Miracle Milk Read online

  Idabel Allen

  Miracle Milk

  A Headshots story.

  First published by Lowbrow Literary Press in 2018

  Copyright © Idabel Allen, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  First Edition

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  1

  Miracle Milk

  It started with a dream, a vision really, that he awoke from, his skin slick with night-sweat as his old voice trembled forth, “Emily.”

  Dr. Irving lay in his pod, the late morning as dark as midnight. It would be this way, night-time from now on. His planet, Eudora, being small and relatively unimportant, had shifted undeniably onto the orbit path of its own largest moon. The sun had become a myth, part of a past that could scarcely be imagined or remembered.

  It was time to leave; there was nothing for him or anyone else on the base. The supply ship from earth had stopped coming months ago; no one knew why. If rationed carefully, there was enough food to sustain them a few more months, six at the most. But in that interminable darkness they were all already dead, this he knew.

  It was strange, the calmness that lay claim to him, soothing him. Dr. Irving rose and looked about. He would take no food, no bedding, only what was already on his body and a few items which he packed into a pouch which he slung over his shoulder. His hand itched for his medical bag, but the bag would stay behind, he had no need for it. The only other thing he grabbed was an oyster colored shawl made from the feathers of the Oooglysod bird. This he wrapped about his shoulders as he stepped into the bright, moonlit darkness outside.

  He was alone on the street, passing unit after unit, the windows shut tight against the dark, the faint outline of silver light streaming through the edges of the windows. They were locked up tight in there, his old friends, warming themselves with miniature solar orbs that gave off a warm yellow-green glow, the only sun left to us, he thought. And soon, this too will be gone.

  They could leave, even him. They could re-transfigure their individual units, piece them together into one ship as it had been when they arrived. Almost three hundred units; it would take some doing. Reassembling the units would be the easy part, getting three hundred families to agree to one purpose was the impossible task. And even if it were accomplished where would they go? All contact with the earth home-base and even other sub-stations had ended months before when the planets realigned, locking them into their lunar path. Who knew what remained of the universe they had known?

  It was the end. But Emily had come to him in his dream or vision, whichever it was, and had shown an alternate ending. He accepted this vision even though he still wished for a little more time. As Dr. Irving passed the last unit he realized that’s all he really wanted. He wasn’t quite through with his thoughts just yet; he wasn’t quite through trying to make sense of it all.

  Dr. Irving paused at the foot of the unguarded guard tower; the old rule of never leaving the compound without permission presented itself. But the old rules were now as irrelevant as the science and medicine he had studied on earth seventy-plus years before. Nothing he had learned had prepared him for his life on the sub-base. He’d come after medical school, volunteered even, when the base was just getting started and people still felt adventurous and unconquerable. He supposed he’d felt the same way then, but he had long since been unable to summon those treacherous feelings from youth.

  He walked away from the base, away from certainty into the swelling bruises of the purple desert. His feet sunk into the cool sand, the tiny granules filled the open spaces in his sandals. The dream was with him again, his steps the steps of his vision, the land the land of his vision. Nothing moved but him; the desert beasts kept their distance. He knew it would be so and was not afraid.

  The glowing moon, as wide as the horizon sat before him drinking the planet in, ingesting it. Their path was very close to the moon now, it was always with them: a silent judge, the waiting executioner. He walked towards the moon as if personally drawn to it, thinking this stormy white moon will have us yet. This is what they all said in solemn voices, defeated voices. Everything revolved around this moon; it became their God, unmerciful, vengeful.

  He walked on unhurried and unconcerned with the structures growing smaller behind him in the eternal night. He did not cast a look over his shoulder at his past; the future was before him. When he made out the faint outline of a tall bluff in the far distance he stopped for a rest near a solitary analystiid. Dr. Irving broke off one of the smaller limbs of the cactus-like plant and sucked the sour milk from the open end. When he had exhausted this limb, he broke another and drank again until he was satisfied.

  The wild analystiid milk was strong, much stronger than the milk processed on the base. Dr. Irving found himself lying on his back staring into the black, diamond-studded expanse above him. Rich in all the essential vitamins, the milk was a natural antibiotic that contained mild sedative and hallucinogenic agents. Millions of pounds of analystiid milk, or Miracle Milk as it was called, had been harvested from the vast analystiid forests of Eudora and shipped to earth to feed the hungry, whose numbers grew astronomically each year.

  But when the earth’s privileged learned of the milk’s strong anti-aging qualities, milk prices skyrocketed and the poor countries that relied on this milk to feed their nation could no longer afford it. The poor starved and the rich remained young.

  And now the great analystiid forests, once as far-reaching as the Sahara desert or the western plains on earth, were dead for want of sunlight. Only a few solitary plants remained. The production of Miracle Milk had finally come to an end.

  Dr. Irving said, “It’s a matter of excess.” He lifted a handful of purple sand and watched the grains slowly seep from his clenched fist. He felt his blood slowing in his body, felt every cell exhale. A sulphuric breeze from the acid pits from the south swept over him, stirring his feathered shawl and sweeping gritty sand into his face. He held his breath and let his tears cleanse the grit from his eyes.

