To the Stars

by Nathan Dodge

  Occasionally, our lay-Scäldi come near us and listen with their wide and avaricious eyes while we tap out stories and advice they will not quite understand until later, when we are both gone. At one point, one of the smaller ones comes near us. She is more awake than the others and asks, to our surprise, why we chose to pair ourselves.

  Endless excitement, taps out Ovana.

  Never alone, I add.

  The little one watches us a moment longer, new fur bristling, before hopping away to gnaw at one of my desiccated feet.

  That is the last either of us talk to the children. In an increasingly dreamy state, I watch them come and go as Ovana and I whisper our memories of the treaty, and the battle, and Neri’s wild, clever bite that saved us all. We laugh over how pathetic we look in this, our old age. We lap the dew around us and wait for the sun in near-silence, only the children’s gnawing audible.

  When dawn breaks, great golden mother-sun Oürinko bringing us bright yellow light while tiny white Söltse lurks behind and to her south, I see the little questioning lay-Scäldi that came to us before cresting the hill in front of us. Above us, the light expands, turning the grasses into a field of shimmering waves while Kal[!] soar overhead. And as Oürinko pours out a brilliant shower of gold upon the hills, my child reaches up into the light for her dragon, infinite love in her shining teeth.

  Last Chance for Lost Cause

  Sharon

  I’d recovered enough to where I no longer limped, so I stood straight as I completed the interview. The interviewer was one of the surviving Russian-Japanese natives, the result of the two colonies intermingling after the initial collapse, when the yūrei moss first started killing people and livestock alike. She had the hallmark look of most natives of the planet: tough, wiry, visibly scarred in places, and missing a finger, presumably due to one of the less virulent poisonous peri-fungi.

  “Madame does not take younger contracts,” she said flatly, and I nodded politely. Be calm, be polite, Anna had warned me, as much a threat as a command. The unspoken words had hovered between us: be calm, be polite, because I can’t keep you around much longer.

  “But Madame is known for her charity,” I said. “And a widow with a small child—what could be more charitable?” I smiled as I said it. My interviewer already knew this, or she wouldn’t have agreed to see me, but it was part of the dance. “A widow who can have no more children, especially. A widow who is—” I hesitated, and her eyes bored into me; I had to be careful here, “—a widow whose contract is not expected to be fully renewed.”

  That was my ticket. I hoped. The labor that had almost killed me, the placental abruption and subsequent hysterectomy. In any normal kind of place, such medical issues simply wouldn’t have been issues at all. Here, it had not only nearly killed me, it had cut my value by half. Anywhere half-civilized back home, manual labor and a working uterus were nothing. But it cost a lifetime’s savings just to ship yourself to Ralia, and I’d been contracted with a promise of two children after the colony was meeting minimums. Only I’d had my child before I was approved, my husband was dead, and no one was ordering a proper, Earth-made synthetic womb for me, not with our electricity ration at one hour per week per family.

  My contractor wouldn’t kill me outright—they wouldn’t go that far—but it was funny how often the extra quarter-ration of food for a nursing mother never made it. Especially not with a boy. You don’t need as many of them to build your stock. Years of wasteful extra effort for a child who might not even survive—and too many men already, really. Besides, my son was off-plan. Such a small infraction at the time, when we were strong and healthy and newly here.

  But while Kelly’s death had nearly killed me at the time, it had also opened a door.

  “Shippai wa seikou no moto, so desu ne?” I said softly: Failure is the stepping stone to success, perhaps/don’t you think? I tried not to cringe as I said it. My Japanese was poor at best, and I risked offending her with my attempt at wisdom—another thing they didn’t tell us before we hiked across the galaxy: no one cared about my medical background in the current undeveloped state of the land, and I should’ve studied Japanese like a fiend en route. But I was hoping a little less-than-subtle attempt on my part to fit in might tip the scales. I looked down at the rug and tried to look as wretched as possible, which wasn’t hard.

