Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

by Catherine Asaro

  Which was why Lizzie would show Themba how to make sauerkraut. Maybe Momma didn’t want Themba to know; maybe it was a secret. But Themba was worth Momma’s anger.

  “Okay,” Lizzie said. She put Themba’s cabbage head down on the cutting surface and reached for a knife. “You—”

  One of Themba’s escorts grabbed her wrist. Lizzie cried out, dropping the knife. She looked at the cafeteria—how could they have gotten through the kitchen door that fast?

  “Fellas, fellas!” Themba shouted, waving them off. “Come on, it’s a kitchen, there’s knives, what’s the problem?”

  The escort kicked the knife over to the other, who examined it closely.

  “You okay, Lizzie?” Themba rubbed her hand. His fingers were pleasantly warm.

  “It’s fine,” Lizzie said. And really, it was. If his escorts weren’t so stupidly paranoid, they’d have let Gemma repair their ship in the mechbay instead of waiting for their own customized mechanics to arrive. And then Themba would have been gone in seven hours, not ninety-one.

  “Come on,” Themba begged them. “Give me the knife.”

  The escorts exchanged flat glances. Then they shoved her back into a corner, interposing themselves between Lizzie and Themba, then handed him the knife handle-first.

  “I guess that’s okay,” Themba shrugged. “What do I do with this?”

  “Take the cabbage,” Lizzie said, craning her head to look out from underneath the escort’s armpit. “Cut it in thirds . . .”

  Lizzie had never taught anyone before, but even so she thought Themba was a little clumsy. He would have cut himself twice—but his escorts reached out, quick as a meteoroid, to grab the blade before it cut him.

  “You’re doing well,” Lizzie said. Themba smiled. Even with the escorts in between them, it felt—well, special. It was simple work, chopping and canning, but making sauerkraut was like the metal beams that framed the station, fundamental and strong; she’d never shared that part of herself before.

  “This is fun,” Themba said. “Now I put in, what? Carrots?”

  Themba dumped the last of the ingredients into a plastic tub, then proudly hoisted his special sauerkraut.

  “What now?”

  “Well,” she said. “It’s gotta ferment.”

  Themba bit his lip. “How long’s that take?” And when Lizzie hesitated, knowing that it was longer than they had, Themba grabbed her arm.

  “Promise me you’ll keep it,” he said, looking absurdly serious. “Keep it here until I come back. Please?”

  “I’ll have to hide it,” Lizzie said. “Otherwise, Momma will sell it.”

  “Show me where.”

  They squeezed past the escorts and darted into the tiny airlock to the fermenting chambers, which were kept on a separate circulation vent. As it was, the damp, yogurty-vinegar sour smell almost made Themba topple over.

  The chambers were small and cool, stacked with giant plastic tubs that bubbled over with foam-flecked sauerkraut. Lizzie hunted for the perfect space to store Themba’s batch. His escorts bumped heads, fighting to peer through the tiny porthole.

  “Come with me when I leave, Lizzie,” Themba whispered. “They don’t want you along, but I bet if I begged they’d bring you.”

  Lizzie froze; it had never occurred to her that she could go anywhere else. She was going to grow up and die on Sauerkraut Station, just like five generations of Denahues before her.

  “Where—where are you going?”

  “I’m gonna be a hostage,” Themba said, and from the dreamy way he said it Lizzie just knew it was the best thing in the whole ’verse. “They’ll give me the softest beds and the nicest food and all the games I want while Daddy talks to the Gineer. He says I’ll be treated like a king while he’s gone, but it could be years. It’ll be lonely. With you, we could cook, we could play VR hockey . . .”

  Lizzie fumbled for a marker and scrawled a big “T” on the top of Themba’s tub.

  “You like me that much?”

  “Everyone’s all stiff where I live,” Themba said. “Grab the wrong fork at dinner, they talk for months. But you, you’re just . . . cool.”

  Lizzie blushed as she shoved Themba’s tub underneath a pile of well-aged kraut containers. No one had ever called her cool. But now all she could think of was Momma and Gemma, and how they’d just gotten Lizzie up to speed to take her slot on this three-man station. Momma should have hired someone new to take Daddy’s place when he’d died five years back. Gemma had harangued Momma enough to get someone new, but Momma was firm: the family would get by without outsiders.

