Phoenix (part 3 of 3)

So now there are fourteen graves on the top of the hill. It wasn't easy to get people accustomed to burning their dead to understand why it was so important to me. Carson told me once to make sure he was never cremated. I’m not sure if the others cared. But I did. It had happened too quickly; they were gone too soon. I’d be lying if I said I had insisted for the sake of any other person but me.

This place is too near the planet’s equator to have much by way of seasons, but it got colder and warmer and I learned the language of the people here that had saved my life. As soon as I could walk around unaided I went to the wreck that was already starting to be overgrown by creepers and small bushes.

I'm stuck as a foreign visitor on a friendly strange world while the Blob, my way home, hangs in the sky as the planet's lightless moon tantalizingly close and impossibly out of reach, full of its robots and equipment running in steady state until something wears down and everything collapses. Then it will really be nothing but a moon, small and close. Maybe one day when the solar cells wear out, it won’t take all the sunlight to convert to electricity. Instead it will reflect back the sunlight bright enough to see at night and they’ll understand what moonlight is.

I go almost every day to the wrecked shuttle to try and fix it, but I don’t know if all my efforts will ever be enough to restore it. What can I say? When I went to shuttle, there wasn’t enough of the engine left for me to say why it failed. All my knowledge of mechanics and different metals can’t determine what exactly went wrong. I can’t find any reason why that beam in the passenger bay should have broken like that either, no reason why it should have come slicing through every seat like the fiery sword of a vengeful god cutting all those lives in one furious stroke.

It shouldn't be that the one who survived was the one getting bounced around like the pea on the head of a snare drum among giant metal monsters. Someone in the passenger bay should have survived. The beam wasn't the weakest spot of the room. And it shouldn't have only half the broken end in a twisted spiral of metal and the other half have a smooth filed look. But what can I prove? There's nobody here that can go on trial for it. And I don't know who on Earth thought it was so important that we didn't succeed, not even report back once, just an expensive failure absorbed by the blackness of space.

I haven’t been absorbed. I refuse to be. My machinery didn't fail and it wasn't our captain or pilot. Someone stole fourteen lives, and one day I'll make them pay the price for that. Even though fixing the shuttle, carefully crafting new parts with foreign materials and techniques and hoping against hope it can make the one trip may fill the rest of my lifetime. Eventually I’ll be able to fix it. I’ve got to.

One day. I cannot stay like this, an old broken bird with crushed wings and useless hopes looking pleadingly toward the sky. So I keep working on my wreck of a shuttle until I find a way to make it sputter back into life. A phoenix made of steel, rising from the ashes.