Colony

by Leigh Matthews

  Basically, BILI was a way to sniff out life on Mars. NASA had sent earlier devices to scan from orbit, and had then installed BILI on surface rovers. There had been some initial excitement over frozen water under the surface, but it had come to nothing. Private enterprise saw this as the all-clear and, soon after, began to send the cargo needed to construct a viable colony on the planet.

  Silver's work focused on ensuring the smooth running of the rovers and the Space Exploration Vehicle, but, thanks to her wife, she knew a little about BILI, and the smaller, hand-held, Lidar devices they sometimes used. Cooper had worked on several of the projects designed to look for organic matter from orbit, and had spent months poring over schematics and data, tweaking sensors and making decisions about where next to explore. Silver didn't have much patience for the slow, steady work of data analysis from millions of kilometres away. She liked to get her hands dirty.

  Right now, though, Silver was doing her best to rid herself of the red dust from the refiner, and she could see the benefits of being in a lab on Earth looking at a computer screen.

  After exiting the airlock, Silver made her way back to her quarters. She walked down the featureless, gray panelled corridor, and was relieved not to run into any of her colleagues as her eyes filled with tears. Shift changes were currently at two, ten, and eighteen-hundred hours. They changed the pattern every three sevensols to help with the adjustment to the longer Martian sol, and senior personnel overlapped with each shift to help keep things running smoothly. It was just after ten now, so Silver figured the mess hall would be full of hungry overnighters, leaving the corridors of the station mercifully empty.

  She wiped away the tears with the back of her hand and wondered if the Commander would make an announcement to all personnel and civilians, or if the CP had already done so. She would check her messages once she got back to her quarters to see what they were telling the crew.

  As she walked down the corridor, Silver yawned and felt her ears pop. The sound of her boots clanging against the grated floor seemed louder suddenly, and Silver stumbled, her legs feeling heavier than a moment ago. She yawned again and thought about Jaz's family, and the family of the missing miner. Protocol after an incident like this was to place a blackout on off-planet communications. The next of kin wouldn't know what had happened for another sol at least, not until NASA had decided what to say. She imagined Cooper getting that call, and realised that it was possible the miner had family at the station, and that they would be stranded, grieving, on Mars for another five hundred and thirty three sols before they could go home.

  When Silver reached her quarters, she scanned her wrist over the entry pad and slid the door open. Inside, she sat heavily on the chair by the door and took off her boots, lining them up neatly under the hook for her EV suit. Silver stripped down to her uniform grey vest and shorts, then slumped onto her bunk and closed her eyes. She could feel the dust scratching beneath her eyelids. It was in her nostrils, her ears, her hair, and she knew it would have been better to shower before getting into bed. No matter how many adjustments they made to decontamination procedures, the dust still invaded the station, but Silver was too exhausted to shower, and her head was pounding. She hadn't had anything to eat since the night before, and had been called to the hangar before her morning caffeine fix. It was probably good that Aliyaah had given her the rest of the sol off, she wouldn't be useful to anyone without some rest and nourishment.

  Silver ran her hands over her face and up into her hair, feeling the rub of sand and dirt. She opened her eyes and then jolted upright. There was someone standing in the corner of the room. She blinked and backed against the wall of her bunk. When she opened her eyes again, the room was empty.

  She tried to hold onto the image, to make out details, but the figure had already faded from her mind's eye. She was scared to close her eyes to try to bring back the image, not knowing what she'd see when she opened her eyes again. For now, the room looked as it should, but she could swear that someone had been standing in the corner, someone in orange overalls.

  Silver pulled her knees to her chest and sat shaking on the bed. There was nowhere in the room that a person could hide. And there was no way they could have been there one instant and have left the next. Her rational brain knew that she was just tired. She was running on empty, had low blood sugar, and had likely had a dose of radiation from whatever had happened in the hangar. What she had seen was just a hallucination, nothing more, but that didn't stop her gut from tying itself in knots. Silver thought about the Commander, and his delusions. She didn't feel feverish, but twice now she had heard what could be described as auditory hallucinations. She needed to take extra anti-rads, eat, and sleep, and then she would feel better.

  She moved to the edge of her bed and reached for a protein bar. She pulled the hard square from the packet and began warming it between her hands until she could roll it into a ball. She took a bite, barely registering the taste as she chewed and swallowed. Silver knew that the smart move would be to head to the mess hall for some hot food, but if she left her quarters now she knew she would be wary about opening that door and seeing the figure when she returned. She would wait it out and let the food settle her nerves so she could think straight and reclaim the space. She could not afford to be frightened of the one place on the station where she could be alone.

  Silver finished the protein bar and put the wrapper in the recycling chute. She found a vial of anti-radiation medication in her cabinet and fitted it into the med port on her thigh. The drugs would get into her system faster this way than if she just took the regular oral anti-rads. After she removed the vial and placed it alongside the other empties in the cabinet, Silver looked at the clocks on the wall, showing Mars time and Earth time, currently eight minutes apart. The planets were moving further away from each other, making communication harder and harder. Silver typically managed to call home once or twice a month, depending on the ferocity of the galactic cosmic rays. The idea of hearing her wife's voice was especially welcome on a sol like tosol, but the communications blackout probably meant it would be a while before she spoke to Cooper. She checked the screen in her room, hoping that Cooper had called before the blackout began, and was excited to see an alert in the bottom corner of the screen. Silver smiled. It was a message from Earth, not from the Commander or Hadley.

