by Alex Thomson
Alistair does this weird thing where he draws thick black lines on his cheeks with some pens he found, like war paint. But it fades and sometimes his face just looks a bit dirty for a while until he remembers to re-do them. Nobody really knows what he’s trying to achieve with this look.
Andy has grown a moustache (I love the fact that Mr Ortiz’s imagination failed him so completely that when he named the Ays he had to use ‘Andy’ as well as ‘Andrew’).
Aaron is always wearing a baseball cap.
And Avery, right up to his untimely death, had enormous sideburns—they looked ridiculous, in my opinion.
They are not bad men, but I pity them. Despite their fig-leaf efforts, they remain incapable of the slightest independent thought. One cycle, to amuse myself, I prepared five questions and had a conversation with all of them separately. Their responses were almost identical, in some cases verbatim. My favourite:
Me: “Wow, you’ve been working hard, those muscles are bulging.”
Andy/Andrew/Aaron/Ashton/Alistair: “Damn right they are. Careful you don’t make (insert relevant Bee here) jealous now.” Then they all winked.
ANDY HAS DISAPPEARED back to his cabin, and Ashton wanders off in the direction of the weights in the corner of Leisure. Brenda moves to make space on the sofa, and motions for me to take a seat. Although I’m never sure how much the Bees like us, they are always interesting company, so I sit down, and she curls around me, and starts to groom my hair. We sit like this in companionable silence for a few minutes.
“You should grow this out,” she says. “You and Lily. You’ve got lovely hair, you should make the most of it.”
“Hmm,” I say.
Lily and I hate our hair, black and straight, and have both cropped it short and elfin. The Bees, on the other hand, have wavy chestnut tresses, and I have to stop myself from reaching out to stroke it. They have pale skin, wide blue eyes that draw you in, and dainty chins. Their faces are often serious, but when they laugh, it’s with a throaty, infectious giggle.
It is rarely a problem telling them apart, but unlike the Ays, this is not down to superficial props. Different speech modulations, different mannerisms, different personality traits—I’m not even sure I could tell you how I know this one is Beatrice or that one is Bess; there’s just a subconscious identification going on when you look at them. Did they do this deliberately, or was it organic? I’m not sure even they know.
Brenda is one of my favourite of the Bees—sometimes she pays me no attention, especially if an Ay is around—but if we’re alone she is warm to me, and tells me gossip and makes me laugh.
We are facing the broad window surveying the galaxy of stars.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” I say.
“They all look alike, if you ask me.”
“Do you know,” I say, “Mr Reynolds pointed at one of them and said it was Earth.”
“Reynolds,” says Brenda with infinite disdain—I love that she calls him ‘Reynolds’ instead of ‘Mr Reynolds’—“knows as much about astronomy as I do about pig farming. Remember that next time he’s droning on about it.”
I giggle and she grins back at me.
“One of the things I’ve figured out is that the Overseers don’t actually know that much. In fact,” she says, dropping her voice to a mock-conspiratorial whisper, “they don’t know a goddamn thing!”
She cackles loudly, and Ashton looks up from his corner, eyebrows raised.
“Not a goddamn thing,” she repeats, and this time I can’t stop myself from joining in with her cackle.
2
SWAG
I AM SHARING a jeep with Brenda, Bess, Juan and Jolly; one of the two Jays—not sure which—is driving. It is the yellow jeep, nicknamed Banana. We are on our way to East 3, a sector with a high concentration of tunnels and mineshafts, in the process of being bled dry of all its metals. The ground is uneven, and my head bounces and judders in time with the bumps. We are all in our suits, scratched and dirty, but lightweight and easy to move around in. Our heads are covered by a hood that connects to the suit, with a plastic visor for us to look out. We are squeezed together in the back, and I can feel Juan or Jolly next to me, his hip pressed against mine.
The Jays are small, but tough and wiry—though in their suits they just look small. I once read the phrase ‘tough as old boots,’ and I thought that fitted them perfectly—with their black leathery skin, and the sense they could bend and bend, but would never snap. If, for some reason, we had a civil war on Hell, I can’t help feeling the Jays would be the last ones standing.
