Twenty-One

There is so much good news, but so much of it is being overshadowed by the bad. I will focus on the good first.

Our octopuses are growing very fast! Vivien, Natsuki, and I are training them. We’ve actually lost some work hours because the other women will stop what they’re doing to come watch us. We all admit to taking long lunch breaks because we want to watch the octopuses.

They are learning quickly, too. We keep the lights dim in the room for them, just enough that we can see, and lead them around the tank. We also, admittedly, spent some extra printer material to make different sizes of “barrels,” so they would know what to move when they do go outside.

I kept them in the stream in the garden as long as possible, but these creatures are the size of my head now, so we had to move them into a different tank. We filled it with ocean water from outside, and they have taken to it. I daresay they seem even healthier than when they were in Earth-based saline. Something about clean water, perhaps?

Natsuki and Ihsan started some fish colonies to release as well, so the octopuses would have bigger food. They’re doing okay on some shellfish, seaweed, and algae, but they definitely need more to eat. Occasionally, I sneak them some pieces of nutritional loaf, but they don’t like that as much as they like mussels and clams.

Vivien finally agreed to let me name them. We do have a bright red one, which I named Otto; a very orange, bumpy one whose name is now Ottilia; a pale red one with the smoothest skin of all four, named Orpheus; and finally, our rust-colored darling, Opaline. They love playing with the barrel toys, and mostly do it on their own for its own reward. I think they will take to the mining operation easily.

Along those lines, our ocean gardens are flourishing. We have some kind of flesh with half a nutrition loaf at nearly every meal – mussels are my favorites so far – and kelp garnishes our plates. We’re all a little perkier for the change in diet.

I think we have some tomatoes blooming. We haven’t had to use the aloe yet, but it too is doing well. The coffee senna bush looks a bit weak, but the stems are a little woodier than the other plants, I’m not surprised. It probably needs more light than its getting, but its leaves uncurled and it should start to blossom soon. Ihsan says we will have to take a brush of some kind and rub pollen from each of the blossoms into each of the other blossoms, so it will self-pollinate and produce seeds. It sounds like we should consider planting another few of these bushes, to diversity their genetics a bit more. The lettuce has nearly taken over the hydroponics, and if any of us have to walk past the garden, we end up taking a brief detour inside to grab a handful of lettuce leaves.

Our water, air, and waste filtration systems are all up and running. The old computer has taken fine to the new crystals, and Zariah sounded confident when she informed us that all atoms were properly entangled and we would have no fear of losing our contact with home. With Earth, I should say – this will feel like home soon.

We are thriving with what we have. But – and here’s where the bad news is – we don’t have much, and we won’t for some time.

We got a communication from Breathe Easy yesterday, in response to the one sent last week. They denied our first resupply mission, insisting that we contact them only when we’re ready for the first water barrels to leave Europa. We will have to find a way to negotiate with them, because, truly, we are running out of industrial materials and I’m concerned for our air filters. Yuda, Chloe, Samira, and Ihsan are discussing ways to reuse them, but we don’t have a great plan in place yet. Meanwhile, I have been charged with writing another communication for Breathe Easy, and I don’t know what to say. I can’t be too demanding, or we’ll never get anything. The most convincing thing I can think of is that the company should go ahead and send the first shipment of supplies, because the transit time is three weeks, and we should be able to get our octopus helpers trained by then.

I suppose I will have to officially write that to them, and then wait to send this transmission. If I send this first, as I have been, then it might come off as rude. I apologize to the CEOs of Breathe Easy – life is complicated out here, and we need the support.

Twenty

I decided to spend the day away from the octopuses, working with Ghadir in the kitchen instead. We completed the necessary welding, to keep the space ship parts together. It’s strange walking into a carbon filament room – a vision I’m used to on earth – from the dim metallic gleam of the rest of the colony. In contrast to the grey of the rest of Rabbah, the kitchen is bright white. I wonder if the next ship will have enough extra pieces that we could make a common room, in the same inviting shades. It takes very little light to make this room seem like daylight.

After finishing the walls, we moved several crates of nutritional loaf from a nearby storage room – which I think we’ll turn into a common room once we have some sitting space inside – into the kitchen and organized them along the walls. “Organizing” is a loose term for the same meal over and over, I realize, but some of them are preserved to last longer than others, so we arranged the different colored boxes against different walls. We then hauled a printer into the kitchen and Ghadir showed me the containers she thought might work for food preservation.

