Deborah
[Note: this was originally written for submission to the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge 2024. The assignment was romantic comedy/a cockpit/baby food.]
“Are those flagella?” He yelled back from the cockpit.
“WHAT!?” A woman’s voice reacted.
“What would you call — ” he pointed to the amorphous, pearlescent…creature?, its undulating protrusions occupying their cargo bay that should have been Sborgalian Space Radishes (the fact these radishes were currently in space was coincidental; they are native to Space County, Sborgalia) — “those? I need to know what to search for!” He tapped frantically at the starship’s console.
“Not flagella! Too small. Try…’pseudopods.’”
He clicked away: “pulsing…blob…pseudopods…horrifying…”
“Halebopp! Don’t call it ‘horrifying!’”
“Brenda. It’s constantly oozing between vague platonic polyhedrons and piles of pudding. We have no idea what it is, what it wants, what it could do to us. This is horrifying.”
“The situation is horrifying. It’s not her fault!”
“‘Her?!’ — ” The control board dinged a helpful tone. “Ugh. It says there are 55,001 species that match within a few parsecs.” Halebopp sunk forward.
“We’ll just have to take our time.” She shot the blob a sympathetic smile as waves rippled across its surface, collapsing against the floor in flatulent little slaps. It began to emit a low moan, like the melancholy cry of whalesong and the reedy chirp of a cricket the size of your leg. “Oh! Add ‘moans’!”
Halebopp looked incredulous. “…Sure…’moans.’” Click. Whirring. Ding! “54,999?! They ALL moan?”
“Well obviously not all of them — ”
“YES, OBVIOUSLY TWO OF THEM DON’T, BRENDA.”
“You know, this is your problem. You used to be full of wonder for the universe and its many incredible and improbable beauties! You used to marvel that something so…”
“Horrifying?” Halebopp offered.
“No! Just — ” their oozy passenger exuded a bulb of slime and began wetly thwapping it against the side of the crate “ — attuned to a different cosmic beauty than we’re accustomed to.”
“’Attuned to a different — ?!’ It’s repulsive and maybe dangerous; we don’t have the radishes, and I just learned that there are 55,000 similar species within a short distance. Let’s just put it out of the airlock.”
“And kill Deborah?” Brenda backed slowly from the cockpit to fend Halebopp off.
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“Zorg, don’t NAME it!” He stood from the cockpit and followed.
“NO, Halebopp, it’s cruel, I — ” her leg brushed an eellike tendril that had slithered from the crate. Brenda’s consciousness felt like it was falling backwards from behind her eyes down a well. Not a well: a wormhole. She was overcome with memory: playing Astroball with her father, the pain of her Pravik fur-snail dying, she and Halebopp buying their cargo cruiser from Uncle Lemon’s Used Spacehaulers and starting their new life together. She gasped as these hit like a bucket of water.
“Oh,” Brenda squeaked.
“Did you get a static shock or something?”
“No. We have something new to add. Mnemonic temporal displacement.”
Halebopp looked agog, but dutifully returned to the cockpit. Whir. Ding. “Huh. One entry. Says it’s a ‘Forvlex.’ Except they’re normally massive. Supermassive. This must be…a baby?” He regretted saying it, but it was too late; Brenda had already begun squeeing and cooing at Deborah. Deborah, for her part, had no reaction.
“She needs our help! I bet she’s hungry. What does it say she eats?”
“HUNGRY?? It doesn’t even — ! JUST GET RID OF IT!”
Brenda couldn’t help herself. She pushed Halebopp, and he fell, quickly, slowly, inevitably towards Deborah, which stretched itself first into a basin, then curled itself up like a vase, and then, with teeth like flaccid toddlers’ fingers, a grasping mouth to swallow Halebopp.
Time ceased. Endlessly cascading sheets of memory like torrential rainfall. Halebopp, a young man, his eyes towards the starlight. Brenda, the artificial lighting from the terrarium catching her hair when she would greedily dig into a new astrobiological rabbit hole, figuratively or literally. The two of them, dreaming together. Their first year “scraping the black,” running rookie routes across the known systems, helplessly and endlessly alone, yet together; helplessly and endlessly together, yet alone. How they grew and learned and loved and hoped.
And he saw how they fell. The endless hours. The infinitudes and the infinitesimal, how a starship went from infinite to irritable to incarceration.
But more than anything else, he saw Brenda. He saw the stars again.
Halebopp gasped to life again. To Brenda. “I’m sorry,” he managed to mumble as Baby Deborah violently rejected his body onto the cold steel floor.
“You remember!” She could see it in his eyes. They kissed for the first time in a long time, consumed with each other. They resurfaced dreamily. Then they remembered Deborah. Halebopp regarded the anomalous, amorphic creature for a moment, first with gratitude, but then with a growing chagrin. This being was not meant to travel with them; it would soon
grow to immense proportions that no ship could accommodate. It was meant for space.
Reluctantly, he lifted Brenda’s chin until her eyes met his. “We can’t keep her, you know. She’ll be safe in space.”
“I know. I’ll just miss her.”
“We’ll miss her together.”
They held each other as they watched Deborah float off into space, adrift in the emptiness of her home. They settled down into the cockpit and made ready for FTL travel again, holding hands for the first time in an eternity as they kicked the ship back into ultraspace.
“You know,” Halebopp said, “We didn’t figure out what a baby Forvlex eats.”
Brenda smiled. “Maybe it eats loneliness.”
“Yeah,” said Halebopp, smiling. “Maybe.”
Baby Deborah watched the starship become a pinprick. It experienced, at last, the first thing that resembled an emotion: insatiable hunger. It compressed its form and then stretched, stretched. First like a sheet, and then a web, and then each strand of the web stretched farther and farther and farther, until it spread itself millions of miles wide, a fishnet circling the star at the center of the solar system where they’d dropped it. The star’s gravity wrapped the being around it, and finally, finally, Baby Deborah ate.
