Enjoy this fairy-tale inspired short story, which I wrote for Elegant Literature (November 2023). This magazine features upcoming authors in all genres, challenging them with a prompt each month. The story below had to feature a theme of what to believe in, in a futuristic society. I decided to re-invent Peter Pan. Hope you like it!
“Plenty of signs of life, Jim. Thermal scans show settlements scattered across the continent.”
Jim scratched his chin. “Aggregations, Tris. Aren’t you the ecologist?”
Tris grinned. “True, Commander. Aggregations.” She ran a hand through her hair and stared at the massive panorama of blue, pocked with feverish bursts of orange and red. She pointed at the spiderweb of interconnecting yellow. “But, as you can see, these connect some of the aggregations. Packed gravel and brick heat up faster than earth. Those are roads, implying the presence of sentient life.”
“Cattle make paths, Tris.” Jim leaned back with a sigh.
Tris gave him that look again, the one that said, I know what the hell I’m doing, Jim.
And Mission Specialist Trista Smith would know. As resident ecologist, she evaluated each planet’s extant life prior to touchdown of any exploratory vessel. Unlikely as it was, there was always a vague possibility their mission would find sentient beings present, and the location would have to be scrubbed.
“Commander, cattle don’t pave roads. Don’t need a PhD to know that.”
Jim raised an eyebrow, and Tris straightened. With such a long mission, Jim had allowed a lapse in formalities amongst the crew, and it was biting him in the ass now. It had, however, made the years of interstellar travel a hell of a lot more tolerable as they sought out viable colony planets.
He pondered the screens. “I acknowledge Mission Specialist Smith’s suggestion of sentient life, but this planet is more amenable to human colonization than any we’ve formerly seen. Atmospheric composition is tolerable, gravity on the light side at 7-7, obviously all carbon-based…In terms of mission parameters, this location is near ideal. I’d like to go to the surface for more tests.”
“We can’t just invade a planet that’s already inhabited.” Tris waggled a finger. “No matter how nice it looks.”
“And damn does it look nice,” muttered Roark, the anthropologist. She gazed out the live screen, where the small planet sat like a jewel in a black ocean. From afar, the primary continent was a watercolor mural of greens and browns, darks and lights, swaths of flat broken by jagged peaks. Cotton candy clouds hung over half, obscuring their visuals. Roark gave Jim her best beseeching look. “We have rapid translation through the ship’s computers. Let’s at least listen, give the computer some input to crunch, and consider going down there to talk. What good is finding another society, another sentient species, if not to make connections?”
“We were warned not to interfere—” Tris began, but it was too late.
The entire crew wanted this. For years they had searched for an alternate home, mapping everything they found along the way. Half of Earth’s inhabitants were in cryo by now, waiting for the time they could build a viable future. Start fresh. Clean slate. Etcetera, etcetera.
Jim believed in the mission, but not for the reasons most of the crew did. They had this whole manifest destiny thing going, a fanatical dogmatic belief that mankind deserved better than what they had broken. Jim just wanted a home.
He rubbed his chin and breathed in the live view. Despite the reality of clinical recycled air in his nostrils, he could almost taste the verdant greenery, the complexity of the salty air on the beaches below. Unpolluted. He had only smelled such things on Alpha, the first colony planet. Certainly, Earth had no places like that anymore.
His orphanage had been clinical too, a place of stark white walls and cloistered souls, all shoving for a place in line to test out, to have a future. Orphans who didn’t test out didn’t have a future, no cryo tube, no education, no place in the world. Orphans who didn’t test out disappeared, probably into the protein paste fed to the survivors. He had always thought someone would rescue him from the place, but in the end he had rescued himself.
Jim was in this to find a place he could call home, because everywhere he had been before wasn’t it. He was in this because he believed there was something better and more beautiful out there, somewhere in the clouds.
One more exaggerated sigh, and then: “Alright, let’s do it.”
Roark raised a finger, her jaw slack as she pressed her earpiece. Then she looked up. “Commander? They’re speaking English.”
“Don’t shoot them!” Roark screamed as she keeled over, her face shield shattered. Stones shouldn’t have broken through her suit, Jim thought, but nothing else made sense either.
A whirlwind of sparkling light surrounded Roark, accompanied by high-pitched shrieking. Roark was lifted like a rag doll, high in the sky and away. The rest of the crew goggled in horror. More stones crashed down upon their expedition, slung from the shadowy trees. Jim hadn’t had a good look yet, but Roark’s negotiation attempt had clearly failed.
He raised his phaser and fired blind. He would have smiled at the shriek of pain that erupted, but he was too busy seeking out the next target. Whoever these English-speaking aliens were, they had started the fight. He was going to finish it, for Roark’s sake.
Another cry rang out, and then a strange thing happened.
A boy sailed through the air, seemingly from the clouds, and alighted in front of him with arms flung wide. “Enough.” He glared at both Jim and the trees. Then he began to pace, all the while eyeing Jim with dark suspicion.
Jim held his phaser level, finger just tapping the trigger in readiness, and followed the boyish alien’s movements, left, right, left, right. A sense of dread settled in his gut. Whatever this was, it couldn’t be human, and yet human it appeared to be.
The boy looked like someone he could have met back at the orphanage: scruffy hair the color of rust, pert nose sprinkled in freckles, and eyes green as an LED. They flashed like one too, flickering from astronaut to astronaut. Then the boy put his hands on his hips and raised his hairless chin.
