Flash SF: The Illusian

Jwandry was just about to take a break from digging her husband’s grave when she caught the movement out of the corner of her eye. Two hours of chiseling away at the rock-solid soil had produced only a shallow indent. At this rate, it would take days to complete it.

There were no schools here to donate Tawney’s body to science. There wasn’t enough fuel to blast the old man into orbit, per his second request, and she couldn’t spare even a little fuel to cremate him, lest she freeze to death before the presently tardy supply craft arrived. The only microbes on the planet were the ones they had brought with them, so Tawney would probably mummify in the moistureless environment. The Offworld Program did not say life would be easy here, but they didn’t say it would be suicide either.

Now Jwandry was staring hard at the nearby rocks, wondering if she was seeing things on this lifeless world, but after a moment she caught another glimpse of it, a fluttering, fuzzy tentacle. Unmistakably, it was one of them. But this was a Terran world, and the illusians only colonized planets with four times the gravity and denser atmospheres, better to convey the vibrations or changes or whatever it was they sensed in the molecules surrounding them. Scientists hypothesized the illusians understood their universe by sampling the molecules around them, like humans with taste and smell, only far more advanced.

On a planet that now had a population of one, what was it doing right here? Jwandry watched as it wiggled and writhed around the rock pile, tendrils radiating out in all directions, feeling over everything. There was no sign of its ship anywhere, which were believed to run on dark energy. She noticed the glint of metal and pattern of electronics mixed within its jumbling tangle of appendages, a spacesuit, and Jwandry realized this wasn’t a colonist, it was an astronaut.

She wondered what she should do. It had to know she was in the area, for why else would it land here? Should she do something to announce her presence to it? Jwandry took a few hesitant steps toward it, momentarily forgetting her dead husband under the nearby blanket, and the illusian seemed to direct its movement in her direction.

When they were within a few feet of each other, Jwandry sat down cross-legged, resigned to whatever would happen next. The illusian wriggled up close to her, and she watched as tendrils within tendrils unraveled with mystifying motion, until a crystal object emerged and was placed before her.

“For me?” she picked it up carefully. It was a geometric shape of incredible complexity. With shapes inside it, interwoven so they appeared to dance with one another as she turned it over in her hand. It was a gift of goodwill, a recognition on the illusian’s part that it knew how human senses understood their world. This illusian wasn’t an astronaut, it was an ambassador.

“I’m sorry I don’t have anything for…” Jwandry trailed off and looked over her shoulder, to the figure under the blanket rippling gently in the breeze beside the shallow grave and smiled for the first time in weeks.

Perhaps Tawney’s body would make it to space after all.