1. You don't know what I see, what I'm looking for between the stars, do you? No, of course you don't. I might as well be looking for flying saucers for all you know. I wonder sometimes what you would think of me if you knew, if you could ever understand what I see when I stare at the sky. 2. I stare at the sky and my head echoes with words and phrases culled from far too many books: "I know why the caged bird beats his wing." "In pride, in reas'ning pride, our error lies; / All quit their sphere and rush into the skies!" "When you reach the stars, and live there forever..." "O I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, / And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings." "Numerous as the sands of the earth and the stars of the sky." "Denmark's a prison....Then is the world one." 3. The world does not believe in flying saucers anymore. Flying saucers are jokes. Flying saucers are just science fiction. Flying saucers are mass hysteria. Flying saucers are a government conspiracy. Flying saucers are corny low-budget B-movies. Flying saucers are swamp gas and fog reflecting the light of Venus. 4. On Venus, rain lashes the monochrome jungle and the sun only comes out once every seven years: all summer in a day. 5. In a day, a day not yet twenty years gone, the dream crashed and burned together with seven souls who rode the fire. Crowds had gathered for the launch; the press scattered to their typewriters, and the fans stayed together to mourn. They wrote songs later, songs of lamentation: "Nightmare Launch" and "Requiem" and "Daddy's Little Boy". I can play the songs now, but I was not there, and can only imagine what it was like. 6. Can you imagine what it's like to want something with every shred and fiber of your soul, until there's nothing left in you but the wanting? And it hurts, the wanting hurts worse than anything real ever could, but you can't let go of it, you can't get rid of it, you can't even wish it would stop 7. I wish you'd stop that, someone says irritably, unable to see why anyone would be interested in knowing the names of the stars. Or the best time to look at some comet (is that the same one all those cultists thought was a spaceship, ha-ha, maybe you shoulda gone with them). Or how to use the constellations to find which way is north, or tell the time of night by the phase and position of the moon. 8. The moon is swallowed by a bank of clouds. Swallowed by the ashes of seven astronauts, one of them a civilian teacher. Swallowed by the shadow of unlucky Thirteen. Swallowed by the trees, spreading their branches like a net, the grass entangling my feet. Swallowed by the end of the Cold War, no need for the upper hand anymore. Swallowed by the glare of earthbound streetlights. Swallowed by fifteen hundred dollars for a screwdriver. Swallowed by the inside of the sky, a solid wall of air. 9. Solid walls hold in the air we breathe. How then are we free? 10. In free-fall, you learn to think of gravity as acceleration and velocity as a direction. In liftoff, you have to keep accelerating to escape Earth's gravity; slow down for too long and you fall. In space between planets, you're taught to think round; there's no local up and there's no local down. In the asteroid belt, they call planets "holes." In a place with Earth-normal gravity, you have to learn your reflexes all over again. In the orbital habitats, you're so far up that down doesn't mean anything anymore. 11. It doesn't mean anything anymore, not to most of them. The ashes of the dream are long cold, cold as the night side of the moon, cold as the abandoned launching pads. A space station from Russia circles above us, and nobody even looks up. Running out of food, running out of room, an expanding society with nowhere left to expand. And a set of footprints in the lunar soil still remains undisturbed, still, still, after almost thirty years. 13. Thirty years ago they knew we would be there by now: cities on the moon, outposts on Mars, orbital habitats circling the planet, mining colonies all through the asteroid belt, scattered like diamonds across the sky. Thirty years from now, will any of it be more than a dull nostalgia for how the future used to be? Thirty years from now, will there be anything left of the dream but stories for me to tell my children? 14. Tell your children: When first we stared at the sky, there was nothing there but the words. Our world did not believe in flying saucers or jungles on Venus in our day, could not imagine space travel even after it happened. We still wish upon stars and we will not stop, not since we reached for the moon and saw it swallowed by bureaucracy's solid walls; if our freedom only means that we are free to fall, it doesn't mean anything anymore. And after thirty years, can we still expect anyone to understand what we look for between the stars?