I looked over at Planka, my Planka. So beautiful lit up in the starlight. Her bulging abdomen, promising our future, glowed against the bright backdrop, a foreboding presence, tomorrow it would be gone. As any father would have done, I began pondering her appearance. Would she look like my mother or would she be atypical and unique like my Planka?
If Planka had looked like my mother, I would have thought her ugly, plain, commonplace. But my Planka was different, like me, made for me, and I for her. Two of a kind, a pair. I thought of us as a couple on Noah’s ark. In the place of the flood waters arising, we had light years of inky space glittering with whitish stars around our floating safe haven. And instead of being taken in, we were cast out, in order that we might live, and that they might live. Planka turned towards me with those lovely eyes, bigger than any I had seen. Red like the sunset, and skin wrinkled with patches of ash staining her striking solid skin, white and smoldering.
“Darling, why are you staring?” She giggled in a sing-songy way. I took one of my appendages and wrapped her up.
“Are you nervous about tomorrow?” I gulped uneasily, for I certainly was.
She shook her head with an air of gracefulness and hesitation. With an understanding I nodded and fixated my attention on the pale blue speck in the hazy arm of the Milky Way that stretched up in the sky above us. Looking at that marble compared to the galaxies swirling above our heads, shooting stars here, and nebulas over there to the right, it was unfathomably the only habitable environment. What a waste of potential, the cosmos proved boring, impractical in the creation of only one living planet. After hundreds of explorations, billions of dollars spent, and countless astronauts lost, the final frontier, space, was labeled as void of any life form, or potential for life, besides the astronomically tiny planet Earth.
“I bet Dr. Rice, and Dr. James, and Dr. Milk are more nervous than you are my dear. I can picture them pacing around their offices, waiting for our message, tinkering with their machines and satellites; just waiting for our call, like a poor sap that has been stood up on Valentine’s Day.” She chirped a laugh and sighed at their memory.
It was only her big heart that caused her to hold such fond views of them. I despised them, they were brutal and tortuous. After draining their world leaders till bank vaults echoed with silence through funding endless searches and sending probe after probe to deep space, Dr. Rice, and Dr. James, and Dr. Milk wishing to keep their luxury leather recliners, leased BMWs, and private villas, vowed to put life into space since none other could be found. I shuddered at their resolve, remembering what that had meant for my Planka and me.
“I can’t believe we once called that home.”
“Don’t you miss it at all?” she whispered.
“No, I don’t. Not a single person. Or a single thing. I was meant to be an outcast, ugly, alien, abnormal, and no one would let me forget it. I’m glad we never can go back. Good riddance, the earth can rot!”
“Eryl…” She covered my scaly hand with her fingers and sought to comfort me with her presence. And I was comforted. As much as the experiments, surgeries, and side glances, cut into me, I was made for Planka, and her for me, so that we could start over again, out on our floating ark. I ran my four remaining fingers over her scars and skin grafts. She was gorgeous, altered for me, and I for her, to produce the baby that grew inside her, the hope for mankind. Our adoration had produced this child, others saw it as an experiment, a test of the evolutionary theory outside of Earth’s confines. But I saw it simply as a natural act. I drifted to sleep with my love curled up next to me, and my Planka smiling at the earthrise. I closed my eyes on the spinning galaxy, and thought of all the possibilities.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
A whirring sound called me into consciousness. Planka was shaking, and panting. Her lungs, shrunk specifically so that she could breathe in this combination of gasses and debris on our planet, were not strong enough for the shock passing through her body. Her red eyes seemed to open wider than I had ever seen them. I felt helpless, and simply sat while holding her hand.
My Planka, in pain, she had known it all her life. It always was tortuous to think of her hurting, an overwhelming sense of guilt rushed through as I thought about her life of pain, born into a test tube, shrinking the lungs, enlarging the heart, stitching her together with genetically engineered skin and scales, test chambers, removal of glands, addition of arms, and the denial of others. I could only imagine those things, but to see the flickering of sufferings on her face; I could feel the sting of not only my past modifications, but in my ability to take that pain from her.
I closed my eyes. And then I opened them. Closed them again. Still the same scene. I decided to leave them shut. Though not for long, as I found I could still see the negative of the image when my eyelids came down, I couldn’t escape the sight. I opened one last time, to behold my daughter. She looked like the old pictures I had seen of my mother, brown hair and pale, pale skin. I hoped that was all that passed down from my family line. I could only feel pride as I looked into her eyes, large like my Planka’s, two rubies gleaming and intelligent. I held her and she had inherited my thick skin.
So far Darwin had done us good, I thanked him until my daughter sucked in her first breath, but didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t exhale. I gasped for my own breath as she struggled to let out hers. A scream animated her chubby cheeks, but no sound came, no tears fell, no relief came. My heart pounded, my eyes watered, my fists clenched. The color drained from my stretched skin, and she absorbed those hues, face changing through the spectrum of colors from beet red to a ripe mulberry. I sat rocking our failed scientific experiment in my arms, thinking of Noah, of sacrifice, of death, of a destroyed world.
Written by Bronwyn Seward
sewardbd@mail.masters.edu
The SciFi Spire 