She Told Me About Her Planet

“You know Maryland is a nut,” Tom said, smile playing across his lips. His red hair and ruddy complexion made his whole face light up. I shook my head. “She tells you some crazy stories, sometimes,” he continued. “All the time.”

“You should stop talking like that,” I said. “You know I like that old crazy thing?”

“What old crazy thing?” Brenda asked, walking into the room. We were sitting in a very small cafeteria taking a lunch break. It would be a long month on the weigh station, but at least it was warm. On the Earth below us that we were circling it was freezing. The poor old Earth had passed through a few centuries of global warming and then, without warning, had plunged into another ice age.

Luckily by that time we had the technology to resist the fallen temperatures. Some of us had even begun to adapt to it. Even if we hadn’t, we had smart space suits that we wore most of the time outside that would adjust to the environment. We didn’t have to wear such things inside, that’s why so many people barely ever went out.

Most of our travel was done through underground tunnels leading us from one dome to the other. The others had decided to live deeper in the Earth with a civilization that had been living and developing down there for millions of years. They seemed almost alien to us with their strange telepathic powers and their advanced technology. They made sure to stay that way. They wanted little to do with the Earth people who lived on the surface.

Very few, the people who were most intelligent and kind, were accepted in their underground caverns as citizens. The others were kept out at all costs for fear they would pick up the “Bad Habits” of the topsiders, as they called it. The main habits–the three poisons, as they called it–anger, greed, and delusion. These were the same poisons spoken of in many Buddhist texts, and it wasn’t a coincidence.

They had secretly been infiltrating the world up top for many centuries trying to guide us on a path of peace. They were exploring the stars when the topsiders were just coming out of the caves. They had even left the Earth a couple of times during the cataclysms that almost wiped out all life and had lived with friendly, knowledgeable extraterrestrials to the point where they were perceived as extraterrestrials by the topsiders. We hadn’t known much about them before this latest cataclysm. Now they were working with us to try to help the human beings survive.

They thought that the most violent humans had been wiped out after the 100 years of violence, global warming, and the nuclear wars instigated by the rich and powerful. I only hoped they were right. I looked up at Brenda wondering if I should answer her question. She was a close friend of Maryland.

“Maryland,” Tom blurted out. I looked at him and frowned. Brenda began to grin as she punched in her code and the food processor slowly filled her cup with hot chocolate. She came over to the table still grinning.

“Maryland is different,” She said looking down into her cup of hot chocolate. She blew on it. “She has a good heart.” She looked up at us.

Tom shrugged. “I know.” He looked at me. She followed his eyes.

“Oh.” She grinned. “Brandon has a thing for her, does he?”

I didn’t say anything, which made her smile more and sing song, “Brandon has a girlfriend, Brandon has a girlfriend.” It was so childish I couldn’t help but smile.

“She’s not my girlfriend. She doesn’t even know I exist.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Brenda said in a lilting voice. She looked more serious. “Like I said though, she isn’t quite human. You know that don’t you? You know she’s a Venusian so some of those stories are probably true.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that, but I still like her. Is there anything wrong with liking her?”

“Yeah there is if you don’t do anything about it,” Tom said. She nodded in agreement.

“What, are you two doing, ganging up on me or something?”

“No. We’re just trying to help you,” Tom said.

“Help you get some gonads,” Brenda added. “This isn’t high school. We don’t even know how long we’ll be alive.” She looked down at the Earth. “This ice age could last for thousands of years, you know. What are we going to do? How do we survive? The lower Earth people don’t give a damn about us. They only tolerate us. The upper Earth people are idiots who are constantly talking about starting a new war when we are in the middle of a nuclear winter. You better grab all the joy you can. Love is something that you shouldn’t pass up so easily.” She looked at me with the most serious look I had ever seen in her eyes before. It sounded like she was talking from experience. I leaned back in my seat and thought about it. She finished her hot chocolate quickly.

“Meet me here for dinner at 8,” she said. She stood up to leave.

“Is that an order?” I asked, knowing that we weren’t in the military and didn’t have any rank over each other. She looked into my eyes.

“I’m serious,” she said. “Meet me here for dinner at 8.” She was so serious that I said OK as she gathered her things. She turned and walked out.

“What the heck was that about?” Tom asked. “Does she want a date with you or something?”

“I don’t know. It was strange. I guess I’ll see what it’s about at 8.”

“Let me know how it goes,” he said. He got up and pushed his seat under the table. “She seemed a little strange to me too. She’s getting weird.” He headed out of the room as I sat pondering. I finished my cup of coffee and headed back down to the engine room. I had to make sure the magnetic bottle was working properly. If that went wrong the matter and antimatter would combine too fast, like what had happened on many more of the ships and reactors on Earth, and boom. We’d be obliterated.

That’s what we all worried about. There had been hundreds of these explosions lately. It was like a game of Russian Roulette. We never knew whose reactor would go next. I was going to make sure it wasn’t ours if I had to sit down there and watch that thing all day. I got up, threw my cup into the recycler, and headed out of the room and down the narrow hallway. Soon I reached a ladder leading down to the engine room, which was like a second home to me.

Many hours passed as I sat there taking readings and studying manuals, trying to figure ways to improve on the reactor. The engineers had designed them, but they didn’t work with them everyday. They didn’t know the flaws in their designs, but we technicians did. I had slowly learned how to correct them so they worked for real to the point where I was putting my corrections down on paper, so to speak, to save other people from the poor workmanship. I had been studying to become an engineer on Com University and was almost finished. The specs and the improvements would serve as an Independent Study Course rounding out my credits, and I would have my degree soon.

