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Earth to Earth	By : Ravenclaw42 Category: +S to Z > Trigun Views: 2957 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Trigun, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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Author’s Note: I like this chapter. It’s not for all tastes, but I liked it when I wrote it and I think it works just as well as a stand-alone story as part of this total fanfic. Don’t expect any of your favorite characters, but I beg that you at least give my experiments a fair chance.

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Chapter 4 - Lifeblood
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There had always been desert on Gunsmoke. Names came and went; people, species, life and death came and went unnoticed, scarring the land a little and then vanishing, swept over with dusty scar tissue. But the desert was eternal -- the desert was its own living being, its own god and devil, its own heaven and hell.

It hadn’t always been hot, clean desert; there hadn’t always been sand and rock as far as the eye could see. First there was the desert of creation, gross molten scarification, the very surface of the semi-spherical lump boiling with its own new life. Each gout of steam was the gasping breath of an infant world, insignificantly tiny in the void of the universe and yet so determined... so infallible, so resolute with newness that no meteor shower could crack it, no flesh wound could stop the life that it was bound to foster.

The red cracks in the earth sealed up, and the blackness of new skin covered the surface of the planet. The infant’s first toddling steps drew it inexorably towards the eighth moon, for in that beginning-time there had been nine other droplets of blue-white rock flung out of the Great Sun’s core along with what was eventually to become the planet Gunsmoke. Of the nine smaller flecks, one had been nearly the same size as the infant planet; this had been the eighth moon, almost a planet in itself, smaller than Gunsmoke but twice as dense and with a heavy, barbituric gravity that drew its siblings into a death dance -- each orbit faltered, drawn to the eighth moon, setting each moon and the infant planet onto a collision course.

The ninth moon, lightest and weakest of the nine, met its older sibling’s embrace first. It shattered against the surface, crushed by gravity nearly seven times heavier than its own. But the eighth moon took injury from its younger sibling’s death -- a fissure split it nearly all the way through, a gaping red mouth that bared its still-cooling innards to the void. And in that weakened state, the first moon, eldest of the ten children of the Great Sun, brought a final end to the eighth moon’s despair -- and in so doing also destroyed itself.

Of the ten, six moons remained, along with Gunsmoke herself; one by one, the small moons were drawn into the planet’s light gravity, circling her as children would a campfire, keeping their backs to her to protect her from the encroaching dark. The planet drifted, settling on an orbit close to the scattered graves of her three smaller moon-siblings.

The planet’s sphere of gravity collected grave dust from her destroyed siblings, building up an insulating layer thick enough to hold in gaseous elements -- nitrogen at first, and phosphorous, and sulfur. The poisonous combinations deadened the surface, and in time the planet shook, so that old scars reopened and white-hot blood spilled out and steam rose curling into the air -- for now there truly was air, of a sort. And the desert turned to a broken, crumbling, roiling mass of new crust fighting old upheaval, a desert strewn with dunes of magma and clouds of steam.

But eventually the fighting stopped and the surface became calm; and so it was that ice first came to Gunsmoke. So far away from her mother sun, the steam coiling around the planet began to condense, becoming thunderheads, becoming sleet and hail and soft crystalline methane snow. Frozen precipitation met the hot surface of the planet and melted on contact, setting the whole sphere awash in a great ocean. But the snow still fell as the surface cooled, and Gunsmoke drifted ever further from the Great Sun; until finally all the ocean had frozen, and clear ice glazed the planet’s black surface.

The desert of snow and ice lasted for Gunsmoke’s first few millennia, until something -- maybe some fluctuation in space or maybe the planet’s own will -- shifted its course and angled it towards its mother. The planet, almost a living being of itself, slunk back towards the Great Sun until she settled into a more sedate orbit, within cosmic calling distance of her first kin.

Ocean returned as the age of ice faded, but even as the water melted, it began to disappear -- the closer the child came to her parent, the more painfully bright her parent’s love became. The atmosphere of Gunsmoke thinned and precious water escaped. Waves grew stronger, more violent, pounding at the pyroclastic flow of the land beneath; the porous black rock, already weak from the vice-like grip of the ice, relented without so much as a fight under the rough toss and grind of the water. More water escaped, vanished forever, while the land was broken by the very thing that should have saved it; and for the first time, the planet knew fear.

But again, after a period of destruction, there came the calm afterwards; bled nearly dry, Gunsmoke hoarded her last remaining water away underneath her loosened surface, so that old air pockets became underground lakes and reservoirs. And the surface -- devoid of ice and water, crushed and crumbled into coarse gravel, encased in a thin atmosphere of phosphorous and nitrogen and the oxygen left over from the evaporated ocean -- The surface began to live.

Millennia passed. A few cells found their inexplicable way into the underground water; they wriggled like infants, twirled like happy toddlers, and finally split like grown children from old homes.

Some fused back together -- Gunsmoke’s first lovers. Some split again -- Gunsmoke’s first divorces. Some of the split rejoined others -- Gunsmoke’s first love triangles.

Some winked out of existence -- Gunsmoke’s first deaths.

And so the world moved on, little by little, growing and splitting and rejoining and loving itself and trying not to die and dying anyway and being reborn from the ashes. Every time life moved to land, it failed; every time land-life failed, ocean-life started over again, mulishly stubborn. The underground reservoirs were filled with phoenix’s tears -- the smallest trickle of that precious water could resurrect a seemingly dead planet.

Life grew. Like the Phoenix, the planet burst into flames -- volcanoes, wild solar flares, hellfire on earth. Twice, every living being on the planet died of disease save a few hundred amoebas living in a single stagnant lake. Still, life grew.

Life grew despite everything. It grew like a fungus, unwelcome and unkillable. It grew with the tenacity of a man holding onto the side of a cliff by his fingernails.

White sand blew in to cover the planet’s surface. And still, life grew.

And after so long trying, life began to flourish.

It wasn’t easily visible to the ill-trained eye, but desert life suited Gunsmoke better than even the planet itself knew. Lizards and snakes and small rodents developed, slowly losing their webbed feet and ancient amphibian natures and moving to the surface, where they lived under rocks and in the leeward faces of sand dunes. Birds of prey -- hawks, eagles, buzzards, vultures -- discovered the evolutionary loophole of wings, which allowed them a higher place in the food chain. Lumbering beasts emerged to eat the newly-born coarse, dry grass; cacti found a way to grow above underground lakes and store water in their skin and spikes.

The planet breathed deep, then, and laughed with this new glory, this new freedom. Joy like nothing ever known before; the joy of motherhood, the joy of creating and caring and loving.

Gunsmoke was God.

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It was into this ancient, new-born world that a few ships carrying alien lifeforms crashed. It was into this infant heaven, this desert hell, that human beings took their first breath of clean air and new life ever since leaving their old home.

It was into this new world that a few beings of a species never known before on any world settled. Angels... angels to the planet’s God. Two others, also -- the fallen angels, the scapegoats, the first killer and the first victim.

But for all their significance and all their age, a century was nothing compared to Gunsmoke’s birth. In a century, one cliff might have broken into the ocean. In a century, one lick of the Great Sun’s fire might have stolen a drink of water from the planet’s surface. In a century, a single amoeba might have split in two.

A century was nothing compared to Creation.

Nothing at all.
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Earth to Earth