by Sunny Moraine
The problem wasn’t the air.
They had expected it to be the air, until the first atmospheric analysis had revealed a breathable atmosphere, much to everyone’s surprise and eventual delight. No, the air wasn’t a problem. The cold wasn’t the problem; they expected it and came well-equipped for it, with thermal suits, and each individual component of the lander specially designed to withstand the temperatures. It was the cold of distance, of a sun so far removed that it was nearly a star just like every other star in a vast inconceivability of stars. But it wasn’t the problem. The specially designed components also weren’t a problem, after the lander, attempting the first return journey to the orbiting ship above, sputtered and shook and tumbled in a shower of powdered snow and a scream of radio static to the icy landscape below. For the solitary figure who watched it happen, none of that was an immediate problem, because he was alive and on the surface of the planet with the hastily assembled base camp. He had stared up through the mask of his thermal suit and felt a blankness as total and complete as the one he’d spent the last few years traveling through.
Food also wasn’t an immediate problem. He had enough stores to last him a month or more if he was careful with them. Water could be collected by melting the ice. Power was provided by a portable generator, and when he looked at it he imagined it glowing with the internal fusion that scraped energy out of the subatomic corners of the universe. It could provide him with power for a thousand years, at least. Power was not the problem.
As it turned out, the problem was that he was alone.
He watched the lander as it crashed back down a mile from where he stood, the glittering point of the Excelsior tantalizingly far above, unreachable now. He might never know what had gone wrong. It didn’t matter. He was further from home than any human ever had been, and he was alone. The Excelsior was empty, and she fell mindlessly around the planet. He wasn’t even sure what help she could be if he could reach her. The captain, the navigator, the engineer, all dead, all in pieces strewn across the ice. He was a planetary geologist on a world with no exposed rock or land that he could see. It was almost funny.
The first week, he didn’t cry. They had been his friends—friends in a way that no one who hasn’t been tightly contained with someone in a metal tube for years in an emptiness beyond comprehension can understand. He had known them and they had known him, and he had loved them, and he guessed that they had loved him, but he didn’t cry for them, and after the week was over it occurred to him that perhaps he should. So he tried. But he couldn’t.
The nearest planet was millions of miles away, a blue gas giant, and at the beginning of the second week it began to rise, a little blue ball hanging in the sky. It only made him feel more alone as he sat on the ice outside the thermal shelter and looked up at it. At home he had a wife and a new baby. His name was Ramon Cortes. His wife was Sheila. His baby girl was Elisa. He held onto those names like solid things as he watched that little blue ball traverse the dim sky. The ball had a name, he knew, but it was a series of letters and numbers, and it meant nothing to him. There was no one with him to talk to, no one to remind him about the things that mattered.
The blue of the planet was the same blue as the sky of Earth. He remembered that. But he was remembering less and less of Earth and had been for years now. Maybe Earth was simply too much to remember. Earth was home but it also wasn’t. Home was the space station with its wheel arms and its slow stately rotation, but now he supposed this place was probably home. Probably the last home he would ever have. At some point the food had to run out.
He wandered across the rippled ice sheets, under the gauzy stars that shone through the pale mist of the atmosphere, under the little blue giant, under the distant glow of the sun. The landscape was largely flat in every direction. Solid and frozen.
Far beneath it, he knew, was a thick and slow-moving sea.
* * *
Two weeks later, he was as far from the camp as he’d yet dared to go. There were no severe storms on the planet’s surface, no blizzards, but he was eating less than he should have been, and he was finding that he tired more and more easily. Maybe that was slow hunger. Maybe it was something else. Once, he would have been interested to find out. It occurred to him to wonder why he was bothering with rationing. It occurred to him to be curious about what he thought he was saving his life for. Sheila’s face flashed through his mind, Elisa’s face followed it, but they were blurred and indistinct.
He supposed survival was eventually just a habit.
So he walked, and that day he walked out to the point where the camp was a distant speck on the milky horizon. He stood and looked at it, and he turned and looked at the white flat land in front of him, and he debated the relative merits of turning back or continuing on. And he wondered, if he continued on in this way, if he might not bother with going back at all.
There was a light.
