Entropy
Entropy
(C) Heather Farthing 2022, all rights reserved
When my grandmother was a little girl, the sky was blue.
It was an illusion, of course, a holographic projection of what the sky was said to have looked like under Great Sol. She used to tell me about how sometimes, under this noble falsehood, some of the plants would get confused and grow green.
As I kneel before the purple-leafed hardroot plant, digging its reddish roots from the ground, I have a difficult time picturing that.
Once in awhile, there are patches of blue across the dome. It’s like looking into a glitch in reality, a blinking, neon hole in existence. My grandmother’s generation find it comforting, but I find it disquieting.
The dome is so dusty now, it’s nearly opaque, bathed in iron-rich, pink and red sand. In some places it leaks, bits of sand falling from above the way the irrigation system did when I was a child. Every so often, somebody makes a motion to fix it, but either there are not enough supplies, or enough energy, human or mechanical.
There used to be cleaning octopodes, who crawled over the outside of the dome, sweeping away the dust with their slime and feeding on pests that roosted there. I’ve seen pictures in school, but they’ve long gone extinct now.
I keep cutting the roots from the vines, one at a time, into the basket. Dig, clip, basket, dig, clip basket. The wrote monotony is supposed to be calming in its tedium. Keep doing the little things to keep going, like a wind-up toy whose mechanisms are wearing out.
The first rule of living in Paradise is that we don’t talk about what’s going on outside of Paradise. So another settlement collapsed in on itself, we still have a harvest to pull in. So another caravan was raided by the night people, we still have repairs to make.
And on, and on, and on.
Just keep surviving for one more day. And another. And another. And try not to think about tomorrow, or next week, or next year.
When my basket is full, I stand up and a stretch, wiping sweat off my brow and frowning. A lady is not supposed to sweat, water being too precious of a resource, but the central climate system has been on the fritz lately.
“Sola? Is that you?” a female voice asks.
It’s one of the neighbors, poking her head over the sand-stained, formerly white picket fence.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I reply wearily, tucking a loose strand of blond hair behind my ear.
“How’re you settling in, love?”
I struggle to remember her name. Mrs. Lovejoy. Mrs. Miller. Mrs…Crumb?
“Just fine,” I tell her lamely, looking down at my basket. “The victory garden is coming along nicely, and I moved my canning supplies into the shelter so I can keep working during an emergency.”
“So productive!” the older woman smiles, her face soft with wrinkles. “I wish I had your energy. But did you hear, love, Mrs. Lovejoy down the street, her baby was born with mutations!”
“Oh, dear!” I reply, trying to remember which one is Lovejoy, coming up blank, but also chilled by the notion.
“Oh, yes, love!” the woman continues, clearly not reading my look of disgust correctly. “My friend Lisa, down at the medical center—you know Lisa? From the Harvest Celebration, she brought muffins?—Anyway, Lisa told me the little girl was born with fangs. Fangs! Can you imagine? Said it was the most ghastly thing she’d ever seen! Unnatural for a baby to have teeth, but there it was! Long and sharp as a bloodsucker’s beak!”
I can feel myself turning pale at the visual, maybe a bit green, as I pick up my basket.
“Must be terrible for a new mother!” she keeps going.
“Sent it to the Wastes, they did. Lisa said Mrs. Lovejoy went a bit mad, calling for her baby girl after they took it from her. Kept calling for her baby until they sedated her, poor thing. Even after they told her the baby was a mutant, she kept asking where it was! Poor thing.”
“Yes, poor thing,” I answer absently, a cold, sickish feeling in the pit of my stomach. “I need to get these inside for pickling…”
“Oh! Pickling!” she cheers. “I used to love pickling. All the trader men used to drop buy for a shipment of my pickles to take out.” She punctuates with a wink before asking, “Your father was a rail merchant, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” I confirm grimly, looking at my shoe and feeling the weight of my basket.
“Well, good for him!” she beams. “Does he still travel?”
“...No,” I tell her simply, shifting my basket with exaggerated discomfort.
The truth is, he never came home. His crew did, but not him, and I don’t want to talk about it to a woman I’ve lived next to for only a week.
“Oh, well, I…oh, dear, love, your hardroot.”
