Thirty-Four

Ihsan has been locked out of sight in a storage area for a week now. Bulus, her partner, assures me that she is being fed and given water, but simply not allowed out. He has taken all of her shifts in the garden, and has set up a blanket and pillow outside of the storage area so that he can speak with her at night.

A few days ago, Fletcher and Rusul, with Vahan’s help, attempted to capture Chloe. She is still recovering from deep bruises and gruesome scrapes, but escaped her attackers easily. Vahan, it turns out, has a congenital heart defect, a disease that cannot be spread, but which he was born with. A Bakalov cannot be so weak. This, he said as I helped him sit up and eat in our still-makeshift medical bay, is his crime.

“Really, it is my parents’ crime, for reproducing when they knew this was a possibility, for allowing me to be borne, for raising me, a drain on planetary resources,” he said. “I managed a factory for Breathe Easy for my entire adult life, but I have been less and less able to breathe these last dozen years, less and less able to hide my deformity. Rather than continue to drain the company’s resources, I agreed to come out here and make my way for as long as I have left.”

“You might be able to save something, go home in a year or two,” I suggested, although I know that is not what he was implying.

He shook his head. “It is amazing I survived the trip to Europa. I will die here. Perhaps my contribution can make life easier for you, for a time.”

He is back in his room recovering now. I don’t know how many people knew about his heart, but surely the men noticed something wrong with him on the way out to Rabbah. For Rusul to use him so, as brute force when there is hardly any force left in him, I cannot understand.

No more sabotage has been committed, in the meantime. Chloe and Vivien had a falling out over the animals – Vivien worked so hard to raise those octopuses, and now they are gone, allowed to die for some premise that did not involve them at all. Chloe maintains that they were dying anyway because of radiation exposure. Vivien thinks that Chloe may have called them and forced them to move barrels too often to the surface, increasing their exposure, forcing them to die faster. They could have lasted until we received the iodine, she insists. I am not sure who is right.

Yuda and Zariah spent several days locked in hushed and intense conversation with each other in the common room, much like the men used to. When they finally emerged, they had a message composed to Breathe Easy’s managing family, the Chen. They asked me to send it, but Kailash jumped in and insisted that he should be the one to send it. I am relieved, because I did not want that responsibility. I will continue to send these entries for the public, uncensored, for it is important for the CEOs to understand what is going on here. I do understand that Zariah is afraid – she is afraid of dying, of failing through no fault of her own. But I also understand Budur’s fear, of failing because her companions, who should have helped her in her quest, chose for her to die.

It seems like everyone is choosing everyone else’s fate. I admit, I did not like this about living on Earth. Not only did I not fit into the Gadhavi caste, not only could I not strive for the same goals as my fellow caste mates, I could not understand why only one group – the Hou – could decide the fates of everyone else. I didn’t want to say so before, but we are already in so much trouble with Breathe Easy that it hardly seems to matter anymore – I never liked having other castes above me. We’re not supposed to have anyone above us, exactly, just helping us, managing us, providing for us in some ways, but in truth I never saw that group provide more than the basic necessities. Small apartments, low quality food. I was constantly made to feel as though I were in debt to the Hou, when I never even met a Hou in real life. I only ever met a handful of Arany, and I was not supposed to look them in the eye. What would happen if I did? Would I have been sent away to a smaller apartment, a camp outside the city? Would I have been divested of caste? Most likely, I would have been dragged to court, and that happened anyway.

But I don’t want to punish the company that sent us into the wilds of the outer solar system. We need their supplies, and this truly is a chance for me to discover my true self as I build a new life. To plot and scheme in a gang, a “union” as it was once politely called, will only make our difficult situation worse.

I suppose I should be thankful for little things, to mitigate the bad. I cannot smell the air or taste the water anymore. I hardly notice how thick it is when I take a sip. I’ve managed to stay more hydrated than some, Samira and Budur being two whose delicate sensibilities prevent them from drinking or eating too much. Budur finally gave up on the knitting groups. I had managed to make a square of scarf, which I gave to her to add to a blanket she was making. She says she’s been cold lately, which I don’t understand because it has been sweltering, with the weight of carbon dioxide and grime hanging thick in front of our faces. But she was grateful for the contribution.