  Fortunately, that was when Themba’s escorts forced their way through the airlock, running a med-scanner over Themba’s body.

  For the rest of the day, Themba acted like he hadn’t said anything, but Lizzie felt like she’d eaten a sugar bar. By the time she went to bed, she was vibrating with the secret.

  Momma combed Lizzie’s hair, as she always did before bedtime.

  “What’s gotten into you, Elizabeth?” Momma asked. “You’re all snarls and tangles, and not just in your hair.”

  Gemma had tried combing once, and even though Gemma was great with engines and cuddles, she was terrible with hair. But Momma was coolly methodical, softly tugging each snarl, and when she was done she left Lizzie with the cleanest, freest hair you could imagine. It was the most soothing feeling, being in Momma’s hands.

  But ever since Daddy had launched himself into orbit, Momma had gotten brittle. Daddy’s death wasn’t Momma’s fault, Lizzie had understood that even when she was six—Daddy was just a cook, and should never have been out on the hull. But Momma had been dreadful ill thanks to a flu she’d caught from some inbound flight; Daddy had been dumb enough to try and do a woman’s job repairing air leaks, and in his haste he’d forgotten to tether himself.

  Back then, Momma had hugged; now, she gave orders. The only sign of the old, loving Momma was in that careful combing, and Lizzie was afraid that if she left—or even mentioned leaving—Momma might stop combing her hair.

  “You lose someone dear to you, you start making distance,” Gemma had told her. “She still loves you, but she’s terrible afraid of losing you. You gotta approach her just right, or she’ll shut down on you like a crashed server.”

  Lizzie tried to think of a nice way to put it, but nothing came to mind. So she blurted it out: “Themba wants me to be a hostage.”

  Momma’s brush stopped in mid-stroke. “Does he.”

  Lizzie leaned back into her Momma, hoping to restart the brushing, but nothing came. So she turned around and said, “He says he wants the company.” That didn’t seem like enough reason to leave the station, so she added: “He’s my best friend, Momma.”

  “I’m sure he is, Lizzie.” Momma was looking at the dented metal of the bedroom wall, like she often did these days.

  “I’ll need you here,” Momma concluded. Lizzie’s heart sank—but the brush started moving through her hair again, comforting and careful. “I’ll be ordering some hydroponic prefab farms tomorrow morning; you’ll need to help install them. And it’s time you learned how to pilot.”

  That was an expected bonus; she’d been bugging Mom to let her learn to fly for years, but Momma said that girls under fourteen shouldn’t fly unassisted near a dust belt. It was about as close as the new Momma came to an apology.

  “That’s real nice of you, Momma,” Lizzie said politely.

  “Changes are coming,” Momma replied, and kissed her on the cheek. Lizzie nearly forgotten what that felt like.

  The next afternoon, Themba’s special-ordered mechanics docked at the station in a big mil-spec ship that bristled with gun ports. Lizzie had hoped that maybe it would take the techs weeks to fix Themba’s ship, but Gemma had already told her it was a simple repair; they just wouldn’t let Gemma touch it without a Level IV Gineer security clearance.

  Sure enough, six hours after the mechanics arrived, Themba came to say his goodbyes. She squeezed him tight, trying t
o store the memory away for future nights.

  “So you gonna come?” he whispered.

  “I can’t. My family needs me.”

  He nodded. “I thought so,” he said. “But it’s good, I guess. I’m helping my Daddy forge friendships, you’re helping your Momma stay in business. Our parents need us. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  Lizzie tried to say yes, but she burst out in tears instead, and then Themba buried his face in her neck. “Come back when you’re done?”

  Themba put his hand on the bright breast of his kaftan and promised that he would. And then Lizzie watched her best friend of four whole days, eighteen hours, and twenty-three minutes leave.

  She hoped she’d see him again, but she doubted it. Things had a way of disappearing in space.

  * * *

  The guests at Sauerkraut Station told Lizzie stories of a world without maintenance. It seemed incomprehensible to Lizzie. How could a garden just spring up when you weren’t looking?

