All Full of Stars
The rippling surface of the coffee reflected an
exhausted face. She lifted the green
mug to her lips and took a bracing sip and closed her eyes to better immerse
herself within the whirling landscape of her mind.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” the voice cut
through her peaceful reverie. The
unblinking orange eyes watching her from across the table gave her no pause –
she stared right back.
“It’s the only way,” she said.
“You do realize,” he replied, his forked tongue flickering as it moved
across his sharp lower lip, “that everything will go back to normal.” He rose
one metallic brow. “EVERYTHING.”
She stared numbly at her coffee, then took a look at
her surroundings; the ash color of the walls, the window with it’s shattered
pane, and the stream of water trickling down the wall. A
mewling noise came from the far end of the room, and a chest of draws – automatically,
she got up and checked on the infant. A
dry diaper and pursed, trembling lips signaled a need for a new bottle. It
would be all right, she reminded herself, nudging the rubber nipple back into
the child’s mouth. She laughed at her
own delusion. Fine – she no longer had
any idea what the word meant.
Her eye strayed to the bed, where he lay silently.
“Leela,” he said, “what’s it going to be?”
She glanced again at the bed, heard the distant crackle
of laser fire. Everything had changed so
in the past week….if only she could go back in time and right the innocuous
wrong that had brought her here…
****
Yesterday
****
“Good news, everyone!”
Leela glanced around the room at her fellow Planet
Express employees and watched every expression turn dull and deadened. She sat up straighter, knowing it would be
her duty to pay complete attention to the Professor’s ramblings. She glanced at the large square-shaped object
he held. “What is it, Professor?”
As always, he was oblivious to her interest. “I’ve just completed work on my first matter
transference device!”
Fry’s vacant expression suddenly sharpened,
indicating his interest. “You mean like
Star-“
Leela swiftly cut in to avoid a disaster. “How does it work?”
“It’s so simple that even an idiot like Fry can do
it,” the Professor scoffed. He placed
his device on the table, then flipped a large red switch mounted at it’s back. Before the crew’s alarmed eyes, it began to
vibrate, a beam of white light refracting from the top it and through the
already well-lit employee lounge. Leela
winced back from the brightness, watching through her protective fingers as Professor
Farnsworth reached into his pocket, retrieving a pencil. “Observe!” he requested, holding the pencil
to the light. Leela felt a sickly shock
of wonder knife through her as the pencil gradually dematerialized into
nothingness. Triumphantly, Professor
Farnsworth shut off the device and looked at his employees with great
anticipation.
Leela knew that his glance around the table had to
disappoint him. Amy, just finishing applying
a new layer of lip-gloss, was completely oblivious; Hermes was re-reading the
financial section of the New New Yorker and Zoidberg was eyeing Hermes’
unguarded sandwich. Only Fry stared at
the device with interest.
Returning her attention to Farnsworth, Leela said, “Where
does the pencil go?”
“Oh, it goes,” he said lightly. “I need you to deliver this to the moon – their
five hundred and fiftieth Science Fair and Bake Off is on Saturday, and I’ve signed
up for the World Altering Devices Competition - Non Lethal Division. Judging begins on Saturday, so this has to be
there by this afternoon,” Leela gingerly picked up the invention, nudging Fry
as the Professor handed him his entrance form.
“No problem,” Leela said confidently. She treated the object with the respect it
deserved as she carried it onto the Planet Express Ship, tying it to Bender’s
rumble seat.
As she took her place behind the wheel, she heard
the robot complaining, “hey! Getcher own
seat!”
“It doesn’t talk, Bender,” Leela scolded mildly. She had been too glad that he’d slept his way
through the morning meeting, apparently onboard in his bunk. She ran easily through the checks she needed
to make, starting up the ship’s systems.
“It’s certainly not smarter than you are…”
“Oh yeah?” Bender snapped, turning toward the
device. “I bet you don’t knows what
comes after 1 and 0! Huh? Doya?”
Bender’s eyes narrowed menacingly.
Leela couldn’t stop a smug smile from spreading
across her face. Bender would be so
distracted with his argument that he wouldn’t have time to bug her during the
short trip. Fry smiled as he sat down beside her, and
their shared, knowing amusement made Leela feel somewhat uneasy. She still had no idea what was going on
between herself and Fry…
Before he could start begging her for another date,
she flipped the switches, sending them skyward.
****
Leela’s old contempt for the moon, with its corny circus
atmosphere and shouting buskers, returned the second she disembarked. It was hard to remember the quiet, peaceful
sight of the earth rising when she was being jostled by popcorn-munching
children and their numb-faced parents.
