Weekly Writing – August 3 2024

“But what’s it like out there?” they ask me. Cuddled in close on either side of me, in a way that wouldn’t be right if I were still captain, but they don’t know the difference, of course. They only know that I and the heating coil are warm, and the night is frigid, and every person they’ve ever met has been there to keep them safe.
Four years old yesterday, and they only know that everyone was happy for them. They plastered their twin smiles with the closest thing we can make to pudding from the local plants, and we sang for them, and as far as I was concerned at that moment, out there could go to hell.
But when the heating coil is set up like a spring-loaded steel bonfire, burning solar power against the frigid dark, the stars always seem so much closer. So much less left behind.
“It’s all right,” I tell them. “Mostly boring. You can’t just leave a spaceship to go for a stroll – there’s no air or ground out there. It’s like living in your classroom day after day after day.”
Of course they both wrinkle their noses at that. There’s only so much they can learn so far, but we’ve been trying to teach it to them. Plants and spaceship parts and constellations.
Not history, though. Never history.
“Is that why we came here?” the younger of them by twenty-nine minutes, with his dark, sparkling eyes and curling hair, asks. As if they were part of the we at that point, not just a flicker so small in their mother’s womb that she was still cleared for active combat duty.
“We crashed here,” I remind him. “Something broke in the ship one day, and we had to land on the closest planet we could find to try to fix it. But it was broken badly, so we landed hard, and that broke it worse. There’s no fixing it now.”
“But we’ve got lots of parts,” the older, with her hair a little straighter and a crease between her brows, protests. “Why can’t we fix it?”
“Some parts do special jobs,” I explain. “You can’t just put any part in any place and have it work. We broke some special parts when we crashed. But it’s all right, because it turned out this planet is a good place to live. Better than out there. So we built our houses and stayed, and then you two were born, and that’s the end of the story.”
“No, it’s not,” she insists. Always so much more stubborn about making all the parts of the world fit in places that make sense. “We’re here. That’s the story.”
“I guess it is. But it’s the end of the story of how we got here.” I ruffle her hair in the way that always makes her huff and pout and forget whatever else was bothering her. “This story, about us being here, is a lot better, trust me.”
And they do trust me. She huffs and he stares up at the stars, but they both settle in close against me, and soon, they’re dozing in the off-yellow glow of the heating coil.
I wish that could be the end of the story. But they’re only getting older, smarter. Their questions are sure to get smarter, too, in time.
We all agreed they should never know. Back when they were born, back even before that, when we broke the parts that landing hadn’t broken quite enough and used their pieces to build our life here.
Back when we broke our distress beacon and buried it in the deepest part of an alien forest. We promised each other then, over its grave, that we were never going to be soldiers again.
The only way to stop being a soldier is to die, and so that’s what our last message to Command told them we did. All the gory details about how we’d been ambushed by an enemy cruiser, took them out but we’re bleeding oxygen fast, navigation busted, drifting off into the black, tell our families we died well. There might even be a plaque for us somewhere.
It’s a worse story than us being here. Alive and well, with half our ship broken apart into new homes by now and the first children of our new world sleeping against me. I hope they never have to know.
I hope it’s a story they can live with. All that out there would give them is death and a plaque – here, they have the forest, a cozy light against the night, and only people who want to see them live and grow up in happiness.