I shook my head. All I had inside my shorts was saggy disposable underwear. “I’m not hungry.” I remembered my manners. “But thank you. What is it?”
The man closed one side of his nose with his finger and blew boogers out of the other side. They landed in the fire, just missing his dinner, and sizzled. “Big ugly lizard. Caught it right here.” He motioned with his hand. “Come over here. I’ll show you. I have some cachaca if you want a drink.”
A big hand closed on my shoulder. I followed it up to my dad’s face.
“What are you doing outside?” he said. “You know you shouldn’t go down to the street.”
“The nurse let me out here. I was just about to–”
“It’s not safe.” Dad let us in with his key and put money in the lift to take us to our floor. He looked tired.
The message light on the refrigerator was flashing, and Dad put his hand on the screen. It was my mother. She sounded upset. “Hisako’s sandcat got out somehow. It must have been when we left for the bus. I can’t find it anywhere, and I have to go to work. Can you look for it when you get home?”
I ran to my room. Nibble was gone.
HOW WE GOT HERE
by Hisako Sasaki, fourth grade
The Chin and India left Earth without even saying goodbye. They lifted as many people as they could to their mining asteroids and launched them into space. We haven’t heard from them since. Maybe they have found a new home; maybe they are still traveling. Some people say the Chin made a new dynasty and will rejoin us someday. They will solve all of our problems or maybe they will take over.
The United Americas decided not to leave by themselves. They had mining asteroids, too, but used them up to build the evacuation ships. Every country that helped out with people or money got at least one evacuation ship. Some of the United’s allies got worm-drive ships and went off to scout for planets we could live on. There were only about twelve worm-drive ships.
The important families left Earth on the fastest ships. At least one ship per colony had a mass-grav system that let it go faster than the other ones. They got to the new planets first to begin working. The rest of the families were frozen and packed into cargo pods. Some families worked as wake crews and stayed awake for hundreds of years to make sure the evacuation ships kept going.
Billions of people were still on Earth when the sun flared. They probably all died, but we have not gone back to check. The colony on Mars probably burned up, too. At the end, people left Earth any way they could. They put rockets on space stations or tried to escape in private ships. Even today, a thousand years later, some of those ships make it to us.
The first plan was to settle on one planet, Freedom, but the scientists were worried about diversifying the species, and people argued about who would live on what part of Freedom and who would be neighbors. So, instead, the evacuees from Earth colonized six planets The EuroD settled Gaul; the RussD settled the water and ice planet Nov Tero; Makkah was settled by evacuees from the Caliphate; the AfriD and BrazD settled Imbeleko; the United Americas worked with Australia, Israel, and the Kingdom to settle Freedom; and countries like Korea, Japan, and Vietnam went to Guatama.
Makkah and the United Americas destroyed each other in the Two-Day War and some of the other colonies are failing. Many of the survivors are coming here to live. We call those people refugees.
My mother is a EuroD. Her family came from a place on Earth called Turkey. My father’s father was a refugee from Guatama, and my father’s mother is from Imbeleko. I am an only child, which means I don’t have any brothers or sisters. We live in an apartment near midtown. I had a sandcat once, but somebody ate him.
And that’s how we got here.
ADEM
Qamata Station, Imbeleko, 3248
Adem opened the door to the captain’s suite. “Sorry I’m late. I was–”
“Don’t worry. You weren’t the latest.” Lucy came up behind him and ducked under his arm to get into the room first. “But now you are.”
Lucy and Adem took seats across the table from their parents while the captain’s new steward served breakfast. It wasn’t a smooth operation. Their mother rarely dined in her quarters, so her steward didn’t get a lot of practice. Most often she ate in the cafeteria with the crew or on the bridge.
“You’re pulling out all the stops, Mother.” Lucy loaded her plate with scrambled eggs and fruit. “You must have bad news to share. The last time we did this Uncle Rakin was buying his way back in.”
Dooley ran a hand through his thinning red hair. “Rakin is partly why we asked you here. He’s rallying support against your mother.”
“He wants command?” Adem said. “He doesn’t have any experience.”
The captain moved the tiny pitcher of cream to the end of the table. She never used the stuff, no one in her family did, but her Gaul-born steward had insisted on putting it out. “He’s claiming he can triple our profits.”
“Which will make his investor pals happy,” Lucy said.
“It would make everyone happy,” Dooley said. “We’re not exactly swimming in it, and we’re behind on maintenance.”
“Does he have the votes?” Adem picked up his coffee and wished he had something stronger. Family politics and business were among the least of his interests.
“No. But it would be better if I knew I had you two on my side when he tries.” The captain leaned back in her chair. “And I need your help with something else.”
“Ooooh!” Lucy said. “Is this when we find out the big secret?”
“Yes. I have a line on a worm-drive.”
Adem aspirated his coffee.
“Impossible. There are only two or three still working in all the worlds,” Lucy said.
“Four that we know of.” Dooley leaned over the table like he was sharing a secret. “I’ve always suspected there were a few more under wraps. Maybe one or two scout ships repurposed as government couriers. I bet there’s at least one among the Nov Tero syndicates.”
