Written in response to...
A reader prompt (#1).
The Planet of the Blue Horizons
The Planet of the Blue Horizons is beautiful but it is not my home. I crash landed here two months ago, jettisoned from the mothership when the armada finally overtook us. At night I look beyond the blue horizons, up into space and wonder where my family are for, during these past months, no one has signalled, no beacon light has shone, no communication has buzzed through the panels of my destroyed escape pod. It is as if the world has collapsed and it is just me left behind in all the universe.
Inside the escape pod, the buttons and dials lie dark, closed off. The only consolation in this great expanse is my assistant, Tobor. I name him ‘he’ but he is really of no gender. He is neutral but trained to respond to me with human-like warmth and concern. At first I felt his ‘humanity’ as invasive and false but in time I have come to a different perception and I find myself forgetting he is of that ilk who destroyed our ship and stranded me here, alone in this vast planetscape.
‘Scan me,’ he says every morning and I put my eye to the squiggly intermingled lines and blink. And when I do, he releases my day’s rations, bit by bit so I don’t ruin everything by eating them all at once. This ritual is a left over from when I was on the ship but neither Tobor nor I have the wherewithal to change the code and so it goes on; Tobor doling out my day’s minimum energy requirements and me dutifully eating the same meagre supplies. Sometimes I don’t know if he is mother, father, warden or friend but like the strangeness of calling Tobor, ‘friend’, I have forgotten that he treats me as a child. I just accept, as I accept the daily ‘scan me’ check, and the walk to the edge of the cliffs where he and I search the far horizons for signs of life and finding none, and so returning back to the pod — our little dwelling we have begun to call ‘home’. This is my normal now.
Until one day it isn’t. I wake as usual from a serpentine sleep in the tiny capsule which is the escape pod, unwinding myself from its womb-like walls to find the homing beacon lit with a piercing blue as bright as the blue that dominates the planet’s horizons. The beacon blinks too, and beeps with a cascade of bleeps and whistles that brings Tobor to my side at once.
‘Is it the mothership?’ I ask.
For answer, Tobor stares at the dials longer than usual. I swallow my first inclination which is to ask again, ‘is it?’ and so I say instead, ‘it has to be’. Tobor says nothing and so I examine the numbers and check them on my UPS. The Universal Positioning System confirms the co-ordinates and my heart leaps before plummeting again. Assuming it is my family, I now have the co-ordinates for the location and time of my rescue. I should feel elated but instead, I feel a mixture of something I cannot quite name but it takes the form of many questions; is there really someone coming for me? How will I even get to the meeting place? It is as if the fact the beacon has activated is as unreal as the fact I am here, clinging to the side of a perpendicular cliff on a planet with endless blue horizons.
‘Maximum time to rendezvous 16 hours, 0 minutes.’ Tobor’s reminder breaks into my thoughts. I rouse myself and move to the edge of the cliffs and look down.
I have no way of descending, no way of crossing what looks like the blue sea below to the steaming cauldron in the distance where the blue horizons grow more vivid. This alien landscape across which I must now traverse if I am to find my family and rejoin them seems too daunting, too far out of reach for me. I shake my head, ignoring my doubts and punch in a coded reply but the control panels go black.
Tobor notices my downcast glance.
‘Scan me,’ he says and so I eat and with the measly morsels comes a new determination to see this adventure through.
‘We have to leave,’ I say flushing down the dry protein cracker with a mouthful of reconstituted water.
‘Maximum time to rendezvous, 15 hours and 31 minutes.’
‘We have to hurry — stuff those supplies anywhere we can - anywhere there’s a pocket. We won’t need much but we should take as many supplies as we can. Once we’re off these cliffs, I doubt we’ll get back. Not that we’d want to.’
I stop, confused then shake my head. I must allow only positive thoughts to enter my brain otherwise, I am lost.
I glance at Tobor. He can carry a lot in the sling I’m going to make out of the spare space suit. I remember something like it from the ship days. Parents with babies strapped to their backs as they walked the fake gravitational aisles of the craft. I take out the Medi-aid bag and ferret around until I find a pair of sharp scissors which I use to cut a hole in the back of the suit the length and breadth of our chests. I wrap the ends over each other and tie them around Tobor’s back, securing them with a double knot. Then I do the same with my sling.
