PALACE SPRINGS

PACELOG 1991: That quirky satellite off Beryl 6 is kicking back a message from HAWKWIND, and the boys downstairs with the headsets and the green screens can't untangle it. The HAWKWIND had been on an experimental mission, a one-way trip to the end of space, and after the '80s we figured we'd lost them. Funny thing was, messages kept coming back, sometimes a garbled transmission from the past, sometimes a new declaration of striking clarity. Seems the folks aboard HAWKWIND had embraced a sort of organic chaos as a social structure, which kept them from going at one another like the other missions. Time folds out in the bleachers where these boys and girls are sitting, so we can't really use that as a reference point. Wrapped in the new messages are old truths; "Golden Void", "Time We Left This World Today" and "Damnation Alley" among them is the early word from the brains downstairs. But it's all irrelevant out there: reality and unreality merge, past and future are slices of the same moment. Decoding "Palace Springs" might lead to nothing; leaving it intact and simply listening is to travel on the edge of space with HAWKWIND. The strange images that flash past, worlds of unimagined composition and color, are the thieves and outcasts of a centric galaxy. In a sense, so is HAWKWIND. They struck out from the '70s in a straight line and never looked back, forging ahead without making the minor corrections in trajectory that most bands did, exaggerating their error over the years. By 1991, HAWKWIND had become an artifact of an unrealized tomorrow, parallel with our own present but never really a part of it. The code buried in "Palace Springs" is this: a glimpse of what the future looks like to the past. Side by side with our own mundane 1991, we're found wanting. If it's enigmatic, isn't it better that way? Space has revealed so few of its secrets, only up to the ankle in an eons-slow striptease of the great mysteries, that inscrutable space rock is just one more inexplicable phenomena in a nightsky full of them. Once we identify something, we immediately diminish it, so tell the boys downstairs to take a break.

I don't need to know what "Palace Springs" is, I only need to know that it is.