All right, I lied. Here's a second Last Exile fic.
There is something about Alex that inspires depressive, dramatic purple prose. I'm very sorry.
The story about Vanship pilots is entirely my own doing, although I'm pretty sure I'm not the first to have come up with it. If I am, I shouldn't be. It's one of those horrible beguiling stories that just, you know, spontaneously generate.
Finished 21 July 2005Thirty-two Feet Per Second Per Second
When Alex was seven, a Vanship pilot told him that the real test came shortly before the end, when your ship was downed, while you were plunging to your death.
From that height it took seconds to fall, and at thirty-two feet per second per second a normal person would black out – or die – long before he actually hit ground. A true Vanship pilot, however, would have been trained never to lose consciousness in flight, no matter what happened. It would not be the sky that killed him, but the ground. A true Vanship pilot would stay awake until the very end.
What was the difference, Alex had asked, faintly puzzled. Did something good happen if you turned out to be a true Vanship pilot?
Probably not, the man had said, distantly. Dead was dead. Then he'd blinked, evidently realising that this was not the kind of story you told small children, and hastily added, "I don't know. Perhaps there's a special heaven for proper Vanship pilots."
And then he'd tried to distract Alex by buying him a whole glass of water, all for himself.
It wasn't a popular story, Alex found out when he was older. The younger pilots seemed to think it was unnecessarily morbid. It suggested that pilots that retired and went to stay with their grandchildren were somehow not true Vanship pilots. But it was persuasive among the older men and women, the ones with no children and grandchildren, and who did not intend to retire. And the older they were, the more stars on the missions they flew, the more they wanted to believe in that special heaven for pilots.
It plagues his thoughts now. Alex has realised that the very best pilots simply can't black out in the air, regardless of whether they actually want to. It's not a test but a curse, to be conscious all the way down, to know that there is no solution, no escape. And yet there's a curious sort of appeal to it – not giving in, not taking the easy way out, staying until the very last moment. The part about there being a heaven for true pilots smacks of wishful thinking, the kind of thing someone would make up to placate seven-year-olds, but still – what if it were true?
It's a beguiling thought.
Alex knows that Yuris would never forgive herself if she hadn't made it, and it would be disrespectful to even suggest that George and Hamilkar did not, to imply that the men who could have rejected the mission and decided to stay with their families – they had families, Alex reminds himself, painfully – were pretenders.
No. George and Hamilkar were definitely true Vanship pilots. They would have done whatever was required of the title.
Alex knows all this. But when he wakes up in the night, drenched in cold sweat from the dreamed memory of the Grand Stream, he prays to whatever might be listening that it wasn't so. Let Yuris have passed out in the storm. Let them have been dead before they were dashed to pieces.
It is too terrible a death to have to meet, face to face.
.
And now it's his turn to be falling, weak from blood loss and the poisons in Delphine's rosevines, the wind screaming in his ears to the tune of thirty-two feet per second per second.
It would be easy to let go now. Delphine is dead, nothing else matters. He hasn't flown a Vanship for years anyway. And it hurts too much.
But perhaps there's a special heaven for proper Vanship pilots, if only he stays awake a little longer. Perhaps Yuris is there. And George, and Hamilkar.
Perhaps –
Perhaps.