Of a Note in a Cosmic Song; Part Three

by Nōnen Títi

  It was a sad night Aryan spent in the bay, unwilling to go to sleep; that was just too normal a thing to do.

  A Little Comfort

  The shocking news had Frantag’s office feeling dark and Daili shivered in the silence that followed Benjamar’s words. They had called an emergency meeting for what was left of the government, since Kalgar, Maike, and Wilam were already on the surface, and Aryan didn’t come.

  Most of the people on that lander had been from Habitats One and Three, and most were women. Just like Kalim had gone ahead on one of the early landers, so had many other men, while their comates had been on this morning’s lander. Daili didn’t ask how many children had been with them.

  Frantag would make a speech to inform the Habitat One population, Benjamar would join Roilan to inform those on Habitat Three, and they asked Daili to talk to the people left on Habitat Two. There weren’t many, as all the farmers were gone. It was only those left working in the laundry, storage, and the children’s home. That was the last place Daili wanted to go, but she didn’t refuse. She told the girls first, so they didn’t have to hear it from a stranger.

  “That’s terrible,” Hani said. “What about all those people?”

  “They’re dead,” Laytji answered.

  “Yes, I know that, I’m not stupid. I mean, they just…” She couldn’t find the right words.

  Daili hugged them both. “It is terrible, but we still have to go down the day after tomorrow, so try not to panic, okay?” She promised to bring them meals back, so they wouldn’t have to go to the social room and not to talk to anybody until after Frantag had made his speech.

  Habitat Two was deserted. Daili first went into the storage area to inform those she didn’t know so well. In front of the home, she hesitated. Just like she’d take Tikot in two days, so others had picked up their adopted children that morning. And she worried about meeting Jema. They’d never spoken since that argument over Frantag.

  At first Daili had felt hurt, thinking she was apparently good enough to be talked to when there were problems but not entitled to know when they’d been solved. After a while she’d realized that Jema was actively avoiding her; she’d walk away from Learners if Daili was there and never came to Habitat One anymore. She must feel rejected – betrayed, maybe. Kalim might be proud of Daili for saying ‘no’ to people, but it didn’t make her feel any better. Many times, like today, she had stood in front of the home thinking she should go in and say sorry, but she feared being told to leave. Today she had no choice and on top of that, she had to bring terrible news.

  It was Kiren who first noticed her come in. Daili told him she had some bad news and it would be best to talk to the adults only for now. Kiren showed her into the office and went to find Tiya and Jema. Jema only nodded to acknowledge Daili’s presence.

  As she had with the girls, Daili informed the carers in a few short sentences; there was no better way. Though all three of them must feel it, Kiren was the only one to show his shock. Not sure what else she could do, Daili left them to cope. “I’m afraid you’ll have to tell the children yourselves.”

  The next day Daili felt a mix of sadness, fear, and nervous excitement. The government had another short meeting. The next descent would take both Benjamar and Daili to the surface. “Many people are really scared,” Frantag said.

  “How many more flights?”

  “Four to get the population down, but Aryan will do one more trip with a group of engineers and all the supplies.”

  “I don’t envy them,” Daili said.

  She met Aryan later when he was collecting his meal. “Are you okay?”

  “Of course I am,” he answered.

  “I was just saying because you lost your pilots.”

  He stopped then. “Good kids they were too. I don’t know what went wrong, Daili, but it’s a shame.”

  ‘Shame’ wasn’t a strong enough word. “If you need someone to talk to, Aryan, you know where to find me.”

  He accepted, though he would never come.

  The girls didn’t panic. They packed up the last of their belongings. The chests were collected that evening; in the morning they’d carry no more than a small bag each. The room looked as bare as the day they’d moved in.

  “It’s kind of sad to see this whole kabin empty. I liked it here,” Hani said.

  Laytji just wished they were down there already. “What if something goes wrong and the whole new generation of Kun DJar gets stuck here?” she asked.

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous.”

  Daili smiled at that. She had those thoughts too sometimes, but she could also see Hani’s logical reaction.

  “I’d like to get involved with something useful from now on. I’m old enough for that,” Hani said.

  To the question what kind of thing she had in mind, Hani answered that she really liked what Branag had done for SJilai – the inventions that made the kabin work like a body. They’d need things like that for Kun DJar as well, wouldn’t they? “I just worry there won’t be anything on that planet we can use to make things from, the way you described it.”

  Daili put her arm around the girl, who was now taller than she was. With Hani’s brain and her looks she could have had anything she wanted on DJar: a born creator, but she had opted for the journey and a life of uncertainty. She’d been eleven when she made that decision. She was fifteen now.

  “You know, I could talk to Branag for you. See if he’d like an apprentice.”

  Daili added that this little time of talking together meant a lot to her.

  “You mean instead of me having screaming fits?” Hani asked.

  “I’d rather you have screaming fits than pout and not talk at all,” Daili retorted. She squeezed Hani’s shoulders. “Look, all I want to know is that you’re okay. I worry about you, you know. It’s easy with Laytji – she can’t hide her feelings – but you need to talk to me.”

