‍THE STAR CATCHER

Cosme Turconi sensed a galactic volatility as he was propelled from the Other Side of the Moon and into the Wasteland.  His ship carved a sinuous path through the torrent of satellite fragments and the barren graves of stars, the drifting remnants of his forefathers.  Unaware of the dark history of his ancestry, he ignored these silent omens as he prepared to navigate the meteorite storm ahead, stardust drawing out his course against the dark canvas and leaving an erratic trail behind that hung, momentarily suspended, before fading into the Nothingness.

A hybrid clone, Cosme’s genetic makeup was equal in human and Moon-dweller: part captor, part captive.  Man had grown accustomed to creating worker-beings for convenience and these creatures were primarily human in their ability to communicate with authority, digest complex data and operate advanced technology, but lacking the instinct and emotion that could lead to revolt.  Cosme and his fellow clones had the qualities of Moon-dwellers in that they survived solely on energy absorbed from moon crystals through their porous skin and had a great resilience to the harsh lunar conditions.  More crucially, they were naturally adept at the practise of star catching.  However, whereas these gentle honey-eyed Moon-dwellers had simply borrowed the stars at night for warmth, catching them in nets woven from the delicate threads of spiders and releasing them again when day broke, Cosme, labouring under man’s instruction, unwittingly delivered the stars to their deaths in thermonuclear reservoirs that powered the Moon and Mars, where man’s warring dystopia now existed.

Cosme’s creator, Professor Victor Turconi, was a talented geneticist and closet romantic.  In the months before he went rogue and was banished from his work with ignominy, Turconi was forced to create complex hybrid embryos destined specifically for lunar labour.  Above all, he was instructed to create non-sentient entities that did not possess free will or, in turn, a soul.  Despising the autocracy that he was ruled by and its unceasing devastation, Turconi, in a final act of silent rebellion, gave Cosme the capacity for emotion.  Rejecting orders to exclude human conditions such as instinct, passion and hyperconsciousness, he only went so far as to suppress them.  The romantic in him was a tortured one that emanated masochistic tendencies and what troubled Turconi most was the desensitisation of mankind.  Passion and angst had long given way to complacency and defeat.  In such a desolate climate he knew that it could only end in despair, but the thought that some day Cosme might truly feel that torment, was, in some twisted sense, a comfort to him.

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As Cosme traversed towards the Earth side of the Moon, lit by the waxing lunar dawn, he watched as clouds of hydrogen plasma pulsed violet, stars exploded and black holes quietly inhaled the universe.  He sat back and drank in the panoply of sounds around him as the other star catchers whizzed past, clusters of dark matter burped photons and distant auroras waltzed.  A thousand moons orbited the celestial bodies as they swung on their axis, suns raged and the dusty skirts of planets twirled for their masters.

While the other catchers hunted in packs, Cosme preferred to be alone, without distractions and safe with his thoughts.  After securing his stellar coordinates, he tuned in his radio and listened to the orchestra of the stars.  Cosme had never heard the ethereal beauty of the musical lullabies once sung by the stars, so he did not recognise the sadness in their songs that were now weighted with melancholy and mourning.  Cosme was under orders to investigate a belt of stars that had begun singing at an uncharacteristically high pitch.  As routine a mission as any other, his days consistently long and repetitive, his hands glided across the controls, flicking the appropriate switches with the casual ease of habit.  He separated the varying rhythms of the star colonies and noted the subtle eddies of nuance with the required diligence.  If he misguidedly approached an angry star - or one close to supernova - the consequences were potentially catastrophic.  If he were to pluck a binary star from the sky, separating it from its partner, then it would sing a note so high-pitched and hideous that it could perforate ear drums light years away unless returned immediately to its other half.  A staccato star was known to be a very elusive creature and prone to severe mood swings.  As for a warbling white dwarf, even the most intrepid of adventurers were advised to avoid them at all times.

