CORIANTHE

bout the Moon and the Stars and Beyond “The first thing you will ask will be where we are. The first thing I will tell you is that we're on Corianthe. In the Pleiades.” StEVE, now again Steve, opened his eyes. He stood up, cracked his fingers, stretched out on the ground ... “Fabulous,” he thought. In front of him, the field of purple grass and inflorescences in all the colors of the Corianthine spectrum. His lazy eyes swept over what seemed to be a huge kit of watercolors under his feet, but they had been expressing a sharp intelligence for some time. The richness of the colors stimulated him. Right now he was translating every hue and every gradient that he absorbed through the iris and even through the skin in musical notes and keys, because he had self-installed his new harmonic synthesizer, and yes, he even managed a real-time translation! Ah, he received this unparalleled gift from the earlier impact, what a thing ... That means that he, Steve, was now in possession of the greatest natural sound translator he had ever known and, believe me, he had begun to understand. Juli hopped around. She wanted to know everything! Everything right away! But first and foremost, she was interested in the purple grass; the peace that rose from it made her so happy that she wanted to breathe it through her eyes. “On Corianthe,” DallE began, with the amused air as if reciting from the technical compendium, “photosynthesis is done in the moonlight. Astarthe – Corianthe’s moon - emits lavender-colored light, and the plants reflect with confidence exactly what they see. And the principle is called ‘resonance.’ In fact, everything here is written in the key of the mirror - or that of resonance ..." We should say that Juli would have been frozen in that round big-eyed expression if she had not found, every moment, a reason to ask for clarification. She was at the age when people are not ashamed to ask, when the corridors of logic align with the sun, and the windows open widely. Her gaze was now combing the horizon line. Beneath it, three quarters hidden, a giant globe, almost transparent like glass. Astarhe. During the day, it rested. Her eyes fled to the surface of the grass, and her little feet began to jump with so much enthusiasm. There, in the grass, there were frolicking creatures who were chirruping like crickets - if a cricket could pull out electric chirps; and would have had bodies similar to those of locusts - if a locust had had the size of the thumbnail of a child of Juli's age, and instead of legs, two pairs of silver bows! The creatures were playful; they emanated a good mood so charming that she would have gathered all of them and embraced them. Perhaps because their smell was a sweet, baby-like smell, she would have held them tight in her arms. “They're picomers,” DallE began. “A picomer begins to live when an earthly being has a desire. In the first moments of life they are barely clear, like pencil sketches. Still moist from the placental fluid from which they broke out, barely alive. Their placenta forms behind humans’ eyes and, when time has come, picomers are born on Corianthe. Once they grow up, they really are locusts. And they can be big or huge, depending on the dreams that are dreamt. In fact, they also provide the courier service from Corianthe to Terra, for the fulfilled desires are sent to their recipients on the back of grasshopper picomers. Let’s say it’s a kind of protocol between the two planets, which nobody has ever signed, but which has become customary, a sort of postal service through which you get both the horse and the package. When you see a grasshopper in the grass, in the summer, know it was once a picomer.” “Some kind of FedEx... Ah, look, one that has only two legs and two springs!” “It’s unfinished. The earth-dreamer, she never imagined the other two. Let’s wish it success. That person can dream something beautiful, who knows...” “Can you dream ugly too?” “Dreams can also be seen in the aesthetics of the ugly. Look, so that you understand. Edgar Alan Poe’s raven was also a picomer at one time. But Poe explicitly requested such a creature, and then the required package was delivered to him. You know what followed. The raven bugged Edgar until he obliged the raven, and passed on to the eternal. Now the guy is on one of Saturn’s rings, bellowing for his raven. I mean, so said, he is; it’s tough to do that among glaciers... In short, he’s got an obsession, baby. In fact, all people get what they’re looking for. And when they’re not looking for anything, it’s even sadder. Dreams do not happen anymore, the planet is drying up...” The sun had risen above midday. ...