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Plus her mind was buzzing. Resistance. Mutations and evolution. She might not even need to bioengineer the algae. It might have already started solving the problem on its own. Life was stubborn.
It’d been the first time they’d properly spent time together without Valerie’s imposing presence over them. To her surprise, they hadn’t devolved into their usual bickering. They’d snarked about professors, kept the conversation light, but something between them eased that night. She’d still found him a bit of an asshole. But he’d been an interesting asshole. Naomi “walked” along the beach for a few minutes. The rock bridge was topped with the dark dots of birds, and the blue of the sky turned haze-orange at the horizon. The sound of waves and bird cries was convincing, but the white foam of
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“I’m not your Mars pin-up. And the planet isn’t
even red! Not truly,” Naomi had watched Hixon exclaim on a morning talk show with some far-too-perky hosts. “Under the dust it’s green and caramel and sand and grey. Not red.” She wasn’t invited on talk shows much anymore. She didn’t play the game.
Jerrie Hixon strapped herself into the pilot’s seat, working the controls with practised ease. With her flight cap, freckles, and devil-may-care grin, she reminded Naomi of old photos of Amelia Earhart.
Naomi had thought she’d performed well in the tests. No, she knew she had. But what do you do when your best isn’t good enough?
“Success will never be linear. Success is illusive, it’s a mirage. What you learn, what you do, how you react—that’s what matters. Are you actually sad about the decision, or are you angry that they turned you down?”
“Good. Don’t be afraid of your rage. It doesn’t have to be weakness. It’ll make you do anything. Get angry. Channel it.” As they rose again, Valerie’s chin turned up in a silent dare. Naomi rose and fell as gravity took and released its hold. She spread her arms wide, far above the ground, and promised she wouldn’t let failure define her. She would try again in two years. And again two years after that. She’d try until they couldn’t say no.
Radiation was a sneaky thing. She remembered reading about the girls at the turn of the last century who dipped their paintbrushes into glowing green radium to paint watch dials, then licked the tip of the brush to a point to do it again, each watch face ticking away at the time they had left. They’d paint
the radium on themselves for a lark, swirls of green along their skin, luminous dust shaken off their dresses at night. They were told it was healthy, and the radium girls glowed right up until their jaws disintegrated and they spat their teeth into their palms.
Hart turned off the projection. “If you don’t want to wait for a potential miscarriage, I can help you,” she said. “It’s your choice to make.” Her voice held no judgement, as if what she offered wasn’t illegal in all fifty states. Women were meant to carry their first child and then be fitted with their IUD, with very few exceptions. Any subsequent children resulted in the additional child tax, which was at least six months of the average salary, and no birth bonus. Enough to financially devastate most families.
She should have known better. That last night before they flew out to the launch site, she’d looked up at the moon, two hundred and fifty thousand miles away, and known she’d be going light years beyond it. She could have ignored his knock. She could have left it at that first kiss. Pulled back, softened her rejection with a smile and another sip of wine. The whole time, she’d known that it was a mistake to look for comfort from him. He was not hers. But she was too much of a coward to spend her last night of her old life on Earth alone, counting down the hours and minutes until she flew out
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Lebedeva watched the fireworks with a half-smirk. “It is strange, to celebrate patriotism to a country that wants us behind bars for what we did.” They all took this in. “Did you ever feel patriotic towards Russia?” Hixon asked. Lebedeva’s gaze went distant. Naomi thought she wouldn’t answer. “Once I did,” she said. “This is new for you—your country thinking of you as a traitor. Give it time. It gets easier.”
“I’ve never been good at patriotism,” Hart said. “The U.S. was too big, too diffuse and diverse to really understand what it meant to be American. Was I proud of the good things we’d done? Sure. But I’m ashamed of a lot of other things. That we did. That we still do.” “I used to be proud,” Hixon said, her mouth twisting as she stared at the remnants of her sweet potato. “In the military, I was honoured to have that flag stitched across my chest, representing my country. I was one idealistic little recruit, plucked right out of the cornfields. “Took me too long to realise the country would
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“Well, he’s straight, white, and has a dick.”
Valerie’s face had remained still throughout the conversation. “Forget America. Forget Earth,” she said. “We’ve got Cavendish.”