“I’m glad you’re on our side, Aelis,” she said.

“I’m not,” I reminded her.

“But if you’re not on their side, then we’re glad to have you,” she said, and shivered.

I think she might be getting sick. There might be a contamination in the water or food. I’m surprised I haven’t caught anything, between cleaning up mountains of dead organic material and drinking a glass of putrid water every day.

And Samira has been holding her regular court in the common room now, not just behind hands in dark hallway corners, but in plain sight, in plain voices. She lounges against a stack of crates, sweating from the weight of the air, and explains to her cult how terrible and selfish the Hou are and how they, the unionizers, are right in their quest. Fighting each other, in her speeches, is a noble act that will ultimately reunite our group – but she fails to explain how infighting will help.

I can only imagine how fired Chloe’s imagination was by the speeches. Zariah has begun using larger words, more like an Arany and less like a Bakalov or Araboa.

I sat in on one of Samira’s long speeches just last week. She discussed a party she attended as an actress, on the arm of a beautiful male Arany movie star, so they could meet the Hou producers who financed their latest production, which was a love story embedded in the tale of the revolution. They couldn’t play anything other than Arany, of course, and yet there were no Arany before the revolution, so they had to play entertainers united by their dream of being sponsored by rich patrons.

“I was approached by one of the producers,” Samira said to her rapt audience. “A short man, thick dark hair, not unattractive, but shorter than I, and I’ve never liked men shorter than myself. It is not unusual for the Hou to approach us when we are at their parties, and we are trained to respond somewhat in character. So we talked, and I complimented his patronage profusely and told him how they had helped us be the best versions of our selves we could be. And he smiled, and he kept smiling at me, sizing me up, and hardly said a thing while I rattled on. No other Hou approached me, so I kept talking to him. After a few minutes, he grabbed my arm and hauled me into a back room. I barely got away without being raped. I was young, and I didn’t know that was expected of me. When we left, my counterpart asked me how many Hou I had spent time with, and I told him one. He was surprised.

“This is how the Hou see us. All of us. Just resources to exploit at their whim, and it is our job to keep them pleased.”

Cyril held Samira’s hand, and patted it. Zariah handed him a glass of water, and Chloe was deep in thought. I got up and left, without realizing that Yuda had followed me out until she spoke.

“It was good to see you in there, Aelis,” she said. I jumped and turned to her.

“I had to know what all the fuss was about,” I replied, and kept walking. However, Yuda stepped in front of me.

“We are glad that you are on our side, Aelis,” she said, and looked pointedly at me for an answer.

“That is what Budur said to me a few days ago,” I replied.

Thirty-Three

Our last supply ship arrived. Silk, carbon filaments, recycled resin, seeds for gourds and grapes and blackberries, a few more octopus eggs, antivirals, and some iodine. Vivien was pleased to see the iodine, and I made sure she smuggled it away somewhere that none of the rest of us would find it.

The supply ship is a hovering black spot on our one outside monitor.

I am glad to see the new seeds. Squash and pumpkins grow quickly, although it takes pumpkins some time to fully mature. Grapes grow slowly, but Ghadir said they could be turned into vinegar more easily, and we might finally be able to preserve some food within the year. And blackberries grow incredibly fast, every day. We may have to move the vines to a different area so we can have a little more control over their spread – I don’t want them to choke the existing plants.

I asked Durada to help plot that, but she has been very busy with the new seedlings. Tiny, tiny buds of plants popping up out of the rich soil she worked very hard to create. When she forgets other people are around, she coos to them about how well they are doing.

I don’t blame her. I feel a desperate love for these tough organisms, growing despite the tragic past around them. An Arany poet could describe the sensation better than me, but you’re stuck with my words since I’m in charge of sending these missives.