‘There,’ I say, pleased with my work. ‘That should carry our crackers and water.’
I fill the sack with the rest of our supplies and then put in a spare air breather, and the tool kit I finally un-wedge from under a metal beam in the bottom of the spacecraft. I can think of nothing else we might need, nothing that will make the journey any easier. I still have no idea how we are going to descend or traverse the surreal landscape or even if the rendezvous I was so anxious to make was going to result in a happy reunion or death but I don’t care. I am doing something to change my circumstance and for that, I’m grateful.
‘Maximum time to rendezvous, 13 hours and 16 minutes,’ says Tobor. His voice is a comfort in the raucous echoing vibrations of this strange planet where no sound resembles anything I remember on the mothership. Perhaps it is familiar to those who still remembered Earth but I have no recollection of that distant planet, being born on the ship, one of those babies carried in a sling around the spacecraft like all the hundreds of babies since, knowing nothing except for the star studded view through the portholes as we sped through the black infinity searching for a home, fleeing from the ever present threat of the fleet as they pursued us across space and time.
I flick my eyes to the far horizons. I still have no idea how we are going to descend from this eyrie, high above the clouds, let alone manage the obstacles we might encounter once (if) we make it down.
‘Alright,’ I say, tightening the sling fastened around Tobor’s shoulders, and mine. I take a sip of the tin-tasting water. ‘Let’s go.’
At the lip of the ridge that stretches either side as far as the eye can see, I look deep into the dizzying depths to which we must descend but the scale causes a fuzziness in my head such that I stumble back from the edge and sit down.
‘Maximum time to rendezvous, 12 hours and 55 minutes,’ says Tobor.
‘I know, I know.’
I close my eyes but the terrifying drop swims before my eyes even though I try to block out the craggy sheer cliffs and the land-looking surface almost out of sight below.
‘Maximum time —‘
‘Be quiet, Tobor.’
He is silent. Then comes a hum and a whoosh as a column of steam shoots up past our noses and then drops, thundering down from where it came. I turn to speak to Tobor but he brushes past me and leans over the edge of the cliff as if he were about to launch himself into the air.
‘Tobor,’ I scream.
But he ignores me and it is then I see tiny crampons pinioned to the undersides of his feet as he lifts one then the other.
‘Maximum time to rendezvous, 12 hours and 48 minutes,’ he says.
‘Ok,’ I breathe.
Tobor holds out his hands and draws me close, locking me to his chest. A moment later, giant wings the shape of the sails that blew our ship in the weightless sky, according to the diagrams in the space classrooms, emerge from either side of his cold metallic shoulders. They are the colour of silver with gold edging, quite beautiful.
‘Maximum time to rendezvous, 12 hours and 43 minutes.’
‘I get it,’ I say.
A moment later, Tobor launches us off the ground as another gush of steam shoots up in front of us. Tobor angles his flight to bypass the searing spray and catches the hot updraft and so we are lifted side on to the steam and then dropped as the water rains down. Faster and faster, we plummet, the cliffs streaking past as if they were a meteor shower, as if we are back on the mothership speeding through space. Then, as the vacuous blue below nears and we hurtle to the ground and I think we must crash or drown or somehow die, Tobor angles his wings backwards and we flutter to the ground landing with the smallest bump on the ground. Tobor folds his wings away and lets me go. We are standing on an oozing surface the colour of the deepest blue at night, and it is warm and covers my feet and ankles. I step up and down but somehow remain upright.
‘Scan me,’ says Tobor.
‘Not now Tobor,’ I say delighting in the warmth, feeling the goo wrapping around my space shoes and squeezing. I think, suddenly, of mother. I have not thought of her for a long time. My forgetting was deliberate. I knew once I thought of her and father, I would not stop thinking and I could not let myself succumb to such thoughts. Not now, not on this planet when I am all alone but this feeling, this trickling sensation as if I am drawn into an oozing warmth, this is different. No one has touched me with such warmth as this since the final quick hug on the mothership before they overtook us. And now this.