Adem struggled to get his coughing under control. “It would cost a thousand times what the Hajj is worth, more than that probably, even if we could find one for sale.”
“That’s only a problem if we were buying it.” The captain poured herself more coffee. “The one I have in mind is free, provided it’s where I’ve been told it would be. Hence our course change.”
Lucy’s eyes narrowed. “Imbeleko never had a worm-drive ship, and there’s nothing near here but the Makkah Cloud.”
“Smugglers used to use the Cloud as a rendezvous. They’d meet to swap cargo, even hold festivals. One of them, an old friend of mine–”
“Old boyfriend,” Dooley said loudly.
“–says he knows where the Christopher Hadfield is.”
Lucy laughed. “We’ve gone from fairytales to ghost stories. This is ridiculous.”
“It’s no ghost story.” The captain made eye contact with both of her children. “If Creighton said he found the Hadfield, he found it. He thinks the worm-drive might be intact.”
“He could make a fortune off that, if it were true.” Lucy’s eyes rolled. “He shared this information with you because, what, you fucked him back in the dark ages?”
Dooley dropped the side of his fist on the tabletop, making the dishes rattle. “Lucy, shut up and show some respect.” It had been years since he’d used his angry voice on his kids, but it worked. Adem and Lucy sat up straighter.
“I can handle this, Dooley, but thank you.” The captain took a sip of coffee in the silence. “He doesn’t want a fortune, at least not a big one. He told me about it because we were friends and because we have an agreement. He’s a wanderer. Hasn’t made planetfall in twenty years. Him or that android of his.” She glanced at Dooley. “I told him if he ever found anything interesting out there that he should let me know. He did.”
“How much are you paying him for it?” Adem said.
“Enough to pay for the next twenty years of wandering,” Dooley’s jaw
tightened, “right out of our damned retirement fund.”
The captain touched his arm. “Which is why we need your help. Your father and I have put ourselves in the hole for this. A deep one. If we can’t refill it, we’ll lose our shares and Rakin will take control. But if we had a worm-drive…” she paused, “there wouldn’t be a ship in the worlds that could compete with us. We could make Nov Tero from here in six standard weeks, then another six to get all the way back to Gaul. Imagine it.”
“Imagine what it could have meant for Hafgan.” Dooley’s voice was rough.
Adem imagined both things. Faster-than-light travel was a common fantasy among those who lived and worked in deep space; a pipe dream, but it could get deeply personal. Everyone had somebody they’d left behind in standard time. He’d nearly wept over how much Lucy had been changed by her years away. A wild, beautiful stranger had taken the place of the little girl who used to follow him everywhere, and Adem missed her. He missed his little brother, too. For Adem, only five years passed between the day Hafgan Sadiq left the ship and Adem’s last visit with him. At that final meeting, Hafgan had been an old man, garrulous and shivering under a blanket with his wife sitting beside him. They’d offered Hafgan’s oldest grandchild a share and an invitation to come aboard, but the girl had looked at them as if they were crazy. Give up the open sky for the corridors of an ancient ship? Even the grandchild might be dead now, but Adem had family pictures and saw his little brother peeking out of every set of dark eyes. Relativity could be a curse.
“What do you need us to do?” he said.
The captain laid her napkin on her plate. “I need you to go get it.”
HISAKO
Age thirteen
My school uniform felt like it was too small, and my neck itched. But it might have just been nervousness. I bit my lip and waited for my friends’ reactions.
Afet leaned across the lunch table so she could get a better look at the picture. “I think he’s cute.”
“Says he’s just a little under two meters,” Colette added, after perusing the profile information. “That’s pretty tall.”
Charo popped her gum. “What’s with his hair? It’s shaggy on one side and really short on the other.”
“That’s just the style,” I lied. “All the Traders wear it that way.”
Charo’s mouth twisted. “That’s not true. I meet Traders at my parents’ parties all the time.”
“Remember relativity. Maybe it’s the style in the future or something.” Afet stroked the screen of my reader to get a different angle on Adem’s head. “Will you have to cut yours?”
“I think it’s just for the men.” I didn’t know a thing about Trader culture. I just hoped it was a style and not some kind of weird thing only he did. Mostly it looked accidental.
Colette said Adem’s eyes were spooky and romantic, like he had spent so much time looking into space that he had lost his soul. Charo said he had nice lips but needed a shave. Then the lunch bell rang. The reader went into my backpack as I headed to class with Afet. My neck wasn’t itching anymore. It could have gone worse.
In the week since Mom told me I was in an arranged marriage, I’d been trying to figure out who Adem Sadiq was. I read his profile over and over again. He was pretty old, twenty-six, and had a sister. He lived on a spaceship and liked music. He was good at fixing stuff. He was an atheist and practiced jiu-jitsu. His birthday was in March, a month before mine.
That stuff was important, but the profile didn’t help me with the important questions. I wanted to know if he was nice, what we’d have to talk about, and what his whiskers would feel like when he tried to kiss me. “Like a sandcat.”
Afet tilted her head. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
Surprises can be fun, like the party Mom and Dad threw last week for my thirteenth birthday. I came home after my violin lesson and my friends were waiting in the living room. The next day, Mom surprised me again: I was legally bound to marry a spaceman in eleven years. Fun? I wasn’t sure about that one.
