Easter: A Blue Planet Love Story
By Tun Kai Poh
On the one-hundred and eighty-third day, he rose from the dead. No Mary Magdalene there to see him, no Julia, only a medtech to administer post- hibernation drugs. Textbooks called the miracle Induced Hypothermic Metabolic Suppression. His skin itched and he wanted to puke up the gray odorless soup they gave him.
Where was Julia?
There had been an accident, the medtechs told him. Then they shrugged. Ramon Ortega had come to Poseidon in his sleep, across six months and a gulf of stars, but somewhere along the way, his wife had slipped away. A problem with Julia's hibernation canister. Something about a lapse in automatic drug injections, lack of circulation to the brain, and million-to- one chances, they said.
He found to his surprise that he could not weep. Maybe it was a side effect of the hibernation. But neither did he weep in the weeks that followed. As he underwent physical therapy aboard Prosperity Station, there were no memories of her, no dreams, only the path ahead and the planet below.
The National Geographic Society (they sent their condolences) had paid too much for the expedition to have a Pulitzer-winning photographer return empty-handed. They still wanted a Poseidon aborigine on their magazine cover. When he was released from Customs and Immigration, Ramon Ortega numbly boarded the shuttle, carrying his wife's cameras as well as his own, and descended to the blue planet. He had risen from the dead, but he was no longer one of the living.
In the colonial capital of Haven, beneath a cloudy sky, he sought out scientists and officials. Where, he asked, could he find the aborigines? There were a few old records of sightings, a detailed necropsy report, but little else. After nearly thirty years of prying and looking, scientists still knew nothing about them. The ray-like creatures lived in the vast reaches of the oceans, while Man had only settled the islands and shallow seas around the archipelagoes. The few encounters between them had often ended in mysterious violence and death. That was fine with him. Just fine.
In the Sea of Cousteau, beneath the yellow glare of Lambda Serpentis, he rode with field researchers, followed the caneopoise herds, and dove in the kelp fields where aborigines had once been sighted. Fierce storms threatened to capsize them. A four-jawed eel ripped his thigh with poisoned fangs. Ramon Ortega survived; he'd lived through worse. He did not think back to the year he had spent in the war-torn New Balkans. He did not remember his brushes with death: minefields, snipers, and fellow journalists bleeding in his arms. He did not recall that he'd first met Julia there, in the ruins of a firebombed town. Two photographers preserving the moment, trying to awaken the world's weary conscience.
Julia. When he and Julia had been courting for two months, she asked him about the scars on his back. He told her what his parents had done, long ago: the worst demon of a past he'd traveled the globe to escape. The story told, it was lifted from his shoulders, gone from his mind. Julia became his memory.
She had memory enough for the both of them. She was Memory incarnate. She remembered Esperanto, an artificial language nobody spoke anymore. Her aunt had taught it to her, as a child. She remembered the antique techniques of black-and-white photography, a lost art in an age of holographic imaging. For ten years, she carried both their pasts: laughter, nightmares, anniversaries, sunny days in the park. Now, Memory was dead.
In the shanty town of Nomad, beneath a chaotic web of walkways and teetering wood and plastic structures built on houseboats and stilts, he questioned poachers and smugglers and prospectors. There were rumors of a place where aborigines frequented; for an exorbitant price, a dolphin guide would show him where. He sensed that after all these months, his search was near an end. Poseidon had not killed him. If he came out of this alive, what then?
In the sprawling roots of a stand of Poseidon mangroves, beneath the surface of the Dolphin Sea, he reached the end of his quest. The alien trees grew up from the shallow sea floor, twenty meters up to the surface, to form organic islands with their palm-like fronds. Millions of tiny phosphorescent creatures flitted in the dark beneath the mangroves. Organic debris - remains of leaves and dead lizards and other, unrecognizable things - floated down here, getting stuck in between the roots, forming the walls of a labyrinth of decaying matter. Ramon negotiated the root chambers alone, gill mask hissing, his camera light barely illuminating the way ahead.
They were waiting for him, in the heart of the trees, ten meters below the surface. Unspeakably majestic, built like three-meter stingrays, but poised like lions. Emanating both history and timelessness at once. They circled him with ease and agility, despite their size. And then, he simply knew: the aborigines were the memory of this world. They kept a secret history, one too beautiful and unimaginable for humans to comprehend. Yet he finally realized that there existed a more beautiful memory. Just as Poseidon's past was the foundation of what the aborigines were, Julia had been a living part of him.
The aborigines seemed to say: - You have forgotten yourself. You chose not to grieve, and so you are missing part of who you are. Go back. Find what you have lost. You cannot live on and grow without it.
Or perhaps they said nothing. It didn't matter. The camera slipped from his fingers, and Ramon Ortega swam up out of the darkness. Breaking the surface, with alien sunlight stippled all around him through the treetops, he heard the cries of eel dragons and the howling of the warm wind through the leaves. He took off the gill mask, breathed deeply, and wept. On the two hundred and sixty-third day, he ascended to the living.