Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation

by Phoebe Wagner

  “Check your helmet,” Ibra said again. It was strange to see that familiar mouth moving and yet hear nothing except through the earpiece settled awkwardly just beside my ear in the helmet.

  I checked my helmet. I checked everything else, too. The scanner on the helmet read me off the data on the gloves, the collar my helmet fit into, the air purification pump. The systems display on the screen of my helmet was our only advanced warning of a sudden weather shift that could end the mission. I was determined to know it well.

  The doors of the Dome opened. Water blew in sheets; I could see just enough out the window to see it splatter across the pane and keep rolling.

  I suppressed a visceral shudder, a sudden fear of being beaten to death under the downpour. The transport shift lifted, engines humming. Suddenly we were off the ground, sailing out into that torrential wind and rain. My stomach dropped as the ship pitched sideways, throwing us against the belts, and then righted itself. I could see weather-beaten trees below us; they had looked so different in the laboratories, or the test fields. Flash-flood rivers ran into collection pools. It was only a flight of ten minutes between the Dome and the Burned City, and I gripped the edge of my seat nervously. Inside the Burned City, a dome would protect Katharos and the students from the elements. I would have no shelter from the bruising rain and buffeting winds.

  “What do you think?” Ibra asked me on a private channel, leaning over as if I would hear beyond the helmet instead of through it. “Someday Katharos will walk this path instead of flying it and go to the Burned City whenever desire arises.”

  “No I won’t,” Katharos replied, “do you know how heavy my equipment is? We’ll be flying skiffs, thank you.”

  We all laughed, and that felt almost normal, as the ship tilted and swayed in the wind. If the ship was struggling against the wind, how would any of us make headway? Maybe Dawith was right and I was too young for tree planting after all.

  Ten minutes we struggled in the wind and sheeting rain until the heavy transport slid underneath the shelter of the Dome of the Burned City. I peered through the water-streaked windows, desperate to see anything. There was next to nothing to look at; the city had been burned thousands of years ago and nobody landed heavy ships on top of valuable ruins. I saw only grasses growing wild, blown every direction by the rotating engines, as Katharos and the archeology students prepared to drive the skiff off and disembark.

  As Katharos stood up next to me, I reached out to catch Katharos’ hand. “I love you,” I said, not caring that everyone could hear us on the public channel. Once the transport ship pulled out of the dome, the wind would make interference a problem with communication. My parents vanished every time dust turned to rain. I was used to nothing but silence for days or sometimes weeks, alone with all the reports the datapads could stream back whenever a connection could be established.

  “It’ll only be a few days,” Katharos said, less of a promise than a hope. It could be less than twenty-four hours, if the weather didn’t hold, and there was no way to get the archeologists home if the ships couldn’t fly. “Soon you’ll be doing a different kind of digging.”

  I watched my parents embrace, sensible enough to say their goodbyes on a private channel. There was the possibility—however faint—that my parents might be saying goodbye for the last time. I could scarcely begin to count the things that had the potential to go wrong; I had counted them up as a kid, every time they left me in the hands of a friend from the archeology department who did not go out on expeditions. A suit failure. A sudden dust storm. A flash flood. A dome failure in the Burned City. A ship crashing. We all could die at any moment on such expeditions. I comforted myself with the reminder that sudden death was just as possible among the Lotus-canals and waterways—falling in and drowning, an environmental accident, the dreaded Dome failure.

  I checked my gloves again. The screen in my helmet said they were in perfect condition and helpfully listed every single person who had ever worn them before me, none of whom I had ever heard of. I thought of Ibra’s broken hand, held together with synthetic bone and skin, hidden beneath the glove, and wondered what the sensor would say about that hand.

  As Katharos piloted the skiff off the transport ship and steered it clear of the doors, I tried not to worry. Meanwhile, we rebalanced the ship for the strong winds outside. Dawith and Ibra argued about a plan that was the exact same plan until Dawith could take credit for it. Another twenty minutes by flight would reach the far edge of the Green Belt, where Ibra had prepared the ground for these trees on a previous journey, cut short by a weather change.