Cosme stared ahead at Earth’s august and luminous sphere and saw not the birthplace of destruction, but instead a thing of sublime beauty, dwarfing its orbiting moon and bathing it in its incandescent light.  Only a small land mass remained, the bulk having been submerged thousands of leagues under its icy seas.  At times, when he stared for so long that his eyes began to play, he thought he could see his own reflection in the floating islands, obscured by puffs of smoky clouds.  He felt a longing in his heart, silent and heavy, that wanted to be a part of those seas.  An outcast, his colleagues were suspicious of his thinking and threatened by its difference, and at night, when the other star catchers were sleeping in their crater beds, their dreamless heads resting on crystal pillows, Cosme would stare into space, unable to close his eyes or quieten the thoughts that swirled around his mind.  He saw no patterns around him and no order, only collisions and calamites.  He feared the chaos of the universe and prayed that he might one day be spared from it.  With each step he entered into an invisible contract with the forces around him and begged for them to guide him towards the right path.

With the heat of the day rapidly increasing and the ship flooded with piercing light, Astra was growing restless.  As Cosme’s sole companion, Astra only served to confirm the distrust of the others who viewed her kind as a purely functional, subordinate entity in which to enhance production - slaves not equals.  She nudged his foot with her snout and he allowed his arm to wander in her direction and stroke her back, at which she recoiled and barked, her jaws snapping at the air before reducing to a brooding growl.  In Cosme’s absentmindedness he had rubbed her the wrong way, which was a grave error when dealing with fetchstickles, who were rather volatile by nature.  Though they were normally exemplary companions, when upset they were a notoriously miserable bunch and Astra illustrated this by huffing her way to the back of the ship with a flick of her tail and a disgruntled snarl.  Cosme calculated that there would be no appeasing her for just under three and three-quarter hours.

Fetchstickles were not all that dissimilar to armadillos in appearance.  They shared a downy underbelly, the ability to curl into a ball when threatened and a similar armoured shell, though theirs was capable of repelling solar flares and asteroid pebbles.  Much like a sheep dog to a shepherd, fetchstickles had accompanied star catchers since the dawn of star catching.  Highly intelligent and resilient creatures, though also exceedingly stubborn and impatient, they were skilled in the language of the stars and endowed with admirable tactics of persuasion that could coax even the most reluctant of plasma balls from the sky. 

A vitriol odour wafted up into Cosme’s nostrils, an unwelcome guest that he coughed and spluttered to expel.   He heard the grumbling of Astra’s bowels, the undeniable source of the putrid gas.  Had she been of a more jovial disposition, he would have jibbed her in the manner in which they were accustomed, but thought it prudent to let it pass this time.  One drawback - and a serious one when sharing a vessel the size of a broom cupboard - was the flatulence of fetchstickles when flying.  They were not designed to withstand man’s influx of technology, nor were they built to leave the Moon’s surface and their insides suffered extraordinarily as a result.

Once the fumes had subsided, Cosme noticed that there was something a little catawampus with the ship.  He glanced at Astra, who replied with a reproachful flick of her tail.  A check of the speedometer alerted him to the disturbing truth that their velocity had been reduced almost to a standstill.  He peered out of the window and observed nothing untoward, save for a red dwarf and a relatively insignificant asteroid belt.  He set the windscreen wipers back and forth to clear the galactic debris from the storm and still saw nothing alarming, though the situation itself certainly did call for alarm.

It was then that he became conscious that the stars had stopped singing.  He had never experienced silence before and it felt empty, cold and crater-like.  He stared out through the spacelight and was met with a thick celestial fog that now enveloped them, a mass of noxious gas dressed in an ominous amethyst.  He recalled the existence of such a phenomenon, but he knew of no first hand accounts to suggest it was anything but mythical.  Clearly at the mercy of the cloud’s inexorable magnetic pull, there was no action or cunning that could rescue them.  At some juncture it would release and, having disengaged their engine, send them plummeting through the cosmos to meet with an undetermined end.