There’s a crackle, and Juan or Jolly, whichever is next to me, speaks into my channel. We are inches apart but he doesn’t even incline his head towards me as he speaks, which is just the kind of annoying but faintly amusing thing the Jays do all the time.
“Leila. Hello. This is the first time in… twenty-eight cycles that we’ve shared a work shift,” he says, his voice blurred by hissing and static. Bess, on his other side, glances at him: she can see he’s speaking but unable to hear him.
“How do you know?” I reply.
“The Rota archive,” he says, in the clipped staccato the Jays always use. “It was barely five minutes’ work to find out.”
“So what’s your point?”
I hear the ghost of a smile through the static. “No point. Just observing. I’ve seen your sister on several occasions recently, but not you.”
“Who are you, anyway? Juan or Jolly?”
“What makes you assume we’re Juan and Jolly?” cuts in the same voice, but with slightly different interference, and I’m annoyed to realise the second Jay has been listening on the channel.
“You’re both down on the Rota for this shift,” I say. “And shouldn’t you be focussing on driving?”
“Pfft,” says a Jay, I’ve lost track which now. “The Rota. What makes you think we follow the Rota?”
“You have brands, no?”
“The Overseers haven’t checked our brands for a long time,” says a Jay, and the other responds with a raspy laugh.
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM with the Jays is that they lack an Overseer to manage them. Overseer Fedorchuk came down to Hell with them, and named them—he died a long time ago. None of us can remember what he looked like or how he died, and the other Overseers won’t talk about him. It must have been soon after our arrival for it to be so shrouded in mystery. But regardless, none of the three Overseers has yet taken responsibility for them. Mr Ortiz is in charge of the Ays, Mr Reynolds the Bees—really it should be Mr Lee, with his two sole charges, but he has so far managed to avoid that conversation.
As a result, provided the Jays do their job and don’t cause too much disruption, they have license to run riot. The only way to distinguish them is with knowledge of the Rota, and the assumption they are following it. Sometimes I’m certain they are deliberately clouding their identities—just for the fun of it, I assume; I can never see much purpose—but short of ripping off their clothes and examining their brands, there’s no way to prove anything.
The Jays’ great passion is chess. One of the items sent down for Leisure was a single miniature chessboard, with plastic black and white pieces. A white rook is long lost and has been replaced with a drill bit. They run a simple system—whichever Jay is in possession of the board, keeps it until another Jay beats him. In the event of a stalemate, the holder keeps the board—and needless to say, between identical brothers, there are a lot of stalemates. So to wrest the board away from his brother, a Jay has to become more and more aggressive, take uncharacteristic risks. And the longer a Jay can hold on to the board, the more he can crow over his brothers.
Do they (could they) ever deceive each other? Swap identities mid-game? Would it make any difference? A few times, I have sat down to watch a game—two mirror images, hunched over the tiny board, both staring at it without the slightest movement. Once, it was Jupiter and Juan playing, I must have sat there for over twenty minutes while Jupiter decided
on his move—the result was a pawn, moving forward one square. I could swear the two of them were deliberately slowing down their play, for their own amusement.
I CLEAR THE trailer of debris, and lug it over by its rope to the jeep. The two Jays have already disappeared into a mineshaft, where their heavy-duty machinery is found, and the Bees are listening to Mr Reynolds, who is pointing towards the top of a ridge. It’s their role to do their tests and predict where the rich seams of metal are going to be found—to map out the whole asteroid while we do our best to take it apart.
A small mountain of jet-black ore—‘swag,’ as our little community likes to dub it—is waiting for me at the mineshaft entrance. I lean down and take a piece in my gloves, rubbing my fingers against the gritty texture. Then I pick up a shovel, and start to load the rocks into the trailer. Soon I am in a rhythm, a mindless repetition of digging and chucking, digging and chucking. There is no sound in the vacuum around me, but my imagination fills in the clatter the rocks ought to be making as they land in the trailer.
