Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation

by Phoebe Wagner

  Her door slid open silently and Heather and Thatcher McCoy stepped into the room. Grace moved forward to shake hands, but found herself pulled into a tight hug.

  “I’m glad he’s had you as his teacher,” Heather whispered in her ear. “He’s always going on about you in his letters.”

  Grace pulled back and looked at Michael’s father, a tough, grim-looking man. Grace held out her hand and Thatcher shook it. His eyes were wet and he was blinking rapidly.

  “I’ve been so lucky to have Michael in my class,” Grace began. Before she could say more, her voice dissolved into sobs. Suddenly they were all crying, standing there in the entryway. When the tears subsided, Grace ushered them into her sitting room.

  “I’m sorry for that. I should be comforting you. Not the other way around.”

  Thatcher, calmer now that he had cried, waved her apology away.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Heather said. “I’m glad he’s had someone who loved him nearby when we couldn’t be.”

  Grace seized that sentiment as a natural segue. “Well, he never needs to be away from you again.” She stopped and bit her cheek to keep from losing it again.

  “Everything has already been approved. You can take him back to New Paris tonight so that he can spend whatever time he has in comfort. I’m happy to help you figure out the best way to explain the truth about the planet and the academy and, well, everything else. I’ll tell you from experience, there’s a real possibility that he’ll hate the messenger, so I’m happy to tell him myself, if that’s what you prefer. Just let me know how I can help.”

  The McCoys exchanged a look. Thatcher nodded at Heather, who said, “We appreciate your offer, Ms. Swenson. But we’re not going to tell him. He’s only got a year left. He doesn’t need to spend that hating us and knowing what he’ll be missing.”

  Grace started to speak, but Heather held up a hand to stop her.

  “We’ve thought about this a lot. It would be different if he had one healthy year left. He doesn’t. He’s going to be weak, in and out of the hospital. We’ll stay here, at the academy, for as long as he has left. We don’t want him to know—ever.”

  Heather reached out and put her hand on Grace’s knee. “I know this is hard for you to accept. You would make a different choice. But I really do hope that you will come and visit him as often as you can. He loves you very much.”

  Heather nodded to her husband, and they stood up to leave. Grace was speechless, her mind racing. He has a whole year left, maybe two, and they’re going to make him spend it in this metal coffin? She knew she should respect their wishes, but the thought made her sick.

  “He deserves a chance to feel the wind in his hair!”

  Michael’s parents stopped in the doorway. Thatcher turned and spoke for the first time. “You’re right. But he has enough pain ahead of him without knowing that he spent his whole life down here for nothing.”

  §

  Grace sat staring into space for hours after the McCoys left. She was startled from her reverie when her seldom-used phone rang. Forrest’s worried face filled the screen. He had a five-day beard and mud smeared on his cheek.

  “I got a radio message saying you needed me ASAP. What’s going on?”

  “I’m fine, honey. It’s . . . one of my students is dying.”

  Talking to Forrest usually calmed her. But Grace found herself getting angrier and angrier as she recounted her conversation with the McCoys. “They’re just wrong!” she shouted as she paced around the room. “He should see the ocean; he should feel the sun on his shoulders; he should ride a horse. There’s still time!”

  Forrest looked troubled.

  “I agree. That’s what I would do if it were our kid.”

  Grace’s heart skipped a beat at those last two words. For a split-second, she almost told him about the baby then and there. But she decided it would be too cruel if it turned out to be a false alarm. She would go to her OB first thing in the morning and tell him when she knew for sure.

  “I could just tell Michael,” she said quietly. “If I told him the truth there would be no taking it back. Then Heather and Thatcher would have no reason to keep him down here.”

  Forrest recoiled as if she had struck him.

  “You know you can’t do that.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” Grace resumed her pacing. “He’s terminal, so he’s already been cleared to learn the truth. I wouldn’t be breaking any laws. Hell, I don’t think I’d be breaking any school rules. Why shouldn’t I?” she repeated.

  “You know why.”

