New Orbit Magazine Issue 08; Feb 2020, The Future of Animals

“Same as all we’ve done in this damn
colony,” the other man conceded. “An
occasional diversion would do us good.
We’re getting rusty little by little. Listen to
what I tell you. Damn the day I signed the
papers to be here. Killing harmless
creatures! Speaking of which, it’s better for
us, although the damn peace on this planet
ends up frying my left hemisphere.”
“Better for us.” Miles bent over. The
fatigue began to crawl through every bone in
his body. “Why the left hemisphere?”
“Just because. C’est la vie.”
Miles’s face shrunk into a grimace as if
he had aged prematurely. With a slow
gesture, he picked up the hide, which had
already been tanned and made free of
contaminating agents, as the insistent call of
the machine went off. He ran his fingers
over the hide and caressed its texture, which
was both rough and exquisite. Then he
entered his cubicle.
Miles knew the hide would make life
much easier inside the base. “All mighty
megacredits,” thought Miles with a wry
smile. Good organic food and some fleeting
pleasure in the human contact simulators.
Nothing too sexual, just a hug would suffice.
“Like my mother’s hug,” he thought. “My
poor mother back home on Earth.”
A stab of loneliness shook him, but he
still continued to spread the hide over the
bare floor. Then he stepped on it. He was
surprised by the warmth that it gave off and
its scent that reminded him of forest, fog,
and water, as if the whole essence of that
planet were condensed in the piece. Red
seas, purple waves, crystal forests. Flameshaped
stones. Bubbles. Fire. Fear. The
beasts’ bloodshed eyes.
“If you could see all this, Mother.”
Nostalgia.
Old memories raced back to him in his
dream and led him to the sands of the Earth
he remembered as clearly as the day of his
departure. His mother held her handkerchief
etched with the blue cross of the First
Orthodox Church of Naurì, crossed herself
for luck on her sweaty forehead, and then
stretched out her hand in a wave goodbye
without tears.
He dared to dream of his return to Earth,
as someone a little older and richer. His
mother, all wide eyed and astonished, in his
memory hadn’t aged even a day and
wouldn’t die without seeing him come down
from a ship of the Imperial Wrecks.
“What could I give you, Mother?”
The hide between his fingers was still
hot, as if life existed beneath it.
He thought of his mother’s arthritis,
which not even the deepest prayers of the
pastoral congregation of the First Orthodox
Church of Naurì had been able to cure. He
remembered those pains and increasingly
colder nights on Earth.
“Mother,” he whispered and imagined
her wrapped in the body heat of his hunting