  The interviewer sighed, looking at my son, who was sitting at my feet in the plush, red rug beneath us. He was frightened, or he wouldn’t be so still. Guiltily, I was glad. He was too small for his age, some eleven months, and I knew his big eyes would count in our favor.

  “You’re from grid LC-1, aren’t you?” she mused. “A singularly . . . notable camp, they are. Of course, Madame cannot take on every charity case,” the interviewer said, but my heart leaped as she said it. There was clearly a caveat. “But I suppose I could look into it.”

  I almost shouted with relief, but I managed instead a soft, pliant nod. “We appreciate it, so very much,” I said.

  We were escorted out quickly.

  * * *

  After a hygiene rinse that left Kel in tears—he always broke out in a rash after them—Anna hardly allowed me to catch my breath before she piled the dish box and rags in my arms. It was my job to clean, a boring, occasionally even dangerous task, but one of the few I’d been capable of in the past year. Ours was only one of two remaining camps that lacked proper sanitary mechanization, but they hardly advertised that in their brochure for planetary grid unit LC-1. As nasty as things had turned in the past few years, some were starting to call our camp Lost Cause.

  It was funny. As much as they lied—oh, how they lied!—about so many things to bring us here, they forgot to tell the best parts, things that seemed so obvious to everyone who wasn’t born here. There was no misery fog in the evenings, to begin with. For all the talk of blue skies, real, blue skies, I had never expected clean air all day, every day. And the food! Real fresh vegetables, dirt-grown and sweet from sunshine, and rich cheese, and meat every week, a prince’s feast back home.

  But the team leaders worried about what to tell their applicants, and our own personal communications with the world were almost as heavily censored. So far as I could tell, not half my letters made it back home. Extra transmissions could always be carried by a pilot for a nominal bribe, but even though I’d been careful with what I said, somehow even those illicit letters were rarely delivered. I’d developed a fair sense of what not to mention in the two years I’d been here, but it wasn’t foolproof.

  “Okay, Anna,” I said, trying to correctly wrap my tongue around the proper Russian pronunciation of her name, and mostly failing, then trundling off to the sand pit to clean the dishes. We were oddities here, Kel and I, Irish-American stock in a sea of Japanese and Russian along with a handful of Germans and French, and though I tried hard to fit in, I failed more often than I succeeded.

  My only consolation was that we were all of us offenders, most days. I was lucky that English was the common language of work, though already I’d adopted much of the local style: little Japanese half-bows here and there, and a slower speaking pace all but absent of contractions, born of the difficulty of so many interworking lingual groups. We all tried to make it easy on one another when we spoke the common lingo.

  The Russian heritage I saw was mostly in the food, hearty stews modeled after old recipes with half the proper ingredients missing or replaced. The planet seemed to support that cuisine a little more easily—the meat we raised was tough, more suitable to stews, and certainly we couldn’t eat anything that lived in the water. The few attempts at in-camp ponds had ended disastrously.

  Little Kel came with me in my carrier, nursing fitfully. He always seemed tired now, still wasn’t anywhere near walking. We plopped ourselves down at the sand pit and I began to scrub. Sometimes Kel tried to help, and I let him with the plastics sometimes, lavishly praising his every attempt while I handled the local clay earthenware. Today I let him remain in the carrier, and he l
ooked at me with a soft, warm smile. The smile on his face was so rare, so precious, I kissed his face all over until he curled in on me, giggling, before I went back to work. Before I put each plate in the clean pile, I gave them a quick spray of vinegar to aid in sanitizing. It took almost two hours to get through the camp’s plates, finishing not long before the lunch bell. I put Kel down only long enough to toss the scraps over the fence before I buckled him back in and I picked up our two plates, heading to the food lines.

