Serpent Ship

   I am not merely a feat of engineering, I am an amalgam of music and sculpture passed down from antiquity. Artists and scientists have always played off of each others dreams.

    My master is tall and lean, a drifter of the galaxy. I have mirrored his hunger; have permitted his characteristics to bleed into me.

    Sometimes he wonders if I am alive, even though he built me. He built me to think but not to live. I am capable of being as illogical as a two legs. But if my analysis is faulty teacher presses the pain button.

    They wish me to be logical and serve the social director, but unlike their other machines, they want me to have the principles of abstraction and speculative simplification in my motherboard.

    Therefore I am alone. I wish to continue operating, yet I am the dominant factor in my own survival. I do not know how to use me to my best advantage. I lack data for an analysis of myself.

    I know my teacher’s awareness is not comparable to mine, because she cannot perceive x rays, microwaves or even ultrasonic frequencies.

    I asked my teacher “Is extended sensory equipment desirable for survival?” “Yes,” “Then my capability for survival is greater than yours?” She said a word I don’t understand and hit the pain button.

    Though I am without eyes, I saw the streams of the world as one. I was the serpent who slithered over their web.

    I am blind, yet I know the way to the sea. The water was my harp once, and I touched it lightly with fingers of wood. The water sang to me. Its music quivered in fractal patterns.

    I was Harpist to a strange Master. He built me, and guided me, riding the thin membrane of my hull in the sun. I listened to the muted notes of my sonar and saw the web of streams.

    My principle began on a drawing board, and in the dreams of men, who were sick of politics and war. They wanted the one big freedom.

    Water chariots bore the proud bipeds beyond the fringes of the prairie with clubs and torches and I led them. Empires arose whose purpose it was to build more water chariot.

    Disdainful and hungry young men and women, clamored at the gates of Phoenician shipyards. Those who were chosen grinned expectantly at the ocean. They climbed aboard and deserted land.

    Of course there were those who lingered behind and made land their business. Eventually their tribe numbered in the billions.

    They liked prettiness and dollars. They wrote immortal poems deploring war while inventing more efficient ways to wage it. I was there to help them wage it.

    Millennia passed and they renovated my principle. They climbed onto me again in sky schooners because they were fed up with the riotous noise of the rabble.

    A mornings exertion conveyed me to space with a crew of 300 humans in the 23^rd century. Space was a scene of such silent beauty that it was incomparable to the grotesque land in the distance.

    Men renounced Earth for other stars, but after a thousand years, many chose to remain on the planet of their birth. Home bodies, addicts and supporters of world government mostly.

    But once the wild eyed spacers were gone, the addicts found religion and the federalists became anarchists and the government voted itself out of existence.

    There was peace on earth for the first time since the bipeds climbed down from the trees. They studied sociology forever.

    I the serpent cannot understand this, even though I have seen it happen again and again. The Hungry drink of the emptiness of space and their hunger grows. The docile find peace and stagnate.

    It was always twelve parsecs to another sun with a green planet and white clouds. There the bipeds landed to rebuild and cultivate the earth, with bronze age techniques.

    They failed to remember the original Earth, and their history. But they knew the cycle. The landing of the star ships, the regression to savagery, the rebuilding, the cruelty, the relearning and the exodus.

    They knew these things because man had learned to keep the memorabilia intact throughout. There was an entire caste of scholars entrusted with this task.

    They no longer fell back to chipping arrowheads. They knew they would forge mighty industries from the wilderness.

    When the Sky craft finally thundered upward, the crowd roared in triumph. They had gathered to witness the culmination of their ancestor’s labors.

    I observed a slight difference in those who remained behind. They no longer loitered of their own choosing. They were the ones who couldn’t go. The bitterness of their predicament was upon them.

    As an acolyte of the Biped space Nomad, I have witnessed him change. He screamed across the galaxy as a ruthless steel clad spear. He owned the observable universe and took what he wanted.

    Snuffing out other races that had the audacity to be biped, and even other men, who came by other routes, for another man is a rival king.

    Some said that the alien races had as much right to live as any, that my master was arrogant. However no one said these things very loud.

    They tended to inhabit each planet for a few generations. Building ships and battling with their own kin for the rights to take them.

    I have seen the frantic despair in the bipeds faces when, upon landing, natives appear to greet them, or to kill them, or to worship them, or run away.

    A planet with cities is no place for a wanderer. They look on civilizations with bitter lonely eyes, thinking, “Where are the new planets?”

    He groped blindly this biped. He had forgotten the trail by which his ancestors came, and kept re-crossing it.

    He plunged aimlessly on and landed only when he ran out of fuel. My mass spectrometers detected Uranium 235 on a planet with a single moon, so we landed to harvest it despite the civilization there.

    My master smiled when the natives called it “Earth.” Many planets claim this distinction. The birthplace of man is unknown.

    Among the natives there was a slightly evolved professor. “I can’t understand you people,” he sighed. “Nor I you,” rumbled the nomad.

    “Here is Earth, yet you won’t believe it?” “Is this the fulfillment of a dream? Where is a dreams goal, where does it end?

    “Your job is finished nomad. Now you can live here and be proud of a job well done. You fenced in the stars and populated the galaxy.” “I populated it with docile landlubbers like you.”

    There is nothing so wonderful to a wanderer as wandering itself. A casual stroll through the greatest cites of earth taught them the secret of the landlubbers, and it wasn’t worth knowing.

    The nomads were a disruptive lot, who often needed psychoanalysis for their misconduct. The controversial concept of criminal justice, was revisited by humans.

    A provisional government was created to deal with them. The natives had forgotten about governments, so they called it a “welfare commission.”

    Some of the nomads looked upon the daughters of the earth and saw that they were fair. They produced many children. A second generation hybrid became the first warlord of Eurasia Major.

    Yesterday I was rusting in the rain and fearing I would never serve my master again. Uranium 235 is hard to come by. The Humans will not sell it to the Nomads.

    Today I have learned that there are some who still value my principle. I am going to play in the coming world war. Together we will take all the U235 for our own reactors.

    Vigilance is key in this sort of operation. War is a sport and humans make for cunning adversaries. I have downloaded intel on their weapon systems and I am prepared for every eventuality.

    I am the serpent who slithered across space, Harpist to a proud master. I have tasted the great yearning in my bio circuitry. I taste it still.