Blue Planet

by S E T Ferguson

  At that comment a few of the popular girls sitting two rows ahead of where Vlad and Beryl sat started snickering. Vlad didn’t have to hear what they were saying amongst themselves to know what they were talking about. If Beryl was in the classroom to learn about socialization, she was doing a poor job at it. She had few close friends there, though he knew she and one of the popular girls, Fawn, were friendly. And, of course, he knew her well. Their fathers were close friends. Not that this made them friends. If anything, it made him like her less. She was smart, she knew it, and she used it to her advantage at every possible moment.

  As for Beryl, if she heard the girls giggling about her, she didn’t care. She was focused on whatever was on the page of her notebook.

  “How do you know she already knows everything in this history lesson?” Vlad challenged Iris, knowing it could get him in more trouble but unable to keep himself from doing it.

  “Beryl, what’s this?” Onscreen, Iris’s face was replaced with a picture of…something. Vlad wasn’t entirely sure what it was, but it sort of looked like a spaceship to him. Not the cool, sleek, Hodios-like ship he had drawn in his notebook, but a clunky ship that likely would never have made it from a planet to a moon, let alone into deep space. It looked almost like blocks stacked on top of each other, like a child had created it.

  Beryl glanced up just long enough to see the image on the screen. “Hodios.”

  Around the room, more snickering. Vlad looked at the image and knew Beryl was wrong. The ship on the screen looked nothing like the ship on which they lived. Their ship was streamlined and smooth, like a giant plane in space.

  “Come on, Iris,” Vlad said. “If I can’t draw, she can’t read her own stuff. That’s not Hodios.”

  “Beryl, would you care to explain for the class?”

  “Do I have to?” Beryl didn’t even look up from her notebook.

  “Yes, you do.”

  Beryl made a noise like something between a sigh and a groan, then set her notebook down on her desk with a purposeful thud. “When Hodios left Earth, it looked nothing like it does today. Almost immediately after it left Earth, Iris started upgrading everything about the ship, from its operating systems to its exterior. If you look closely at the picture, you can see Earth in the background. I would guess this picture is from shortly before Hodios left Earth orbit.”

  “How about a little more? Maybe something on the other Hodios class ships.”

  Beryl made the same groaning sigh again. “The Hodios where we live now is the original ship, with its significant alterations. During the colonization process for each new planet, a new Hodios is created, from which the colony and its intelligence system can easily operate asteroid and planetary mining functions. The new ship also provides a safe haven for the colonists, in the event of a disaster, such as a disease epidemic or seismic activity significant enough to alter a planet’s climate. And each newly created intelligence system takes on its own personality and appearance upon creation, with only one intelligence system per planet. On occasion, an intelligence system has decided to remain on a planet, such as with Artemis, who stayed on Polis. In that case, Hodios gets a new intelligence system. When Artemis decided to stay on Polis, Iris came to be the intelligence system on Hodios.”

  “Correct on all counts.” The screen at the front of the classroom switched back to an image of Iris. Next to Vlad, Beryl picked her notebook back up and continued reading whatever was on the notebook’s screen.

  “Know-it-all,” Vlad whispered under his breath. He didn’t think it was loud enough for Beryl to hear, but she turned her head toward him.

  She had definitely heard it.

  “Exactly what I hope to be someday,” Beryl smiled, as if the joke was somehow on Vlad. And then she went back to her reading.

  “Now, Vlad, as your drawing suggests you are into ships, perhaps you can summarize your reading about our history of communications drones and, in particular, our history of communications drones with Earth.”

  Vlad looked up at the ceiling of the classroom, hoping the move would magically impart him with the knowledge Iris was now asking him for. He hadn’t read the homework. He had been hanging out at the landing platform of Hodios, watching the pilots for the Birds. They were going to arrive at the newest planet humans were going to colonize in two weeks, so there was a lot of preparation going on, even into the evening hours when Vlad could actually watch them.

  “Umm, that we have communications drones?” Vlad finally stammered. The popular girls at the front of the classroom snickered again, this time at his expense. Iris didn’t stop them this time, either.

  “Technically, that is something you could have gleaned from the lesson, but that doesn’t make it the right answer. If you had read it, you would have known that, throughout the time since humans left Earth’s solar system, we have periodically sent communications drones back to Earth. However, none of the drones has ever come back. We do, however, have established and regular connections between the colonized planets via communications drones. Thanks to some recent technological advances by yours truly since we left Civitas, distances that once took several years to travel are now being traveled in months. But that wasn’t in the lesson.”

  Vlad rolled his eyes.

  Thankfully, Iris didn’t see the action or chose to ignore it. The last thing Vlad needed now that his evenings could be spent watching the Birds get prepped was to have his parents get a note from Iris on his behavior. They would definitely make him stay in their quarters if that happened.

  As Iris moved on to talking about the communications drones carrying updates to the Iris intelligence systems as well as personal communications between people on the planets, Vlad stared at Iris’s face onscreen, wondering why he hadn’t gotten in trouble. She had to have seen him roll his eyes at her.

  It was almost like she didn’t want him to get in trouble.

