"How's the boredom, Commander Garces?"
	"Just fine, Houston. I got myself set up for the big burn this
morning."
	"And since then? We don't want you coming back a year from now
stir-crazy."
	"I have a copy of divertissement protocols to get me through."
	Everyone slotted for long solo tours in orbit got extensive train-
ing in the psychology of fun. Consuela Garces could not kill with her bare
hands -- embarrassingly few Navy officers could, as far as she was con-
cerned -- but given only a ballpoint and a ream of paper, she could deploy
60 different folk arts. Were she ever to not be entertained, instinctive
reactions would carry her to a more diverting part of the titanium foot-
ball carrying her and a year's food supply to orbit around Mercury.
	The first thing her aliens sent her was a stylized cartoon depict-
ing her at rest in the control bay. She composed a message for ground
control saying that she had contacted a non-human race with mastery of the
fountain pen but inadequate understanding of shadow. She didn't send it.
Tableuax followed that showed her life on Mercury (or was it?) as seen by
one individual, always outlined in red. The smaller ones were always drawn
pointing to someone near them. The red one always pointed outward at who-
ever was drawing. Outward at Garces, more or less.
	Her pens all burst as she tried to use them. Her banjo, which had
never sounded right without gravity anyway, snapped five drone strings in
a row. She didn't bother laying out the tiles meant to form a small dance
floor, fearing a broken leg or worse. Fuming, she waited for her aliens
to explain themselves.
	Two months later, at the height of Mercury's perihelion, Garces
finally got another picture: hundreds of red figures, all pointing
straight up. She dispatched the long-delayed message back to Earth.
	The next day, and every day after that, her aliens sent her food,
too much for ten people to eat, colors and flavors undreamt-of at home.

written for Lauren 9/19/01

I read lots of science-fiction as a kid, so I figured I could wing it acceptably. However, after bothering my astronomer roommate with questions for 15 minutes, I realized that I was going to make a glaring error somewhere and that was that. I did check the orbital periods of all the planets in our solar system myself, though, to find one whose year was a simple fraction of ours. Wouldn't you want Mercury and Earth to be in the same relative position at the end of the mission? I don't know. I also forgot at one point that I'd already established how long the flight was, so that datum got driven home harder than necessary.

The original ending, abandoned halfway through, involved a flood of alien comic books. So what? Well, that's why I changed gears.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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