by Max Carver
Bartley, his ride home, was already throwing back shots with his rowdy miner friends, already getting blotto for the night. Eric recognized his chance to escape and took it.
Eric left the way they'd come in, making his way down the steep, litter-choked stairs. He trudged through the usual slurry of waste in the road, past crowded bars and clusters of people whispering outside them.
He stopped at the window of a trailer-bodega lashed to the canyon wall with steel cables, where he bought a couple of burritos and a bottle of Penguin Pop. The cola reminded him of home, of birthday parties as a kid.
As he finally approached his own apartment building, the screen in his pocket buzzed. He checked it, hoping it wasn't Naomi or Hagen summoning him back to work—or worse, Bartley drunk-calling to demand he return to the bar.
Instead, he saw a text message from his apartment building's management center. He wondered whether he'd forgotten to pay rent, but when he opened it, he saw that he had a package waiting. An actual parcel of physical mail.
That could only mean one thing—mail from home. Maybe one of Suzette's gift packages. Usually she sent a video of herself along with it.
Suddenly energized, he hurried toward the ugly concrete-and-waste-metal building, eager to see her again.
Chapter Four
The apartment complex had a low concrete shed with a rusty tin roof that it called the “community center.” It consisted of a couple of vending machines and a screen where you could lease an apartment from the automated system or try to argue with it about your rent.
He headed for the ten metal lockers at the back, used when tenants had deliveries larger than their mail slots allowed. He pressed his thumb against the scanner for locker 7, as the text message had directed. The locker beeped and the square metal door popped open.
Eric knew it was from her as soon as he saw the brown package decorated with a couple of glittering heart and star stickers. The first package Suzette had sent him, about a month after he'd arrived on Caldera, had glowed with overlapping animated stickers of thumping hearts, shooting stars, and teddy bears giving a thumbs-up. It looked like her arts and crafts supplies had dwindled, or maybe her university classes were getting tougher and more demanding now that she was a sophomore.
He grabbed the box and darted outside, up the narrow concrete steps two at a time, then up a steep ladder. The ladder was loosely bolted into the canyon wall and rattled as he climbed.
His apartment waited at the top, one of several of old cargo-drop containers that had been welded together and repurposed into low-quality rentable rooms. The main lock to his apartment opened with his thumbprint, and then he unlocked the extra padlock he'd added himself for when he was away. It was a rough neighborhood. Rough town and planet, too.
Inside, the apartment was just a single rectangular gray room, unless you counted the booth-sized water module in the corner, which was basically a shower stall with a sink and a toilet. One vent in the corner filtered the smoggy volcanic air from outside, rendering it somewhat breathable.
He hastily tore open the package and dumped its contents onto his low single bed, eager to see what Suzette had sent him from home.
There was a Lightpoint University t-shirt, with their mascot, the firefly. Lightpoint was the oldest, largest city on Gideon, with just over a million people, the planet's capital. It was also home to the planet's largest university, founded a century earlier, well before the war.
A dozen pink-frosted cookie hearts spilled onto the bed, vacuum-sealed for the long shipping journey, from wormhole to wormhole, star system to star system. It was a major expense to send something as simple as sugar and flour across the galaxy, but seeing the cookies warmed his heart.
He ripped open the vacuum seal and the sugar-cookie scent immediately took him back home, to warm fires on cold Christmas nights when the snow had piled high in the fields. One Christmas Eve night when they were fourteen, he'd taken Suzette riding on his big gray Percheron horse, Ranger. His family kept huge draft horses; their size was necessary to get the attention of the native Gideon devilhorn, hoofed beasts that dwarfed the buffalo of Earth. His family owned a herd of them.
They'd galloped through snowfall, thousands of white flakes streaking past on either side as they raced across the moonlit prairie.
“It's like stars,” she'd whispered. “Like flying away through the stars. Go faster!”
They'd made out pretty heavily that night, at least by Suzette's prim religious standards. Riding the giant, obedient horse had made him confident, had made him feel strong and fast, instead of stiff-legged and slow. He was always closer with the horses than his brothers had been for just that reason, spending hours riding alone across the prairie.
