Finally, one sunny day, we had completed all the changes on the AIs’ lists. We had packed and stowed everything, made sure we had plenty of food, and then we simply up and left.
It really felt that easy, which surprised me. When I looked down at the pond, at my cabin and my greenhouse, at the people I had known all my life, tiny as ants as they waved up at us, I expected trepidation or even fear. But none of those feelings made it through the haze of exhilaration and happiness as the pond shrank into only a sunlit dot far behind us.
The craft itself—I couldn’t call it a mini-blimp anymore, since it looked nothing like one—made a lot less noise than I had anticipated. A soft purr and a slight swaying were the only signs that we were actually airborne, and of course, the fact that we couldn’t go outside. I didn’t mind that part, not at all. The cramped space inside the camper put Krista and me in close proximity all the time, and she seemed to enjoy it as much as I did.
There was one single cot to sleep on, but I had brought the self-inflating air mattress that could be hooked up to a windcatcher. Every time I set it up, it would generate just a little more energy than it used to fill up. I had a kinweave blanket and pillow too, whose soft glow may not be necessary in summer, but helped a great deal with the waking up-process during dark winter mornings.
I hadn’t thought much about what we’d be doing while flying north, other than looking at whatever lay beneath us and keeping an ear open for AI reports. Luckily, Krista had. Her pocket-AI had years worth of movies and books and games and music of all kinds to enjoy if and when she didn’t feel like planning one of her many dream houses. Just for fun, she claimed, but I noticed the longing in her voice, and found a new longing inside my own heart: to help her achieve that, in reality.
The first few days flew by, both literally and figuratively. Our systems held up perfectly, and the farther north we traveled, the more hours of sunlight we had, giving us more power. It almost felt as if we were chasing the sun, daring it to stay above the horizon throughout the night.
The landscape changed, too. The shallow ponds and lakes became scarcer. Forests and hills were surrounded by grasslands, not water, and soon those hills became mountains, the trees lower and more gnarly. We didn’t see any settlements, but we were trying to avoid them anyway, since we didn’t want to explain ourselves to anyone who might be able to contact us.
***
On the fifth evening, we set down earlier than usual, after the AI informed us there was a high chance of Aurora Borealis that night. Even the AI wasn’t sure if or how that might affect our crazy craft, but neither one of us wanted to find out.
We landed right on the bank of a stream with the idea that refilling our reservoirs with fresh water would mean less energy to clean what we already had. Also, I just thought it looked nice. We were surrounded by open flat land, that faded into hazy, blue hills in the distance.
The air this far north had probably always smelled this crisp. We had watched a documentary from Before, showing us reindeer and a glass-igloo hotel, local entrepreneurs making and selling natural remedies such as lichen wraps, calling it Saami shamanistic power. The AI made adjustments to our kinweave suits before it deemed it a good idea to go outside.
The stream ran quickly enough for us to consider it worthwhile to detach a few windcatchers and toss them in, as tiny makeshift waterwheels that we connected to kinetic receptors. I picked them at random, but Krista arranged them in a colorful pattern so they looked almost like a tropical flowerbed underwater.
It didn’t take long before the mosquitoes showed up, attracted by the residual heat from the solweave and our bodies. They came in clouds, their high-pitched buzzing almost louder than the zapping sounds the adjusted microcurrents on our kinweave suits made.
Krista laughed and ran straight into the cloud of insects, twirling and waving her arms to catch as many little bloodsuckers as possible with the electric sparks. I made her AI start playing music for her to dance to as I sat down on a rock and simply enjoyed watching her. My own suit zapped away, bringing down mosquito after mosquito as soon as they came close enough. I didn’t think I’d ever felt this happy in my whole life, and doubted I could get any happier.
“Come on, you need to move or your suit will run out of energy and you’ll get eaten alive,” she said as she danced towards me. She pulled me up before I had time to protest and held on to my hands as she made me stumble along with her twirls, the red light of the setting sun painting highlights in her hair.