We have made several new filters, as well, and although our water still has particles floating in it, it is no longer milky or sour. It barely even has a taste, although I wonder if that has more to do with drinking tainted water for so long. Samira and Budur both took ill after consuming a few more glasses than was safe. I hate that they were our guinea pigs, but that’s how it goes sometimes. They are both recovering now – pale and sweaty after too much physical exertion, and sometimes their eyes become dark and feverish, but they will recover.

Our air has a metallic taste now, which the fresh filters seem not to have taken away. We have all felt a bit lethargic lately, and it is not merely the tension between all of us – I think it relates somehow to the air.

Tensions between us – they are at their worst. I assume that Kailash, who has taken over for both Haven and myself, communicating directly with the Breathe Easy CEOs, has already mentioned this to the higher-ups so I guess I can tell the world about what has happened. Zariah is on a union organizing tear again, but this time Suharto on one side and Samira on the other. She announced this to all of us at dinner a few days ago.

Abandoning her nutritional loaf, Zariah stood to get our attention, but it took Chloe’s voice over the rest of ours to quiet us all down. Zariah met our eyes, each one of us, and then said, “This last shipment was unacceptable.”

Vivien dropped her fork, CLANG, against her plate. Samira stood and moved just behind Zariah, keeping an eye on the Ikin woman.

Zariah continued. “Many of us have expressed concerns about our future here on Rabbah. We are all here to work,” she looked at Yvain, at me, and continued, “but we are all here because we have been told that our mere existence is a debt that we must repay to society. We were sent away because we could not repay that debt in ways deemed acceptable, not by us, but by a handful of elite families. We have been sent to prison for as long as it takes, which will be longer than our lives.”

I heard Haven behind me drop her food to her plate with a splat. Suharto, sitting at Zariah’s right hand, turned his gaze to take her reaction in.

“We must fight this injustice,” she said. “We must form a union. We are not only our own caste, but a group that supports each individual member. We were chosen because we each have skills that can only be applied to living in this colony, which makes us specialized workers. We are a specialized workforce, and we require special attention if we are to survive. We have to make that known.”

Samira began nodding along with Zariah’s speech.

“There are several of you out there who are unconvinced,” Zariah continued. “You were raised to believe you were servants for some illusive greater good. That greater good failed you, not the other way around. That greater good does not think you are worth keeping around. That greater good will, without a show of strength from us, allow us to die.

“We have a plan. We can show Breathe Easy how strong we are, because we, not they, hold the reins on this operation. Earth needs us as much as we need them, and we must not allow them to forget that.”

Haven stood, and I heard the shaking in her voice. “Breathe Easy has filtration plants all over the country, they don’t need water from Europa. We are an experiment. Which will fail if we do not work harder …”

“You said yourself that the filtration plants were failing at an expensive rate,” Samira interjected. “They would not have undertaken this project without believing that the capital was there. It is a better option than Earth’s water, and we should know that about ourselves.”

“If we do not fight back, to make them understand,” Chloe said, stomping her way to stand with Samira and Zariah, “they will never respect us enough to help us more. If we die, they will only send more colonists. And those colonists, too, will die without real assistance, more than they have given us. We can maintain ourselves, but we cannot truly expand Rabbah without cooperation, instead of condescension.”

“Men,” Suharto stood, and put an arm around Zariah, “We were sent here to protect and support these women. Many of us are former soldiers, and those that aren’t are farmers. We bring structure to their lives, but on Earth, men have lost their way in supporting their families. Women are hard workers, we must not forget that. These women have struggled, and when we arrived, we talked about what they needed, without asking them what would truly help them. Uniting with them to help Breathe Easy understand their struggles, that is what we must do. We must look past the enforced caste system, which all of us abandoned, and work together to create a truly new life.”

Budur whimpered. Haven, always violent in the face of adversity, slammed a hand down on her table. “If this is to really be a new life, then shouldn’t we imagine a new world? Why bring up archaic evils like unions when we can look ahead and work to evolve the entire system?”