I glance down at the vines and my blood runs cold. The vines are retreating into the round, brown shells that grow around the central root, pulling away from whatever edible tubers I haven’t collected yet. If I’m fast, it makes harvesting easier, but there’s a high probability they won’t be edible in the morning.
“I wonder what they know that we don’t,” I ask, ears perked for the sound of sirens.
“No telling, love. Best hurry up out here before the sirens go off. Hurry along now, off with you.” She wanders away from the fence and back toward the house. I drop back to my knees and start scrabbling for the shed roots. If I don’t get them, they’ll sprout into new shells, choking the garden and prolonging the harvest. I can’t have that, so I can only grab what I can before the sirens go off.
What could they be reacting to? Another sandstorm? Radicane? I should probably sleep in the shelter tonight, just in case. Ever since I was a child, I hated waking up in the middle of the night to the sirens, the confusion and panic. When I was about eight my mom caught me sleeping down there on more than one occasion, often but not always after the hardroot started acting weird.
At least it got rid of the gossipy neighbor.
I shiver again. I went to school once with a girl, a friend of mine, I can’t remember her name. She was one of those early-life friends where you color together, play dolls together, but don’t think about them after second grade, or would be if she hadn’t shown me the patches on her arms. They were scaled, thick armored plating, and she could make them light up and glow. I was so jealous and thought they were so pretty, until the next day when she didn’t come to class and we had a special lecture on the dangerous of mutants and mutation.
With pictures.
It’s not just the radiation storms that cause the mutations. When that happens it’s usually tumors and deformities. Those are sad enough, but sometimes, beneath the murky brown sun and amid the harsh, cold desert, nature just…breaks. When that happens, you can get all sorts of nasty things, like babies with fangs, milkers with no eyes, whales that float in the sky, feeding on atmospheric plankton.
Of those things, we cast them out. We can’t have such monsters breeding and passing on their aberrations, and sometimes such things can spread like a virus. We send them out to the Wastes, no matter how old or young. It’s how we’ve kept ourselves pure since the days of Old Earth.
When I’ve dug up all the tubers I can find, I take the basket inside and wash my hands at the kitchen sink. The water gurgles and sprays before the air in the pipes clear and slightly murky liquid pours out. In my grandmother’s day, it ran clear, but the slight taste of dirt is all I’ve ever known.
I look out the window. Sand-stained, cookie cutter houses in chipped, pastel colors with identical sand-stained, formerly white picket fences line my view. I grew up a few streets over, but when my mother died of radiation sickness I was assigned new housing, and I’ve been in the marriage lottery since I was eighteen.
Last week, I won.
He’s a good man, or so I hear. A bit older than me, a member of City Council and on the police force. We first met at the lottery drawing, although we didn’t know we’d be the winners at the time. He’s due to join me at my residence next week, when we’ll have our civil marriage ceremony, and then I’ll be a married woman with maybe a child on the way.
The Usoan Dream, I suppose.
In middle school we learned that the expedition that brought our ancestors here centuries ago were chasing an Old World dream. There was a time in the settler’s history where things were simple, regimented, and ordered. A man went to work from nine to five and came home to dinner on the table and something gentle and unoffensive on the AV unit. A woman spent her day at laundry and a stove, and children knew no fear or worries.
They were chasing that when the came here. The Old World, orbiting a rapidly expanding yellow dwarf star, was dying. After years of a painful, agonizing near-death, they came here chasing a peace they had never known.
The Old World died from a bang, a blaze of cosmic glory. The new world is dying of a prolonged, wasting illness, orbiting a star guttering like an overused candle in a strong breeze.
But unlike our starfaring ancestors, the people of the domed cities of Usoa just don’t have the energy to care, and there isn’t anywhere to go if we did.
I wash the tubers in the sink, watching out the window as the squat, purple trees draw their leaves in to their branches or trunks, dropping fruit or shielding it inside tough shells.
Yep, definitely a shelter kind of night.
I reach for another tuber. As I lean against the sink, I feel the chain around my neck give and something heavy dropping into the sink, which makes me swear.
