Saturday, September 09, 2006

Lott's Wife--a Foray into Science Fiction


Lott stared out the window at the stars glittering through the dark reaches of space. He had been shaken by his wife's departure. Arianna had always been phobic around other species, but her fear and dislike lifted when she met Rourke. Rourke, green-gold and massive, spoke with audacity and carried himself like one of entitlement. Lott a space pharmacist could not compete with the colossal Plutonian and yet found it difficult to believe that Arianna could leave her post as doctor on a spaceship and be satisfied as the concubine of a prince from Pluto. Such were the travails of life in the stars.
Lott could recall growing up in a ship not unlike the one he was assigned to upon finishing pharmacy school. He and Arianna had come from the same spawning colony and likewise both studied the sciences; he pharmacy and she medicine. It was not a surprise when they were both consigned to work on the same vessel. Their subsequent espousal was humbling and fugitive, Lott was befooled by love, but no more.
Gray with metallic flecks the interior of his cubicle contained all of the modern pharmacology implements. It was no longer necessary to pulverize medicinals for some centuries or bottle them up by hand either. Now-a-days a robotic arm did the individual mixing and dispensing at the flip of a switch. Lott found that days went by when his expeertise was not even necessary for consultation. He stared out at the stars that shone ageless and indomitable. In his mind a mechanical arm rocked his stainless steel crib and those around him silencing the clamor of a thousand cries for the duration of their interminable, dormant infancy. When the day came that the babies could crawl and express bi-products into a chamber pot the coddling ceased and the intensive education began; seventeen languages, mathematics, physics, galactic geo-astronomy, biology including species evolution, botany, philosophy and the 'sensory arts'. The years of learning had been thorough and Lott was a master pharmacist for it. He knew that those less fortunate who had the disadvantage of being thrust through a 'breeders' birth canal and reared by biological caretakers could never hope to accomplish the level of knowledge that he had at-
tained. His association with Spawning Colony number six-seven-zero-one had been very useful indeed.
. . . to be continued. . .

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