“This one keeps dried foods organized,” she said, pointing to an image on the screen of a boxy container. “We can add any words we want on the side, so for example, when we begin drying seaweed, we can label this ‘Nori,’ or ‘Kelp.’ And this one,” she scrolled over to a jar with a tight lid, “is for pickled or brined foods. Until we get tomatoes, we won’t need many of these, and by then I hope I have enough store credit to purchase my own material for the project.”

“Don’t you want to pay off your debts?” I asked.

Ghadir’s shrug was full of nonchalance, not something I see often in the other ladies when I ask them about their lives back on earth. “I like the hard work here.”

I nodded in agreement. Ghadir’s smile in response could be its own power source.

“I thought you were forced to come here?” she asked me. I shook my head.

“But you were in court …?”

“Yes,” I said. “My husband sued for divorce and I had no way to pay back the company he worked for, but he sued for divorce because, well, I’ve been interested in much of this type of work – sewing, gardening – for as long as I can remember being interested in anything.”

I didn’t think it was possible, but her smile actually grew bigger.

“I am the same way,” she said, in response to what I’m sure was a very curious look on my face. “I have been interested in food, cooking it, growing it, since I can remember going to a restaurant with my parents and wondering where that food came from. My parents didn’t know and they wouldn’t answer me, because Senfte are meant only to communicate, take the lower castes’ work and present it to the upper castes.” She signed. “I got a job in a commercial kitchen, despite my parents’ desire for me to get a better job than them, perhaps in a call center. I learned to cook there. And …” she bit her lip.

“If it was a criminal thing, believe me, you can tell me,” I said. Without thinking, I put my hand on her shoulder, much like Vivien had yesterday. Ghadir also was unused to a non-Senfte physically interacting with others, but her caste is more used to this type of contact so she did not shrug away as quickly as I did.

“I started taking seeds from fruits and vegetables. I tried to grow them in a patch of soil in the park near my home.”

I smiled at her. “I did the same thing, except I found a group of gardening enthusiasts who met in secret at night and planted in a patch of soil near the outskirts of town. It was far enough away from my house that it wasn’t traced to me for years.”

We laughed together.

“I also,” I added, “Stupidly tried to grow an apple tree in a window box in my house. I think I just wanted to see a sprout, constantly, in my home. That was some evidence at my trial, let me tell you.”

Ghadir nodded. “I was mainly charged with theft from my workplace. I didn’t get anything to grow, but I took food home and created a vinegar mother and then vinegar and learned to brine and use citrus to preserve foods. I had quite a stash of canned vegetables, none of which I had legitimately bought.”

I nodded. “It’s strange to me, to think, that this is how we’re repaying society. We could easily have ended up on a chain gang, mining an asteroid for platinum, but here we are, using the knowledge that condemned us.”

“It’s true,” Ghadir replied. “I’m just grateful that I can get away from all of that.”

She showed me a few more images of containers, utensils, pots and pans to cook with. After I helped her load the printer with resin and carbon, I asked, “Do you want to go back?”

She shook her head. “No, actually, I want to stay here. I know most of you want to return when your debts are paid, but not me.”

I nodded. “I actually don’t want to go back, either. Chloe even suggested we, maybe, think of ourselves as a separate caste now, different from other people.”

“Kind of like the Moon Base inhabitants?”

“Kind of, yes.”

Ghadir was lost in thought for a moment, as the machine warmed up. Finally, she said, “I think that’s a good idea. We should suggest that to Breathe Easy.”

Well, Breathe Easy, it has been mentioned before, but I suppose this is our official suggestion to you. We don’t have full approval from the other women in the group, but I can’t imagine they would disagree, unless they plan to return to Earth.

I spent the rest of the day working with Ghadir to print some supplies, using the tiniest ration of material possible. We did not go over budget, but she did not seem happy with the results. I think we should be fine, as we will not be preserving food for a few more months anyway.

I did ask her if there was anything she could do to make the nutritional loaves taste better, or at least different, and she said she could try gathering salt – perhaps the first time a human has eaten salt from a non-Earth source! – and said she would start that project tomorrow. She also said, in very excited tones, that we will be able to supplement the loaves with bivalves and seaweed in the next week or so, and added that she had a secret recipe for fried rice that might translate to the nutritional loaves.

My mouth is still salivating, hours later.

Zariah and Yuda finally made the last upgrades to the computer system, installed our ship’s computers and began transferring programs over. They also completed repairs to the communications array, which did not involve either of them swimming around in the shimmering dark outside the station to fix any antennae.