  When she was younger, she’d asked the customers about these worlds, expecting that if she asked enough people then one would eventually relent and admit that yeah, it was all a lie, just like the Vacuum Vipers that Dad had told her nestled inside incautious little girls’ spacesuits, waiting to bite anyone who didn’t check their EVA suits carefully.

  But no; somber businessmen and travelling artists alike assured her that yes, water dripped freely down from the air, and helper faerie-bees flew seeds into every crevice. Gemma had even taken Lizzie down to the rec room, where customers paid money to kick their feet up on one of eight overstuffed footrests and pull a rented screenmask down over their heads, to show Lizzie the videos she’d taken of her planetside adventures. It had taken some convincing before Lizzie had believed that it wasn’t a special effects trick.

  What would it be like to live in a world that could get by without you? Lizzie’s world was held together by checklists of chores and maintenance. Lizzie’s world needed her.

  For the first time, though, her needful world didn’t feel like enough.

  In every room, she found something she’d forgotten to tell Themba. Her daily tasklist became a litany of things she should have said to Themba, a constant ache of wondering what he would have thought.

  When she straightened the cramped sliding-cabinet beds of the twelve guest chambers, she would have told Themba of all the crazy things people left behind—ansibles, encrypted veindrives, even a needler-rifle once. When she re-tightened the U-bends of the shower stalls, which provided luke-warm dribbles of water to customers for a nominal fee, she thought about how Themba would have wanted to see the central heating system, would have squirmed into the central axis to look at the boiler. And her worst chore of all would have been a joy with Themba there; normally, Lizzie hated pushing all the spare part bins away from the walls of Gemma’s repair bay so she could scan the walls for metal fatigue.

  But with Themba, she would have tugged up the heavy metal plate in the floor to expose the hidden compartment full of emergency supplies. Then she would have whispered about the hidden hidden compartment below that they never dared open, lest they disturb the dust at the bottom.

  Then, afterwards, she and Themba and Gemma would have all clambered into the punctured ship that was crammed edgewise into the beams of the dockbay’s ceiling—that contentious collection of parts that Momma called a junker, and that Gemma insisted was a classic waiting to be restored. And Gemma would have hugged them both as she told Themba the story of Great-Gemma and the Pirates.

  But that was stupid. Themba’s father had brought him to hundreds of planets. Why would he be impressed by a secret compartment? Sauerkraut was a novelty to Themba the first time—but when his hands stung from chopping a hundred heads of cabbage, would he still smile? When his shoulders ached from serving defrosted sausages and Insta-Ryz buns to six-hour guests, would he still want to stay?

  Of course he wouldn’t. He had chefs now.

  And when Momma’s voice boomed down from the conning tower to alert her that a new collection of guests was on its way, Lizzie took her place by the station’s airlock with new vision. Momma always told her that the guests were weary from nearly a month in the transit-ships—they wanted a happy smile, a home-cooked meal, a touch on the shoulder. Lizzie had seen them as just another chore.

  Now, when the airlock hissed and let in that first blast of body-odor-and-ganja laced air, Lizzie sniffed deep. As the guests emerged, stretching their arms and looking around in blink-eyed wonder, Lizzie saw them not as chores, but as people. Where had they come from? Where they were headed to, and what would it be like to stand in those strange and beautiful places?

  As she drifted off to sleep, Lizzie pressed her face against the air vent, imagining a breeze—a wind stirred by no fan, only the goodness of the world itself. And she longed, burned, to feel that wind on her skin, to feel sunshine unfiltered by glassteel faceplates.

  She needed to talk to Gemma.

  Gemma was busy reducing the leakage on the junker’s engine. Still, she dropped down the knotted chain ladder to invite her up into the cramped cockpit—their private talking-to space. Gemma took off her protective facemask, shook out her long gray hair, and patted the lap of her oily coveralls.

  Lizzie curled up into Gemma’s hug, resting her boots on the curve of the junker’s dashboard. Momma was practical, giving Lizzie the biology-talk of why you never played doctor with the customers—but Gemma was the one who told her how Momma and Daddy had fallen in love and made Lizzie.