  My primary job was to watch the weather; we could not rely on satellites and without someone watching every horizon, the weather analysis would not reliably run on its own. The rain might last days or hours, and the satellites wouldn’t tell us which with any reliability, depending on how fast a dust storm brewed.

  I watched out the rain-streaked windows, looking at Ibra’s life work, shared with Katharos and Dawith. The artificial dunes broke up the Desert; the windbreak between the Dome and the Desert, the rain soaked grasses, the trees and the pools supporting them. Two or three temporary shelters shimmered bright electric blue against the landscape; encampments of Sunborn goatherds and shepherds who drifted from oasis to oasis to feed and water their flocks, picked the fruit Dawith and Ibra had spent years experimenting into sustainable crop. Ibra’s voice echoed in memory: It is the nature of the Sunborn to live under the sky, even when the wind blows dark. We must give them lives, too. I had never asked what had driven Ibra to leave the homeland, to live in the Dome and never see a real sun or the stars. But I didn’t have to ask. We had left the answer behind us in the Burned City.

  §

  The transport ship came down in wet sand with a crunch. As the crew drove the diggers and other equipment out into the sand, I checked my suit one last time. The first rain falling on me felt almost as strange as the sand underfoot; the readings on air quality flooded the visual interface of my helmet at once. The air was breathable, just hot, and like the rain, full of contaminants I had only a few hours to take in without damaging myself. The water hit me. Heavy, strange pellets of sensation rolled off my suit and made an erratic tapping noise against my helmet. I engaged the heaviest weight of my boots and dragged myself through the sand towards the windbreak Ibra had made some journey ago. Water was pooling there, waiting for us to come and plant.

  Dawith and Ibra were arguing, which was normal. Dawith could not come into our house without arguing with somebody; I thought maybe it was a hobby. I listened with half an ear: where to put the trees, how to make the grass take to the wet soil, as the two marked up the map that overlaid my vision seamlessly with where to put things and in what order.

  A minute or two after watching dots moving on the map, I decided to do the one thing I had trained to do my entire life. I knelt by the water, feeling the wet sand crunch under my knees through the skin-tight suit, and prayed. I whispered the words, not wanting to interrupt the public argument. There was no escaping except by turning off the public channel.

  I shut my eyes to avoid distraction and prayed the words Ibra had taught me, the religion of the homeland I had never seen; to the Face of God who lived in the water, in the rain, in the Desert itself, in the trees we were about to plant and the grasses we were about to lay down.

  Other students knelt by me, repeating the prayers of the Domeborn, Katharos’ prayers. I joined those, too. I knew all the prayers. I loved the sound of them and had learned many over the years; the prayers of the homeland, the prayers of my home, even prayers to Faces of God no one remembered in the Dome anymore.

  Over the sound of Dawith shouting grumpily about the correct way to plant a date palm, we prayed. Trees were about to root into the earth, about to become part of the Desert, about to whisper underground to each other in the divine language of trees. Birds would flock in the trees. Animals would come to eat. Strangers would pitch their tents alongside the water. The
students and I consecrated the holy ground, to the Faces of God that would come in all these forms, and others unknown to us.

  Dawith and Ibra finally stopped arguing. They came to the water that rippled with wind and rain, to pray with us.

  “We’ll be planting the trees first and then laying out the grasses,” Dawith said, as if it was not the idea Ibra had suggested from the beginning. “Luyn, make yourself useful, mark the places the trees will go so the digger can make space to root them in.”

  I walked along the track the visual display of my helmet laid out for me, stomping large circles in the places where the digging machine would have to go into the wet ground. In the shelter of the liman, the wind was not so strong as it had been in the air. I was almost accustomed to being buffed around, gently bending my knees and swaying when a particularly strong gust came from an unexpected direction, and the spray of water that followed.