We gathered in the glowing light of the screens, all 12 of us, and composed our first direct message to Breathe Easy. We tried to keep it as simple as possible, too.

We have arrived. Tear-down of the ship is almost complete. Need more printer material, industrial supplies for filters, more seeds. Octopuses not ready to help with barrels yet, but barrels filled easily. Please send supplies asap.

I hope it is not too demanding, but Chloe and I took responsibility for the message’s content and signed it before sending it off into space. Yuda said it would probably take two or three days to reach Earth, then two or three more days for a reply to come to us, so we should know by next week when our first supply ship arrives. And then someone will have to be brave enough to pilot it.

Suddenly that hard-earned nutritional loaf is not sitting so well in my stomach.

Nineteen

Sorry for any delays, everyone. We’ve been dismantling the ship, which I’m glad to say is going well, thanks to the training that Breathe Easy provided for us. We’re about half-way through that process, and we moved all of our personal items into Rabbah, and are living there full-time now. A few days ago, we had a problem with the air filtration and had to wear our helmets until the system cleaned itself up, but we started another few colonies of algae to help generate oxygen for us, and we know to clean the filters every other day, rather than simply twice a week. We will probably have to go to every day, once the other round of colonists arrives.

The waste management system took a lot of work, but we fixed it in a reasonable amount of time as we began moving into the colony. It’s gross, but some of our waste flows through our garden, in which we’ve planted the spindly sprouts we barely managed to generate. I think, perhaps, they were choking for vitamins and gravity, because now our tomatoes, senna bush, spiky aloe leaves, and fluffy lettuces look much better. I’d like to get together with Ihsan and Durada and plant more when we can.

Earlier today, we released the bivalves in two giant nets, which are currently drifting along either of the largest sides of the station. It will take them a few days to attach to Rabbah’s outer layer, but I’ve been assured that they will find the metal lining familiar and will immediately want to congregate there. Natsuki told me that, while she worked in aquaponics on the coast, pieces of shipwreck and submerged ancient buildings washed up from time to time, covered with shelled creatures like barnacles and clams. She and her friends would gorge themselves on the tasty treasures.

There was a time in my life when I would have found that disgusting, but now, it sounds amazing.

We also put the kelp and some of the algae into the water. Individual algae can float through the almost microscopic mesh weave, but nothing else will. The kelp is mainly outside of the air/water lock, so that we can reach it for harvesting.

We’re still eating the last of the nutritional loaves. I look forward to peppering mine with the early lettuce leaves next week, when they’re big enough to pick without harming the underlying roots.

As far as the actual mining operation, we have removed all of our items from the barrels – our items are packed in neat rows in our storage rooms, and the barrels are submerged. Chloe and Haven have taken detailed inventory of our supplies, and as soon as Zariah and Yuda mend the communications systems, then we will make contact with Earth and request more supplies. We need more silk and carbon, of course – Ghadir has focused much of her energy on making storage containers for the food we’re growing, so we can begin preservation. We won’t store much except the few tomatoes we manage to grow hydroponically, but when the next colonists arrive, they’ll bring a luscious variety with them and we will begin planting with soil that we’re going to make ourselves. I’ll let you guess out of what.

Oh! And good news, our octopus eggs hatched. We only got four out of the 100 eggs we started, but I think that will be enough to get us going with the barrels. These guys can live about two years, and they will be grown in a few more weeks. I plan to take another 100 eggs and float them outside, in the midnight black ocean, to hatch. The first octopuses hatched on another world. I haven’t released our four into Europa’s waters yet, as I’m somewhat afraid that they might freeze and die. They’re used to temperature controlled environments, but I think I’ll let them float in the stream we created in the garden, so that they can get used to cold water.

Vivien and I have been like overbearing new mothers with these tiny creatures. We argued earlier today about what to name them. I suggested that we give them all “O” names – Olive the Octopus, for example, although I didn’t want to name any of them “Olive.” I just wanted to suggest to Vivien that we follow the naming pattern that seemed conventional.

She shook her head. “You never want to get too attached to animals you work with,” she said, “even if they’re smart, trainable, whatever. You may have to kill them for some reason, and if you get attached then you won’t be able to do it. Someday, they’ll die of natural causes, and if they have names, you could be too distraught to keep going.”

“But we’re training them to work with us. We need to tell them apart, and a name could be like shorthand for their characteristics. You know, if one of them is redder than the rest, instead of calling it Red, we just name it … Octavia,” I shrugged, “or something like that. Then we know. We’re going to end up naming them anyway.”