After some time, Andrew crawls out the mineshaft, dragging another load behind him on a tarpaulin. His suit is streaked with black. He must be exhausted, but he picks up a shovel and starts helping me to load up.
We are nearing the end of the pile of swag when he turns to me and speaks on my channel. “You know, you need to have a word with your sister,” he says.
“A word?”
“Yeah. My brothers aren’t happy. She keeps sticking her nose into our business.”
“What business?” I say.
He shakes his giant hooded head. “Questions, questions, too many damn questions. Just tell her to back off.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He lifts an enormous rock with his shovel, and hurls it into the trailer. “Speak with her.”
Then he stomps off and ducks his head back into the mineshaft.
SOME TIME LATER, I am at the ore depot, a giant circular vat packed with thousands of crates of metal ore. It is scarcely credible to think that a single one of those crates would make me a rich woman on Earth. In the same way, I suppose, there must be millions of chessboards on Earth, but if you were to destroy the Jays’ single board, a new one would be ridiculously overvalued here.
The books on Mr Lee’s reader are mainly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so I can’t glean much information there about what happened to the metals, but from what Mr Lee tells me, they started to run out in the twenty-first century. Lead was the first to go, followed in quick succession by zinc, platinum and nickel. Dozens of rare metals too, all crucial to the production of everyday items like cars, phones and televisions. All original elements, impossible to synthetically reproduce.
It had been known for years that huge quantities of these metals were to be found on M-Type asteroids like Mizushima-00109, but nothing was done until the reserves ran out. Even then, they had to come up with a solution of who to send out to the asteroids. Unless they were paid exorbitant wages like the Overseers, nobody else was crazy enough to come out here for a stretch of seven Earth years.
Until us. We, of course, are working for our passage to Earth. And in a masterstroke of efficiency, we’re also mining our own fuel—courtesy of the hydrated minerals we dig up, to be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen.
The Jays sometimes make bitter comments about the fact we even have to fuel our own trip to Earth, but really, it seems churlish to complain about our status. We were brought into existence for this express purpose. The scientists back on Earth, who made us possible, are God-like figures—it’s not for us to question their decisions and quibble about logistics. I’ve put my trust in them, and our future on Earth.
I CAN VAGUELY recall a time when Mr Ortiz gave us a speech about the importance of what we were doing here. Spirits were low for some reason or another, our quotas were down, and Mr Ortiz has always fancied himself as something of a motivator. We were all gathered in the Community cabin, it must have been the General Asteroid Meeting that takes place every hundred cycles.
“This simple black rock,” he said—for he had brought a prop with him, a chunk of swag the size of his fist—“will be worth several thousand dollars back on Earth. Do you all realise the value of what we’re doing here?”
Twenty blank faces stared back at him.
“Every two hundred cycles—two hundred cycles—our small team mines more nickel than would have been mined on Earth over a twenty-year period. We’re pioneers! You’re going to be heroes when you get back to Earth!”
I paraphrase, of course. I can only loosely remember what he said, and I’ve made him more eloquent than he really is. All my memories seem to blur, until they’re no more than a series of frozen images, woven together by my imagination.
INSIDE THE DEPOT, under the solar-powered lanterns, my real work begins. The swag needs to be sorted into crates depending on what they contain. Water rocks are the easiest—you can spot the stress fractures on the outside where the frozen water has expanded. The different metals are harder—first I pass a supermagnet over them to check they contain some metals. Occasionally there is nothing—the Bees sometimes get it wrong when making their calculations—but generally even the smallest traces are worth keeping.
Then I proceed with a series of tests to separate out the different metals—dabbing with a solution of hydrochloric acid to check for nickel ore (the surface turns red), or another pungent acid that remains colourless when applied to platinum ore. It is long, repetitive work—often unrewarding, since after eight hours of sorting, the depot will look scarcely any different from when I started: some ore from crate A now in crate B, some ore from crate B now in crate A, ad infinitum.
