at the pause. Light lost. Distance wasted. Weather coming.
He could make the eastern cut before dark. He knew exactly how to spend the next
hour, and the knowledge suddenly felt cheap. So he opened the last piece of fruit
from a ration pack sealed three stars ago and ate it without checking the time. Juice
ran over his thumb. He licked it away and tasted sweetness so sharp it embarrassed
him.

The road remained. Beyond it waited mountains, perhaps ruins, perhaps nothing at
all. After dark the first stars appeared, each one capable of becoming another year,
another wound, another magnificent excuse to be elsewhere. He watched them
come out one by one and did not choose.

Then he unlaced his boots and put his bare feet upon the dry red ground.