  Silver pulled up the message and pressed play, then sat down at the small table and waited for the video feed to load.

  SIX

  It was almost a year since Silver had said goodbye to Cooper at the Johnson Space Centre. She had walked away in her NASA uniform, illuminated by the flashing lights of the photographers documenting the launch of Octavia. Her smile had been both nervous and genuine as she waved to the crowd of people gathered to watch the historic launch.

  Their journey to Mars had taken just over five months, shorter than the typical trip thanks to the use of plasma rockets. In the six months that they had been living on the planet's surface, Silver had talked to Cooper only a dozen or so times. Communication felt strained between the two of them, even without the hindrance of technology, time, and distance.

  As Silver waited for Cooper's message to load, she thought with a smile about how they had first met. Cooper had quite literally fallen into Silver's lap, tripping while walking across the campus cafeteria, and spilling scalding hot coffee over herself and her colleague. Fortunately, everyone was wearing coveralls designed to withstand significant heat, so the only lasting damage was a small blister on the knuckle of Silver's thumb. Cooper had asked to take Silver to dinner, to apologise, and Silver wasn't sure whether to find the encounter charming or alarming.

  Cooper's charm soon won out, and later, when they were tangled in Silver's sheets, Cooper kissed the healing skin and smiled at Silver before looking up at the dark ceiling decorated with glowing stars above her bed. "The Monoceros constellation?" Cooper asked, and Silver kissed her, thinking then that she would marry this woman.

  C
ooper moved in a few months later, just after the announcement of the first crewed Mars mission. On their first night living together, Silver had looked up at the stars and noticed something new. Cooper had added Mars to the night sky, "So we always remember what brought us together," she said.

  The red planet watched over them for years as they slept, together, or alone if one of them was working late or on a mission. After Cosima was born, the stars would keep Silver company as she lay in bed listening fretfully to the sounds of her daughter sleeping in the crib beside her, each breath feeling like a miracle, each snuffle or hiccough a potential disaster.

  Some nights, the idea of seeing Earth from the red planet made Silver feel small and insignificant, like she should accept not only her own inevitable slide towards death but Earth's too. On other nights, seeing Mars looking down at her made her optimistic about the future of humanity. If they had the tenacity and ingenuity to get to Mars and build a colony, how could she doubt humanity's ability to reverse the disastrous environmental and climate impacts of the last couple of hundred years?

  When Cosima turned one, they moved into a townhouse, and Silver assumed they would duplicate the night sky, taking Mars with them. But Cooper didn't want to paint the bedroom ceiling black. She insisted it was gloomy and that grown-ups didn't do such things. She also vetoed Silver's plan to paint Cosima's room with planets and spaceships, and after some intense debate over wallpaper samples, they finally agreed on a woodland creatures theme.

  Despite not going to sleep each night under an umbrella of constellations, Cosima quickly became fascinated with rockets and space. She listened, her eyes wide, to Silver's stories about exploring planets, and demanded to know what Silver did at work each day. It was endlessly charming to Silver how Cosima clapped with delight at photos of the Earth from space. She knew her daughter didn't really understand what the photos meant, but she would one day and Silver wanted her to carry on being excited by space and science.

  As a child, Silver had been anything but delighted at the idea of space. She found the expanse of the universe absolutely terrifying. The idea that the Earth was continually spinning, and that she couldn't even tell, was especially scary, not to mention the idea of the universe continually expanding. What else was happening that she didn't know about and couldn't even sense once she knew to look for it?

  This desire to not only find answers to the questions they already had, but to find new questions had stuck with Silver into adulthood, finally leading her to Mars.

  Silver took another drink of water from her canteen, a gift from Cooper on their first anniversary. She looked at the engraving and wondered if, even all those years ago, Cooper had considered the Mars mission futile. Perhaps the little prince was right, and you couldn't pluck the stars from the sky.

  The message was buffering at eighty percent, and Silver shuffled in her seat, impatient to see Cooper's face. It was ten sols since she had heard from her wife. Cooper and Cosima had been sick with colds, and Silver hoped they had shaken it off by now, especially because Cooper was extra cranky when she was sick.

  "Hey," Cooper's voice broke through the static before her image appeared. "I hope all's well up there."

  Cooper sounded tired, and when her face appeared on the screen, Silver saw that she looked exhausted. She was hunched over, wearing her familiar and beleaguered, beige cardigan. There were dark circles under her eyes, which were rimmed with red.

  "Poor love," Silver said, running her fingers across the screen. Her cold must have been keeping her awake at night. She looked as bad as Silver felt right now.

  Then Silver realised that Cooper wasn't looking directly into the camera. She seemed to be deliberately avoiding looking Silver in the eye.