It’s a small piece of junk my father brought back from one of his excursions, just a shard of something he thought was pretty, clear glass or resin of some sort, with thin gold lines inside like wires. On the top part, near where the hole for the chain is drilled, is a stylistic drawing of a golden sun, a lot like the picture books show Great Sol.
“I’ve seen things like this in the Wastes,” he told me as I sat on his lap, holding it in my hands. “The traders talk about it being made by aliens. Isn’t that wild?”
I fish it out of the sink and hold the chain up to the window. It snapped at the clasp, an easy fix. I pocket them both to keep from losing them and then go to the city-issued toolkit under the sink, prying open a different loop and tightening it down on the eye of the clasp. One link shorter, but at least I haven’t lost it.
By the time I return to the sink and the tubers, there is a lightmobile parking outside the kitchen window, black with white highlights, round fenders, and a five-pointed star on the hood.
I groan, and then go to the front door to meet him.
Ehnzo is at least a good-looking man. His dark hair is going a little gray, but he’s tall and smooth-skinned with a good, vital job. Any woman would have been lucky to win him in the lottery, but the idea of living with someone I don’t know forever turns my stomach.
“Sola,” he breathes when I open the door, mid-knock. “May I come in?”
“Sure,” I reply, stepping aside. “It’ll be your house in a few days, so why not?”
“I’m glad to see you’re okay,” he nods, closing the door behind him. “When the plants started hiding, I…I thought I should come stay with you.”
“It’s not regulation,” I remind him matter-of-factly. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
I feel a bit like a heel at how it sounds. The man is putting forth an effort. Surely that should count for something?
“Well, I just…” he sighs, looking down, seeming small and awkward in his SWAT gear. “The outlook on the radar isn’t good, and I didn’t want you to be alone.”
“Alright,” I answer softly. “Your stuff hasn’t been moved over yet, so it’s still a single in the shelter, but alright. Shelter nights are more fun with company anyway.”
He blushes, even though that’s not what I meant.
“I keep an emergency bag in the ‘mobile,” he mutters. “I’ll got get it…”
While he steps away, I finish washing my tubers and take them downstairs for canning. At least we’ll get it done twice as fast.
Chapter two
(C) Heather Farthing 2022, all rights reserved
When my grandmother was a little girl, the sky was blue.
It was an illusion, of course, a holographic projection of what the sky was said to have looked like under Great Sol. She used to tell me about how sometimes, under this noble falsehood, some of the plants would get confused and grow green.
As I kneel before the purple-leafed hardroot plant, digging its reddish roots from the ground, I have a difficult time picturing that.
Once in awhile, there are patches of blue across the dome. It’s like looking into a glitch in reality, a blinking, neon hole in existence. My grandmother’s generation find it comforting, but I find it disquieting.
The dome is so dusty now, it’s nearly opaque, bathed in iron-rich, pink and red sand. In some places it leaks, bits of sand falling from above the way the irrigation system did when I was a child. Every so often, somebody makes a motion to fix it, but either there are not enough supplies, or enough energy, human or mechanical.
There used to be cleaning octopodes, who crawled over the outside of the dome, sweeping away the dust with their slime and feeding on pests that roosted there. I’ve seen pictures in school, but they’ve long gone extinct now.
I keep cutting the roots from the vines, one at a time, into the basket. Dig, clip, basket, dig, clip basket. The wrote monotony is supposed to be calming in its tedium. Keep doing the little things to keep going, like a wind-up toy whose mechanisms are wearing out.
The first rule of living in Paradise is that we don’t talk about what’s going on outside of Paradise. So another settlement collapsed in on itself, we still have a harvest to pull in. So another caravan was raided by the night people, we still have repairs to make.
And on, and on, and on.
Just keep surviving for one more day. And another. And another. And try not to think about tomorrow, or next week, or next year.
When my basket is full, I stand up and a stretch, wiping sweat off my brow and frowning. A lady is not supposed to sweat, water being too precious of a resource, but the central climate system has been on the fritz lately.
“Sola? Is that you?” a female voice asks.
It’s one of the neighbors, poking her head over the sand-stained, formerly white picket fence.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I reply wearily, tucking a loose strand of blond hair behind my ear.
“How’re you settling in, love?”
