Directly ahead of them, like a marvellously large pearl in
a sea of black, was a beautiful turquoise planet with white wispy clouds
circling it. It glowed in iridescent hues of blue and green, winding in ribbons
of swirling vortices and currents. It was very similar
to earth except that the colours were different, and the oceans and land masses
strangely shaped.
For those who had never seen a habitable planet from close
up, which was everyone except Rose; it was the most wonderful sight, like
seeing your first ice cream cone. It looked as delicious. The others had all
been born, and had lived their whole lives, on neon lit space stations or
mining docks, or under bio-pods on planets with hostile environments; none with
this rosy, airy aspect. Unconsciously their mouths hung open as they drank in
the sight.
“It looks wonderful,” said Sweet Mary quietly to
Righteous. “So much light.”
She squeezed his hand and laid her head against his arm. It
seemed they had become friends, a development not entirely lost on Dutch who
felt strangely discomfited by the sight but couldn’t quite say why. Jealousy
was a strange new emotion to her and she didn’t like it one little bit. To
distract herself from the unpleasant feeling tightening in her chest, she
interrupted Sweet Mary’s description mid flow.
“We’ve picked up a signal,” said Dutch, and all the heads
turned to her as one. “Standard Federation-issue distress-beacon signal; coming
from somewhere on this planet. Officer Angelo tells me it’s probably from an
ore-miner who got accidentally sucked into the wormhole about a year ago.”
“That’s what the big expedition was for,” said Rose. “My
son and his crew were supposed to attempt to rescue him. As well as explore
what was here, I suppose.”
“Well, it seems we’ve found him. Whether he’s still alive
is a different story.” Dutch looked at the planet ahead.
“So. We’ve got a
decision to make. What do we do now? Do we land or what?” she said, and from
the looks on their faces it seemed none of them had any idea. The ‘we’ in her
sentence was mere politeness. Once again she was going to have to decide for
them. None of them had much experience of these matters and were as reliant on
her as a bunch of babies.
“This place seems to have the right mix of air and water
so I reckon it’s habitable. Well, that’s what the computers tell us anyway. We
have enough food supplies for a few years but here’s the bad news. We might not
have enough fuel to blast off again once we’re down on the surface. We used an
enormous amount of it trying to get away from the grip of the red giant over
there and we’ll probably use what’s left trying to make a soft landing. So,
once we land, we might be there for a very long time.” Dutch looked around at
their expectant, blank faces and waited for the message to sink in. From all
her mining and exploring expeditions, she knew a lot about strange uninhabited
planets. She knew the loneliness first and foremost. They’d be cut off from
their own kind forever, and that does strange things to people. The planet
might look appealing, but it was a big empty place for just five people to live
in. Then she continued.
“The alternatives are few. Going back through the
wormhole, for me, Sweet Mary and Righteous, is not an option. We might have
enough fuel for the journey, but not enough to outrun the Federation fleet once
we emerge on the other side. The only other thing we can do is keep flying in
the hope of finding an inhabited planet or space station, but the chances of
that are small according to the computers and scanners. There are no other
man-made, or sentient signals anywhere. We’re just picking up normal space
clutter. And of course, the distress beacon.”
She knew it was going to be the distress beacon that
tipped the odds. Human beings are far too curious to walk away from something
like that. What if the person was still alive? That thought would haunt them
for the rest of their lives.
“So,” she finished. “What do you think?” Her eyes went
automatically to the next alpha-male in the pecking order.
“I suppose we should make an attempt to go back through
the wormhole but somehow I don’t think you will,” said Officer Angelo with a
wry smile and shrugged his shoulders in good humoured resignation. He wasn’t an
enforcer at heart. He was a peacekeeper.
He had been brought up by a doting mother who had watched her
husband ruin their first child and had overcompensated on the second. She had
been only fourteen years old when she had become pregnant for the first time.