An entrancing calm washed over Cosme and he submitted himself to the now inky-black blanket that shrouded the ship.  Sensing their imperilment and subsequently driven from her sulk, Astra vied for her master’s attention, but her efforts were wasted.  She followed his gaze, at its zenith, his eyes distant and foreign, and it was not long before she also disconnected from her thoughts.  They waited, transfixed, for the something that neither of them knew what, to do whatever it was that it was going to do.

He did not know how much time had lapsed, perhaps even light years, but when he did finally wake from his dreamy state, he was aware that they were falling at a disconcerting and accelerating speed.

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A shooting pain flashed through his spine and alerted him to the fact that he was, miraculously, still alive.  The ship had folded around them like a coffin, pitch black and buried in rubble, entombing them save for a welcome crack of opportunity in the side door.  With considerable effort, he shifted his weight to his shoulder and craned his neck to find Astra, who was lying upturned on her shell, legs frantically cycling in the air, not having had sufficient time to protect herself.  He reached out and turned her the right way up, at which she barked gratefully before retreating into a ball. 

Cosme, with impressive feats of contortion, managed to manoeuvre his leg and force the weight of his foot against the door.  At first reluctant, then with an air of resignation, it fell away and Cosme rolled out onto the ground beneath.  He stared at the ship-sized shape of sky above in the roof that they had crashed through.  It appeared to be an old sub-surface colony, a relic of man’s invasion, torched and derelict from years of solar flares and radiation erosion. 

He levered himself into an upright position, bones cracking and muscles atrophied, but seemingly in tact.  He stared down a capacious corridor, either side lined with an infinite number of doors and above him a mangled sign dangled by a wire:  Shackleton Recreational Center.

Cosme shuffled past the debris at his feet, kicking aside objects that had no significance to him.  Many were in cinders, black and sooty to touch, a mess of mangled wires and tattered chips.  The doors were sealed and he brushed away the dust to reveal runic labels:  Gymnasium, Pet Parlour, Adult Entertainment.  They were accompanied by various propaganda slogans, a nod to the hotchpotch of governments and corporations that once battled for a slice of the Moon.  He made his way to where Astra was teasing a zigzog.  If you were to cross a meerkat with a marsupial much like a bandicoot, elongate its tail and bend it into a vertical Z shape, then you would have something very similar to a zigzog.  This particular one was now quivering and quailing in the corner, terrified as Astra performed a death dance prior to swiping it with her tail, flinging it across the corridor and watching gleefully as it slid down the wall to land in an inanimate heap. 

Cosme scratched at the sign on the last door: The Astronaut Chef.  The word chef was as foreign as the others, but, at last, he recognised astronaut.  Beneath were written the words: Tastes from Earth.  He gave it a kick with his boot, frustrated that it offered him no answers to its meaning or solution to their predicament.  He motioned for Astra to follow him back to the ship to investigate if the transmitter might still be capable of sending a distress signal.  She returned his command with a defiant glare and, with the zigzog regaining consciousness, resumed her pyrrhic jig.  No sooner had her feet begun to tap again when she was interrupted by an almighty wailing, much like the disturbed whistle of a comet plummeting through space, which was in fact coming from the door in a delayed reaction to Cosme’s kick.  It creaked open, echoes reverberating around the walls, to reveal a room with no apparent end and what appeared to be a jukebox of gigantic proportions in its centre that dwarfed the astonished pair.

Astra scurried in and Cosme cautiously followed, circumnavigating the bodacious contraption, marvelling at its aesthetic silhouette.  Unlike the aerodynamic machines he was used to, this was beautifully awkward in its design.  Flanked with two large metal cylinders and four smaller ones, there were two arms that jutted out from the body which was square at the bottom and narrowed into a triangular point at the top.  Adorned in its entirety with buttons and labels, the bizarre apparatus housed an armchair and helmet in its centre, from which a web of wires and pipes protruded.  Above it a plaque read: ‘Epicuriosity Ltd. Taste the difference.’ After the Moon rejected man’s horticultural efforts, severe rationing and culinary synthesis had reduced taste to a purely recreational pursuit.  