  Like she wanted him to be able to spend time with the pilots.

  Maybe Iris wasn’t as mean as he thought she was.

  Vlad erased the drawing from his notebook and started looking at the pictures Iris was sending to it, related to the distances between the planets. Next to him, Beryl leaned back in her seat. On her notebook screen, she was now looking at a picture of a creature he knew was a cat, an animal that had been kept as a pet on Earth but had not been brought onto Hodios when it left Earth. As she watched a silenced video of cats falling off of things, her mouth turned up into a small smile, still smug from having gotten the answer right and being able to do what she wanted.

  Iris may have been OK. Beryl, though, was unbearable.

  Chapter Five

  Rona Roberts stood up from the bar stool and smoothed her hair back toward her bun. She knew the gesture was futile—years of wearing it the same way meant she had perfected it, to the point where not even a hair would be out of place—but this was not the time or the place to look her worst. Best to double check.

  When things got tough on Columbina, Rona knew others looked to her, despite everything that had happened with Whit.

  Or maybe it was because of what had happened with Whit. Because she had lived through something that would have destroyed someone who wasn’t as strong.

  Twelve years since he was gone, and she still hadn’t quite figured out how not to think about him.

  Rona looked at her daughter, sitting on a barstool. Everyone who had known Rona in her younger days thought Beryl looked like her, thanks to their shared red, or in Rona’s case, formerly red hair. But Rona only saw Whit when she looked at their daughter, their only child. Not just in their shared green eyes or their dimpled cheeks, but in the way they both scrunched their nose when she said something they disagreed with or the way they both chewed on their lower lip when mulling over the answer to a question, or a hundred other mannerisms no one else noticed. They were so similar personality-wise, as well, in so many ways, like their curiosity and questioning that often went too far, their absolute love for their d
ogs, and their ability to be best friends with a being some considered less-than-human. And there were the more troubling similarities, like their shared obsession with improving life for humans in space, whatever the cost.

  If only Whit hadn’t been so obsessed, so single-minded in his belief that he could improve their universe, if people would change the rules, he would still be there with them.

  Rona forced herself to put the thoughts of Whit out of her head, even though she knew it would only be temporary. There were far more pressing issues today than thinking about someone who had been dead and gone for over a decade.

  Around them, dozens of their fellow Columbinians were in the bar, asking questions of Iris. As soon as word of the aliens had gone out, seemingly everyone on the planet had come looking for her, even though Iris could answer their questions by phone just as easily as she could in person.

  “Where did you set the odds?” Beryl asked Iris, unable to help herself even though she wasn’t normally one to gamble.

  “Don’t answer that,” Rona said, giving her daughter an angry mother look that she wished she didn’t have to use so often on her 24-year-old daughter. “Are you sure these are aliens?”

  “Positive. I detected a large object slowing down as it entered our system. I am waiting on visual confirmation. As soon as I have that I’ll send it to everyone’s phones. It should only be a matter of a minute or two now.”

  “So I take it you don’t know whether they are hostile or not?” Beryl asked.

  “No. I’m trying to see if I can figure out who they are or where they came from. Like I said, I will have visuals from the ship shortly. I had to reconfigure some of our outer system satellites to get a shot of the ship.”

  Two people pushed through the now crowded bar to where Rona, Beryl, and Iris were. Rona was happy to see Vlad. She was less happy to see Heming, who had never met a pretty woman or a get-rich-quick scheme he didn’t love.

  “When are they going to get here?” Vlad asked, jumping into the conversation as if he had been there all along.

  “At their present speed, it should take them two days to go into orbit above Columbina. They are slowing down.” Iris responded.

  “You know, I think I saw this movie. Something about an alien attack on Earth. It didn’t end well for the Earthlings.”

  “Good thing we’re Columbinians, then. And if you’re thinking of the same movie I’m thinking of, it ended alright for the Earthlings. I mean, not the ones who lived in all the cities the aliens destroyed, but the ones who were hanging out with Will Smith,” Beryl said. Vlad moved so he was standing next to where Beryl sat at the bar. To Rona, the two of them still looked like the couple they had been for so long and until so recently.

  “Tell that to Harry Connick, Jr. As I recall, things ended poorly for him,” Beryl smiled. Vlad ordered both himself and his brother a round of drinks from Gamma, who was now fully engrossed in their conversation and not even attempting to hide it.

  “So, Iris, what are the odds on these aliens being hostile? Should I be heading for the caves to hide, or should I be making some money on this?” Heming repeated Beryl’s inquiry from earlier. Rona shook her head; she had never understood the obsession with gambling so many of the humans who had come to space shared.

  Before she could answer the question, Rona saw Iris give Beryl a glance. Rona realized no one else would have noticed what passed there between them, even if they had seen the look. Rona only saw it because Beryl was her daughter and because, thanks to Iris’s relationship with Beryl and Whit before her, she had seen that look before.

  There was something more to the aliens that Iris now knew.

  And it wasn’t something she had not expected.

  Suddenly, Rona felt the phone on her wrist buzz. Without her having to do anything, a picture of a ship in space appeared on its screen. Around her, the phones of everyone else did the same thing as Iris sent out the picture.