“If we could make Cavendish our world entirely,” Valerie said, leaning forward, her face animated, “if we could build it from the ground up, set the rules for everyone, how would you want it to function?” “You’re asking us to build a utopia?” Naomi asked. “Sure. Thought exercise.” “No such thing as utopia,” Lebedeva said. “People mess it up.” “Or one person’s utopia usually means someone else’s dystopia,” Hart agreed. “Come on,” Valerie said. “Try, at least.” They thought about it as the fireworks kept up their slow dance. “Well, if the ground belongs to all of humanity, then there shouldn’t
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“Free education,” Naomi said. “And placing emphasis on art and creative play as well as science.” “Good one,” Hart said. “No plastic,” Lebedeva said. “No fossil fuels. Eco-friendly from the beginning.” “No factory farming or meat industry,” Hart said. “I mean, we’re basically all vegan once those meat packets run out anyway, if you consider meat grown without a nervous system vegan.” “No men?” Hixon joked. “Though I guess that plan is already kaput with the backup crew.” “We don’t have to wake them up on day one of landing,” Valerie said. “We can have a few weeks of a women-only planet, I’m
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Naomi couldn’t get the image of the five wrapped bodies in the airlock out of her mind. They’d used rubber sheeting meant for lining her soil planters. Horribly, she’d spent a split second wondering if they should keep the corpses for fertiliser, or, even worse, as emergency calories. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t.
Donner Party, Becky Chambers
Valerie pressed the button. The bodies were there, and then a blink, a release of pressure, and they were gone. Cole floated out there, somewhere, left behind with his crew mates. Man overboard. Naomi’s eyes still stayed dry.
They had slipped back into their routine, the rhythm of monotony. Yet the five women tiptoed through the ship, as though afraid to disturb ghosts on board, even if none of them were superstitious.
She’d press her fingers against the flesh that gave at her hips, her thighs, tracing the curve of her belly. She’d thought she’d hate it, from years of swallowing the message that women shouldn’t be too big or too much. She didn’t mind taking up a little extra space.
The symbolism of that would be undeniable. It could fracture the new status quo.
She closed her eyes but still felt the almost warm glow of purple against her skin. She breathed in and out, long and slow. For the first time in days, she felt almost at peace. Time to take the others out of the dark.
“I still need a name for our base. It hasn’t come to me yet. Maybe we have to see it first.” Like when people didn’t name their child until they held the squalling, wrapped bundle. Naomi stifled her laugh. She hadn’t even begun to consider names.
“Like hell she will,” Valerie said, pulling a face. “I don’t know the assigned gender yet.” She’d avoided finding out the physical sex—she didn’t mind either way. She would have cared, if they were still back on Earth. Where having a girl meant she would be born into a world where her chances of doing what she wanted with her life were smaller and shrinking each day.
It didn’t make sense to bring a new child into the world when Earth only had thirty, forty years left. Naomi had gone to her high school friend Lynn’s baby shower the previous year. She couldn’t help but ask Lynn why she’d gotten IVF. Lynn had shrugged a shoulder, her stomach already distended—she was having twins. She’d have to pay the additional child tax on one of them, which wasn’t cheap. The IVF would have been a pretty penny, too. “Earth has been thirty years from dying for twenty years,” Lynn had said. “It’s going to stay thirty years off forever, just to scare us into recycling.”
It was late on Earth—nearly two in the morning. Naomi should have been in bed ages ago.
what time zone are you in????
It was late. All the women on the ship would be asleep.
doesn't someone need to keep watch?
He had a peculiar intonation—in his speeches, he tried for gravitas but ended up speaking with that untethered transatlantic accent from old movies. Cochran was a desiccated hard-boiled egg of a man—hair too white to be from anything but a bottle, pale skin spotted with freckles. His dark eyes, blond eyebrows and eyelashes gave him the look of a skinny, naked mole rat, but with perfect, Chicklet teeth. He’d been handsome, once, but time and hatred had bleached him.
“I also feel queasy,” Lebedeva admitted, and the rest of them blinked at her in surprise. She must have felt absolutely wretched to admit that much. Naomi had a bit of nausea, but not much more than she had throughout the pregnancy so far. Perhaps at some deeper level, their bodies did know they’d moved thousands of miles in a few minutes.
