by Rob Favre
“What makes you sad, Tom?”
“This is probably the end of my theory that aliens invented baseball.”
“Perhaps. Or also perhaps it means that aliens invented both baseball and forks.”
I nodded thoughtfully, and grinned. “I like the way you think.”
We walked along, listening to the laughter from the group ahead and the wind whistling through the rocky hills off to the left. Cordelia and Regan were fully set now, and just a sliver of Goneril hung above the horizon in a fiery blaze. Our black shadows danced among the rocks as we walked, far out across the blood-orange plain. I knew this whole thing had been hard on her too. Sometimes I felt guilty about having dragged her into it. Since we were together when we found Galactic Park, a little bit of the suspicion about me had smudged off on her as well. Nobody really thought she was in on the plot, exactly, but there was talk that maybe she was a little too easily fooled by my tricks. Especially after what had happened during the trial back on the Heifer. Some of the Young Ones had a long memory about that kind of thing. I hoped today’s discovery would mean a little less pressure on her.
I decided to say something, quietly, to break the silence.
“I am, like, really hungry.”
She didn’t answer. I guess she must not have been hungry. I glanced over at her as we walked. She was staring at the horizon, lost in thought. I tried to think of something else to say, but nothing was there. We just walked in silence, watching the stars come out.
Dad took a bite of rice and held up his fork, just staring at it for a little while. “I just can’t get my head around it. The idea, it’s just…” he said. “How big was it?”
“Just a regular-sized fork. About as big as that one.”
“And it was just lying there in the sand, waiting for someone to find it?”
“I guess so. I didn’t see it until Renay picked it up.”
“Unbelievable.” He just shook his head.
I pushed the rice around on my plate. Plain rice. That was dinner tonight. I never realized how much you could miss ketchup until I had eaten plain rice for a couple of meals. Yeah, I would have tried ketchup on my rice. I would have tried anything on my rice. I was hungry from being out in the suns all day, but I just couldn’t bring myself to take another bite.
“Is there anything else to eat?”
Mom looked over at the serving line. Almost everyone was already eating, so it was starting to dwindle a little. “Sure, there’s plenty more rice.”
“Anything that isn’t rice?”
Mom shook her head. “Tom. You know they’re saving food for the Christmas… the Exmass feast.”
“It won’t be much of a feast if we’ve all starved to death before it happens.”
“You won’t starve. You just have to eat the food we have.”
I never thought I would miss the old “black bean enchiladas” that we had to eat occasionally during the trip here, but I would have taken those over rice in a heartbeat, just to be able to eat something different. We’d only had mixed luck with getting different types of crops to grow since Planetfall. The soil, moisture, sunlight, seasons – everything was different here than it was on Earth, so we were just trying a whole bunch of different stuff and seeing what worked. Rice and grass seemed to do alright, which was good for the goats and, I suppose, technically good for me. One time a patch of strawberries just grew like crazy for a month, but then the day after we picked the berries, all the plants withered and died.
We sat at the table for a long time, talking about what the fork meant, how it got there, and what else we might find. I asked about what they’d done while I was out exploring. Dad refused to talk about the plumbing. Mom talked about how some of her grass sprouts were growing until she saw that Dad and I were both bored. Then she changed the subject to Exmass planning, and especially the feast. I did end up finishing my rice, but I hated every bite.
I wiped a grimy sleeve across my sweaty forehead. I was lucky to still have one synthweave shirt left. Mom kept telling me it was only a matter of time before it fell apart, and I knew she was right. It had once been a textured pattern of light gray on lighter gray; now it had faded to a dusty beige. The Young Ones had never worn synthweave, of course, so they had no problem wearing cotton or hemp. Goatskin was becoming pretty popular as well. Me? I just wasn’t ready. I was clinging to this last little frayed piece of civilization as long as I could before I started dressing like a caveman.
Rick offered me a drink from his water bottle, and it wasn’t cold, but I didn’t care. The suns were blazing in the afternoon sky, and we were looking for some more silverware, or a plate, or anything that wasn’t a rock. Personally, I was really hoping to find a baseball. Or a dinosaur egg. That sounds dumb, I know, but there was no good reason for us to find a fork or a baseball diamond either, so why not dinosaurs too? So far, though, all we had found was rocks and sand.
Luckily, the tedium of not finding anything left plenty of time to talk.
“They say a school will open after the next harvest,” Rick said as he took back his water bottle. “I heard the Chief talking about it a few days ago.”
“Not gonna happen.” I pulled my work gloves back on and plunged the shovel back into the black sand. “They’ve been threatening to open a school since the day after Planetfall.”
“This time, I believe they mean to do it.”
“Nope. Not gonna happen. You know why? If we’re in school, who’s going to do all the work? We’re barely keeping up as it is.”
“Indeed. But the Chief believes that once we stop this search, we should be able to use some of the time for learning.”
“Well, they can try. But they can’t make me go back. I didn’t come a billion miles through space and almost die twenty times just to have to do math problems again.”
