Title: „A Love Beyond the Stars – Points of Departure”
Author: Dax
Über Category: Battlestar Galactica
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all related characters are registered trademarks of 20th Century Fox Film Corporation.
Battlestar Galactica created by Ronald D. Moore; based upon the 1978 Series Battlestar Galactica created by Glen A. Larson. Copyright 2006 USA Cable Entertainment Inc.
The Instalment title comes courtesy of Babylon 5, created by J. Michaels Strazynski. Copyright 1997 Warner Bros. PAY TV.
Summary: A look back on the time that has passed since Willow & Tara found their way to Earth.
A Love Beyond the Stars – Points of Departure
An Epilogue
My Name is Hope.
Hope Alexandra Maclay, I am the daughter of Willow Rosenberg and Tara Maclay; my father Alexander – Xander – Harris died almost two years before I was born.
I was born aboard a very big spaceship, a mighty war machine named Galactica, the first and only baby ever to be conceived and born aboard this Battlestar and I spend the first year of my life onboard Galactica.
My mommy Tara later claimed that for the first few months on Earth I had difficulty going to sleep without the constant hum and vibrations of the Galactica surrounding me.
While I was last child to have been born aboard Galactica, the twins - my brother and sister, William Alexander – Bill and Dawn Alexis – Lexie were the first Colonial children born on Earth.
Even our “stepbrother” was a first of sorts.
John Riley Summers was the first child – as far as we know, that was born to both Colonial and Earth parents. He was raised by our mothers because sadly his mother died when he was only two years old.
Like so many of her fellow Viper pilots, she came down with cancer, a late consequence of having been exposed to massive doses of hard radiation, shortly after I was born.
She didn’t succumb to the cancer though.
It was around the time she started to lose her strength because of the rapidly progressing cancer, that a vicious predator endangered our settlement.
Knowing that she hadn’t much time left, Aunt Buffy went out to hunt down and kill the beast that had not only taken some of our animals but killed an older member of our tribe.
It was a long hunt and a hard fight, but eventually she was successful in killing the beast, that was as cunning as it was deadly, even though her victory came at the cost of her own life.
Buffy Summers died the very next morning from the severe injuries she endured during the fight – a fight that to this day is still sung about at the fireside.
Her death came as a hard blow to my momma Willow, because she and Aunt Buffy had been close friends since high school, not to mention Buffy had been her wingman during their time as fighter pilots.
But even though she was saddened by her best friend’s death; she was glad that Buffy had died as she had lived – fighting.
From all the Colonials, Buffy Summers had turned out to be the best hunter, respected for her trade by the male natives of the tribe we had joined.
Mind you, before that, hunting had been a prominently male skill.
In this respect, things had already been changed by our arrival, they learned from us but at the same time we learned even more form them.
By now we no longer distinguish between Earth born and Colonial / Cylons, we are all humans and that’s it.
Many Colonials died on Earth in the early days. In the first year alone, almost one hundred of the six hundred Colonials that came to this part of the world died.
Some of the other pilots died from cancer like Aunt Buffy, others had fallen to their death, unaccustomed to the rather rough terrain or fell victim to one or the other predator.
After all it is one thing to decide to give up on all technological advances, in my opinion a rather romantic notion; it’s rather a different thing to actually go on living in the compatibly primitive ways of our times.
The most losses we suffered during the first winter, several people froze to death, died of a severe cold or even starvation.
Some of the Colonials’ first born children didn’t make it to their first birthday - what can I say, these are hard times we’re living in and reaching an age beyond 40 years is considered old age.
For some of the Colonials this was all quite hard to get used to.
They had to learn that people could die of rather simple diseases. Diseases which once had been easily treated with the advanced medical knowledge they once had access to.
Some people, I heard, just couldn’t cope with this new way of living and they simply gave up and died.
***
So many things are now lost to us besides the advanced technology and medicines.
More than the technology, my mommy Tara mourned the loss of the rich cultural heritage of the Twelve Colonies, like music, poems, novels and the great plays of her favourite playwright.
