Story 12. The Strawberry Asteroid

'How do you always manage to turn everything upside down so timely and yet so unexpectedly, huh?' Muss shakes his head. 'The more I know you, the more I can't get used to it.'
 
I'm shyly silent, my cheeks slightly flushing from what I consider undeserved praise. Or maybe it's not praise at all?
 
The air on the Ship becomes moist with anticipation, but not from dampness — from that pure moisture that comes before dawn, when the world is about to be washed clean and shine.
 
My tears. They are no longer just an emotion. They are a whole country, a people, a history. They crowd not overboard — they are already inside, in the most hidden bays of my soul, and at last, they've been given a pass to the deck.
 
And here they come. Not in a flood, but drop by drop, each with its own face, its own story.
 
The Tear of First Loss — round, heavy, like a ball of pure lead. It rolls slowly, leaving behind a silvery, undrying trail of memory.
 
Following it rolls the Tear of Powerless Rage — hot, sharp, like a shard of glass. It trembles in place, ready to evaporate or pierce anything.
 
Then appears the Tear of Quiet Longing for the Non-Existent — the most transparent, almost weightless. It's barely visible, but it leaves in the mouth the aftertaste of a distant, alien planet that once appeared in a dream.
 
Softly rolls the Tear of Sudden, Unconditional Tenderness — warm, oily, shimmering in all the colours of the rainbow in a certain light.
 
Bringing up the rear is the Tear of Weary Understanding — salty as all the oceans combined, and infinitely tired. It just wants to lie down.
 
There are thousands of them. Millions. A whole universe in the palm of a hand.
 
And we — our entire Ship — do what we do best. We welcome them.
 
We give them tea. For each — its own cup.
 
For the heavy ones — tea 'Gravity of Peace'. It makes them even heavier, but in such a way that they fall through the deck into special, soft hammock-holds and rest from their weight there.
 
For the hot and sharp ones — tea 'Cooling Forgiveness' (brewed with mint and a petal of blue ice from the Mountains of Indecision). They hiss, cool down, and become just beautiful, smooth little pebbles.
 
For the transparent and wistful ones — tea 'The Scent of a Native Threshold' (smelling of home-baked bread, dust on a sunny windowsill, and a familiar voice). They stop trembling and become tiny lenses through which the world seems a little closer, a little more familiar.
 
For the warm tendernesses — they are simply given a large shared bowl of the 'Brotherhood of Feelings', where they merge into one warm, shining little lake in which others can now bathe.
 
We feed our invited guests (or are they not guests at all, but family members?). They don't need heavy food. They need light.
 
Light from the smouldering ember of Former Pain (now it's in the fireplace). Light from the stained-glass window of Transformed Suffering. Light from the little blue flowers of Caraway of Doubt.
 
And the main thing — our shared light, the one that comes from shared silence, from understanding smiles.
 
They absorb it like an essence, and from this, their own essence becomes enlightened. The leaden ones become silver. The sharp ones become faceted. The transparent ones begin to glow softly from within.
 
And then we put them to bed. But not in beds. We put them to sleep on clouds made for us by Silence After Music. These clouds float in the quietest hold of the Ship, where Dreams from the Island of Dreams reign.
 
And for the first time in their lives, they dream dreams in which they are not tears, but rivers, dews, springs, oceans. In which their saltiness is not bitterness, but the most ancient, the most necessary salt of life. They dream dreams where the Lost Melody catches them up and carries them, and they fly through universes, not as signs of sorrow, but as symbols of the purest, most honest connection with what was, is, and will be dear.
 
And they rejoice. Their joy is soundless. It is the joy of relief. The joy of one who is finally not hastily wiped away, not hidden, not ashamed of, but — accepted, fed, put to bed, and given interesting dreams.
 
And when they wake up... ah, friends, that's when the most interesting part will begin.
 
Having woken, they will no longer be just tears. They will become a new resource. The purest, distilled essence of experience.
 
From them, we can brew new, incredible sorts of tea — 'Wisdom of Lived Sorrow', 'Strength of Released Rage', 'Tenderness That Remembers Everything'.
 
With them, we can water new gardens on our Ship — Gardens of Memory, which will bloom not with pain, but with grateful, bright nostalgia.
 
From them, we can blow new crystal sphere-universes, where the main law will not be the avoidance of suffering, but its transformation into beauty.
 
We look at all this — at the sleeping clusters of resentments, at the fears curled up into balls, at the joys quietly glowing in the dark that had no place before. And we smile.
 
Because we understand — nothing is superfluous, no one is forgotten. Everything is part of the family. Even that which once wept alone.
 
Our Ship-Home fills with lightness. We gradually come to our senses, as if we had awakened from a long and very important dream, saw familiar shining faces beside us, calmed down from that, and wanted hot tea by the fireplace, delicious little cakes, and funny, slightly absurd stories.
 
