Making Ends Meet
The original copy (which was the only one, alas) was lost. Missing. Completed just before the war started, Na-via (pronounced NAH veeYAH) had been given the story her mother had written (called This Moment Of Exertion), so Navia could read it, so Navia could create an accompanying image (Navia was [and still is] a depictionist [somewhat like a photographer, but without a camera], specializing in three-frame short stories told in still images).
After her mother left (and never returned, alas), when the war between Federation and Tlingon Empire started, Navia never saw her mother again. Neither again would she see that story. She could not find it among her mother’s things; did not know where her mother put it. Mysteriously, Navia’s father and brother knew nothing of it. Apparently, she had shown it only to Navia.
But Navia never forgot about it. While the story’s disappearance didn’t haunt her, it remained her constant companion, continually on the edge of her thoughts. Always bothered her that the story never got released to the public along with the other stories her mother wrote. The story her mother told was a first contact scenario without fear (both in terms of in-narrative, and in her telling of it), because she did not imagine the alien encounter would or could be hostile… because their own civilization has never been hostile. The Deltan people have never had a violent history; the conceit was completely alien to them. The trick is to be communal-conscious, without conformity to herd-mentality behaviors. To know the difference.
A story involving first contact is both ironic and poignant, considering that Deltans had already lost their interest in space voyaging; concentrating on their own inner-space… which is why the story portrayed an allegorical contact situation.
Get Sean Stubblefield’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Nine years later, at age twenty-three, five years passed the end of that forlorn war, Navia became determined to attempt a re-creation of the lost tale. Due to the absence of capitalistic precepts in Deltan society (which is commiserate and common courtesy throughout The United Federation Of Planets), Navia (as with her mother) were not treated like starved rats in a cage, so they could behave accordingly. Society enabled them with free time to pursue artistic endeavors, instead of shackling the populous with work-for-the-sake-of-work burdens. Profit motive inhibits (if not prohibits) any rational system of production, distribution and harmoneous interaction. Capitalism could never solve poverty, because capitalism creates poverty, then criminalizes it. Capitalism is not concerned with generating liberty, but with enslaving people to servitude for its capricious whims. Manufacturing endless struggle and conflict, not rendering efficiency and equity.
Like war, Capitalist policies have never been part of Deltan experience.
And she kept the image she did create, even after all these years. Except for the fond memory, it was all Navia had in the case of her mother’s missing story (the story of her mother’s missing?). The only evidence that the story had existed; that Navia had not imagined it.
Of course, built on and from a faint, distant memory, this re-creation would and could never be the original. Obviously, it would have to be a different story; based on another. Ultimately, it ended up being a story about a missing story (both literal and metaphorical). Actually, this book isn’t a book at all, but melodious motley medley of notes on a book which the author will never have the skill to actually write. She admits as much from the very beginning, and then asks readers to consider the plight of an intergalactic astronaut who is caught in a negative space between two alien perspectives.
A heroic meta-fictional meditation on the nature of creativity and intersection; delicate lines possible between lost and found.
Adapting the title from the original, as she did the story itself, Navia called this new rendition Exertion Of This Moment.