Rusul, normally all slick and slimy smiles, came forward. Ghadir, perpetually by my side, shrank into my shadow as much as she could.

He said, “All of this talk is nonsense. Yes, we are all flawed and have been sent here to repay our societal debts. However, this is an opportunity. All of you agreed, when asked to join this expedition. You were not forced. You all wanted, at the time, to repay these debts.”

“Some of us were forced,” Durada said.

“That is untrue …”

“What alternative did we really have?” she asked. Rusul looked astonished.

“We had the option,” Haven interjected, “of working on other mining operations, on asteroids or on Earth. You could have all lived long lives on the Bainbridge Island colony, although some of you chose to leave and are now making trouble out of nothing. We could each have served jail sentences, had our lives eaten up with court dates. But instead we were presented a lucrative business opportunity, that applied our talents in some way so that we could take our traitorous impulses and imprint the good of society onto them. Aelis, that is what you were after,” she looked desperately at me. I vaguely nodded. Ghadir’s hands rubbed against one another in her lap, making soft shhhing sounds like a printer. Yvain put his calloused and scarred hand on mine.

“The option was an illusion,” Samira said. “If we did not take this, and especially, I suppose, if we did not have such a good chronicler in our midst,” she nodded at me and I looked away quickly, “then we would have been locked away. I certainly would have been executed, for allowing Arany to betray their world with physical work is so unnatural that my very genetics could not have been allowed to survive.”

Cyril stood and took Samira by the hand. “Yes, we Arany are only allowed to work from the mind, the imagination. We cannot apply that imagination, and we work ourselves into insane debt our entire lives to employ others just to make that imagination real.”

I did not realize so many of the upper caste could feel the same way as we workers in the lower ranks.

Rusul, and Fletcher, who had approached to stand behind his left, shuddered. Rusul was red as a warning light. He said, “This is disgraceful, this is the kind of activity that would be unforgiveable on Earth.”

“But we are not on Earth,” Chloe said.

“But we are from Earth! We agreed to the rules before we left! This is what we are, not some blasphemous union racket scamming those who give us shelter, give us food, give us a reason to keep going when we destroyed every other reason for existence!”

“The Hou broke their social contract with us long ago,” Samira said quietly. Cyril agreed, continuing for her, “The Hou do not give freely, in spite of the Declaration of Incorporated Personhood. They do not even see the lower castes as people. We are an exploitable resource that they see in terms of income. When we cost them income, we are less worth the budget-balancing effort.”

“We have to use anything we can to make them see us as people, not a negative number on their balance sheets,” Samira said.

“Yes!” Chloe pumped her fist, and Suharto joined her. Abbas, remaining in the shadow of the conversation, looked away.

Rusul left, Kailash and Fletcher at his heels.

Yvain, the gentle damaged giant, gave an appropriate pause for mourning, then asked, “How does that work?”

I removed my hand from his.

Chloe grinned at him. “I see you are interested. Vivien is going to start training the next group of octopuses in the next few weeks, and once we have them ready to work the barrels, we refuse to release them without Breathe Easy’s recognition of certain inalienable rights of ours.”

“The right to life, for instance,” Vivien said.

“The right to help, to keep trade lines open,” Yuda said. “We negotiated this many times when I was still on Bainbridge, your Hou can understand a bargain.”

“The right to keep to ourselves here, without quotas,” Zariah said.

Haven was gripping the edge of the table again. “We cannot do that, they will never agree.” Budur was crying silently into her hands, since Kailash had fled.

Yvain’s face was blank, unmovable as the ancient rock formations in the middle of our home country. He asked, “Again, how does this work?”

Zariah and Yuda looked to Chloe, who grinned like a devil cat.

