By the Light of Betelgeuse

A flash of fiction

My prompt this week came from T.A. Leederman and you can find all the prompt responses over at More Odds Than Ends.

Micha Binson leaned against the parapet, soaking in the warmth from the stones, while she looked dreamily up into the night sky. Her tall form was draped in gauzy silks, spun from the little worms which had traveled to the planet with humans. Food, clothing, waste disposal: the tiny insects had been carefully engineered. Micha was not thinking about the neosilk she was wearing, though. She was staring up through the hazy atmosphere above her, given a spectral quality when seen through the transparent dome of the city.

Mars was, and always would be, a bare outpost of humanity. She wasn’t thinking about the generations before her, and how they had dared to leave Earth. She was thinking about her own future. One that was as unclear as the stars above shimmering through the dome and unbreathable air.

Micha was tall, lean, and beautiful. She knew this with a certainty and no self-consciousness at all. Her long dark hair, coiled intricately and secured to her well-shaped head, framed an oval face with large dark eyes to match it. Her soft red crimson lips parted slightly as she breathed out a single word.

The scuff of a footfall behind her snapped her back to the current time and place. She spun around, one hand dropping to her hip, to rest on the hilt of the long curved knife she wore there.

“It is I.” Roldy Jackson greeted her in a low tone. He took no offense at her readiness to defend herself. If he thought at all about it, it was with a tinge of admiration for her composure and competence. Nonetheless, his next words were tinged with solicitousness. “It grows chill.”

“The walls are warm.” She leaned back against the stone slabs. “I heard the list will be published on the morrow.”

“I came to speak with you of that,” he admitted, leaning against the wall next to her, his broad shoulder only inches from her smooth cheek.

“Yes?” Her tone was cool and disinterested, and she was again staring upwards into the darkness. Had he been able to see her eyes, though, he would have noted the spark kindled in their depths.

Roldy couldn’t see her, although he was looking down at her face, well enough to read her expression. The lights of the city had not yet warmed and lit the dome, and even when they did glow strongest, they barely reached this remote corner. Micha had chosen her retreat well.

“If...” he took a deep breath, the only indication of the depth of his emotional turmoil. “If you are not on it...”

“Then what?” She shrugged her bare shoulder, and it brushed against the cloth of his sleeve. “Then I remain here, on Mars, dying as we all are. From the moment of our birth, death is coming for us. I am not a coward.”

“And if you are on the list?” Roldy was pricked to irritation. “Then what?” He echoed her words back at her. “The collapse began when Betelgeuse began to dim.”

They both looked upwards, then, towards the red pinprick of light barely discernible through the gaseous haze. Their world was doomed in slow motion, as the nebula not yet visible to the naked eye expanded across unfathomable distances until it was sweeping over this planet, and the next planet, disrupting the technology of both and leaving havoc in its wake. Mankind’s very survival was uncertain.

“Then...” She whispered. “Then I shall live. I shall leap, reaching for the stars and perhaps out there I will find adventure, the chuckling laughter of many children, and a home won in battle with the dangers of the new world.”

“If you are not on the list,” Roldy turned towards her, his shoulder against the warm wall, his tall frame bent protectively over hers, his arm crossing over her and bracing against the wall on the other side of her body. “If you are not, I shall marry you and take you as mine on the ship.”

“How do you know you’ll be on the list?” Micha laughed, and ducked under his arm, dancing away a few steps.

The lights had lent a warm glow to the dome, and she flickered in and out of shadows in her iridescent silks.

Roldy watched her, unsmiling. “I am on the crew.”

She stopped, the silks still in motion for an instant before they, too, hung still around her. “You will go. No matter what.”

“Yes. And if I have anything to say about it, you will be at my side.” He took two long steps and grasped her upper arms, feeling the coolness of her skin on his hot palms. “As the bride of my heart, keeper of my home, mother of my children.”

She shivered. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow, then I will answer you. When the sun has risen.”