For a moment or two he looked at it, glowing and distant, and he wondered what exactly he was seeing. A star. A meteor. An undiscovered moon. Some other distant satellite. Perhaps it was the reflection of the sun on the ice; the brighter star of the sun was rising directly ahead in a dawn that looked like no dawn he had ever seen before. Something else.
It was getting closer. He watched it get closer, and he didn’t feel afraid. He hadn’t felt afraid since the lander went down. At that point, fear might have been permanently beyond him. The ice creaked low and deep under his boots.
The ice was on fire.
Or that’s what it seemed like. Logically he knew that was ridiculous; ice didn’t burn, and even if it did, it didn’t burn like this in a plume of bright flame, a plume that was drawing steadily nearer and nearer, as if it was making for him with a conscious purpose of its own. Those things didn’t happen. And yet this was happening, and as he imagined the fact of fire, the existence of it, the memories he had of it, he realized that he wouldn’t run even if it was fire and it came for him. He was on a world colder than any human who had not experienced it could imagine. He couldn’t even imagine it, not really, with the protection of his shelter and his suit. But fire was heat and light and life, he remembered that much, even if it was life that killed sometimes.
For weeks now he had seen nothing but the ice and the sky, the inside of his shelter, the inside of his suit. The ice groaned under him, and he closed his eyes and spread his arms, wanting so badly to believe that there was something to welcome.
“Hello.”
He opened his eyes. He wasn’t sure how long they had been closed. Time here was sometimes impossible to judge. In front of him, hovering or sitting or floating over the ice was… a shape. A color. A cloud. A mirage. It wavered and shivered in the air, faintly transparent, somewhere between a bright red or orange or yellow or white, like every color of flame in one place. It was warm, gently pulsing through the thick material of his suit, and if it was warm that way he could only imagine the real heat of it.
“Hello,” it said again in a softly melodious voice, and he stared at it. There seemed to be only one immediately sensible course of action.
“Hello,” he replied, and fell silent.
The thing seemed to flicker and shift, and somehow he got the sense that it was thinking, and for the moment he was going to ignore the utter strangeness inherent in the idea that such a thing could think. It was already apparently talking to him, so perhaps it was better to assume that all bets were off in this case.
“It is a nice day,” it said, and it sounded a little hesitant, as though it wasn’t sure this was an appropriate line of conversation.
“I guess it is,” he said, looking up at the dim haze of the sky. He’d been there for many days now, and all of them were pretty much like the others, so far as he could see. But not having much to compare it to… yes, it was a nice day.
“You have… originated from this location?”
He shook his head. “No. I came from…” He took a breath and looked away. “Somewhere else.”
“Ah.” The thing wavered. It seemed somehow disappointed. “I have also originated from… somewhere else.” It paused, and the wavering grew stronger. It was becoming less and less transparent, the edges of it closing in and hardening, the colors shifting wildly. “Please wait a moment.”
It was like watching a picture come into focus. Or… no. He remembered once, seeing a very old camera that had belonged to a great uncle. Seeing his great uncle demonstrate it, snapping a flash of a picture of a smiling Ramon, a child with two front teeth missing. After he took the picture, his great uncle had crouched down beside him and together they had watched the picture develop, the image coming into shape out of vague formlessness.
It was taking human form.
Or humanoid. Even as it solidified and shaped itself, it still had no skin, no hair, no features that he could make out. But it had four limbs, a trunk, and a head, and it cocked its head to the side, and though it had no eyes he could feel it looking at him.
“Is this better?”
He guessed it was, and he nodded. Before, it hadn’t been worse. It was hard to know what it was, when something like this happened. But he got the feeling that the thing had gone through considerable effort to pull itself into shape, and he wasn’t going to disregard that. So he nodded, and the thing made a pleased noise.
“We are both strangers here. Tell me how you came to be here, please.”
“I was…” he started, and looked back at the distant shelter, and at where he knew the wreckage of the lander must be, too far away to see.”We came here to explore. Something went wrong. I’m the only one left.”
“I understand.” It reached out with one of its limbs, and he saw the wavering of heated air over it as it came close to the arm of his suit, but didn’t touch, and it was the pleasant warmth of holding his hands over a crackling fire. “I am also the only one left.”
“Were you part of an expedition?”