“We keep the barrels hostage, but we have to cost them so much money that they must turn to us. Abbas told me about the water shortages on the edges of the country, where seaside harvesting requires fresh water for human consumption, where fresh water is the rarest. Suharto, also, says that our troops are starved for fresh water, and not sent required oxygen tanks to keep their lungs in good shape. Many soldiers recently have died of black lung, which should have been wiped out a century ago when coal mining legally ended. Only those of us who lived in large cities did not feel the shortage. Haven’s precious water filtration factories are not able to keep up with demand for fresh water and healthy air. We do that, but we force them to send us more supplies than they planned as well.”

“You allow us to die for a statement?” Ihsan’s grinding whisper cut through Chloe’s treacherous talk.

“None of us will die,” Chloe replied, “we might have lean times, but we know what we’re doing better than Breathe Easy thinks. We could be self-sufficient inside another year, no problem…”

“With Breathe Easy sending us aide from time to time,” I interjected.

Chloe sighed, “No, this last shipment was a good amount. Low quality, but a good amount. We can work with that. Zariah and Yuda and Guo might have a way to recycle some bits and pieces for printer material. We have lots of seeds. We do need more, but without our precious water, Breathe Easy will fall. The Hou CEOs will do anything to stop that.”

“Our lives are at risk,” Ghadir said. “If you worked in the garden more you would understand how little food we have.”

“I know exactly how little food we have,” Chloe answered. I have never seen a bigger, brighter smile on anyone’s face.

Ihsan shot to her feet. “YOU!” She yelled, lunging for Chloe. She grabbed the woman’s suit and shook her, then sent her flying into a stack of empty containers. Chloe landed with a yelp against the wall and slid down. Zariah rushed to her side, while Suharto pulled Ihsan’s arms behind her back and shoved her face-first into the opposite wall.

Through a film of bloody foam around her mouth, Ihsan shouted, “She destroyed the garden! She killed us all!”

Thirty-Two

No more sabotage this last week, but no sign of the saboteur either. The men have pulled themselves off several shifts so that they can sit in the common room and talk, talk, talk about our future. I knew that we, the women, were destined for mainly hard labor on this voyage, but I had hoped for more help. Now it is 12 people, not 24, working on little sleep to ensure the colony’s barest survival.

We have planted all the seeds we have left. Durada has industriously taken the rotting food and composted it to make rich soil that we hope will quickly raise these new plants to life. We have hatched all the fish eggs and shellfish that we had left as well, and will release those in the next few days. None of our eight octopuses have shown up, so Vivien is hard at work, with a permanent furrow in her brow, to hatch the last of the octopus eggs. It will take months for them to grow up, and in the meantime, our barrels will remain adrift, listless, in the endless deep of Europa’s ocean.

There has to be a better system than that. I asked Yuda and Guo if they could think of a mechanical way to lift the barrels so that we could continue mining operations. The question stumped them, and although I’m sure they’re still thinking about it, water-proofing a computer system, even under ideal circumstances, would take at least as long as raising octopuses and training them for the job.

We received several messages from Breathe Easy regarding the sabotage. They have sent one more supply ship, which they had expected would leave full of water, which instead has proven to be a waste of their time. They have told us that this is the last one until we can load it down.

Ghadir and Chloe have created a meticulous feeding schedule for all of us, so we will not run through our supplies before we have more plants and bivalves to feed us.

I suppose I should talk about other news. As you may suspect, there are some shifting alliances among the 24 of us. Yuda and Guo are surprisingly close – they have intense shouting matches about the theory of quantum-entangling crystals, and then mere hours later they have their foreheads pressed together over their meal. One might assume that Zariah is unhappy in this instance, but she, Suharto, and Chloe are consistently seen in a clump. Sometimes Abbas joins them, sometimes he and Chloe stand off to the side, making sharp gestures at each other and speaking rapidly under their breaths. Payam stays near Yvain as much as possible, staring at him with puppy dog eyes and intently ignoring me. Yvain brushes Payam away, like brushing a fly off your face. Fletcher and Natsuki still work together, but they never speak, and Natsuki is more likely to share her meals with Vivien, Ihsan, Ghadir, and Durada, who also mostly ignore their assigned partners. Haven and Vahan dutifully share their lives, with Vahan following Haven’s lead on most projects. Rusul, Fletcher, and Kailash converse on a regular basis, feet apart in importance postures. Many times, I want to pull rank on them, or have Samira do so. But I won’t. Yuda was right, I advocated to the group to relinquish the idea of caste. I can only do my part to prove that is a viable option for us.