I struggle to remember her name. Mrs. Lovejoy. Mrs. Miller. Mrs…Crumb?
“Just fine,” I tell her lamely, looking down at my basket. “The victory garden is coming along nicely, and I moved my canning supplies into the shelter so I can keep working during an emergency.”
“So productive!” the older woman smiles, her face soft with wrinkles. “I wish I had your energy. But did you hear, love, Mrs. Lovejoy down the street, her baby was born with mutations!”
“Oh, dear!” I reply, trying to remember which one is Lovejoy, coming up blank, but also chilled by the notion.
“Oh, yes, love!” the woman continues, clearly not reading my look of disgust correctly. “My friend Lisa, down at the medical center—you know Lisa? From the Harvest Celebration, she brought muffins?—Anyway, Lisa told me the little girl was born with fangs. Fangs! Can you imagine? Said it was the most ghastly thing she’d ever seen! Unnatural for a baby to have teeth, but there it was! Long and sharp as a bloodsucker’s beak!”
I can feel myself turning pale at the visual, maybe a bit green, as I pick up my basket.
“Must be terrible for a new mother!” she keeps going.
“Sent it to the Wastes, they did. Lisa said Mrs. Lovejoy went a bit mad, calling for her baby girl after they took it from her. Kept calling for her baby until they sedated her, poor thing. Even after they told her the baby was a mutant, she kept asking where it was! Poor thing.”
“Yes, poor thing,” I answer absently, a cold, sickish feeling in the pit of my stomach. “I need to get these inside for pickling…”
“Oh! Pickling!” she cheers. “I used to love pickling. All the trader men used to drop buy for a shipment of my pickles to take out.” She punctuates with a wink before asking, “Your father was a rail merchant, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” I confirm grimly, looking at my shoe and feeling the weight of my basket.
“Well, good for him!” she beams. “Does he still travel?”
“...No,” I tell her simply, shifting my basket with exaggerated discomfort.
The truth is, he never came home. His crew did, but not him, and I don’t want to talk about it to a woman I’ve lived next to for only a week.
“Oh, well, I…oh, dear, love, your hardroot.”
I glance down at the vines and my blood runs cold. The vines are retreating into the round, brown shells that grow around the central root, pulling away from whatever edible tubers I haven’t collected yet. If I’m fast, it makes harvesting easier, but there’s a high probability they won’t be edible in the morning.
“I wonder what they know that we don’t,” I ask, ears perked for the sound of sirens.
“No telling, love. Best hurry up out here before the sirens go off. Hurry along now, off with you.” She wanders away from the fence and back toward the house. I drop back to my knees and start scrabbling for the shed roots. If I don’t get them, they’ll sprout into new shells, choking the garden and prolonging the harvest. I can’t have that, so I can only grab what I can before the sirens go off.
What could they be reacting to? Another sandstorm? Radicane? I should probably sleep in the shelter tonight, just in case. Ever since I was a child, I hated waking up in the middle of the night to the sirens, the confusion and panic. When I was about eight my mom caught me sleeping down there on more than one occasion, often but not always after the hardroot started acting weird.
At least it got rid of the gossipy neighbor.
I shiver again. I went to school once with a girl, a friend of mine, I can’t remember her name. She was one of those early-life friends where you color together, play dolls together, but don’t think about them after second grade, or would be if she hadn’t shown me the patches on her arms. They were scaled, thick armored plating, and she could make them light up and glow. I was so jealous and thought they were so pretty, until the next day when she didn’t come to class and we had a special lecture on the dangerous of mutants and mutation.
With pictures.
It’s not just the radiation storms that cause the mutations. When that happens it’s usually tumors and deformities. Those are sad enough, but sometimes, beneath the murky brown sun and amid the harsh, cold desert, nature just…breaks. When that happens, you can get all sorts of nasty things, like babies with fangs, milkers with no eyes, whales that float in the sky, feeding on atmospheric plankton.
Of those things, we cast them out. We can’t have such monsters breeding and passing on their aberrations, and sometimes such things can spread like a virus. We send them out to the Wastes, no matter how old or young. It’s how we’ve kept ourselves pure since the days of Old Earth.
