The Red Sun Sets on Kepler 186f

Yuri looked out across the empty valley below her, dark and vast, aimlessly fingering at the locket about her neck. To her left, east, the red sun hung low, not quite dropping behind the mountaintops. To her west, twilight danced, alive with green and purple ghost-lights dipping low from northern skies. Home wasn’t that far but still, darkness meant danger on Kepler 186f, Sunset lasted for literal hours here, but even a few minutes of night meant trouble. She turned back to the rubble and reloaded her wagon for the hike back home.

Astronomers called K186f a Goldilocks planet, but it didn’t feel ‘just right.’ First, time here was unlike anything humans were used to. Even at noon, the sky was no brighter than an overcast Gaian day. Further, every other planet, planetoid, and liveable rock they’d managed to infest rotated at a rate between sixteen and thirty five hours. K186f, however, took six days, five hours, and seventeen minutes to spin once. An artificial sunlight and timer system was used to keep the settlers from going insane. The first settlers, an advance team sent to ready the camp for the rest of the colonists, hadn’t made it six months. One crewman had not slept for weeks leading up to the arrival of the colonists. In the weeks before the group’s arrival, while everyone slept, oblivious to the omnipresent, soft, red sun outside, he stared at walls and ceilings and counted sheep and did everything he could--in vain--to fall asleep. One night, after the rest of the expeditionary crew slept, he moved, cat-like, systematically through the camp, murdering everyone in their sleep with a tanto knife before going outside and gutting himself on the lawn. When the next immigrant ship arrived, his body and those of his cosettlers were mostly devoured and the remains scattered across a significant area around the camp. The new settlers, including Yuri, left Athens and rebuilt miles away.

The wind shifted favorably, and she took this as a sign to move. With the sun behind her, Yuri lifted the small heart she wore and kissed it. Her grandfather’s Purple Heart, her mother had paid a goldsmith to turn it into a locket before she left for the Kepler system. It contained digitally engraved images of her mother’s parents inside, enclosed in an eternal embrace. Her grandfather, injured during the last Earth war (just before its human-induced toxicity rose to a near-uninhabitable state), left in search of more hospitable climates--along with his family and most of humankind.

She walked, cart in tow, back to the only home she’d known for most of her life: the camp. Ochards and the growing fields, like her, invaded the natural order of K186f. There were cattle, too, and pigs, and rabbits. All had escaped into the wild. Herds of Gaian livestock ravaged native plants. She’d read that pigs and rabbits had been the cockroaches of mammals back on Earth, taking over entire ecosystems. At first, she was shocked that those were the animals chosen to take to the new settlements across the galaxy, but then she realized that this was exactly the reason they were chosen: a guaranteed protein source, native species be damned. This was not to say that the Kep-bears and bluefoxes weren’t enjoying the new bounty of food. If anything, it had given the planetary predators an easy life, and they’d seen a massive population boon as a result. Some of the local herbivores, however, hadn’t dealt so well with the competition. In fact, she couldn’t say the last time she’d heard the lonesome wail of a grazer, let alone seen one’s lean, feathered rump wisping through the woods. Only feral Gaian beasties were to be seen.

Her grandparents (whom she had never met nor spoken with) had settled another system in the region, but as the new mission of humanity was to expand throughout the galaxy, her parents were chosen for the main settlement on K186f, and Yuri had been conceived--and born--along the way. She was educated during their flight, in Earth and human history, including mythologies, and her mother teased her that she was going to be a new Eve, mother of an entire planet’s life. Yuri countered that she would instead be Athena, the smartest of all gods, and let someone else be Eve, or Hera, or whoever they chose to be the mother. She would instead use her brains to lead the people to great achievements. Her mother laughed at this; Athena the wise she had called Yuri for many days. Her father, the ship’s lieutenant commander, heard this and convinced his superiors to name the settlement Athens.

Whatever she’d thought of scientific advancement and heroic Athena, this was not to be. As Yuri grew and learned, her aptitudes were tested, and it was decided that she would be the archivist and historian for K186f. By this time, Yuri firmly in her teens, the idea of recording the beginning of an entire civilization like some interstellar Homer sounded much more palatable than what she had seen in the science office.

When they arrived, Yuri (now seventeen) recorded the terrible imagery at Athens. Given access to the base’s security footage, she witnessed firsthand the horrific final night of the expeditionary team. She searched the killer’s room like a detective,searching his data pad for clues. She discovered his insomnia and found that this became rage and paranoia and eventually murder. Finally, while she didn’t come up with the specifics, it was Yuri who suggested using some sort of system similar to the one used on spaceships to help everyone get normalized sleep.

Yuri’s wagon slowed her significantly when it was full. She should still make camp around nightfall, but it wasn’t ideal. Darkness in the wilds of K186f gave her shivers. The creatures that arose for the long, long night on this planet, that she tried to keep out of her mind whenever possible, the things that had devoured most of the remains of Athena camp, were nightmares incarnate. A dance with even one of these creatures would be ugly, and she would likely see four or five.

