Blue Planet
Page 6
“Beryl,” Whit placed the gold necklace around Beryl’s neck, fastening its clasp and letting it drop against the girl’s shirt. The large emerald at the end of the chain glistened in the light streaming in from the open door of the Bird, its summer heat welcome in the cold of the Bird, “this is for you.”
“What is it?” Beryl plucked the emerald from where Whit had placed it over her head and around her neck, knowing it was a necklace but bewildered as to where it had come from.
“It’s an emerald.”
“Like my name?”
“Yes, like your name,” Whit said, “An emerald is a type of beryl.”
Whit then placed his hand over Beryl’s, the one which was not examining the necklace. “This belonged to one of your ancestors. The family lore says he was a pirate and this was some of his ill-gotten gains. It’s been passed down for generations. When your great-great-grandmother stepped onto Hodios, this was one of the few possessions she brought with her.”
“It’s from Earth?” Beryl asked, knowing something from earth was something to be treasured and protected. Very few things remained from Earth, having been lost or destroyed in the decades since humans had left their home planet.
“It’s from Earth. When you wear it, think about all the people who came before you, who didn’t let others tell them how to live their lives.”
“I’ll never take it off.” Beryl let the necklace drop out of her hand, the heavy stone falling to her chest at the end of the gold chain. Beryl was a serious girl by nature, but this was the most serious Rona had ever seen her look.
“Well, honey, maybe take it off when you shower,” Rona interjected then. She didn’t know why she did, but perhaps it was because the mother in her couldn’t help herself. It had been such a mom thing to say.
Whit had laughed then, a hearty, heartfelt laugh that should have cut through the seriousness of the situation, but couldn’t “You don’t have to wear it all the time.”
Beryl had shot him a look then that suggested she wasn’t going to listen to him.
“Mr. Roberts, we need you to hurry things along,” one of the two men on the Bird who had been sent to oversee things said. Rona knew him; he worked in mining. He was another normal person pressed into service under this unprecedented situation. He didn’t want to be there, either, but he did have a job to do, and he was going to do it.
Whit had pulled Beryl close to him then in a hug, and the little girl wrapped her skinny arms around his neck as he bent to her. Their daughter looked so young at that moment. Too young to lose her father.
“I love you, Beryl,” Whit wasn’t crying, but his voice was not the strong, confident voice Rona had heard for so many years. He pulled away then, placing his daughter at arm’s distance to tell her the last few things he would ever have a chance to tell her. “Listen to your mom. Never be afraid to stand up to people. And remember, no matter what, I love you and will always think of you, every day.”
“I love you, Daddy,” Rona hadn’t heard the girl call him Daddy for years, but at the moment, it must have come out without thinking. Whit hugged her again, briefly, and rubbed the heads of the two dogs, Camp and Poydras, before standing up, rubbing his eyes, and wiping away tears before they could fall.
Whit picked up a large backpack. Rona had helped him pack it the night before, full of clothing and some personal items.
The last one Whit said goodbye to was Iris, who had found her way to the edge of the door, probably trying to stay out of the family moment. Their goodbye didn’t involve any words. Instead, Whit hugged Iris. Rona assumed the two of them had said whatever they needed to say to each other at some other time, as she and Whit had done.
Whit broke off the hug with Iris and readjusted the straps on his backpack. He turned and looked at Rona long enough for her to feel the tears in her own eyes finally start to drop. He turned his gaze away from her, back toward the green grass of Libertas toward which he now walked. He took several steps on to the planet, just far enough away from the Bird to allow it to take off before turning around to face the people inside.
One of the two men moved to press the button to shut the door of the Bird, but before he could, Poydras yelped and ran down the ramp, toward Whit. The two of them had been inseparable for years; the dog wasn’t about to stay on the ship without him. None of them needed to hear a translation of her thoughts to know she loved Whit and couldn’t let him leave without her.
That was when Rona lost it. The tears now came freely, and she didn’t try to stop them.
The other dog, Camp, let out a sound somewhere between a yelp and a howl, but he didn’t follow Poydras down the ramp. Instead, he glued himself to a spot at Whit’s feet, as if he couldn’t move.
Rona pulled Beryl close to her, holding the young girl next to her as her puppy stood at her feet. Part of Rona wanted to make sure their daughter didn’t follow her father’s dog to the planet, to doom herself as well.
Like herself, Beryl was now crying. She had been stoic since the sentencing, accepting of what was happening. But those dogs did it to her, too.
The unabashed emotions of the dogs allowed both of the humans to realize the import of their moment.
This was the last time they would ever see Whit. Her husband, her daughter’s father. No matter how she tried, the things Rona loved about him—his voice, the way he smelled after coming home from the lab, the way it felt to sleep next to him, everything—would fade away now, eventually to be lost and forgotten, no matter how hard she tried to remember them.
The man pushed the button, and the ramp of the Bird raised itself up from the earth.
On the other side of the door, standing on Libertas with his dog at his side, Whit had raised his right hand, almost as if he was going to wave. Except he held his hand in the air, a wave stuck in the middle of the motion.