“No.” It sounded confused. “I do not remember how I am here.”
Ramon’s brow furrowed, and for a moment he worried about that, though he knew it would be hard to see through his faceplate. If the thing’s vision even worked in any way that was familiar to him. If this wasn’t just a trauma-induced hallucination. “How do you speak my language?”
The creature cocked its head to the side in a distinctly curious fashion. “What is ‘speak’?”
He tried to think of an answer for that. It seemed so basic, so fundamental, and they were doing it, or so he thought. But in two weeks, things that had been very certain had begun to seem far less so, and in the end he simply shrugged and shook his head.
“It’s not important.”
Because he didn’t suppose it was.
* * *
They had been walking for a while before he was sure that it was floating and not walking at all, a few inches above the surface of the ice. They had been talking for a while before he came to be sure that the voice was female. This was something to be less sure of. Two weeks alone, and was it scarcely surprising? Wishful thinking might have been all it was. But he felt sure.
It sounded like Sheila.
He could feel it touching him as they moved, reaching into him and probing, learning. The same way it had known that he needed a more familiar shape. A familiar voice. He imagined it, in a kind of distant fashion: a race of shapeshifters, becoming facsimiles of whatever they needed to be, of whatever was wanted. But he sensed that this was far too simple.
“Where do you come from?”
“You ask me that now? I can’t describe it.” It–she–was talking differently, now, as well. Easier. More… well, more human. She laughed, and it was Sheila’s rich laugh. “It’s… nothing like this. You would have to see it.”
“I want to see it,” he said, and it was true, as much as he wanted to go home, as much as he wanted to live past a few weeks from now. But he knew that all those things were impossible.
“I wish I could take you.” She sounded sad, flickering in place like a candle and waving a glowing arm towards the horizon. “I think… I think maybe I had a craft. But it wouldn’t carry you. It won’t carry me, anymore.”
He was quiet for a time, mulling this over. The ice creaked and crunched under his boots. When he looked down at it, the creature cast light through it, and though he knew it could be half a mile down to the liquid sea, he thought that perhaps he could see shapes moving far below, murky and immense.
He was still staring down when he spoke again. “What are you going to do?” And for a few moments, she didn’t answer.
“I don’t know.” She made a soft sound, something like a laugh, though it was far too sad to really be one, and yet not sad enough to be weeping. “This place is beautiful. But I miss my home.” She was moving a little slower, and before he even realized he was doing it he slowed his own pace to stay near to her. Whichever part of him was turned towards her was warm, and his body was chasing that warmth like a plant reaching for the sun.
He could have asked her for a name to call her by. He didn’t want one.
“I don’t remember my home.”
She flickered again, in a way that he could only interpret as surprised, puzzled. “How can you not remember where you came from?”
He shook his head. “I remember where I came from. I said I don’t remember my home.”
“They aren’t the same?”
“No.” He looked up. The Excelsior had set, the blue ball had set, the distant sun was high in the sky, the milky darkness looming over him in a great dome. Had they ever been the same? Back on the station there were showings of holovids from Earth every night, and people congregated in the theaters, rapt and silent, lost in a shared memory, or, for so many of the younger children, a story that they’d been told and nothing more. His Elisa had been born in space. Did she have a home?
Once, his home and where he had come from had been the same. But he only knew that was so by virtue of logical deduction. He had no memory of it that felt any more real than the holovids. He was like those children, listening to just another story told.
“Maybe this is my home now.”
She seemed to shiver, an almost distractingly human act, and though she had no face for him to tell by, he was sure she had turned away from him. “But it’s so cold here.” She spread her glowing, many-hued limbs, as though reaching for the sky, for what lay beyond it. “My home is so warm. So bright. We live in the light and we feed on it; we sing together, tell each other our stories. We know each other’s minds.” She turned back to him. “I don’t know your mind. I can see it, and I can touch some of it, but it’s like… like more of it is too far away to touch. It’s a strange thing. I can’t understand what I’m seeing.”
“We’re different.” He raised his hands to either side of his headpiece. Suddenly it felt oppressively heavy. “My people would call you alien.”
He felt her smile, like a light fingertip tracing over the surface of his brain. “My people would call you friend.”