  Grace looked away and crossed her arms.

  “He’s not our son. And how would Michael feel if he found out that his parents intended to keep the truth from him?”

  Grace wasn’t persuaded. She would make sure Michael never knew that she had ignored his parents’ wishes. Sure, his parents might hate her for a while, but they would forget about that when they saw their son walking on a beach at sunset. Besides, Heather and Thatcher didn’t really know Michael; they didn’t know how curious and kind and thoughtful he was. They hadn’t watched over him every day as he grew up; she had.

  “Just sleep on it, okay? I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  §

  Grace went to her doctor before sunrise the next morning. Afterward, she went straight to Michael. She knew she should slow down and think things over, but after her appointment, she found that she couldn’t stay away. She loved the boy like he was her own child, and she needed to see him.

  He looked exactly the same. That surprised her, until she realized that only three days had passed since his collapse. Could that be right? she wondered. It seemed like a lifetime.

  When Michael saw her walk in, he tossed aside his tablet and sat up in bed. “Hi, Ms. Swenson,” he piped, smiling.

  “Hello, Michael. How are you?” She moved to sit on the edge of his bed.

  “Oh fine, I guess. I feel a little dizzy when I get up, but that’s all. I know it’s going to get worse.” He trailed off and looked down. Grace reached out and brushed a lock of hair out of his face.

  “What are you reading?”

  “Huck Finn. You were right—it’s great! I just got to the part where Huck and Jim miss the Ohio River in the fog.” He chattered happily for a while, describing his favorite parts of the story and what he would have done differently, if he were Huck.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I can send you some other books I bet you’ll like.”

  It’s time, Grace told herself. She took a deep breath, steeling herself, but then her voice died in her throat. She had given the speech hundreds of times—she didn’t even need to rehearse before graduations anymore—but now she couldn’t find the words to begin. She looked down at her hands clenched in her lap.

  “And we can still play chess, right, Ms. Swenson?”

  Grace looked up at his face, open and hopeful, despite everything that had happened to him.

  “Every day.”

  She pulled him into a hug. “Call me Grace,” she whispered.

  §

  Forrest was waiting for her when she returned to the apartment. They hugged, and then she flopped down in her favorite overstuffed chair. She felt completely drained.

  “Did you tell him?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  Forrest nodded. “Why not?”

  “I realized I was only thinking about myself—what I wanted. That’s the kind of selfish thinking I’ve spent my whole life fighting.”

  Forrest furrowed his brow. “You knew that yesterday. What changed your mind?”

  “I guess you persuaded me.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, that would be a first. Come on, tell me.”

  Grace sighed. One of the things she loved about Forrest was that he would never say I told you so. One of the things she hated about him was that he wanted an explanation for everything. She knew he wouldn’t stop digging until he got the truth or something close to it.

  “It was
n’t a logical process. I just realized that when you love someone and you know something that will hurt them and telling them won’t change anything—”

  She choked back a sob as she put her hand on her stomach—her stomach that would never swell with new life—and then forced her voice back under control.

  “—you protect them, because you love them. It’s the right thing to do, even if it means lying to them.”

  Forrest knelt down in front of Grace and put his arms around her. She allowed herself a moment to imagine that the doctor had told her something else. She pictured Forrest’s disbelief, followed by his wild, barking laugh, and the gleeful calls to their parents. Then she took a deep shuddering breath and closed a door in her heart.

  I’ll never tell him, she decided. It would be her gift to him to carry this hurt alone. She knew she could do it; she was no stranger to secrecy or to pain. Besides, she didn’t have time to grieve. She had work to do, the most important work in the world.

  The Desert, Blooming

  Lev Mirov

  The first time I heard rain, it sluiced down the sides of the Dome door like the wet spray of a root mister, if a root mister could pummel you flat. The sound was nothing like a drumbeat. Oh, it was repetitive, but not the kind of repetition you could build a melody on top of—erratic, windblown, and dripping like a faulty pipe letting out too much water in the botanical garden.

