It was one of those very old, pretty architectural structures that reminded Marsh of childhood on Earth. A very pleasant memory that brought a smile to his face. And Marsh didn’t smile often.
He looked down into the sparkling, pale blue of the water that resembled the sky on Earth, or, at least, the way he had seen it as a boy. He could remember when he had found an old newspaper in the basement – to think of basements, wonders in them, antique and useless! – preserved in a fine plastic lacquer, with the ancient date of 2015. That had been so long ago, but he still remembered the man on the inside page who resembled him so well in spite of the age and time difference. His name was something like Eastworm or Eastwell…. Marsh didn’t recall anymore. He found it hard to believe anyone had ever needed more than one name.

Marsh looked straight up, snapping out of his little, pleasant reverie. The omnipresent stars above him seemed like seeds spread out in the jam of the universe. The universe wasn’t so big, no, not once you’d traveled it as he had. If you thought of it in terms of your own limited little space, of course it seemed too enormous for words. But if a person looked at it as it was meant to be seen, why, it was of no consequence to life what size the universe was. It may be ever expanding, yes, but who should care? It meant there was more opportunity to find the places your species had never seen before.

Glancing about him, Marsh was disgusted with the glittering technology. Since he’d left Earth, all he could find in his beloved cosmos were vulnerable oases of technological information, each one ruled by a fool who was checkmated against the others around him. In these, people lived out their lives trying to amuse themselves.
But what did it matter? Marsh was happiest in the open octants with only the silence of the vacuum and the pull of inertia. Where, some people said, angels hide.

Marsh looked down in the water again. The blue and the reflections upon it absorbed him. He touched the stone; real, all right, a very cold, very hard, decorous stone with jagged lines and slashes that looked like part of the rock. Very old indeed. Two stone cherubs with chubby bodies and thin wings with water coming out of their penises. Their faces seemed to laugh at their comic positions.
Marsh circled it slowly. What had inspired a man to make this?

Timeless. That is what art is called when its beauty and meaning transcend time. But perhaps the most timeless art is that which pulls you into its world, where time in the form of minutes or hours has no meaning.

Above the doughy cheeks of the cherubs, the universe was black, struggling against the bright light of the space station. Around Marsh, people talked about the traveler, and the spell that this ordinary, old fountain – which everyone who lived here knew well and ignored – had upon the stranger.
A little girl wanted to ask him if he knew about Earth, because she had heard about it in school and he seemed like he might know it and remember. Her mother steered her away from the man. Space travelers were notorious pedophiles, because only pedophiles could stand such solitude as is encountered in the vast spaces of nothingness between colonies.

Marsh withdrew his hand from the stream of “urine”, wondering why people stared. He was mesmerized by the memories it brought back to him of life as it had been when he was young before the expansion of the sun forced evacuation of that beautiful, unequalled planet. That ground, which he had prided himself in being so unattached to, was calling him.

In his dreams, he walks down the street again, with the sun a giant ball that sears through half the sky. His face is melting like butter; his hands too, but even when his body is gone, he keeps walking, until the sun stops menacing and all the people come back and say Marsh, you look just like Clint Eastwood in 2015 only you are not dead.

There were words going through Marsh’s head of a time when he was little and his mother was reading a book. How fascinated Marsh was by the book! Why had they ever used such weak, weary things as books and pages to keep those beautiful words and sayings that pleased him so?

<><>“Had my bones, like the sun,
<><>been splintered on this canyon wall
<><>and burned among these buckled plates,
<><>this bright debris; had it been so,
<><>I should not have lingered so long
<><>among my losses. I should have come
<><>loudly, like a warrior, to my time.”

It was called “Wreckage”, written by N. Scott Momaday. Marsh was surprised he remembered it so well. He remembered the poet’s name because his brother’s nickname had been Scott and the name Momaday thrilled his childhood tongue.

….And then Marsh realized that he was just Marsh the Cowboy of the Skies and Marsh was only his name among the people on Earth anyway, but that word, which had some special meaning once, meant nothing to any of the other people who lived in the sky.
For some reason, he dug into his pocket. He retrieved three round, gold-ish pieces of metal: coins. They made three little golden arcs to the fountain and one landed on a cherub’s uplifted hand. The stone face still smiled.