I remember many evenings sitting together at the fireside, with Mommy Tara quoting from plays or reciting poems, singing songs with her oh so beautiful voice. She took it hard when later in life she started to forget particular lines or the melody of a favourite song.
Sometimes I heard her crying over this and Momma Willow trying to comfort her.
I’m ashamed to say that I’ve forgotten most of the poetry and plays she taught us and I’m afraid soon this knowledge will be all but lost to us, now that Mommy Tara is no longer around to remind us.
My children, who I’m raising with my partner, the youngest daughter of our tribe’s chief, have other things on their minds than the cultural heritage of worlds that mean nothing to them.
Even to me the Colonies are nothing more than a distant memory of my parents past, though sometimes I still dream of the mighty Battlestar Galactica hanging in space above Earth, as it was when my Momma Willow brought us down to our new home.
***
The sun is settling and soon it will be too dark to write much more, besides I have only one piece of paper left.
Not far from here I can see a cat sneak through the high grass, on the hunt for a mouse or something; it’s doubtlessly a descendent of old Miss Kitty Fantastico.
Despite her originally having been a house cat, and kinda a spaceship cat too, she adopted quickly to living in the wild and within a fortnight of skipping our tent, returned with a partner and pregnant.
She always remained close by, though her kittens kept their distance.
I imagine it will be some time before cats will allow themselves to become pets again or more to the point, allow humans to think that that they are their pets.
I’m now 42 years old and yesterday Bill, Lexie and me buried our Mommy Tara, who died almost exactly one year after Momma Willow died last summer and in my heart I know that this was the longest she could go on without the love of her life.
They are resting side by side, in the shade of a big old willow tree.
Momma Willow always joked about that if in the far future people would do excavations and stumble across her remains they might wonder about a prehistoric woman having an artificial knee joint.
Who knows?
Al I know is, that I’m missing them terribly, as do their grandchildren.
***
Well I’m almost at the end of the last page, as well as at the end of the very last pencil (no more really than a very tiny stump) and I don’t think I’ll be writing much more after this.
I’ll place these papers, together with the journals of my two mothers in the last plastic container and bury it somewhere deep and, I hope, safe for future generations to read, provided our way of reading and yours are the same.
So to anyone who might be reading this, might it be in the distance future or only fifty to hundred years from now (if it’s “tomorrow...” Cory! Put them back or you’ll be in big trouble with your mommy!), I just wanted to tell you about some of your ancestors, who came from beyond the stars in search of a new home and in the hope that humanity will not repeat the errors of their Colonial and Cylon brethren; and that among them were two women who loved each other and their kids very much.
***
150.000 Years later.
The editor in chief let the article drop to the desk, “Are you kidding me?” he asked the young woman sitting in front of his desk, who looked uncertainly at him.
“What do you mean?” she asked politely.
“Oh come on,” B. Asmussen thundered, ”you’ve pulled many strings to get an appointment with me,
“I grant you some of my valuable time and you present me with some fantastic story about humans once upon a time, in a Galaxy far far away!”
The young historian winced, as he fired his sarcastic anger at her and of course he neither was to be stopped nor was he finished.
“Then you add in some huge spaceships, humanoid machine people and robots with a moving red eye called xylophones…”
“Cylons.”
He ignored her.
“In case you haven’t noticed,” he pointed at the framed cover pages hanging on the wall behind him, “this is a Science Magazine, not some stupid scifi mag for weirdoes!”
“Sir, this isn’t a made up story!” The woman brushed a strand of red hair from her eyes.
“Oh yes, it’s the life account of some prehistoric lesbians from 150.000 years ago, a diary of some sort, which you just happen to find while you visited some excavations in, where was it again?”
“Tanzania.“
“Right,” that painful sarcasm again.
“And just as a pure coincident, it happens to be not that far from where other scientists, real scientists mind you, found the remains of Mitochondrial Eve, the ancestor of humankind as we are today.
“Not to mention right after some space nuts, claim to have spotted a small part of a spaceship wreck on a photo made by the Curiosity probe on Mars!”
He looked at her, defying her to tell him otherwise.
