The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction by Brandon Morris (red white and royal blue hardcover TXT) 📕

it and grudgingly paid $20.00 for the rest of the flight, as if that would make any difference now.

The net turned him on to a book by a well-known literary critic who’d passed away a few years ago. The man had put together a collection of what he thought were the 100 best poems. Peter downloaded the electronic version, and was captivated by the first verses.

He was almost afraid to continue reading. There were far too many good poems to choose just one.

Two hours later, Peter chose one, a poem that the German poet Stefan George had written almost 130 years ago. It was an autumn poem and it spoke of farewell. A civilization on a planet with bound rotation or with an exactly vertical axis of rotation would not know seasons, but farewells should be unavoidable anywhere in the universe.

The poem spoke to him personally, in a strange way, creating quiet voices in his head. He could not understand them, they only whispered. The sound of children running through dry leaves drowns them out. He feels the sun on his forehead. It is no longer hot as in summer, but pleasant. He is suddenly an old man whose life had rolled past. A red-gold leaf lands on his palm.

His neighbor on the right still had his eyes closed. The older woman on his left, on the other side of the aisle, was wearing headphones and watching a movie from the in-flight program.

Peter read quietly.

We walk up and down in the rich tinsel / Of the beech aisle almost to the gate / And see outside in the field from the lattice / The almond tree for the second time in flower.

We search for the shadeless benches / Where no foreign voices have ever frightened us / In dreams our arms intertwine / We feast on the long mild glow.

We feel grateful as to quiet roar / From treetops radiant traces drip on us / And only look and listen when in pauses / The ripe fruit knocks on the ground.

He was satisfied. What of it would reach an alien listener? He copied the text into the AI’s language model, which translated it into a data stream. Was that really a good idea? The back-translation was even more subject to error than the translation itself. After all, there was no unique original language, but several from which the model had extracted concepts. Peter reversed the process, and generated the data stream from the German original.

Now he just needed to upload the new signal to the beacon.

April 1, 2026 – Albuquerque

He didn’t make it out of bed until the third ring of the alarm clock. A time difference of eight hours was cruel. Despite the overlong day, he had barely been able to fall asleep, and now he was supposed to get up when it was late afternoon for his body.

But he had to get out. He had one day to get a weapon. How else was he going to gain control of the space glider? The coffee in the motel breakfast room helped wake him up. It was just the way he liked it: strong, black, hot, and bitter. He poured himself a full ‘dose’ in a big paper cup, drank it down at the table while eating a dry bagel, poured himself a refill, and closed the cup with a plastic lid. If he upped the dose every 60 minutes, he might make it through the day. Fortunately, there was a fast-food café on almost every corner.

He chose Los Ranchos Gun Shop. The store had the best reviews on the net. It was still a mistake, though, because they didn’t open until 11 a.m. Peter steered the rental car back onto the four-lane 4th Street. It was only 13 minutes to Old Town if he took the slightly longer route via Rio Grande Boulevard. When he saw a river drawn on the navigation screen, he made a small detour. He crossed the Rio Grande River, which carried lots of clay-tinted brown water. At the next available crossing, he turned around.

The old town of Albuquerque was worth seeing. Small cafés and tourist stores invited you to visit. He let himself drift for an hour and a half, and by then he had seen everything. In the meantime, the Los Ranchos Gun Shop had also opened. The selection was huge. Everything was available, from pistols to rapid-fire rifles. On one wall hung an advertisement for ‘Henry.’ He knew the name from Karl May’s books.

When it was his turn, the first thing the dealer asked him was for his driver’s license, probably standard procedure for anyone seeking to buy a gun.

“Forgotten at home, sorry,” he said.

Maybe the man wouldn’t take the law so seriously. But the dealer, who in his leather shirt resembled a cowboy, just laughed.

“Happens to me all the time, too,” he said. “But I can’t sell you anything until you show it to me.”

“Too bad. There’s nothing to be done at all? Um, price-wise, I mean?”

Peter spoke quietly so that the other customers didn’t overhear.

“Not a chance. I can’t afford to have my license revoked.”

“I see. Thanks anyway.”

“Sure. Thanks for thinking of the Los Ranchos Gun Shop.”

Peter left the store. Just outside the door, another customer stopped him. He wore a holster with a shiny chrome gun on his belt.

“Hey, buddy,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Every other Saturday, there’s a gun show here. The private sellers there ask few questions.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“You’re welcome.”

It was Wednesday, and he flew on Friday. He couldn’t wait until Saturday.

He had imagined buying guns in the States would be easier. Apparently gun laws in the States were tougher than he’d been led to believe. He’d found neighborhoods where shady characters lurked on street corners, but he couldn’t just go up to a guy like that and ask him if he had any weapons to offer. What if he was just waiting to take his wallet, or,