  The politics of the food line took me a long time to figure out when I got here. There was a complex list of unwritten rules to observe, ranging from seniority to the current state of bribes with the cook, but today I skipped the politics and headed straight to the front. For two days now I, and I alone amongst my fellow contracts, had been given a minimum ration. It was barely enough for a grown woman had we eaten three times a day, which we didn’t, let alone enough for one nursing a weak child—and Kel hadn’t been given a separate plate, either. I had given him first choice of my food, of course, but the camp food is often hard or impossible for him to eat: the vegetables raw, the meat tough, bread and noodles almost unheard-of luxuries. After all, there weren’t supposed to be children in our camp yet, and processing takes time. All in all, a disaster for a small child with a single tooth, whose mother lacked the calories to provide the bulk milk to compensate.

  So today I was pushing my luck, but I went to the head of the line anyhow with two plates. It was making waves, which wasn’t good, but this was my son. My son.

  Oddly, the head cook didn’t seem surprised to see me, and without argument loaded up our plates. Particularly shocking, there was a beautiful vegetable soup—soft, pliant vegetables in a rich, heavy stock. I stared blankly for a moment, then asked, hesitantly, “Did you make this for Kel?”

  “Yes. As congratulations,” the cook said, her voice thick in that way Russians speak, where every consonant is richer than I could possibly make it, and a little smile animated her face ever so slightly, wobbling up and down.

  “The transfer?” I said, and she nodded. I shrieked with joy, and I felt everyone startle around me before I said, “Thank you so much, cook. This is so kind of you. Thank you!” Tears welled up in my eyes, and I blinked rapidly.

  “Wish I could have before,” she said gruffly, but before I could inquire I was nudged, and then I was moving in the river of contracts, anxiously elbowing for their afternoon rations. I waved my thanks again as I was herded away.

  I balanced our tray carefully until I found our favorite table, sheltered under one of the almost-trees, a giant peri-fungi that was mostly harmless unless you were stupid enough to try to eat it. I untied Kel from the carrier and moved him to one leg, where I began to feed him the soup, blowing on it heavily before each bite. He ate frantically. Kel was always hungry. Bitterly, I wondered if I could have bribed the cook earlier, if that would have helped. I wasn’t surprised at their attempting to starve me out, but I should have seen the cook’s desire to help. Those kinds of failures could kill a person out here.

  I expected the transfer would be fast, and in that I was correct. Transfer arrived that evening with a minimum of fuss. It was an actual, proper craft waiting for us outside Anna’s home—no planet-made siding or deconstructed walls, like our units, which were little more than open barges after one too many cannibalizations. It spoke well of Madame’s prosperity. I raced around completing our packing. As little as we had, we could afford to forget nothing. Anna was there, watching me, ghost-like, from the door. I approached her almost shyly, despite our months together.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Anna, I—” But as soon as the words exited my mouth, she turned away, suddenly busy with cleaning the lodge, though she, like me, hardly had anything to care for. It took me a moment to realize she was deliberately avoiding us. “Anna,” I said clearly, directly, “Anna, I would like to tell you goodbye.” But she wouldn’t look at me, instead muttering something in Russian I couldn’t begin to understand.

  A bell sounded outside, a warning that the convoy was ready to leave. “Anna,” I said again, more urgently, but she didn’t respond, and finally I walked outside. I settled my son in the transport where, to my shock, there was even a proper infant’s seat, cushioned and secured and faintly smelling of the local vinegar. Just as I was seating myself and gave the confirmation for the door to close, Anna appeared outside the lodging. There was a vague look of shame on her face.

  “You did more for us than anyone else did,” I said, half-shouting to her over the hum of the engines. “Thank you.” She gave a brief nod of thanks, her gratitude evident for one brief moment, before the door slid shut. By the time I found a window to watch out of, she was gone.

  I moved again to sit next to Kel, where I could just barely peer out of the window left of him. The camp held my last memories of my husband, but too much had passed since his death for me to cling too much to it. The view was beautiful, though. The camp’s twenty-meter sludge wall was probably overkill—the local predators had never been seen to jump over ten vertical—but it meant that to exit I was given a last chance to see the camp from a good height, just as I had when we first arrived. Kel looked out the window, intrigued, and I narrated as we went.