“Mr. Asmussen,” she said more calmly than she felt, “you can throw all the sarcasm that you like at me but that doesn’t change the fact that my story, as unlikely as it might sound, is true and that I found this diary myself.”
“So you found it, typed it out and then brought it to me,” the editor in chief said and the young woman nodded,
“Then bring me the originals, not your edited version of these events!”
She blushed considerably, “sorry, I can’t.”
“And why is that?”
“You see, they were sort of vacuum sealed into this plastic container,” she explained, “but once the seal was broken the papers started to deteriorate rapidly. We had barely enough time to hand copy all these pages as it is.”
“Ever heard of this magical device called a copy machine?”
She let out a sigh, “we couldn’t risk that. I know it sounds lame but we’re talking about a document that has been literally lying in the earth for well over 100.000 years. Subjecting it to a scanner might have damaged it even faster without getting any usable results.” Pointing to the photographs of some of the pages on the desk she fell silent; she had said her piece, now it was up to him.
“I’m sorry Miss but these pictures hardly count as proof,” he said politely. “And this is a scientific magazine and every scientist or historian, like you yourself supposedly are, will tell you, you need prove everything, especially when it comes to a wild thesis like yours. You must understand, if you could bring me any proof regarding the age of this docudocument.”
The historian sighed again, to herself this time. She knew when she was beat.
She couldn’t even blame him; her story was hard to believe. If at least she could have provided him with the container in which she had found this remarkable account.
***
“No Honey, he didn’t buy it,” the redhead spoke into her cell phone as she left the publishing house and made her way down the street. “Can’t say I blame him, I mean we both knew that it would be a tough sale, given that we weren’t able to preserve the original.”
She listened to the person speaking at the other end of the line and smiled.
“Yeah, maybe we should go back there next summer and do some more digging. If we’re lucky we find something else that has a connection to this diary and thus is considered proof for guys like this chap at this publishing house.”
She stopped at a coffee shop for a quick hot chocolate with vanilla flavour, extra hot with whipped cream and sat down outside to continue her phone conversation.
“You know I’m really lucky to have you as a girlfriend and later today I’ll take you out to one of the best dates yet.”
Again she listened to her girlfriend.
“You know what this Asmussen chap suggested before I left?” she asked next. “He gave me the number of a TV producer, one Ron Moore, said that this Moore guy might be interested in our story, as a TV series or something like that.
“Maybe we should keep this as a last resort. After all, it’s a story about robots rebelling against their masters and some fifty year later they were coming back to take revenge, having taken on human form, sending the survivors on a wild ghost chase for planet Earth. And that all featuring one big bad ass spaceship – Battlestar might actually sell.”
She laughed on her girlfriend’s remark. “Yea, maybe change the names of the Robots from Cylons to something more commercial. Well, I see you later – love you!” she said and pocketed her cell.
“Excuse me,” a woman asked and she turned to see a strikingly beautiful blond woman sitting at the table next to her, She was wearing an almost scandalously tight tailored red dress and was sitting next to a quite handsome man, though being a lesbian herself she wasn’t exactly the girl to judge.
“I hope you don’t mind,” the blond went on, “but we couldn’t help overhearing your phone call and about this story about humans on the run from robots?”
The Redhead nodded.
“In search for Earth and you say this is a true story? “
Again she nodded in acknowledgment and even though she didn’t exactly knew what made her do so; she told the woman and her companion a little bit more about the Battlestar Galactica, the gay fighter pilot and her girlfriend.
“Now that sounds really interesting,” the blond woman said and the men nodded in agreement.
“You mean you believe me?”
“I see no reason why not,” she handed her a business card, even though it wasn’t exactly apparent where she would keep cards in a dress like this. “Give me a call and we can talk some more.”
“I will,” the redhead promise pocketing the card and giving the woman one of her own business cards, while she was at it.
“Then we’ll await your call Miss…”
“Rosenberg,” the redheaded woman said with a smile, “Willow Rosenberg.”
All this has happened before and it will happen again.
A Love Beyond the Stars
The End