K186f’s wildlife, though different from Earthly animals, bore striking evolutionary similarities. There were small, insectoids; there were swimming creatures that breathed through gills like fish; there were amphibious creatures, reptilians, and creatures that could only be described as mammalian--warm blooded, giving live birth, and producing milk for their offspring. As historian, she documented these creatures as they were discovered, in word, image, and 3-D holograph. The hardest part wasn’t discovering the creatures, but naming them. True, the scientists gave them scientific names--in Latin, always involving some variation of the word Kepler--but the common names were given to them by the people who discovered them or a settler of New Ephesus (Athens was the ruined settlement, so for luck, they took their name from Artemis’ home). A grazer, for example, was a large yellowish flightless bird. It moved gracefully about the fields and light forests of the planet, eating the dark brown grasses that grew everywhere, as well as any insects in the grass. They were beautiful, as amazing as anything Yuri had ever seen in her Gaian studies. Even seeing the purple-and-brown-striped terror that was a Kepler’s tiger crouched in waiting as a grazer came near, knowing that the fearsome yowl would be almost as ferocious as its attack, even a moment such as that had beauty inside its terribleness.

But most of that rich, deep-brown grass was gone now, devoured by the cattle or otherwise destroyed, and anything that had grown in its place was Earthen grain. Like the livestock, it had taken over like weeds, and although earth beasts could eat Keplen grains without any problems, most of K186f’s animals couldn’t process Gaian plants. Soon there were fewer and fewer of the native animals as the native plants were destroyed by the invasive materials, and this of course trickled down throughout the animal kingdom. Again, the only thing that seemed to survive all of this were the native predators and the encroaching alien plants.

She approached New Ephesus, remembering the colony. Ephesians had fared better than the Athenians. Nearly three Gaian years passed, in fact, before the first major incident. That was the plague. Nearly half of the settlement became ill; no one knew why; even the doctors and scientists could not discover the cause. There was a fever and a rash and pustules, and for the severe cases (which most were), heart and lung failure. Her parents died, leaving Yuri a lonely young woman. Once the survivors began talking about herd immunity, almost one hundred people had died. One third of the settlement gone (closer to half when you counted the Athens massacre). The remaining settlers--just under two hundred--promised to become a more tight-knit community and work towards preservation. Then they went back to their normal ways, ignoring one another whenever possible.

The second event was the culling. During one of the long nights, the livestock was locked away for safety; the barn seemed secure. But just over twenty-four hours into the darkness, the cattle began making a turbulent cacophony . Safety rules regarding darkness had been well-established because of the dangerous nightlife. Still, nearly three dozen settlers went through the tunnel connecting the barn to the main quarters, entering what could only be called a slaughterhouse. Three large beasts were wreaking havoc in the barn. Gore and carnage covered the walls and floor, Several of the cattle and other livestock had managed to escape the barn and were running off into the darkness. The massive Kep-bears turned upon hearing the humans enter and charged, claws and teeth everywhere, easily maiming or killing three dozen poorly prepared men and women, leaving only two alive to tell the rest of the camp. Then, perhaps sensing a bigger response forthcoming, disappeared into the night much as the cattle had minutes earlier.

The third event happened only hours later. Seeing what remained of their fellow colonists, the survivors decided to act. They tracked the bears back to the vast valley below Athens. With one hundred and fifty people, armed and carrying torches, the annihilation of the Kep-bears should be nothing--child’s play. They surrounded the valley from the ridgetop and set the ground aflame. The wind was in their favor, blowing into the valley, the fire lit quickly and marched steadily inward. The mob watched intently for several minutes. Then someone screamed. Then someone else. And another. The people looked to one another and all around before realizing that they had been surrounded by Kep-bears. The creatures were picking them off, and now that they realized that, the bears seemed to change tactics and head at them straight on, forcing them towards the fire. There were many more than three of them. The choice was grim--death by fire or at the teeth of a vicious, intelligent creature. None of the fire-bearers escaped; only Yuri, who had been recording from her safe distance, managed. The fire raged on for weeks, burning everything in its path, scorching plant and animal and soil indifferently for hundreds of miles.

The remaining few people handled the events more or less as poorly as one would expect. About half committed suicide, another three or four overdosed (Yuri could no longer remember how many), and the last few just--disappeared. Now, Yuri thought, some fifty years later, she was alone on this planet, alone in this system. She had arrived intent on being Athena, but she was never Athena, or even Artemis, to this planet. She was the worst character in all of mythology: a human. They had arrived on K186f bringing only destruction and chaos to a beautiful world. How many worlds had humans settled by now? How many settlements had taken hold? How many planets were already on a path to the same fate as Earth? She entered the New Artemis encampment, home of one, closed and locked the door.