His Little Earthling

by Katie Douglas

  “You’re right. He might be dead already, and no one’s there with him, and you might never see him again. And the whole world could end tomorrow. So you should play My Little Unicorn with me and we’ll worry about other stuff after it’s happened.”

  Sarah stared at Laila in disbelief. “Who says stuff like that when their friend needs reassurance? What’s wrong with you?”

  Laila busied herself trying to find something in a large toy box.

  “I’m sorry,” she spoke into the toy box as plastic toys rustled around her hands. “I don’t know what to say to make you feel better. I don’t know how I can help, except by letting you be Princess Sparkle Magic Unicorn.” She turned around and held out a very glittery white plastic unicorn with blue sparkly mane and tail. The whole thing was about a foot long. Sarah had never been interested in plastic toy unicorns, but as far as they went, this one looked pretty special.

  “That’s a very sparkly unicorn,” Sarah said, taking the proffered toy and examining it.

  Laila smiled then rummaged in the toy box again. “She’s the best one. I’ll be Princess Cupcake Friendship Unicorn.”

  “Why do their names sound like word salad?” Sarah wondered if it was something to do with making sure people found the toys online.

  Laila shrugged as she pulled out a yellow unicorn with a pink mane and tail, and which had a picture of a cupcake tattooed on its haunch. “I don’t know. It’s just what they’re called. I bet your name sounds confusingly meaningless to them.”

  “They’re not alive,” Sarah remarked flatly.

  “For all the macaroni that is holy! Play with the unicorns already!”

  “Sorry. But, uh… what do I do with them?” When Laila stared at her in disbelief, Sarah started to color red. Instead of laughing at her, Laila nodded in understanding.

  “Okay, I’ll start.” Laila put the unicorn on the floor, and when she next spoke, her voice was different. “Princess Sparkle Magic Unicorn, we need to buy a bigger Unicornland Castle because all the bathrooms are dirty and I lost the kitchen.”

  “Uh… sure. Do we just go to the unicorn realtors?”

  “No! We build it out of clouds, obviously!”

  “Of course we do. Here, I found this blue cloud we can make a new castle out of.” Sarah grabbed Laila’s pillow from her bed. It was difficult, but Sarah resisted the urge to start a pillow fight as she handed Laila the new imaginary castle. Laila nodded approvingly.

  “We need to cover it in fairy dust to keep the Bogmonster away. If he eats our tails then we can’t fly anymore…”

  Chapter Seventeen

  In the morning, Sarah was shocked that Laila was promised a whole day of being treated like a baby, and a sound spanking from Flin, after Laila threw a full-scale tantrum about not being allowed to come on the rescue mission. Instead of apologizing and not making it worse for herself, Laila had started yelling about how unfair everything was. Even after having her over his knee, Basil had to practically drag Laila out of the house so he could get her to school. When he returned, Sarah was relieved that they were finally on their way.

  Sarah liked her friend, but she had no idea why Laila threw such big tantrums if she didn’t want to be punished, but then, Sarah had to admit to herself that sometimes she did some stupid stuff in that department too. Perhaps quieter stuff than Laila, but no less ridiculous. A case in point was the fact that she had told Ral to get lost right before he had actually gotten lost. In space. When she found him, and told him she really did care about him, would he punish her for her behavior, or would he write it off?

  If she hadn’t been so mean to him, Sarah had to wonder if any of this would have happened, or if, instead, he might have told her where he was going, and the precise time he’d expected to return, so she could have investigated faster when he didn’t come home. If she never saw him again, Sarah knew it was all her fault.

  She was too scared to cry about it, so instead, she sat in the cockpit of Basil’s ship, willing it to fly faster. As if it disapproved of what Sarah had done, the whole ship coughed and spluttered then the lights went out.

  “Basil, what’s wrong with the tin can?” Flin’s voice asked.

  “Probably just a fuse or something. You know how she can be. And you never think The Great Gig is a tin can when she’s saving your ass. Six times and counting.” After a few tense minutes in the dark, as it got colder and they continued to drift uncontrollably through space, the lights came back on.