When I’ve dug up all the tubers I can find, I take the basket inside and wash my hands at the kitchen sink. The water gurgles and sprays before the air in the pipes clear and slightly murky liquid pours out. In my grandmother’s day, it ran clear, but the slight taste of dirt is all I’ve ever known.
I look out the window. Sand-stained, cookie cutter houses in chipped, pastel colors with identical sand-stained, formerly white picket fences line my view. I grew up a few streets over, but when my mother died of radiation sickness I was assigned new housing, and I’ve been in the marriage lottery since I was eighteen.
Last week, I won.
He’s a good man, or so I hear. A bit older than me, a member of City Council and on the police force. We first met at the lottery drawing, although we didn’t know we’d be the winners at the time. He’s due to join me at my residence next week, when we’ll have our civil marriage ceremony, and then I’ll be a married woman with maybe a child on the way.
The Usoan Dream, I suppose.
In middle school we learned that the expedition that brought our ancestors here centuries ago were chasing an Old World dream. There was a time in the settler’s history where things were simple, regimented, and ordered. A man went to work from nine to five and came home to dinner on the table and something gentle and unoffensive on the AV unit. A woman spent her day at laundry and a stove, and children knew no fear or worries.
They were chasing that when the came here. The Old World, orbiting a rapidly expanding yellow dwarf star, was dying. After years of a painful, agonizing near-death, they came here chasing a peace they had never known.
The Old World died from a bang, a blaze of cosmic glory. The new world is dying of a prolonged, wasting illness, orbiting a star guttering like an overused candle in a strong breeze.
But unlike our starfaring ancestors, the people of the domed cities of Usoa just don’t have the energy to care, and there isn’t anywhere to go if we did.
I wash the tubers in the sink, watching out the window as the squat, purple trees draw their leaves in to their branches or trunks, dropping fruit or shielding it inside tough shells.
Yep, definitely a shelter kind of night.
I reach for another tuber. As I lean against the sink, I feel the chain around my neck give and something heavy dropping into the sink, which makes me swear.
It’s a small piece of junk my father brought back from one of his excursions, just a shard of something he thought was pretty, clear glass or resin of some sort, with thin gold lines inside like wires. On the top part, near where the hole for the chain is drilled, is a stylistic drawing of a golden sun, a lot like the picture books show Great Sol.
“I’ve seen things like this in the Wastes,” he told me as I sat on his lap, holding it in my hands. “The traders talk about it being made by aliens. Isn’t that wild?”
I fish it out of the sink and hold the chain up to the window. It snapped at the clasp, an easy fix. I pocket them both to keep from losing them and then go to the city-issued toolkit under the sink, prying open a different loop and tightening it down on the eye of the clasp. One link shorter, but at least I haven’t lost it.
By the time I return to the sink and the tubers, there is a lightmobile parking outside the kitchen window, black with white highlights, round fenders, and a five-pointed star on the hood.
I groan, and then go to the front door to meet him.
Ehnzo is at least a good-looking man. His dark hair is going a little gray, but he’s tall and smooth-skinned with a good, vital job. Any woman would have been lucky to win him in the lottery, but the idea of living with someone I don’t know forever turns my stomach.
“Sola,” he breathes when I open the door, mid-knock. “May I come in?”
“Sure,” I reply, stepping aside. “It’ll be your house in a few days, so why not?”
“I’m glad to see you’re okay,” he nods, closing the door behind him. “When the plants started hiding, I…I thought I should come stay with you.”
“It’s not regulation,” I remind him matter-of-factly. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
I feel a bit like a heel at how it sounds. The man is putting forth an effort. Surely that should count for something?
“Well, I just…” he sighs, looking down, seeming small and awkward in his SWAT gear. “The outlook on the radar isn’t good, and I didn’t want you to be alone.”
“Alright,” I answer softly. “Your stuff hasn’t been moved over yet, so it’s still a single in the shelter, but alright. Shelter nights are more fun with company anyway.”
He blushes, even though that’s not what I meant.
“I keep an emergency bag in the ‘mobile,” he mutters. “I’ll got get it…”
While he steps away, I finish washing my tubers and take them downstairs for canning. At least we’ll get it done twice as fast.
Chapter two
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