FROM THE ADAMA JOURNALS:

I wonder if, when we finally outrun or destroy the Cylons and find a planet to welcome us, we will be able to reconstruct our lost legends, our destroyed books, our currently unperformed entertainments. Some of these are, of course, preserved in our computer banks, but not all. Not all. Yesterday I requested a copy of the Caprican story Sharky Star-rover, confident that it had to be preserved somewhere in the fleet records. But the answer returned, scan negative. For a moment I could not accept the answer. A book that I’d read and reread years ago was no longer available—was, in effect, lost to us. No one would ever read it again, unless a frayed copy turned up in somebody’s locker or as an artifact on some deserted planetary outpost. I nearly instigated a search.

Alone in my quarters, I tried to remember the story of Sharky Star-rover. I thought I could remember it easily. Perhaps I could renew the oral tradition, keep alive at least the major part of a story I had so loved. But, I soon discovered, I had few of the details of the story in my mind, even less memory of the order in which it happened.

Sharky was just a boy, that much I recalled. A tough kid just past the hurdle of puberty. Trapped on an out-of-the-way military asteroid, where his disabled-veteran father coped with his combat record by becoming a hophead and his mother coped with the father by turning into a shrew, Sharky vowed to escape. I don’t remember how he managed it, but he stole a supply shuttle, having learned simple piloting by watching the ship’s pilot do the job. He headed the shuttle away from the complex of military asteroids, setting his course for an area that was considered unpopulated, although appealing rumors of sin cities and pleasure palaces had accrued around it. Somehow he teamed up with his new pal Jameson. I don’t remember whether Jameson stowed away on the shuttle when Sharky stole it, or whether they met on one of the many settlements Sharky visited. Jameson was some kind of blob, a representative of an alien race that was quite unpopular in some sectors of the galaxy. There were times when Sharky had to hide Jameson away, but when it was necessary, he fought tooth and nail for his alien friend.

It’s Sharky’s friendship with Jameson that I really want to remember. They worked so well together in flying the shuttlecraft across the galaxy—I recall all kinds of clever exchanges, all sorts of moments in which a sly joke of Jameson’s gave Sharky peculiar and valuable insights on life. There was a meditation of Sharky’s in which he almost said he wished that a real love were possible between a human and a member of Jameson’s race. He never really said he wanted to embrace Jameson—and, remember, Jameson couldn’t be embraced, or even held onto, no matter how hard you tried—but it was clear that Sharky’s fantasy would include a Jameson magically transformed to human shape and quite embraceable.

The adventures are even harder to recall than the impressions of character. The book was basically a collection of episodes about Sharky’s adventures on the various planets he stopped at. At the more civilized settlements he found that his theft of the shuttle had been recorded and he was wanted as a criminal. He had to go through some pretty hairy times to escape and not be returned home. (The continuing to flee was an especially important feature of the book—it seemed to suggest that irresponsibility was a desirable way of life, and I find it funny that my responsible adult self remembers that theme so nostalgically.) He fell in with a group of criminals, pretended to go along with them, then thwarted their plan by getting Jameson to walk in on them at the moment of the crime. But what was the crime? Who were the criminals? Why don’t I remember their characters? Once Sharky—who was only in his early teens, remember—almost successfully impersonated a star-cruiser captain, a disguise he was using to try to obtain a cargo hold of food when he and Jameson were starving. I can remember that episode pretty well. I used to read it to my children when they were growing up. Zac used to pretend to be Jameson, and crawl bloblike around the floor.

I can still feel the sadness of the end of the book, when Sharky and Jameson were finally apprehended. Sharky wanted Jameson to be returned home with him, but the rules wouldn’t allow it. The officer in charge of the squad that captured them told Sharky that Jameson could not survive within any military installation. He would be a figure of scorn. The captain said that separating them was an act of compassion and not cruelty. Sharky said he saw the point, but I never felt he did, and neither, I suspect, did any readers of the book. Anybody who could read the scene of parting between Sharky and Jameson without crying had to have a sturdy hold on his emotions. I can’t really remember Sharky’s return to home, perhaps because I don’t really want to. I remember it was sentimental. Perhaps his dad had gone off his habit and his mother had become a saint. It doesn’t matter. Nobody I know who ever read it ever bothered much about believing its ending.

Clearly, Sharky Star-rover was a flawed book, and perhaps some misguided programmer librarian thought he/she had good reason for not including it in the Galactica computer library. That’s too bad. Sharky’s quest for a more adventurous life seems so similar to our quest for Earth. The story might give us hope when we need it. No matter how much of the book I can reconstruct, no matter how much eloquence I attempt in trying to retell the story to anyone, I’ll never really have Sharky again. So much has been destroyed. So much.