  “The fuck was that?” Flin demanded.

  “Evanescent Mode Drive just threw a spark. Nothing to write home about, princess.” Basil patted Flin on the shoulder then turned his attention back to the console. Sarah watched in amazement as Flin just laughed and shook his head. As she looked in their direction, she noticed the spots of orange rust dotted across the cockpit.

  “Uh… why don’t you buy a new ship? You must be able to afford one,” she remarked. This old contraption looked like it was falling apart.

  “Here we go,” Flin remarked.

  “There’s nothing wrong with The Great Gig,” Basil replied stiffly.

  “It’s going rusty. Like, it’s literally a rust bucket. One of those buckets which doesn’t have a handle because it fell off.” Sarah couldn’t believe that Basil was oblivious to this.

  “There’s nothing wrong with this ship,” Basil reiterated. “Unless you want to find someone else to take you to find Ral.”

  “You abandon my cousin and we’re through,” Flin said quietly. “And you’d have to be blind to not notice the problems with this hunk of junk. Earth girl’s right. You need to get it welded or we’re getting a new ship.”

  “She’s my ship.” Basil said it in the tone of voice someone might use to justify why they didn’t take their wife to the police station after discovering she had a passion for bank robbery. Sarah saw why Laila loved him so much… and why she needed to balance him out by being with Flin too. Two men though… Half the time, Sarah wasn’t sure if she had the energy for one man.

  Sarah didn’t really remember the journey back from Earth’s moon, so the trip in a spaceship was something of a novelty, even if it was a slightly rusty and temperamental vessel that didn’t add up to what she’d expected of futuristic space traveling technology. All the TV shows and movies she’d seen, all the comics and books she’d read, they all made out like the future was rustproof and brightly lit. Or on fire. Instead, it was still subject to the same foibles as her own time; things still got dark at night, the wind still messed up her hair, and metal still oxidized. Beyond the newest, sleek, black-poured parts of Minos Kerala city, there was still a lot of trash.

  The view didn’t seem to change much, either. When Sarah had been very young, her parents had entranced her with a computer screensaver of white stars moving, making her feel like she was flying through space. The first time she saw it, she declared to her mom, “One day, I’m gonna go on a spaceship and live in space, and it’s gonna look just like that out of the windows!” Her mom had smiled and nodded. It was a bit disappointing that space mostly remained still, with the occasional nearby star moving past at a sedate pace. Maybe it would look like that if they went a little faster, but the distant stars barely moved over the course of an hour, and none of them ever seemed to get any closer.

  “Shouldn’t we be flying past planets?” she asked after watching out of the window for a long time.

  “No. I tend to plan my routes to avoid star systems as much as possible to ensure we don’t accidentally fly into any stray moons or similar. It’s not safe,” Basil explained.

  “So… this is the view? For however long it takes us to get to Ral?”

  “If you look real close, you’ll start to see pictures in the dots,” Flin said. Sarah rolled her eyes.

  “You’re kidding. How d’you not die of boredom?” Sarah especially wondered how Laila ever put up with space travel. The girl was so easily bored she was constantly in trouble at the Minos Kerala Academy because s
he wasn’t paying attention.

  “We usually talk to pass the time,” Flin said.

  “You’re related to Ral, right? Is everyone in your species… uh…” She started to blush. “Are you all… not monogamous?”

  “Polyamorous? Most of us are, yeah. ‘Cept Ral. He’s a bit weird though. Think he read too many Nidian romance novels when he was young; my Aunt Kifa—one of his moms—loved those books. Anyway, somewhere along the way he got the idea that he only wanted to fall in love with one person, and he wanted that person to only be in love with him. I don’t really understand it; I’m a firm believer that it takes a village to raise a child and to discipline a naughty girl, but I respect his choice.”

  “And you all discipline naughty girls?” Sarah decided to make the most of asking someone questions without having to worry about looking stupid in front of Ral, who already had plenty of reasons to know how dumb she was.

