Good Morning all!
In my first post of this year, I told you that I was striving to have my short stories published. I also said that if any of those stories were rejected, I would share them here. Well, that has occurred so for your enjoyment, here is the first part of a little science fiction piece for you to enjoy!
*****
In my first post of this year, I told you that I was striving to have my short stories published. I also said that if any of those stories were rejected, I would share them here. Well, that has occurred so for your enjoyment, here is the first part of a little science fiction piece for you to enjoy!
*****
“What is it like?”
“What is what like, Nysa?”
“This new place we are going to? The one you came from?”
Glancing at her wife, Tasya turned to their youngest child and smiled down at her eager face.
“It is like no other place in our galaxy, little star,” she replied, picking Nysa up and resting her on her lap so she could look out the viewport of their small shuttle craft.
“And what is it called again,” Nysa asked, her large blue eyes absorbing each approaching planet as they slowly drifted by them.
“Well,” said Sitara, double checking their flight path on the control dash in front of them before turning to her, “it’s called Earth.”
“Earth,” echoed their little love, her long brown curls—so much like her other mother’s—shimmering with highlights accented by the cabin’s dim lighting as they bounced each time she swiveled her head around to take everything in.
“Yes,” Tasya sighed, looking out herself at the passing wonders she hadn’t seen in ages.
Earth.
She wasn’t sure what they would even find once they reach it, but it was an opportunity, a chance to be themselves without fear and ridicule smothering their lives.
Hearing Nysa whisper something in delight, she looked up in time to see a self automated cargo ship slowly drift overhead. She didn’t know if the vessels moving from one mining colony to the next around them were the same as when she was a child or if they had been upgraded in the last hundred or so years.
Memories, like time, were a funny thing when you had a lifespan of eternity.
“Do not reminisce to deeply, my love,” Sitara’s husky voice broke through her thoughts. “The past is just that, let it lay behind us.”
Reaching out, taking her wife’s hand, she gave it a reassuring squeeze, her hazel eyes meeting honeysuckle brown with a knowing look.
Yes, the past was behind them.
But it was also ahead of them as well.
In an odd sort of way, they were coming full circle—seeking out a new home, like so many of their descendants, free of persecution.
They were an anomaly, after all, in the age of Amaranthine.
Naturally born immortals, the first and few of their kind.
It was a kick to the face of their still living ancestors, one that stung deeply considering it was mother nature herself who had forced them from Earth in the first place centuries ago.
They had endured decades of resentment for it.
But it was time now for their little family to be free.
She wondered briefly, as they watched the self guided machines move about, if the humans that had been left behind were still there, or if they had finally been wiped out.
It had to be at least three or four centuries since anyone crossed back past Mars.
Once the generational ships had been created, the planetside colonies were no longer needed nor wanted. She herself had been born on Eleusis, just past Pluto—Sitara on Aeneid circling Mercury, and Nysa—their third child, had been born on Colony Mythos. Only she herself had ever seen Earth growing up, but only from a port window on family’s private vessel. None of them truly knew what it meant to live on a planet, to touch raw soil, feel the sun itself on their skin, and experience seasons outside of a dome barrier.
She only hoped there was more than hardened magma and water awaiting them.
“Oh,” Nysa exclaimed with excitement, drawing the attention of her mothers. “What are those?”
Looking out, Tasya and Sitara took in a sharp breath, eyes glancing at each other before returning to the massive structures ahead.
Romulus and Remus.
The first space station colonies established in the outer orbit around Mars—and the technological stepping stones for humanity to expand towards distant stars.
Like bulky plane shaped satellites, they drifted in tangent, their solar panels raised towards the Sun along with their solar sails. Sterile blues and greys stood out against the red and yellow flares that emanated from the star and their father planet while every few seconds a flickering of lights would go off like a beacon across them both.
They were ominous and breathtaking all at once.
Yet they remained silent, no transmissions echoing out amongst the matter of space.
“Sentries, little star,” Sitara finally replied, her own eyes growing wide in excitement. “The gatekeepers on the path towards home.”
“You should go wake your brothers, Nysa,” Tasya suggested, giving her daughter a loving squeeze. “We will be passing by Mars soon and then the ISS. They don’t want to miss that.”
A rush of joy and adventure spreading across her face, Nysa hopped down from her mother’s lap and took off to the door at the back of the helm, pressing her hand to the access panel to unlock it, before dashing through into the small living quarters they had been residing in for months.
“Home,” she echoed, turning to her wife. “Are we truly ready for this, Sitara?”
Chuckling, the mocha skinned woman shook her head and gave their still interlocked hands a squeeze.
“It’s a bit late to be having doubts now, my love,” she replied, shoulders tensing a little as she caught some sensor scans lighting up across the dash and checked the readings out carefully.
Examining the data as well, Tasya nodded and sighed. “I know, I just hope we haven’t made a mistake, that we’re not wrong about what we will find once we get there.”
“You are the planetary geologist,” reminded Sitara. “I’m just the pilot and engineer. You tell me. Do you think you are wrong?”
No.
Not really.
She had run hundreds upon hundreds of simulations since her days as a university student, it was her life’s work, and they had all come out relatively the same—no matter the natural disasters that had forced their ancestors off of Earth, the planet would by now have returned to a natural life supporting state of existence.
“No, I’m not,” she replied, releasing a deep breath, forcing her shoulders to relax and ease her nerves out. “By now the planet should be booming with new life, and, hopefully, others like ourselves.”
“You really think our distant cousins have had the evolutionary leaps we have without manipulation?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “And they may very well have exceed us.” Glancing at her wife, she added, “I’m hoping, either way, they are more accepting than our own kind.”
“Not our kind,” corrected Sitara with a bitter look. “The Amaras may be our family, our descendants even, but they are not like us.”
Tasya conceded.
Her wife was right.
In the age of Amaranthine, the Amaras were Gods—immortal evolutionary perfectionists—but created solely by their own hands.
Not like them at all.
When she flipped through the pages of history books and saw reflections much like her own staring back at her, she couldn’t help but see the price immortality had cost those around her.
Like Sitara and their children, they looked nothing like their progenitors who—with their pale skin and solid white eyes—looked like ghostly machines. When they had been wombed and allowed to mature naturally, they had achieved what had taken over a century to perfect—no gene manipulation or cybernetic technology required.
She could only imagine how the doctors who had helped conceive them felt when they were finally born.
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