Random Story :
Jarima
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer It was always slightly …
Varish
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
On Varish, blue belonged to the sky alone.
The seas were dun-colored dunes rippling across the basins. Hills of beige and taupe rose from hectares of an ocher fescue, fading to a wan grey in winter. For more than half the year, only the sky was un-brown or un-gray on Varish.
And it was a wonder for it never blemished. The sky showed no difference in tone between its horizon and azimuth. Nothing in the atmosphere diluted its color, not even the presence of a star. For no sun was visible on Varish and night never fell.
The air felt forever fresh, pure and bracing. Days were an unvarying cool as though the entire planet stood at an alpine elevation in one of Earth’s equatorial regions. It neither rained nor snowed. Trees grew from subterranean nutrient sources, sprouting and shedding leaves on a schedule unconnected to changes in temperature or length of day. Their foliage was lavender and indigo with rounded lobes. At no point did leaf pigmentation falter or the blades turn brittle. No creatures bit the ends off the leaves, and no fungi formed anywhere on the trees. In autumn, children collected the falling colors to shield themselves from a looming time of seemingly endless dun, beige, and taupe.
Even though the Varish sky was a skein of astonishing beauty, as planetary visitors never failed to mention, the children remained insensible to it. Since the young experience time slowly, the months of pewter and dross were unyielding. With no night, no lamps lit their lives. Colored glass was unknown to this civilization, as was the light bulb.
A sameness seemed to settle over every young mind and spirit, its vortices swallowing visual perception itself.
In time, the children asked their parents for more color. Domed structures were built and purple leaved trees were planted, in profusion, under glass to fill the leafless months. Since neither temperature nor light declension caused leaf fall, these artificial environments were mere shelters where parents hoped to create hothouse style conditions. They imagined that they could suspend the depredations of the outside world. They hardly knew what they were doing, but succeeded, nonetheless. They became botanists, arborists. One could stroll beneath purple arbors and canopies of lavender for hours. The domes grew in size and ambition. Every adult on Varish became an arborist, working long days to develop new hues and tones, to preserve the color purple.
For a time, the children felt better. A variegated canopy swelled and contentment reigned. This was important, for the planet had always been a quiescent place. It was a destination for the disturbed, for those needing to rehabilitate their humours, their bones and vessels. It had been so since the planet was settled by utopian seekers. Visitors were always treated with care; each was guided across a landscape of soothing sights. Nothing was sharp and there were no horned creatures. An increase in purple did not change this, and the analgesic economy flourished.
Soon, trees that never shed their leaves moved outdoors. Parks of everpurple became commonplace. While this brought pleasure, it too lost its lustre. The children said they needed something to touch. Could the tree bark grow fur, they asked.
Certainly, it could. Purple pelted trunks appeared along boulevards. Varishites of all ages enjoyed a new pastime: grooming bark. The craze for fur grew, and domes became fulltime laboratories rather than leisure destinations. New fur varieties were released each month on trees and in take-home form. And these shone with new tones like mauve and fuchsia. Soon, the arborists bred foliage to match.
But the children grew tired of this as well. They abandoned the bark and trees and turned their attention to the fescue. Crossing the hectares, they tousled its tassels. Until then, the children had only known the plant as a source of food. But now they were drawn to the velvet of its leaves, the emboss of its seeds. And they adored its ocher, that un-purple color. For days, weeks, and months they felt their way through the fields. Parents looked up from their bark work and sighed. It was time to focus on fescue.
One morning, a child lay down in a hectare. She looked past the tassels and into the blue heavens. When other children found her, she was unresponsive. Her eyes were open but unblinking. Her pupils did not dilate; her irises remained static.
She was alive, with a pulse slow and plodding. Her breath, while shallow, maintained her pallor. She appeared to be in a trance rather than a state of shock. Other children, intrigued, lay down with her and looked up. Gazing past the tassels to the sky, they, too, became insensible. When ships of the disturbed approached Varish, passengers found hectares of children lying on their backs seemingly dead. But they had been forewarned and the sight brought them peace. This was further proof that a vaunted tranquility beckoned.
Seasons passed. Soon no children were up and about. Purple trees matured and the land sported a cloak of colors it had never known. Long months of pewter and taupe, of a dun undifferentiated were largely gone, exiled to distant quadrants of the planet. As word of the children’s trance spread, more and more visitors arrived and the land began to fill up.
The parents, those adults who had been led by their children to change the face of their home; to find an arboreal avocation that soon became a fulltime botanical vocation, they did not miss their children. For each day, they worked to produce small amounts of aqueous food and drink which they inserted into the arms of their progeny, using tiny needles.
As they turned their attention from leaves and bark to manufacturing life itself, the parents grew reacquainted with what they’d once loved about Varish.