Free Orb by Gary Tarulli

apology. Not in an age where science rules and the precious few storytellers are bereft an audience.
    As I stood at the viewport self-absorbed in (admittedly) unstructured thoughts, Kelly quietly entered the room. Approaching from behind, she wrapped her arms around my waist and pressed herself tightly to my back. Resting her chin on my shoulder, we looked at the planet together. Softly, she whispered in my ear.
    “Thinking of a name?”
    “Beautiful, isn’t she? Hard to believe that a few months ago she was encased in ice. I will find a name befitting such a world, but she will have to settle for second best. I will never find a name as sweet sounding to me as yours.”
    “Hmmm. You’ll have
me
melt.”
    “Can you stay with me tonight?” I abruptly asked.
    “I’d like nothing better. You seem lonely.”
    “I’m very often lonely.”
    “Sorry. Why?”
    “Sometimes, I guess, my inner thoughts isolate me.”
    My response was cryptic. It didn’t really explain anything. Nevertheless, Kelly accepted it gracefully; even giving me an easy way out if I chose to take it.
    “Maybe,” she said, “you’ll someday share those thoughts with me.”
    I said nothing, letting her wish disappear into the emptiness of space.
    As we walked to my cabin I silently criticized myself for having missed another opportunity.
    Not only for what I said, but for what I somehow couldn’t say.

Landing
     
    EARLY THE FOLLOWING morning (for the first time in a hundred days the word took on real meaning, for we eagerly awaited the advent of sunrise)
Desio
, in the capable hands of Commander Thompson, sliced a path through the planet’s atmosphere.
    Safely transported to within one hundred meters of P5’s surface, we became the first humans privileged to behold the moving, living ocean in liquid form. Our elevated perspective revealed to us a strangely placid expanse of widely interspersed, low rolling swells remarkably unmarred by wavelets, sea foam or disturbance of any kind. Highlighting and bisecting this elemental scene was the endless unbroken line of glare cast upon the water by the planet’s slowly rising blue sun.
    I found myself mesmerized by the overwhelming serenity of the ocean and my mind began wandering into uncommon imaginings and fanciful abstractions: The water … shiny-smooth, metallic-colored, fluid-moving … transforming itself into a boundless, polished sheet of cobalt blue steel slowly undulating solely through the will of a fundamental and unknowable authority.
    I don’t believe I was alone in my daydreaming, for there was an undeniable calming feel to this tableau, a quality possessed and imparted by the muted blues and grays, the simplicity of shapes and lines, the grandness of scale, the timelessness. There was also something just beyond my comprehension here, something intangible at play. We were not original to this picture; we knew it, we felt it, and we were humbled into silence by it.
    And in that silence,
Desio’s
instruments performed the vital process of sampling the planet’s atmosphere, the resulting tests ruling out the presence of chemical or pathogenic threats and bolstering our shared hope to experience what had for so long been denied: To walk on solid ground; to breathe fresh, unrecycled air; to see another sunrise, and later, to see it set. In short, if only in part, a return to the natural cyclical order of life.
    We traveled onward as the sun—twice the size of Earth’s—continued its slow rise, growing dominant in appearance, completely emerging from the ocean as a distorted disc hovering on the horizon. Then, with the young planet dutifully spinning one new day, the last vestiges of dawn began to recede. The disc began brightening. Fully rounding. Accomplished both in manner and in form that had been repeated nine hundred billion times before.
    And so, in awe, we venerated the start of the new day.
    Thompson, taking pleasure in ignoring automated piloting, decreased
Desio’s
forward