Another World

by Samuel Best

  Gavin tugged at Merritt’s pant leg.

  Do I have to be here for this, Dad? he signed.

  Merritt grabbed Gavin’s two small hands in one of his own and squeezed them together, shushing him.

  Uda had seen the interaction. She smiled and knelt down with one knee in the soil, then looked at Gavin.

  Her hands moved slowly, but accurately, as she signed, This is very important for both of you.

  Gavin’s eyes went wide as saucers, and Merritt couldn’t help but grin.

  Uda stood up, her knee wet from the soil.

  “I’ve sectioned off this field into equal shares, one for each ticket purchased. I can already tell by a quick count that not everyone enrolled in the farming initiative is here.” She shrugged. “Best of luck to them on the surface. They will need it.” She picked up the jar by her boots. “Now, can anyone tell me what this is?”

  “Soyflower seeds,” said one of the women. She was short and sturdy, with a pleasant face and flushed red cheeks. The man standing at her side smiled at her proudly.

  “That’s right,” said Uda, turning in place to show the jar to the group. “So far, it’s the only Earth crop we can grow in this soil. We have tried thousands of variations, even produced a hectare of corn, but two bites off the cob would kill you. The soil on Galena is more acidic than what we’re used to back home, and soyflower is resistant to this difference. It has been engineered to produce its first flower within a month of planting.”

  She dug in her pocket and pulled out a fleshy white petal, more similar to a mushroom cap than a flower.

  “It’s edible right off the stalk, though the texture leaves much to be desired, in my opinion. Most of you are already familiar with its processed form, which I’m sure you won’t miss once we arrive at Galena. However, you will need to find ways to process your harvest, as that extends shelf life. Galena’s winter lasts two months. You get two harvests a year before the cold arrives. If you seed too late, your crop will die. We spliced acid tolerance into the seeds along with the necessary vitamins and minerals. We even managed to up its radiation tolerance, but we still can’t keep the plants alive during a freeze. Keep that in mind.”

  Merritt felt the leather pouch of seeds Emily had given him pressing against the center of his chest. There might be enough in it to spare a few for the journey, but there would be no way to hide the abnormal plant if he managed to nurse a bud out of the soil.

  “Everyone take a handful of seeds and choose a section,” said Uda. “We’ll get started with the basics.”

  As the farmers lined up to take their seeds, with Merritt and Gavin at the rear, she added, “Some of you have probably noticed there is no powered machinery in this room. Remember that there will be minimal electricity on Galena. We’ll be sending down several solar and wind turbine kits along with the materials to construct two hydroelectric dams. It won’t be nearly enough to power traditional farming equipment. Your hands will be your power source.”

  A few farmers expressed shock at this revelation.

  “Don’t worry,” Uda said with a sly grin. “Humans were tilling fields long before machines came along. If half of you can grow a full stalk of soyflower by the time we reach Galena in six months, I’ll show you how to build a plough and harrow from scratch.”

  It came time for Gavin to collect his seeds.

  Uda knelt down and offered him the jar. Blushing, Gavin reached inside and scooped out a small handful. Uda winked at him and stood. Her face hardened as Merritt approached, last in line, while the other farmers wandered around the soil, laying claim to their own square patch.

  “Brave of you to bring him all this way,” she said.

  Merritt dug into the jar and grabbed a fistful of seeds.

  “Braver still to remain on Earth,” she continued, “where he wouldn’t be alone.”

  Merritt’s hand froze halfway out of the jar. “There are other children on board.”

  “Administrator’s children,” she said. “They will not go down to the surface.”

  She pulled the jar from around his hand and walked away. Merritt stared at his closed fist, unsure about what just transpired.

  Gavin tapped his leg and pointed to an unclaimed patch of nearby soil.

  I saved you one, he signed. As they walked across the soil, he added, Bet I can grow mine faster.

  I bet you can. I think she gave me a fistful of duds.

  What’s a dud?

  Something that doesn’t work. He stopped when Gavin did. Is this our patch?

