Perkunnos by Elia Fielden
I saw a sprite once. It was a long way away. I grew up near the coast until I was about 6, when we could afford to move inland to a safe town with a proper faraday cage. I don’t remember most of the time there.
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I was with my grandmother and we had gone up to one of the higher levels in the cliff face because she needed to collect messages and their radio was up on the top. We could see much further over the ocean than we usually could, down at the bottom where people lived and the boats left from. We were up in the radio rooms waiting in line when someone shouted, and everyone went to look at the windows.
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It was right on the horizon. I put my hand out and it was about the height of my thumb. I could just about see its legs going down to the sea and its glowing halo reaching up into the ionosphere.
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My grandmother told me she hadn’t ever heard of one coming so close to shore before. I thought this was silly because I couldn’t see it very clearly and it looked very small and far away. Everyone seemed to be taking it very seriously though and some people were praying. I didn’t really understand what was happening. The sprite stayed there for about an hour and a half, then left. When my mother’s boat came back in the evening, my grandma cried a lot. It was only when I was a lot older that I really understood. She must have spent those hours not knowing whether or not she would ever see her daughter again.
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When I moved to town the other kids would ask me a lot about it because they knew I was from the coast, but it wasn’t much of a story. They made fun of me because I had a different accent to them and didn’t know some of their words or how the cage worked or what to do about lightning. I’d never seen lightning hit anything before other than the sea or boats.
Extract from work in development
Plate II from the Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings Manual. Solar Protruberances. Observed 5th May, 1873
Plate IV from the Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings Manual. Aurora Borealis. Observed 1st March, 1872
I grew up wanting to be a radio engineer or an observational astronomer. I loved the look of the massive radio dishes and the antennas in the big array. I knew it was a dangerous job, and I thought that would be exciting.
I liked to daydream that maybe it would be me behind the radio telescope when we heard back from the Others, or that maybe one day I’d be the one to communicate first with the Spirits. Maybe I could invent something that would make them make sense to us. Maybe I could invent a way to fight them.
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I found out about the orbital relay station when I was 12 or 13. Everyone started talking about it because one of the leaders in Big Town was vying for power and decided to campaign for a mission to restore it. She said she was sure that if we could restore the relay we would be able to get in touch with the Others. We all knew that the atmosphere scrambled the signals pretty bad, but I don’t think anyone really believed that the Others were out there anymore, it was just ancient history and didn’t really make a difference to people’s lives. The Others were for history class or church.
She knew this too. It was just a big wild claim aimed at drumming up fervour, not a real policy. She was backed by some of the most powerful people in Big Town, and they wanted a big grand gesture for the people to get behind - so the people would stop talking about their work and their living conditions. She won, of course, and after a few years of ‘unexpected’ delays the relay project was abandoned, deemed impossible ‘due to the worsening of atmospheric conditions this century.’
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But I couldn’t stop thinking about the relay station. I’d look out for it on clearer nights, but it was very hard to see. The clouds, the lightning, and the brightness of the auroras made it difficult to see any stars at all, let alone something small and moving. We just knew it was up there somewhere. If it hadn’t already dipped into the upper atmosphere and crashed down somewhere on the other side of the planet.
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I got really excited by the announcement of the relay project. I thought it would work out perfectly and I’d be old enough to be a proper trained radio engineer by the time the project succeeded (as I was sure it would). I thought this was fate, it would be me, I would be the one to talk to the others, I would hear their words from above beamed down to me via my beautiful satellite.