Helena Maria - chapter 2

Helena Maria her self had been born during a thunderstorm rolling through the valleys of the Sierra Nevada mountains. This fortunate event had taken place in the late eighties. She had been brought up in a small village that commonly went by the name Canillas de Albaida. Even though being close to Nerja, the blues of the mediterranean and the sunny coasts of Spain, Canillas appeared a different world. Far from any hotels, packed beaches and any signs of more modern times, Canillas de Albaidas white houses clung to the slopes of Sierra Nevada like a last memory of a different Spain. An older nation of scorched earths, winegroves and olive trees. And of course an occational cactus fig. Therefore she came to spend most of her childhood close to the heavens of the Earth. Even at summer the air there was particularly clear and the sky shined like a sea of distant diamonds at night. From her home in the village she could also se the summer houses on the opposing slopes. They were more like traditional fincas really, small stone buildings for the farmers of old. One of these houses had been bought by an astronomer from somewhere far, and at certain nights he could be seen gazing the skies with his telescope. The villagers of course though he was spying on the village, and he was not very well welcomed in the small town, because they didn’t have any mind for the skies and could not comprehend the situation without a colorful explanation in their own words, and since they kept from talking to the man, and he from them, their relations didn’t improve much over the years, being as most people are that spend most of their lives worrying what will grow out of dust or not rather than what looks down from above. But Helena Maria was different, and when she saw the distant figure standing there, she learned her eyes and mind to travel the deph of the skies and dreamed away. In fact, it was on one of those nights, laying on her back after a short meeting with a surprisingly untallented youth, that she made a promise to devote her soul to the heavens. Now, had this been some hundred years earlier, this would have ment rigorous celibacy and silent contemplation upon Gods mysterious love rather than the sinful pleasures of mankind. But Helena Maria had another mind, though it included an occasional vision of love. Often short, too hasty, or delivered with a surprising deficiency of skill.

Her family had a branch in the Netherlands. A result of european power politics in the fifteenhundreds. So she eventually went there and studied astronomy at the university of Groningen. She wrote her master thesis on the evolution of quasars. She continued to Uppsala for her phD on the subject of Galactic evolution in the Local group – a time schedule for the next one billion years. She had since worked at different observatories until two years ago when she got a position, assigned at the european VLT - Very Large Telescope - in Chile. Since then she had been working with the tracking of stars like Betelgeuse when she didn’t manage other projects passing through the observatory array – which in reallity took a good portion of most of the time.

Helena Maria carried obvious spanish features, there was no question about that. And she was percieved as a beatuful woman by the average male population. She was blessed with a slender and curved body that few men failed to notice. It had been a close liaison since her early teens. Her slighly protruding jaw, her distinguished chest, and the long curly black hair, it was all quite spanish in nature. So was her temper. Her mother had said that it came from the thunderstorm the day she was born. Helena Maria beeing aware of all this, thought large stars like Betelgeuse to be suiting objects of her devotion. Red hot boiling titans, from a distance they could cope with her fluctuant passions.

She had just come down the stairs of the Yepun telescope, one of four mirrors at the array, when one of the staff members addressed her.
“Dr Helena”, the young man obviously came of scandinavian origin. His eyes sold him out. Fallen. No morals.
“Yes, that would be me”, she replied with an accent. “What can I do for you?”
“You have a call.”, he continued.
“Really? Who?” Few called.
“’Honestly don’t know”, he said. “It wasn’t I ...”.
Sound came from the orange earplugs dangling from his neck. It was playing loud and the minimilized sound found a nearby airwave. A few moments after the song came to Helena. The voice unmistakable. It’d been a long time though. She had played the song many times when she was as a younger version of her self. From a time draped in neon lights, short fluffy skirts and lace. Really more than a decade before her own generation. Still. The tiny voice came to her again. In an exquisit high falsetto going for the next octave in high tempo rainbow coloured notes.
“Don’t leave me this way ...”
“Never mind she said. I’ll be right there.”
“I had the call directed to your office.”
Helena gave a thankful smile in return. The young mans eyesight followed her as she left. Fallen. She would of course have to have him. Another day.

When she came in, the office met her covered in the slightly dimmed light she had left it in. Papers spread themselves across the desk. Over the shelves, the floor and much about everything else that offered a surface. She moved a recent report from ESA on Mars away while she sat her self down in a chair and picked up the phone. A diod blinked. The caller was still there. Beeing in the middle of the night this was obviously no social call. She saved a few breaths. And spoke with her most official voice, in slight accent.
“Yes, it’s Helena, with whom do I have the pleasure of talking at this late hour?”