Cosme climbed up towards the chair.  Peas, pickle, pumpkin.  Astra vocalised her disapproval and remained at the foot of the stairs in protest.  He curved his lips around the words, an invocation, searching for clues to their meaning.  Lemon, lentils, lychee.  He eased himself into the seat and placed the helmet on his head and, as he slipped his hands into the gloves, he felt the shudder of a distant moonquake.  Sake, samosa, sausage.

Over the sound of Astra’s barks, he heard a faint whirring that developed into a disconcerting crackle.  He froze, panicked, waiting for the noise to manifest itself.  Beetroot, betel nut, borscht.  An alarming electrical buzz ricocheted around the room and in an instant they were flooded in a luminous yellow light.  The machine clicked into gear, though from what power source he could not imagine, and before he had time to move, its arms had imprisoned him and Astra’s vociferous cries were gone.  Tagine, taramasalata, tofu.  

Alone in the cage he now found himself in, he surveyed the sea of controls.  He closed his eyes and extended a finger tentatively outwards, randomly selecting a button: Peppermint.

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Goosebumps crept across his skin, the hairs on his head tickled and he felt a rush of blood to his neck that froze at the nape.  His eyes bulged from their sockets and he clamped down on his teeth, gripping the seat in an attempt to thwart the giddy sensations that plagued him.  He visualised a vortex of white cloud spiralling inside his brain, sucking his insides up and into the follicles of the hair on his head as it stood on end.  In his mouth - whose purpose up until now had been purely vocal - a pleasurable tingling flooded his tongue and transported him to the previously unexplored rooms of his mind.

When normality returned, he was left trembling, exhilarated and alive for the first time, his entire being was awake and he reached out again.  His tongue began to twitch, a crackling sensation prickled his mouth and an internal popping sound, reminiscent of mission descents, darted around his ears.  He felt a rush of saliva in his mouth, lips pursed, his face scrunched up and a shiver ran through him, a vibration down his spinal cord.  His head began to shake from side to side, his body convulsed and his toes quivered.  Lemonade.

Prisms of gold spun in his mind’s eye.  Intense flames licked at his irises and his tongue was scorched with heat, beads of sweat poured down his forehead and his eyes began to itch and sting.  He squirmed in his seat and yelled in pain, his skin singed, the shock made his head whirl uncontrollably and he beat the chair with his fists.  His heart pounded as if it was about to explode and he felt something stir in his loins.  Chilli pepper.

No morsel or even crumb had ever danced upon his tongue and the taste buds that existed there only as a vague remnant of mankind had lain dormant all his life.  Now they were just waking from their slumber.  As they dreamt, distant flavours entered into their chimeras and they began to stir from their beds, throwing off the covers, stretching out their stiff little legs and cramped little toes. 

At guacamole they began to wiggle their hips.  When they felt watermelon wash over them they opened their eyes and their feet began to tap as coffee took over, lifting them up and shaking them down.  With passion fruit they took their partners’ hands and began to spin each other round and round.  With apple crumble they jumped up into the air and twirled into a frenzy until mustard sent them hopping up and down and convulsing as if possessed, darting around in a rage until they collapsed in a heap, panting.

His senses fused together in synaesthesia as tastes revealed themselves as a confused jumble of colours, images, sounds, memories and numbers.  Blackberry:  Astra, reprimanding him with a snap of her tail then melting with the pat of his hand.  Wasabi:  A supernova exploded within, splintering his insides.  Cocoa: A black hole, luring and magical, dark matter seeping into his vision then bursting into a cloud of the palest yellow.  Rosemary:  That brilliant lunar morning so long ago when he had caught his first star.