  The milk and tears were too much for him. He rolled to his side and brought his pressed knees to his chest and placed his hands under his head. The purple desert stretched before him and he was glad that it was waiting for him. The base and everyone on it was under a dark cloud or dark moon as it were. It wasn’t just the isolation, the lack of contact with earth, or the large milk silos, unfilled and unneeded. It was more than all that.

  It was like that other dark time.

  No one talked about those days, or even thought about them if they could help it. The matter was pushed from the mind as soon as it surfaced, even for Dr. Irving. But Emily had replayed those days in his dream; the days when the wombs of women were barren.

  It began a couple of years after Dr. Irving arrived on the frontier planet on the shuttle. If thirty babies were delivered one year, the next year maybe only twenty-two were born. Dr. Irving noticed the decline, but thought space, the living in it, made conception more difficult. He was young and inexperienced, they all were. Almost no one remarked or complained about the gradual decline of births for a few years. But when only eleven babies were born one year, then eight the next, people began to worry until one year there were no babies and none the year after and the year after that.

  But that wasn’t the worst thing that happened. Women went mad for want of a child. They forgot to change their clothes or eat for days at a time. They tried to s
teal children from other families. Paranoia set in. Men, blaming their wives’ barren conditions on some disease or disorder, turned in desperation to girls, starting with the eldest, and then turning to the younger girls as their efforts failed. The girls were unwilling to participate in these efforts and had to be forced.

  And still no babies were born.

  When women began throwing themselves into the acid pits south of town, men battled each other, delirious with grief and guilt.

  People were not themselves.

  Those were frantic days for Dr. Irving and his small medical staff. They were unprepared for the sheer volume of mental illness and violence gripping the base. There were never enough hospital beds. Medicine was on short supply and the morgue, well…

  Dr. Irving sat up, tucked his knees to his chest and draped his long arms over his knees. For the first time he looked back in the direction he had come from but all he saw were dark cloud shadows shifting over purple dunes. It was just as well, he thought. He got to his feet, turned his back to the moon and began walking into the desert where steep the sand dunes fell into deep sand valleys.

  Moving in the darkness, out of the moon’s reach, Dr. Irving remembered much of the land. He’d come before, only once, but once had been enough. Emily, his wife, had brought him, and in his dream she had led him once more. It had been many years since they’d traversed this land, when the childless epidemic was at its worse, and the madness and violence were at its peak.

  Emily had joined Dr. Irving on the sub-base a year after his arrival. They’d gone to the university together on earth: he a medical student, she an archeologist. She’d always been captivated with the thought of space and the idea of life on a foreign planet. She did not believe Eudora to be lifeless as it was supposed and spent her days wandering the wilderness, searching for signs of ancient civilizations. Emily was rooted in the past, in the ways and understandings of things long past knowing or believing. And he had loved her as one loves the kiss of sunlight upon bare skin.

  At the base of the rocky bluff Dr. Irving felt a little nauseous, as if he might be sick. He studied the structure before him, knowing it to be a wicked thing, but knowing it was where he belonged.

  “Here,” he reminded himself as he made his way up past boulders, pushing his hands into cracks and crevices, getting a good hold and climbing upward.

  He was breathing hard when he reached the black mouth of the cave, which was just as he remembered in his dream. He pulled a solar orb from his pouch and held it in his flat palm. The orb fed off the heat in his hand until its warm, green light illuminated the entrance. He proceeded forward, ducking slightly as he entered the cave, placing his empty palm on the cold rock walls as he moved forward. His thin, old blood raced in his ears and his heart pounded in his papery chest with an intensity he had not felt in years.

  The narrow passage into the cave gave way to a large cavern. Pink stalactites hung from the domed ceiling, glittery in the glow of his orb. The air smelled of the dank water wetting the walls. He stood in amazement, moving the orb slowly about him, taking in this inner world. Over half a century had passed since he last stood in the cave and yet it was as if he had never left. The oval shape of the cavern, the stale mineral taste of the air, and the reduced temperature were familiar to him.

  Just like before.

  He moved to the back of the cave, to the structure made of pink granite; a table, flat and broad. It was sturdy in a way that would have been reassuring had Dr. Irving not been so intimate with its purpose. His hands trembled above the flat surface streaked with the dark veins of an ancient evil. He reached to touch the strange symbols carved into the table’s stone flesh, wondering at them not for the first time.

  But Emily had not wondered. She had known what needed to be done. She understood the old ways, the old Gods of a planet she said was not really called Eudora, but was truly Plysstodul, meaning ‘holy vessel’. She was the only one who knew of the great ceremonial gardens, the Gardens of the Spirits, she called it.