Pushing right back, Leela followed the signs marking the way to the
park’s grey-paneled exhibition halls.
A green-haired woman waited for them at the
admission’s desk- she took the form Fry offered and scanned it. Producing a rubber stamp, she blotted the paper
three times, then pointed into the hall.
“Booth 422,” she told them.
“Come on, Fry,” Leela ordered, hefting the
contraption to its destination. He
shuffled up behind her, hands in pockets, his expression showing nothing but
boredom. Peering over the box, she found
her way to Booth 422, which was the width of a conference table and had the
depth of a bread box. Grumbling, Leela
placed the invention carefully in place.
Satisfied, she glanced up to see Fry filling out a form posted to a manila
clipboard right outside the booth.
“Fry,” she said, “The Professor’s supposed to fill
that out!”
As she snatched it out of his hands, he whined, “I
was doing fine!”
She squinted at the form. “The Professor isn’t a million years old!”
“He’s older?” Fry wondered.
Leela shook her head as she erased Fry’s handiwork. “Why don’t you try to find Bender in the Beer
Pavilion?” she suggested.
“He’s all hung up on this new tapbot. And I’d rather hang with you,” Fry said,
smiling widely.
“Fry…” she concentrated all the harder on her form.
“I’m not bugging you, am I?” he was, breathing down
her neck and distracting her from spelling out the Professor’s middle name
correctly.
“No, you’re only annoying me,” she responded, crossing
her last t. At that point two lab-coat
sporting men wearing red badges strode up to the table.
“And what,” said the taller one, who sported a
handlebar mustache and smelled like a keg of old English whisky, “does this do?”
Leela quickly turned toward the table. “This?
Well, it uh…”
“Transports matter,” Fry said. “See?” he flipped on the device, then grabbed
the light pen from Leela’s hand and tossed into the stream of light it
produced. As before, the pen disappeared
into thin air.
Leela turned toward the judges, a stagy, broad smile
on her face. They were scribbling notes
upon their own clipboards.
“Fascinating,” one finally said. “But where does the pen go?”
The answer came in the form of a metallic roar as a
large, warty grey hand shot up through the light. The hand was attached to beefy grey shoulders
, which connected to a mighty skull bearing a long, elephant-like nose. More and more of these creatures, bearing laser
blasters, surfaced. She recognized their fearsome armor and warmongering
demeanor and her throat constricted.
The largest creature, his voice blasting forth with
might, shouted, “Who threw this into my royal chamber?”
Every figure in the room shrank away into the
shadows. Leela saw Fry, his entire body chattering
with fear, as he huddled under the skirt of the table. The
black barrels of their waving rifles, pointed indiscriminately at the women and
children gathered nearby. The threat bringing
out her instinctive heroism, Leela stepped forward to proclaim her guilt.
Fry’s voice rang out over hers. “It was me.”
Training their rifles beneath the table, one soldier
pulled aside the skirt. Fry hunched
beneath it, shivering uncontrollably.
The tallest one sneered, “for many years, we have
battled the pencil menace, aided by the wrinkled hand of dominion! But the ancient one has gone, and left a puny
descendent! Now is the time for vengeance!”
“What’s your order, King Jumbo?” one of the now-many
soldiers asked.
“Destroy him.”
Fry shrieked, dodging each blast of energy. His fleet-footed fear gave Leela the opportunity
to think – and a quick study of their fearsome masks revealed a slight
flaw. A flash of light; a support beam
holding the polls of the booth structure in place buckled. Leela snapped her teeth down against a rising
scream as the structure tumbled down on Fry’s head, knocking him unconscious. Her body screamed ‘ACT NOW’, and Leela obeyed
her instincts; grabbing a tiny chunk of rock from the ground, she leapt with
catlike quickness and pitched it in the opposite direction of Fry’s body. The soldier’s heads followed, predictably,
the progress of the rock, giving Leela time to dodge into the fray, grab Fry,
and make a break for the nearest air shaft.
Behind them, Leela heard the soldiers calling for
blood, demanding vengeance in the name of Princess Pachyderm, who had lost her
life with the drop of the Moon’s pen.
Shuddering, Leela dragged a mercifully unconscious Fry up the air shaft,
as far away from the conflict as she could get.
***
As she clambered through the shaft, Leela was
unaware of anything but the impulse to stay alive. Therefore
when she, at last, found an exit in the grating – and pushed it aside to enter
a small apartment overlooking the fairgrounds – it took her a good minute to hear the Professor’s voice.
“Leela?
