37, day twenty four.
The lady squeezed her ears shut to try to block out the noise. It didn’t help. Should she say something? She should say something. Didn’t those people know she could hear it, every single time? She looked down at them resentfully. There there were, just sitting there, all smug with their efficient heating and their breathable air. She hadn’t gotten one decent night sleep since they showed up. Sure, at first it was flattering. They looked up at her beauty and were moved to song. But it had been a hundred thousand years already. Couldn’t they find something else to sing about? That was it. The next time an asteroid came by, she wasn’t going to warn them. Maybe a global cataclysm would give them a bit of bloody perspective.
She sighed. Far below her, the sigh could be felt, just slightly, in the tides. She knew she would warn them if an asteroid showed up, or another alien race bent on enslaving them and selling them off on the galactic marketplace. Of course she would. She always did. That was her job. She could sleep when the sun expanded.
Maybe they would get bored of writing songs and verse about her? No, that was not very likely. After all, who could bore of her? Her majesty was unmatched by anything else in the heavens or earth. It wasn’t ego. She knew it. They had said it too many times for the message not to have sunk in. And after all, that song, down there, sung by the lonely sailor drifting in the sea? That one wasn’t so bad.
Off in the distance, the lady sensed a disturbance in the Oort cloud. An extra-solar comet? No, it was too focused. It changed direction too rapidly. A ship, then. It could be nothing. It could be peaceful contact, even though in all her eons she had never seen an alien race that wished them anything but harm. She wondered idly if they sang songs about their moons. Either way, the people down below needed to know. She shook herself out of her reverie. She could dream about sleep another night.
For now, there was work to do.
Stealing All the Sevens 