  This one’s yours, Gavin signed. He pointed at the one next to it. That’s mine. It’s not a dud.

  “Okay then, Mr. Expert,” said Merritt. “Show me how it’s done.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MERRITT

  Two Months Later

  At full capacity, the Halcyon carried six-hundred crew and nearly ten-thousand passengers.

  This hadn’t occurred in years.

  The vessel was only the second mega-starliner to be constructed — and the last to remain in active service to the public. Despite its monopoly of the starliner market, a weekend cruise around Earth’s moon in recent days saw, at best, a guest roster barely topping one hundred passengers and a crew complement of forty. In truth, ten employees could do the job, but adding another thirty — as well as skillfully restricting passengers to specific areas of the ship — helped distract from the impression that the Halcyon was a ghost ship.

  Just over a hundred passengers had chartered a ride to the Mars mining colony. On the whole, they were construction workers helping to build a massive holiday resort. How Diamond Aerospace, the corporation funding the construction, could expect a return on their investment given the plummeting expendable income of the average Earth citizen was beyond the imagination of even the most skilled financier.

  Yet still the workers kept coming, toiling away in the red sand of Mars in twenty-two month shifts. They hitched a ride with the Halcyon on its way to Galena, then again on its way back to Earth. According to newscasters with little to no knowledge of the subject, Diamond Aerospace intended to build a resort town on Mars that rivaled the glimmering twin cities of Avalon and Haven on Earth’s moon.

  Fifty passengers had purchased tickets to Galena at staggering expense. Thirty-two were enrolled in the Farming Initiative, and eighteen were tourists — adventure-seekers, Rip enthusiasts, and all-around bored richfolk.

  A handful of passengers were flying on their government’s dime. These researchers, administrators, and safety engineers would travel back to Earth when the Halcyon departed Galena after its one-year radiation-shedding cycle.

  At launch, this voyage of the starliner boasted one-hundred and fifty passengers, and fifty members of the crew. After dropping the workers off at Mars a month ago, the total number of souls on the Halcyon came to just over a hundred.

  For those so inclined, it was certainly easy to avoid company. Yet, for those who didn’t like the feeling of being alone in a ship nearly a mile long, it was sometimes difficult to convince oneself there was anyone else on board.

  For members of the crew who slept in the cramped quarters below Deck 6, it wasn’t difficult at all.

  Merritt awoke with his back against the ceiling, elbow-to-elbow with other members of the crew, who were still dozing in their cocoon-like sleeping bags. The floor was a meter below him. A bright blue ladder bolted to the floor disappeared in both directions, running the entire length of the crew quarters.

  A low-grade vibration coursed through Merritt’s body. A layer of GravGen units had been installed under the floor of every passenger deck, keeping travelers rooted to the floor instead of adrift in zero gravity. Since GravGen units were unidirectional, pointing them up toward the passenger section of the vessel did nothing for the crew on the decks below except jostle them gently in their sleep.

  Merritt stopped the vibration alarm on his watch and unzipped his sleeping bag. His face and hands felt puffy from the zero gravity as he
pulled on his work boots. Reaching out, he grabbed a rung of the floor ladder and pulled himself against it.

  As he made his way to the nearest junction, he passed beneath other members of the crew. Some were awake and scrolling through the screens of personal tablets, perhaps checking their messages from home.

  Communications from Earth were disseminated to the crew’s message server once a week, so the days following an upload were especially quiet. Instances of person-to-person collisions spiked as crew members walked around with their noses buried in their tablet screens.

  Merritt never checked his messages. Even if he did, he would find the inbox empty.

  Something bumped against his head and he looked up. An apple spun away slowly. Above it, Willef grinned down from his sleeping bag.

  “Oops,” he said, his voice more raspy than usual after just waking up.

  Merritt plucked the apple from its tumble and stuck it in a pocket of his coveralls.

  “My last one!” Willef protested.

  “Better hold on tight next time, then,” said Merritt as he continued along the ladder.