I don’t kid myself about the work I do—I don’t need the physical strength of the Ays, the intelligence of the Bees, or the technical skill of the Jays. If it had been cheaper to send robots to do our work, robots would doubtless have been employed. But it would be absurd to be embarrassed by the role we play, considering it’s a role for which we were bred. And it takes a certain discipline too, to categorise all these rocks, without ever losing track. Mr Lee likes to call us archivists, and sometimes privately pooh-poohs the works done by the others. “Blessed be the archivists!” he will say, and I don’t really know what he means but I laugh anyway.
I TAKE A break to hydrate myself through a straw—as always, I leave the depot to sit on the rubble outside, and stare into the black infinity ahead of me. It is cold out on the surface, even with the foam insulation that lines our suits, and I have to keep myself moving to stay warm, shaking my hands, waggling my toes. The East 3 dig site is only a five-minute drive away, but I can see nothing ahead of me except the black, empty desert. It occurs to me that living in these conditions could send a person mad, if they had spent their previous life on Earth as the Overseers have. To go from rivers, rainforests, beaches, cities, farms—all concepts I can only attempt to visualise—to this silent, barren land; it must feel like a prison to them.
Conversely, even though I feel like I ought to dislike its emptiness, its silence, I cannot. Earthbound humans may crave the colour and noise of their homeland, but I daresay if they had been born here in Hell, they would have learnt to value its un-Earthness.
I wonder to myself, is this is how it feels to be in a mother’s womb? Sealed off from the outside—no noise, no colour, no movement. But then, who knows what it’s like to be in the womb, maybe it’s an explosion of sensations? This is exactly the kind of line of questioning that gets me funny looks from the Overseers.
My problem is that I read too much. Mr Lee’s reader—it’s been a blessing and a curse. All the time, I’m soaking up these images of a foreign world, one that couldn’t be more different to our own. But try and apply to Hell what you learn about Earth, and you get in all sorts of trouble.
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” Mr Lee once said, sounding very wise, but then he’s the bugger that lent me the reader.
AFTER EIGHT HOURS of repetitive tedium, it’s time to move on. Next to the ore depot is the stores depot where we keep our supplies. I drive Banana and the trailer over there. Water, dried food, medical supplies and oxygen tanks are found here, as well as all our construction tools. It is surrounded by a vast shell: the body of the shuttle that first brought us and our supplies down from the master ship. The quantities seem staggering—at the rate we’re going, it will last another three orbits, plenty to last the next set of brothers and sisters who come here to replace us in six hundred cycles. I wonder if they’ll stick with the same combination of Ays, Bees, Jays and Ells.
That would be bizarre, if six new Ells turned up. Like going back in time, to see myself when I first arrived. I doubt they’d want us to see each other, though. Cross-contamination or something, like platinum and nickel ore in the same crate. Except that’s not really the same, is it? Not everything can be compared with asteroid mining.
I load up the trailer with supplies, as requested by Mr Reynolds—food and water, and a bundle of wires, needed by the Jays to help fix one of the heavy-duty drills. I get into Banana, and off I go back to East 3. It’s dark now, even more so than when Juan (or Jolly) was driving us earlier, and I can barely make out any details of the landscape, just the solar-powered lantern by the mineshaft. The jeep pitches and staggers about as I drive blindly on, trusting to instinct to keep it upright, and this seems to work. Nobody is waiting when I arrive, so I pull up by the mineshaft and turn off the power.
I step out and peer into the mineshaft. Lanterns are strung out at regular intervals, like fairy lights. I have been down the shafts a few times, when all available hands were required to help repair a tunnel boring machine or clear a collapse. Usually you can stoop your head and walk, crab-like, at the start of the tunnel. The Jays reinforce the sides with concrete and steel, and it feels pretty safe, like an extension of the base. But further down, you have to get on your hands and knees to crawl, and the tunnels become more ragged—dust everywhere, and brittle, crumbling swag on the floor. The Ays, who spend hours down the shafts, pick up dozens of scrapes and bruises (which of course they are not shy of sharing with everyone else, if only as an excuse to take their tops off).