Boldly Cumming

Lovey smiled as she toweled off her milk-covered breasts. "Good, you are one of us, now." She reached out her hand and he took it. She led him out into the sunshine as naked as Adam.

She led him into the rows of her crops. He felt the turned soil beneath his feet. He wasn't sure he liked his feet unprotected. "So, are there any native bugs or other pests? Snakes or rats or anything else to watch out for out here?"

She smiled. "Of course. Eden must have its serpent, no? There is a small six-legged rodent that enjoys raiding our farm, about the size of a house cat. And there is a lizard-like creature that hunts them. About the size of a medium alligator." She shrugged. "They look formidable but run away when we are near. Mari An trapped one and took some samples before releasing it. She could tell you more."

Jason nodded. He realized such things were to be expected when you dropped into a completely new ecosystem. He looked down when Lovey stopped in front of a raspberry bush. She held her open hand down to indicate the bush.

He looked at her playfully. "Raspberries?"

She frowned. "Look again, genius."

He did. The plant itself looked just like the fruit bushes that his mother had kept around their place, except the leaves were aqua. He caught his breath as he realized he was looking at a native plant, and it was being grown in their garden. A closer look at the fruit revealed a blue hairlike membrane that seemed to wrap around the lobes of the fruit. He looked up at the enchanting woman inquisitively.

"This is the only indigenous food that we have added to our diet. We call them cafberries. Short for Ceti Alpha Five berries. Ginger and I found them our first week here and we have tested them thoroughly. They are safe to eat. Try one."

With mild trepidation, he plucked a plump specimen the size of his thumbnail. He examined it before popping it into his mouth. The fruit burst between his teeth and the flavor was a lot like a strawberry but there was a tingling sensation like you get from the first sip of a sweet, carbonated drink.

"Wow. That's good, but I'd hardly call it amazing," he said honestly.

She gave him a wry look. "The amazing part is what's inside it. You know that enzyme that the Professor told you about?"

Jason nodded.

Lovey pointed to the bush. "That same enzyme is in the fruit too." She paused so that Jason could grasp the enormity of the revelation. "So even without the sylphs, we'd all have gotten the benefits of the enzyme. It just would have taken longer. Those blue follicles in the fruit glow at night as the sylphs do."

But Jason wasn't hearing her anymore. He turned and ran.

Lovey was stunned. "Jason, what is it? Come back!" she yelled as he left the garden in a full sprint.

***

The compound had a small building that was essentially the control room for the whole place. It contained their communications system, probe controls, and sensors. In the absence of one on an actual ship, the Captain called it "the bridge." Jonas, Ginger and the Professor were all sitting within when Jason burst through the door as naked as the day he was born.

Jonas clapped his hands together with a wide smile. "All right! Someone's getting into the Ceti Alpha spirit!" Ginger and the Professor laughed delightedly.

"We can send it back!" Jason exclaimed.

The smiles turned to confused looks. "Send what back?" Jonas asked.

"The cafberries! We can freeze them and send them back to Earth. Imagine the lives we could save if they had access to the enzyme!"

Jonas frowned. All three of them did. "No boy. We can't. Think it through." He paused.

Jason shrugged. "What?"

It was the Professor who answered. "What do you think they would do if we told them there was a fruit here that could double their life span? Cure diseases, heal broken bones?"

Jason wasn't getting it. "Well, they'd send ships and people and ..."

Ginger interrupted him as Lovey stepped through the door behind him. Her hand caressed his shoulder.

"They would send more people, and then more ships and more ships and more people, and within a century they would destroy this world too. They would pillage it for every natural resource. And kill anything in their way to get it. Just as they always have."

Jason stammered trying to deny what he knew. "But they could ... umm." The door to the bridge opened again and Thurston, Mari, and Gilligan stepped through, moving to the empty chairs near a planning board.

Jason looked at them quizzically wondering how they knew that everyone else was in there. He looked back at Ginger. "But if there had been those berries when Cora got sick ... think of all the Cora's that we could save now?"

"At the cost of what? An entire planet of living things? We've only scouted a fraction of this planet with our drones. "What if we find a sentient race? This is their world."

Lovey took his hand and brought it to her lips. "You know human nature. You know what people would do for this. They would destroy and they would kill."

Gilligan gave a wry look and added, "Just ask the Native Americans about that sometime. The Australian aborigines, the Amazonian native tribes. And that was just about land. This is about immortality, boy, or near enough to it."

Jason's shoulders slumped, knowing they were right. He looked up and met the captain's eyes. "But more people are coming, how do we keep the secret?"

Jonas gave him a flat look. "We sent the catastrophic occurrence code two days ago."

Jason's jaw dropped. "You ... did?"

The big man nodded. "Yes, with a report that we'd encountered a native species that had killed some of our crew and were impervious to our weapons." Now that Jonas had mentioned it, Jason couldn't recall seeing any of the weapons that had been on the Vairon's list of equipment.

Jason stepped back away from Lovey. "That means that they would cancel all further rockets and quarantine the planet." He did some mental math. "But it's too late to call back any of the Jupiter rockets except for Six. It's not passed the point of no return yet. Jupiter Three, Four, and Five will still arrive."

Thurston nodded from his chair. "Yes, we decided that we would build our new civilization with forty-two colonists."

Jason frowned. "Forty-two? With the three additional rockets and yourselves, that's just thirty-nine."

Mari cleared her throat and smiled at him. She rubbed her belly affectionately and looked at the other two women, before looking back at Jason. "Plus, three," she said happily.

Jason looked back at the captain. "C'mon man, you can't just highjack a trillion-dollar mission that's taken fifty years to build up, because of what you think is gonna happen. You don't have the authority."

Jonas shrugged and held up his hands. "And yet we have. Simple. As well as being a starship captain I'm also pretty handy with computers. After Jupiter Five lands, a computer virus will launch, destroying our communications capabilities from this control center, the Vairon, and the four Jupiter rockets, forever. And it can't be stopped, it's already in the system. Unless you're better with software than I am."

Jason stood stunned. As a machinist and engineer, software wasn't in his mental tool bag.

The Professor continued. "We just can't let the humans do to Ceti, what they did to Earth. We have the opportunity to build a world of empathy and love here. Where we live with the natural world, not over the top of it. Where we build without destroying, live without killing what was here first."

Jason looked at him, holding his hands out imploringly. "You say humans as if you're not one anymore. Just because you're not on Earth, it doesn't change anything!"

Ginger stood and approached him with a serious look. Jason's knees got weak when he saw her eyes begin to glow with a violet light. "That idea might not be as far-fetched as you think, Jason. Not too far-fetched at all, if you ask me."

*******

Author's note.

Hard to fault the logic, huh? And forty-two is a pretty important number after all.

A quick note on the crew of the Vairon. The older readers will recognize the cast. I was designing the crew in my head and suddenly the original castaways from Gilligan's Island popped into my head. It was too much fun to resist. You will also note that I have changed the ethnicity of some cast members. Before you go accusing me of being "woke", understand that I figured the crew sent up by an international agency wouldn't be made up of all white folk. It was simple common sense. Anyway, I had fun with this, I hope you did too. "Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale ..."