  “You fix that GravGen in section five?”

  “Ask me in an hour.”

  “Like I said yesterday,” Willef called after him, “it’s a waste of time. Thing’s as old as this ship.”

  “So are you,” Merritt shouted back, “and you’re still kicking!”

  Willef grunted and nestled deeper into his sleeping bag amidst a chorus of annoyed groans from sleepy coworkers, mumbling something about ungrateful workmen.

  Merritt reached a junction and kicked off the ladder, floating up into a tunnel that ran past the GravGen level, toward the passenger deck. He grabbed the ladder as gravity slowly increased, then stepped onto a small platform which led to a service door. After swiping the cuff of his sleeve over a security panel in the wall, the door whooshed open and he emerged in a lushly-carpeted red hallway between two stateroom suites.

  Consulting the screen of his wristpad, he followed a pulsing yellow dot toward the malfunctioning GravGen unit.

  The giggles of children drifted down the hallway as Merritt walked. He turned a corner to see a young boy and girl, perhaps five years old, floating in the hallway, laughing with glee as they bumped against the ceiling and sank back down to the floor. The boy rolled out of the pocket of zero gravity, then ran toward it, jumped, and tumbled end over end up to the ceiling, still laughing after hitting his head on a light fixture.

  “You found the magic spot,” said Merritt as he stood next to them. He held out his hand and felt the weightlessness. The floor under his boots lacked the tell-tale vibration of a GravGen unit.

  “Magic spot?” said the girl, giggling as she laid with her back to the ceiling.

  Merritt nodded. “It’s the only one on the ship. It moves around, though, so it might be gone later.”

  “Where does it go?” asked the boy. His straight blond hair stuck out in all directions as he floated upside down.

  “It’s a secret.”

  “We’ll find it!” said the girl.

  “I hope so.”

  “Arthur! Shurri!” snapped a woman’s voice from behind.

  Merritt glanced back to see a middle-aged woman poking her head out from a stateroom door, eyeing him with distrust. She had a wet bath-towel wrapped around her head and white facial cream smeared on her cheeks in large circles.

  “Get in here now!” she barked.

  “But Ma-muhhh!” the children whined in unison.

  She held up a warning finger, scowled at Merritt, then slammed the door. Reluctantly, the children drifted out of the zero-g pocket and trudged to their stateroom, shoulders drooping in defeat.

  Merritt knelt down and found a panel seam in the floor. With a hard press of his thumb near the corner, a small silver ring popped up from the seam. He pulled up the one-meter-square panel, thick with shielding, and leaned it against the wall, shying away from the blast of heat erupting from the hole. The heat created a shimmering pillar of air in the hallway. Merritt stayed on the edge of it as he lowered himself into the space under the floor, already sweating.

  He dropped into zero-g, careful to swing his legs up to avoid banging against the shell of the GravGen unit. It pulsed below him, emitting an electric-blue light from its circular outer edge. The light trailed in sinuous threads over the surface of the broad, grooved disc, disappearing into a black hole in the center.

  The unit was in a failsafe stasis mode. Merritt pulled a multi-use spanner from a utility box secured to the floor and hinged open the unit’s control panel. A faded blue-and-white logo adorned the inside of the lid. Most of the letters had peeled away, but Merritt was still able to read the words Diamond Aerospace. He frowned, trying and failing to recall where he’d seen that name before.

  Other children on board, he thought absentmindedly as he ran through the GravGen unit’s self-diagnostics protocols.

  In the two months since the Halcyon had departed Earth, he had seen none besides his own son. The Galena Farming Initiative encouraged families to make the journey, yet affording a single ticket was already difficult enough.

  Something about the mother led Merritt to believe they weren’t enrolled in the initiative. She didn’t strike him as the farming type. A year ago, he wouldn’t have believed it about himself, either.

  Yet, a year ago, he still had Emily.