  The digging machine drove out of the transport ship to follow after my footsteps. Some students set up an emergency shelter. Others slowly moved the trees out of the transport ship, singing the hymn of planting to the trees. At last they would progress from root balls to things in the ground, interconnected with all other living things.

  I wondered if the archeologists sang hymns in the holy places of our ancestors.

  After marking out the digging places with my boots, I disengaged the heaviest setting of my boots and skidded across the wet sand up onto the artificial dune my parent had built. I scanned the horizon, ignoring all the visual commands and instructions flashing past me as I focused on the weather in all four directions. The edge of the rain was farther than my human eyes could see, but the scanner knew things I didn’t, and my whole job was to make sure we would know how long this rainstorm among the cycling storms might last. “We have six hours before the storm breaks!” I called through the communal frequency, watching every other direction. Six hours for us, a few more for Katharos, safe in the shelter of the dome that protected the Burned City. The satellites showed multiple storms, coming in waves. There would be another chance to plant the grass down.

  I slid back down the liman and tried to figure out what would be the most help. I decided to focus on the emergency tent. A dust-storm following after such heavy rain was unlikely, but not impossible. Even if you survived being smothered by the dust, the contamination in the dust clouds would poison you slowly. I had read about that excruciating death hundreds of times. I had read about everything that could kill you. The terrible diseases that followed exposure to the sun or the rain, I knew well. The old wars had left the Desert a wasteland and the waters poisoned. Only trees and the sophisticated filtration from Ibra’s homeland could slowly reclaim them.

  The students and I set up the tent, and I scanned over and over that it was safe. Every opening was secure and closed correctly, airtight. The emergency rations were up to standard, every part of the medical pack was present. The air inside was purified, and I could have taken my helmet off, but I was getting used to it, and the constant stream of information of what everyone was doing and where they were was comforting, if overwhelming.

  “You don’t have to be so paranoid,” our medic Layladin said wryly. After the disaster of Ibra’s ship, and the Lost Eight, there were always contingencies. Always. “Everything was checked before we got here.”

  “I like knowing,” I said, shrugging a little. I left Layladin and went back out to take in the weather, sliding my way back up the liman. It was easier now that the wind had died down. A good number of trees had already gone in, and the grass was rolling out on schedule for a six-hour timetable. The chatter of labor was just soothing noise in my ear as I watched the weather. I could see the edge of the stormhead, now, and the sunlight beyond it. It was the first time I had ever seen the real sun. I stopped short, watching the light shine behind the cloudhead. I had seen the artificial sun rise and set so many times I had expected the real sun to look the same. It didn’t, though; it was a ruddy pollution red behind the gray stormhead, strange and surreal, beautiful and menacing at once.

  “Look up,” I said. Some of the Domeborn laughed—confused, delighted, a little afraid—and I heard Ibra laughing too. It was hard to believe the surreal sunlight could wound us, but I knew it wouldn’t take long. I paid attention again to the weather readings. “Timeline’s shortened. We have a half-hour before sunlight hits.”

  Sunlight, as beautiful as it was in a distant shimmer, meant no more work. It was too dangerous, with the sun heating the poisonous vapors in the air and the way it would sear flesh on even brief contact. Even the Sunborn herders wouldn’t move their flocks by day; daylight was for the protection of the tents. But the rain didn’t always fall at night, and once the rain stopped falling, we would have to wait until nightfall and hope the ground was still wet enough for planting, or wait for another storm to roll in some hours from now. These trees had been growing for years to be planted in this season’s rains.

  I slid back down into the wet sand, and hurried my way to help with the planting. Trying to speed the process wasn’t easy. I poured fertilizer and shouted tree health readings as thick young trees went into the Desert sand, packed down and the wet sand covered. The trees were hard to move and too important to be left in the hands of a machine that would damage the branches or scratch the tree trunks. We had been working in teams of four; now we were down to two or three per tree, to get everything in the ground fast enough.

