This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/EuropeanSwollow on 2024-11-03 20:45:38+00:00.

Weather balloons ambled through the stratosphere. Like a tidy row of chicks calling for their mother the beacon lights spangled the twilight of early dawn. A shuttle drew near, descending to meet them. “That’s the last pickup,” announced the pilot, his voice routinized and bored. 

A grappling pole extended stern and upward from the shuttle at a forty-five degree angle. The shuttle flew below the nearest weather balloon, snagging its hanging tail with the pole. Micro chains along the pole dragged the balloon into a compartment in the stern of the shuttle designed exactly for the purpose. One after another each balloon was recovered likewise. 

On the continent below Dr. Amy McDonough gazed East over a far-reaching canyon. The entirety of the canyon was covered in a monoculture of green and blue lichen like flora. The canyon itself being a tectonic stretch mark, dug into the distance beyond the curving occlusion of the planet’s surface. Like the sunrise on Earth the sky filled with colors before it filled with light. A lusty burgundy lined the horizon beneath burnishing bronze in hues so rich it seemed a trick of the gods that they could not be smelled or tasted. Amy looked over her shoulder as she left the canyon behind. That sunrise.

Base camp had been struck and the last of the gear sent to the Icarus V in high orbit. As Amy approached the last shuttle a swarthy barely kempt man hopped down from atop the below-board port nacelle. “She’s a beaut’,” the man said.

“The sunset?”

“Indeed it is, Doc. But I could have just as easily been talkin’ about you.”

“Oh, Wes.” She sighed. 

“It’s going to be a long couple of years in space, Doc. Don’t have to be long and lonely.”

“You’ve used that line before, and not on me.”

“It’s a damn good one, isn’t it,” Wes said with a wink. 

Amy ignored the attempt. His enduring optimism was charming but had almost zero effect on the doctor. Almost.

She took another look at the glowing horizon. “Just like Earth,” she said quietly.

“You miss her?” Wes Asked.

“How could I not? Do you?”

“I’m partial to wherever I can stretch my legs. A little hard to do on the mother rock.”

“What about here?” Amy asked, walking toward the shuttle.

“Homesteading you mean? What’s the point of being free if you spend it working yourself to death in the same twenty square miles? Nah, I don’t mind a touch-down, but the stars are my stake. You?”

“My husband would have in a heartbeat. And I probably would have too… With him, I would have.”

“You? Homesteading?”

“Well, there’s a lot of research to do here still… That was before though.”

The shuttle took flight. 

“Take me over the canyon once more,” commanded Amy.

Wes plunged the shuttle into the chasm. Above it glowed the golden herald of the system’s white Sol-like star about to show itself through the vail of nitrogen. Amy could have followed the canyon a quarter of the way around the planet, but the time for musing it was not.

“Take us home, Wes.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

With that the shuttle lurched out of the atmosphere and into high orbit to meet its patient mother hen. 

Far outside the living air the Icarus V, it’s hull clutched by merciless contrasting shadows against the local star, gradually imposed itself upon the shuttle’s view of the cosmos. Not a single humanizing fixture in sight, the Icarus V’s brutal modules bore only naked plating, conduit, and rail. Home was a skeleton clothed only in organs and veins. 

Wes announced their arrival over the comm and was greeted with boarding instructions.

Amy left her husband’s love for beauty in the eddies of invisible helium above humanities new third womb. Trailblazing paths between the stars was not for hearts overmuch attached to things such as beauty.