Slowly, the ramp closed, the man on the other side disappearing from their view. Rona watched him disappear. She knew, even then, that it would be the memory from that day she would call to mind most often, him standing on the planet with nothing but a backpack and his dog.
The door clicked closed, a final lock to signal that Whit was gone forever.
An exile.
Chapter Twelve
“I wish you would take a sidearm,” Rona listened to her daughter’s plea, yet again, as they walked toward the open field which served as the planet’s lone airport, on the far edge of town from their own home. Camp walked a bit in front of them, following his nose between interesting smells.
It wasn’t a long walk, as the only city on Columbina was not large. Situated on the edge of the ocean, it mostly spread along the sandy white beach. That was where the few bars and restaurants were as well as most of the city’s homes and apartments. A few other homes, like that of Beryl’s, sat away from the beach, in a clearing that had been cut out of the Columbinian jungle. The town quickly backed up to a mountain, part of a range running up and down the length of this side of the continent. Between the mountain and the water, much of the land was covered with the fields of plants brought from Earth and the farms on which they grew. These fields and plants sustained life on their earth-like planet.
“For the tenth time, I’m not taking a sidearm to a ship full of Earthlings,” Rona replied. “You’ve read the history books. You know how most Earthlings were about personal weapons when we left.”
Rona’s own sidearm, usually holstered on her back, was back at their home for safekeeping. She did, admittedly, feel somewhat naked without it; she could easily count the few times she hadn’t had it on in the last two decades. It was a rare person on Columbina who didn’t carry some sort of weapon at all times.
“I’d be more comfortable if you took something.”
Rona sighed and repeated the same thing she had told her daughter the night before, as they watched the last of the transmissions the Earthlings had sent. “And I don’t think they flew 90 billion light years to come down here and start a fight.”
“Lighten up, Beryl,” Rona took Beryl’s hand then, like she was still the little girl on Hodios instead of the grown woman on a planet dozens of light years from the home of humans. Beryl didn’t resist her. “If those Earthlings mean to do us harm, I’d rather something happened to me as an emissary to their ship than to someone else.”
“And I’d rather you take proper precautions.”
The night before, the two of them had watched the third of the transmissions from the Earthlings on the ship which now hovered in the sky above them, where V normally sat in its vigilant orbit. Like the first transmission and the one that followed that, it had been a pre-recorded video of the same man.
There was nothing of substance in either the second or third transmissions. Instead, they consisted of reassurances of the friendliness of the humans who were in the sky above them.
The only thing of substance to come out of the second and third transmissions hadn’t come from the Earthlings, but the Columbinians. They had given the man on the transmissions a nickname: “Benny.” Rona didn’t know who had come up with it, but it fit. The man looked like a Benny, and so the name had stuck.
According to Iris, she hadn’t communicated with any actual Earthlings, either. Her only communications had been with their AI system—their Iris equivalent. However, despite it being a similar system to herself, Iris wasn’t referring to it as an Intelligence System. As she said, even without communicating with it, she could tell it was not terribly intelligent, at least in the same way she was intelligent. It seemed to Rona that Iris was using AI as a sort of insult. Rona worried that Iris was underestimating the capabilities of the Earthlings and their AI. She didn’t think the Earthlings had bad intentions, but if they did, it would be imperative Iris took that seriously. If she did not, the Columbinians could be in trouble.
Camp darted ahead of them, seeing another dog to greet. Rona watched the dog, unworried, going about its day. She had always thought humans should be more like their dogs, who didn’t dwell on potentialities until they were more than mere potential. That the Earthlings would harm them was this sort of potential.
What was for sure, though, was that Rona was going to be one of five people to make the first contact with Earthlings in more than 70 years. Iris had suggested the group after nearly everyone on Columbina had volunteered. They were a collection of leaders of various smaller communities on Columbina, the sort of diverse group few to which would be able to object. Iris had known, as Rona did now, that this was something historic, something people would talk about for years and decades to come, and she had wanted the people participating to show that it wasn’t a moment for just the men and women going to the ship, but for all of Columbina.
They had one of the most important moments in their own histories ahead of them, and Rona wasn’t going to think about the ways it could go wrong or right. She would accept her part in that history and hope for the best.
Before reaching the airport, where a large group of Columbinians had already gathered to watch the Bird take off on its flight to the Earthling’s ship, Rona stopped.
“Are you OK?” Beryl asked as Camp scampered back toward them, stopping at Beryl’s feet and sitting on the ground. Rona took her daughter’s other hand in hers, facing her.
“No matter what happens,” Rona said, looking into her daughter’s green eyes, “know that I love you. I’m proud of you, and your father would be proud of the woman you’ve become, too.”
“I thought you said nothing was going to happen today.”
“It isn’t. But that’s something I should tell you more often than I do.”
“I love you back, Mom.”
Rona pulled her daughter in close then, hugging her and lightly kissing the top of her forehead, before they started back toward the airport, walking in silence.
Chapter Thirteen
Beryl watched her mother take the last step into the Bird, the subtle wave meant for her unmistakable as she did so.
