Prologue to The Lost City
It was raining. The planet had 250 sunny days and 75 rainy ones. That’s how the terraformers made it. That’s why it was perfect for agriculture. It was supposed to be a sunny day. But it was raining. Marion looked up and closed her eyes, letting the drops fall onto her face. At least they washed down her tears. She allowed it. She allowed the water to collect in her deep-set eyes and then like an overflown pond the water poured out of its basin and continued its path to the ground. She allowed it for a minute. To hold her breath. To try to calm down. To be brave.
She forced herself to come back to reality, even though all she wanted to do was to forget everything but the rain. She looked down. Down at the grave they had just placed her mother in. For a second, she remembered being four years old and on a massive settlers’ ship, coming to this planet. She sat in her mother’s lap and she was telling her all about the new planet, how there would be plenty of space and how great it was to provide medical help to the first colonists. They would have a home. Fresh food every day. Marion couldn’t imagine it, she was a space station girl. She was born just as her parents were finishing their degrees.
Then another flash, another picture. Her mother valiantly bending over her equipment, trying to understand, trying to find a cure, racing against time, and then slumping over the table, the loser. Marion was there the moment it happened. She didn’t even try to make her be alive, she looked the same way her dad did a few days before. She didn’t even cry. Not until her mother’s body hit the bottom of the shallow grave they dug.
She looked away now, at the faces of her companions. Children stood around the grave. A few bending over shovels, looking at her. She was the oldest. They expected her to tell them to cover her mother’s body with dirt. Marion hesitated. She didn’t want to do it. She wanted to curl up to her mother’s warmth, hear her father’s laughter, not this. Not burry them.
There was a movement in front of her. Lily, her little sister was looking up at her now too, expectantly. She was begging her sister with her eyes, but for what? To make it all go away? To make their parents be alive? To make this a nightmare that they would all wake up from? Marion wanted to scream at her, to shout, to question what was she, what were they all expecting her to do? She was just a child herself. Before she knew it, the scream bubbled out of her, and she was shouting at the other kids to do it, cover the grave, and she turned around, running away, away. Away from everything. Away from the responsibility, the future, the dead and the living.
When she was suddenly out of breath, she stopped. Looking around she noticed that she had run into one of the gardens next to a house. An empty house, all the adults dead. There were barely any of them alive anymore, just the kids. Why would a disease kill the strong and leave the weak? That was what her mother kept asking. Marion didn’t know.
The wind caught up. Before, the rain was pouring straight down, and then suddenly a wind came. There was a roar in the sky, and Marion knew what it was, a ship. The planet was under quarantine, no one was supposed to land. Curious, and forgetting her grief for the moment, she raised her hand to shield her eyes from the downpour. It was an egg-shaped ship, bright lights coming from it. It slowly, but deliberately landed on the pad that they used for supply ships. She ran again, but this time towards the ship, hoping that there would be people to save them, to save her from having to become a mother to her sister, from a future full of hardships. She ran but stopped suddenly as she saw that the things exiting the ship weren’t people, but the aliens people called ‘demons’. Their tall, lithe bodies, alabaster skin and jewel-coloured hair made them imposing, and scary figures. There were three of them, in the middle a female of the species stood regally in flowing red fabric. She swerved her head towards Marion, fixing her eyes on the girl. She wanted to scream again at the sight of those eyes but caught herself just in time. The alien had black eyes with red pupils, and a sense of dread filled the human child.
“Do not be afraid, human, we have come to rescue you. We have a cure for the sickness ravaging the planet,” she spoke with a clear, though forced voice. “Where is your leader?”
Marion pointed towards the hut where the few remaining adults were trying to keep each other alive, and the woman glided towards it, seemingly not minding the rain. Two males followed her, obviously her guards.
The girl looked after them. She knew that everything was going to change. Her old life had died, and she was beginning a new path, without her parents, but with her sister. The thought of the unknown scared her, but she had to go on. With a new resolve, she squared her shoulders, and headed back to the grave, back to her sister, and her new life. Whatever it may bring.
#scifi #alien #death #newbeginning #children
Where to begin
Consider the arrival of a new tenant to a basement apartment. He is a young man in his late twenties. He has a goatee and sideburns, because the year is 1998, and most young men of that time had those things on their face. He wears jeans and a t-shirt, has very few belongings, all of which fit in the bed of a rusted pickup he’s backed into the drive of an old home. He turns the key in the door and enters for the first time to scope out the place he will call home. It is possible our story begins here.
It is also possible it ends here. Had we been following the previous tenant, this might feel right, as an ending. Perhaps our concern should be with this other person. He too is a young man in his late twenties, his appearance so similar as to be the same, whose departure is its own beginning. So you see, these decisions of story are arbitrary, and fallible. Mistakes might be made, wrong choices, when we attempt to decide such things.
And the question is, where to go from here. Which young man should concern us? The one arriving, or the one departing? And if we choose incorrectly, what then? I say we, but clearly it is I who must do the choosing. I must decide for us. And you must trust me.
I choose the man arriving. We will begin there. It will be our point of entry to the story, but not necessarily the beginning. Though at some point we may find ourselves back where we began. Or starting over. It all has much to do with the house.
The house has been crouched over the basement for one hundred years. It has a long history, and this history is unknown to us. The history may matter a great deal, but we cannot know how it matters, only that it does. We cannot know all the souls who’ve lived in the home, only that they have. Meals have been prepared, meat cooked in ovens, sauces simmered on stoves, bottles of wine spilled, children conceived. Wallpaper has been chosen, installed, enjoyed, become tiresome, been removed. Terrible fights have occurred. Love has been shared. And the residue of it all lingers like smoke in the walls.
People have died within these walls, and some have lived, more or less. There was word of a suicide. These details are lost to us. We know only that they must influence anyone who enters. Some people are more sensitive to these things, some less. But the house has had experiences over time, and absorbed them, as all houses do. And these things come to bear. They matter.
They matter because the basement is no longer a basement. Where once it had concrete blocks for walls and bare earth for a floor, it now has a carpeted floor, finished walls painted a neutral shade to beckon new tenants. The house above has been cut into four separate dwellings. It is no longer a family home, but home to many, some for short periods of time. People come and go now more than ever before. The life of the house has accelerated, as the house itself has aged. The older it gets, the faster it spins. It might wish to hold its weary head.
So there is risk involved in choosing where to begin, you see. But we've chosen. Or rather I've chosen, and you must trust me. Let us begin.