  As Dawith and I worked side by side on one of the last two trees, the rain slowed to a drizzle, and then it stopped. “We have minutes!” Dawith shouted, hands steadying a tree trunk as I desperately shoveled sand over top of it. The professor’s gloves flashed in front of my helmet, the display screen reading out messages.

  Damaged, the screen warned in sun-red as Dawith darted off to the next of the tree trunks. The diagnostic ran almost faster than I could read it. Exterior lining cracked.

  “Professor!” I shouted. Dawith ignored me as I ran behind, leaving the tree only half packed in, the student who had been working the ground on the other side bellowing in confusion, trying to finish what we’d left unfinished. “Professor!” I repeated as Dawith tried to get the last tree properly planted, hands grasping the round acacia trunk. “Your gloves!”

  “Not now!” Dawith shouted. “The clouds are about to break!” To the student struggling to stomp the ground around the tree, Dawith shouted, “Get inside, Akila, I’ll finish it!”

  I shoved my way in front of the professor, stomping hard on the bright orange boots while engaging the heaviest gravity setting. The jolt of pain got some attention at last. “Your gloves,” I repeated, almost screaming, “are cracked! They won’t protect you from the sun!”

  The clouds were beginning to part overhead. “Everyone inside!” Ibra shouted. “Dawith, leave it. You heard Luyn. Leave it!” The work was unfinished; not every tree had been covered properly. I grabbed the protective sheeting from Dawith’s hands. “I’ll finish.” Our voices over the communal channel were a confusing cacophony of instructions, last directives, how to keep the trees from withering, frantic attempts to cover the ground, footsteps in the wet sand making chaotic trails. I kept stomping the earth into place, watching the clouds slowly stretch out into a thin film between us and the bright light beyond.

  My helmet wouldn’t stop counting the seconds to direct sunlight contact. As the heavy sheeting to protect the vulnerable tree roots was self-anchoring, I only needed to spread it across the wet earth around the tree and it would hold itself in place. I threw the sheeting down, heard the weights engage. Everyone else was already running. They moved so slow, their boots set to stomp the earth down with weight. “Change your boot settings!” I shouted, and I let my boots lift me along as I raced to join them. Ibra stood at the door of the shelter, determined to be the last.

  The sun broke from behind the clouds, dazzling me with its intensity. The light blinded me as it caught against the pool of water, illuminating into a giant ruddy mirr
or just as I skidded into the tent. The last sign of it I saw was orange-red light glaring bright off all the wet sand, Ibra’s wet helmet glowing like fire in the sudden flush of light as the door shut. The pneumatic seal sucked in tight and left us with familiar artificial yellow-white lighting.

  In the tent, Layladin had stripped the gloves off Dawith’s hands. “Soaked,” the medic scolded, running a scanner across the professor’s hands. “How didn’t you notice? Didn’t you check your suit before you put it on?”

  “I thought the wetness inside was sweat,” Dawith said, hands ruddy and swollen out of the gloves. I had never seen chemical burns before and tried not to stare. Indomitable Dawith was apologizing. I had not seen Dawith so distressed since Ibra’s disappearance, and that had been so long ago sometimes I felt I had imagined it. “With the shortened timetable, there was no room for delays. I thought—”

  Layladin cut Dawith off. “We’ve caught it just in time. A course of medication and rest and your hands should recover from the pollutants in the rain. You can’t go out in those gloves again. They’re worse than rubbish. Completely contaminated. You’re lucky. You’ll have to consult the rest of this run; if I catch you lifting anything. . . .”

  “This work is too important,” Dawith replied, some of the old bluster back, as if the suggestion offended. “I’ll stay inside and run diagnostics. I didn’t leave my family and green trees for the work to be interrupted before it’s finished.”