The Starport Bellipotent

or, Growing Up Sci-Fi
by Sunday Williams

To one side of me, as I pass, is a verdant, Switzerland-like planet, the kind of home planet a Princess might watch be destroyed by an evil tyrant bent on extracting Rebel information. It is in its pre-vaporization stage. To another side of me (remember, we are in space, so there are going to be as many sides as I need) is a black, cracked celestial object, now dull with weak radiation and congestive, man-made smog; the kind of expired dead star mass that orbits a sand-planet where one might collect The Spice, if one so desired. To another side of me is a torus-shaped station, the collected artifacts of a haphazard race of people, the kind who can't seem to get enough funding at any one time to finish a project. But it's coming along okay anyway. They're obviously trying hard, despite the duct-taped CO2 scrubber-vents and what appears to be a major ding near the aft-most shuttle port.

I want to be able to take us to the alpine, crystalline planet, the one whose people hold no words in their language for 'weapon' or 'cancer,' (and correspondingly no objects, I'm not trying to imply they aren't articulate). I can't take you there. I'm not from there, and I haven't a passport.

I am from, you see, the black anathema on the other side. And if you hadn't already guessed it's a rather melancholy place, but before you roll your eyes, a caveat: there is a way off the planet. I'm off, aren't I? Pay attention, there isn't much time.

I can easily pinpoint the times in my life when I have survived the vagaries of this fissured and poisonous surface by glossing over the edges of reality with the fantastic (you see, I cannot use the word 'fantasy' here lest I be mistaken in this context for a ren-fair goober, which I have been in my dark past but not today). There was the improbably demeaning deli job which required my chopping, washing and spinning of upwards of a hundred pounds of lettuce in a solar hour, something I couldn't have endured for as long as I had if it hadn't turned out that the massive orange salad spinner was, in reality, a high-yield electrical generator. Exactly the generator I needed to crank, desperately crank, in order to build up enough of a charge in my plasma injection drive ship to successfully convert electrons and positive ions into electrically neutral ionized gas. If I could get it going, I could take off. Reach escape velocity.

Another caveat, because I like them: there is space for only one body onboard this ship. In fact, it's a law of my black planet that only a solitary person may find their way off world. It's a major tenet of even having a passport. You are allowed to meet up with people once clear of the legal airspace of sixty-two miles vertical from planet crust, but you can't get out with them. It could be said that it was proof of wit and guile, your ability to escape, but in truth the very witless often escape on their own. It's just a thing. It's always hard, getting out, and it takes no one particular skill.

The good thing about planets that value sameness is that they have no compunctions about telling you when you don't belong. But they won't show you the door, and you have to let yourself out.

I have known my entire life that I was to take this journey, and in many ways this is unusual. For one, I am female. There are a lot of women that complete this without their sanity intact (for example, myself). And you'd think that having boobs would matter little in a one-person escape shuttle with a malfunctioning plasma injection drive, and in most respects you'd be correct. Inside the ship, it matters not at all. The ship has this fantastic armor on it, the kind that takes at least two decades to start getting sturdy. It takes craftsmanship, finesse, and can only be built by repeat stress-testing and inevitable failures that, miraculously, become less and less frequent. It gets uglier. But it works better.

Outside of the ship, things are stickier. You can't spend your entire life in the ship, it breaks down, you need to eat, use the toilet, get a pap smear, all kinds of bullshit. You've got to train to be a filtration technician, a light-sail hand, a laboratory tech, an assassin. Not all at once, luckily. The black planet has facilities for all of these needs, and though it doesn't exactly discourage girls from them, neither does it encourage them. It is so easy to look up through the brown fug of the atmosphere to the toothache-bright point of the Alpine Princess Planet and think, but it's just right there. What is the meaning of all this work if there is so readily available to the eye this bright night jewel, the dresses and the tiaras practically visible even from here? I, like most girls, didn't yet know that I wasn't issued a passport and never would be.

But I looked at it. We all did. Girls still do. The bizarre thing is that, from some early stage and arguably at the behest of my caring parents, I developed a slight nearsightedness. There was something between this black grease on my feet and that glass ornament, and it was the epic expanse, which I apologize for wording like that, but you have to observe it with a more empirical eye. It was everything else.

Another strange discovery, and the most unexpected of them, was the preponderance of penises surrounding me in my new nearsighted space. This wasn't entirely (mom, plug your eyes) a bad thing. More delightful than even this development were these fantastic tits I could share in return (not necessarily my tits per se, their mere existence -- tits as a phenomena -- seems to eclipse any sort of scale-of-one-to-ten grading system and go straight to a scale-of-ten-to-ten with deeply complicated subcategories not limited to nipples [size, color, etc.], overall breast volume, pertness [and conversely, jugginess], and actual proximity to the man). I was quick to use them as a handy deflection, hiding away the calluses I had developed from working on my ship. I was rewarded with instant friendships and soon, stagnant, tortured crushes gone to decay because once in the peg of the female friend, you are no longer truly a girl with breasts, you are a sister -- worse, a sort of short brother who menstruates.