  An ancient city, undiscovered and waiting, had revealed itself to Emily, spoke to her on one of her solitary expeditions. She’d been in the east, studying vast rock formations, trying to uncover what their placement and forms meant in the universal sense. The formations had purpose, this Emily was certain of. She walked among the rocks polished marble-smooth and stained varying shades of purple by the desert sand-storms that erupted without warning and choked the air with a fury of sand and wind.

  It was there, from cracks and crevices that they first spoke to her, or sang to her really. Their silvery voices carried no words Emily could discern, only a luxuriating melody, inviting her, drawing her into a slit in a rock, barely wide enough for her trim body. The slit was an opening, a gateway into the real world of Plysstodul.

  Inside the Garden of the Gods, a sapphire river snaked brilliantly between open courtyards of the ancient Greek fashion that lined both sides. Rock formations were now marble columns engraved with an unknown language, symbols unrecognizable to Emily, but nonetheless inspiring. The columns supported a ceiling with a painted mural of a hoofed creature: powerful, commanding.

  The animal was golden, with a face of solemn justice that gave Emily the sense of being in church as a child and looking up into the face of the Apostle Paul in the great stained window behind the altar. As she stared at this great holy beast, she became aware of the music once more, and was filled with such peace as she had never known possible.

  The alluring music worked to dull her senses but Emily fought against it, determined to find its source. She had seen no creature, but knew she was not alone. Their presence was felt, around her, near her, in great numbers and she would not have been surprised at all if an invisibly solid body brushed up against her.

  Sensing the music was coming from the river, Emily went to it. As she moved closer the beautiful sounds intensified, bringing tears to her eyes. Something in her was brought together, some old internal conflict healed, some uncertainty laid to rest. And always, the rest of her life, she would wish to hear that song, that pure sound that cut her like a delicate knife which seemed to injure and heal in the same stroke. And it seemed she had to touch the water, to dip her hand into that loveliness, to submerge even a part of her.

  But when her tender white hand entered the sapphire blueness the ground quaked beneath her, propelling her forward, thrusting her elbow and shoulder deep into the water which was no longer the startling blue of a November sky, but red, rusty. And her arm, which she removed from that rusty foulness was blood-stained. For that was what the water had become and that is what she removed her arm from; a river of blood. So shocking, so shocking.

  She stumbled back, crab-walking away from the treacherous river that had taken from her the only true beauty she had ever known. But it was not only the river that had changed but the columns, those magnificent pink and lavender beams now ran with blood from each engraved symbol. But more than that, that sweet luxuriating music had been replaced with a stark, empty silence which filled her soul forever more. Her grief knew no bounds.

  When the hoofed deity above her roared his thunderous contempt upon her she shriveled into an old woman, her life spent in that instant. And then she ran, on her feeble old legs, hobbled away from the horrific Garden of the Spirits where blood flowed into the earth and silence marked the barren emptiness of all things lost and forgotten on planet Plysstodul.

  His wife had returned to him with a fever that never truly went away. Always she had an elevated temperature. Always there was some infection she was fighting. But she never said a word, even when strands of her hair turned white, even when cried out in her sweat-soaked sheets at night, moaning into her pillow the most mournful sound Dr. Irving had ever heard in his life.

  Only when the women began throwing themselves in the acid pits did Emily awaken from her dark dream, knowing and certain what must be done. Just as he had woken from his dark dream, knowing and certain what must be done.

&nb
sp; Dr. Irving was there, once more, to do what needed doing. He held the green light before him and studied the dark stains streaking across the cold, dead marble. Here, he thought, we laid her, Jessup’s child, the youngest in the colony, not yet six years old. And I, he thought, a doctor, a man of science and reason, laid her down with her tender eyes on me, frightened but trusting, for I had delivered her into the world, my face the first her infant eyes beheld.

  Then Emily, also trusting that he would do the right thing, the thing that needed doing, had placed in his uncertain hand the jewel-encrusted dagger she had discovered in the dull yellow clay of a forgotten subterranean river. That hoofed God would not accept a sacrifice from a woman. Emily had been very clear on this. It had to be him, a medicine man.

  Dr. Irving looked at his wrinkled and spotted hands as if the knife were again in his grasp. Then Jessup was on the table, again, now, before him, the child, an innocent. Emily had held her, comforted her. She sang a song, an earth lullaby, and stroked the golden hair, hushing the child, soothing her. And the girl allowed this for she had not seen the knife just yet.

  Then the words, the sacrificial prayer, had flowed from his numb mouth, he disbelieving but anxious also for that bountiful harvest, those new babies to save them all. As he spoke, he felt Emily’s eyes on him, felt her hunger for the ritual. He would never look at her the same again.

  With an efficient swipe of the blade on Jessup’s tender throat, her blood flowed onto the table, cleansing them all.

  That was all there was to it. Within days of the sacrifice a chemist discovered the molecular agent in Miracle Milk that had caused the barren conditions. A concoction was created, of what Dr. Irving was never certain, and added to the processed Miracle Milk. Within a year the hospital nursery was filled with newborns. Husbands and wives embraced each other, daughters were safe again.

  It was as it always had been before.