Post date: May 20, 2017 1:52:57 PM
Caradorynee: Kin
#2
Lark considered the girl, who looked so much like his old friend Baylee Wright that he ached with remembrance. How many years had passed since he’d heard her laughter or felt the radiance of her smile bathe him in warmth? Centuries. It had been centuries.
“That explains so much,” Lark finally said, releasing a long, slow breath, “and nothing at all.”
The human, only human, who had yet to furnish him with her name, frowned. He held out his hand and she handed him back the chipped bowl. He positioned the fingers of his left hand at the edge of the bowl and willed the water molecules to separate from the crushed suegat reed.
The reed mass glowed orange as it rose from the bowl to hover in mid air. He unceremoniously dumped the now powdery contents of the suegat reed to the ash floor.
He held the now purified bowl of water out toward her again. When she had taken it, he asked.
“If you did not come through the rift, how did a human…woman come to be here, on Caradorynee?”
“We crash landed,” she said, after taking a long swallow from the bowl. Her lips glistened for a moment before she licked the droplets away.
“There are others?” Lark asked. He could not hide his surprise. Maybe that explained why the Dueanian elders had been so harsh in their retribution.
The young woman shook her head. “Only I survived.”
Lark took a breath. Her sorrow was palpable.
He knew about sorrow. He’d lived with it so long that he feared a large part of him had withered to blackness, yet he remained alive. Did his beloved still live, the woman he’d taken for his second wife? He’d not seen her since he’d been thrown into exile. Did she still exist or had the transformation consumed her like it had so many others? And what about their children?
“Where exactly am I?”
Lark turned his attention back to the girl. Tentacles of his sorrow tingled along his many Shegata markings. She’d drained her bowl without him even noticing.
“Do you have any knowledge of the planet Earth?”
The young woman handed Lark back the bowl. “Only what was in the Artemis library’s archives. The ship’s satellite system lost contact with the planet some sixty or seventy years before I was born.”
Lark could not hide his disappointment. The girl had no knowledge of current or even recent events of the place where he’d been born. He sighed and once more began adding some suegat reed to the now empty bowl.
“Earth? Was it still intact back then?”
“Intact?” she repeated with a frown. “You sound like it bloody just exploded or something.”
Lark considered the possibility that the earth in his previous alternative universe had done exactly that, exploded or simply died out. It certainly would explain why he’d encountered no Dueally’s in the past few centuries.
Lark’s sorrow deepened. If his earth no longer existed there was no going back for him. No matter what his plan for the girl had entailed it would not be wise to try to return. If his old earth didn’t exist who knows where he’d end up if she did manage to take him back through the rift.
Lark busied himself with extracting the salt content from the suegat reed leaving the water a murky greenish colour. He did not speak again until he’d handed the bowl back to the girl.
“Your ship…the Artemis was a CBM vessel?”
The young woman shook her head. “No, the Artemis was a SR vessel. The Colony Building Mission vessels were decommissioned soon after Mars and a few of the outer planet moons in our solar system were colonized.”
Lark’s eyebrows raised. “More planetary colonies than Mars?”
“Planetary, no,” she replied after she’d taken a sip. “The colonies are on satellite moons. Jupiter’s Ganymede and Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus. Plus Uranus’s moon Oberon, but that’s just a repair and supply outpost for the PE vessels.”
“PE vessels?”
“Planetary Exploratory vessels. They’re commissioned to investigate beyond our solar system.”
“And your ship was a SR?”
She nodded to him. “A Supply Retrieval vessel. We retrieved supply beacon pods and delivered them to Oberon or piggybacked them to the closest SR vessel going in the direction the pod was slated for.”
“Sounds like outer space has turned into one giant freeway express,” Lark said.
Lark noticed her eyes sparkling as she laughed at his comment. “That’s one way of looking at it.”
“The fertility programs,” he began, “aboard the CBM vessels, were they also decommissioned?”
The girl took a longer drink from the bowl. “Not immediately, but gathering further eggs and sperm became no longer necessary.”
Lark nodded. “Then you were born naturally…I mean you had living…”
The young woman laughed again. “Oh, yes, I wasn’t conceived in a petrie dish or spent my first moments of life in a test tube, if that’s what you mean. My parents were living and they did actually have sex.”
Lark felt himself blush, which at his advanced age was a feat in and of itself.
“It’s good to know that the human race survived, even if they did so on another planet,” he paused, “or moons. Baylee would be pleased and also so disappointed.”
The girl finished her second bowl and lowered it cautiously. “You know,” she said slowly, “that’s the second time you’ve said the name Baylee.”
Lark swallowed hard. “Yes, she was very important to me,” he said.
The girl licked her lips and Lark had the feeling that she was suddenly very nervous. She bit her bottom lip and swallowed, then she said softly. “My middle name is Baylee. Star Baylee Wright.”
Lark’s breath caught. He felt himself begin to shimmer. There was no way he could explain what he was feeling, it was so surreal. After what could have been minutes but was probably only seconds he smiled. “Well, Star Baylee Wright, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I think I should inform you though, that you more than likely have my blood running through your veins.”
©Human in Inhuman Worlds by Janet Merritt