Dammit, what’s going on?”
She placed Fry on a nearby bed, then lifted her
wrist. “We’ve got an emergency,” she
informed him crisply. “It’s an Elephantus
attack.”
“So slap on some ointment and get back to the
fair! I need someone guarding the device
until it’s in the hands of the judges!”
“No! The
Elephantus, Professor!”
“The most vicious, warlike tribe of robotic elephant
people in the known tri-galaxy area,” Professor Farnsworth remarked
thoughtfully. “Intriguing…but impossible. Their home world is billions of light-years
away from the moon! Why, with current
hyperdrive technology it would take over three years for them to reach…”
Desperately, battling the far-off sound of
screaming, Leela said, “They used your invention!”
“Yes,” the Professor said, scratching his wrinkling
chin. “I see…”
She glared, “Did you know the transmogrifier could
be used in reverse?”
“Preposterous!” Professor Farnsworth snapped, slamming
his hand on the desk. “Do I seem venial
enough to risk the safety of the entire planet just to win four thousand
dollars and a five-minute shopping spree at the Venusian morgue?”
“Yes,” Leela replied. “Did you even know where all of those pencils
were landing, ancient menace?”
“What? You’re
getting hard to hear, Leela…” an off-screen noise sounding vaguely like thunder
rumbled nearby.
“Professor, static interference was abolished over a
hundred years ago…”
“This is interstellar interference – it just sounds
like thunder…” He stood up to turn off
the monitor, revealing his left hand as it shook a piece of tinfoil. “Good bye, Leela! ”
“Crud,” Leela muttered as her wrist communicator
went dead. She sat on the floor, staying
low to the ground as a patrol of Elephantus ships strafed by. Another look at the bed allowed her to reason
that Fry, shrouded as he was among the curtains of the bed, was largely
invisible. She counted the minutes until
King Jumbo gave up his quest for revenge.
***
As it turned out, the Elephantus were very
stubborn. Saved only by the inaccessibility
of their loft and the width of the intruder’s bodies, Leela’s days were spent nursing
Fry and spying on the world outside her window.
Completely isolated, she scoured her mind for
weaknesses in the enemy. They were
impossible to confront physically, their strength being twice that of the
average tank. Mentally they were sharp,
as were their general physical cognitively.
Her only hope was in their greatest strength of all - their incredibly sensitive hearing. If she could manage a diversion, they could
get away easily.
But, she thought miserably, what good would that
do? They would hunt Fry until he was
destroyed.
“You fool,” she muttered, sponging his
forehead. “What made you speak up?”
He stirred. “Because
you were gonna say something.”
Relief filled Leela, mingling with the anger she
couldn’t bring herself to express again.
“Fry!”
“I couldn’t let you die for something I did,” he
said, voice reedy and thin.
“But if they’d taken me I could have handled them! I…”
“I did it for another reason, too.”
“Fry…”
“I love you, Leela.”
She knew by his even breathing that he had returned
to the underworld, leaving her alone once more.
***
On the tenth day, she heard a mewling noise coming
from the neighboring apartment. Setting
her restless mind to the task, she spent all day picking the lock on the sealed
door between the units. By sundown she’d
managed to crack the lock.
The apartment was neat, orderly, with stocked
pantries and no adults around. She
followed the sound of sobbing to a small nursery at the rear of the apartment,
where a blond-haired little girl sobbed and kicked, her diaper soaked.
Automatically, she searched for diapers and changed
them, then gave the infant a zewieback cookie from the cupboard. She raided those, and then carried the baby
back into the building and re-sealing the door.
Sitting down, Leela looked at the tiny baby in her
arm. Cooing, the infant smiled up at
her, waving her chubby legs and arms. The poor thing is an orphan now, Leela
realized, empathy clouding her judgment as she tried to figure out the pile of
bottles and formula she’d taken. One one
blanket a name had been embroidered.
“Erin?” she asked, staring at the baby. “You don’t look like Erin. How about Victoria?” she barely realized how
one-sided the conversation was, or how insane it made her look.
Making her first bottle and putting it to the child’s
lemon-pucker lips, she began to feel joy for the first time in a week. “Hi,” she whispered. “My name is Leela. I’ll be your mommy for now…”
***
And so the days stretched on, the food and water
supplies going lower and lower. It was a
nightmarish stalemate. No physical force
on her part could stop them; there was no way she could expect them to
sympathize with her, not with the death of a princess lying at the root of
their aggressiveness.
