Page 59 of Time Traveling Space Bastards
I grabbed her hand and took her to Big Daddy’s controls. I was going to show her something no human had seen before. I asked Big Daddy to open the control panel so she could see outside. I made a sweeping gesture with my hands.
“Welcome to what’s behind the black hole. This is my galaxy. That’s my planet right there.”
“It’s gorgeous! I’ve seen photos of space before, but I never thought I’d be up here seeing it in person. And this isn’t evenmygalaxy.”
She was so excited, and it just made me feel amazing that I could do this for my Velne. I could have landed on the planet itself, but I vividly remember seeing space for the first time as a child. It was a big experience for me, and I had it the next few times I’d gone up there.
Space travel was common on my planet. We visited other planets in our galaxy to either vacation, visit family friends, or just to trade resources. I was alotolder than my first time in space and I’d done it a lot because of my family, but it never really got old.
“This is…wow. There are no words. I’m up here and down there, there are people living their lives on those planets. It’s surreal.”
“Not yet,” I said. “If Big Daddy did his thing, we’re in my galaxy before our ancestors discovered it. You’re looking at acompletely untouched galaxy right now. The next time you see it, every planet is going to be occupied and developed.”
“Wow.”
“Ready to go down?”
“Will it be as bumpy?”
“It’s only bumpy through the black hole.”
“Then, let’s go!”
I was just as excited as she was. I was about to see my home in her natural state, before any of us got here and started building. This was my history.
Yeah, I was about to manipulate it by leaving Baxter’s books in a cairn we were going to have to build, but I couldn’t change that much of our past without completely erasing Enix and maybe myself.
I still needed to figure out how to fix the present, but maybe an idea would come to me while we were doing this.
Space was beautiful. So was their planet. I was standing on it before anyone got here and that was a big thing. I’d always lived in cities surrounded by buildings and pollution, but I always did love nature. I just didn’t get many opportunities to commune with it because my parents didn’t trust me outside with no supervision and I didn’t get much time to do it after I ran away.
The ground of this planet was covered in purple flowers that smelled amazing. I pretty much always said if I got rich and could buy a house instead of my apartment, I wasn’t going to have a lawn. I was going to have it dug up and have purple clover planted instead for the bees.
This isexactlywhat I would have wanted. The air here was pristine. The trees were like our trees but not. The bark was slightly different, and I’d never seen leaves that color before. Some had fruit growing, but I didn’t know if they were edible or not.
I could see animals peeking their heads out to see what we were doing. None of them approached, but they were checking out the new arrivals. One of the reasons my parents called the psychologist again was when I was nine was when I tried to domesticate a racoon who was going through our trash and ended up needing a ton of shots after it bit me.
If not friend, why friend shaped? My dumbass wanted to go running and pet all the animals on this planet who’d never seen people before because some of those animals were stinking cute.
“What’s that? Is it a wee little baby?” I said, pointing at one that looked a little like a kitten, but definitely wasn’t.
“That’s a Chogur. That one is fully grown. They don’t get big, but they are huge apex predators. A few people have tried to domesticate them and keep them as pets, but they have big feelings about it.
“See the one peeking behind the tree? That’s a Risni, and they approached us first and domesticated like they wanted it. Plenty of people have them as pets or for protection.”
“Oh, my god, I want to bury my face in its belly and blow raspberries. I always wanted a cat or dog, but my parents thought I would hurt it and then I ran away. My apartment doesn’t allow pets, so that was out.”
“We can get you one when we are back to my present. You might not want to pet that one unless she comes up and asks for it because she’s never seen anything like us before.”
“Noted. So, what do we do now?”
“The only signs of life when our ancestors got here were the fauna. They eventually found a cairn made of rocks like someone was marking a grave. Some people wanted to leave it alone and not disturb the dead, but others decided to dig. They wanted to figure out who died here and why there was no one else here.
“They said they needed to disturb the cairn to know if the planet was safe. They started digging, but all they found was thedevice we had delivered. They did other digs, but they didn’t find anything else buried. We need to protect the device and build a cairn around it so they know to look there.”
“Good thing I’m excellent at picking nice rocks,” I said.
“Have someone with you at all times. It’s not just the animals. Some of the plants are dangerous.”