  “Not at the same time… well, sometimes at the same time. But it’s fairly standard across the galaxy. If someone has put themselves in danger, they ought to know there are real consequences, so they don’t ever do that again. If someone has hurt someone deeply, there’s every reason why they should be held accountable for that. You’d struggle to find anyone across the Interplanetary Alliance who didn’t believe in that.” Flin waved a hand at the stars, as if to illustrate his point.

  “A couple of planets banned corporal punishment after it got popular in the 2090s; Earth was one, under a very strange government in the mid-twenty-second century, when the whole world went down the pan for a while, but the divorce rate skyrocketed and they quickly discovered just how necessary spanking was,” Basil explained.

  “What happened?” Sarah wondered.

  Basil pressed some buttons on his console before answering. “Eventually people weren’t together long enough to get married, everyone was too preoccupied with arguing and doing dumb things like taking out huge loans to finance the latest implants, which made them smarter, faster, better able to see and hear, and whatnot. There were a lot of people trying to live in a world which had outpaced them, they had no morality, and no one was mentally prepared for the amount of information they were being bombarded with every day. People didn’t need to learn anything, because implants would do it all for them, and no one needed to make any decisions, so society regressed. On Earth, it was known as the cyberpunk period.”

  “Oh, that’s why Bergensmith’s Voyages was such a weird memoir!” Sarah thought back to the book she’d read for Mr. Tarik’s class.

  “We never had that on Telia II,” Flin chipped in. “We were too perfectly designed to ever need to turn ourselves into part robots. Except for the Speakeasy chip, of course. That was essential. The rest of the galaxy needed to understand our language so they heard all our amazing ideas about how to solve all their problems.”

  Sarah giggled; it was obvious that Flin was only joking. As far as she knew, elves hadn’t contributed much to the rest of the galaxy.

  “Keep telling yourself that, tree-hugger,” Basil quipped. “Anyway, then people realized that the world was made by people, and that technology was supposed to make life easier, so they ditched a lot of it in favor of a more straightforward life. And that was around the time Earth made contact with the rest of the galaxy, so they reinstated spanking at the same time. A lot of laws were overhauled during that period, as we took on the Interplanetary Alliance’s laws instead. And suddenly everyone owed them a huge debt of taxes.”

  “Wait… how do you know all this?”

  “Oh, no,” Flin grumbled. “Don’t get him started on his family history.”

  “I’m glad you asked! My parents were from Earth, so I’ve meticulously researched my genealogy, and the history of Earth surrounding the past few hundred years. Want to see?”

  Sarah nodded. “I love seeing anything from Earth. It reminds me that it was real.”

  “Would my esteemed acquaintance care to fly the ship for a moment or two?”

  Flin rolled his eyes and nodded. “I don’t have a choice, do I? I mean, since the autopilot’s busted, I can take the helm or become Crashy McCrashface, really.”

  “Over here.” Basil ignored Flin, and instead he showed Sarah to a computer terminal at the back of the cockpit where he tapped a few things on screen. A family tree appeared. “My parents, Hayley and Tim Rhodes.” He traced his finger up the line showing his grandmother, and the image scrolled, showing more of the top part. “My grammy was born in Vancouver, and she lived there her whole life. My mom used to tell me how much she missed her.”

  “What happened to your parents?” Sarah asked. He didn’t seem old enough for them to have died of old age. She wasn’t even sure when people died anymore, with all the medical advances that seemed to mean everyone aged at a greatly reduced rate once they reached adulthood.

  “Space accident.” He didn’t elaborate. “That’s my other grandparents, they were from Trinidad.”

  When he scrolled some more, going further into the past, Sarah’s eyes fell on one name. Liam Bryan. A chill coursed down her spine and she felt tears on the edge of her eyelids as she reread it.

  “My… my… no.” She shook her head.

  “What is it?” Basil sounded concerned. Sarah pointed at the screen. It had to be a coincidence.

