Ribbons Through Moonlit Orbit

20250912

Prompt from DailyPrompt.com

“Adrian, you cannot be serious.” The captain’s eyebrows were threatening to escape containment. “You want to break stealth and jeopardise the mission to send fan mail to some, some poet??”
“I said anonymous-”
The plaintive rational was shot down without mercy. “We’re at war, soldier! There will be no, I repeat no, contact with the enemy under any circumstances. Am. I. Clear??”
“Yes, sir.” Adrian ducked his head, hoping his disappointment might pass as contrition.
Apparently not, or else the captain decided it was necessary to drive the point all the way in, because he launched into a stern lecture about their vital duties and the importance of patriotism and that the Harlgons were fundamentally evil.
Adrian keep his head bowed. His gaze fixed on the soothing rippling lights of his keyboard. His mouth firmly shut.
He wanted to ask why the captain thought he’d trained as a translator. If the man realised this involved far more than just memorising phrasebooks. Particularly for an alien species; standard inter-species translator training took two decades of schooling and at least one decade living in the alien culture.
The paperwork for Adrian’s time living immersed in Harlgon culture was still sitting on his hard drive. War had been declared four months before he graduated.
Tickets to see Pleekal perform vir poetry live were saved right next to it.
He still vividly remembered that morning, seeing the headlines and feeling… disbelief, mostly. Like he must be trapped in a nightmare. His entire future evaporating before his eyes.
A selfish response. He knew that, and was ashamed of it, and had never voiced it to anyone. Even his fellow graduates who might have felt the same.
What he voiced, like everyone else, was that it would all blow over soon. That it had to. It was posturing, nothing more. It had to be.
Then graduation came, and he found himself thrust into an environment where his degree, far from opening doors, meant he was viewed with suspicion. The only place he could find employment was… with the war effort.
Using his studies against the people he’d been learning about. Who he hoped to live with, learn from directly, build bridges to.
Of course the captain believed Harlgons were evil. He had to. It was part of his job while humanity was at war with the other species. If you looked at a Harlgon ship and thought of their poetry, their beautiful mosaic sculptures, their cultural celebrations of harmony… you might hesitate to press a button and reduce that ship to shrapnel.
The tirade petered out. Or something called the captain’s attention away. Adrian hadn’t noticed him leave.
He was probably in big trouble for not listening to his commanding officer.
He should probably care about that.
Being branded unpatriotic was… dangerous, right now.
Sighing, Adrian turned back to his monitor. To the intercepted messages awaiting translation.
Did Pleekal know that vir work continuing to be broadcast on open channels meant it was available to the enemy? Maybe ve just didn’t care and vir work wasn’t considered a security risk. It could be coincidence that these heartfelt, mournful reflections on the horrors of war were being beamed into space such that the sniffer ships would inevitably scrape them.
Technically there was no need to translate those messages. Nobody in the army wanted to read such things, certainly not now.
But Adrian hadn’t yet gotten in trouble for doing so. For reading these poems, and translating them, and adding them to the database of decoded messages.
It was pointless. Stupid.
He clung to it.
To that one tenuous link to the life he thought he’d have. To the dreams he’d built and then watched his species tear out of his fingers.
Realistically, he’d now never meet Pleekal in person. Never get to tell vem how much he loved vir work, how reading translations of Ribbons Through Moonlit Orbit had sparked his fascination with Harlgon culture, how wanting to experience vir art directly had lead to him learning their main languages and put him on the path to becoming a translator.
He’d certainly never get to be part of adapting their works for human audiences.
But just in case… he kept a backup of all vir poems he’d translated.
If the war ended… if neither of them had died… if Pleekal was still willing to consider sharing vir art with a human audience…
So many ‘ifs’. Such feeble hope.
But even on days where he couldn’t believe in dreams, reading these poems was still a comfort. A remote hand extended across no man’s land, a faceless whisper of “I know. I feel it too.” A shared pain expressed in his second tongue.
He liked to think, if Pleekal did ever learn of his existence, ve would be pleased that vir words had made a difference, even a small one. That ve was casting these poems out into the cold, war-torn vacuum of space in the hope they would land on receptive ears.

Prompt was “A fan of an artist is grappling with the concept that despite their life being incredibly impacted by this person’s work, the artist will never know of their existence.”