  “We’re saying goodbye to the old camp, Kel. We’re going to a new one. They have better food there, and trash automatons, and there are days they do not work. They’ll have clothes for you, and soft-cooked food, and we’ll be warm at night.”

  “Da?” he says. It’s the only word he says, but he knows what it means.

  “Da isn’t here anymore,” I said. “Da loves you.”

  Kel was used to this answer. I showed him his father’s picture every night, of the two of us holding Kel—when Kelly died, one was printed for me as a favor, despite the scarcity of paper—and though it had been many weeks since his father’s death, Kel still lit up when he saw it. It was in my threadbare breast pocket, and I touched it, briefly, just to make sure it was still there. When I earned a little money, I hoped to buy a proper, sealed frame to protect it from the sun and damp if it cost a half-year’s savings. I peered out the window for a few more minutes, saying goodbye to camp, the place I thought Kel and I would begin so many happy days—and turned forward.

  I didn’t know precisely where Madame Lee’s camp was, but I did know it was farther up the ridge and closer to the White Sea, where the ghost moss grows the least, and therefore the fewest mutations exist. It was an enviable spot, procured by this first-landing plantation owner. She was one of the few who had survived from the very start. She had to have reached the enviable age of seventy, assuming she hadn’t lied about her age to join one of the pioneering ships, as so many had. I was curious to meet her. Camps were never large, and if nothing else I assumed she’d want to inspect the contracts she’d so kindly purchased.

  The flight was longer than I expected, and eventually I dozed. Kel woke me with whimpering. He’d woken from a nap as well, and was eager to nurse. I looked out and realized we were descending into a low, beautiful courtyard, dotted with a few last flowers even with the incipient cold. Some of them I knew, like hydrangea, but others were as bewildering to me as the planet’s native life. Perhaps some of the flowers were native—there was a spiny, purple one that was odd enough—although it would surprise me. I had never seen what I would call a flowering native plant, only the creep of peri-fungi.

  We came to a halt with only the briefest of adjustments. As soon as I pulled our belongings, the transport departed with elegant ease. Kel waved at it briefly, distracted from nursing, and then we both looked around us.

  There was no greeting party, but I wasn’t surprised. I had become accustomed to this planet’s rough edges. For all I knew, they were testing my adaptability and initiative. I shouldered Kel and our things and made our way through the narrow edge of the garden. It seemed we were at the rear of the complex, probably an area reserved for landings. Certainly I didn’t see anyone. I pointed out the flowers
as I went. I had heard that some of the more successful camps had begun to plant inedibles, but it was still a shock. The camp must be prosperous indeed to pursue such frivolous pursuits.

  Farther ahead was a fenced-off rabbit warren and one small enclosure of goats, just barely visible over a rise. I nearly crowed out loud at seeing their sleek hides and warm, ruffled, healthy fur. Meat would be plentiful here, and apparently without the danger of infection that the other camps faced. Their hybrids were clearly superior.

  In most camps, bison and a kind of antelope had proved the only animals remotely resistant to the planet’s native fungi, and due to their size, were allowed to roam free outside the settlements and our clean, safe soil. Inevitably, almost daily, a predator or two enjoyed our spoils, despite the fences and snipers who stood on the wall towers to protect the herd. Over time, our settlement had produced a herd that had a stronger relative immunity than the original animals. But here they had managed to raise smaller animals resistant to the planet’s hungry fauna. It was a remarkable accomplishment, one that proved Madame’s commitment to her contracts.

  Kel was nervous in my arms. He had grown so familiar with this feeling that it registered only as a kind of quietness on his face. I finally reached the outermost edge of the grand lodge and entered the arched entryway, which hinted at a kind of classical Moorish architecture, ducking ever so slightly before I walked us down the native blue stone pathway.

  Inside, the walls were the more common construction blocks shared by the other camps, cheap and efficient and blandly ugly. But there were also, unexpectedly, little murals and stenciled flowers around many of the doorways and along some floors, small but tender efforts. My shoes echoed softly in the emptiness.