Bonus Fiction: Human

Another bonus fiction. I’m realizing I actually have a lot of older stories under 500 words lying around. I’ve always liked the length. Maybe next week I’ll post “Melquíades is Dead.”, which was also a flash fiction.

But this week is this week, so on to this week’s tale. This story is somewhere in the neighborhood of 8-10 years old and originally appeared in the late Jackhammer E-Zine, and again in their “Best Of” anthology. Back then, I had done terribly silly things with the format, capitalization and punctuation. I’ve corrected all that affected nonsense here, but the actual words are unchanged. Here’s a chance to get a glimpse of my growth as a writer:

HUMAN

The looming silver behemoth lumbered through the star-dusted vacuum with an ease belying its bulk—a tear-shaped drop fallen from the eyes of those who had seen the death of their Mother. It’s lustrous, fifty-mile surface of plating and antennas regal but sterile. Near the rear, where the steel leviathan’s invisible wake distorted stars and made them twinkle, a man looked out a reinforced plasti-glass viewport at the greens, browns, and blues of the great sphere hoving into view below that his descendants would call their new Earth.

She was a crawler—a surface-monkey, some of the insiders would say down their noses. She could see a shape darken the dull yellow light emitted by the square viewport visible between her braced legs. She finished tightening the worn pon-wheel and slipped her tri-wrench back into its pocket on her thigh. She slid her moor line—the ship’s artificial gravity did not extend everywhere—to the nearest longitudinal cross-slit and used small metal rings on the hull to pull herself down to peer inside.

Startled, he took a step back when a slender, prehensile tail (pre-launch geneticists had believed in more than four viable limbs) slipped into view, gripped the edge of the viewport, and a crawler pulled herself into sight. He had never actually seen a crawler, only read about them in the library and heard stories from Grandfather (a member of the first generation of ship-dwellers)—they had been bred to live in space outside the hull and keep the ship in one piece. Crawlers were a myth that he had known must be true, but that he had never truly believed in until now. She was beautiful, every sharp detail startlingly enhanced against the stark black of space. Large, wondering sloe eyes, a delicately boned face, slender fingers, flowing amber hair. Her feet, which had opposable toes, her hands, and her tail were exposed, showing golden skin. A thin, metallic cord extended from the ship and hooked into her belt and her tail moved gracefully behind her.

She reached a tentative hand toward his astonished face, but it was stopped by a foot of plasti-glass. He was so much like her, yet an entirely different being. She couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder at the planet below.

He followed her gaze to the planet’s surface and wondered for the first time what the crawlers would do after colonization. Raised in null-g, gravity would kill her.

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