With no survival instincts to warn him off bitter, potentially poisonous tastes and no preconceptions of flavour, Cosme’s virginal palate reacted in a myriad of unexpected ways.  He thought black pudding to be deliciously rich, appreciated the subtle delicacy of oysters and discerned spinach as on a par with a rare cluster of nursery stars.  He found chocolate repugnant, milk vile and lasagna conjured up one of Astra’s bouts of wind.  He relished in this newly discovered subjectivity, in the endless options at his fingertips, the choices he made and the reactions he had to them, every one fresh, exciting, and entirely unpredictable.  Even the foulest of tastes gave him unsurpassable pleasure in their difference and in his freedom to leave himself and be transported into their foreign lands.  The stars sung inside his head, a different taste with each note.  The higher pitches came with sour, bitter tastes that made him pucker up his lips and scrunch his nose.  The faster the tempo, the hotter, spicier flavours came and made his eyes water and turn his mouth into a furnace.  The slower tempos were delicate and smooth and the lower pitches were sweet and heavy, like sticky toffee pudding.

Overwhelmed and delirious, desperate to absorb each and every one, he jabbed wildly at the buttons.  His eyes watered, his face spasmed, his nostrils flared, his mouth fizzed and he yelped as his whole body trembled, craving more until darkness brought him to his senses and he realised that the tremors were not coming from within but from outside.  He flung the dead cage open and launched himself down the stairs towards the waiting and anxious Astra, eyes full of rebuke.  He heard the first meteorites hit and the building shudder, large pelts of meteor rocks crashed through the roof, narrowly missing them as they darted through the corridor that had already begun to warp with the heat, towards the surface.  The last thing that crossed Cosme’s mind was jalapeño.

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A deluge of pigmented images swept him away, drowning him as he stretched out his arms, plucking them from the air but each time opening his hand to find an empty palm.  He climbed ladders of moon dust, used stars as stepping-stones until they exploded in supernovas and floated downstream on a prism of gold, but each journey was fruitless.  Drifting in and out of slumber, he would half wake, panic-stricken and confused, with an inexplicable and pervasive desire that he could not satiate.

The fog eventually cleared and he woke to a foul taste: nothing.  He turned his neck to the side and was met with a wall of angry pain that made him cry out.

‘Careful, you’ve been out for a week.’ 

‘What happened?’ he croaked, recognising the voice of The Speaker.  It was the same voice that had told him who to be, what to do and where to be all his life.  He felt uneasy and distrait, the jigsaw pieces of his memory upturned and spread across the table of his mind.

‘After crashing into a disused colony, you were hit by a heavy meteorite storm,’ he replied evenly.  ‘They got there just in time to drag you from the ruins.’

Fragments stumbled around his brain, colliding with one another in an incoherent mess.  The Astronaut Chef:  That intoxicating torrent of sensations that every part of him ached for.

‘What about the base?’

‘Obliterated.  Goodbye.’  The Speaker clicked off, leaving a momentary trace of static before silence.

The news slowly crept its way into Cosme, worming into his core and he bunched the sheets into his fists despairingly.  The prospect of a life without taste, where the Astronaut Chef lay in ashes, was not one that he wished to consider.  He felt a cold, dark void growing inside of him, a black hole that sucked at his very being.  The connection that he had always felt with Earth, the desire he had been searching for all his life, had manifested itself as the Astronaut Chef.  He had never felt that he belonged on the Moon, but he had, for those brief moments with taste, found himself.  Yet no sooner had he discovered it, had it been so cruelly taken away from him.  He stared out of the window, languishing in his misery and observed the waning light of the moon dusk, the long dark night soon to commence.  It was then that, for the first time, he heard the true lament of the stars, their hollow notes laden with grief, and it seemed that they were singing from within him and he understood their sorrow.

