A pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09, with just a bit of red added for eyes, because this alien sees something very special today...
While I was traveling with Khadijah on our honeymoon, the Xtaravian water butterfly was in an aquarium we were visiting – a beautiful creature in the darkness of the exhibit, no doubt enjoying the constant display of bipedal humans and humanoids flowing by beneath it.
I always think of Christmas, and all that it means, when I see this beautiful creature, large enough to envelop a human, intelligent enough to save one from drowning. One Christmas, one brave man returned the favor.
I was 16 years old, and my best friend Marcus Aurelius Kirk Jr. and I had graduated high school two years early that May. We had been working odd jobs but were not really feeling the whole idea of college. Our parents gave us space because they knew that like all men who become worthy of the name, we had to figure things out for ourselves.
It was December that year, and Xtaravia was in the news for a terrible crisis – human settlers had made a big mistake that had taken food out of the water butterfly's environment, and had realized much later that without the water butterfly, they were as good as dead, because the water butterfly eats all of the cyanide-producing algae in Xtaravia's rivers and streams.
There were a million settlers on Xtaravia, and because of a local stellar storm from Earth's general direction, the professional consortium fleet could not bring enough water or evacuate them.
That left the wild possibility of a temporary food source being brought in from the local region – but again, the professional fleet didn't have the ships available, and the commercial fleets had most of their crews down for the holidays.
Enter Joseph Tiger, a gutsy commercial shipper with a base only 20 light-years away. He bankrupted his company for Christmas, paying all his workers quadruple-time to come back and ship the food needed to save the water butterfly, and thus the human settlers of Xtaravia. He and his crews made it to Xtaravia on Christmas Day that year, just in the nick of time.
When Mr. Tiger was asked about the whole thing, his answer was unique.
“I believe in Christmas. God gave His Son to save humanity. All I gave was my company. This was easy. What Mary and Joseph did – that was hard. I'll be home by January 18. My workers are heroes and will get hired all over the place, or have enough money to hang on through the middle of the year and find whatever else they want to do. It's really no big deal when you really believe in Christmas, and in humanity being worth saving, at any cost.”
This story reached Mark and me by Dec. 27 of that year, and it helped us decide what we wanted to do. We went into working in commercial shipping, and toward the end, before we started our own company, we had a chance to work under Mr. Tiger, who by then had restarted Big Cat Shipping. Mr. Tiger became our mentor, and we went on Christmas runs with him to the frontier because “We'll be home and whenever we get there, it will be a celebration – but Dec. 25 is just a day. If you believe in Christmas, you do what God did in giving, every day.”
Mr. Tiger eventually retired and sold Big Cat Shipping to Kirk and Dixon Shipping … it meant the world to us that he trusted us like that. We did the deal on Xtaravia, by a river full of flourishing water butterflies, ten years after Mark and I began our own company.
“I've never seen y'all as competitors, but co-laborers – the frontier is big and humanity needs a lot of help out here,” he said. “So many people told me I should shun you because you worked for me and then went into the same business, but the frontier is huge, and we always understood each other. I'm glad to turn my work over to you two – I'll enjoy my retirement, knowing that you will take care of your people and the people you meet just as much as I would if it were me.”
Until the year he died, Mark or myself would still pick our old mentor up for any Christmas runs there might be … even as his health failed, this was his special Christmas treat, and he lit up and regained his strength just for a little while every year ... until one January, like he always said, he went home, home to his reward.
“Rufus?” Khadijah said, interrupting my memories.
I came to myself seeing my reflection, and also a curious water butterfly who probably had never seen a bipedal with water flowing on his face.
“I was just thinking of Christmas,” I said to my bride, “and the mentor who fed these water butterflies one year on Xtaravia on Christmas Day, and started me onto my journey to you.”
“Really?” she said. “Sounds like one of those long-term kinds of Christmas miracles.”
“That's right,” I said with a smile. “Let me tell you about it.”