The Last Sunset

Shodun watched the last moments of the great sun, his face caressed yellow fingers which slipped slowly down his jawline. It was beginning to lose its shape, melting at its edge as it at last joined Shodun in old age. In a few moments it would set for the last time. Of course, it would rise again in another fifty years but by then Shodun would be gone, his perished bones the last signs of life beneath the cold barren sky. He sank deeper into his deck chair and turned his head to look at Sable. “The last day, I suppose,” whispering thought there was no sense of occasion. Sable’s lifeless form said nothing. The years had done nothing to blemish her smooth skin – no life could survive in this barren atmosphere, not even bacteria. Black polished marble, the stars pricking her skin as if to reveal a cold white sun within. Her closed lids gazed upwards, her dark lips pouting ever so slightly, tantalising the black of space with the breath before a kiss. Shodun couldn’t remember when she’d died; it must have been years ago now. Uncountable years of loneliness, with only the unending light of the ever present sun for company. And now that was setting.
Then again maybe it had only been a couple of years. There had only been two or three transmissions come through since then. And she’d certainly been alive the last time he’d shaved; that detail was definite in his memory even as everything else faded around it. Even the smallest events became momentous in the monotony of waiting. He stroked his beard; yeah, he thought, not more than two years growth there.
The radio started to crackle. Some things just wouldn’t die. The company claimed that the little unit was built to be indestructible to be able to withstand the rigours of space and the myriad of hostile environments that company employees had to contend with; Shodun reckoned it was to withstand the rigours of the tortured souls for whom it was the last remaining reminder of a life beyond the stars. Ratchets, wrenches, hammers and spanners, electrolyte drills, nano saws – the squat battered box had survived them all, smugly awaiting its yearly performance.
“This is a Krennel Mining Company broadcast for stations in quadrants Sigma-Tau 3, 4 and 7, and Omicron 9.” As always they were reading the annual weather report now. Not that the company men on Serrora Five had ever needed to listen to that. A solar storm. Wormhole drift. They had craved anything that would have made a change from the endless day, and the slow baking in their atmosphere suits. The piercing sunlight even filtered down into the shafts hundreds of feet below the surface, tormenting the miners like a butterfly flitting over a shipwreck would torment the survivors with the knowledge of an invisible land and rescue somewhere over that horizon. There had never been any escape from the light.
Shodun still remembered those first days, the sixty years doing little to dull the memory but maybe a little to embellish it. A chance to leave behind the darkness of homeworld. The little light that had made it through the smog of his planet’s atmosphere and his city’s fog had been all used up by those who had lived on the thousands of stories above him by the time it reached his home. On arriving upon Serrora Five He’d stood at the foot of the starship’s ramp, arms spread wide, soaking in the rays of the sun. Everything appeared in radiant clarity: he could see each individual grain of sand, every spire of the crater’s edge. The faces of the other miners which in the gloom of a year of transit had blurred into one now became intricate histories, scars and pits etched memory into skin. Now he sat at that very crater’s edge; if he wanted to he could look down at the very spot where he had stood all those years ago.
Not that he wanted to. It would mean looking down at those empty corrugated shells of the shelters that had become his home, and the gaping maw of the main shaft. Not that the shaft had been there in those early days. They’d been the very first arrivals to Serrora after the terraformers had blasted the crater into the face to the planet, smoothing the rock enough to allow the ships to land. The first to meet the gaze of that sun. And the first to lose that moment of elation. Waiting for the main shafts to be sunk, they’d stayed up for what must have been at least a couple of days, waiting for night to come. No one had briefed them properly, told them that they would never have the respite of darkness. Those first ‘nights’ had been agony, lying in the cots trying to step out into the arms of sleep as the light raked their consciousness through clenched eyelids. Shodun couldn’t remember what sleep had been like before he’d come here. All he could remember from his youth were the stars. They would spend the day climbing to the top of the projects, out through the smog till they reached the roof with only the barest of atmospheres between them and the stars. Lying on his back beneath them, he had counted the endless pricks in the blanket of space, and each one he had named an abandoned soul alone in the emptiness. None of those lights could conquer the darkness around them, yet together they set the sky alight. Even after he’d found out that most of the lights above him were simply satellites beaming down the Tube footage that imprisoned his parents miles below, they never lost the magic that had set him out on his journey to reach them.
But for sixty years, light had been ever present. Yet he couldn’t now be sure that there hadn’t always been the light: the absence of light now seemed only a mismemory.
