A Thing As Good As Sunshine

by Juliet Nordeen

  It was a wonder someone hadn't turned me in long before.

  "We have to protect them the way they protected me."

  "Protected us."

  In that instant I realized that I wasn't the only one in trouble. "Momma, what are they going to do to us?"

  "I don't know."

  I'd never heard her say that before. Sometimes she'd say, look it up for yourself, or jokingly threaten I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you, but she'd never in my life said I don't know.

  My tears came back. Shame. Anger. Fear — the worst fear I'd ever felt in my whole, short, cooped-up life.

  "No crying, Honey-Girl," she said as she grasped both of my hands in hers behind our backs. "Don't give them the satisfaction. You didn't start this; neither did I. You dry those eyes and hold your head up."

  I did what she asked and spent the rest of third shift dozing, watching and thinking. My butt grew sore from sitting on and against unpadded, cold rock. My wrists chafed in the cuffs. The guard changed and occasionally people walked past to take a look, but they all maintained their distance. My thoughts raced, mostly thinking about how Momma had not once said everything's going to be okay.

  *****

  Instead of the normal first shift bell, I woke to an announcement cancelling all the day's non-critical duties and declaring an emergency town hall meeting in the amphitheater to convene in sixty minutes. Our guards uncuffed us and took us to a huge hygiene facility right off the main room to take care of our business and clean-up. I washed quickly, but Momma stood under the hot shower until a guard came in and yelled something at her, something unintelligible because of the wall of human noise flooding in around him.

  We walked out of the oversized bathroom to find almost every inhabitant of the Rock packed in shoulder-to-shoulder. Strangely, instead of a homogenous mixture of people of all colors and sizes, I saw that like-clumped-together-with-like — a cluster of folks who looked like Auntie, two separate groups that looked like Sheng Tian, some who looked so much like Momma that I stared with my mouth open, and then there was a whole bunch who looked like me, fair and light. The crowd made way to allow our guards to take us through to a long, stone-shot-through-with-veins-of-ore table in the middle of the room. At the head sat Parker, the Commanding Officer and highest-ranking Perseus employee in the Rock. I knew him from his picture on the TechPad. He wore all-yellow coveralls with a row of badges decorating each sleeve. Eleven of his Governors, all in matching white coveralls, filled the long sides of the table, leaving two chairs at the opposite end for Momma and me.

  I sat, but Momma stood, until forced into her seat by a guard, then she placed both feet up on the table, trying to appear unworried about the situation. But I knew by the paleness of her normally rich-toned skin that she was afraid.

  Parker glared at Momma until she took her feet off the table. His voice was low and echoed around the room as he read the charges against us. He spoke quickly about me, his language formal to the point of stupidity, but it took him minutes to get done with Momma.

  "Do you dispute these charges?" Parker asked.

  "I want to know what you're going to do about it."

  "That depends," he said.

  "On what?" Momma raised her chin high.

  "When did the child arrive at Perseus Two?"

  Momma crossed her arms over her chest and closed her mouth tightly. The executive sitting closest to us on the left side of the table leaned over to Momma and whispered, "Being an ass isn't going to help you, Naureen. Either of you."

  "Don't be such a lawyer, Ethan," Momma spat. I had no idea what a lawyer was, but it sounded like the opposite of sunshine the way Momma said it.

  "Very well, if there are no mitigating factors," Parker said.

  But before he could speak again Momma interjected. "She's been here twelve years."

  The crowd around us made a simultaneous sound of sucking in air; it startled me. As I looked around I got the feeling it had been a spontaneous action because they were all looking at each other in surprise. How could so many people do the same thing at the same time without someone directing it? And then I realized they were expressing a common emotion. They were surprised. Surprised by how long I'd been in the Rock? How stupid. The Rock was huge, monstrous — I knew that from my third shift explorations with Momma. There were plenty of places to hide things, all kinds of things. Momma's thin Journal was full them.

  "How did she arrive?"

  Momma smirked. "By spaceship."

  Someone laughed in the distance, but Parker ignored it. "Crew shuttle or cargo boat?"