  “I’m growing up, Daili. I’m pretty good at coping on my own, but I’m very grateful for you taking me and I’ll never forget that, whatever happens.”

  ‘Whatever happens’ was a heavy subject right now. “I know, honey, but you must have hard times missing your mom, just like I miss Anni. That’s when I need to talk about it. That has nothing to do with being grown up; it has to do with friendship.”

  Hani gave her a quick hug that was worth more than all the words she’d spoken.

  None of them slept well that night. Laytji was too impatient to have breakfast. “Can’t we go yet?”

  “Let’s get Tikot,” Daili suggested.

  They walked down the empty street of Habitat Two. Tikot was waiting outside the home and came running up when he saw them, then turned. “I’ve got to go tell,” he said.

  In the home she found him between a group of children saying goodbye, his blond locks standing out. These people had been his family for four years, and no doubt they all had the accident in mind as well.

  Jema handed him a small pack and looked up when Tikot pointed. Daili thought she noticed a brief smile.

  “I’m ready,” Tikot said.

  In a similar kind of hurry to when she had taken Hani from Brita that day at the wingport, Daili now took Tikot. From now on, Kalim and Tikot would be part of her family. Was she crazy to start this now, after so many years? Then again, weren’t they all a bit mad?

  If the kids were frightened, Daili never saw it. Her own nerves took over once they boarded the small kabin. She didn’t make any attempt to talk. As before, she closed her eyes until they’d safely reached Kun DJar’s surface. The whole kabin seemed to let out a breath of relief simultaneously.

  During the adjustment period the children talked without stopping, and once it was time to leave there was help everywhere. All the equipment and chests were carried by others. The walk up the trail was slow and quiet. Nobody had the energy to speak.

  Once on the down-slope from the rim to where the settlement was, the children became excited, especially when they saw the first h
omes. How odd to walk here as if entering a town on DJar. On either side of the path, in blocks of eight, stood the grey-and-blue plastic buildings that looked like the SJilai rooms; all identical, neat, and clean-looking homes, each with a number, straight from the factories. One of those was their new home and Kalim welcomed them in with a grand gesture. The children immediately went to check out the bedrooms, while Daili dropped down on one of the chests that stood in the middle of the floor in the front room and let Kalim take her in his arms.

  “Hey, hey, can’t you wait with that until you’re alone?” Laytji asked, coming back in.

  “We were alone,” Kalim answered.

  “So can we go out and see the rest of the town?” Tikot wanted to know.

  All three protested Kalim’s suggestion that they rest first.

  “I wouldn’t mind having a look,” Daili admitted, though a rest would have been welcome.

  Kalim called it East Street, but it was a dirt path that led from the north rim of the crater, past their home, and into the middle of town. In the centre sat the social building with the clinic and a lot of homes in a circle around it. This was named Central Circle, and from it a similar path led away in eight directions, while a second circle further up, called Circle Road, connected all the streets, including the eight shorter ones, which went outward from there.

  “So between East Street and North-East Street we have another street, hence the need for all streets to have proper names,” Kalim explained and asked if they were happy.

  It was hard to realize she was here for good now, but Daili answered that she was happy. If nothing else, the feel of the wind and the need to wear outdoor coats made Kun DJar more real than SJilai had been.

  But it was also different. The days were light but hazy – you could almost look directly at Kun without danger – while the nights were clear but less dark than before. Kalim informed her that the colour of the clouds changed from green to yellow and even blue, which he still thought was due to whatever substance was suspended in those clouds, and it wasn’t just water. It was carbon-based – life – but it seemed as native to the sky as plankton was to the sea, and harmless, for it didn’t descend low enough for people to breathe it in.

  During the first kor, Daili took it easy, giving her body time to adjust. It was enough to get a feel for the town and to get used to the new routines, like collecting their drinking water and food pouches from what was known as the “central kitchen”, but was located at the end of North-West Street. From there you could look out over the entire town, the size of which still amazed her – a mas of people really was an awful lot when you thought about it. Tini’s design was shaped like a star. To the west the streets were the longest, but to the south-east they were short, due to the crater.

  On the Kun DJar calendar, Station Two was in its first kor when the entire population was down on the surface. A Kun DJar moon was thirty days, so SJilai had been in orbit around Kun DJar for more than a set of days now; it was time to get started on some real work.

  Daili invited the kids to come along for an exploratory walk around the crater; Tikot said yes, Hani said yes, but Laytji did not. “No thanks; I prefer to help Jema in the library. Many kids are helping there.”

  Daili expressed her doubts. She’d have liked to keep them altogether.

  “Mom, I can take care of myself.”

  “Kun DJar is a different place, Laytji. Different from DJar and from SJilai.”