  “Hang on.” Basil seemed to catch on quickly. He scrolled the image some more, and Sarah swayed on the spot, feeling like someone had walked over her grave. They pretty much had. On the screen, a thin line connected to Liam, and when she followed it, she saw her own name, Sarah Bryan, and her own date of birth, 1989.

  “Oh, my…” Sarah covered her mouth with her hands because her heart stung. “This can’t be real. That’s me. And that’s…” She paused for a moment as her voice broke. “That’s my baby. Do… do they have a record of what happened to him?”

  Basil looked at her in amazement then ensconced her in a hug.

  “I can tell you, but I think you should take a seat.”

  Basil indicated one of the fold-down seats toward the back of the cockpit. Sarah flopped on one; her legs were rapidly turning into jelly.

  “Liam Bryan was a really interesting part of my family history. He became a doctor of microbiology, I think it was, and he went on to be a part of the team that invented smart viruses.”

  Basil paused, and Sarah knew he thought this was a big deal.

  “What’s a smart virus?” she asked.

  “You know how you get good bacteria and bad bacteria? Well, a smart virus is a good virus that people invented. It finds another, usually deadly, virus, in someone’s body. The smart virus then removes the deadly virus’s genetic information, and replaces it with something useful. For example, the first use for smart viruses was to target AIDS. It turned AIDS sufferers into mathematical geniuses.”

  “So… my son… he cured AIDS?” Sarah couldn’t believe she was hearing this. “And he was one of your ancestors?”

  “Yes. He helped to cure AIDS and went on to help eliminate all other dangerous diseases. He married Alia Khan, who worked alongside him in the lab, and they had three kids. Liam died in 2106.”

  “Wait… that means he lived to be ninety-two? Is that really my son?” After the amount of tears she’d shed for her lost little one, it was surreal to find out he had not only survived without her, but gone on to do something meaningful and important with his life.

  “Either he’s your son or this is all some mighty strange coincidence. Let’s find out.” Basil scrolled further up the page, and Sarah saw the names of her own parents, right at the top of the family tree, along with their dates of birth and death. She noticed her own death was merely a question mark, as was the name of Liam’s father.

  “That’s my mom and dad.” Sarah began crying. The closeness of this connection, the knowledge that her son had been a great scientist, and that Basil was a direct descendant of hers, all rolled together and she began to sob. “I’m sorry, it’s just so big,” she cried, as s
he tried to wipe away the tears.

  “Take a minute.” Basil patted her on the shoulder reassuringly and she looked up at him with tears in her eyes.

  “You’re my only living relative,” she said softly.

  “And you’re mine,” he pointed out. “Looks like neither of us are getting out of family gatherings from here on in.”

  She managed a smile when he said that. “So, how in the world did my family end up in Trinidad of all places?”

  “Because Liam and Alia were scientists.” Basil said it like it was obvious.

  “And… they liked to go on vacation?” Sarah asked.

  “The Trinidad and Tobago Space Center? Big rocket launching place? Famous for being the departure site of the first manned missions to all the planets in the Solaris system?”

  “Maybe it was built after I was cryogenically frozen,” Sarah suggested.

  “It was a bit of a science hub. When the planet’s surface was destroyed, the only survivors were from Trinidad, because everyone piled into a ship while the first shockwave was… you don’t want to know about that, do you?”

  She shook her head. It was bad enough knowing that the Earth was no more, she didn’t want to think about how it happened, how it might have felt for the people left behind, the horror and chaos… her thoughts latched onto it all, and suddenly she was trying hard not to cry again.

  * * *

  When they reached Martina, the moon where Ral had been working, Sarah disembarked The Great Gig with a feeling of deep dread. When she first stepped onto the moon, her atmo-suit’s face mask kept steaming up and she strongly disliked the sensation that if she put her foot down too hard, she would accidentally bounce up into the air and maybe float away into space. As she got used to the strange weightless sensation, however, she found it was fun to make little bunny hops and gently drift back to the ground. It did little to take her mind off the fear that Ral might be dead.