Speaking of Samira, she and Cyril are seen talking together on a regular basis. Durada, of course, does not care – she never wanted a partner to begin with, and since Payam, Samira’s partner, seems hyper-focused on impressing my partner, I suppose Samira has no one else to talk to.

Yvain has been diligent and kind. I was not keen on the idea of another partner, after my failed marriage. However, I think I am beginning to see why Yvain and I were paired together. He is not merely quiet, he is pensive. He is not merely considerate, he is respectful. He does not take up more of my space than necessary, and he always asks for my opinion when he helps me during my scheduled shifts. He asks me about my life, but he never pressures me when I do not want to answer his questions. I have been reluctant to describe much of my life, until just yesterday. We had a very interesting talk about our futures on Rabbah.

It was late at night, and we were in my tiny room. Yvain was stretching, some kind of meditation and strength training combined that he told me he learned in the military. I am in the midst of one of Budur’s knitting assignments – she still holds late-night knitting groups for those who are mentally capable of the challenge. She assigned me to knit a pair of “leg warmers” – knit fabric tubes for your legs, like pants but without the waist area. She said that we should knit clothing that can go over our suits, to help keep us warm if our power generators run low or the layer of shellfish attached to Rabbah’s outside walls should completely disappear for some reason, and we are fully susceptible to the cold. It was late enough that my eyes were growing dim and I squinted at the work, frustrated with my inability to see or, apparently, feel the stitches.

“Knitting is not your subject,” Yvain finally said. Somewhere in my frustrated stitching, he had finished his asanas and leaned against a wall, watching me. Weeks before, I might have said he was staring at me, but that’s not how it feels anymore.

“My illegal lessons covered hand-stitching, gardening, cooking,” I replied, “but I did not start knitting until Moon Base.”

“You don’t seem to like it.”

“I don’t see the usefulness in it,” I admitted. Yvain smiled. He has this small smile, just the corners of his mouth turning up. It lights his eyes, but the rest of his face hardly changes.

“You will be good at it, because I know you will keep trying,” he said. My former husband, Alan, would never have said something like that to me. He would have said something about what Gadhavi, in general, can do. Or something about duty or civility or the job we owed to our employers and the castes above us. But nothing about me, personally, and what I could do. I have always been my caste. I wanted an opportunity to walk away from that, and I couldn’t, I still find myself repulsed by the thought of the lower castes around me, even though I respect each individual on this colony.

“Aelis, tell me,” Yvain said, after I had paused in thought for some time. I snapped back. “We were all recruited for this journey, somehow. I think we all saw the posters. And you clearly have needed skills to live here. But what really happened to you?”

So I told him. I told him about my divorce and lengthy lawsuit and the eventual settlement that led me – gratefully, I stressed – to apply for this opportunity. He nodded.

“But you,” I said, “did not come with those skills, and only about half of the men who came are used to physical labor. Why did you come to Rabbah?”

He smiled again, but his eyes drifted off in thought. “I only ever wanted to be a soldier. I was always glad for the food and shelter provided for me by … whatever job I held. Dutiful to the last. Both of my parents were soldiers, died in the last police action. I had been out of the academy just long enough to get shipped overseas, and soon took my father’s place on the front line. I was there for years, planning drone strikes, hooking myself in to the system and leading missions, frying my mind away little by little. They don’t tell you, when you start training, that your mind cannot handle that much input for that many hours a day, when it is not gathered by your natural five senses. On most missions, soldiers would collapse from brain melt. Once or twice I was the only one left.

“The insurgents, devious cyberpunks though they are, put their physical bodies on the front line at least. They may have lost limbs or lives, but they did not lose their self. I felt my Self begin to melt, run into the drone I piloted and each time, less of me made it back.