On the twelfth day, she noticed some Elephantus
troops digging by the airtight seal of the dome. Horrified, she realized there were even more soldiers
outside of the dome, planting what looked to be large mines of explosives. They’d gotten tired of waiting for Fry to
appear.
She laughed hysterically, maniacally. “I guess an Elephantus never does forget…”
Her laughter stopped at Victoria’s cry. Leela looked at the hopeless baby in her arms,
the luckless friend in the bed, and for the first time in her life felt
entirely helpless.
Someone
help me!
“You asked?” A
silky voice wondered from behind her.
She turned to see the Robot Devil standing there,
wearing the regalia of a moon tourist.
His oversized foam rubber cowboy hat and “Moon Me!”
shirt gave Leela her first real laugh for the day.
***
She eyed the icy red figure sitting at her borrowed table. Sure death or the forfeiture of her
freedom? The restoration of Fry’s life
and that of Victoria’s parents and everyone else who had been on the moon that
day for six months of her life. She had
unwittingly given the same for the opportunity to hear Fry play months before,
had chosen unwisely, and was again facing down the exact same unpleasant fork
in the road.
Could any woman be this saintly?
The decision was made as she heard Victoria’s
laughter, pealing from the drawers as she stared at the Devil’s outlandish
costume.
***
After the first couple of months, Leela decided that
living in Robot Hell wasn’t that bad. She
had plenty of time to perfect her mastery of the martial arts, and because of
her social position most everyone deferred to her, bowing, scraping, letting
her wield her power.
Leela believed she did so fairly, in the six months
a year she was forced to spend down here.
The Robot Devil (or RD, as he demanded she call him) was a decent if
completely platonic (her firm decision, not his) husband. He didn’t mind her keeping in touch with her
Planet Express colleagues, and left her alone during the six months she spent
in New New York every year.
“My queen!” a red bird made entirely out of metal
piped as it flew into the room. “I have
a message from the surface!”
“Thank you,” she said, ripping open her note.
Dear
Leela,
I
miss you. Everything here is good.
I
miss you.
The
Professor’s still mad Zoidberg smashed his invention, so he’s making him work
overtime (something about Venus and the morgue). Bender says to give these to RD and that he
hopes you’ll be blessed with lots of little upgrades soon- Leela shuddered, putting aside the expensive
and illegally-imported cigars. Amy’s doing good, and she made her first
solo delivery in the ship yesterday without anyone’s help.
I
miss you. When are you coming home?
I
miss you,
Fry
A tear came to Leela’s eye, which she quickly wiped
away. He had given his hands, and nearly
his life for her – she’d been willing to do the same for him. They had a friendship made of rock – even if
most of those were rattling around in Fry’s head…
“Leela!” RD called, clanking into the room. “I’ve brought something for you!”
She grumbled in disgust. “It’s not possession of another lost
soul? I haven’t finished learning the
name of the last robot you tricked into serving us…”
“My name’s Ned,” the footstool she rested upon said.
“Furniture don’t talk!” said RD. A soft cry from the robot’s chestplate sent
Leela to her feet.
“Victoria?” she mumbled feebly.
“Just because she’s human doesn’t mean you get to
name her!” RD retorted. He opened his
chest and inside sat the now six-month-old child. In a second Leela held her.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“Know?” RD shrugged.
“Her parents sold her to me for a regular gig on the bandstand on the
moon,” he shook his head. “You humans
and your desperation. It makes me sick…”
“What were you planning on doing with her?” Leela
asked, bussing the girl again on her cheek.
He shrugged. “We
do need a dog…” in an instant he was on
his back, Leela’s fists activating his pain sensors violently. “All right!
You can keep her!”
Triumphantly, Leela stood up, grabbing the child and
striding out of the royal chamber. With
Victoria she went to the only room that was entirely, uniquely hers – a solar
with a wide-open glass roof.
Sitting down on a plush violet couch, Leela pointed
up at the sky. “Can you see all of the
stars?” the sky was indeed alive with activity that night. “That’s Venus – that’s Mars…there’s the Big
Dipper….” She said softly to the baby, who half-listened to her new
mother. Leela laughed, hugging the
baby. “That’s okay,” she smiled. “It’s a lot to remember for a baby. Just try to remember this much – this,” she
gestured around them, “is just a place
we sleep. Up there,” she pointed. “is home.”
And up there would always be Leela’s home – above
the ground stood the city she loved, the apartment she kept, the stars and
heavens she loved to fly through. And no
bargain, no matter how generous, could make her love a robot she barely
knew. No hundred plus lives saved
unaware would ever turn her into a polished lava rock for the Robot Devil’s
pocket.
The End