Now, alone in his metal apartment, he shook off the memories conjured by the sugar-cookie smell. He bit into one of them as he lifted out the most important item in the box. It was a little square, just large enough to check his thumbprint, decorated with a cartoon rabbit placing a carrot-shaped envelope into a mailbox.
Eric pressed the square against one wall of his apartment, the one that had been spray-coated with a digital display screen. When he wasn't actively using it, ads for nearby business floated quietly but noticeably on the wall.
Now the wall turned solid blue from floor to ceiling. It flickered, and then Suzette appeared, more than double life size. Her strawberry-blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore a shirt that would have scandalized her mother back home—it looked like a grid of shoelaces and strings, leaving most of her torso bare. She sat cross-legged on a bed in her dorm room.
“Hey, Eric!” She smiled and waved. Her blue eyes reminded him of the bright skies back home, so different from the constant low volcanic smog of Caldera. “Hope you're doing great up there. Sorry it's been a while since my last message. It's so busy here! But hey, big news—look at this.” She turned around to display a firefly tattoo on her back, glowing the bright green luciferase color the insects used to attract mates. Its wings beat, and it flew a few centimeters up her back, then went dark and drifted back down again. “Cool, right? I'll have to hide it from Mom. She'll freak if she sees it.”
“Yeah, she will,” Eric agreed. He wasn't sure what he thought of the tattoo, but he was drinking in the sight of her nearly bare back, her low-slung yoga pants. He wished they were home again at that moment, kissing and pawing at each other in her hayloft.
Suzette couldn't hear his response, of course. Travel between star systems was only possible through a system of wormholes humans had discovered, built by an unknown civilization that seemed to have vanished. The wormhole system was a relic of a time long before humans, like the ancient Roman roads and aqueducts that remained in Europe thousands of years after the empire collapsed. That was the clichéd example, the one all the teachers used. Eric didn't know much else about the Romans, but he sure heard a lot about their roads.
Each wormhole gate could only connect to a few other star systems, but each system seemed to have at least two gates. Each star system with gates was a small node in what appeared to be a vast network all along the spiral arm, and perhaps reaching even farther, to distant points in the galaxy.
Communication between star systems was slow and unwieldy, dependent on an unreliable and convoluted system of orbital relay routers positioned near the wormholes. Back in Sol system, where humans had originated, a signal had to travel for hours from the router at the Saturn wormhole gate to the one at the wormhole gate orbiting Neptune. Signals could take days to cross multiple systems.
A voice call from Caldera to Gideon was out of the question; every time he asked Suzette a question, he'd be waiting weeks for her reply. Signals broadcast into an open wormhole often vanished anyway, never even emerging on the other side.
Real-time casual communication between star systems wasn't an option, so interstellar communication tended to be in large chunks, like letters or videos, rather than the quick exchanges of voice calls and texting.
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br /> On the screen wall, the giant version of Suzette was still peering over her shoulder at him, showing off her new tattoo. A wicked smile crossed her face, and she swayed her hips from side to side, her black yoga pants clinging to her skin.
“Do you miss me, Eric?” she asked. She licked her lips. Then her overdone seductive smile faltered. She turned around to face him. “I miss talking to you. You always made me laugh, no matter how bad I felt. And you would always listen to all the junk going on in my mind. I've been thinking a lot, about a lot of stuff...”
While she spoke, he stepped into the shower module, rinsing a layer of black volcanic dust off his skin. He kept the water pressure low so he could hear her—not that high water pressure had ever been a problem in this apartment, anyway. Some days it was barely a trickle. That was what he got for scrimping and saving, for living at the very aptly named Budget Box Apartments.
“...so I know I always said I wanted to major in Zoological Engineering, right?” she continued. “And we talked about doing an experimental ranch, maybe on my family's land or yours, you know, see if we can create gentle-tempered devilhorn.” The mammoth-sized ungulates were valued for their beef, believed to be the finest anywhere, putting to shame even the famed wagyu cattle that produced top-dollar Matsusaka and Kobe beef. Gideon was about 1.4 Earth masses, with a thicker, more oxygen-rich atmosphere, and those conditions had something to do with the size of its wildlife.