  Merritt wiped sweat from his brow, flicking it off his fingers into zero gravity, then shut the control panel. All systems were in the green. He drifted down, dipping beneath the lip of the GravGen unit. Its outer shell was shaped like a covered bowl, with various sensor and equipment bricks clinging to the curved sides like remora.

  The bottom of the bowl was a dense column of metal tubes and glowing blue cables. The column turned at a right angle when it hit the floor, trailing away toward the back of the ship.

  The info screen atop the junction box at the column’s right angle was blank. Merritt checked the link with his wristpad. He was picking up signals for the GravGen units to either side, but not the one right above him.

  A floating drop of sweat hit his eye. He wiped it away with his shoulder as he typed a request for parts into his wristpad. It was a futile gesture, he knew. Never once had the equipment foreman delivered a replacement. The man had a habit of making himself difficult to find, lurking in the bowels of the ship with a deactivated transmitter, forcing Merritt and the other workman to play hide-and-seek to keep the ship running smoothly.

  Still, he typed up and submitted the request. He’d have time during his second or third shift to swap out the junction box. Until then, let the children play.

  If their mother lets them, he thought, grinning as he pulled himself up toward the hole in the hallway floor.

  The crew showers on the passenger deck were blissfully unoccupied when Merritt finally peeled out of his blue, grease-smeared coveralls and dropped them into the communal laundry bin. He entered a small booth with no door and stood under a shower head the size of a dinner plate hanging down from the ceiling.

  Merritt squeezed two drops of liquid soap from a dispenser and lathered his face and body. He slapped a red button on the wall with his palm and waited. Something groaned behind the tiled wall, then chug-chug-chugged like a car engine struggling to start. A short blast of lukewarm water slapped his head and shoulders, barely pulled down by the thrumming GravGen under the floor. He quickly wiped the soap from as much of his body as he could. As always, his towel would have to do the rest.

  Pushing his luck, Merritt slapped the red button again, to no effect. He could wait out the ten minute reset timer, but he only had an hour before his next shift, and he needed every minute of it.

  After donning a nearly-clean set of workman’s coveralls, he made his way up several levels, toward the aft passenger section of the ship — the area designated for blue ticket holders.

  Two months was enough time for Merritt to grasp a basic understanding of the layout of the star
liner. Many parts of the habitable core of the vessel remained unexplored, but those were areas with limited or no mechanical equipment, places a workman would be sent only to weld a loose panel or swap out a light fixture.

  The blue ticket sleeping quarters weren’t individual quarters at all, but rather a series of long hallways lined with bunk beds on both sides. The beds were stacked three-high, the lowest being level with the floor. Several of them were occupied by passengers who ignored him, but most were empty.

  Merritt walked the long hallways, having memorized his route in the first few days after launch. He passed a rack of emergency spacesuits and helmets — claimed on a first-come, first-served basis for blue ticket holders — only to be used in the event of a catastrophic loss of atmosphere.

  He knelt down next to a floor bunk and smiled at Gavin. The boy sat at the head of the bunk, knees tucked up to his chest, tablet expertly balanced upon them as he read a book.

  Gavin returned his father’s smile.

  “Whatcha reading?” whispered Merritt.

  Treasure Island, signed Gavin.

  Merritt signed back, Again?

  It’s the best one.

  At last count, he had read nearly a novel a day since leaving Earth. The ship maintained an extensive entertainment archive.

  My favorite, too, Merritt signed. Have you been studying?

  Gavin wrinkled his nose and reluctantly shook his head.

  We need to know how to grow crops, or we won’t be able to eat, signed Merritt.

  What about food from the ship?

  We’re only bringing enough for a couple of months, Merritt told him. After that, we eat what we grow, or we don’t eat.

  But why do I have to know it? asked Gavin, frustrated. You’ll be doing all the work anyway.

  Oh, is that what you think? Merritt signed, smiling. I’m going to need your help down there. I can’t do it by myself, and you’re so good at it.

  No I’m not. Gavin sighed. I’ll study after I finish this chapter, okay?