Once, after spending many months forming a close friendship with a formidably dorky male counterpart and over the loosening consumption of some quantities of ethyl alcohol, I posed my inevitable inebriated lament, "Why can't I find true love? Am I actually too nerdy? Nerds always seem to find other nerds." (True love is an Alpine Princess Planet term I admit I'm not sure I understand the definition of, I just like to throw it around -- makes me look smart.)

This friend, whom I never did hook up with, turned to me and said, "Sunday, it's too obvious you don't need anybody."

Which was at that moment the most devastating, untrue, utterly factual and exhilarating thing anyone had ever said to me.

The next day, when I got to the hangar where my ship was being stored, there had been a terrible fire and the armor plating was carbonized and cracked in places from the heat. It took some time to repair the sections, and I was never able to smooth out the damage entirely.

The irony of science-fiction is that the isolated are drawn to it, but with the distribution points for science-fiction being so few and parsecs between, the result is the unavoidable collision of many suddenly unisolated geeks, nerds and dorks, sans socialization. Or, a correction, sans popular socialization.

Free from the tyrannical expectations of most of the universe, this band of people has been raised on a black, female communications officer on a starship traversing a universe of white men. They play games as women, women who have better tactical skills than their slower but stronger male counterparts. They root for the elvish warrioress because she's severing heads and taking names. They know the female FBI agent's skepticism is healthy, but yearn for her to finally catch on that the damn aliens are real, already. They get chills at the female Replicant's clever poise.

What are the metaphorical breasts of pop culture compared to the witty banter of an alien-thwarting reluctant hero ship's Warrant Officer who also happens to be, swoon, a woman? What does it mean, though, if she's not saccharine sexy, but nevertheless is at some point in her panties? What if there were also men in their panties, does that negate the woman-panties? What if she cares about cats and children? What if she works on an ore mining ship? What does it all mean?

The least functional part of my ship is the navigation system, which I am preoccupied with fixing, or finding someone else to fix it for me. My parents desperately want me to fix it too, and I can't say as I blame them. I mean, where am I going?

I can't delineate between how my life has been hindered by simply being female, or how by being a social minority, and which things are a combination of both. My earliest memory of escaping the black planet was my father explaining to me the concept of the universe being physically infinite. I must have been three or four years old at the time, and before you draw any conclusions about my being a child genius you should know he is prone to saying any manner of things out loud as long as they are either unlikely or misguided. I was an innocent bystander.

Alternately, I think my earliest memory of understanding being female came about this exact time in my life, when I fought the suggestion of a dress being worn to a photo-shoot and successfully negotiated corduroys and my favorite t-shirt instead. "You're a girl," my mother said without cruelty, but by way of explanation. "No," I told her. "Girls don't fly spaceships. I do." Unable to argue my logic, she relented, and it remained something left irreverently undiscussed for many years; if girls don't fly spaceships, and you do, and yet you are undeniably not a boy, what are you?

Many years later it was often an unwanted side-dish, uncommon but without avoidance: what are you? You look sort of like a girl, but it's clear those looks don't come easy. Short hair would be preferable, if it didn't make you look like a twelve-year old boy. Dresses would be nice, if they didn't get caught up in the lateral-quantum intake manifold. And, you sort of act like a girl, but you're not afraid to say pussy and you have bouts of public gas. And here, here is the part I want you to pay attention to: you sort of act like a girl, but you're building a spaceship. What are you?

I've been called a lesbian more than once, and without harm on my end. It would be like someone calling me a lasagna. Lasagna is nice, but I am simply not one. However, don't assume that I haven't assimilated the deeper meaning intended, the one in which my calling in life is inconveniently associated with a different gender than my own. Why, if we both like building spaceships, we both must like pussy.

My spaceship has a cloaking device. I splurged. It's not the kind you can activate with a switch, though, because despite my splurge I could still only afford the discount build-it-yourself kind, and I may have wired at least one flux capacitor wrong. It takes an embarrassing amount of time and energy to get the cloaking field to generate, and even then it's not one of those cool shimmers that suddenly delivers clear starfield where once was radar-reflective metal. No, I'm afraid it is a jagged, digital spray, where instead of making the ship disappear it becomes deceitful. The starboard gamma assembly might appear to be a few meters the wrong direction, and where the viewing port was now lies a scattered mess of light. It's serviceable in a pinch, but I can't pass totally undetected. It's more that I pass unspecified.

There was a time when I was trying to install the cloaking device that I became confused, because there were other girls that were not building spaceships, and whom did not understand my desperation to get off the black planet. We didn't have the blissful O2 deprivation of sexuality between us to help me hide my calluses, and questions were raised that I was too inarticulate to answer. What is the motivation of a girl who places herself square in the middle of a spaceship hangar, day in and day out, if not to be around boys? More importantly, and more problematic, did I really, truly want to be in the hangar with those spaceships at all?

