A quick dash through the bustling street. Insomnia. Faces of people coalesce into a blur.
A martian cop stands immobile like a black statue peering at me through the dark glasses. His face impenetrable and suspecting. I'm getting paranoid, too little sleep. Taxis rush past me, hysterical honks, blares, flashes of traffic lights, green, red, blue, pink, orange, green.
I want to slump on my knees and vomit. I'm tired, but I need to find a safe place first. This street is not a safe place, and also it looks indefinite. And to walk through the crowds is as easy as to swim in the ocean during the storm. I fumble in my pocket, my fingers slide over pieces of paper, checks, some crumbs. Disgusting. I'm looking for a piece of a tab with the remaining pills. There should be two of them at least. This way I would be able to last a bit longer.
My fingers scratch the insides of my pocket, and I realize that I have no idea what I would do, if they are not there. I have no emergency plan for this situation. I wouldn't be able to move probably. And I wouldn't be able to fall on the pavement because the black martian cop in his shining black helmet and his shining sunglasses will notice me. And this is something I can afford even less than hell and suffering.
A green Varian guy passes me warbling into his phone. A laughter with ultrasonic waves in it. The traffic moves slowly like a metal river, flashing its lights, relentless and oblivious. I see a face of a Martian woman, pale and haughty, looking past me without expression. She wears an elegant gray coat and dark glasses. All the Martians here wear dark glasses because the intensity of light on this asteroid hurt there eyes. Although, it's weak and pale as if it's a constant overcast here, all the time.
The crowd catches me in its stream and carries me to the other side of the road. I don't really care on which side of the road I am now. I'm completely disoriented, my thoughts are blurry, and I cannot gather enough strength to organize them enough to figure out the direction I need to go. On both sides of the road stand the walls of huge buildings; their gleaming and sparkling glass walls reflect the commotion, flashing traffic lights, and crowds of running people; racial diversity of ten thousand different planets.
The tops of the buildings are invisible beyond the clouds. The buildings are so tall that the sky above is visible only as a narrow stretch between the two infinite glass walls. Despite the feeble sun of this asteroid, the sky is still blue and somewhat beautiful, interspersed with innumerable clouds that float through it hurriedly and anxiously like those chunks of broken ice rushing through the river in spring.
Anxiety is the name of this place. Everything is soaked in it. It's in the stride of people, in their eyes, in the jerky movements of green and red clumsy cabs, in the nervous sound of their beeps, in the constant rustle of steps, like the sound of dry rain. My fingers eventually captured the torn off piece of a tab with two remaining pills. I fumble with the tab extracting the pill then clutching it hard in my palm I throw it in my mouth and swallow it. I do all this somewhat absentmindedly, my thoughts have drifted somewhere else,
I think about thirty-five hours I've already spent without sleep in spaceports of the four different asteroids and at spaceships. Passenger ships, cargo ships. Before the second connection, it felt like a more or less pleasant journey, first class lounge, fizzy drinks with lime, coconut palm rum, and leather couches, comfortable chairs in the spaceship and the holograms of a cheerful soap opera playing in front of me. It was in a language native for the second red asteroid with the name that was impossible to pronounce or remember. So I wasn't able to understand what was happening there except that it was weird. The native people on the second red asteroid were weird, with the orange tint of their skin, green eyes, and slightly elvish pointed ears. And the principles of their relationships were incomprehensible so I wouldn't understand a thing from this soap opera even if I knew the lingo.
The second connection was near the Venus satellite, on a space station that channeled the streams of migrant workers from the numerous Venusian satellites toward Mars. To the dirty and radioactive quarries of Mars satellites where they would work and die eventually. They wore shabby, dirty clothes, homespun checkered shirts, and colorful crocheted hats. They were cheerful, optimistic, hairy, smelly, and very alien. Their language reminded series of click and hisses, and when I stood in line with them preparing to board the spaceship travelling to my next connection in a remote place where nobody spoke Martian or Earth languages, and populated by races of which here people only had some really vague idea, I was spooked out of my mind.
I had been on the run for eighteen hours already. I hadn't slept. First I was attached to the news feeds flashing every minute new updates about the situation at Erno, before the connection switched off.
When it switched on again it was all in Martian, and it had no single mention of Erno. It didn't exist in this world where people spoke Martian and Earth, lounged in leather chairs drinking cocktails with coconut rum.
On the second leg of the route I fell into a state of mental fatigue, I couldn't fall asleep, so I sat in a comfortable chair of the spaceship and watched a soap opera of the red asteroid that I couldn't understand. The second connection was all about the hassle, confusion, crowds, incomprehensible languages, and noise. Strange men with huge black eyes and faces, overgrown by fur wearing military fatigues and carrying the shotguns. Crowds of cheerful Venesuan migrants streaming around and producing shouts of delight finding some shabby, dirty, and suspicious food joints in the transit lounge. Confusion and mix up at the customs where some toad-like creatures noisily squabbled with the ragged guys pushing forward irritably, trying to get through.
Shortly before I arrived there on the second ship I extricated my second passport and travel card from a hiding place in a book I carried with me. Then I went to the lavatory, thoroughly torn apart the first passport and flushed it down the toilet together with the travel card and boarding passes. Now I was a different person traveling from a different place. It was a sort of alternative reality, something that only happened it the realm of these papers that told some story about me in a language I couldn't understand. Everything had been written in one of Venusian dialects and I could only hope that there weren't any fuck ups in these papers. Otherwise, I would be stranded in this place or eventually taken to Venusian prison where they would disassemble me to supply the black market of organs. Or were those horror stories an exaggeration?
The third spaceship was a cargo ship slightly refurbished to carry Venusian migrants. It wasn't possible to sleep there because of the noise, vibration, and jolts. But mostly due to anxiety caused by the fact that I had almost no idea what I'd encounter at the third connection and how I'd have to act. There were certain problems in the travel card for which I had to figure out the way to solve.
At some point, I would meet a Martian who would direct me further, but only if I would make it successfully through the third connection, and this was a mysterious point where I didn't know what to expect. Combined with the problems in my papers, growing anxiety, and a state of feverish fatigue from twenty hours without sleep. Plus the noise, vibration, and jolts of cargo spaceships. Plus the loud snore of Venusian workers who sprawled all around the spaceship and slept; unfinished snacks from the transit lounge cafe strewn around them and dribbling from their open mouths. There were another six hours of waiting.