It’s the last week for the Rule of 3 blogfest so this is my fourth and final post. I have learned so much from this foray into short fiction; the weekly deadline to post, as well as the make believe world of Renaissance, have all given me a brief window into speculative fiction. I must say I hope it won’t be my last. Here we go with Sen — not towards an end — into a completely new beginning: the rest of her life with her mother’s people.

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Taking the bag off his granddaughter’s head, Tibor, smoothed back her hair and stared down into clear, blue, blue eyes. Eyes he knew would mark her as the bridge to between humans and the Ulimum civilization. Sen stared up at him, not in fear, but in a similar kind of wonder. Her head was held in place by a vise like grip of malleable plastic, much like the rest of her semi-upright body. The doctors continued their laser scans of her body in the all white isolation cube.

She was speaking to him but he couldn’t understand her, had never had the patience to listen when his daughter tried to give him lessons. It was a dying culture after all. Theirs was the one that would prevail, on another planet, far away from Renaissance. He turned away in frustration as his daughter, Alysia, Sen’s mother, entered the cube. Her willfulness and insistence on studying the humans had led to all of this trouble. But also what might be their salvation.

The door slid shut behind her. Alysia –the only one to be able to have a baby in nearly forty years. She moved across the white floor in rubber shoes towards them.

Sen sat up, her restraints moving with her, allowing her to swing her legs and sit upright, but not to raise her arms.

“My darling,” Alysia said with the same thick accent that had mesmerized Sen in the forest, words unrecognizable to him.

“I want her out of these, now.”

She moved to tap in the code to release Sen but the lock flashed at her and the elastin remained entwined around Sen’s body.

He shook his head.

“Not until all the test are completed,” he said. Sen’s wide eyed gaze made his throat constrict and he had to turn away briefly, pretending to note something on a blank chart.

They had to be sure that the fertility the doctors suspected in humans was in fact present in Sen. Then only could they leave this planet with hope for the rest of their people.

“The sun draws ever nearer, father. We must go before we are incarcerated with the rest of the planet.”

“If she doesn’t have the cure, she says here,” he said with the firmness that characterized his tenure at the Elder’s Council.

“To die with the rest of her people? With her father?”

Alysia knew the answer though she continued to ask the difficult questions. Nothing had changed.

A team of red coats entered the room, indicating Alysia should set aside. A prick and Sen was under again, slanted lids sliding over those blue, blue eyes. He took a deep breath and dared to hope.

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535 words and I used the prompt “The final event becomes another secret for generations to come.”

 

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