  "Does it really matter?"

  "The company has directed me to ascertain the manner used to convey this stowaway to Perseus Two."

  "Bullshit," Momma said as she leaned forward. "The Company doesn't give a rat's ass that she's here, much less how she got here. You know it. I know it." Momma motioned to the crowd of people surrounding us. "They know it."

  I snickered at the thought of anything's butt being used as currency until Momma reached over and silenced me with a touch. She glared down the length of the table at Parker as if daring him to disagree with her about the Company.

  "The Company issues strict guidelines for congress aboard the Rock. They provide minimum but adequate supplies for mandatory personnel and not one bit more."

  "And that's why it took you twelve years to realize she was here: all those missing rations, unexplained water shortages, rampant power drains." She shook her head in disgust. "Quit hiding behind the Company. As long as we meet ore quotas, metal at the dock on time, they couldn't care less what happens to any of us." She punctuated her last statement by looking around, meeting those few eyes that would meet hers.

  "It's up to me, as the Commander, to implement all aspects of the Charter with assistance from the Governors," Parker said. "We uphold the rules or chaos will overcome."

  "I know how things work, how they really work. It's my job to reconcile every kilogram on and off this Rock. I have Ledgers full of rules bent to nearly broken, for years, and somehow I don't see this chaos you fear so badly."

  Each one of the white-suited Governors at the table started fidgeting. I knew that Momma must have something in her thin Ledger about each of them. Contraband alcohol, illegal recreational drugs, unapproved electronics, banned entertainment modules that weren't available to download through company frequencies. But Parker didn't fidget. Momma's thin Ledger held no sway with him.

  Momma took her tone down a notch, "Heaven knows the Rock isn't an easy place to live. It's not natural, not healthy, nothing at all like home. The work is dangerous, our lives depend on redundant life support systems and the favorable trajectory of a million asteroids hurling around out there. If it takes a bent rule, now and again, to carry us through to our homebound dates, so what?"

  The woman sitting to Parker's right spoke up, "But she's a person, not a liter of whiskey."

  "Yes, that's my point, she's a person." Momma reached over and held my hand. "She's the person I need to get through this hell and come out the other side with some sanity. I'm grateful for the day she arrived in a Stasis Pod, stuffed into the nose cone of one of the supply boats. I don't know who smuggled her here. No one ever claimed her; so I took her in and raised her as my own."

  "You have no idea whose child she is?" Parker asked.

  A voice from the crowd behind him yelled out, "She's Mary's daughter. Mary McDonald."

  The room erupted into chatter. As Parker banged his open hand on the table, trying to quiet things down, I stood up and tried to see who had spoken. The guards shoved me back into my seat, knocking my breath away. Mary McDonald. I had a real mom out there and her name was Mary McDonald.

  Parker motioned to a guard who plunged into the still noisy crowd and returned with a tall, thin, sandy-haired man in tow. The guard forced him to stand next to Parker's chair.

  "McDonald?" Parker asked.

  "No sir," the man answered. "Mary's dead, sir."

/>   "How do you know this child is McDonald's?"

  "She's the spittin' image, sir." Murmurs of agreement came from the part of the crowd that looked like me.

  Parker dismissed him, and then looked to the woman sitting at his right. She consulted her TechPad. "McDonald, Mary A. Contract inception date: 24/3/2041. Arrived Perseus Two on 6/6/2041. Contracted for fifteen years. Killed by outgassing in mid-2043, body lost to space. Next of kin: minor daughter, unreachable."

  "Outgassing?" I asked Momma quietly.

  "Gas pocket deep inside the Rock. Sometimes the drills hit one and the power of it blows everything out the nearest lock." Momma bowed her head. "I remember that one. A couple of weeks before you came to us. Fifteen people died. Quick. I'm sure she didn't suffer."

  Parker's voice roared over the background noise. "Why didn't you report this child when she arrived?" he asked Momma.

  "The truth?"

  "This is a fact-finding inquiry," he said, pleased with himself.