Vivien shook her head. “Aelis, we may need to eat these creatures at some point.”

“They’re for the mining operations!”

“I know, I know,” Vivien said. She put a hand on my shoulder, the most physical contact I’d seen her provide to anyone, ever. The Senfte are really the only ones who make physical contact with people, or at least are trained to. I glanced at her hand without thinking about it, and she snatched it away when she saw my eyes move.

“Anyway,” I continued, “if we expect to train them, we need to get used to treating them like employees, not like food. I’m going to name them, and you can call them Steak, Eggs, Bacon, and Hot Dog if you want.”

Vivien’s shoulders shook. I think she was laughing, but I couldn’t tell. She said, “Alright, but I don’t know how you’re going to name them when they all look alike.”

I looked closely at the thumbnail-sized creatures, whose tiny tentacles waved in the water of the cylinder as they swam back and forth. I wondered if they would eat the unhatched eggs at the bottom of the tube. It didn’t seem like a terrible idea, but I walked over to an algae sack and scooped a bit from the top, dropping it into the container before I responded.

“I’ll pick out names for them now, and we can see which names fit them best when they grow up.”

I admit, I got a little obsessed with the idea, and rather than eat dinner with the rest of the group, I’ve been sitting in front of the computer terminal, which Yuda hauled down from the ship just yesterday. My rear is beginning to hurt from being pressed into the floor for hours, but it’s the only way that I could get access to an encyclopedia. Because the next wave of colonists will be all, or almost all, male, we were sent with a “Baby Names” program. I don’t really know what to think about that, except that computer programs take up less space than seeds or resin, I suppose. Anyway, it’s serving my purposes now, so I suppose it’s not all bad.

Here’s my list so far:

Oliver
Opaline
Otto
Orpheus
Ophra
Othniel
Olga
Ottilia
Ove

That’s enough for another hatched group – if there’s only 4 in 100 – and I can’t find many that satisfy me. Maybe I should branch out into other names? Maybe I should just call them Thing 1, 2, 3, and 4? Or maybe I should do what I suggested to Vivien, and call them Ceviche, Fillet, Fishstick, and Gefilte?

This is frustrating. I should find a different project to work on tomorrow.

Eighteen

We have finally completed the air filtration upgrades, and Yuda and Zariah have successfully installed the newer crystal core into the computer system. I had hoped, when they returned to the shift for a very late meal with the rest of us, that we would suddenly feel Rabbah come to life, shuddering beneath the ship. I had hoped to hear a rhythmic whiiiiirrrrr of fans and siphons through my bones, but nothing happened. Still, they both looked pleased and calm, if exhausted.

After lunch, we helped them run a large cable down into Rabbah’s core. We have little battery on the ship itself to spend, but both Araboa women think we can spare enough to power the computers on and turn on the air system. We decided we would all take extra turns on the exercise equipment, running to recharge the ship’s batteries, and hope that the extra exertion would keep the ship going long enough to revive our new home.

Once plugged in, the computer system slowly revived, lights behind buttons turning on first, then the screens, then a few small lights throughout the main computer room. I stuck my head down the corridor, and more and more lights were coming on across the colony. The air filters still did not kick on, but after manipulating the computer a little, Zariah told us that the entire system was rebooting and checking its power levels, and would not initiate anything else until it had concluded there was enough power to turn more systems on. And so we wait.

We also discussed transferring the algae into the air system, and the rest of our plants and animals into the large bay designated for agriculture. There is a bay door there, and at some point – when we have enough oxygen that we no longer have to use our helmets – we will modify it so that we can have a flow of water through the area. I am tempted to set up another water wheel-style system, but I’m not sure we have enough extra material for me to print the parts I need.

Of less importance, we wandered about and picked rooms for ourselves. We’ve been living in the same few rooms, clustered together, for a month now, and I think we were all excited by the idea of a little privacy. But, we also designated one of the container areas as both storage and meeting room. Samira said, timidly, that she would like to restart the knitting group as soon as possible. I think Budur has been prancing a little ever since Samira said that.

I cannot wait to start disassembling this ship and building onto Rabbah. We’ll fix the waste management system next, although (please don’t think too hard about this), much of our waste will be transferred into the garden and, well, out into Europa’s waters. I assure all of you readers that Breathe Easy has amazing filtration systems. They’ve been mining Earth’s trash-filled, radioactive, rising oceans for a few years now, and we’ve all had a bottle of their water or hung out at one of their oxygen bars at some point.

