The Home of Forgotten Stories

Submitted to the Return of the Night Owl Challenge on Vocal

Every dome on Murd has at least five barn owls, or we’d all be dead by now.

I can still remember being out in the fields with Mom, taking soil samples, or was that later? I wouldn’t have been old enough to help take soil samples the first time I ever remembered hearing the barn owl. At any rate, once you’ve heard it, you never forget it: a long screaming siren, beckoning the field workers to get back to the dome as quickly as possible. It’s a terrifying, unmistakable noise, and it’s meant to be… evidently they modeled the sound (and the name) after a kind of Earth bird. A nocturnal bird, that only wakes up when night is coming.

We would run, not walk, back to the dome. I was young enough at the time that Mom picked me up and ran with me rather than waiting on my short legs. There was never any telling how long the sun might take to set. Better safe than sorry.

The UV lights would always be on inside the dome, blazing reassuringly through the glass roofs of the houses.

The original name for the planet Murd was Mutability, which is a rather pretty word that means “changeableness”, and that’s an apt word for our world. It was chosen because the nature of the planet changes dramatically when day shifts to night. During the day, the Morsus bacteria that crowd the atmosphere here are relatively harmless. As long as you don’t develop the Allergy, you’re fine. But at night they wake up and begin to feed. Anybody who steps out of a circle of UV-enriched light during the darkness of night will last roughly two minutes before being devoured down to the bone. Every living creature on this planet has some kind of native defense against Morsus, but it will take a few more hundred years of research before humans can alter our DNA enough to become invulnerable.

We would sit down at seven chimes to eat our dinner–perhaps roasted hummer and sliced galleon tubers that we raised ourselves–and talk about the day’s activities. Some of my best memories are of us just talking at that table. Harn especially; he was only a few years older than I was, but he still managed to entertain the entire family with his stories about school. I was always in awe of him. My own experiences in school seemed deadly dull to me, but he always managed to add spice to the mundane.

Mutability also applies to Murd’s rotation, which isn’t reliable. Day can last anywhere from five hours to 78 hours, depending upon the mood of the planet that day. The crust of our planet floats uneasily above a volatile mantle, occasionally getting caught on a back-current or spinning forward suddenly.

So that, combined with Morsus, led people to start calling it “the Murder planet”… which was later shortened to Murd. Why did we keep settling here? Who knows. It’s not a bad life once you get used to it. The Morsus in the air create rather spectacular sunsets, so that’s nice.

I still remember the one series of classes in school that was interesting to me, Earthology. We had to learn about Earth because we were still biologically Earthlings, and Earth biology was essential to learning about our own biological requirements. But some of the things we learned in that class were absolutely wild. Clothing, for instance. Why would you cover yourself with a layer of cloth? Doesn’t skin do that already? We learned that some places on Earth were very cold, so it was necessary there, but people wore clothes even in the hottest places, to maintain modesty.

Modesty isn’t a hot commodity in a world where creating pockets of darkness next to your skin could be hazardous at night. One time, just to see what it felt like, I wrapped three towels around myself to mimic clothing. Mom and Dad were both extremely unhappy with me. I spent the evening listening to about thirty-five holos about the dangers of clothing on Murd. Harn was the only one who thought it was funny, and I’m guessing that I was the topic of more than one highly colored story told to his friends at school the next day.

Earth’s climate was also fascinating to me. Seasons in particular… Murd’s rotation isn’t placed on a permanent tilt, so the concept was foreign to me. We had some cold days, sure, but most of our settlements were on the most temperate latitude on the planet.

We did once have a night that lasted about 117 hours, and it probably got rather cold outside the domes. I still remember that night. Mom and Dad were having very serious whispered conversations, and I knew they were talking about the solar panels that powered the dome lights. We stored as much of the power as we could, but eventually those lights would go out.

The very first settlers here kept everything in sterile conditions inside of the domes at first, but you can’t live like that forever, not if you have to farm and live. And it didn’t take much analysis to recognize that there was something lethal in the air. Initially, we thought about introducing a bacterium that might feed upon Morsus, but there are too many microorganisms on Murd that depend upon vast amounts of Morsus for food, and those microorganisms support the ecology, and so on and so forth. Besides, introducing anything that’s a monster enough to eat all the Morsus would be like befriending a tiger to help you get rid of that troublesome hyena in the neighborhood.

Instead, we kept the lights on. Inside the domes, that is. You can’t light the whole world; Dad keeps talking about the plans for doing that someday, but honestly, if the Morsus were to starve and die out, the planet would probably die, according to Dr. Juniper who taught Ecology. We’d also be up to our armpits in dead animals and plants. Morsus is our only scavenger here. Why would we need another one?

In later years, I finally found a reason for continuing school. I developed an interest in genetics out of something like desperation; I wanted so badly to eat Earth foods that I trudged through layers of biology and chemistry just to be able to work with Earth/Murd plant hybrids. I still remember crying the day we managed to crossbreed Earth beans with Murd greenberries to produce an edible bean plant that could withstand constant exposure to the outside landscape. We eat beans almost every day now. Newcomers to the planet complain, but you can’t imagine how awful it was to only have tubers.

And of course there were (and are) the bacteriologists that studied nothing but Morsus. The biggest question they always had was, what level of darkness was sufficient? Morsus would strike at night, but pockets of artificial darkness created during the day didn’t seem to cause a reaction. Shadows with ambient light surrounding them usually were safe. Usually. There are always accidents. And there is always the Allergy.

Harn developed it when he was eighteen.

It’s not really an allergy; what happens is, the trillions of bacteria in our own body suddenly stop fighting Morsus in the dark beneath our skin. I remember hearing a sound coming from his room one night–I had gotten up to get some water–and I knocked on his door and said his name. He said in a kind of screaming whisper, a voice that sounded an awful lot like the barn owl, “HELP.”

When I opened the door, he was lying on his bed in a pool of blood, blood streaming from his ears and his mouth and his nose, through cracks in his skin, and this I remember distinctly: his stomach was becoming visibly concave with every second, as though his innards were disappearing. In fact, they were. I screamed, and Mom and Dad came running and of course they pushed me out of the room and locked the door. I hated them for it in that moment, but in the years after, I understood it better. I listened at the door and I heard Harn’s whispers, and the moment when those whispers stopped at the click of the hypo that they used to stop his suffering. They didn’t allow me to see his drained and deflated body once it was all over.

Can you hear that? Yes, that’s the barn owl. It sounds a little scarier once you know what it means, doesn’t it? Let’s go have dinner.