  Over the sound of the rain, my parent laughed. “What do you think, Luyn?” Ibra called to me, stepping into one of the bright saffron suits that would protect us all from the acidic elements outside. “Ready to feel rain for the first time?”

  I had read about rain, watched recordings of my professors and mentors suit up in their emerald suits to prepare for the onslaught that made the flight to the Burned City possible. At nineteen, I wasn’t sure I was ready. But I was tall enough to fit into a suit, big enough to wear a helmet, heavy enough not to be blown over by the torrential winds. I had trained my whole life to leave someday. Ibra thought I was ready to put trees down, and I wanted to live up to my parent’s expert estimation.

  I was used to water. The City of Lotuses is one of the wettest places in the world. Its endless maze of channels and waterways and time-perfected ecosystem grow enough food to provide for the other Dome Cities of Tumry. The wind and sand, the poisonous particulates in the rain, and the threat of the sun vapors worried me.

  Ibra had been born under the sun and the trees in the east where the Desert had become grassland full of trees and oases built over hundreds of years so the trees slowed the endless wind and the rain formed pools and the air was cleansed. I had never seen the grasslands and the orchards of Ibra’s home, except in images or the calls from Ibra’s parents. They always asked if Ibra was ever coming home, if I would make religious pilgrimage to the ancient city Ibra had come from.

  So far, since coming to the Dome, Ibra had only left for these missions to plant trees in the rain. I had never been out at all.

  Katharos, black hair plaited in tight rows to keep the helmet snug, was suiting up in the emerald green survival suit of archeologists for the trip down into the Burned City. I was too proud to admit fear in front of both my parents so I only shrugged at Ibra, as if to say, rain’s rain, though it spooked me even more than the occasional sound of dust storms sweeping against the enviro-skin of the Dome.

  “Check that crate again,” Katharos said to my lucky older classmate Maryim, who was going down with the archeologists. “If the skiff isn’t loaded just right we’ll topple over in the first strong gust and waste precious time reloading.”

  Part of me wished I was going into the Burned City to take samples of the ruins; Katharos had a crew of the best students to unearth a trash pit and dig for seeds and other samples of biomatter remains. I dreamed of seeing the remnants of the shrines, especially the preservations of the Shrine of the Cup-bearer, the face of God who had given us medicine, my particular interest and my sworn patron.

  But they were all years ahead of me in their studies. I had only just begun the practicals for archaeological work. I was going with Ibra to put trees in the ground, while the soil was wet and the trees would take root. I had never seen Ibra at work outside, only in the laboratories, grafting tree stock and hybridizing fruits and seeding the wild grasses grown in the labs from the things Katharos found in waste pits to see how they would take in field conditions. Unlike me, the students were going for credit. Katharos took things out of the ground, Ibra put things in. I wondered, sometimes, how two such opposed disciplines had met and made a life—made me, carefully cradled for the gestational months in a tube not so different from the one that Ibra sprouted fruit trees and shrubs in, save for size.

  “Come on, Luyn, check your helmet,” Ibra said to me cheerfully. Ibra’s voice was louder in the helmet earpiece than in the enormous hangar. The Dome would open, rain would wet these grounds, soft underfoot with mosses that could tolerate the irregular conditions of loading and unloading and purify the air and rain that came in. The best pilot in the Dome of Lotuses would fly us out the gate and drop the archeologists off underneath the sheltered, smaller dome of the Burned City, then turn to the Green Belt.

  The enormous ship slowly filled up with trees and seed beds and archaeological equipment. The air inside was breathable, but accidents happened.

  When I was still a small child, a pilot lost control of the ship in the wind. For days Katharos and I had mourned, inconsolable as Dawith ran scenario after scenario trying to convince the Dome pilots to send someone out to look for possible survivors, or, at the worst, recover some of the precious trees that had been Ibra and Dawith’s shared labor in the laboratory. Only Ibra reappeared on the far edge of the Burned Dome when the ship finally launched. Only Ibra had suited up early and worn a helmet during the crash, and still the suit had not protected Ibra’s hand from permanent damage after exposure to the elements.

