Pluto's Sister

For the entirety of approximately 4.543 billion years, my outward existence has consisted of this: floating in cold nothingness, with the occasional glint of metal or meteor to provide some amusement.

But inside...

Inside is where it hurts.

There are seven of us grouped around a blazing star, each to forever follow our own orbits. If you listened to the chaos inside me, They would consider us six, with an outlier just a smidge too small to be called our own.

Is that not unfair?

But of course, They cannot hear me.

They could never hear me.

My story begins approximately 4.41 billion years ago.

I was empty for 0.31 billion years. Young, afraid, child of violent explosions and voids, woven in stardust and nothingness - all smooth skin and harsh, frozen stone wrapped tenderly around molten cores.

0.31 billion years. A blink of an eye, now I know. Then oceans formed. There was land too, where the water was not, but it was empty and barren and had always been there.

Liquid was new to me, this fresh, strange matter collecting where my elbows bumped and eyes dipped. The coating was mostly cold, and sloshed around strangely as I spun and swirled along my path, not yet worn down and familiar.

3.77 billion years ago, the pockets of heat in the water changed. They were different in a way that I wasn't.

They were alive.

Tiny things, so much smaller than anything I had seen. But I held them preciously in the depths, heated from deep inside my core.

It was a very long time before I sensed the cells changing again. They were becoming larger, collecting and cooperating and growing.

My siblings had their own turmoils, their own storms to weather. As I did. But I protected my lives as best as I could, through the wavering conditions of my body.

I was old and becoming ever older. One must understand how weary life grows after billions of years, riding a long path that never ends and simply grows familiar, then boring. My orbit was a steady, constant thing, as was how I moved along it.

One must also understand how excited I was when I saw the animals. Moving slowly, quickly, all at once in the water. Prey and predator. The plants, rooted sedately, floating with the tides of my waters.

My life. My lives.

They were beautiful and new in a way one will not understand. Least of all I.

After that, things happened both slowly and quickly. The cycle of death and life I found cruel at first, but necessary. The fish that waded on land, flopping and struggling to breathe and eventually growing legs. Plants learning how to breathe air, to grow bark and deep roots and flowers. Animals with fur and skin instead of slippery scales and pale membranes, animals that laid eggs and gave milk, animals that grew larger than I had ever thought possible.

It was then that I wished for an animal to grow as large as me. As half of me, even. They would understand.

Would they?

They were new and stunning and cruel, but also loving, and I could not do anything but to try to influence their lives in tiny ways. More often than not, I failed.

And so to lessen the disappointment, I learnt to watch, to tend to the sky and stars, instead of reaching inside myself and feeding the beating hearts of my lives.

I learnt to listen to rain and the way wind whispered through fresh leaves. The way the herds fell against lone predators. The ever-moving currents of the land and the sea.

I, too, was ever-moving, but I was alone.

I stayed alone for thousands of years.

Then I saw fire.

Inside myself, in tiny sparks instead of huge spheres, prickling my skin and drawing pride instead of blood.

They were sculpted from clay and blood and dirt, but they told wonderful stories. Stories that sparkled like diamonds and made me see my sky with new eyes. Stories that enchanted even as I laughed at their pitiful lack of understanding. Stories that could fell the sky, if I allowed it.

And so I listened once more.

I am afraid that I coddled them, drawing the cold away so that they might have had heat, bringing the largest herds so that they might feed and grow. They cried out and danced for rain, and I tried to give it to them. I tried to nurture them, my own children, in misguided ways.

I should have stayed to my own path.

The next time I saw them, they had evolved. They had fur against the cold, rivers for water, animals for meat, plants for soup. They no longer needed my intervention. They no longer needed me. It hurt too much to look at them, so I left.

I abandoned them for a few hundred years. Perhaps, if I had not, things would have been different.

I was blind to their new ideas, like ships, and slavery.

To me, a few hundred years was a short time. A few hundred years, to Them, was a defining history, something that carved out Their roots and set Them in stone. I had tried to leave, but Their lives were fascinating, changing and spiraling along paths I would have never thought to make. Like leaving. They knew how to leave me. They launched ships of metal to sail across the skies, instead of the seas, and brought Their buzzing, flame-bright life with Them.

I do not know when I began to think of the humans as Them. They are different now. They are stronger than I am, and They are tearing me apart.

Children are misguided things. Like Them. Like me.

They are cruel and loving things, but They are too strong in some ways and so desperately weak.

Nature is a cycle of love and life and death, because needs must, because mothers cannot but love their children. Even as babies are abandoned, stepped on, chewed by lightning that They have harnessed. They could fell the sky. Now They can yoke the clouds and claim the blue.

Have they not already?

They are my children.

I cannot but love Them, even as my depths roil with pity and fury. Look at what They have done to my other children. Look at what They do to my children. Look at what my children do in return.

All I can do is look, and listen, even as screams fog the sky.

My air is changed, unstable, toxic. It chokes me, and I cannot do even the little I could before. My body is wounded with waste and materials that itch and burn. My waters, the milk of life, are stained.

They are so empty, so full of waste, drained of my lives.

Sicknesses tear across my land. Some of Them leave horrible legacies that sting and burn. Some of Them are neglected, horribly estranged, as innocent as my animals. But most of Them...

They are complicit in Their destruction, but not enough. They are cruel, but not cruel enough; They are kind, but never enough.

Good and evil runs rampant across what was always gray and green.

My plants have stopped singing and begun screaming. Nature, the best tool of mine, is falling apart.

As am I.

The smoke prickles my eyes. I wobble along my path, barely seeing, unsteady as my rain.

And I listen. Of course I listen.

What else can I do?

What else is left?