Rick was giving me a funny look. “Is school really so bad? I have to say, to sit in a room and just read things and learn – well, it sounds much nicer than what we are doing now.”
“Oh sure, they want you to think it’s about learning. But soon there will be tests, and grades, and report cards, and before you know it, you’ve lost TV privileges for a month.”
The color drained from Rick’s face. “They… they can take away the TV?” He had gotten really into watching old TV shows in Central. This week he was working his way through Law and Order. Personally, I didn’t see the appeal. There were hardly ever any zombies. But he just couldn’t get enough of any show that had people walking around a city. He always had questions about cars, trains, diners, skyscrapers, and especially stoplights. Stoplights were fascinating.
“Just wait, my friend. As soon as they start grading you, they’ll get ‘concerned’ about your performance. At least you won’t have to hear about having to bring your grades up if you want to get into college.”
“What is college?”
“Another school that you go to when you’re older.”
He leaned against his shovel and looked at me, puzzled. “So, if you do a good job in school, the reward is more school?”
“Pretty much.”
“What a curious system. Perhaps they will start a college here too.”
“At least I’d be able to get a baseball scholarship.”
We dug and talked for the rest of the afternoon, just like we had the last ten times we’d been out here. We took a break and sat on a rock, wondering what was for dinner. Okay, that’s a lie, I knew we were having rice. But I imagined what it would be like to have something else. Anyway, I was looking out across the black sand and away to the jagged obsidian mountains on the horizon when I thought I saw something move. A white wisp, out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look and didn’t see anything except a cluster of gray-white boulders. Must have been a piece of paper, or a stray plastic bag, blowing in the…
There wasn’t any wind right now. The air was almost dead calm, silent and thick and heavy.
“Don’t leave without me,” I said to R
ick. “I want to check something out.” He nodded and went back to his digging.
I trotted over to the rocks. I would probably just find a scrap of paper blown in a gust and that would be that.
My heart started beating a little faster as I approached the rocks. I was sure it was nothing, but my heart wasn’t taking any chances.
I rested my hand against the smooth side of the boulder. It was warm from the sun, like a huge bowl of soup. I took a deep breath and stepped around the corner.
There was nothing there.
No paper. No bags. No fluffy white kitties.
Just a set of footprints in the sand, heading away toward the mountains.
After the game, Hal had taken the boys back home. It was time for another visit, and the boys did not have the patience for this kind of thing. She wondered if they would come with her when they got older, or if they would always think of this as that weird thing their mom did.
Would they live to an age where they might think she was weird? She pushed the thought down, away, back into the place where thoughts like that had to hide.
The visit was one-sided, as they always were. But she felt better afterwards, as she always did. Closer. Less lonely. She just sat in the cool chamber, sometimes chatting quietly, sharing what was happening with Hal. The boys weren’t paying attention in school. Mother still wasn’t back on her feet, but her leg was doing better. When she ran out of things to say, she just sat and listened to the quiet of the chamber, and the soft echoes of voices from the settlement. She put her hand against the cool glass of the freezer, looked inside. The same face, every time. Nothing ever changed in there. Out here, it seemed like nothing ever stayed the same.
Silently, she said goodbye.
Chapter 3
“Momma, is the dog ever going to catch the bird?” A few chuckles rippled through the audience. I turned around to see who was asking. It was Mindy. She was five, she was very serious, and her big blue eyes were full of concern.
Her mother smiled patiently. “I do not know, sweetest.”
“What happens if he catches the bird?”
Emma hesitated. Maybe she didn’t want to get into the whole story of where meat comes from during movie night. “I’m sure we will find out. Let us watch the pictures, sweetest.”
Mindy nodded and went back to watching, studying the cartoon like she was preparing for an exam. We had, at most, two minutes until the next question. Everyone laughed as a huge boulder landed on the coyote, pulverizing him.
When the Hope/Freedom blazed through deep space and came to rest here, what she brought with her, along with the goats and turnips and people, was culture. Lots of culture. Stored in her data files were digital copies of every major book, painting, song, film, play, game, and poem that existed when she left Earth. Mom was always telling me to read King Lear, and learn about the original Cordelia, Goneril and Regan. I tried a couple times, but it was pretty dull, and I could just look up and see Cordelia and her sisters burning in the sky whenever I wanted anyway.
After Planetfall, just as soon as we had set up shelter, and drilled some wells, and set up cordal panels to power the water purifiers that were connected to those wells, and started preparing the soil for crops, and got the toilets working, and about thirty other things, we finally got around to the important stuff: entertainment. Within a couple months we had some basic screens connected to the media servers; within a few more, Foster and some of the engineers had taken a wall projector from the old observation deck and installed it in Central. Just a few days later, there was even sound.
Oh right, you probably don’t know what cordal panels are. They’re just like solar panels: they take in energy from a star and convert it into electric power. But since the star we are pulling it from is Cordelia and not Sol, a few of the Old Ones insisted on changing the name. None of the Young Ones raised any objection to this, since they’d never seen Sol and had no idea what a solar panel was. They were mostly confused that anyone cared what they were called at all.
