Helga (unedited)

Chapter 2: The Glory

Where there is smoke, there is fire, and where there is passion, there is determination.  I happen to be, well, fortunate t have met such an extraordinary being. She struck me as odd, in a whimsical light, a torch for my melancholic soul. She was a lady, and a half. In all honesty, she was double that which any man could become, and then some. Her grace was reminiscent of a legion of angels. The way she advanced, my goodness! Her clothes, the black clothes that she habitually draped across her soft, pale skin were as pitch as the make-up that made her up. I was never in the position of fearing the woman, though her stare could and did lay a thousand soldiers to waste.

Before I go on giving you an essay about the woman, let me go back a few months and retell the story.

We had been living on the planet Mercury for a few hundred years. By then it had become a more ‘life-supporting and life-sustaining’ planet, as one lady on the TV once mentioned. After they humanised Mars and Uranus, all planets were fair game. The Earth died a few years, seven to be exact, after we settled on Mars. I remember my grandfather describing the death as ‘an inevitable catastrophe and utter shame to a blue marble’, though the last picture of Earth clearly indicated that the oceans had become grey and the land filled with plastic beaches of black muck. Nothing green could be seen anymore. When the Earth couldn’t support our overpopulation, the leading agencies and countries decided to split us as people. Some were placed 10 000km from their own families. While they inhabited red Mars, their families had to survive frigid Uranus.

I am told that the first years were the worst of them all. Although the story of Adam and Eve is a fascinating read, nobody actually wanted to repeat that situation. There was no garden of eternal fruit and warm. On Mars you were in a desert of red dust, so hot and dry. On Uranus, you were also in a desert, a blue desert of dry ice.

Luckily, I only was born in Mercury. Sure it’s much closer to the sun, but I do get to be older than the inhabitants Mars, and much much older than those of Uranus, and our skin has evolved to survive scorching temperatures. Our days and nights are accelerated and so we literally have to live fast. It is cool though, to board a ship to Uranus, and travel back in time. Besides space travel, I feel honoured to have met the woman that walked my way that short Sunday’s afternoon.