  Sometimes at night I heard Ibra scream from the other bedroom in piercing agony. I had always known what that was about. There were new rules, now. We all were fully suited inside the carriers. The new rules had never stopped the screaming.

  The Sunborn are not like the Domeborn, Katharos had said, when Ibra returned and sought medical treatment, just as when Ibra did something not done in the Dome or was being recalcitrant. But I knew what Katharos had meant: I would not have survived it.

  My parents loved each other, and perhaps because the Sunborn have a resilience Dome-families have lost, they chose to make me in Ibra’s image, using that genetic stock as the root to graft me onto, a hybrid. The choice had been controversial at the time. Nobody called it controversial now.

  “Are you sure your kid can really help us with planting?” Professor Dawith from outside the Dome asked, looking at me with a familiar sneer as I fastened my suit up all the way and secured the helmet in place, double-checking the gloves to leave nothing exposed to the gritty sand or the ferocious water. I felt my stomach plummet. This again. I was too young, everyone said.

  “That kid,” Ibra said, prickly with authority that came whenever challenged, “is strong enough to lift trees and knows more about the landscape and what grows here than they ever taught you in school at the same age, Dawith. Do you want your trees planted on time or not?”

  I squared my shoulders. “If you don’t like it,” I said, trying to sound as tough as I could, “you could always try lifting the trees yourself instead of flirting with the pilot while the rest of us are working. I understand, of course, senior professors aren’t expected to do heavy labor, but with the harvest coming in, it’s down to every strong hand, and I have two.”

  That wasn’t going to endear me to Dawith, who had been Ibra’s rival and professional colleague a long time, when they’d both come to the Dome as outsiders. But Dawith had never really liked me, and I had never liked Dawith (intruding on important work, Dawith once said, not knowing I was in earshot).

  Dawith only shot me a surly look and said no more. I was acc
ustomed to Dawith being surly until someone had pulled out a bottle of liquor, when Dawith’s friendlier side emerged, and I got to hear about what they did in the south where the other green belt was being pushed forward by Dawith’s relatives.

  “Stop, the skiff’s unbalanced,” Katharos shouted. The student landed the skiff just feet from the enormous transport ship. “Do it wrong, do it twice,” Katharos snapped, clearly grumpy. “We’re not putting that thing in there until there’s no chance of tipping. Get it right this time. Use your pads to calculate weights if you have to. They’re integrated into your helmets. Use every part of the suit.”

  I went to help with the reloading of the skiff. My parents were talking with their microphones off, side by side arguing about something: maybe the correct way to load skiffs into the transport ship or something else that would make or break the flight. It was reassuring to see them their normal, decisive, argumentative selves. Ibra’s gloved hand was laced tightly around Katharos’ dark green one, as if pressure could sink through the thick protective suits and give them physical contact again.

  The other students didn’t hide annoyance when I calculated the ideal weight distribution of the skiff, but they listened. Everyone thought I was there because of who my parents were, but I would prove them wrong and pull my own weight.

  Once we had settled questions of weight and loading, we all strapped into the transport ship. Through the air purifier in my helmet I could smell the green of the date palms and the grasses we would root into the limans Ibra’s team had constructed on some previous journey. The ground was ready for desalinification, for filtration through planting, to turn the Desert into a blooming place that herds might travel from oasis to oasis.

  I knew Ibra’s fevered descriptions of the project by heart. Someday the Green Belt to the south and our Green Belt would meet. We could drive the Desert back until the sand-winds no longer ravaged the coastline and the great river could sustain farming life again. Someday we would abandon Domes entirely, Ibra said, except as places of sanctuary in emergency conditions. I didn’t really believe it was possible, but the modest proposal of windbreaks Ibra had come to work on now promised far more, once joined to Katharos’ expertise on the ancient plants that had grown here once and Dawith’s work with hybridization and rootstocks that would survive the wind and rain alike.