  Suddenly there were things to worry about again; the sea in the distance, the river with its slippery banks that had already caused two broken bones, and the crater itself. That was aside from Kalgar’s list of dangers pinned on the social building wall: The only water safe to drink was that which was distributed at the central kitchen. Nothing that seemed to grow or live on the land was safe to touch until the tests were completed. Nothing was to be eaten but what was in the pouches. What looked like berries were not; inside them was a life form, which Remag suspected was a stage of metamorphosis for something. Nobody was to attempt making a fire; Branag had constructed a heater that ran on one of the small fuel generators and was placed in the social room, but was only allowed to burn at night to preserve fuel until a better system was devised. It was okay to move about inside the town area and around the crater, but not to leave the paths because of blue rocks and other unknown vegetation. Nobody was to go near the fog if it descended onto the land, though so far it had stayed away from the settlement. The farmers, in particular, were advised to leave the fields when that sound was heard, since it had confused people before, and two cattle had been found dead for no apparent reason other than having been near the source of the sound.

  “It scares me,” Daili told Kalim. “It’s almost as if the planet is telling us we’re not welcome.”

  “There is, no doubt, a perfectly logical explanation. We just haven’t found it yet,” he replied.

  The children were aware of the dangers, of course, and Laytji was no longer little, but Daili made her promise not to leave town anyway. Together with two of her now three children, she turned toward the crater, alert to any signs of the fog or the sound, constantly cautioning Tikot not to run off. On the upward-sloping path, Daili studied the rocks that were lying around without touching them; some were large boulders, but none the size of the one on the crater floor, which was visible with the naked eye.

  “Is that the space rock?” Tikot asked.

  “No, it’s probably a rock that got hurled away from the ground because of the power of the space rock crashing in. It must have fallen back down and rolled into the centre of the bowl-shape.”

  “How long ago did it happen?” Hani asked.

  “That’s what I have to try and find out. It’s hard to tell if we don’t even know how fast life evolves here or how much rain falls or the amount of weathering that takes place. I’ll have to drill for a sample inside the crater as well as up here to make comparisons.”

  “What are you expecting to find?”

  “For now, anything the land can tell me, Hani. It reads like a print, only in this case you read downward from the end to as close as you can get to the beginning.”

  “Will we find fossils?”

  “Now that would be the best treat of all, wouldn’t it? But don’t count on it. There isn’t much evidence of abundant life, not even in the topsoil.”

  Yet it was soil. Even if they’d not yet found the life forms, the evidence of it was just below the surface. “Besides, the question is if I would recognize any of it as life.”

  Tikot helped by finding rocks that could be useful to Daili. He pointed her to everything that looked different and heeded her warnings to only touch them with the thick gloves she’d brought. They only managed to get a small section of the rim surveyed before Daili was exhausted, but the kids never once complained. Darkness came before they made it all the way home – lucky there was always a moon in the sky. “We’ll have to learn to tell time by the position of Kun,” Hani said.

  “We’ll also take a light tomorrow, just in case,” Daili decided. Maybe tomorrow she’d go to the northern slope and have a good look at that river.

  Kalim and Laytji had the evening pouches waiting for them on a table made from Kalim’s and Daili’s chests pushed together with a cloth over it. Their home, like all others, had one light hanging down from the ceiling. It was made of a real glass cover around a live flame, which burned on oil. Laytji and Tikot loved it. It made a soft glow, keeping the centre of the room well lit, but the rest in shadows. It was not a light you could write or read by, but it did the job for a family meal. If only they could have chairs rather than sit on the floor…

  “How long before we can eat from the land? I’m sick of these things,” Tikot said, putting down his pouch.

  Though it was no longer served in the large SJilai cups, it was still the same food as they’d been eating for four years now. While on the kabin there had been two meals a day, each consisting of a drink and a foodbar; here, w
ith only half the hours in each day, they were separated, with the bars in the morning and the pouches at night. Kalim explained the need to test everything and that the DJar crops needed time to grow; once they were eating from the land they would have to learn to cook and prepare it. “You’ll never be able to just eat when you’re hungry again, so enjoy it for now,” he said.

  “But I’m never hungry,” Tikot answered.

  “If everything in the soil here is different, does that mean the DJar crops will turn out different than on DJar?” Laytji asked.

  “That’s a good question for an agriculture specialist, like Wentar.”

  “We may never be able to eat them anyway, not if we can’t cook them because we can’t make fires. We’ll have to eat it all raw,” Hani said.

  Unable to answer that, they all went to their mats to keep warm.

  For the time being, they lived from day to day; Tikot sometimes came along with Daili and sometimes went with Kalim. He coughed a lot and so did Laytji.

  Suspecting the coloured clouds, Daili worried, but Kalim said he’d had it too when first on the surface; it would go. Since the kids didn’t act ill, Daili tried to ignore her fears.

  She kept her walks to simple exploration for now. She focused on the land that surrounded the settlement, making sure not to venture too far out. She wanted to get a profile of the soil around the river first, to see if it was sediment in the water that contaminated it, in which case it might be possible to use it straight from the lake up top, or whether it was the water itself. The map from SJilai and the radar photographs gave her a good idea of what lay under the surface, but only a sample could help determine the composition. She now had two apprentices, as well as Hani, to help her carry the small generator and the fuel-cylinder to work the drill.

  Tikot made it a point to step on everything that moved in the soil. Daili warned him a few times. “They may be animals. You don’t just kill them,” she said, but he did it anyway.

  “They ruin the plants,” was his excuse, because he had heard the recent complaints about something from the soil eating the crops.