  "I need to talk to you about something and," Cooper paused and her face contorted. Perhaps something more serous than a cold had been stealing Cooper's sleep, Silver thought. She immediately looked for signs of Cosima playing in the background, and when she didn't see her, Silver's chest began to feel tight.

  "Goddamnit, Sil. I don't want to have to do it like this," Cooper said, looking off to the side, her face bathed suddenly in yellow light filtered through the kitchen drapes.

  "Do what, Cooper?" Silver said to herself, "What's wrong?"

  Cooper shuffled and then drew herself upright, her shoulders and jaw suddenly stiff and businesslike. "I'm filing for divorce, Silver. Lawrence is drawing up the papers and he'll figure out a way to get them to you." Cooper looked directly at the camera, her eyes cold and dry as she said, "I don't want you to fight me on this. It's what's best for us both, and for Cosima." Silver saw now that Cooper had already cried enough over this decision and that there would be no changing her mind. "And I want to sell the house." The hard edge of Cooper's voice broke slightly as she said, "This doesn't feel like home any more."

  Silver's mouth filled with a bitter taste, and she tried to swallow it back down. She clutched at her stomach, then ran to the bathroom and threw up the partially digested remnants of the protein bar.

  The sound of Cooper's voice continued to fill Silver's quarters, and she heaved again, bringing up nothing but bile.

  "I can't do this anymore, Sil," Cooper said, her voice a little softer now. "I need to start moving on."

  There was a noise in the background of the video and Silver heard Cooper tell someone to wait a minute. "I've got to go, Sil. I'm sorry. I really am."

  Silence filled the space where Cooper had been, and Silver slumped to the bathroom floor. She felt the sharp shock of the cold surface on her bare legs, reminding her that she was just inches away from the swirling, dusty chaos of the planet, with only a thin, inflated pod for protection. For an instant, she was tempted to smash everything in sight, to tear a hole in the one thing that was allowing her to breathe and stay alive.

  After Cooper's decision not to join her on Octavia, Silver had pleaded with her not to end their marriage. They had worked hard to find some kind of compromise and, eventually, Silver had promised Cooper that she would only do one rotation on Mars. She would come back on the first major flight, in two years' time. Cooper had made Silver swear that after that she wouldn't accept any missions longer than a couple of months.

  She began to wonder, to really think about the point of all of this, of exploring new places, of leaving the home she knew. If she didn't have her family to go home to, why did it matter if she spent years of her life getting to know this unfriendly planet? If they were never going to join her here, what had been the point of Project Arche?

  Silver laughed bitterly as the tears ran down her face. By dedicating herself to bringing life to Mars, she'd lost the life she had on Earth.

  Seven

  It was easy to grow complacent at the station. The artificial gravity and climate controls created a false sense of safety, especially for the civilians, who rarely ventured outside the station. Silver was all too aware, though, that they were close to calamity at any given moment. She also knew that to think like that was exhausting and unproductive. A willful ignorance was necessary to get through each sol, and this was something Silver had been taught early in life.

  She had grown up in a house full of secrecy and pretence, and while she had been confused about a lot of things as a child, she had been sure that she didn't want to live that way. She wanted something different, a new kind of family and community.

  By the time she left for Mars, it had been almost twenty years since she had seen either of her parents. She had come out to them in her early twenties, once she was financially independent, with a full scholarship. Their reaction hadn't surprised her at all. She had anticipated their judgement, their anger, and had reconciled herself to the idea of walking away from them for good. With no siblings to afford her even a simulacra of connection, she wasn't sure if her parents were still in San Diego, or even if they were still alive. Her father would be in his eighties now, and Silver wondered if anyone would think to contact her in the event of his death.

&nb
sp; She had thought about looking up her parents when she got pregnant with Cosima, feeling some vague guilt that her child would, like her, grow up without knowing her roots. But, after some procrastination, she had decided against getting back in touch; there was nothing her parents would add to the life she was building with Cooper, other than judgement and stress, so Silver let them go one last time.

  Growing up, there had been many ways in which Silver had stuck out in the predominantly white neighbourhood where her family had settled. The colour of her skin and her burgeoning queerness meant that she had learned early on how to make herself inconspicuous, identify her allies, and swallow any anger she felt. Silver's mother, May, was Navajo, and had lived on reserve land in the Arizona desert until she ran away as a teenager. Trying to create a new life in San Diego, her mother had quickly met a white man twenty years her senior; the man who would become Silver's father.

  Her mother had only spoken of her birth family a handful of times, as if she didn't quite believe her life had been real before she came to the big city. To Silver it seemed that her father made no attempt to overcome or even try to hide his disdain for May's history.

  She had seen her mother's birth certificate once, her name listed as Mai. She signed every Christmas card and birthday card as May, though, and had such fair skin that most people assumed she was a white woman.

  When Silver was born there had been no mistaking her lineage. She was much darker than her mother, and it seemed to Silver that her skin had made her a disappointment right from birth. Her parents seemed to have indulged some strange delusion that they were a white couple and would have white kids. So, despite her father going through the motions of parenting, Silver sensed that his heart wasn't in it. Her parents had no more children after her, but Silver could remember hushed discussions about adopting another child, a white child.