The Planets Are for the Prosperous
The Planets Are for the Prosperous
Brian S. Wheeler
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This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2015 by Brian S. Wheeler
Contents
Chapter 1 – A Terrible Waste
Chapter 2 – The Planets Are for the Prosperous
Chapter 3 – Equal Opportunity
Chapter 4 – Prime Time
Chapter 5 – A Blanket of Alien Stars
Chapter 6 – It All Makes for Good Television
Chapter 7 – The Illusion of Power
Chapter 8 – Exodus
Help Spread the Story
About the Writer
Other Stories
The Planets Are for the Prosperous
Chapter 1 – A Terrible Waste
Becky Chen never hated humanity as badly as she did whenever she looked upon the beauty of another alien world.
“Maybe we could somehow modify the readings,” Becky sighed as her survey associate Glenn Harold stepped next to her on the mountain ledge, so that he too could gaze down upon the valley that stretched to the far horizon. “Maybe we could report that the atmosphere is toxic. Maybe they would believe us if we told them that the air would turn poisonous if the settlers remained on the planet for any longer than a month.”
Glenn removed his helmet and took a deep breath of the air. “It wouldn’t work. You know how desperate all the masses have become on Earth. All those poor settlers would come charging out here anyway. You couldn’t stop them after they won the lottery. And you’d never be allowed to step foot on another alien world again if the lottery offices discovered you were ever dishonest with your survey reporting.”
“I just hate it.”
Becky kept her helmet snuggly latched upon her head, and she would not remove her hands from the gloves sealed into her protective security uniform. She wasn’t worried about any extra-terrestrial microbe settling on her skin, even less troubled at the thought of some alien virus crawling into her socks to hitch a ride to a new planetary ecosystem. She was far more concerned about delivering some stow-away germ from Earth to the life forms covering the valley at the foot of the mountain range. Becky wondered why she still cared.
The environment of the planet the survey reports listed as TU/873 met every demand the lottery offices required before opening a planet to settler colonization. It was nestled square in a binary solar system’s goldilocks zones, orbiting the dominant star in one and a three-quarters of the time it took Earth to rotate around its solar center. Oxygen composed 30% of the atmosphere; another 62% composed of nitrogen, with trace amounts of other elements composing the remainder. Though the dual stars burned in the sky, filling the planet with a mild, bronze light at all hours of the day, the temperature would yearlong feel like a crisp, autumn day. Freshwater rivers and oceans were visible, as were the swaying fields of green and gold. The settlers would only have to exercise a little care. They would only need to exhibit a little conservation, and the planet would provide a home for them and for generations of their offspring.
As they ever did during the three years in which she had worn the extra-terrestrial surveyor uniform, Becky’s eyes filled with tears as she gazed down upon that valley, the very picture of the old Earth she had imagined once belonged to her kind, before over-population, disease, war and ruin had mangled humankind’s native world. She knew that the settlers humankind delivered to TU/873 would never display an ounce of the care and sacrifice required to preserve that planetary gem below her.
Glenn set an ungloved hand upon her shoulder. “You have to learn to let things be. You can’t allow that which you have no power over drag your spirit down. You’ll go made if you don’t look on the bright side of things.”
“Who’s to say I haven’t already gone mad?” Becky pressed at a button on her wrist computer and tinted her visor before Glenn could notice the tears gathering in her eyes. “Show me where’s there’s a bright side to any of it.”
Glenn smiled. “The bright side is that you get to look upon it before humanity tramples all that color into oblivion. Sure, you’re just as powerless as I am to preserve any of it, but for those brief days when we’re surveying for the lottery offices, we get to see all the wonder in its original glory.”
“And we just take as many pictures as we can for the libraries and the coffee table books?” Becky snarled.
“It’s something.”
“Do we have time to watch it again?”
Glenn smiled. “We have plenty of time.”