As her mother disappeared from view into the Bird, Beryl looked up into the sky where she knew the Earthlings’ ship would be, where her mother would soon be headed. It was just a bright object there. Without any visual aid, the ship could have been V as easily as it was the Earthlings’ ship. Not that either was much more than a speck in the sky. If you didn’t know you were looking for something or where to look in the sky, you would likely never have seen the ships up there.
Vlad stood to Beryl’s right. She didn’t recall him coming up to stand there, but she felt reassured at his presence. Even more than being reassured, it felt right to be standing next to him, watching his father, Cale, follow her mother on to the ship as one of the other volunteers making the trip up to the Earthlings’ ship for the first physical contact with the other humans.
Unlike her own mother, Cale didn’t look toward the gathered crowd. Beryl wondered if it was because of who he was leaving behind. Unlike her mother, who had only Beryl, Vlad’s family was so typical of a family on Hodios or one of the planets. His six younger brothers and sisters were there, too, as well as his mother. Perhaps if Cale had looked toward them, to what he was leaving behind, he wouldn’t have been able to get on the ship.
Beryl watched the pilot, Ollie, board the Bird after Cale and tried not to think about how glad she was that Vlad wasn’t the pilot who had been chosen for the trip. Instead, the pilot going to the ship was older, the man who typically ferried people back and forth between Columbina and V. Beryl didn’t know him well, but he had gotten her and Vlad out of more than one potentially dangerous situation in the past. It was the right choice, but Beryl knew Vlad wished it was him making the trip up there even though he hadn’t told her. Vlad wanted to be back out among the stars, and this was as close a chance as he had gotten since Hodios left them on Columbina.
Having the other pilot take the Columbinians to the Earthlings’ ship had been the right choice, though. The other pilot was more experienced than Vlad, and there was no reason to send a second person from one family on board the Bird.
Plus, though Beryl would never have admitted it out loud, she didn’t want anything to happen to Vlad. If something happened to the Columbinians on board the Earthlings’ ship, she wasn’t sure she wanted to live on a planet where the only person she had ever loved who was still alive was Iris.
*
Gamma was the last person to board the Bird.
Gamma was not her name, but after decades of being known as such, even she thought of herself as Gamma.
In front of her, everyone else had boarded the Bird seriously, but
Unlike the business-like people boarding in front of her, Gamma was treating this as a happy event. For her, it was. Who knew who might be on the ship? Perhaps there were humans on board who could tell her about the family and friends she had left behind so many years ago when she departed on a ship headed to another world.
Perhaps there would be a descendant of one of those people, an unknown friend or relative.
And maybe—just maybe—there might be someone on board she had known, once upon a time.
Gamma looked up at the crowd. There, near the front, she saw one of her favorite young people on Columbina, someone who regularly came into the bar she ran. She had been there late the previous night, shortly before Gamma had closed up for the evening.
The breeze had been blowing in off of the ocean on that earlier night, a cool and refreshing wind in the fading heat of the day. The water glowed with sea creatures, tempting the unsuspecting to get close.
Beryl had been sitting with Iris, drinking a beer and watching old TV shows on the sets above the bottles of liquor. Alcohol was still a lucrative trade there in the stars, where they still tried to recreate the best parts of life as it had been on Earth. Gamma had figured that out early, opening a bar
shortly after the original troubles on Hodios had been handled. She had loved running the bar and stayed on the ship after all the other original Earthlings had settled other planets. When she had gotten to Columbina, though, it had been different. She was old now, and Columbina was so much more like Earth than any of the other settled planets. She knew it was probably her last chance to live somewhere like home, and so she had taken it.
Around Gamma’s bar, a few of the tables were occupied with couples and friends, and someone played darts. It hadn’t been a busy night, Gamma had easily handled all the customers without even employing one of her serving drones, while her dog dozed lightly near Camp at the edge of the beach outside the bar.
“Gamma,” Beryl had asked her as she was about to leave, “why did you decide to leave Earth?”
Gamma had poured herself a drink from a bottle then, thinking about her answer. When she finally started, half of the glass was already gone.
“I think most of my reasons were similar to others who left Earth. I mean, I was appalled by what freedoms people were willing to give up for what they falsely viewed as a bit of security. I wanted to be able to live my life without interference from others, be they government officials or meddling troublemakers.”
She took another drink. “But that was the reason all of us had in common. I think it was the subtler things that made most everyone make that final decision to get on that rickety ship. For some, they had few family members and figured they had nothing to lose by heading for the stars. Others were naturally up for an adventure, and this was the biggest adventure humanity had ever embarked upon. Others wanted to be a part of history.”
“For me, it was different. I always wanted to meet people, to see what made them live life the way they did. It’s probably why I ended up running a bar on Hodios and down here. And, if there was one person I would want to meet more than anyone else, it wasn’t a person at all, but an alien. I figured, if I ever wanted to see if there was intelligent life out in the universe, something else for us to talk to and learn about, the best way to find it would be to hop on a spaceship and head to the stars.”