Cosme withdrew further into the desultory thoughts that ambushed him as he struggled with erratic mood swings, fevers and hallucinations, only half aware of the lives around him that continued to give and follow orders.  His honey-hewed eyes greyed and as he stared despondently out of the window across the lunar surface, searching for the tastes that he could not reach even in his dreams, his existence, naked and transparent, revealed itself to him as mundane and futile.  He found no redeeming qualities in the Moon that now appeared incorrigibly hideous and ruined, on the brink of collapse, its flaws glaring back at him and mocking his misfortune.  He traced its dilapidated surface, blasted apart into cumbersome craters, the demolished caves and the deserted colonies.  It all paled in comparison to the pleasures of Earth, those delights that had been hidden and denied him by the very beings that he had toiled for diligently and without question all these years.  With nothing to keep him on the Moon, and the Astronaut Chef no longer there, he resolved that he would travel to Earth and claim taste for himself.

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When night came, Cosme stole out of the base and drove a lunar buggy across to the warehouse where the ships were docked.  He had calculated the necessary adjustments required to adapt a protostar ship to withstand the Earth’s atmosphere.  Protostar surveillance deciphered the codes that these special stars emitted through radio waves.  Unlike their peers, these luminaries did not produce nuclear energy but were instead extremely sensitive to the wider cosmos and thought to pick up on galactic activity well before anything or anyone.  They were ancient souls that could transcend time and if his colleagues could crack their ever-changing puzzle of language then they could, perhaps, translate the future.  Due to the positions of these stars, towards the area of the galaxy where the Earth spun, the robust ships were aptly suited to his mission.

He slipped in through the side door, his mind already a tangle of screws, bolts and levers, and got to work.  Spurred on by a cocktail of obsession and ambition he worked doggedly, never pausing to rest.  When the solder slipped, he lost a screw or his eyes seared from the chemical seal, he just thought of his new life with Tastes from Earth.  When he had stitched together the final piece of his parachute, he was ready.

As Cosme prepared for take-off, cross-checking his trajectory, test-running the engine and securing the hatch, he felt a fluttering in his belly and an electric pulse through his body.  He recognised the sensation not as nervous excitement but as ginger ale mixed with horseradish.

The roof retracted and he jettisoned into outer space, leaving behind his erstwhile lunar life forever and he relished in his liberation.  It seemed to him as though the whole galaxy shared his enthusiasm and responded to it with an acrobatic display of asteroid back flips and meteorite cartwheels into the abyss.  His mind ran away with thoughts of his heroic landing and the welcome applause of the tastes.

After Cosme and the ship had adjusted to one another and he was comfortably cruising towards his destiny and the sphere that harboured the enigma of taste, he allowed himself to drift off, exhausted from his toils.  As he voyaged through space, eschewing spinning vortexes of dust, dark matter and innocuous nebulas, the sounds of the stars began to seep into his lucid dreams, their songs of loss pushing him further into his mind, chasing him with their notes as if bidding him to retreat.

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He woke with a jolt, his eyes burning, watering in silent protest to a foul and pungent odour that scratched his nose and itched the back of his throat.  Stilton.  He recognised it instantly as the pervasive aroma of an airborne Astra.

In his self-absorption, all thoughts of the fetchstickle had evaded his mind and he felt a pang of double cream.  Grateful for the company, he brought her close to him and affectionately stroked her feathery underbelly.  Concerned with her master’s wayward behaviour she had kept a distant, watchful eye over him and though she knew from the portentous song of the stars that their journey would be perilous at the least, the sage old fetchstickle had, understanding that she could do nothing to prevent him, stowed onto the ship as his guardian.

As they passed through the galaxy, every member rushing about their business, clusters of gases and asteroids colliding, Cosme thought of what it was to be human.  That great mortal in possession of unequivocal delights, blessed with a planet so bountiful as to grace them with sensory ecstasies like taste.  Soon he would walk that Earth and he would not want for anything more than the pure unadulterated pleasure of the Astronaut Chef and he imagined endless lines of the machines, inviting him into their world.

