Chapter 9: Epochal Shift

Change is inevitable. All things pass. Nothing lasts forever. The only constant is change. What goes up must come down. People grow apart. Absence makes the heart wander. Familiarity breeds contempt. Empires rise and fall. Novelty wears off. Lured by greener pastures, chasing horizons, wander lust, new conquests, following a star, curiosity kills the cat, the latest rage, a fresh idea, a different point of view. New and untried is more attractive than old reliable. This last is truest in regard to lovers.

Why?

Chaos theory? Entropy? Atrophy? Designed obsolescence? Time is a wasting decease? Decay clears the way for the fresh eruption of new? Boredom? Faithlessness? Short attention spans? What?

My theory?

Capriciousness is the dominant characteristic of a loopy universe!

Cycles, weird elliptic orbits, whirling dervishes, spinning, rotating, revolving, perihelion, aphelions, parabolas and spirals? Loopy!

Luna isn’t originally the name of our moon but another word (Latin) for “the moon”. If moons are as common (as is suspected) to planets around other stars as they are common around planets in our own solar system? A universe filled with lunas?

Then the universe is a total fucking lunatic asylum! Loopy!

Loopy, in my humble opinion and theory of everything.

Loopiest and most capricious of all, are teen-aged girls, especially rich daddy’s tween-aged girls. Wendy dumped me. The hero worship, the gratitude, the novelty of a spaceman boyfriend wore off in a hurry. Wendy also kicked me out. To make space. Out with the old, in with the new. Boyfriend. Bet he doesn’t last as long as I did.

Maarta saved me the embarrassment of crawling back to Joe’s with my tail tucked between my legs. She invited me, and I’m now living with Maarta. The woman is insatiable. For decades, she was an orbit whore, until she began putting on weight. Early in her thirties she was at low ebb in popularity and requests for service, so changed careers. Now she cleans houses. A respectable step up in the world.

Maarta told me a startling secret. All the orbit girls know this and are sworn never to reveal it.

The asteroid-tug pilots never leave their ships, because they can’t. They’re hardwired in, and not whole, but dismembered and the parts separated though communicating. That’s something to consider. Chilly in here, what’s the thermostat say? Is there any other route to obtaining a starship master’s license, without first serving aboard asteroid-tugs as a cutup? Something to seriously look into. A secret known by more than one very closemouthed person, is no secret. How can three people protect a secret known only amongst the three? One kills the other two, remains taciturn, and never divulges.

The lawsuit is proceeding, or in process of continuing, same thing. Will I be compensated for the loss of an afternoon’s run-ups to near space, because I have to be involved in this Q&A discovery process?

No. Since I instigated the lawsuit, I’m at fault for any inconvenience I might suffer. That’s what I’m told, in tones, not to be argued with.

Both sides can ask questions but only through their attorneys. I’m not permitted to speak except in response to a direct question to me.

There aren’t many of those.

The attorneys, in three separate bunches, not including my own pair and their secretary, making a fourth bunch, represent three distinct separate defendant corporations. The Clinic, the supplier, and the manufacturer. My attorneys ask the stupidest unimportant questions of these company officials, each hovering around their attorneys bunch. So I asked our secretary for pen and paper. She was very agreeable and helpful, supplying me. The questions and suggestions I scribbled and tore off as strips of paper, I passed to her. Accepting them with a smile, she forwarded them along to the junior attorney on my team. After a quick glance at my notes, he wadded up each of them, completely ignoring my instructions, not even conferring with the lead attorney or calling his attention to them. You would be infuriated too, I wager. Things aren’t going well for my case. The patronizing smiles of my opponents convey that much information.