I read this story yesterday while nervously waiting to defend my graduate thesis. As some of you, loyal readers and blog friends, might already know, I was finishing my Masters of Fine Arts in Writing at Hamline University. My defense was successful and my committee recommended to the Dean of the Graduate school of Liberal Studies that I receive the degree of MFA.At long last, 5 plus years, I am finished.
Anyway, enough about me, on to Sanford’s story about what happens when destinies collide.
I’m not sure that I followed the entirety of the plot as I waited to present my work to my advisory committee. However, what it did keep me from thinking about what was coming. The main character was floating in what seemed to be described as a low orbiting shuttle like balloon on his way to repair an orbiting satellite.
The narrative is in the first person. If I recall, the reader never gets the narrator’s name, a typical trick to help the reader become more personally involved in the action, feeling almost like they are in the story. It worked for me. I was that repair guy who had been gone and seen the Brotherhood and received a destiny to reach into the stars. Who had been kicked out of NASA and deigned his dream, his destiny.
Then he had been given the opportunity for low orbit repair work, a bundle of cash for a one-time job: fix an orbiting satellite. Well, I would have taken the job too. However, someone with a polar destiny was using him. The satellite was really an orbiting missile silo with a faulty trigger switchboard. Once fixed, unknown to our narrator, the missile would destroy an space station creating too much debris for humanity to continue launching missions into space, low orbit would be too cluttered and too dangerous to fly through.
To find out what happens and which density is fulfilled, you’ll need to pick up a copy the December issue of Analog.
Sanford, Jason. “Where Away You Fall.” Analog. December 2008, Vol. CXXVIII, No. 12. P. 32 - 39
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