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Mary E. Lowd writes stories and collects creatures. She's had three novels and more than seventy short stories published. Her fiction has won an Ursa Major Award and two Coyotl Awards. Meanwhile, she's collected a husband, daughter, son, a bevy of cats and dogs, the occasional fish, and a garden full of roses. The stories, creatures, and Mary live together in a crashed spaceship disguised as a house in Oregon. Learn more at marylowd.com.
It took a hundred years to design and build the first planet. Multi-dimensional bulldozers and hyper-spatial cranes arranged the mountains, the icy spires, the cozy sea-green valleys in-between. Everything was perfect; ready for a feathered avian species to take roost in the frozen castle-like heights or maybe a variety of vine-swinging primates to set up their homes in the valleys. But no one came.
So I built another world--a moon to circle the planet. To follow the theme, the moon's face was formed from glassy mirror-like ice, great stretches and planes of ice. Hoofed equines could pound their way around the moon, reveling in those wide, broad planes. But the equines didn't come.
The planet and the moon shone at each other, reflecting each other's empty beauty, waiting.
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No one wants ice worlds anymore, I thought. My next planet was red and dusty, and it only took a few years to build, smashing asteroids together, gluing them in place. But no reptiles came to bask in the red world's sunburnt warmth.
I was good at building worlds now--I could churn them out, one every several years. So, I kept building: a green planet, wishing for a civilization of tiny rodents; another covered in oceans, hoping to become inhabited by sentient fish; an entire world carved out of a giant purple gem--I don't even know who would live there. But it's beautiful.
Each of them waited.
Each of them is waiting.
I keep building worlds, hoping that some day the creatures will come, but there are too many other worlds out there for them. Too many places to live. Yet, I keep building. Some day they will come.
Until then, my empty empire is perfect and serene.
The End
This story was first published on Tuesday, December 6th, 2016
Author Comments
I wrote "The Empty Empire" in a flash of sadness and frustration. I mean, uh, inspiration. I was looking at my website where I reprint my previously published stories, and I was trying to motivate myself to post another story. But I couldn't picture anyone reading it. I couldn't picture anyone caring one way or another about it. My story archive was the empty empire. So, if you'd like to visit some sparkling worlds, simply waiting to be inhabited--or rather, read--head over to DeepSkyAnchor.com. They're waiting for you.
- Mary E. Lowd
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