“Maybe we should slow down,” I said after I’d barely avoided stepping on her toes for the third time. I couldn’t focus with her so close to me, my hands still in hers, my heart pounding in my chest. I couldn’t look away from her eyes and the intense gaze in them. They looked green in this light, like the dwarf birches and heather plants covering the ground.
The music changed into something slower—the AI had probably heard me—and Krista melted against me. We had bumped into each other in the close confines of the camper many times over the past few days, but never lingered even when I, at least, had wished for more. This felt nothing like that, nothing like gently holding her shoulders to move around her. This was Krista, confusing me, making my head spin with fragments of thoughts and wishes and fears and what-ifs. The one clear thought I had was to wonder how the AI had programmed the suits to only zap mosquitoes, not human hands, and hers were traveling together over my back, and mine were split, one at her slim waist and the other at her neck, under her hair.
Until I untangled it and plucked a buzzing mosquito from her cheek, careful to only use my fingertips so the suit didn’t get close enough to accidentally zap her. She swallowed audibly as I couldn’t help myself, but drew my fingers down her face.
“You know what happens when a person picks a mosquito off someone’s face?” she asked, her voice husky, enticing, her eyes staring into my soul.
I shook my head, unable to form words.
“They have to kiss her. It’s tradition.”
“Is that so?” I croaked the words out and shuffled my feet until it didn’t feel as if I’d fall over from a stiff breeze.
She nodded. “It is now.”
Soft lips met mine, and it felt as if my suit’s bugzappers had turned inside out and trickled down my spine. She tasted like strawberries, and I couldn’t stop sipping and tasting and feeling, my mind blank, euphoric, as if I was floating on—
“Oh wow.” She pushed herself away and stared behind me. “Hien, look!”
Well. Obviously our first kiss wasn’t as earth-shattering for her as it was for me. But I turned to look, and to hide my embarrassment too, and my mouth fell open.
The sky, still the deep orange of a midsummer sunset, was alight with gigantic green-yellow streamers, dancing like we had done moments before, twirling, flaring up, changing colors and waning, only to appear again in new and different flowing arches.
“AI, visual recording,” I said, and added, “Up. The sky.” I wasn’t capable of saying anything else, but I did manage to move myself in behind Krista so I could both hold her and look at the same cosmic display she saw.
I barely had time to get those few words out before the tops of the green bands turned into a deep crimson, flared impossibly high and settled back to green and yellow.
I felt Krista draw in a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m going to take this as a sign, Hien,” she said. “If you’re okay with that.”
“Eh?” I had a stupid moment. Given the circumstances, I don’t think anyone can blame me.
“About you and me. How we met and now this.” She hesitated for a second, and I’ve never heard her sound as vulnerable as she did when she spoke again. “Please tell me I’m not wrong. Tell me I haven’t misinterpreted you.”
I would have told her if I had been able to speak. Instead, I turned her around to kiss her again, hoping she would understand my answer. Words would come later, soon even, because she needed to know how she had changed my whole life in the
short time I had known her, and how I hoped she would continue to do so. But for a while longer, I needed to simply enjoy the magic of this moment.
***
We spent a couple of days by that stream, coming to terms with our changed relationship. It felt like the most natural thing in the world. Dreamlike to me, because I had to constantly check with myself to see that I was awake, that this was real, that I could touch and kiss Krista whenever I wanted. And even more unbelievable, she touched and kissed me, too, whenever she wanted.
The mosquitoes never stopped coming, but the Aurora Borealis did. Eventually we had enough of zapping bloodsuckers, gathered up our improvised waterwheel flowerbed, and continued on our way.
The remains of Hammerfest made both of us sad. We had thought we would want to stay there for a few days, explore the ruins, but decided to continue to Bjørnøya and Svalbard as soon as possible. We got to work on converting the craft’s bubbles on a tiny, rocky beach by the outlet of a fjord on the day before midsummer’s eve.
There’s not much to tell about the rest of our journey. At least, not much that isn’t too private to share. The largest of our solweave bubbles turned into an air cushion, the middle one combined with the wings into a big solsail, all the rotors except one submerged, and the original bubble served to keep us on track.