  "I knew you'd put her out the nearest airlock." Momma's chin was sticking out again. "Quietly, so no one would ever know."

  "How dare you..."

  "And then you'd offer me one of your white suits," she shouted over him, glaring around the table at his Governors. "Figuring that would buy my silence, subdue my conscience. It would be like she never existed. I couldn't do that. Not then. Not ever."

  That big old room, with all those people in it, went silent. So quiet I could hear the drills vibrating through the rock — in the middle of all this, someone was still churning out the ore, digging after the treasure buried down deep in the Rock to keep the Company happy.

  I was horrified by Momma's suggestion that the Commanding Officer would send someone to their death by putting them out the airlock. Momma and Parker locked glares across the table, a fierce battle of wills that neither looked ready to back down from.

  "So what do we do now?" Momma asked, without averting her eyes.

  "Governors?" Parker asked, equally unwilling to look away.

  The first speaker sat halfway down the table. "We could send her back to Earth on the next crew transport."

  "And what do we do with her in the meantime?" Parker asked, still staring Momma down.

  "I don't know," came the answer.

  "And who's going to stay here past their homebound date so this stowaway can take their place on the shuttle. Anyone?" Parker asked, finally breaking the stare to look around the room. "No volunteers?"

  No one made a sound.

  A second idea came from across the table. "She could be trained to take over her late mother's position, fulfill the rest of McDonald's contract."

  "The job has long been filled by a new worker," the woman next to Parker answered.

  "Why not just leave well enough alone?" Momma asked. "This colony has functioned just fine with an extra mouth to feed for twelve years. We'll teach her critical skills so she can act as back-up to others on their tasks, and in the meantime she can do menial work."

  "You know that's not possible," Parker said.

  Ice-cold shivers raced up my spine. For a minute I considered how it might feel to be jettisoned from the Rock like so much garbage. I knew the science, even in the cold of space my blood would boil from exposure to zero pressure in about 19 seconds.

  "You mean to put me out," I said. My lower lip quivered against my will and hot tears rolled down my cheeks. The bully at the other end of the table wanted me dead, and he looked like he had the power to make it happen.

  "You aren't even supposed to be here, young lady."

  "I didn't smuggle myself."

  "It doesn't matter. Your presence here is a latent risk to us all. You and your 'Momma' have perpetrated a crime on every person in the Rock, for twelve years. What would you have us do?"

  "Put her out!" came a shout from the far corner of the room. The idea sparked through the crowd, catching a supporter in its grasp here and there. They were a noisy minority and they joined their voices as they yelled, "Put her out! Put her out!"

  I tucked my feet up on the chair and wrapped myself in a little ball against the hate and rage in their words. I'd never done anything to hurt any of them, yet they wanted to extinguish my life in the vacuum of space.

  A high-pitched whistle pierced the quickly disorganizing chant — I yanked my head up — and a single voice shouted, "You can't, she's pregnant."

  The chant died, hushed as the word pregnant rippled through the room. Parker's head dropped nearly to the table.

  "Momma?" I asked.

  "Shhh, Honey-Girl. Just wait." The tension in Momma told me she was surprised. Only three people in the Rock knew I was pregnant, and that voice couldn't have been Auntie Pria's.

  Sheng Tian shoved his way through the crowd to the foot of the table where Momma and I sat. Stunned, I couldn't do or say anything. I searched his face trying to decide why he'd be so stupid, so brave, so insane as to put himself in the middle of this mess. Moments later, I noticed Auntie Pria standing right behind him, her hand on his shoulder.

  "Your child, son?" Parker asked.

  I silently willed Sheng Tian to say no, to stay out of this, but in a proud voice he claimed our baby in front of everyone in the Rock. Brave. Stupid. Wonderful.

  "You realize you've just confessed to committing a crime?"

  "No, sir." Sheng Tian stood tall. "I've studied the Charter, my employment contract and my holy writings. There's nothing in any of those documents ascribing criminal action to intercourse, conception or giving birth to a child in Perseus Two."