Before I knew it, it was 745. Even as I worked and tried to get my engineering degree I was haunted by the thing that haunted most Earth citizens–what was to become of us? What had our ancestors in their greed and violence condemned us to? We would be struggling to help the Earth recover for thousands of years and living in artificial environments, unless we went back to the Earth and braved the harsh, frigid weather outside of the domes, as few had.

All of us knew that if it began to warm in any one place instead of celebrating it and working together we would start fighting for that one small piece of ground and the rich would try to buy it and keep buying it as the land recovered until we were all in the same mess we were in before the cataclysm. They would own everything and most of us would be landless, peasants again.

No one talked about this openly, but we knew what would happen unless we could find a way to stop it. The Lower Earth people had their problems. They were so prejudice and fearful, with good reason, they weren’t really any help. The extraterrestrials hand off policy was useless too, leaving the only options open warfare into eternity, or us leaving and finding more healthy planets as refugees. I couldn’t be angry. We did it, or allowed it to be done, ourselves. We had waited to late before we stood up for the Earth and our children, and for justice. Now we would have to pay for it.

I headed over to the ladder and climbed up to the first floor. I rushed down the narrow hallway to the small cafeteria and entered. Brenda wasn’t there. Off to the right there was a very small cafeteria for people who wanted a little more privacy. I walked over and opened the door. Maryland was standing there looking down at a table; her strange bluish hair with lush, thick curls hung loosely down and around her shoulders. Her skin was dark, but her eyes were blue…very bright blue. The opposite of my almost black eyes and brown skin. I was surprised to see her. She smiled.

On the table there were two candles, plates, and covered serving dishes. Two tall wine glasses sat there with a bottle of chilled wine. She smiled and then laughed a bit. “I should have known it was you,” she said in a very melodic tone. I walked over to the table. She motioned for me to sit and she sat across from me. “They told me they had set me up for a blind date and told me to come to this room. I don’t usually go on dates, me being the only Venusion on the platform, you know? But Brenda can be very persuasive.”

“Yes, she can,” I admitted. “She has a way of looking at you.”

“So true,” Maryland said. She picked up the bottle and looked at the label. “This looks like some expensive stuff, shall we?” I gave her a nod and she filled up the glass closest to her and handed it to me. I handed her the other one and she filled it also. We clinked glasses. “To interesting outcomes,” She said. I smiled and agreed.

I had the best time of my life. She was delightful. She talked about planets, ships, things I had never heard of. She told me about her planet where they had lived in peace for thousands of years on floating platforms in the upper atmosphere. Her planet had been somewhat like the Earth. It had evolved more quickly, since it was closer to the sun, but they, like the Earth people, became foolish as their technology became more sophisticated. They began to have war and violence as they polluted the whole planet until they changed the makeup of the lower atmosphere.

Some of the people left while others found ways to survive and stay on their planet. Earth was inhospitable, so many of them developed a thriving civilization on the fourth planet. The ones on mars repeated the same old foolish mistakes because of pride and arrogance and moved out to a larger planet. The 5th planet was a massive planet. Everything went well. By the time they had settled on that planet they had had interactions with extraterrestrials who were guiding them and helping them to thrive while trying to stop their arrogance and warlike behavior.

Soon the 5th planet began to become violent too and developed dangerous weapons. At the same time they began to send expeditions out of the solar system endangering other civilizations. They began to make war with the remnants on mars which sent them fleeing to Earth. The planet became so destructive that the extraterrestrials intervened.

Unable to find any group to work with because of the prevailing arrogance they shattered the whole planet, creating an asteroid belt from the left-over chunks of the planet. The blast damaged mars and caused a magnetic shift of the poles which ended up scraping the whole planet of vegetation and blowing away most of its atmosphere. The few left people either went to Earth, or the began to live as an underground civilization with the help of extraterrestrial

The next time the ETs intervened it was on Earth. The same people, or type of people, who took their poison to the other planets soon began to spread their poison on the Earth until it was utterly corrupt. The ETs decided to wipe out the disease and caused flooding over most of the planet wiping out most of the people.

It took thousands of years for a new civilization to arise, but with the same poison in their minds. The civilization almost destroyed itself several times. We were living after it had happened again, and we weren’t sure that had been the last time.

It seemed that the virus, the disease, was not human beings, it was the human mind. It was a flaw, a bug in the human mind that caused racial hatred, gender hatred, classism, all of the unfair and destructive motivators that had brought about the destruction of the Earth several times, but how could one cleanse the mind of a people from the outside. They couldn’t. They really couldn’t. This time they were doing it from the inside, hoping it would take.

I sat there in wrapped attention wondering why I hadn’t heard this before. Why had it been hidden? I realized it was hidden because very few people knew about it, and the wrong people, the ones who were most twisted, didn't want anyone to know about it since knowledge is power. It was hidden in the open in the many myths and religious texts that were denounced as being just stories, right there for all of us to find, while we were being deceived and told not to look at those sources.

“I’m talking too much,” she finally said. I just smiled.

“I love to hear you talk,” I commented. She smiled pleasantly.

“Good. I love to hear you talk too. I love to…” she got quiet for a moment, “to be with you. I don’t know if I am saying it the right way.” She lifted one eyebrow.

“I would say, yes you are.” She laughed a bit.

“I hope this means this won’t be the last date,” She said, before taking another drink.

“I’m sure it won’t. You can’t get rid of me that easily.” We were silent for a few moments.

“Let’s have some desert,” she said. We removed the cover from a small dish. There were two pieces of blueberry pie underneath. She looked up at me quizzically.

“Blueberry pie,” I said. “It’s good.” We each took a piece. I looked up at her and saw her chewing. She looked up and watched me watching her and smiled. “Am I doing this right?

“You do everything right,” I said.

“Maybe someday we can do it right together.” Her lips turned up into a slow grin and leaning slightly forward I said,

“Nothing would please me more.”

The End

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