Sol – 869 – Just another day on the edge of nowhere.

I threw away my alarm clock a few days ago. I put it in the airlock and just blasted it right out into space. Damn thing was starting to drive me mad. It’s out there now somewhere, ringing away in the void. At least it will be, until it’s gears seize up, its hands stop turning and its face freezes over.

Perhaps some day it will drift into the orbit of a strange alien civilization who will become fascinated by its inner workings and eventually venerate it to the point of idolatry. The God that needs winding (That’s a good name for a book actually, I should write that down).

But in all likelihood it will just keep on drifting forever. Space is a pretty big place y’know, and there’s not really much chance of bumping into anything. But just in case, that’s where the Galactic Lighthouse Society comes in.

We’re here to make sure your spaceship doesn’t get smooshed in a singularity, or spaghettified on the event horizon. If there’s a meteor shower we provide the umbrella, if there’s a black hole we put up the traffic cones and when a nebula lets off gas you better believe we’re the first to get a whiff of it.

Most of the Lighthouses are automated now of course, I’m one of the last, a dying breed…

I’ll do a bit of exercise in the mornings if I’m feeling inspired. I have a running machine and some weights set up in the corner of the room (Lighthouses don’t have corners strictly speaking but I’m not sure how else you’d describe it).

Then I’ll shower and go down to the observation deck to eat my breakfast. Usually porridge and coffee, occasionally an egg and on Sundays a couple of rashers and sausages suits me fine. Some days truth be told I just sit there, stupefied by the vast and splendorous universe that surrounds me. By the time I snap out of it the coffee’s usually gone cold.

When I first arrived here I found it fierce lonely to be honest, it was just me and the cat, Picasso. The silence was smothering. Picasso wouldn’t be a big talker at the best of times (though he says a lot with his eyes). Still, despite his obvious concern I had awful trouble sleeping. I’d be up half the night raking over the past like one of them Buddhist fellas in his zen garden. The nightmares were terrible. I’d come to, soaked in sweat without a clue about who or where I was. The circular walls made me feel like a child abandoned at the bottom of an enormous well.

I thought about packing it all in once or twice.

Every day I climb the winding stair to the top of the tower, where the Silurian diamond hovers in it’s containment tube like an enormous glass eyeball. The diamond is a lamp, a light, a beacon against the infinite dark. It’s how passing ships orientate themselves in local space. It outputs all sorts of strange signals, spectrums and wavelengths and once tuned is accurate to an improbable degree. But just this moment, first thing in the morning, it is cold, quiet, the colour of dark ice.

I sit down at the old synthesizer and flick it on. I give the keys a quick test. A squelchy, fuzzy sound comes out of the tinny speakers. I clear my throat. The tune I play is a prehistoric Urth song called Music For a Found Harmonium. It’s a lively, optimistic piece and I give it some welly but the diamond doesn’t stir. Doesn’t even begin to stir really. It just hovers there looking sort of dour. If a hovering alien diamond could be described as dour then this is it.

“That’s how it’s going to be huh?’ I say. There’s no response of course, there never is.

No one’s exactly sure why Silurian diamond’s need music to function. But then, no one’s quite sure why humans need it either.

I try a different tack. A melody filled with sad beauty. Another Urth song. The diamond keeps schtum, until I start to sing that is. My voice is no oil painting but it’s passable enough.

“Words are flowing out

Like endless rain into a paper cup

They slither wildly as they slip away, across the universe.“

There’s a tremor of light deep in the core of the diamond, a little electric worm wriggling about, a butterfly opening its wings in sunshine.

I continue:

“Pools of sorrow, waves of joy

Are drifting through my opened mind

Caressing me, possessing me.“

There! A fountain of sparks pours from the iris of the eyeball. It splashes across the floor, bathing me in light and shoots out into the terminal night saying I am here, I am here, I am here.

I spent the rest of the morning in my spacesuit, going around squeegeeing off starfish that had gotten stuck to the lighthouse during a recent solar storm. My home juts upward from an asteroid whose official tag in the Galactic Directory is GIO229O. I just call it Giorgio, or Gio for short.

With my bucket of starfish collected I sat on Gio’s edge and patted my ancient stony friend. I enjoyed a lunch of liquidized nutripax delivered via feed tube in my helmet. My spaceboots dangled off the side and below me there was nothing but a sheer drop down to infinity.

What a view, you’d hardly believe it. From my perch I could discern the farthest reaches of my domain: The desert world Arrak, which registers as nothing more than a pale blonde dot beside the central star. Next to it Sumi, a toxic world whose steamy jungles are home to countless unimaginable lifeforms. And right below me, the cool blue marble, Bardo, planet of fathomless oceans.

Somewhere in the void behind me: Mort, the dead world at the edge of my beat.

Beep beep! goes the notification inside my suit. Oxygen low. It’s a tune I know only too well.

Evening. The stove crackled away and I poured myself a wee whiskey and plonked down in front of the telly. It was a nature documentary, some bird was doing a funky little mating dance up and down a branch. No sooner had I gotten myself settled than Picasso leaped up on my belly and started purring away like a little idling engine.

A few hours back a Zort cloud had moved in and it was hammering down proton jelly. I listened to it splatting against the walls and roof of my tower. The rhythm was hypnotic and lulling. These droll old walls had stood strong for a thousand years. For the sake of all those other lighthouse keepers down the ages I sincerely hoped it had been a thousand years of peace and solitude.

I was mulling over all this and close to drifting off when the radio crackled. I leaped up and sent Picasso flying across the room with a meow.

“Come in, come in, Valentia Station here. Over” I said sitting down at the radio.

There was another crackle then a man’s voice: “Quite a storm I say.” He had a distinguished but worn voice, like a beautiful colour sanded away.

“That it is sir, that it is. Who am I talking to?”

He was a salty old spacedog called Tom Grace. Had himself a beat up old tug out there ferrying this and that and what have you around from system to system. As I say, it can get lonely out here and it’s good to have someone to talk to now and then.

So me and Tom Grace we shot the shit for an hour or so. The storm was playing havoc with his instruments but thanks to my diamond he knew exactly where he was headed. I think he just wanted someone to listen to him. You know how it is when you’re about to crest the hill of life, it’s a fantastic view if you can stop looking over you shoulder.

These types are endemic in the outskirts of the galaxy, men who’ve drifted far too long amidst the fading stars. Delivering things they have no care for, to places they may never see again. In the darkness the memories sometimes become so filled with light you could fall into them and drown.

Sometimes I worry I’ve gotten that way myself to be honest. It passes as these things do. After all I’ve to feed the cat and sing to my diamond.

I said my goodbyes to old Tom Grace and signed off for the night. I damped down the stove, turned out the lights and climbed the winding stairs to bed. Picasso yawned at me as he watched me pull off my knit sweater and boots. I lay down and got under the covers. I thought about Tom Grace and his little ship out there. I thought about storms and people passing through. I thought about a great deal of things, and in no time at all I was fast asleep.

That night I had a dream so vivid it was to haunt me. There was a star, burning with all the memories of all the creatures who’d ever existed. Ships were sailing towards it. Countless, countless ships, like rice scattered over a great black sheet. All of them sailing to the one place they knew intrinsically: The past, the planet of evergreen memories, the eternal land of lost loves, hopes and dreams.

As the ships approached the people grew younger and younger and the light grew brighter and brighter and just before dawn they passed on and vanished into that white dot.

Limitless undying love

Which shines around me like a million suns

It calls me on and on across the universe