  “Gemma,” she asked, “What was it like, when you ran away?”

  “Sounds like someone has a case of Station Fever,” said Gemma. “You counted the walls yet, girl?”

  “228,” said Lizzie.

  “Only 228 walls in Sauerkraut Station,” Gemma nodded, clucking her tongue in sympathy. “All the walls you’ve ever seen. And each of those walls feels like it’s squeezing you. There’s gotta be someplace bigger out there, and you’re gonna die if you don’t step into it. That it?”

  Lizzie nodded eagerly, feeling like Gemma had just opened an airlock inside her.

  “Perfectly normal at your age,” Gemma concluded. “Is it that kid you liked?”

  “Themba.”

  Gemma waved her hand in the air, like she was trying to clear away smoke. “Themba, whatever. He’s not important in the specific—for me, it was a merchant marine. Sea-green hair, storm-gray eyes, all adventure and spitfire. The important thing is that he made me think of someplace else. And then I had to go.”

  “Daddy said you made your Momma furious,” Lizzie said.

  “Oh, how I did!” Gemma’s titanium-gray eyes twinkled. “Left her with just my brother—a two-man crew for a three-man station. It was years before they forgave me.”

  “I guess it would be mean to leave you with all that work,” Lizzie said. But Gemma planted her finger right in the center of Lizzie’s chest.

  “My happiness shouldn’t enter into it, Lizzie,” she said firmly. “Only you know what’s gonna make you happy. That’s why you should go if you need to, Lizzie—you have to follow your own dreams.”

  Lizzie felt absurdly grateful.

  “But planets are big and careless,” Gemma continued. “I’ll tell you what I told your Momma: You get swallowed up there. There’s so much room to spare that people just wander away. They don’t need you like station folk do.

  “And us spacers are fools down there, Lizzie; you’ve seen how they make us look in the VDRs. They laughed at me for recycling waste urine, for refusing to bathe more’n once a month, for jumping when the wind whistled. Eventually the loneliness ate me up inside, and I crept back home to take my licks. My family forgave me—that’s what families do—but I never forgave myself.”

  Lizzie thought how easy Themba had made it seem. Gemma pursed her lips thoughtfully, then added:

  “I hate to say it, Lizzie, but Themba’s probably forgotten you by now.”

  “Themba would never forget me!�
�

  Lizzie hadn’t meant to yell. Gemma just nodded wearily.

  “That’s exactly what I thought about my merchant marine, ’Lizabeth.”

  Lizzie knew Gemma didn’t really mean that. Whenever Gemma talked about the nameless merchant marine who was her Momma’s pa, it was always with such a regretful fondness. It was a hurt, Lizzie could tell, but a useful hurt, like the way your muscles ached after a long day of wiping off solar panels.

  But Momma must have noticed her loneliness, because within a few days the chores started racking up. Shipments of wiring and water tanks arrived, and Lizzie spent whole days in her EVA-suit tethering vacuum-safe cargo packs to the surface storage hooks.

  Then one day she saw a gigantic construct-tug blotting out the stars, a ship big enough to hold whole stations inside its belly, and soon after that a ferry-trawler dragged two huge shiny new rooms towards them, gleaming in the sun. Momma explained that the new hydroponics modules were here, two new rooms and twelve new walls for Lizzie to check.

  It was exciting and dangerous work, since adding any new chambers to the station’s architecture could cause any number of dangers; hull breaches, orbit eccentricity, brownouts. The last time they’d added a room was well before Lizzie was born.

  “Why do we need more hydroponics, Momma?”

  “We’re gonna need more independence,” Momma said. “This’ll give us extra oxygen and more food once the shortages start coming.”

  “What shortages?” But Momma refused to talk about it. Gemma nodded grimly in agreement.

  Prepping for the addition was a lot of work: Lizzie and Momma had to go over the hull with electrostatic rags to clear it of grit, and then pushed a layer of fresh sealant over everything so the surface was smooth and ready. Then, all three of them maneuvered the bulky units to the hull carefully so the new units almost touched—one bump might cause it to fuse in the wrong place—then clamped and vacuum-welded the metal.