It's My Party

Lucia glanced back down to the wooden stairway and then out again to the snow-covered wilderness. "Look how beautiful it is Emily. Look how wild and free it is! Such a gift, and we should honor the giver. Fatima, you promised me the right to name the planet. I want to honor Sapphire, honor her love for us and her playfulness. I want to call the planet Heaven."

Fatima blinked. "Call the planet Heaven? A bit pretentious, don't you think?"

Jada turned to Fatima. "No, I think I get it. It's Sapphire's last thought before she died, that life is what you make of it. It's the thought that bound our two species together, the thought and the value that both our species could appreciate." Jada waved and pointed with her arm. "That planet out there, it can be anything we want it to be. Ricardo would have chosen hell. Why can't we chose the opposite? What's stopping us?"

The nine humans stared in silence at the outside scene. They were on a new virgin planet, a gift that was to be humanity's new home. The sun was only a few degrees above the horizon, and the strange-looking trees were in the deep shadows of their winter slumber. A lifetime of exploration and discovery was before them, and they owed it all to a single alien child who had the love and the courage and the selflessness to rebel and say no. Yes, perhaps it was an alien mind, a mind humanity would struggle to understand for generations to come. But with childlike determination Sapphire had bridged the gulf between her species and another species that was so unlike her own. And across that great gulf, Sapphire and the humans had shared their value of goodness.

It was now early afternoon and the last of the day's brief light was fading from the sky. In deep thought, Mark and his wives and his dear friends turned and returned down the stairway to the comforts of home and family.