  The ship on their screen was a ship they had all seen before.

  “Holy shit,” Rona said, then put her hand to her mouth, as if to stifle the curse that had already left it. Around her, dozens of other people were having similar reactions, seeing the alien ship on the screens of their phones.

  The ship on their screen was Hodios. Not Hodios in the form they all knew, after decades of improvements, but Hodios as it had looked when it had left Earth.

  Above the noise of the crowd, Iris’s voice came across all of their phones and into their heads.

  “It seems the visitors we are about to have aren’t really aliens at all. They are Earthlings.”

  Chapter Six

  As the noise from the announcement finally died down, a voice rose above the crowd in the bar.

  “They’re going to blow us off of this planet.”

  Beryl, unfortunately, knew exactly who the voice belonged to.

  Reed.

  Beryl knew Reed. On Columbina, he was best known for two things. For one, he was unable to hold down a job, despite a dozen opportunities to do so since their arrival on Columbina. A combination of a bad attitude, lack of work ethic, and a significant alcohol problem had not served him well. The last of these three issues had led to the second reason everyone knew Reed. Several years earlier, a drunk Reed had accepted a bet to go swimming in the Columbinian ocean. His face still bore the significant scars from that incident.

  More than once, Beryl had wished the ocean creatures had finished the job they had started.

  And it wasn’t because of his inability to work or his alcohol problem.

  The reason Beryl wished him ill had everything to do with his wife, Fawn.

  Fawn and Beryl should not have been friends. Fawn had been a beautiful young woman, concerned with boys and popularity during their pre-teen and teenage years when Beryl had been buried in books and her experiments. They had different friends and different interests. And yet, the two had become friends.

  It turned out, Fawn wasn’t just a pretty face; she was interested in medicine. She had become a nurse when the easiest path available to her would have been to get married and become a mother at a young age. After she was certified as a nurse, Fawn had been interested in helping out Beryl to find potential medicines in the jungles of Columbina, but at about that time, she started dating Reed. And Reed had stopped Fawn from pursuing this goal.

  He had also stopped Fawn from spending anything but minimal time with people like Beryl.

  Shortly after they got together, Fawn was married and pregnant, and thanks to Reed’s dislike of Beryl, the two rarely spoke. Now, years of abuse at the hands of Reed—mental abuse, though probably physical abuse as well—had taken their toll on Fawn, who looked much older than her 24 years.

  “Ahem.” Rona cleared her throat, and Beryl knew her mother realized this was a situation ripe for getting uncontrollable quickly. Rona knew as well as the rest of them what Reed was like, and the last thing she wanted was to let him get the upper hand. The last thing they needed was to waste time or let people like Reed get the ears and hearts of those who were willing to believe the worst. “Thank you for your attention. I know you all have a lot of questions, and I’ll let Iris answer them. Send the questions to her on your phones.”

  Almost at once, the noise in the crowd increased exponentially as people started talking, their wrist phones picking up questions and instantly sending them to Iris.

  Beryl loved watching old television shows where people got frustrated with the earliest versions of spoken communication with their electronics. She could hardly imagine a world where her phone didn’t immediately filter out everything but her own voice and understand everything perfectly, giving her the information she wanted, in whatever form she preferred, so instantaneously as to be imperceptible.

  It worked so seamlessly, Beryl sometimes wondered if Iris had somehow done something to their brains to mesh them perfectly with their phones.

  “Everyone,” Rona said after people had a few minutes to ask questions and
the noise from the crowd died down. Behind her, Gamma and her serving drones doled out beers and drinks, the old woman smiling at the sudden arrival of a huge amount of business. “I’m going to have Iris come back up here and answer, as best she can, the most common and important questions everyone has.”

  Rona deliberately got down off of her chair, turning the room completely over to Iris. “I’m not going to bother answering questions for which I don’t have an answer; so, for instance, I don’t know how many people are on the ship. These questions, you can all find on your phones and see that I have no answer.”

  Iris started answering questions, about the specific size of the ship, the lack of communications from them, and the like.

  Iris was answering questions, but not any to which Beryl wanted an answer.

  Beryl found herself tuning out, as the only questions Iris seemed to have answers to were not questions for which she wanted or needed an answer.

  Over the growing noise of the unsatisfied crowd, Beryl heard a familiar voice next to her.

  Of course Vlad wouldn’t ask Iris the questions in the prescribed manner.

  Not that Beryl would have, either, but she found it annoying to see that particular trait exhibited by someone else.

  “Iris,” Vlad asked, “I have a question for you.”

  The crowd went nearly silent; despite his sometimes arrogant nature, Vlad was well-respected on the planet. There weren’t many pilots, and Vlad was in charge of the few pilots, both professional and otherwise. He had been obsessed with flying since he was a kid on Hodios; when they got on planet as pre-teens, Vlad precociously learned to fly by his thirteenth birthday. He loved to fly, in much of the same way Beryl loved the work she did.

  “You said these Earthlings have stronger security than we have on Hodios. If we were to want to get past these defenses the Earthlings have set up, would it be possible for you to do so?”