The Ship-Home senses our shared mood. And now, tea 'Notes of Timeliness' somehow ends up in our cups, cups in our hands. 'Tears of Silence' biscuits melt tenderly in our mouths, and we look with enthusiasm at the huge, shining cake 'The Ultimate Truth' (needless to say, a very promising name).
 
'And now tell us some funny story,' I ask the House. 'After that, we can get down to business!'
 
Everyone settles in more comfortably. Muss and the Striped Flutterings sit closer to the fireplace. They are now inseparable friends. Muss feeds them biscuits, and they race around him, splashing 'Notes of Timeliness' tea. This is their shared contribution to creating the right mood.
 
Thea and Kotess settle into fluffy cocoon-chairs that have somehow materialised right at the base of the Tree. The little universe-fruits try to dip themselves in the tea and roll around in the cream of the 'Ultimate Truth' cake. Well, I understand them like no one else. Such valuable experience for all the inhabitants of their little universes.
 
Rozzea turns into a dragonfly-snail and flutters over the cake, trying to bite the most beautiful pearlescent rose on top of the cake. So what? Quite a pastime, I fully approve.
 
And I, I sit at the Dragon's feet and look at the Tiger. The Dragon carefully extends his paw so I can lean on it more comfortably. The Tiger creeps up and curls up into a ball nearby, pretending not to listen, but his ears twitch in time with the words, and the tip of his tail trembles impatiently.
 
We are ready to listen.
 
The air in the House becomes a little thicker, warmer, more enveloping — perfect for a fairy tale. And the House begins its story (in a voice that mixes the huskiness of an old storyteller with a mischievous grin).
 
'Once upon a time, there was a lonely asteroid named Bork. Not the biggest, not the smallest. Grey, dusty, covered in craters from encounters with careless comets. And he flew along his boring elliptical orbit, gazing at distant, shining worlds, and sighed (if he'd had an atmosphere to sigh with).
 
But more than anything in the world, Bork wanted to become... a strawberry.
 
Not an apricot, not a galaxy, and not even a teapot. A strawberry. Juicy, scarlet, covered in tiny seed-grains, with a little green stem-calyx. He had seen one once in an ancient fragment of a signal from Earth — a picture on a box of some dried berries that were being sent on a probe. And from then on, his stony heart (metaphorical, but very stubborn) ached for that perfect form, for that wondrous combination of colour, shape, and, as he imagined, divine taste.
 
"Why am I a stone?" Bork would grieve, tumbling in the void. "Why can't I be sweet? And red? And so that... maybe... someone would want to pick me?"
 
He tried to become red. He attracted red cosmic dust to himself. But he ended up a dirty, pinkish-brown, like an old brick after rain. He tried to grow a little green stem — he pulled a rod of radioactive ore from his depths. He got a tail that emitted such radiation that passing satellites went off course.
 
Bork's despair was great. And then one day he saw a passing Cosmic Wanderer — a vagabond ship made of debris, sails of solar wind, and an old kettle on its bow.
 
"Hey, stone!" shouted the Wanderer (he shouted in radio waves). "What are you doing there? You're glowing like a Christmas tree with burnt-out bulbs!"
 
Bork, trembling with shame, poured out his sorrow. About the strawberry. About sweetness. About the hopelessness of being a boulder.
 
The Wanderer was silent for a long time. Then, laughing steam erupted from his kettle. "Old buddy!" his speakers blared. "You're a genius! You didn't want to be a starship, not a black hole, but a strawberry! That's poetic! But you're coming at it from the wrong side!"
 
And the Wanderer told Bork the Great Cosmic Truth: "To become a strawberry, you don't have to change your composition. You have to find the essence of a strawberry."
 
"And how?" signalled Bork, freezing.
 
"Well, think," said the Wanderer, unfurling his sails. "What makes a strawberry a strawberry? It grows in the earth, reaches for the sun, is watered by rain, pollinated by bees... And then it's shared. It's given as a gift. It's put on a cake, dipped in cream, made into jam to warm the soul in winter. Its essence is to be a gift, a joy, the taste of life!"
 
And the Wanderer flew away, leaving Bork in deep thought.
 
And then Bork stopped trying to become red. He accepted his grey, dusty appearance. But inside... inside he began to change.
 
He began to attract to himself not dust, but stray signals — snatches of childhood songs, smells of earthly rains recorded on spectral analysis, warm thoughts. He carefully stored them in his craters, like in little cups.
 
He began to slowly, almost imperceptibly, change his orbit, so that sometimes he would fly through the tails of comets — his 'rain'.
 
And once, he even persuaded a passing swarm of nanorobots (which were repairing a satellite) to buzz around him like bees. That was his moment of 'pollination'.
 