Staring unbelievingly at the blue indicator on the wiz stick she sat spellbound
on that toilet seat for a good hour trying to assimilate the ramifications of this
new information and what to do about it. The father was a vicious drunk; maudlin,
insecure and possessive. He was also very old school and she knew he would
never let her have an abortion. Not that she didn’t want a child, but she knew
what kind of temper he had and shivered at the thought of him disciplining the
child like he disciplined her.
She had been right and he had thrashed them both bloody.
Under his heavy hand the child, a boy, had become a cowering, neurotic, nervous
wreck who finally overdosed on a designer drug at the age of twelve. At the
funeral, his only comment to her had been. “That’s what happens when you spoil
a child.”
So she shot him with his own gun. Right up close. She
waited till he had passed out one Saturday night, put the .38 Police Special to
his temple and blew his brains out. She wore her washing-up gloves to make sure
there were no fingerprints on the gun and that the shot left no gunpowder
residue or blood splatters on her hands and arms. Then she wiped the gun clean
and put it in his dead hand. She was a cop’s wife after all, so she knew the
drill. He never stopped shooting his mouth off about his police work and police
procedure – and now that knowledge came in handy.
The police ruled it suicide, which was nothing unusual in
their line of work. Alcohol poisoning and suicide were the two biggest cop
killers around. But she’d killed him as surely as he had killed their first
son.
When she found out a few weeks later that she was
posthumously pregnant by him, her first impulse was to get rid of it as if it
was some spawn of the devil and that he might reincarnate as her baby to come
back and haunt her. But through a combination of indecision, denial and fear,
she didn’t do anything until it was too late. She was ultimately glad of that.
The child was her joy and her friend. He revived her interest in life and gave
her a reason to carry on. They did everything together. They went to operas,
ballets, museums, films, circuses, funfairs, everywhere there was joy and
beauty, fun and laughter. He learned to respect other people simply because she
respected him, and treated him like a human being…not a child. She taught him
empathy and kindness by example in deed and word, never saying bad things about
others and always trying to find the good. And she taught him to always help
people less fortunate than himself.
Yet, despite all this, he eventually became a cop. Life is
funny like that. You can’t shrug off fate so easily. Anyway, he was a very
different sort of cop from his father. He had no axe to grind, no chip on his
shoulder, no pent up anger from his formative years, so he was just and humane
in all his dealings. He never used force and he would never intentionally harm
another person, especially not a woman, no matter what they had done. Also,
although he knew nothing about his mother’s little lapse in loving-kindness
towards his father, it had perhaps unconsciously influenced his attitude and
made him even more sympathetic towards Dutch’s crime of killing her abusive husband. In either case he
did not actively seek to put her under arrest again. She would probably have
kicked his ass anyway.
Dutch snorted at him in affectionate derision and turned
to Rose. “What about you?” she said more kindly. “I know you miss your boy….”
Rose looked out the window at the wonderful new world
facing them.
“He……..” She didn’t know how to say it. “I don’t really
have anything to go back to. My boy’s got his wife to look after him now, and
there won’t be that much space for me in their lives. Anyway, if we go back
they’ll be waiting for us, and that’ll mean you and Sweet Mary and Righteous
will all go back to jail….”
“…and be executed in all likeliness,” said Dutch,
finishing her sentence for her. “Righteous?”
Righteous still clung to Sweet Mary’s hand, his face
uplifted as if he was listening for something. They had to wait a long time
before he could pull himself together and formulate any words. It was hard
seeing a great big man like that struggle like a baby.
After several false starts he said, “Something has
happened to me here. It’s hard to explain. But I feel like I have fallen into a
pit. This new world is dark to me. I cannot see what I used to see.” He paused
for a long time. “But I don’t want to go back. I don’t know why except that I
also don’t want to see anything happen to Dutch and Sweet Mary. I cannot see
this new planet, but by all reports it will be a wonderful place to live. I
also think it would be good to find this man who is stranded here.”
“Okay,” said Dutch, and turned to Sweet Mary expectantly,
who almost jumped in surprise that Dutch would ask her opinion.
“I don’t know,” she dithered. “I’ll go where everybody
else goes.”
“Okay then,” said Dutch. “It’s unanimous. Buckle up
girls!”