Krista had a bout of sea sickness, but I was able to care for her until she got used to being rocked by the waves. The never-ending sunlight kept us going at a steady pace both day and night, and we made good time.
Bjørnøya was nothing more than a bunch of rocks, inhabited by birds, and it looked too harsh and desolate for us to want to make landfall there. We didn’t need to, anyway, as we weren’t flying in a blimp anymore.
During those days, I learned just how incredibly rare it was to see Northern Lights in the summer. Krista just smiled and said it had to be about as rare as crashing a mini-blimp into a lake and being rescued by a strawberry farmer who just happened to be one’s soul mate.
We found the seed vault cared for by a community of maybe fifty people and a bunch of bots. They welcomed us and helped us find what we needed, and that was that. As I said, reaching Krista’s original goal didn’t make much of an impact on either one of us, not compared to how we had found each other. And how we had started making plans, how every moment we weren’t otherwise occupied, we used the AI to help draw blueprints and calculate material needs, talking and dreaming about our future.
Mrs. Solheim arranged a party for the whole village during our stop-over to collect my things. Until that day, I hadn’t realized how much people cared about me. They looked sad that I was leaving even after I told them I would be overseeing the farmbots remotely, and that they would still get all the fresh strawberries they could eat, and that both Krista and I would spend our future summers with them.
“Are you sure you want to leave your home?” Krista would ask me in the week leading up to our departure.
And I would reply, with a smile, “Are you sure you want to be my home?”
We both said yes. Every time.
***
Charlotte M. Ray lives (physically) in Finland with her husband and their computers, and (mentally) in whichever imaginary world she is currently occupied with. She is fascinated with new and upcoming tech, and secretly wishes someone would invent a brain image-to-text converter and teleportation.
Review this Book
Don’t forget to leave a review of this book online at Goodreads, Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com, or wherever you buy books or discuss them online.
About the Anthologist
Sarena Ulibarri is Editor-in-Chief of World Weaver Press, and she is also a fiction writer who has been published in Lightspeed, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Weirdbook, and elsewhere. Her solarpunk story “Riding in Place” appeared in the anthology Biketopia: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories in Extreme Futures. She lives in a solar-powered adobe house in New Mexico, and can be found online at SarenaUlibarri.com and @SarenaUlibarri.
More Solarpunk Science Fiction from World Weaver Press
SOLARPUNK: ECOLOGICAL AND FANTASTICAL STORIES IN A SUSTAINABLE WORLD
an anthology
Edited by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro
Translated by Fábio Fernandes
Imagine a sustainable world, run on clean and renewable energies that are less aggressive to the environment. Now imagine humanity under the impact of these changes. This is the premise Brazilian editor Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro proposed, and these authors took the challenge to envision hopeful futures and alternate histories. The stories in this anthology explore terrorism against green corporations, large space ships propelled by the pressure of solar radiation, the advent of photosynthetic humans, and how different society might be if we had switched to renewable energies much earlier in history. Originally published in Brazil and translated for the first time from the Portuguese by Fábio Fernandes, this anthology of optimistic science fiction features nine authors from Brazil and Portugal including Carlos Orsi, Telmo Marçal, Romeu Martins, Antonio Luiz M. Costa, Gabriel Cantareira, Daniel I. Dutra, André S. Silva, Roberta Spindler, and Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro.
More From the Authors of Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers
THE CONTINUUM
Place in Time, Book One
by Wendy Nikel
Elise Morley is an expert on the past who’s about to get a crash course in the future.
For years, Elise has been donning corsets, sneaking into castles, and lying through her teeth to enforce the Place in Time Travel Agency’s ten essential rules of time travel. Someone has to ensure that travel to the past isn’t abused, and most days she welcomes the challenge of tracking down and retrieving clients who have run into trouble on their historical vacations.
But when a dangerous secret organization kidnaps her and coerces her into jumping to the future on a high-stakes assignment, she’s got more to worry about than just the time-space continuum. For the first time ever, she’s the one out-of-date, out of place, and quickly running out of time.