Naomi bowed her head in relief. “Congratulations,” she said to her belly. “You continue to boldly go where no baby has gone before.”
“I’m not sure it’ll do much good. Even if plenty of people want to send their children, it’d take protests on a massive scale. So many still don’t believe the Earth is truly under threat, even with all the evidence in front of them. They wear the filter masks and hire private firefighters and proudly declare the sky is not falling. They’re still stuck in the system that we are trying to break. Too many people in power are in the way.”
A silence tinged with worry rolled off the others in waves. Only Lebedeva appeared unbothered. She hadn’t had a home in the same way the rest of them had, not for years. Being untethered like this was nothing new for her. Naomi almost envied her that.
Flu vaccines were growing less protective every year, making each year of Evan’s work harder. Illnesses spread as quick as wildfire in the crowded areas teeming with refugees. Even in the more affluent areas, young professionals were crammed in close quarters, renting overpriced bunk beds with up to thirty people in a dorm. If anyone had a cold, it’d jump from bunk to bunk, through those flimsy blackout curtains that gave the illusion of privacy, and then spread to the overworked people’s offices. Sick pay was something technically available but never taken.
Naomi hadn’t told him about the pregnancy, but this, this was like poking holes in condoms and not telling her. Wasn’t circumventing birth control revoking consent? She sat back down at the table, staring at the whorls of the wood. A pregnancy and a baby would be a great subplot for a documentary series about the Martian astronaut and the space botanist, wouldn’t it? She downed her bitter coffee in one gulp.
Naomi debated leaving a note, simply disappearing, but she was someone who craved closure. She didn’t want the end niggling at her, late at night—something she poked at like a sore tooth.
Everyone had grown used to giving orders to the pleasant-voiced feminine robots. Alexa, Siri, Sophia, Sage, do this for me. A perky “okay,” and your wish was her command. They’d all been doing it for years before women started realising the men in their lives had been conditioned to do the same to them. And by then it was too late.
Naomi watched television on the screen that took up nearly the whole wall, and she was seventeen again, back at home the summer before college.
Fahrenheit 451, black Friday deals on large tvs
Valerie Black was a zealot to her own cause. To her, everything she was doing was rational. She would never be persuaded to another path. She’d take loyalty bought with blood as long as people followed her.
elongated musk
“Extra bit of good news: Cochran died. The VP too. Both contracted the virus. Even if they hadn’t, they’d have been deposed by now, I reckon.” Hixon smirked in satisfaction. “Lots of people are blaming them for what happened. His policies loosened a lot of safety regulations for companies, so people currently think the virus was a result of that.” “Feels a little wrong to be so happy to hear about someone’s death,” Hart said. “But eh. I’ll live.”
sound too familiar in a sense
“Have we jumped?” Valerie asked. She wouldn’t have been able to feel it. “No.”
???
“You used to think more of humanity,” Naomi mused. “My mom always said Hawthorne was created to help make life easier for people.” Automated robot labour to free up leisure time. To help pave the way for governments to roll out a universal basic income.
“I was carrying it on,” Valerie said. “Cavendish would have been all Catherine wanted. A place with a gentler pace, shared resources, her creations helping to build a new, better society.” “She wouldn’t have agreed with the cost of it.” Naomi clenched her teeth together. “God, if she could see you now.” Valerie’s bravado flickered, her expression something Naomi couldn’t read.
unrequited love?
“I’m not a toy soldier to wind up and march in whatever direction you choose. I never was. Destroying what’s in your way doesn’t leave you anything.” She gestured at the constraints. “You’ll never get what you want.”
She’d needed blood transfusions, and thankfully she was type AB. Everyone on board ended up donating a little, so as not to overload anyone.
+/-?
Her life has been star-touched in more ways than one.
Our mother’s left hand hovered over the button to release the airlock exterior door. A few months ago, I’d have said she was doing this out of revenge. Sending Valerie out into the void alone as a punishment. Instead, thirty years too late, she is honouring Valerie’s wishes. Leave me out there.
Our pasts, our histories all faded as the four of us stood together, and watched the sun set over Cavendish.