“Remove your helmets. You look stupid.”
Jim wanted to stare, but commanders can’t afford to be in shock, especially with one crewmember magically lifted away by sprites and one babbling like a fool. “Smith, get it together,” he muttered. Then, more loudly, “We cannot due to contamination risk, friend, but we would like to talk, not fight.”
The boy chortled, echoed by a chorus of snickers from the forest. “We don’t ‘talk’, especially to grownups. Now, off.” The boy snapped his fingers, and a bright light appeared, alighting on his finger. “Make them obey, Tink. I don’t like not seeing their faces.”
The light jingled, and then a powerful crack shuddered out from it, and Jim’s visor flew open.
Smith grasped at her throat, panicking, and although Jim’s readings indicated the atmosphere to be safe, he found himself doing the same. After all, billions of novel microbes lived here, and it only took one to be deadly. Nevertheless, as shivers of fear flushed through his body and weakened his knees until he collapsed to one side, he kept breathing. And living. And hearing the boy’s raucous laughter.
Jim finally composed himself and helped Tris to her feet. Heaving a shaky sigh, she removed her entire helmet. He did the same.
“Better,” the boy declared. “Now that I can see you—” He stopped mid-sentence and narrowed his eyes at Jim. “You.”
Jim raised his palms. “We are humans from Planet Earth. We come in the spirit of exploration and peace.”
The boy scoffed. “I doubt that very much. You get that from a movie?”
“Please tell us where Roark is. The woman who was carried off. Is she alright?”
The boy crossed his arms, chortling. “Who cares? You don’t belong here. Not any of you. But especially you, James.”
Jim felt a wave of dizziness threaten to overwhelm him, but Tris caught his elbow. They exchanged glances.
“How does he know you, Jim? How is any of this possible?”
“You were never meant to be here,” the boy repeated, stomping his foot like a child with a tantrum. “Never.” He furrowed his red brows, then snapped his fingers again.
The bright light coalesced once again, then faded to reveal a pixie on his finger. He glared at it, and it glared back, tiny hands on wide hips. It leaned into his face with an angry jingle.
The boy entered a seemingly one-sided conversation, his cheeks flushing and his voice rising. “This is your fault…He doesn’t belong here. I don’t like him…I told you last time.” He shook the pixie off with an irritated flick, and it tumbled through the air. The boy stomped his foot again and shouted, “I get to pick who comes.”
Righting itself, the pixie approached Jim and hovered.
Smith nudged him. “Hold out your hand, Commander. I think it’s friendly, definitely sentient.”
He did, and the light became a beautiful woman with gossamer wings and a leafy silken dress. She gave him a coy wink and jingled, but this time, he understood.
“Hello, Jamesy.” She blew him a kiss and scanned him up and down. “You’re all grown up now. What a shame, or is it?”
Jim staggered back, leaving the pixie hanging in mid-air. She merely stepped forward a few paces to settle on his hand once again and beamed at him, then pointed up.
A flurry of light encompassed Roark’s prone figure, and hundreds of pixies set the anthropologist on the ground.
“I’ll heal her,” the pixie offered.
The strangely familiar boy turned purple beneath his red hair. “Heal my boys and forget about these grownups, Tink.”
“I won’t heal one without healing the other,” the pixie refuted.
The boy glowered, then nodded. “But then they have to leave.”
There was something about this boy. Jim didn’t know what, but the leafy clothing, almost like a ghilly suit, the feathered cap and the lopsided grin made Jim’s stomach churn. The carefree, snappy attitude. The orphanage. This boy was at the orphanage back on Earth.
How was that possible? The creature was a shadow of Jim’s nightmarish childhood, eternally youthful while Jim had aged decades.
He finally managed to speak, throat cracking. “You didn’t take me. You rescued boys from the orphanage, but you didn’t take me.”
A long silence followed his words, and the boy’s expression darkened. “I didn’t want you.”
With those four words, the boy unraveled the persona Jim had worked so hard to knit together. Jim the Explorer, Jim the Commander, Jim the Founder of Beta.
Jim was still an orphan, rejected, homeless. Even in this magical haven, there was no place for him. Despite the chain of events that brought him across galaxies, his search for home was fruitless.
He bowed his head. “Why?”
A gentle tinkling and cold caress forced his chin up. The pixie gave him a wistful smile. “Because I liked you.”
“You can never, never stay, not if you steal my pixies’ magic,” the boy announced. “This place is mine, only mine, and grownups don’t belong.”
Blood pounded in Jim’s ears, and instead of heartbreak, another old sensation returned. Fury. Hatred. Resentment for the world that rejected him.
The pixie turned to the boy. “You don’t own it, Peter. James can stay, as can his crew. He got here fair and square without you.”
“No, Tink.”
“Then I won’t heal Tootles.”
The boy grimaced. “Fine, but I’m never speaking to any of you again. Never ever.” He shot into the air and disappeared.
Jim watched as Tink dusted sparks of light upon Roark’s body, and the woman arose, rubbing her head. Miraculous.
He wondered if he should tell them, any of them, about the hopeful missive he had sent right before landing:
Commander James F. Hoogeveen to Mission Control: Viable colony planet found, second star of the Numquami System, fifth planet. Initiate primary colonial mission now. This could be our new home.