Dad was supposed to have been home to help her with the announcement and my questions, but he was at one of his political meetings. “Does this mean I can never date?” I said.
Mom’s eyes got wide. “You’re too young to be worried about that!”
Little did she know! The kids at school were always talking about dating and going out and sex. Afet had been going out with Henrik Birky for two months. They talked on their readers all the time, she said, and had gone to the stims together twice. At my party, they kept drifting off to make out.
And Henrik was just a skinny boy with big ears. Adem would be interested in a lot more than kissing. What if I didn’t want–?
Afet elbowed me. “Madame just asked you a question.”
“Huh?” A long, polished fingernail tapped on my desk. Tick-tick-tick. My heart seized. Our history teacher Madame Stavros had a long list of rules, but the most important one was: if the class ever got too loud to hear that tap, we would all get detentions and an extra assignment. I guess the class had been quiet before, but now, in the wake of the tap, I could hear air molecules brushing together.
“That is not the answer I was looking for, Ms Sasaki.”
My face burned, half because I’d been caught not paying attention and half because of what had distracted me. “I’m sorry, Madame.” I ducked my head.
“Please see me after class.”
Ze moved on to torment Afet, who didn’t know the answer, either. Afet didn’t care about Gaul history any more than I did, but unlike me, she didn’t have to worry about keeping her grades up. My jaw got tight as I watched Madame move through the classroom. I wouldn’t need history in space anyway, no matter what my father said.
“History affects us every day,” he told me the last time I had complained about the class. “Look around you. It’s why people who look like your school friends live in La Mur and people who look like you live in La Merde.” My father was full of theories like that. He went into La Merde for a lot of his so-called meetings, and his refugee friends there preached that their colonies had been designed to fail so Gaul and the other rich worlds would have cheap labor. “We thought we’d be free men on our new worlds, but now we’re all slaves again.”
That wasn’t in the history Madame Stavros taught. Imbeleko and Guatama were failing, sure, but it wasn’t part of a plan; they just hadn’t been run correctly. Gaul had opened its doors to the refugees and gave them a safe place to live and food to eat. Every day there were new people coming down from orbit and asking for a handout. They weren’t even from here, and they wanted more and more every week.
Madame Stavros finished prowling and broke us into groups to work on a project. I tried not to think about anything beyond schoolwork. I made it about ten minutes, thanks to Julio Odland, one of two boys in my assigned group.
“I heard you have a husband lined up.” Julio was gross but super rich, so no one made jokes about him in front of his face. Behind his back though, Colette wondered if he could see his penis well enough to pee. She called him Sit-Down. “May I see the picture?”
I opened the picture and held out my reader. Julio studied it, his pink tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth. “He looks like a rapist.” He looked down his nose at me. “He bought you. Your parents will get a lot of money, and you’ll have to fuck him. That makes you a prostitute. A space whore.”
My stomach started twisting like it wanted to kill me, and I couldn’t get enough air.
Julio licked his lips and raised his voice a little so all the kids in my group could hear him. “If you give her parents some money, she might fuck you, too.” He winked.
Bonar Saiz, the other boy in my group who Charo said was a good kisser, leered at me. “How much would it cost?”
Colette punched him on the shoulder. “Shut up. Julio is just being an ass. It’s an arranged marriage.”
“She’s still doing it for money,” Bonar said. “I jus
t want to know what else she’d do.”
“It’s not like that,” I stammered. I suddenly wasn’t sure what it was like. I felt like I was going to be sick.
“He’s, like, forty. You’re thirteen.” Julio’s lip curled. “That’s sick enough, but your parents are getting money for it.”
“The money is for school.”
“School sucks. I wouldn’t have sex with an old man just to come here.” He looked at Colette. “Would you?”
“No.” Her face turned pink. “Of course not.” She didn’t look at me.
“But it’s okay for your friend? My mom says arranged marriages are wrong. It’s like slavery.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.” I spoke above the prescribed whisper, and I felt Madame Stavros come up behind me.
“Is there a problem, Hisako?” ze said.
“We are having trouble getting organized,” Colette said. “Hisako was getting frustrated.”
“That’s something else I suppose we’ll have to talk about after class.” Ze brought hir hand down to my desk. Tap-tap-tap. “Let’s try to get some work done before that.”
Madame Stavros busied hirself with another group, and Colette brandished her fist at Bonar and Julio, daring them to say something else. We spent the rest of the period working at the proper decibel level, but I didn’t contribute much.
Even Colette rushed away when the end-of-class bell sounded, leaving me to the never tender mercies of Madame Stavros. Ze assigned a punishment essay on the torrid relationship between Gaul’s second prime minister and Parliament and directed me to move all the desks back into neat rows.
Madame’s long skirts swished up behind me as I worked. “Many marriages resemble whoring, you know. Many things do. We all sell what we must to get what we need. Arrangements are not just for people like you, Ms Sasaki.”
My breath caught. I’d had no idea Madame had heard us talking. I turned to see hir.
The Light Years Page 6