Trembling With Fear 01-26-25

The Cliffs of Azul D, by Anna Orridge

When the first settlers arrived at the salt marshes in the sixth sector of Azul D, they were mystified by the four-mile-long rocky mass rising from the white expanse. They called them cliffs and speculated that a sea, now long evaporated, once lapped the feet of those giants. But ecologists later deduced that the ‘cliffs’ were, in fact, huge fungal stalks entwined. Their outsides were petrified, allowing the tender living innards to thrive within. 

From that dense mass, an amethyst gum seeped in patches. When caramelized, it could be used to make sweets effervescent on the tongue, not unlike sherbet. They called them Sheer Drops – a quaint bit of humour that only the oldest migrants from Earth would get.

The gum could also be fermented to create a frankly dangerous liquor called Violet Agony. But that wasn’t what drew the settlers back again and again, or eventually led them to build a pioneer town, Hazy Valley, in the huge pool of blessedly cool shade beneath those fungi. 

The gaps between the gills under the overhanging caps teemed with crystalline 

projections – intersecting, transparent cubes. Those cubes were the planet’s closest answer to Earth’s silicon. They were vital for creating the chips and cables which might make Azul D more than a desperate and disregarded outpost in the galaxy.

The Azulian miners who hacked that treasure did not plunge down underground shafts, 

but working at such heights they made the head pound, forced sweat from armpits. The people on the ground beneath in their reflective suits were mere specks of glass and glitter in kaleidoscopic formation.

Like their Earth-bound forebears, the miners found rich seams of folklore along with the silicon and the gum. There is nothing like a dangerous and lonely profession to provoke the ancient itch of storytelling.

There were the predictable tales of strange knocks and songs that carried on the breezes.

But one story stuck out. It was said that sometimes, if a miner chiselled at the cherished sap too fast, it would reveal a slit. Not a gaping irregular hole, but a neat cerulean ellipsis that easily fit a human hand, achingly like a glimpse of home skies.

Most miners who saw this would quickly abseil down the cliff in alarm, praying or swearing.

There would be the odd one who lingered, though – usually a rookie. 

But then there was that old timer, wasn’t there? Aspen, his name was. He’d been one of the first of the settlers who took to mining. He was good at it too, despite the kyphosis that advanced with his years and left him often in agonizing pain at the end of each day. When he was able to, he would lift his arms to the skies and whisper incantations in a language nobody recognised. 

There was no prospect of retirement for Aspen. Most of the credits he earned swirled away down the drains of gambling and Violet Agony which, despite its name, was actually a very effective form of pain relief.

As he reached his 60s, he found his days sagging with guilt-tinged nostalgia. He started to talk of those he’d left behind on Earth – a family, long estranged. The planet had been a wreck by the time he’d migrated, but it still had something of its old verdant beauty. And now its memory was bathed in the warm cloudy waters of Aspen’s love and regret.

It wouldn’t be hard to imagine the old man gazing wistfully at that slit, letting his gnarled hand linger above it.   

When was the last time he’d seen a blue like that? Surely one touch wouldn’t hurt?

#

There was a search party for Aspen, of course, but there weren’t really many places to search beyond the nooks and crannies of the fungal cliffs. 

There were some standing stones in town. Nobody knew whether they had been there before the settlers arrived, a freak of exogeology, or whether they’d been dragged there in a fit of nostalgia. At any rate, they’d become a magnet for graffiti and the equivalent of Wanted and Missing posters. 

Aspen’s friends carved the likeness of his face into the standing stone at the centre of the ring. But nobody ever reported a sighting.

#

In town, someone would occasionally remark on how often miners went missing. They would be greeted by silence and hostile shrugs from the drinkers of Violet Agony. Press the matter too far, and fists might even be flung. 

Everyone knew the danger. The miners were working at heights of up to four hundred feet. It wasn’t surprising that so many died. 

But why, so often, was there no body? Not even mangled traces at the foot of the cliffs. 

There were the predictable tales of serial killers or winged monsters flitting amongst the fungal columns, ready to grip complacent prey. 

Perhaps. The planet had not been thoroughly explored and who knew what beasts could be lurking in those great caverns?

#

Recently, the miners enjoyed an evening when the sun sank low on the horizon. They stopped their work to admire the landscape’s stark beauty. They could see spores whisked from cliffs by the convoluted winds of Azul D. Against the bloody sunset, they resembled earth’s starling murmurations. 

But then one young woman suddenly cried out, pointing at the sky. 

It took her workmates a while to calm her down, make her explain herself.  She swore, out of that swirling chaos, she had spied the shape of a human crouched, knees clasped, before the winds dispersed the spores. Her friends might have dismissed this as a hallucination born of exhaustion and oxygen deprivation, were it not for one detail. 

The human form she said, had a great lump on its back. And before the spores were dispersed, she saw it rock its head back, lift its hands. As if in supplication.  

#

The miners of Azul D were a hardy breed. They knew danger, disease and loneliness.  They knew the price of any lump of silicon or gum by weighing it in their hands. 

And, more than anything else, they knew that longing for Mother Earth could extract a higher price than any mother lode.