Cibola Burn

He could remember a time when they’d laughed together. When Lucia had come from the hospitals on Ganymede full of stories about the patients and the other doctors. They’d eat vat-grown steak as tender as anything harvested from an animal and drink beer fermented there on the little moon. They’d talked for hours, until it was long past time to sleep. Now their conversations were so careful, it was like the words all had glass bones. So he changed the topic.

“It’s strange to think about it,” he said. “I’ll probably never weld in a vacuum again. All those years apprenticing and working, and now everything I do has air around it.”

“Tell me about it. If I’d known how it would all play out, I’d have spent my rotations in the general clinics.”

“Well, you’re the best hand surgeon on the planet.”

“The best hand surgeon on the planet is doing a lot of reading on digestive disorders and gynecological exams,” Lucia said dryly. Her eyes went hard, distant. “We need to talk about Felcia.”

And here it was. The gentleness, the calm, the soft memories. This was where it had been leading. He sat forward, his eyes cast on the ground.

“What’s to say?”

“She’s been talking about what happens next. For her.”

“Same as happens for any of us,” Basia said.

Lucia put another bite in her mouth, chewing slowly, though the food hardly required it. A gust of hard wind pressed in at the window with the soft ticking of grit against the glass. When she spoke, her voice was soft, but implacable.

“She’s thinking of university,” Lucia said. “She’s done the tutorials and examinations on the network. She needs us to give permission before the applications move forward.”

“She’s too young,” Basia said, knowing as the words came out that it was the wrong tack. Frustration knotted his throat and he put his dinner, half eaten, on the armrest.

“She won’t be by the time she gets there,” Lucia said. “If she went with the first shipment and transferred at Medina, she could be on Ganymede or Ceres Station in nineteen months. Twenty.”

“We need her here,” Basia said, his tone hard and definitive. The conversation was over. Except that it wasn’t.

“I don’t regret coming here,” Lucia said. “And you didn’t force me to come. The months after Ganymede when we were all living like rats packed too tight? All the ports that wouldn’t take us in? I remember that. When Mao-Kwikowski was dissolved, I was the one who helped Captain Andrada draw up the salvage papers. I made the Barbapiccola our ship.”

“I know.”

“When we took the vote, my voice was with yours. Maybe living so long as refugees made us wild or brave. I don’t know, but to come here. To begin everything again under a sky. Under some new star. I thought it was as obvious as you did, and I don’t regret coming.”

Her tone was fierce now. Her dark eyes glittered and flashed, daring him to disagree. He didn’t.

“If we spend the rest of our lives mining lithium and trying to grow carrots, I will be delighted with that,” she went on. “If I never reattach another ligament or regrow a lost thumb, then fine. Because I chose it. Jacek and Felcia didn’t make that choice.”

“I’m not sending my children back,” Basia said. “What would they get back there? With all the work that needs to be done here, with all the things there are to be learned and discovered here, how is going backward a good idea?” His voice was getting louder than he’d meant, but he wasn’t shouting. Not really.

“Being here is our choice,” Lucia said. “Felica’s choice is where her choice is. We can stand in the way or we can help.”

“Helping her back into that isn’t helping,” Basia said. “She belongs here. We all belong here.”

“Where we came from —”

“We came from here. Nothing that happened before matters. We are from here now. Ilus. I will go down dying before I let them bring their wars and their weapons and their corporations and their science projects here. And I will be damned if they get any more of my children.”

“Dad?”

Jacek stood in the doorway. He had a soccer ball on his hip and an expression of concern in his eyes.

“Son,” Basia said.

The moaning of the wind was the only sound. Basia stood up, took his canister and then Lucia’s. Taking her leavings to the recycler was a small olive branch, but it was all he had. The sense of impotent rage and shame boiled up in his throat and found to release there. Katoa, the landing pad, the concern in Jacek’s eyes. The years they had spent fleeing only to land in a brick palace that his daughter wanted to leave. All of it mixed into a single emasculating anger as hot as solder.

“Is everything okay?” Jacek asked.

“Your mother and I were just talking.”

“We aren’t from here,” Lucia said as if Jacek hadn’t come in, as if the adult conversation could go on with the boy there. “We’re making it that way, but it isn’t true yet.”

“It will be,” Basia said.

Chapter Six: Elvi