Memories

Greetings to everyone, the following story was inspired by the digital art of @xpilar, I invite you to visit his blog. The picture that motivated this story is the following.

Fuente

Memories

The bright blue color of the cloud kept Paul absorbed, contemplating it from the ship's watch station, his mind wandering between memories of the sky of Ocarina and its lavender-colored clouds and the snowy mountains of Anu.

At Ocarina, he had received most of his training as a pilot. After four thousand hours of flight, and even more of instruction in simulators and classroom activities; those skies had become so familiar to him that he felt that he could still close his eyes and see them in his mind. And not just the sky with its permanent clouds and the colonies of aerial algae that floated on them. Also its land landscape, covered with deep green lakes, its white glaciers and its extensive orange forests. It had lost count of how many times it had circled that planet.

While Anu, his native world, remembered his mother and him living together in the mountains, both had taken care of his father's flock and grazing lands after his father's death. Anu was one of the least civilized worlds of the colonies, when its population was initiated by an environmental fundamentalist organization, land was granted to individuals committed to the environmental movement.

His father, a sort of hippy from the Perseus era, was in complete agreement with this. He and his mother embarked on a life as sheepherders, in a valley in the middle of the Apolo and Vesta mountains, on land granted in concession, which once could have been a small country. About thirty grazing robots and fifteen aerial drones to monitor the flocks were his only manpower, in all that extensive territory, to take care of, depending on the season, up to about ninety thousand sheep.

His mother was the hardest and most persevering woman in her goals that he has ever known. When her father suffered the accident that took her life, she proposed to continue alone and take charge of the whole operation, she had to learn to operate and maintain the robots, to deal with suppliers and customers. But what he could never understand was how to operate the drones, he could never learn to control them, his instructions always ended in a small air disaster.

That's where Pablo's taste for flying came from. At the time of his father's death, he was ten years old and already in the academy, taking classes to continue in the task of shepherding, although he had not yet received adequate training, with much patience and perseverance, perhaps learned from my mother, managed to control the thirteen drones that survived her attempts, and gradually became an expert operating them. Perhaps it was a disappointment to her mother when she told her that she wanted to pursue a career as a pilot and not as a pastor.

His mother did not object, she only complained because she would have to take care of herself or hire someone who would help her, but she gave him all her support in that decision. Just like when her accident happened in one of the first training sessions.

He was flying a small ship next to his tutor even in the academy of Anu, the artifact a little rudimentary, as almost everything in Anu, suffered a failure during the flight and fell into stall, he and the instructor had to eject, but during the ejection, his belt, which apparently had been incorrectly adjusted, got stuck with something and practically severed the lower half of his body.

He spent almost a year in a hospital in Ocarina, the closest inhabited planet to Anu, where his injury was repaired. He must have received robotic limbs and the replacement of his spine and part of his vital organs. During all this time his mother occupied a chair next to his bed, had left the farm alone, in charge of the robots and the farmers association.

After that both decided to stay in Ocarina, he to continue his training in the academy of that planet, until he became a pilot and she, only to accompany him in his resolution, the grazing lands, forty years from that, are still managed by the farmers association, which is responsible for transferring the royalties to his mother.

While he, today, pilots an environmental control ship, beyond the skies of Ocarina, in the limit with the space, contemplating in his viewer the lavender clouds of Ocarina and on his head the dense cloud of blue gas that surrounds the system and that separates him from the neighboring star and Anu, his world of origin.

Text of @amart29 Barcelona, Venezuela, June 2019

Memories

Memories

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