Cosme had been vaguely aware of his attenuating physique, a loosening of his skin and a painful twinge in his spine.  He stretched himself out, knuckles cracking.  Astra eyed her master’s delicate demeanour, his transformation now manifesting itself in the physical: his eyes had lost their glint and his expression wild.  Despite their more abrasive characteristics, fetchstickles - as the last remaining fellows of a lost era - embodied the spiritual grace that once existed in the Moon-dwellers.  And so it was, that on witnessing Cosme’s demise, Astra laid herself down next to her sleeping master and sacrificed the last of her energy to him.

The moon crystals that lined the walls of the ship had begun to blink, their glow fading.  The further away they travelled from the Moon, the weaker their strength appeared to be.  He glanced at Astra, her shell lacklustre and eyes pallid.  They still had a considerable journey to make and Cosme feared what would happen if the crystals ceased to glow at all.  His thoughts were cut short by the unexpected tailwind of a comet hurtling passed the ship, sending it into a spin.  Cosme gripped onto the control panel while a curled-up Astra yo-yoed around like a bouncy ball.

When the rotation reduced to a gentle rocking, Cosme, elated by their survival, began to laugh.  His lips had never before matured past a gentle pull to the sides - a quivering smile - and the deranged mirth poured out of him until he was bent double, howling and shaking violently.  He caught Astra, who was still bobbing around the ship, and his laughter changed almost seamlessly to tears, large woeful droplets that followed one after the other in quick succession, streaming down his face as he continued to convulse.  Her shell, worn and brittle from the journey, was smashed around her lifeless body as he cradled her in his hands.  His heart ached until it broke, its shattered pieces falling into the waiting black hole inside him.

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Like Laika before her, he watched as she drifted off, exploding into the galaxy, her ashes destined to float around until they met with other equally lost particles and formed a star.  As he imagined her disgruntled notes singing out across the Milky Way, he saw a noth flutter past the ship.  These curious creatures of nothingness were moth-like shapes of nothing cut out of something, existing only in that they actively nothed.  They were reflections of the nothingness in the universe born from grief - the black cracks and holes of broken souls.

Alone and immersed in a celestial fog reflective of his state of mind, his resolve began to falter.  He was utterly, devastatingly alone.  He mollified himself with thoughts of Earth, the tastes and the consolation that they would bring but no sooner had the notion entered his mind did it darken.  How would he know these tastes when he got to Earth?  What form would they have?  Would an Astronaut Chef still exist?  Though he remembered the way that the different tastes had felt, unlike sight or sound he could not recall them exactly and began to doubt if he had fully understood them in the first place.  In his gluttonous ardour he had abandoned the familiar for the uncertain and was wholly unprepared for what lay ahead.

He was feverish and his body throbbed with a dull ache.  His eyesight was deteriorating and a ringing had developed in his ears.  He felt restless, irritable and he could not focus his thoughts for the stabbing pains in his abdomen, a sign of obsolete organs coming to life.  He watched as the ship was bathed in a rainbow of lights and listened as the star song slowed down until it was just a distant sound catching on the wind.  His human emotions having already developed, now, as he neared the Earth’s atmosphere his body was also adapting and he would soon be introduced to the biological fragility of his human ancestors. 

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The fog cleared to reveal broken remnants of space stations and dead satellites, the ghosts of human exploration.  A knot of fear welled up inside him, coupled with an intense crushing sensation, his body punched back and pinned to the floor as he struggled to peel himself off and to the controls, as if the atmosphere were rejecting an unwelcome intruder.  He had just pierced the Earth’s atmosphere and in a few minutes he would hit its surface.  With his residual energy, he released the parachute and shut down the engine. 

He felt his insides banging against their cage and his cheeks disappear from his face to the back of his head.  Rays of sunlight attacked his eyes like daggers and they bulged from their sockets as he plummeted towards the ocean below him, gambling that he would land on one of its islands.  The lines and shapes he had etched into his mind from afar were now colliding and morphing into the bizarre as he hurtled towards them.  Securing his seatbelt, he closed his eyes and tried to focus his panicked thoughts on blueberries and oysters.