  Parker frowned and looked first to the woman next to him who shrugged her shoulders. Then he looked to "Ethan," the man Momma had accused of being a lawyer. Ethan shook his head and then looked down at the table.

  "Nevertheless, young man, you failed to report a stowaway in the Rock."

  "He didn't know I was a stowaway," I said, giving the partial truth with more confidence that I ought to.

  Parker didn't even look at me; he stayed focused on Sheng Tian. "How do you propose to deal with the situation?"

  "With all respect, sir. You need to let her stay."

  "And, what, have two unexpected mouths to feed? Raise the child like some kind of damned station mascot?" He laughed at me.

  "Why not?" Momma challenged.

  "It's against the rules."

  "What rules?"

  "The Charter."

  "The Charter was written by thirty planetside lawyers. Thirty sexually-frustrated suits in a conference room in a sixty-story skyscraper in a city next to the spaceport. Thirty shareholders, greedy bastards." Momma voice cracked as she yelled. "Thirty people who can take their children or grandchildren to the park and play in the sunshine any time they want."

  The noise in the crowd grew. Parker shouted over them all, "The Charter is written for our protection. All of our protection. It cannot be changed."

  "It can," Sheng Tian said.

  "It must," Momma said.

  "It cannot." Parker used a tone similar to Momma's dealing-with-punks-voice and it drove the crowd to near silence. He steepled his fingers and closed his eyes in thought.

  Even though he was my enemy, my mortal enemy it seemed, I felt a little bit sorry for him. I knew how hard Momma's job was, keeping track of all the stuff that got people through their daily slog in the Rock. Parker's job had to have been harder — he didn't have to deal with stuff, he had to deal with people. Sometimes when I was little girl I fantasized about growing-up and being in charge, how I'd change all the rules so that little girls could go wherever they wanted and befriend whomever they liked. But as I watched him decide my fate I knew I would hate to be Commanding Officer. My life was in his hands, but so were the lives of every person in the Rock.

  As we waited to hear Parker's judgment the commotion in the room stayed at a hushed murmur. They all wanted to hear what he'd say as much as I did. Sheng Tian's hand stayed on my shoulder the entire time, but I dared not look at him for fear that I would
cry.

  After two minutes of contemplation Parker laid his hands on the table in front of him. "Young lady, I know this isn't your fault. Nor is it Ms. Abdul's — in theory. Given the situation, I understand the choices she made, however ill-advised. Therefore, Ms. Naureen Abdul, I sentence you to 400 hours community service and a fine equivalent to one year's salary."

  Momma frowned as the crowd reacted; it was a tough punishment, but nothing that would crack-the-nut, as she would say. A fair judgment. She reached over and squeezed my hand and my heart leapt to hope that he might have taken Momma's advice and act as fairly toward me.

  "This Rock and everyone aboard are my responsibility. 1,680 souls," Parker continued. "You, however, little girl are not my problem. Neither is that unborn child. My chief concern, my only concern, must be for the integrity and the safety of the legitimate crew of this facility. The rules must be upheld or this Rock will fall into chaos. I'm sorry..."

  My heart pounded against my ribs and I couldn't breathe.

  Parker stood. "It is my decision that you will be placed in a stasis pod until the arrival of the next supply ship and then you shall be returned to Earth the same way you arrived."

  Arguments broke out among the white suits at the table and carried into the crowd behind them. Some supported Parker, others backed Momma and me, and others shouted concern for my unborn baby. People spit as they yelled, poked each other in the chest, and hurled curses against gods, ancestors and generations not yet born. I'd never been exposed to so much anger, suspicion and fear in my life.

  "Momma?"

  Her jaw hung open in disbelief until Parker stood and a pair of guards in tight-fitting black jumpsuits flanked him for the walk out of the huge room.

  "You unbelievable bastard!" Momma jumped up and tried to follow Parker but got shoved back into her chair. She opened her mouth again but curse words quickly gave way to gibberish. Auntie Pria rushed to wrap her arms around Momma.

  "Momma?" I screamed as my little world flipped inside out. As frightening as everything in the last few shifts had been, this was worse. "Momma, I have to go back to Earth?"