THAT DAY

I'd been reading Dan Simmons' PHASES OF GRAVITY, about an ex-astronaut's spiritual crisis. What tops a moonwalk; what do you do with the rest of your life?

His buddy smuggled a Frisbee onto their mission. Earthbound critics screamed "Ghetto kids are starving, and NASA spent billions so these clowns can play Frisbee on the MOON?"

THAT NIGHT

I'm a black V-bat. Not short for vampire: I'm a child's doodle of a bat or bird, a simple V. The stratosphere's my habitat--up where the stars poke through the deep noon blue.

One day, what looked like a black swastika tumbled by. I feared it was neo-Nazi, but it spun the other way, the Indian good-luck way. And it had curved yin-yang arms, not those sharp Nazi elbows. So I took a chance and grabbed it. I was right--soft, light plastic, a toy not a weapon. A sort of boomerang? But why so many arms? And who threw it?

So I fluttered up the jet stream, towing the cryptic toy in my hindclaws, in search of its owner.

Over the horizon loomed Mt. Meru. A needle of rock and ice, rising above the cirrus--like Starmont or Nix Olympica, it reaches the verge of space...

Near the summit was a ledge serving as a doorstep for a small cave. On the ledge, a dejected octopus sprawled. No wonder the boomerang has extra arms: Octopian esthetics!

I returned it to its owner, pleased. Helping a holy hermit has to be good karma.

Gravity's thin, this peak's so high. So, the octopus monk was spry. Ecstatic over its boomerang, the octopus rose, and danced.

And I'd worried that playing was fascist!

NOTES NEXT MORNING

Swastika frisbee = play looks selfish to me--Nazi! But it isn't. I'm just too damn serious.

Low-grav octopus dancer = a short story in Analog a few months back speculated that octopi might do well in space--they could leave the water, learn high tech...

Meru = the mountain of the world, in Hindu cosmology. The octopus monk has to be very pure, to live so near the top.

Mountaintop in the stratosphere = 1) "The Winds at Starmont": a science fiction fable where the mountaintop symbolizes enlightenment, like Meru. 2) in "Phases of Gravity", the ex-astronaut climbs a mesa on a vision quest. But instead of the cave that successful questers usually find, he sees the moon dotted with lights, and knows that despite the Challenger crash, settlers will follow him. The voyage of his life was not in vain.

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