Glenn reached into the satchel set near his boots and retrieved an antique baseball, the type of sphere the American nations once employed in their strange game of baseball so many of the anthropologists working for the surveying offices still struggled to decipher. Glenn drew his arm back and threw the ball as far ahead as he might. Becky held her breath as she watched the ball fall. What would some dim-headed settler think if he should come across that baseball while plowing a new field? Would that farmer believe some ancient and forgotten civilization of aliens had stitched baseballs out of cowhide just as his ancestor humans did before the Earth was plundered? The scientific odds of such were, of course, impossible, but when had humankind’s settlers ever respected the sciences? Would finding such an artifact in the field motivate that farming settler to take a rest from his work long enough to contemplate for a second what that planet may have once held before him? Should that settler one day uncover a grave of a small, gray alien while building a grain silo, would that farmer think anything of his delicate position in the larger cosmos? Becky doubted he would. Three years in a surveyor’s uniform convinced her that a settler would never indulge in a deep thought. She knew that the farmer would only continue to plow.
Glenn held up a finger. “It should be bouncing off the ground any moment now.”
Becky could no longer see the white speck of the descending baseball as it fell closer to that ground covered with swaying green. But she knew the instant when that baseball struck the valley, for thousands of creatures jumped into the sky in a rush of wings and wind. Becky smiled. Surprised, the flying wings flickered through the entire catalog of colors, glowing like pixels upon that bronze sky’s canvas. They swirled into a rising column that neared her perch upon that overlooking ledge, shimmering in a cloud that reminded Becky of an antique kaleidoscope her grandfather had gifted to her the day she enrolled in the surveyors’ academy. With such flickering and fluttering wings of color gliding all about her, Becky couldn’t help but to consider that planet her favorite among all of those she had visited amid the stars.
Becky extended her gloved hand as the swarm lifted to her, and she giggled as several of the wings, shaped like giant butterflies of the sort scene only in children’s books, settled upon her sleeve. She giggled to watch the creatures mimic the color of her sleeve so that they nearly blended into her uniform’s shade of light gray.
“I wish we had more time to study them,” sighed Becky. “I
wish I could learn what fuels their light, what process gives them the power to camouflage themselves in so many colors.”
“I know,” Glenn answered, “but we’re not a scientific team. We’re only here to suggest how many settlers the planet might support and what items the lottery offices should include in the kits they’ll supply to those settlers.”
Becky wished that the protocols established in the surveying of alien worlds had not been written by men and women so fearful of an alien virus ever tracing its way back to Earth. She wished those rules allowed her the opportunity to carry one of those winged creatures aboard their surveyors’ star shuttle, where she might’ve given the glowing, flickering wing a name and adopted it has a pet. Though so many creatures darted about the air, their numbers still carpeted the valley floor. They didn’t appear to have any natural predators to fear. Becky suspected they had as much in common with Earth’s native plant life as they may have had with any of the old world’s insects and birds.
“They are truly amazing,” Glenn chuckled as a wing rested upon his head and shifted its hue to match the spotted color of his graying hair.
“How do you do it, Glenn? You’ve been a surveyor since the start, one of the first trained and hired by the lottery offices almost twenty-five years ago. I’m a rookie by comparison, and yet I already feel so old. How do you keep putting that uniform on, knowing what’s going to follow us?”
Glenn’s smile faded. “I keep wearing the uniform because the waste makes me as sick as it makes you. It makes me so sick that I can’t imagine ever turning around and going back to where I came from. I can’t think of returning to humanity, not after humanity’s already wasted so many worlds. I just keep wearing the uniform so that I can keep drifting further and further out into the stars.”
“And I thought you wore that uniform for all the benefits.”
Glenn laughed. “That’s the spirit. A healthy dose of sarcasm will serve you well in this work.”
“On with the job?”
“On with the job,” Glenn nodded. “I’m sure the lottery office is already anxious to launch another housing stack into the stars so they can reclaim one piece more of Earth for themselves.”
They descended that mountainous trail and reached the valley floor before lunch, which they took surrounded by thousands of curious wings that pulsed a rainbow of colors for their enjoyment. Becky spent the afternoon holding the range pole while Glenn squinted into his level, both doing their best to ignore the curious creatures that insisted on settling atop their tools. The work demanded little of the body, but Becky still felt exhausted when she reentered the survey star shuttle at the end of the day, for it was not easy to forget what would likely become of those flying chameleons of light the moment the first desperate colonizer stepped upon the planet.
* * * * *