Page 7 of Planet Zero
The ground was no longer rocking. She strained her ears for sounds, and couldn’t get anything. Debating the wisdom of showing her face to the world, she nevertheless began to crawl, pushing at the furs, seeking a way out from under the collapsed shack.
Reaching the edge, she carefully lifted the heavy furs. The rush of fresh air hit her face, and she gulped lungfuls of it, her eyes blinking at the light. Ehr was beginning to set, telling her that the night had gone by, and most of the following day had as well.
Something swiped near her face and she screamed, forgetting that she must stay quiet, lashing out blindly with the hand that was numb from being cramped in the same position too long. Hitting soft pelt.
“Goddamnyou,” she wheezed, barely able to catch her breath from fright. The Yuux chirped merrily.
She pushed them away angrily. “Some protectors you are. Go away.”
But she didn’t really want them to go away. She wanted to grab them both and snuggle them close to her chest, to feel their warmth and heartbeat. But the excited Yuux flew up to conduct their rambunctious play out of reach.
Addie crawled out and stood, looking around.
Here and there, signs of former organized life lay visible among the freshly plowed ground. Broken pottery. Torn skins that used to cover the teepees. An axe without a handle.
The light wind picked up and threw dry sand into Addie’s face. She blinked fast against the grit.
“Anne?” she called out, and the breeze carried the name away. “Iolanthe?” she called louder.
There was no answer.
Large collapsing holes in the freshly turned dirt pointed to where Wrennlins had slithered back to the pits of hell that was their home, gone only until the next time they got hungry.
Addie started walking amid the ruts.
“Hoban?” she whispered without hope. “Anybody.”
No one heard her. No one was left to hear.
A lone untouched bush sported rust on its dark green leaves - spilled blood.
Addie stopped with hands hanging down her sides in a sort of sedated, poleaxed state, absorbing the absolute, final stillness of the open plains around her. She listened to the sounds of nature unadulterated by conscious beings.
Finally, she turned around and shuffled back to the collapsed shack.
She worked until Ehr set and Ihr emerged, pulling the heavy furs aside, moving the broken poles, digging through the debris to locate things that could be salvageable and transportable.
In between her tasks, she made a short trip to a Qom thicket some two miles away to find a few tubers and make herself a drink. Her clay pot had broken, but she improvised by using the largest pot piece for a container. She drank the juice and chewed the stringy tasteless tuber flesh that she supplemented by the equally tasteless brown berries she’d picked up along the way.
And then she lay down to sleep. She was tired, so tired. She wondered with curious detachment if the Wrennlins would return. Was it a habit of theirs to come back to the site of a previous hunt? She didn’t know and cared little. Why worry? Wrennlins could erupt without warning at absolutely any place on this thoroughly unenjoyable planet. She was as at risk of being gobbled up by the gray tongue-less mouth where she lay as she would be a mile away, ten miles away, a hundred.
The Yuux made themselves comfortable next to her head.
Apart from them, she was truly, utterly alone.
???
She woke up early, before Ihr had a chance to hit the horizon. It was hard to judge the exact length of days on this planet, but the women had figured that the “night” was much shorter in duration, only a quarter of the full day cycle, and that the entire cycle lasted longer than the twenty-four earth hours. It was an estimation, of course, but that was what their bodies had felt.
At the thought of the women, Addie’s breath hitched inside her chest. She hadn’t formed a real kinship with any of them, not even Anne, but the feeling of loss pierced her sharply.
She rose and finished up her tuber juice for breakfast, wiping the concave piece of the clay pot clean and tucking it into the sack she had packed yesterday. The bulging sack contained all of her earthly possessions. Err, planetary possessions, whatever the name of this place was.
It wasn’t one of the named planets in which Earth scientists were interested enough to call it anything but its assigned discovery sequence number. Addie’s ill-fated cruiser’s computer had referred to it as TY75734b. The flashing numbers had seared themselves onto Addie’s eyes from the alarm screen as the spaceship system had been warning, warning them of getting too close, of a potential collision as they had hurled down through its rarefied atmosphere…
Addie hoisted the sack over her shoulder. It had happened. There was no changing the past. She had crash-landed and had been forced to make her life here, in the City of Seraphims, with the women who had come here before her.
And now they were gone, and another chapter of her life had come to an end.