The light began to dim as the sun stroked the horizon smudging the dark emptiness above with ochre. He supposed that the sky must have always been so black; the sun had always been too bright to look upwards. They couldn’t look down: the ground below only served to remind them of the daily toil below the surface; and besides the sand reflected the light only too gleefully back at them. So they only had each other to cling to. That was all they’d had. That was why Sable had meant so much to them. The myths of the sterilising nature of the radium they were mining were no lie. There was no chance of adding to their number. And so when a fair skinned stowaway, not older than twelve, was discovered on one of the supply ships, she became their daughter. The hardest, scummiest men and women the mining company could assemble had doted upon the girl. None of them ever knew about her past: it was assumed that she was just running like the rest of them.
She was different from all of us though, thought Shodun; better even. Whilst they would never leave the shelters without their suits to protect their skin from the ravages of the sun, she’d run with gay abandon around the settlement bare naked. And that was how she’d got her name. The sun turned her into the one colour absent from the entirety of the planet from sky to core: black. Sable.
They’d survived, Sable caring for each man or woman as they gave up on the fight for existence and wasted away until it had been just her and Shodun left. He always supposed that the company was meant to have picked them up years ago. The radium had dried up some twenty years previously: they’d have none when the shipments had ceased. The supply ships kept coming, though they were automated now, and the transmissions kept coming too. “Now for the company news. Three new planets have been discovered in the Treviose system. A company terraforming team has been sent to the most promising, a Class IV temperate planet with good mineral and crystal prospects. Any mining personnel with Grade 5 or higher experience who would be interested in joining this new outpost should speak to their mission commander.” Well at least humanity still exists, thought Shodun, out there somewhere. Not that they cared for those they left behind. Not even Mission Commander Errick.
Shodun supposed that he missed Errick now; though that seemed to be the only emotion he could feel now. Sure, at the time the miners had hated his guts. The arrogant little snot weasel; that had been Sable’s phrase for him. And by the time she’d met him, Serorra and her sun had drained Errick and his once pressed uniform of the ambition which he’d arrived here with. Straight out of the Company’s training academy, young and going places. An outpost command straight away. Maybe Errick had had the same affect upon his superiors as he did upon those under his command, sent to this dead backwater with the sort of irony the miners dreamed for. But even though he may have been arrogant, self-centred, pompous, negligent, and entirely unfamiliar with anything approaching the process of mining a planet dry, he hadn’t been so bad. For one thing he’d let them keep Sable. Admittedly the alternative was face down fifty angry and desperate miners. But if they’d not cared about Errick, probably no one ever had. Each had even shed a hidden tear when the Company had not even allowed them to bury his prized uniform with him in the earth of Serrora. He’d had to suffer just as they had. He may not have been down the shafts, suffocating in the half light, but he too had been abandoned out here. If only in their isolation, they’d all been in this together, in the end.
And now that end was at hand. Shodun didn’t know what would happen when the sun, now almost half set, disappeared. At least he might be able to sleep well. For sixty years the light was all he’d ever known. Life would go on, probably. That was what Sable had told him for all those years. Life could go on. Exhausted, barely able to stand, and covered in dust, every day he’d stagger from the shafts below. His soul left below like the rocks that he worked to crush, ready to crumble if he tried to grasp it. But, straining through the blinding light, he would be able catch glimpses of Sable, dancing with the joy of life at the return of her family at the end of their shift. And he would stumble forward, hands outstretched before him, straining to catch at the ethereal figure. And then his hands would brush against her smooth skin; the ecstatic jolt would drop him to his knees and he could clasp her slender legs as if they were columns holding up entire starships.
Above him now, the sky was as dark as those legs, and though the sun itself had set, it clung onto the horizon with an orange stain as he had to Sable. Shodun found himself kneeling over her. He placed his hands on her cold skin; he raised her body and cradled her head in the crook of his neck. Is this all we ultimately become? The voice sounded like hers, though the words were his. Simply bodies? Is that all we ever were? Bodies hollowing out the core of a planet, bodies dancing, bodies dying. He looked up at the stars: how can I know that she was more real than you, he wept.
And as the light finally faded, he clung to her. Because at the end of the day, he thought as his tears rolled down his mask and froze to the glass, that is the one truth we do know. I know you’re here because I hold you.
Nothing stirred beneath the dark sky. Only the stars remained. For countless worlds to see, they were still here. “In closing, the company would like to thank all its employees for the many sacrifices they make and the hardships they overcome. May we commend your souls to the stars. End broadcast. Good night.”