Over on the NaNoWriMo forums, we had a prompt to write a letter FROM one of our characters to us during quarantine. I chose everyone’s favorite aristocratic Latina space archaeologist, Doña Ana Lucía Serrano, and here’s what she had to say…
M. Mathieu,
You and your peoples have built for us, your children, a utopia. Plagues here are contained within hours, tamed and woven into the ecosystem around them. Quarantine is a matter for ships and domes, in some tragic cases for cities. The worst I have seen in my life was the Crisis of Prithvi, and even then, mate could reach out to mate and clasp hand, shoulder, cheek, lip.
I suppose it would be declassé to ask for your experience and feelings, even for anthropological science.
These “are the days worth living for,” as your Edith Keeler says. And they are indeed coming, the days when the deserts bloom and the hungry are fed and their diseases cured, and all souls share hope and a common future. Even now, the people of Earth are clever and kind, and can solve their problems as long as they retain hope that problems can be solved.
And where human talent alone will not do, there is the bounty of nature…a partner with you, not an enemy. You know this: your sourdough bubbles on the table, your cabbage becomes sauerkraut, and your first instinct when cooped up at home was to plant a garden. To plant a garden, to raise seeds to be planted out of doors in a few short weeks! I do not need to spell out the metaphor for you, writer, or my admiration of the hope it suggests in you and all my ancestors. Fungus, plant, animal, and human are all family together, and they are more than willing to help us if we help them. We are earthclan, we all live in abundance together, or all die alone.
Ah, does it all seem so large? Yet the plague is so small, a microscopic machine that is almost alive. And in weight, it and its rancid cousins weigh half the beetles of the world, that’s all. But only remember your L’Engle, and her lights. Every small victory against the darkness is a victory for light. Every strike for human potential and earthclan harmony are strikes toward the future. Your worlds upon worlds of community gardens are not so far off. Only practice your hanzi, practice your karate, water your plants, ranch your yeast, love your wife, and ask “let me help” (as Allende de Mars so beautifully said).
Use this crucible to forge the things you could not before. Begin training at home, begin making cheese, begin a systemic course of reading. I care not what, only narrate it to me as you can.
Because out of such buds do blossom the days worth living for.
Je t’en prie…
Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y Veracruz
That was a great little read! Loved the tone and the positivist in it. The are was great for it too!