Dry Soils

First Written    Tue Feb 20 05:24:24 2018
File Modified    Wed Feb 14 18:32:26 2024
Latest Upload    Thu Sep 19 03:09:54 2024

"Her lips were as red as Martian soil, but nowhere near as dry," he lied into his notepad. No, both of those things were actually more like rust, not red. Or was it burnt ochre? His sisters would kill him for mixing up the two. Salome would probably evaporate him on the spot once she'd hear he was trying to write a memoirs.

"Not if something else doesn't kill me first," he thought.

But was there even any doubt that the Chairman's son would be making it home in one piece? Maybe there was. He had been torn apart before. He had been put back together before too, at great cost to both his country and to his chances of ever being allowed to tour again.

Here he was, though. In a half-compromise, half-strategic show of force, he was championing the war front while remaining as far away from it as possible.

"Guard duty, son," Kuretes had told him, "not against the enemy, but against doubt. How often does a guard need to draw his weapon, to remind his charges that they wouldn't die without a fight?"

The answer in this case was never, unfortunately.

And if he weren't enough of a liar, he had to remember her lips were in fact, the same amount of dry as everything else on the red and barren world. He had to admit though, that they were never too dry for the things they did in his room after briefings. Where Mars was barren, Dune's lips were just the opposite.

He wanted to say they brought something back to life in him, but nothing ever blossomed when they were together. That just wasn't Dune. No, she grew weeds in him. Hungry, like anything that grew in red soil, and naturally selected to choke out everything weak.

The list of weak things had been growing since he let himself be relegated to the back lines of an interplanetary conflict. Here he was in the middle of the kind of war romantics and patriots drooled over: the final, the holy, the foretold-by-movies invasion of our homeworld and its redhead cousin. Here he was, forgetting about all that entirely.

She was definitely a weed. After four months with Dune, he had forgotten his mission. After eight months, he had forgotten his lack of one. He was approaching a year now and he had almost, but not yet entirely, forgotten his fiancée.

He hadn't forgotten how perfect it had been before he'd left. Moira wouldn't have minded a rushed wedding. Catherine was just dying to be a flower girl. The Mechs would have had an itinerary planned out two moments before he'd even told them the date. The only thing that wasn't ready was a young, broken soldier who wanted so badly to show the world that the only thing spineless about him was his body.

Was it really his fault that the mathematically perfect, sunny summer wedding day happened to coincide with the day he had to board? It takes a Republic shuttle roughly four months to close the gap. Curving backwards from the Earth at just the right time, they caught the red planet at its closest point in three. There was no other day. And there was no moving the wedding either, no, that would have been less than perfect.

He wanted perfect for Moira, and for his father, and for the entire world who would no doubt be watching the "antics" of the Republic's people's boy. It was just another guard duty thing. Still, he'd had three good months to work through the feeling that there were two launch windows that day and he'd missed the wrong one.

When he had first landed, it was fall on Earth. The delay was four minutes. It was like they were playing phone tag. She told him, in four minute intervals, about the Halloween party she had sat through while proof reading her papers She told him about Davash, his sister's new nomad suitor who was a convenient source when fact checking xenobiology theses.

Now? The delay was fourteen and growing. If they were pen pals now, they would be carrier pigeon enthusiasts by the next fall. If had married her then, he now thought, maybe he would be angry. Angry when she told him about the leaves changing and the first snowfall when he could only tell her about the red soil and the red soil.

As far as he knew, he didn't need anger right now and she didn't need anything at all that he could give her from a cold bedroom a dozen or so light-minutes from the birthplace of mankind. Moira was science. The only thing she needed was questions to answer and she had plenty of that on Earth. Last he'd heard, she was rubbing elbows with foreign dignitaries now. Steppe Hivers, Arash'Mi, even the Chinese were talking to her.

If there was anything she needed, she never made it clear. To be fair, he had never asked her either. Now the only thing they talked about were aliens. Yes, he could call them that. Definitely not the Hivers or the Arash'Mi, but these things? They were aliens still.

"Aliens," he wrote, "like the thing my future wife and I became to one another."

Cheesy, just like Moira hated. Maybe if he'd married her she'd have divorced him after reading that. Maybe if he'd married her then, he wouldn't be lying in bed thinking about kissing Martian girls.