We’ll also build a kitchen, and I have been ravenously thinking of the meals that Ghadir can create for us, limited though our current resources are. Our seaweed is doing well – it needs larger containers to roam, for sure – and our bivalve larvae are almost large enough to release into the oceans. I might head that project, and I will see if I can get Samira to help me with netting to enclose the meaty settlers onto Rabbah’s walls.

We still have no octopuses. Perhaps their container is too small, and the genetics deep inside the eggs are telling the potential creature to wait, wait – don’t gestate, there’s nowhere to go. I will try releasing some of these eggs into the waters of Europa to see what they do.

Oh.

Wait!

I feel it!

It started! Rabbah is alive! It shook to life just as I thought it would. I can feel it, vibrating my bones through the console, through the chair I’m strapped to. The City of Waters is pouring vibrations up into our skeletal ship. We’re going to be alright, our air filtration system works!

Seventeen

We’ve been on the slushy surface of Conamara Chaos on Europa for a few days now. The station needed more repair than we anticipated, and so we are still, mostly, stuck inside the ship, which has anchored itself to a hatch protruding just below the surface. The ice was only 2 kilometers thick here, so it didn’t take us long to drill through the surface.

Even that is not tightly sealed, and we have to be very careful to move into the decompression chamber and seal it behind us before opening the hatch, with our helmets on. Everything is made of metal, not a combination of stronger carbon filaments and metal and silken fibers, and so our technology does not quite fit into the existing systems. The thick red-brown crust of rust around the outside does not help matters.

The first step into the colony was physically painful. We all descended, as per the precautions we were taught, with our helmets on and oxygen flowing into them from tanks. The lower we moved into the colony, the more I felt sluggish, tired, like I was moving through syrup, when it occurred to me that I was finally feeling real gravity again, after a month without it. The pressure of the ocean around us creates enough of a sensation like gravity that I could keep my feet on the floor without magnetic boots, I felt a pull on my muscles and I wished, so hard, that I could breathe the fresh air of this new life, to go along with the aching pull down, down, down to the center of Europa.

Ghadir collapsed, and we let her lay on the floor, soaking in the sensation. Budur’s breath became tense as she pushed her arms over her head, but she was smiling.

As we got used to the gravity, we began walking around. The rest of Rabbah was not what we had hoped.

Haven has hardly spoken since we first dove into Rabbah, examining the antiquated computer system. Zariah and Yuda have talked of nothing but the system, spending every meal bent over blueprints and every day huddled deep inside the colony’s computer systems.

In a way, I had expected cobwebs, but the only sign of the previous inhabitants are faded buttons, rubbed where human fingers pushed or turned them, and a little dust in some corners, which is most likely made up of desiccated human skin flakes.

Our algal colonies are producing a good amount of oxygen, to supplement the tanks that we brought with us. I’m glad we decided to start those while traversing the asteroid belt. It not only kept our minds off things, but it has come in handy as we were not prepared for the state of ill repair we encountered. Durada, Natsuki, and Vivien have taken turns cleaning corrosion out of corners, and monitoring our budding ecosystems on our ship. Samira and Chloe are busy attempting to replicate the fine mesh of the air filtration screens, because we will need more of them than we have, and it would take too long to ship more to us. The rest of us are installing the filters, soldering and gluing and weaving, like moles in long, dark tunnels day in and day out.

We did find a fortunate system we were not expecting, however – a water wheel, that uses the gravity-driven daily tides to spin a wheel and generate electricity. Yuda found the batteries attached to the system, and they had exploded, covering the area in a greenish sheen of metallic acid. Aside from the batteries, nothing was eaten away. She thinks we could hook the old system up directly into one of the computers, so rather than storing energy for later, we’ll use the set-up to directly, and constantly, power the main communications system.

Meanwhile, our own ship’s batteries are beginning to run low, so our work day has from 16 to 20 hours a day. We sleep in shifts so we can get a minimum of 5 hours, but then we work 20 hours straight. I am fortunate that my fingers are growing used to the work and my mind can wander to thoughts other than the rhythmic welding and weaving.

I dreamt of dawn and dusk last night. The lights on the ship try to mimic the sensation, but since we exist in a greater-than-24-hour cycle these days, it hasn’t made much difference. Everything feels unreal, but the unreality is now my reality.

It will be nice to go back to a regular sleeping pattern. I hope I can.