THE GRANDMOTHER PARADOX
Place in Time, Book Two
by Wendy Nikel
When Dr. Wells, the head of the Place in Time Travel Agency, learns that someone’s trying to track down the ancestors of his star employee, there are few people he can turn to without revealing her secrets. But who better to jump down the timeline and rescue Elise from being snuffed out of existence generations before she’s born than the very person whose life she saved a hundred years in the future?
But Juliette Argent isn’t an easy woman to protect. The assistant to a traveling magician, she’s bold, fearless, and has a fascination with time travel, of all things. Can the former secret agent Chandler, with his knowledge of what’s to come, keep her safe from harm and keep his purpose there a secret? Or will his presence there only entangle the timeline more?
COVALENT BONDS
Edited by Trysh Thompson
Covalent bonds aren’t just about atoms sharing electron pairs anymore—it’s about the electricity that happens when you pair two geeks together. This anthology celebrates geeks of all kinds (enthusiasts, be it for comics, Dr. Who, movies, gaming, computers, or even grammar), and allows them to step out of their traditional supporting roles and into the shoes of the romantic lead. Forget the old stereotypes: geeks are sexy.
Featuring nine stories ranging from sweet to hot, by authors G.G. Andrew, Laura VanArendonk Baugh, Tellulah Darling, Mara Malins, Jeremiah Murphy, Marie Piper, Charlotte M. Ray, Wendy Sparrow, and Cori Vidae, Covalent Bonds is a chance for geeks get their noses out of the books, and instead to be the book.
FAR ORBIT APOGEE
More modern space adventures
Edited by Bascomb James
Far Orbit Apogee takes all of the fun-to-read adventure, ingenuity, and heroism of mid-century pulp fiction and reshapes it into modern space adventures crafted by a new generation of writers. Follow the adventures of heroic scientists, lunar detecti
ves, space dragons, robots, interstellar pirates, gun slingers, and other memorable and diverse characters as they wrestle with adversity beyond the borders of our small blue marble.
Featuring stories from Jennnifer Campbell-Hicks, Dave Creek, Eric Del Carlo, Dominic Dulley, Nestor Delfino, Milo James Fowler, Julie Frost, Sam S. Kepfield, Keven R. Pittsinger, Wendy Sparrow, Anna Salonen, James Van Pelt, and Jay Werkheiser.
MRS. CLAUS: NOT THE FAIRY TALE THEY SAY
Edited by Rhonda Parrish
When you think of Mrs. Claus, do you imagine a quiet North Pole homebody who finds complete fulfillment in baking cookies, petting reindeer and crafting toys alongside elves? How about a magic-wielding ice goddess, or a tough-as-nails Valkyrie? Or maybe an ancient fae of dubious intentions, or a well-meaning witch? Could Mrs. Claus be a cigar-smoking Latina, or a crash-landed alien? Within these pages Mrs. Claus is a hero, a villain, a mother, a spacefarer, a monster hunter, and more. The only thing she decidedly is not, is a sidekick.
It’s Mrs. Claus’ turn to shine and she is stepping out of Santa’s shadow and into the spotlight in these fourteen spectacular stories that make her the star! Featuring original short stories by Laura VanArendonk Baugh, C.B. Calsing, DJ Tyrer, Jennifer Lee Rossman, Kristen Lee, Randi Perrin, Michael Leonberger, Andrew Wilson, Ross Van Dusen, MLD Curelas, Maren Matthias, Anne Luebke, Jeff Kuykendall, and Hayley Stone.
SCARECROW
Rhonda Parrish’s Magical Menageries, Volume Three
Within these pages, ancient enemies join together to destroy a mad mommet, a scarecrow who is a crow protects solar fields and stores long-lost family secrets, a woman falls in love with a scarecrow, and another becomes one. Encounter scarecrows made of straw, imagination, memory, and robotics while being spirited to Oz, mythological Japan, other planets, and a neighbor’s back garden. After experiencing this book, you’ll never look at a hay-man the same.
Glass and Gardens Page 28