Weekly Drabble #330: Teaching Moments (Patreon)

This week's prompt comes from Jeffrey Kessler with 'never a failure, always a lesson'.  Enjoy!

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Teaching Moments:

Caleb’s father always said he was determined. His mother said he was stubborn. They were both right. Once he set his mind to something, he did everything in his power to make it happen. He didn’t give up easily, even when he probably should. His obsession with the Wall was one of those times, but even though he had to let it go, he he couldn’t fully relinquish that dream.

No human had ever made it beyond the Wall. Every attempt to do so, whether it was via automated probes or manned expeditions, ended in failure and tragedy with gnarled, lifeless wrecks belched out when the Wall shifted or lingering, eternal silence as ships and scouts vanished without a trace. Even if by some miracle, some vessels had managed to get past Sol’s enveloping barrier, none had ever returned home to tell of what they’d seen.

Caleb wanted, the urge bordering on fanatical hope, to be the first. The stars were out there. The universe was out there, and humanity had given up on them. Every night, he saw the line that was not a line splitting the sky and it called to him, a mystery that no one had ever solved. He studied hard in school, math and physics and prep courses. In university, he specialized in astrophysics focusing specifically on the Wall, devouring every scrap of information he could get from surveys, recovered records, centuries of sensor telemetry and research. He studied the salvaged wrecks of previous expeditions, going through every line of analysis, every publication and every theory he could find. He spoke with navigators, scientists, astronomers, professors, historians – even some of the more controversial Heritagists. Caleb wanted, needed to know everything.

Most of those he talked to gave him the same story, the one he’d learned since he was a small boy gazing up at a starless night sky. They had been ill-prepared to face the Beast and the Wall had been their only defence. By design and intent, it could not be breached. Those who said it was a gift from God said that to attempt to do so was hubris at best and sacrilege at worst. God would bring it down when He was ready, Caleb was told. Those who believed humanity’s ancestors or some ineffable alien species had created it gave him much the same story. Only when they were ready could they travel beyond, and humanity was still far from ready.

Others insisted that the Wall was less a test and more an eternal guardian. Beyond it, they said, lay naught but desolation or worse. The Beast still prowled among the stars, they said. To venture out was to risk bringing it upon Earth. This segment of the population, well represented in the ‘Quiescent’ Party (officially the Home and Hearth Responsibility Coalition, the current majority party), was deeply opposed to any attempts to breach it.

The warnings others gave him were not coached in fear, but in fact: nothing and no one had ever survived crossing the Wall. Try as Caleb might, he couldn’t argue with the litany of lost and ill-fated expeditions, nor the inescapable precedent it set for his own desire. How many other determined or stubborn men and women had been resolved to be the first to see the stars, only to be ripped to shreds by the Wall’s ferocity, or become fused with their ships as reality-bending tides and surges enmeshed flesh and metal. Or worst of all, how many had starved to death over months and years, trapped within whatever lay beyond the Wall’s threshold?

For five years, the corvette Lucky Role had been held just within the Wall, in sight of everyone but unreachable. Every rescue attempt failed; the vessel might as well have been swallowed past a black hole’s event horizon. The crew starved to death, a cruel twist of fate spitting the ship back out two months after the last of its personnel succumbed to hunger.

Caleb had had to give up his dream and settle for the realities of what was, not the flights of fancy of what might be. He graduated with honours and enrolled into the Solar Inclusionary Fleet as a search and rescue specialist, assigned to the fast-response cutter Fjaðrhamr. In his off hours, he still chased his fantasy, planning and feeding that little spark of hope that remained. He sketched notes, read through technical journals. He had a few penpals he kept in contact with; some friends of his father, some other starry-eyed dreamers and a few less socially palatable types.

Kat was one of them. She was a Heritagist whose views made her unpopular even within her own movement. Caleb had been warned more than once what associating with someone like her could do to his own reputation, but the young woman had a keen mind. They’d fought bitterly for top placings in their shared classes, acrimony eventually becoming conversation and the revelation that they weren’t quite that different. They’d bonded over a morbid fascination with the remains of those who’d tried to cross the Wall, Caleb looking for ways to survive where others had failed and Kat hoping for any trace of evidence for her outlandish and, to be honest, somewhat unnerving theories.

They’d kept in contact even after her scholarship had been revoked and she’d had to drop out of the university. She’d tried to enlist in the naval academy to continue her studies, but they’d practically slammed the door in her face. Nobody minded Heritagists, unless you were one of ‘those’ ones, and Kataleya most certainly was. She did manage to finish her studies at a smaller university and took an apprenticeship with an equally small, but up and coming starship design firm.

Between her and his other contacts, Caleb had a well-studied knowledge base to draw upon. It was no small point of pride that two of his designs had been accepted by the SIF; one was being rolled out in the latest generation of vessels and the other was still going through testing and affirmation, but he was sure it would pass. For someone as young as he was, that was no small accomplishment. His work would make it safer for ships to operate by the Wall and its unpredictable fluctuations. It wasn’t nearly enough to convince anyone to cross the Wall, but it was a small step towards that goal, though Caleb himself was afraid he would never see it.

Every time he looked out at the sky, he missed the stars. Humanity had been without them for more than a thousand years. Maybe some day, he promised himself, some day.

...some day he’d get to see them.