CHAPTER ONE
She knew of many fates worse than the merciful death at the end of a finite human life. On the rails that encapsulated her eternal life of duty and obligation, she was condemned to one. She was doomed to brief moments of happiness between tears, experiencing joy vicariously and to have the memories of it all engraved on her heart forever and ever. Her name was Maetel.
On a high hill, overlooking a river flowing to the sea, Maetel watched the sun set on her sorrowful memories. She was a Metalian Girl, keeping her promises, but she couldn't help thinking that she could still have a life, somewhere else. After all, it was a great big universe, with lots of places to go to, and since she couldn't die trying, she had one more promise she was going to keep. If only she could chase her dreams and live for herself….
It was kind of cold that night, walking alone toward her fate. She knew she was doomed to fade away and begin her journey yet again. She could hear a train outside, in the far-off sky, on the rails of destiny and thought, 'If only it could be mine….' Then, in one precious moment, 'He' swept back in her memory and said, "Maetel, its painful when you're so close, yet still so far out of reach…. The train is waiting. Its waiting: waiting there for you. Now run to it… run to it Maetel: run to it!"
And she did. But even as she ran, there was nagging feeling in her heart that she couldn't explain or understand…. She had completed her mission, and somehow, she still felt like a traitor running away. Emeraldas had said: 'Our journeys have no end…' and yet hers had! What had begun as a promise, a duty and obligation was over. Still, she wasn't prepared for and couldn't explain the confusion in her heart, so she set it aside thinking, "I'll deal with that tomorrow." It was a tomorrow that for her would never come.
Simply put: she was unprepared to let it go. The reality of her decision didn't hit all at once, but crept up in the little things. It had been a long time since she'd been 'mortal' for lack of a better word…. While she hadn't been 'immortal', she'd been much more than merely human. During her Coronation Ceremony, the Symbiosis Memory Storage Unit had changed her at a molecular level. But now, the things it had done to her no longer functioned, or at least they didn't function as intended and none of it could be undone. It affected her perception of reality more than she could now know or comprehend.
The second thing was that the body she'd been using was now hers. But now she wasn't sure that it hadn't been hers all along. While it, 'she', was young, strong and at the peak of her beauty, suddenly her hair no longer fell perfectly into place anymore. On her eternal journey she'd maintained it by eating, taking showers and baths as a matter of convention: a small enjoyment. But now she needed to, had to and sometimes couldn't for days on end. Now, when 'it' was cold or hot, so was she. Now, when it was hungry or tired, she was oh so hungry and tired. The reality of these things and a thousand and one other little things suddenly became real issues for her to deal with.
Next was the suitcase that her mother had given her: her inheritance. It had been dimensional, relative in time and space, having in it whatever she'd needed to have in it. Now, it only contained her communicator, one of her two dresses, two of three sets of undergarments, her bathing suit, wrap, toiletries (to include an all important hair brush), two of her three guns and/or her whip-sword and a small amount of hard currency: the remains of her last Galaxy Express stipend.
But the single most important fact of her new existence was that she was no longer a Princess. She was no longer the Sole Heir the Throne of The Millennial Queen, Maeteru La Andromeda Promethium, ruler of the Mechanized Empire. Now, she was simply 'Citizen' Maetel, a disparaging but descriptive term for her as a refugee. She was a displaced person whose mere presence was often resented and unwelcome. This was driven home to her ruthlessly on a daily basis. Finally to add insult to injury, she'd found that her accounts had been frozen.
'Money is not so important until you have none…' she realized. The little jewelry she had on, her weapons, her suitcase, its contents and her train pass was everything she had.
Still, as bad as all this was, the single most terrible thing of all was that now Maetel was alone and without a purpose: she had lived, but she had no reason to live…. 'I'm not Emeraldas, to do as I please,' she thought. She hadn't conceived that something as basic as living for herself could be such an issue, but for her it was. Promethium, having taken her soul-ring, had left her unable to deal with the day to day business of living. That part of herself that controlled her outer emotions and not a small part of her will had been taken. Maetel couldn't fight and couldn't surrender: she was trapped in a life without purpose.
Alone in this confused, wounded state she left the only home she had ever known: La Metal. When Leopard had ordered her deportation so long ago he'd told her, "No royalty is needed in the new La Metal!" Even if 'He', Nazca, hadn't told her to get on the train, she would have done so on her own. Whatever her new life was to be she thought, it would have to start fresh somewhere else.
On the train, she had nothing but time to think about where she could go and what she could do. She thought of going to Earth and Tetsuro. She cared for him and knew that he loved her. She knew that he was in love with her…. She knew he would welcome her with open arms without a question or a second thought. She also knew it would be wrong. As much as she wanted her life, he deserved his: he'd earned it! Ultimately, she really was content to live on only in his memory, an illusion of his young man's heart, a dream of his youth.
What she needed was a quiet place where she could live a simple life. There were many worlds to choose from, places where she could live, where she could find someone, marry, and perhaps even have a family of her own…. Such things had never been a thought to her before. The question was that now that she was free of her duty, her obligation, could she develop the will to live for herself? With these thoughts and more weighing heavily on her mind, she slept and she dreamed.