We were still rolling with the seven-day week, though there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between workdays and weekends. The same stuff had to get done every day, and it’s not like anyone was going to school or working a sales job in an office. There was a lot more plumbing to do than engineering, to my dad’s constant frustration. But at some point, a few people started gathering to watch movies in Central once a week. The audience grew and grew until it was pretty much the entire colony. Most of the movies they showed pretty were dull; nobody on the movie committee seemed to have much interest in zombies or mutant sharks or anything cool. We were getting a steady dose of grownups walking in the park and talking, and dogs and dolphins teaching heartwarming life lessons. Most of the The Godfather was super boring; a couple murders were all that kept me from falling completely asleep.
None of the Young Ones had any taste in movies, it turned out. No matter what dull old thing they showed, they watched in wide-eyed wonder. They couldn’t get enough of any movie that was set on Earth. I mean, I guess it was a way for them to get flickering glimpses of a world they never knew, of their own past that they’d only heard told in stories, of cities and parties and armies and feasts. But whatever. They were still missing all the good horror movies.
Which is how we found ourselves gathered to watch a cartoon coyote chase a cartoon road-runner, only to fail and be hilariously maimed over and over again. These cartoons had become a surprise hit with the Young Ones. The kids liked them because the dog chased the chicken until rocks fell on his head; the adults liked them because they didn’t need anyone to explain the history or politics of Earth in order for them to understand anything, and also because the dog chased the chicken until rocks fell on his head. That’s funny no matter how old you are.
Zoe was sitting beside me, picking the last grains of rice out of her bowl with her fingers. “Here,” I said and slid my half-eaten bowl over to her. “I can’t eat any more rice.”
She didn’t hesitate. She grabbed my bowl and started shoveling rice into her mouth. I immediately regretted giving it to her. I was still hungry, and that was all the food I was getting tonight. I really didn’t want to eat more rice, but there’s one thing even worse than eating plain rice, and that is not eating. But if anyone on the planet was going to eat my food, I was glad it was Zoe.
“Will they be showing another movie with that Mr. Hemsworth tonight?” she asked around a mouthful of rice.
“I doubt it. Why?”
“I thought he was very funny in the last one. He hit things with a hammer.”
The cartoon ended, and the movie started. I didn’t recognize it, but it started with a man and a woman walking in a park in the fall. Looked like Manhattan. I wondered if Manhattan still existed, and if it did, who lived there.
“Come on,” I whispered to Zoe. “This looks lame. Let’s get out of here.”
“But I want to know where the man and the woman are going.”
“I gave you my rice, you owe me.”
She nodded and followed me outside. The air was cool and there was a light breeze that smelled faintly of goat. It was already dark, so we stayed on the Lawn in the blue-white glow of lights from Central and some of the living spaces. We walked slowly in front of New Upper Stoor Edge, a hulking structure made out of jagged scraps of the Hope/Freedom that was home to about a hundred families. It was finished about a month after New Lower Stoor Edge.
“Did they find any more tracks today?”
I shook my head. “No, nothing yet.” It had been about two weeks since I found that first set of footprints. We’d tried to follow them, but it was dark before we got very far; the next day, they had all been blown away by the wind. We’d searched the area each day since, but found nothing. I was starting to wish someone else would start to make the life-and-death discoveries. Each time something like this happened, it only made people more suspicious that I was making things up for attention.
We walked quietly past the
Enchanted Forest, a cluster of foot-tall pine saplings that were going to be the Exmass trees for future celebrations. Right now, they were still too small to be decorated much. Fortunately, we didn’t have much in the way of ornaments. So that worked out pretty well.
“Zoe, you don’t think… You don’t think I made up the footprints, do you?”
“And why would I think you made up the footprints?”
“Everyone else thinks I made them up because I can’t live without being the center of attention.”
Zoe thought carefully about this. Her face went dark as we passed into a shadow. When we entered the light again, she was very serious. “That is a very strong argument. You have convinced me. You are definitely making the whole thing up for attention.” She couldn’t help letting half a smile slip through.
“Oh, that’s how it is?” I started poking her on the arm. “Pay attention to me! Pay attention now!” She laughed and ran away, and her laugh bounced around the silent colony and drifted off into the cold purple-black sky. Her hair drifted behind her like tendrils of mist on a foggy morning, glowing in the electric light.
When I caught up to her, she promised she would pay attention to me, but only if I stopped the poking.
“I accept your offer,” I said triumphantly.
“So, you admit you are after attention, Tom the Old One. I knew it.”
I shrugged. “You caught me fair and square.”
We walked and talked for a while longer. Eventually we sat on a boulder in the middle of the Lawn and looked up at the stars.
We heard voices coming from Central. People were leaving, scattering in little groups to go back to their rooms for the night. It looked like Mindy hadn’t made it to the end – she was sound asleep in her dad’s arms.
“Did they end movie night early?” I asked.
“Perhaps the movie ended.”
I didn’t see how that was possible; we hadn’t been out here that long.