Reflection
By: L. Gay Palmero
The blazing sun beat down on the barren landscape, scattering dangerous radiation like dust. Following it through the greyed sky, its smaller companion was dim by comparison, haloed in a soft white glow.
On the observation deck, he sat constricted in alien flesh, sensitive eyes protected by a darkened radiation visor. A bright spot of crimson in the uniform sand and grey of the landscape, he looked out over the forbidding aspect, but his thoughts were elsewhere. His dim reflection in the clear glass of the dome threw back at him a mammalian picture. The fingers of one hand touched it, traced it with the absent abstraction of distant thoughts... Light years distant on a world he had never seen.
Letters had told him of alien things, unpronounceable in his sibilant tongue. Grass, trees, and flowers; flying animals called birds, and numerous other wonders... His brother had loved them all, but the wonder that had held him in greatest awe was the sky... Not grey with ash clouds thrown up by the unstable volcanoes that had forced them into this domed prison on their own world, and not the blazing white of the oppressive heat and light given off by their mother sun, nor yet the pale lavender of the eclipse years, when the daughter-sun's heat was not enough to warm the atmosphere outside the dome, and her light left them in the dusk of Eclipse Winter. No, the skies described in the letters were blue, a color as unfamiliar as the dusky gold of the alien hair that covered his scalp.
And the humans... His brother had spoken often of the humans. Wondrous creatures with smooth skin instead of scales and warmth instead of the chill of tissue that could only absorb heat, never give it back... His head tilted back to pick out the daughter-sun in her pale halo of light. Even behind the radiation visor, his delicate eyes flinched from the blaze of the mother-sun. He lowered his head, opened the clenched hand that rested across his knees. A letter disc fell from nerveless fingers, tumbled to the sand, lost in his shadow. Humans... Ugly creatures who had lured his brother into a trap and killed him without mercy.
He slumped forward, rested his head against the cool glass that sealed out the suffocating ash and burning radiation. His eyes closed, and he tried to picture that distant world against the darkness of alien lids. His imagination failed him; he could not conjure up images to fit the strange words. Vegetation had never grown on this world, that had burned almost dry by the merciless mother-sun. He could not imagine growing things any more than he could imagine the wealth of color that other world produced, sealed in the colorlessness of his own home. He slid back from the glass and saw his reflection for the first time. He traced it again with graceful fingers. This was the appearance his brother had chosen, because of its strangeness. The others had chosen shadow colors, things they were familiar with, but his brother had always been more daring... His mind shied away from the thought with the senseless anxiety of grief. He studied the alien appearance, this shell he had fought for with determination. They had always been identical, their sameness as strange as the distant world described in his brother's letters. Monozygotes were rarer than surface water pockets; he and his brother were the first in centuries. It was said that, if they survived, they were destined for greatness. He had fulfilled that prophecy, rising faster than any of his peers until he held one of the highest ranks in the military and had the ear of the Leader himself... But his brother's promise had been destroyed by mammalian creatures who bled warm blood the color of the uniform he wore.
He pressed the palm of his hand against the crimson reflection, met the alien eyes, sought for their color behind the dark tint of the visor, but could not find it. The silence rang in his ears; the stillness of the ground beneath his feet felt unnatural. Emptiness coalesced into shadow-fear deep inside. In all his life, he had never been alone; there had always been the sense shared between them, their strange closeness that had baffled their instructors, peers, and superiors. Now that had been ripped away, robbed from him by violent death. He pushed his hand against the image in the glass, seeking to mold it into reality, to give himself back what had been taken from him. Fear turned to hatred, hatred to thoughts of vengeance. Beneath his fingers, the reflection bled crimson on the glass, the color of human blood that he had never seen... The color, but not the warmth. There was only the familiar chill of his own kind. The aching cold of death...