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The ship disintegrated on impact and spat him out onto the ground with a thud.  He gasped, clasping his throat, gulping for air as the oxygen scorched his lungs.  He clutched at the parachute, dragging it from him to reveal a white light that penetrated his weakened flesh, now opaque and damp.  Prising his reluctant eyes open he was confused to see that the water he had just been rushing towards was now up above him and streaked with rusty strokes speckled with purple hues.  Colours danced around him, colours that existed without light and glow, colours that were solid and deep.  The ground he lay on was soft and spongy unlike the rocky, uneven, lunar surface and as his body sank down against it he felt it drawing him in with its tentacles, warm and inviting.

He traced the clouds and fleeting black crosses that sketched themselves across his vision and felt sure that he was dying.  He fought against the agony and his resistant body, mustering all the strength that existed within him to bring himself to his knees until he was staring at the utopia ahead.  The pain was only mildly subdued by the adrenaline and thrill of the unknown that pulsed through him with urgent desire.  Colours breathed deep inhalations that drew him in and out with them, shapes swayed and balls of orange and red hung from the spiked fingers of their puppeteers.  In the absence of mankind, Earth had healed itself and was restored to its natural glory.  At his feet, queer insects crawled across his toes and around his head winged beasts led a cacophony of buzzes, tweets and squawks.  He stumbled forward awkwardly like a child, tearing at his surroundings, searching for the lights, the labels, the tastes and that glorious machine that was to be his salvation. 

Cosme pushed past green globes that fell and smashed to reveal their strange dark pink insides.  He held the flesh in his hands, cool and refreshing as he rubbed it over his body.  He heard a crack from behind and saw brown spheres dropping from above and splitting in half, lying naked with their white flesh glistening in the light.  He cradled the rough and hairy bowl, stroked the smooth insides and poured the clear liquid over his head, the smell suddenly bringing him thoughts of coconut and he panicked again at his quest, his eyes darting around for the tastes he sought out and the machine.  He fell down with the balls, forcing himself up again, and again, each time a greater effort than the last as his vision blurred.  His will was sustained by a final thread of hope, but it was quietly diminishing as he saw no buttons, no wires and no Astronaut Chef.  Knowing instinctively, from the pit of his heart, that he did not have long left, he moved about desperately, listlessly embracing the words - raspberry, rhubarb, rum - begging them to come to him until his moribund body finally collapsed. 

He was on Earth, that wonderful globe that he had for so long dreamt upon.  He had done the unthinkable and for a brief time lived another way, but it was all lost now.  The pain slipped quietly from him and he lay there mourning his failure.  As the clouds entered his mind he felt a gentle nudging at his shoulder and turned to see Astra, restored to her normal self, pushing him with her snout.

It was then, in those final moments that the tastes came to him at last, no longer beyond his grasp as in his dreams, they were instead real and palpable, twirling flirtatiously around his mind as he drank them in.  He was back in the machine, chilli knocking on the door, honey caressing him with full lips, while nougat took his hand and lemongrass held it tight.  His body numb and weightless, he savoured them delicately and without urgency, for he knew that they were his now.  He allowed Astra to lead him away, scuttling ahead, stopping every now and then to turn and check that he was close behind as they approached the light of the Astronaut Chef, its rays piercing through the canopy and giving the leaves a nebula glow.

With his mind gone, the life left in him slowly ebbed away.  In pursuing the pleasures of man, Cosme had also taken on his suffering, felt his torment and inherited his self-destruction.  Oblivious to the food that surrounded him, he had not seen the keepers of the taste that he so longed for.  Coconut, mango, watermelon.  Nor did he know that they held the sustenance for which to cure his pain:  the hunger that he had not recognised. 

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Image 1: Dukebox

Image 2: End

Image 3: Pattern

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All images by Maya Shamji

Supernova video courtesy Nasa Archives

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