I lift a leg, seeking to escape, knowing I am being drawn into emotions I cannot let myself feel, not if I am to keep my head clear and my mind set on the prize ahead. Only when I reach the rendezvous point and I know my family are truly coming for me can I let myself drown in these feelings.
‘Ok, Tobor,’ I say.
I place my thumb to his heart, scoop up the small protein cracker and nibble at it. I’m not hungry, not really but I am so enmeshed in the ritual, I don’t have time to think about eating, I just do.
A few moments later, the sustenance courses through my body and I lift my head, energised. It is then I realise the soft goo is moving, like lines in a conveyor belt, they rise and fall, backwards and forwards in parallel to each other, their movements so subtle, it is almost impossible to feel. It is only as I gaze back towards the cliffs do I realise we are on a movable surface for the cliffs are barely visible now, so far away are they hidden behind jets of stream erupting from between the conveyor belt landscape.
‘Will they take us to our destination?’ I ask Tobor.
‘Maximum time to rendezvous, 12 hours and 04 minutes,’ Tobor replies.
‘I think I will take a nap.’
The goo is so soft and the smell emanating from it so delicious — like warm chocolate — that it soothes me and I sink to the ground. The earth, if that’s what it’s called, cradles me. It’s like having a pair of loving arms take me and hug me. I feel my eyes sting with bitter tears. How far away my family are, even if they are still alive.
‘Tobor,’ I call, looking up as his long shadow falls across my body while behind, the brilliant violet sun sets over the moving blue mass. ‘Wake me in a little while.’
It was more than a little while when I rouse because the pale blue horizons speak of an indigo sunrise. I leap to my feet.
‘Tobor,’ I cry. ‘How long have I slept? I told you to wake me! Please tell me we haven’t missed the rendezvous —‘
I scan the skies above. They are a deep blue-violet, quite delicious, but empty. There is no spacecraft, no beacon, nothing, not even a shooting star to show where a ship might be.
‘Tobor,’ I cry again.
‘Maximum time to rendezvous, 0 hours and 20 minutes,’ says Tobor.
‘20 minutes? Tobor, I don’t understand.’
Wildly, I look around but there is still no sign of life other than myself and Tobor. Then I hear a buzzing and feel a strange halting sensation. The conveyor belt stops. A beam shoots out of the sky and lands not 10 metres from where we stand. I gaze in awe at the light, following it’s trail up to the sky, seeing nothing, but feeling a pull that draws me closer and closer to the shining beacon.
‘You did it,’ I say, my eyes dazzled with bright light as I try to refocus on Tobor.
‘Maximum time to rendezvous, 0 hours and 2 minutes,’ says Tobor.
‘Tobor,’ I say, taking his hand and bringing us to the centre of the beam. ‘You’ve been like a brother to me. Thank you for rescuing me and saving me.’
‘Maximum time to rendezvous, 0 hours and 1 minute.’
‘I’ll never forget you.’
‘Maximum time to rendezvous, 0 hours and 45 seconds.’
‘You should come too. I know you think they won’t want you, not after what they did to our ship, but you’ve been my friend. I’m going to be lost without you. Please, come.’
‘Maximum time to rendezvous, 0 hours and 15 seconds.’
The beam intensifies. It grows so bright I am blinded. The buzzing grows to a crescendo. I lose hold of Tobor as the conveyor belt ground shifts and moves. I stumble and almost fall but then the pulling begins and my body is lifted from the ground.
‘Tobor,’ I shout but the words are muffled, lost in the beeping, vanished in the bright blue horizons.
‘Maximum time to rendezvous, 0 hours and 0minutes and 0 seconds,’ says Tobor. ‘Scan me.’
I really hope you enjoyed this week’s ‘Written in response to…’ a reader prompt :-)
Next time, the story behind the story…
And, just to let you know, there’s a slight adjustment to the newsletter publishing schedule. Written in response to…a reader-suggested prompt will stay at the last Sunday of every month but, from July onwards, there will be just two editions. The second instalment will be a behind-the-scenes on how I wrote the story and the inspiration that prompted it.
There’ll still be occasional updates in between :-)
Until next time,
Jacqui