Five Minute SciFi Stories

the pendulum swings

A/N: This is my entry for Round Three of the Short Story Smackdown. Part of the prompt is the song in the header, 'Tarantula' by Aussie band Pendulum. What came out in response to this prompt is a love story, but please don't let that put you off. There's drugs, death and betrayal if you keep reading.

Say what you want about the Venusians, they've certainly made some questionable biological choices, I won't argue with you there, but they thirst like the rest of us. That makes them human.

Aalia hated her thirst. She hated the collective human thirst that forced her to cycle between Venus and the Oort Cloud on a never-ending quest for water. Venusian humans consumed water as soon as it arrived on the planet. It was a human weakness, this need to consume. The Water Corps existed to feed this need.

No one chose to enter the Water Corps. Doctors and engineers who made the mistake of being too good at their job were conscripted. An invitation to join the Water Corps was a great privilege. No one refused. There was no way to refuse. Aalia hadn't meant to be too good at her job. The threat of the Water Corps loomed somewhere in the back of her mind, but she was distracted by the task at hand of combining elements from the air with elements from the dirt to build cheaper materials for spacecraft. The Venusians prized cost cutting. Aalia cut costs better than most, and so, the day after her sixtieth birthday, she was rewarded with the impossible-to-refuse invitation that had ruined thousands of lives before hers.

Her husband had waited for her. At least for the first cycle—five years for her, but 40 for him. He was 100 when she returned, still young for a Venusian, and still in love with her it seemed. He was ready to spend her six month on-planet break as if she had never been away. The problem was Gaman, the doctor on board the Icebreaker, a veteran of 15 cycles, her only crewmate and the man tasked with completing her on board training.

Like every new recruit, Aalia had been terrified of boarding the icebreaker named Slake--a ship the size of a small city--and spending five years hurtling through space with only one other human to keep her company. Gaman was waiting for her in the control room, sitting in the captain's chair, grinning, his three eyes twinkling and his red hair floating around his head. He stood and touched her shoulder in a gesture of welcome and she couldn't speak, couldn't breathe, for a moment. Her mind whitewashed by this man. This was why she had been conscripted to the Water Corps. She was meant to meet Gaman, a man who should have been dead 200 years before Aalia was born, but thanks to humans' biological need for water, he was here, standing in front of her. Every molecule inside her pushed against her skin, straining to get to him.

And then, just like that, 15 cycles and 75 years later, Gaman was forced to retire. He had served his 30 cycles. Congress clipped his wings and gave him a house with a garden and a couple of monkeys. It was the least they could do since everyone he had once known was dead. Everyone except Aalia, and she was stuck on an icebreaker with a rookie, weaving through planetoids in the Venusian territory of the Oort Cloud.

"You know what she said to me?" Eshwar, the rookie, said when he boarded Slake for the first time. "I won't wait. Forty years is too long." He buried his face in his hands. "We've been married for fifty years, and she won't wait for me."

"She's right," Aalia said. "Forty years is too long."

Gaman knew what it was like to be forgotten. That didn't mean he would be strong enough to wait for Aalia. She didn't know, really, how he felt about her. She knew what he said. She knew how she felt. And she hoped it was enough.

Eshwar should be with Aalia now, learning how to watch a sentient ship perform its work with no need for human intervention. Instead, he was off enjoying the ship's ability to simulate any human. He could pretend his wife never left.