The Story of Icarus And Daedalus But In Space by Geetika Yelugoti

[Featured Story]

That Icarus was the son of Daedalus was of great bewilderment to the townsfolk, for the boy’s idle nature diametrically opposed his father’s sharp mind and productive hands. At fifty years-old, Daedalus was still in his prime, inventing toys, tools, and everything in between. His aptitude for invention was prominent even at the fresh age of nine, when he had made a business of fixing and upgrading the playthings of the town’s children. At sixteen years-old, Icarus was anything but precocious. Icarus passed the greater portion of his time by either walking around the outskirts of town with an absent minded gaze about him or playing cards with those who were shunned due to their drinking and gambling tendencies.

It was when he was engaged with the latter activity that he stumbled upon the prospect of flying. The man to the right of him in their card-playing circle of misfits, rambled something of birds and gold stars. The man was evidently drunk, but Icarus was one to give into any drunkard’s follies. He surmised that it was reasonable enough: the stars glitter and gold was shiny. It was to be concluded, then, that stars were composed of gold. And the birds that fly so high in the sky must be witnesses to this truth.

An idea struck him: he was to become a bird. Upon becoming a bird, he would reach for the stars and steal them from the sky. Then, he would have all the gold he could ever want, and he would not have to dilly dally all day as his father Daedalus did.

Swept up by the charming notion of the persistence of simple life as it was, he abandoned the card game and ran to his father’s shop to propose his ingenious idea. Facing his father, he asked if they could build a pair of wings, just like the ones attached to the bodies of birds. His father found great pleasure in this suggestion. It was a daring task, and it was the first idea that ever arose from his lackadaisical son; thus, Daedalus had every inclination to agree.

And so father and son, but mostly father, worked tirelessly to build a pair of wings. The son often stared blankly at his father’s work, played with the trinkets in his father’s shop, and was barely receptive to his father’s simple commands. After two years had gone by, Daedalus had built what he considered to be two perfect pairs of wings, an expanded model of bird wings to fit the larger arm span of humans. Icarus’s eyes widened at the very near prospect of his wealth, and he eagerly begged that they used the wings that day itself. Daedalus accepted his pleas, but he warned Icarus that they must not travel too far. Any farther than the Earth’s thermosphere and they would be lost in an unfamiliar dark void.

Through the night, Icarus and Daedalus made it well into the various layers of the atmosphere, and as the night began to fade, they had decidedly reached the end of the thermosphere. Until this point, Icarus had failed to even see, forget capture, the stars as he had hoped. Ignoring his father’s requests to turn back, he flew further and further and further and left his poor father behind.

In his path, he came across giant balls of gas and many large odd-colored spheres, but no stars or gold as he had hoped. He figured that they must be even farther along his path, so he flew further and further and further. After many a day had passed, he found himself surrounded by bright spiraling things and yet no gold stars. His will had finally withered and he was ready to go back. Admittedly, it was a surprise that his patience had been tested for this span of a time.

Frustrated, he attempted to trace back his steps. But his returning path seemed to be longer than the path he had taken to get there, so he was convinced he had taken a wrong turn somewhere despite having traveled in, more or less, a straight line. So, he retraced his steps back to where he originally was to make his path more clear to him. His journey back to where he started on his path of return also seemed too long, but he kept going in hopes that he would find something of familiarity, hopefully one of the grand spirals he had previously seen. After concluding that this journey was definitely taking longer than it initially had, he decided that he must have missed one of the telltale signs he was looking for along the way, and decided, once again, to turn towards his starting point. And then that was definitely taking much too long, so he turned back again. Soon, he found himself stuck in this loop of going back and forth, confused as to his position in the black void and the distance or path home.

Eventually, he grew tired of this loop and convinced himself that floating around in a void was better than wandering around back home, anyways. At least here, no one was there to bother him and he was free to do as he pleased, even if there was not much to do at all.

As he floated around in the black void and as his age increased beyond his ability to keep track of it, his mind grew every so slightly sharper and he reached two conclusions:

1. The black void was expanding, at an ever-increasing rate far beyond his ability to catch up to its change.

2. All that glitters is not gold.

[Fin]