But the devilhorn were called that for a reason—the delicious monsters were ill-tempered, with enormous horns, hooves big enough to crush a man's back, and they were prone to fighting and stampeding. Giant draft horses were needed to drive those cattle, to even get their attention.
“...lately, though, I've been thinking Urban Design. Like maybe even...colony planning? I know your dad always says the peace won't last, but right now, with the armistice, people are saying there could be a whole new age of exploration. Like the times before the war, like we read about in school. I could end up designing entire cities! Can you imagine? A little country girl from Wellspring traveling out across the galaxy, planting cities the way Grandma plants herbs in the kitchen garden. Like...Alexander the Great. Only bigger. Wouldn't that be something?”
Eric felt a prickle of uncertainty, and the early edges of fear. This was different from the shared future they'd always talked about, sometimes after making out in her hayloft, the night breezes stirring the scents of leather and straw.
His current gold-hunting venture was only meant to be temporary, something to make up for being declared too handicapped for the military and too mediocre a student for the university. Gideon didn't offer a lot of opportunities for higher education, anyway, and going to another star system for college was so expensive that it didn't bear discussion. His older brother Abel hadn't had to pay anything to attend the fleet academy, but Eric was doubly barred from that option by his legs and his middling college entrance scores.
So, after high school, he'd remained at the family homestead, preparing himself to gradually take on his father's responsibilities over time. Someone had to, and his brothers were off serving in the military on other worlds. Armistice hadn't meant a formal peace treaty, thought it had brought some demobilization and disarmament. Many people, like Eric's father, expected the war to resume in time.
The Earthlings and their allies will be back after they rebuild and reload. We should be doing the same, Roy Rowan often opined at the dinner table, a hefty plank slab on the screened-in back porch, typically heaped with tomatoes and greens from their gardens, and of course the finest beef in the galaxy. In his younger years, Eric's father had fought in the Colonial League infantry. He'd joined the day he turned eighteen, not long after the war's inception, when Gideon and ten other worlds formally withdrew from the Earth Alliance and declared themselves free.
The government and special interests on Earth had not responded well to that, and so the war had begun.
Ever since the accident ruined Eric's legs at age twelve, Eric had lived under the shadow of his father's disappointment. It was unspoken yet palpable, as if Eric's hopelessly wrecked legs and clumsy braces were a sign of weakness. And weakness in the son could indicate weakness in the father. Eric's rejection from the service seemed to seal it—Eric was the disappointing son, by far.
Meanwhile, Suzette had gone off to the big college in the big city, more than a thousand kilometers from their rural hometown. Eric had grown restless and felt useless, inferior to his brothers, miserable to be the one who stayed home and accomplished a lot of nothing.
He was here on Caldera to seek his fortune, but he intended to use that fortune to sweep the girl on the screen off her feet, to give her a beautiful mansion, a beautiful horse, anything and everything she wanted. To finally convince her to marry him instead of dancing around the subject. To see him as her lifelong mate, not just a going-nowhere old boyfriend who still lived with his parents.
“...hope you're coming home to Gideon for Christmas,” Suzette said. “You know I'll be back at the home place for that. We can do cider, horseback rides...like old times. I'll just have to keep my backside covered when Mom's around!” She turned to show Eric the firefly tattoo again. “But not when I'm alone with you, Eric...” Suzette hooked a thumb into the waistband of her yoga pants and slid them lower along one hip, thrilling him as she exposed more of her tight, curved—
“Suzy's doing a strip tease!” someone shouted from off-screen. Someone male. Suzette blushed and tugged her pants back up, though she didn't seem too hurried about it.
“Get out!” Suzette yelled, but she seemed close to laughing.
“Maybe we should all strip for her boyfriend!” A guy ran into the frame, dressed in a beaded-shell necklace, palm-print boxer shorts, and nothing else. Suzette pushed him back, but he resisted. Their fingers intertwined in a play-wrestle that made Eric's own hand ball into a tight fist.