This was the mightiest of set-backs. It was a lesson from early on, but one of the last of the greats: you, cosmonaut, are not a part of any team. None. It was a necessary thing to learn in order to leave the black planet, but the one that pressed the most G's -- after being told for a lifetime that you are one of two parts of humanity, and then to be corrected at so late in the game, no, we just meant biological parts. You weren't to read anything more into it. With that, I was given the final schematics to the ship's drive, and with no great fanfare. I had to get away because somewhere, in the bone-cracking nothing, was my home. Where my people were, whatever they were.

It's easy to say, with rapid access to small moons and close horizons, that's it's all about perspective. In fact, I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that even if you get the damn plasma injection engine cranked, you're also keeping your eye on the oxygen converter coming off the fuel cells, on the heater so you don't freeze your ass off (on the reflector shields so you don't cook your ass off), routine gasket checks on your spacesuit, on your food supply, on your whiskey supply, on your communications laser. It's a wonder there's any perspective to be had at the end of the day. And once you've got this all settled, in the incredibly unlikely event that each of these things synchronizes its function to keep you safe all at the same time, suddenly it's too obvious you don't need anybody. You can be on your own? So be.

Did you expect a shuttle from the Alpine Princess Planet to come meet you? Offer you a place to stay and an appletini? No, I don't know what an appletini is either.

The Alpine Princess Planet doesn't send out shuttles. I hate to be the one to tell you. It's the reason we're floating here, so near it, yet unable to land. So you can see that, despite your effort, despite your good intentions, they don't send envoys, not for anyone or anything.

But let's face it, shall we? There was an age where I finally had the ability to look through the maypoles with their pastel streamers and where I girded my loins and saw past the custom bioengineered unicorns. I was looking at the foundation of the Alpine Princess Planet for the first time: they don't have any tight jumpsuits. Last time I checked, they had neither ultra-pasteurized nacho-"cheese" sauce nor Tricorders. They sure as hell didn't have any good booze. Will this lack out-balance the Jacuzzis, the diamond rings and the feet glued most securely to terra firma that I've missed out on?

I could go back to my black planet, butÉ Isn't it peculiar how difficult it is to speak outright smack on your planet of origin? Irregardless, you can respect the part that allowed you to build your spaceship, even if that part gave you the ultimatum between independence and the unified, single-minded work-hives. It is, after all, the planet that taught me to survive for days on nothing but coffee, rock music and waterproof mascara.

But as I mentioned earlier, these are not the only two docking points in this section of the galaxy. Among others there is this doughnut of carbon-steel, diamond-nickel glass and duct tape orbiting just next to us here. It's difficult to make out, but someone has stenciled Bellipotent on the side, an ostentatious and charming name for something that is both immobile and unarmed.

Nevertheless, what if I was to tell you that inside there, inside that most unassuming and admittedly slapdash space station was what everyone had been looking for? All the people that so desperately escaped the black planet, who labored in love and fear to save themselves from a most certain doom, and all the shocking presentation of Alpine Princess Planet escapees still swaddled in pink crinoline and rhinestones?

I bring you here because you may not believe if I were to simply tell you. You see, when these many young cosmonauts have grown, after the bruised shins and the misery has smoothed away under the glacial passage of many years, and after the many bizarre, beautiful and awkward ships have been conceived, assembled and flown and crashed and flown again, they have wandered to this exact spot. And once in the spot, they have seen the sort of cruel and mostly fucking fantastic secret of the universe: once alone, once so far from our starting point, we have already made our own world and it was with us all along, though it has no mass or volume. It comes with us. We can travel as far as our lifespan shall allow or we can stay here in the orbit of our multitude kin, and either way our world is with us. It doesn't care if we have tits or not, or if we pretend we do or not.

We enter the Starport Bellipotent at a seemingly late point in our lives, and we observe in awe and anger and relief. How can this have existed when I have struggled so hard, when I have spent entire nights awake trying to rewire the navigation system and failed for weeks on end, when I have cut myself, bruised myself, lost myself and then found myself again (right next to the hydrospanner where I looked for myself last). When I met other starpilots just as when they were finishing their ships and even though I had years to go, they left...

I once came from a black planet where I was alone. For a short time, I thought I wanted to go to the Alpine Princess Planet, where I should want to be. Then, for a long time, I just didn't know where to go; I only knew that I needed to.

Now that you are here, it makes sense, doesn't it? That we should meet each other here, after we've grown, after we've already learned how to maintain our spaceships and fly them with a moderate degree of skill. That our mixed origins should lead to this plethora of the strange, of these paragons of bad-ass geek, of these many genders.

I must advise you to watch out for the Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters, the hover-dildos, and the Incoming Transmissions from unknown sources with attachments, but you're free to roam. I don't want to mislead you by presenting this as utopia -- you cannot stay forever. That's why we've worked so hard on our spaceships. It is truly there, where we live. But we can park here at the Starport Bellipotent pretty much indefinitely.