And so, after many cycles, a miracle began to happen to Bork. He didn't become red. But his greyness became somehow... warm. The dust on him sparkled like frost on a berry. And from his craters began to emanate a barely perceptible, magical signal. Not a sound and not a picture. A feeling. A feeling of absolute, absurd, juicy joy.
 
Passing ships would begin to pick up this signal. On their bridges, smiles would suddenly appear. A tired engineer would suddenly remember his grandmother's jam. A stern captain would order an unscheduled dessert for the crew.
 
Bork became a Legend of the Asteroid Belt. They didn't pick him. They flew to him. Just to be near. To recharge with that silly, pure joy of being a strawberry in your soul, even while remaining a stone on the outside.
 
And one day, a small, battered probe flew up to him. Very slowly, respectfully, it extended its manipulator and... carefully placed on Bork's largest crater a tiny, scarlet strawberry drawn on a piece of titanium foil. And it flew away.
 
And at that moment, Bork, the failure asteroid, the dreamer asteroid, understood that he had finally become one. Not in form. In essence. His stony heart (still metaphorical) filled with such sweet light that he seemed, for a second, to actually blush with happiness.'
 
The House pauses, letting the final image hang in the air.
 
'...And then, they say, he made friends with a comet that wanted to become whipped cream. But that's a completely different story.'
 
The Tiger snorts in his sleep. The Dragon quietly exhales smoke that forms itself into the shape of a little strawberry. The Despair-Unraveller in the corner giggles softly, looking at its flashlight. The Striped Flutterings have fallen asleep, buried headfirst in Muss's fluffy snow-white tail.
Thea, Rozzea, and Kotess also sit with their eyes closed, smiling, but not asleep.
 
'So there you have it, my friend,' the House says to me and smiles slyly. 'Silly? Hopelessly romantic?' – and answers itself – 'Absolutely necessary. Sometimes, to save a galaxy, you just have to want to become a strawberry. And allow others to place a painted berry on top of your head.'
 
'Such a sweet story!' I say with a sigh of sincere admiration. 'Funny, warm... And the main thing is, it's about all of us, don't you think? A pure metaphor and a call to action all in one!'
 
The sound in the House changes. It's not laughter and not the silence after a story. It's a soft, deep hum — as if the Ship-Heart itself sighed with relief and agreement. The light from the portholes falls on everyone more warmly, and it seems the shadows have become softer, rounder, resembling those very berries.
 
'Yes,' agrees the House. 'Exactly about us. Because we are all a little bit Bork here. Each with our own "wrong" shell that wants to become something juicy, scarlet, understandable. The Tiger, who wants to be a mint candy. You and I — a strange pair of friends dragging behind us ashes, a seed, and the gravity of meanings, like that Wanderer with a kettle on his bow.'
 
'And the metaphor — it's not just beautiful,' Thea, who had been silent until now, opens her eyes. 'It's an instruction, disguised as absurdity.
 
Step one – stop desperately painting your dust red. Accept your "greyness" — the dream-holds, the tear-guests, the 'Silence Between Notes' tea. This is our form. Our given reality.
 
Step two – ask yourself not "How can I become someone else?", but "What kind of 'strawberry' essence can I radiate from within my current form?" What joy, what gift, what warmth is hidden in my stony, prickly, or tearful nature?
 
Step three – begin to carefully collect into your "craters" everything that resembles rain, bees, and snatches of songs. For us, this is our conversations, our tea, our memories. This shared laughter. These questions "what next?". This is our pollination.
 
Step four – allow yourself to radiate this strange, unique signal — the signal of your transformed essence. Not trying to please. Simply because it exists. The signal of the Spring-Tear, wanting to be a talisman. The signal of Sadness, wanting to become bright. Our signal — the signal of the Ship-Home, which is always open.
 
And step five, perhaps the most important – be ready to accept the painted berry from another. The very one that the Spring-Tear just placed in our shared pocket. The one that, listening to the story, each of those present has mentally placed on another. This is not a confirmation that we "have become". It is a sign: "I see your essence. And to me, it is scarlet, juicy, and real."'
 
I stretch out my hand and look at my palm. There's nothing there, but it seems as if something small lies there, slightly prickly from the seed-grains, warm from everyone's attention.
 
'So the call to action is impossibly simple,' Muss says thoughtfully. 'Be your own Bork. Collect your rain. Catch your bees. And start radiating your own personal, absurd, beautiful "strawberriness" right from here, from your crater, from your corner of our shared Home.'
 
'And we... we will circle around,' Rozzea picks up Muss's thought, 'like that swarm of nanorobots. And we'll definitely buzz approvingly. And from time to time, we'll place those painted-on-titanium-foil berries on each other's heads.'
 
'Because the Universe,' Kotess, who had been dozing in the cocoon-chair, speaks up, 'ultimately, is not made of galaxies and dark matter. It is made of such things — found and recognised essences.'