On her eternal journey she hadn't dreamed: immortality was like that she'd supposed. But it seemed that now she carried the memories, the dreams of a thousand years. She never had the same dream, the same way twice. More often than not, what she had was a disjointed jumble of images, confused, incongruent, out of sequence and meaning, meaningless except in the horror and pain they sometimes caused her.
She dreamed of her sister Emeraldas often, who in these dreams sometimes, somehow, wasn't her sister. In these dreams, their story, all of the stories, were profoundly different. She couldn't explain it, but she knew that somehow they were all true! She didn't know how or why and not knowing, caused her to question her sanity. But there was one constant in her dreams: her story and Nazca's part in it. He'd died fighting Promethium. He'd died fighting for the future. He'd died for her, she loved him and his memory kept her sane….
She dreamed of Mel, a girl whose face she could only imagine. A girl whose last words had been, 'I want to remain human.' Nazca had loved her so much that he'd tried to single handedly overthrow the Empire for love and loss. There, in the engine room of the Harlock's Death Shadow, with his story of Mel and his unwavering answer to her question, "If my mother is still alive, what will you do?" Nazca had said without hesitation, "I'll fight of course!" And with those few words, he had captured Maetel's heart forever and a day.
Hardgear's evil laughing face flowed through her dreams like a torrent, but the feeling, the anger, that welled up inside her at the thought of him was terrifying! It was a blemish, a spot of darkness on her heart: an unquenched, unquenchable desire for vengeance….
The only time that part of her ever rose to surface was the moment she'd thought Tetsuro was lost to her in 'The Flow of Time'. In that moment there was nothing she wouldn't have done, nothing that was beyond her rage and the memory of it frightened her. It was a subjective moment in her otherwise objective life, countered only by her love for Nazca.
She dreamed of her mother, the loving woman she had been and the mechanized misery she'd become. She dreamed of her father who she had lost not once, but twice. She dreamed of Laurela who had sacrificed herself for the future believing her past sins to be unforgivable. She dreamed of Arina, the android, who'd given her life saving humanity, mourned for who she was, not what she was.
She dreamed of everyone who had passed her way, who they were, and the parts they'd played in her eternal journey. Their pains and sufferings were as real to her now as they had been to them then. And like her journey it went on, and on, and on the same but different every time. The memories would drive her down into the depths of confusion and despair but Nazca, always Nazca, would come to lift her up and give her the courage to go on, to never give up, to never surrender….
As bad as her dreams were, waking up was often worse. She often woke up ill with hunger, but most times she woke at being poked, prodded or jostled by something or someone. This was something that she'd never had to deal with before: being 'handled' and 'touched' by strangers…. It wasn't so much that she minded, as Emeraldas certainly would have, but that these people obviously didn't mind: they thought nothing of it at all!
'This is how 'regular people' live,' Maetel realized, 'crowded together without personal space: pushed, prodded, touched…. I must accept this as well.'
The commuter trains on which she was compelled to travel rarely had bathrooms, dining cars or conductors. While the stations had clean restrooms, generally, they rarely offered more than vending machines with selections of empty calories. So, by necessity, with her suitcase she would go out onto the street hoping for a Hole-in-the-Wall restaurant, food vendor of some kind and/or a bath house outside the station or close by.
Sometimes, even this wasn't possible. While on the train and in the stations she was protected by Galactic Law, but planet-side she was on her own. She often faced an unreasoned, baseless contempt for simply being alive: for having survived the fall of Empire. She was defenseless against that hate…. She was charged, tried, convicted and condemned by people who didn't care if she were guilty or not.
Then one day, travel-weary and shivering; kneeling on a sidewalk with her suitcase, her hair disheveled, her clothes wrinkled, eating from a low end Binto box, the unblinking eye of a paparazzo's camera caught her in mid-bite. She was very unhappy about it but, what was she to do? 'Citizen' Maetel did the only thing she felt she could do: she swallowed her bitterness and vowed to never let anyone see her cry. She simply ignored him and finished eating while the shutter clicked.
When she'd finished, she looked the photographer in the eye, thanked and embarrassed him. He was so taken aback that he offered to delete the pictures saying that, "Beauty, should be shot beautifully." At that Maetel smiled. She remembered Tetsuro saying that same thing to her once. But Maetel said "No" adding, "I am just a Citizen, a regular person now…." She then went into the station and boarded her train. She'd thanked him because he'd helped her make a decision as to where she would go to try to live out the rest of her life….
In the entire universe there really was only one place where she knew she could live in peaceful obscurity: 'The Planet of Tomorrow'. She and Tetsuro had almost been forced to stay there once, or many times perhaps, she couldn't remember now…. She'd thought then, and said as much that they, that she, would have been happy there. That she would have and could have been happy to just live as Hoshino Meiko, Tetsuro-kun's sister…. And so her new journey began.