Page 8 of Planet Zero
She started walking but then stopped and turned around, surveying the place. She could no longer recognize it, all turned up dirt covering the mowed-down structures and vegetation. Wrennlins left no bodies to bury.
With one final glance, Addie headed out to the world, her direction the Olzol Mountains. Wasn’t there always something exciting about the mountains that drew people to them? She’d go, check them out. She had time, after all. A lifetime. No one was waiting for her here. No one was waiting for her on Earth, either, where she had been presumed dead two years since.
Addie walked all day, stopping twice to rest and eat off the land. The rocky steppe with low-stature flora spread in front of her as far as the eye could see. Trees didn’t exist here, but the shrubbery was variegated and plentiful, and so was the myriad of grasses of unimaginable kinds. And moss. Moss was everywhere.
Addie had grown very fond of the mosses, mostly for their useful application in domestic chores, but also for their beauty and softness. Here, where towering trees didn’t exist, the moss was king. It sprawled on the ground and covered rocks in intricately shaped patches that ranged in color from pale greens and yellows to oranges and reds, and olive, and even blue. And it was soft, friendly. Where grasses could cut you to the bone, and bush leaves released liquid that burned through the skin, Addie was yet to come across a poisonous moss.
When the night came, she unrolled a skin pallet on the mossy ground, thinking about Sathe and her secret of making the hide so pliant. Poor Sathe, she didn’t deserve her fate.
But did any of them?
Munching on the dried mushrooms she had salvaged from the shack, Addie stared at the perpetually clear sky that never darkened. She longed to see the stars. The sight of a night sky would have made her feel a little closer to home. She only wanted something familiar to cling to. In this foreign world where she didn’t belong, where nature itself seemed to want to expel her, she yearned for an anchor to ground her, for a grip to hold on to.
She spent a restless night. Sounds of animals rustling in the brushland nearby kept waking her up, and she woke up tired the next morning.
Her progress was slower today as she stopped to forage for food. In the afternoon she came across a pool of Jat sand and decided to take a bath.
Sand, of all things, provided cleansing on this planet the way the water did on Earth. But not every type of sand; only Jat sand. Dark brown in color, it was medium-grained and a little oily to the touch, but not so oily as to leave a residue. It was almost impossible to hold Jat sand in your hand. Its slick consistency made the grains slide through the cracks in the fingers and trickle away, taking the grime with them.
Jat sand was everywhere in small quantities, but in some low-lying areas, it congregated in dips, like large puddles of water. Coming across such a puddle on her trek, Addie undressed and got into Jat-filled rut like in a hip bath. She poured handfuls of the sand on her hair and body and felt it slide down her neck and torso in grainy rivulets like droplets of mercury, leaving her skin wonderfully smooth and clean. Her Yuux, nestled on a branch of a nearby Qom bush, were watching her attentively.
It had felt strange at first to get completely nude in the wild and complete her grooming rituals under the prying eyes of the small animals, but Addie no longer thought much about it. Guess she was adjusting, after all.
After “washing,” she took her crudely knitted dress and swished it in the sand along with her equally crudely constructed underwear and sock-boots. Once she was done, she gave her hair and her clothes a careful shake-out to get rid of the remaining sand and got dressed. The entire operation didn’t take her more than fifteen minutes.
Objectively speaking, Jat sand was awesome. Still, she’d much rather have water. You could drink water. You couldn't drink Jat sand.
???
At the end of the following day, Addie reached the shipwreck.
She hadn’t been looking for it specifically but knew that she might come across the spot where she had arrived.
They had landed so violently two years ago. The cruiser had been able to deploy its drag parachutes and landing gear, but nothing had been working as it should have been, and the deployment had come too late, and the speed with which the ship had hurled down had been impossible to counteract enough to ensure a safe touch-down. Nearly fried alive from the extreme temperatures of dropping through the atmosphere, they came down in the manner of a multi-ton golf ball shot by a firm-handed club, grazing the surface at several hundred miles per hour, skidding, sliding, twisting and turning, bouncing, rupturing the impenetrable casing, before finally coming to a grinding stop.
Addie lowered her sack-pack and surveyed the site.
Time had smoothed the scarred ground. New vegetation fluffed up the deep grooves left by the ship’s underside plowing through. Even the crater left by the craft’s first powerful impact was now mostly filled with the sandy, rocky dirt, covered by moss in some places.
She approached the ruin, her emotions strangely quiet.
The planet’s multitude of underground inhabitants, slugs and worms and tiny warm-blooded scavengers, had taken care of any organic matter in a short time.
The ship’s inorganic remains still lingered. A mangled carcass of the outer layer, the quartz thermal layer that had been covering the metal casing, retained its shape, cracked and crumbling in places. The holes revealed a complete decay inside. Plastic and vinyl components, foam padding, glass, and other synthetic bits hung and lay in heaps after they tore loose when metal parts holding them had disintegrated.
Addie inspected the wreck calmly, noting how no traces remained of anything containing metal. If it did, returning home could have been a possibility. But something about this planet, its atmospheric structure, or its warped laws of physics, negatively affected metallic bonds. Iron or aluminum, gold or nickel - the metals simply fell apart, unable to maintain their hard form.
The process of disintegration had started within hours of the crash, and by the time Addie had roused herself from the shock of the impact, there had been no antennas for radio communication, no titanium alloys comprising the ship’s hard body, no engines, and no way home. There would never be.
A rescue mission, should word of her survival reach Earth by some miracle, would be as doomed as their own unfortunate cruiser. No, there would be no rescue mission. Besides, no one at home even knew they managed to land. Their last Mayday transmission had come from space before their hapless captain committed one more mistake that had brought them within this planet’s gravitational pull, the last one in a chain reaction of near-sighted choices that ended in disaster.
Addie came closer to the ship’s skeleton. Her fingers skimmed the sharp edge of the broken quartz outer layer, her finger feather-light, applying no pressure at all to the shell that was as fragile as that of an egg. It cracked dryly as it broke into pieces. A light wind rustled the plastics inside. A large native bug scuttled away, scared by the noise.
Standing here, touching the only item in this world that tied her to home, Addie felt detached. This heap of garbage held no tender memories for her. It only reminded her, vividly, of the terror of the crash, the physical pain of her injuries, and the debilitating desolation that followed when she had grasped her eternal inability to go back home.
Yet she had survived then, and she survived again. There must be meaning in it.
“Here I begin. At ground zero. Planet zero, more like it. Well, it’s a fitting name. Not TY75734b. Planet Zero, baby.”