He closed his eyes. He had said that perhaps this was his home, but it wasn’t. He could feel that. Maybe this was a home for the dark, slow things drifting under the surface of the ice, maybe it was good for them, but it wasn’t good for him. Back on the station there had been a botanical garden, a massive collection of Terran plants, flowering, a riot of color. But it had to be constantly replenished. The garden was equipped with the best sun lamps, the most advanced soil technology and the most nutritious supplements, the clearest, cleanest water, refined and enriched.
And yet, within a few months’ time, everything they tried to cultivate sickened and died. It was a problem that no botanical scientist seemed able to solve.
Ramon thought he understood it now.
He detached the headpiece and lifted it away, and as he did so he felt the cold rushing in almost like something solid, striking his cheeks and mouth and chin and the side of his neck with light slaps. He inhaled, and it was his first unfiltered breath of the air of the planet. He dropped the headpiece onto the ice, and the faceplate made a clattering noise. She made a quiet sound, and as he turned towards her he could feel her heat through the cold. She wasn’t standing close, but it was almost overwhelming, and he lifted a gloved hand as if to ward her off.
“What’s wrong?” She sounded confused. “What was that you just did?”
“I’m tired of breathing filtered air,” he said simply. He took a step or two away from her and dropped his hand. He didn’t need to protect himself from anything. “Do you breathe?”
She was turning redder, colors shifting faster, until once again she almost looked like a little flame dancing over the ice. He sensed more confusion. “I don’t know what that means.” She paused. “I can feel it when you do it. But I don’t know what it is.”
“When we stop doing that, we die,” he said, and his voice was flat and quiet. “Do you do that?”
“What?”
“Die.”
“I…” She closed the ends of her arms together, as though clasping hands she hadn’t quite managed to form, and lowered her head. “We fade. We go out.”
“When?”
“When it’s our time,” she said. He couldn’t even begin to speculate about whether or not such a creature could weep. But she sounded as though she might be close to it. “Why are you asking me these things?”
Ramon took a step towards her, and then another. The ice cracked again, and more loudly now, and he saw that under where she floated there was forming a shallow puddle of water. “How do you know when it’s your time?”
“We feel it.” She raised her head, and he though he could begin to see features drifting across where her face might be, vague and dim and half formed. The flash of an eye. The corner of a mouth. “Inside us. It’s the same way we know it’s time to feed, time to rest.”
All around him was cold, and she was a bright pillar of heat before him, and he stepped closer. He could feel the skin on his face beginning to flush and tighten. “We know things the same way. I know…” She seemed like Sheila. The flash of the mouth was her mouth, a mouth he had kissed so many times before and not kissed in years. The rich brown eye was Sheila’s eye. He missed her, yet he remembered her in fragments, the same as everything else now. Everything but the sky and the ice.
“I know.” He went to her.
She tried to move away, but he didn’t know it. As he stepped into that warm embrace, as she struggled, his hair caught fire and began to burn, and from a distance he could have been her twin, his glow hidden in the bland gray of a thermal suit. His skin blackened and crackled and he didn’t scream. She didn’t scream. She enclosed him in her bright arms and held him as he burned. The ice cracked and shuddered, and the bottom vanished from under his boots and he slipped away from her. It was a long, long fall, a deep chasm opening into dark water, and he fell into it without a sound.
She watched him go. There were memories in her mind, memories that were not hers. A woman, a child, concepts that she both understood and did not understand at all. She stared into the abyss below and then stared up into the one above, her own world too far away to conceive of. She tried to remember it, and found that while she could, it felt no more real than the memories she had stolen.
All stories.
Floating above the surface of the ice, leaving a glistening trail of melt behind her, she began to move away towards the horizon, toward where she knew the shelter would be. The blue ball of the gas giant rose behind her, and the Excelsior followed it, dead and silent.
She was alone.
About the Author
Sunny Moraine moonlights as a writer with whatever time her pursuit of a doctorate in sociology leaves her, which is not as much as she’d like. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including “Like a Thorn” and “Like a Long Road Home“. She lives in a Hobbit hole outside Washington DC with her fiancé, two cats, and the voices in her head. You can visit Sunny here.
©2009 Sunny Moraine
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