“Stop it, Chet!” Suzette squealed.
“Leave off!” a young woman's voice called, speaking with a heavy, tropical-sounding lilt. She moved into view, an athletic-looking young woman with rich caramel-toned skin, dressed in a purple sports bra and matching jockey shorts. “Come along, Chet. Leave off her. We're going to be late.”
“Thanks, Rafaela,” Suzette said as the other girl pulled the guy out of frame. Suzette finally looked back at Eric, and she was blushing. “Sorry. And hey, this is not what it looks like, Eric!”
Eric wasn't sure what it looked like. The scene was puzzling and unsettling.
Suzette turned her screen to show him her new dorm room, which was much more spacious than the one she'd had her freshman year. And much weirder. The room was circular, with six beds, most of them messy and laundry-strewn. An open sitting area was at the center of the room, furnished with patched bean-bags and an old couch. The guy and girl that had wrestled with Suzette earlier, Chet and Rafaela, were now starting to dress, taking clothes out of cupboards above their beds.
“We've moved to a pan-gender, open-plan co-op dorm,” Suzette explained. “It was voluntary. I admit it was kind of freaky at first—we grew up so traditionalist-normative back in that little town, you know what I mean?”
“No idea.” Eric sat on the edge of his bed now, dressed in shorts and t-shirt for the night, trying to figure out what she was talking about, what exactly was going on in that dorm. She angled the screen back to herself and her own bed. The girl called Rafaela squealed and laughed somewhere out of view. Horsing around with Chet.
“Anyway, it's been an adjustment, but it really does help you develop a more communitarian state of self-transcendence,” Suzette said, sounding nothing like the girl he'd grown up with. “You start to feel like part of the bigger picture. Not so isolated and alone.”
He frowned. Maybe he'd been wrong to leave Gideon. She hadn't asked him to stay behind—had encouraged to get out there and try if he wanted to—and none of her messages in the intervening months had indicated that she'd been hurt by his choice to go. H
e missed her, but he was starting to wonder whether she missed him.
Eric looked down at his weak, misshapen legs, veined with the stiff steel curves of his braces and scarred all over by the surgeries that had installed them. His back throbbed, too, right around the jack implant. It often did. Gideon wasn't a rich, heavily urbanized planet. The hospital had done the best they could with what they'd had.
Eric's worst fear had been that Suzette would leave their flyspeck town, go off to the big city, and realize that she could do much better than the poor crippled boy back home. Maybe their whole relationship had been based on nothing more than her lack of options.
“So, my roomies are great.” Suzette slung an arm around the underwear-clad girl called Rafaela, pulling her into view. Chet came up behind them and draped his arms over both girls. Another guy passed in the background, tall and muscular, dressed in just a towel, his long hair concealing his face. “Maybe we can all get together sometime when you're home. I think you'll really like Chet.”
Chet winked. Eric felt like punching Chet's teeth back into his throat.
“And now we're officially late.” Rafaela drew on her blouse.
“Say bye to Eric,” Suzette said.
“Bye, Eric.” Rafaela waved. “Have fun...being a miner.” She giggled, and the guys in the room snickered.
Suzette rolled her eyes. “Bye, Eric.”
The wall turned black. After a few seconds, an ad for Jimbo's Pharmacy and Plastic Surgery appeared on the screen, floating slowly like a cloud. The words OPEN LATE! ASK ABOUT OUR FACE & FINGERPRINT SPECIAL! flickered like old-timey neon over the doc-shop's logo, the words vanishing and then re-spelling themselves again and again, one letter at a time.
With the video ended, the room was mostly dark again, lit only by the floating ads on the wall, which he couldn't turn off.
Eric sat on the edge of his bed, trying to process what he'd seen. Suzette was certainly changing fast. The old her had been aghast about living with a single female roommate when she'd first gone off to college, horrified to have so little privacy. Now she shared a bedroom with an assortment of guys and girls, all of them basically strangers compared to the folks back home. Life at the university sure was different from life on the farm.