Violet Odyssey: The City of Brass

 It had been unseen for over nine years, and the tenth was drawing to a close with the flight of the fireflies and the last gasp of spring's chill before the rough heat and humidity of summer settled over the kingdom. The paling blue hue in the sky looked ordinary and wonderful in every way from the tops of the shrugging hills, where long grass swayed among lightning bugs. But the lights that flickered and danced across the yawning stone-and-metal meadow below radiated anxiety and enterprise. They told a story of opportunity and apprehension.

The "ordinary" blue sky above abandoned its pleasant ruse without violence or alarm. Rather, it seemed almost playful as it shed its cloak of deepening black and indigo. The clouds rolled over and shifted into clear but luminous vapor. Where their ghostly outlines had been fading into the coming night, they took on solid form, tracing the shapes of the impossible. Meanwhile, the light reversed course, and color blushed back into the heavens like spilled watercolor across a damp canvas.

Overhead, the spreading light and color coalesced into towering stone and sprawling walls adorned with moss and ivy. A bordering wall of semi-transparent stone, interrupted by metal-bossed gates, wrapped the city in midair in a gravity-defying embrace. Buildings and spires clawed upward into the stratosphere and out of sight, their facades gleaming with the tones of polished brass and gray-tempered metal. Multicolored stained-glass windows winked down upon the world below, the curious moonlight nodding in acceptance of each one as they steadily manifested, beginning in the west over the rolling hills and finishing in the east above the Astronomica Facility below. Its own lights had halted, and its noises had fallen silent in awe and anxious respect.

The tenth year—an Odyssey Year, as people called it—had arrived with the quiet appearance of the mysterious and terrifying City of Brass, formally designated the Violet Incursion.

Its coming had never harmed the earth below. It had never disrupted the health or commerce of those who stared up at it in reverent unease, save for the occasional person who injured themselves through panic or simple inattention. The only interaction the colossal metropolis of stone and steel had with the world below was a glowing trail of teal and violet auroral light that seemed to reach down toward the nearest major city or town, depending on where one stood.

Indeed, once the initial shock and dismay had faded, the city's chief gift to humanity was curiosity. And curiosity bred intrepid, venturesome adventurers.

For centuries, people had attempted the journey. First with towering ladders and wooden contraptions, then with fixed-wing aircraft, and more recently, with rockets. Every summer solstice they launched themselves recklessly skyward in pursuit of the impossible. But the City of Brass was an impatient siren of the heavens. It lingered for only a single day before the clouds lost their shape once more and the city slipped behind the veil for another generation to ponder.

I cleared a tuft of prairie grass from my notebook, frowning at the smudged sketches interspersed with rough calculations and theories. My heart was pounding at the sight of my third odyssey year, and I took several deep breaths to steady it.

The silence snapped like a twig as a pair of children cried out from their perch in the gnarled oak behind my patch of flattened reeds.

I whipped my head around, blinking away the spots left by the brightening spectacle. One of the children was scolding her brother for climbing to an even higher branch in search of a better view.

Pointless, of course.

The city never came any closer, and it never let anyone come any closer to it.

Chastity Palmer, in her rebuilt Caproni Ca.20, had called it "a fleeting enigma, mockingly rolling out the carpet and bidding us enter, only to flee like a playful pigeon."

Elegantly put for the first female fighter pilot of the 1920s.

Geno Miconi had used rather less elegant language after bailing out of his SR-71 Blackbird back in '74. The decade of famine and rampant unemployment had fostered a looser tongue, and his review was much shorter, rhymed with a certain waterfowl, and did not make the BBC's censors happy. All viewers ever saw was him angrily cutting away his flaming parachute—ignited on the devilishly hot hull of his steaming jet—followed by a blurred mouth and a camera filled with his red, blistered palm.

But the world—and I—remembered the Aeris shuttle most keenly, ten years ago in 2018.

It had been a terrible year for aviation in general, with El Niño pummeling the southern states with relentless rain and record tornadoes sweeping across the central United States. The solstice had been no exception. Sheets of rain and gunfire-like hail battered the shuttle, yet the NASA and ESA representatives outvoted the lone JAXA representative, and the launch proceeded. The prospect of losing another ten years to stifling disappointment drowned out concerns for the astronauts' safety.

"There are more astronaut candidates than fishermen these days. We can have another crew ready for the next cycle if needed," the graying, hard-nosed NASA representative had told the cameras.

The launch had gone as expected.

Communications from the shuttle were broken and garbled, which was typical for a Violet Night, when radio waves ceased their normal behavior and satellites all seemed to wink to sleep for reasons no one had ever been able to explain. Even so, the crew's voices carried unmistakable frustration and bewilderment.

Captain Richard Ryan of NASA was the last person whose transmission could be clearly understood before the shuttle passed beyond communications range.

"Ayn, where are we? I can't... the apogee? The sky is... it's like... Cav—come in, Cav—the sky is nothing but a—"

He had been trying to reach Mission Control at Cavanaugh Astronomica Site One.

He never heard their frantic replies.

To him, Aeris was flying straight and true, however baffling the journey had become for him and his two crewmates. To the world below, however, Aeris had ceased pointing skyward. Its blinding rocket plume had been snuffed out like a match in a hurricane.

What the naked eye could not perceive, NASA's instruments and humanity's astonishing optical technology laid bare.

Aeris had stopped climbing altogether.

It hung at an altitude of 260,500 feet in the upper mesosphere like a marionette, seemingly beyond the towers and walls of the City of Brass, yet somehow having never reached them.

While panicked engineers hammered at keyboards and overnight market managers shouted futures adjustments and collapsing odds, Aeris vanished completely, blinking out of existence like a glimmer upon one of the city's stained-glass windows.

And it took my father, Richard Ryan I, with it.