“I started … sympathizing with the insurgents.”

I jumped. My knitted mess flew from my hands to the floor as I backed myself into a corner of my bunk and stared at Yvain, the tall, graying, sad-eyed Bakalov who had lived on my floor for over a month now.

His eyes went wide, he held his hands out, palms up. “Please, Aelis,” he said, “I am not violent. I don’t think I ever was, even though once I wanted to kill the enemy, whoever the enemy was. I didn’t know what killing meant, and when I found out, all I wanted to do was even the playing field for them. If they could fight more like us, then they might stand a chance against us. There might be less death. They are not so different from the Araboa, who live right next to us. They have a different structure, they hold different values, but they are people.”

“You gave them our technology?” I whispered.

Yvain nodded. “I became a weapons dealer.”

I choked back an urge to vomit as my stomach rolled and my eyes spun to follow the room – like the fainting spells induced from being unhooked from the glasses. I did not faint, but I could not steady myself for several minutes.

Yvain handed me a glass of water when the spinning stopped. It was milky, but it has been milky and sour for weeks because of the damage to our filters. I took a sip, allowing the taste to wash over my tongue and wake me up.

Yvain sat next to me on the bunk, but stopped short of putting an arm around me or leaning into me somehow. He said, “I was wrong about the weapons-dealing. I just wanted to get away from the death, the death of Self for us and the full-body death for the insurgents. This was not what I was told. The insurgents should have been evil creatures, but they were frightened people pumped full of too much ideology, just like me. But they did not use the gift I gave them the way I had hoped. The killing became much, much worse. When I saw the death toll on our side, after what I had done, I turned myself in. I, too, faced a long lawsuit for treason, harder treason than yours, treason only a soldier can commit. And this is my prison.

“But I would rather be in this prison, far away from all of the grief on Earth, than living the life I had before.”

I took another sip of the sour water. Finally, I said, “Did I commit treason?”

Yvain nodded. “You betrayed your society.”

“I had never thought of it like that, exactly. I always felt like I didn’t fit in, but then I found this and I didn’t think … if this life could exist, it could not be treason, really?”

Yvain’s eyes smiled, then welled full of sadness. “All of us here are traitors in some way.”

“We did talk, before you men arrived, about why we had been sent to Europa. Even Haven, who adores Breathe Easy so much, made mistakes. Criminal, sure, but not treason.”

“It is good we are not on Earth,” he said.

“Despite the hardships here,” I replied. Yvain nodded.

Thirty-One

I am sorry to say it, but I think the men are not very wise when it comes to running the colony. I think we might have done better for ourselves before. Yes, about half of them have taken on other tasks that they were better at, but the tensions between the women have not resolved, and the sabotage of the station is getting worse. I can say for certain it is sabotage now, as well.

Natsuki and Fletcher, Ihsan and Bulus, and Yvain and I were all on an 8-hour gardening shift before Yvain and I split off to work on the filtration system with Yuda and Guo. When we came in, nearly all of the plants had been destroyed. A rotting pile of seaweed, lettuce, and cucumber mush – the remains of months of hard work and wistful dreaming – loomed at us from the center of the garden. The tiny, unripe fruit from the strawberry patches had been picked, as well.

“I suppose we’ll be eating nutritional loaf for a long time,” I said.

“I wonder if Ghadir can do anything with this?” Yvain suggested, softly and mostly to just me.

Ihsan was trembling. “This is not right, no one can decide the fate of 24 humans,” she said. Then her head snapped up, eyes staring at the spring we created with the old, rusted-out hydraulic system. “The fish,” she whispered.

“Someone is doing this intentionally?” Fletcher asked, looking around at all of us. I nodded, but spoke to Ihsan instead. “What do you mean, the fish?”

“Outside!” she yelled.

The bivalves. And the octopuses. I rushed into the main control room, where Zariah and Suharto were watching Vivien impatiently teach Dagon how to call the octopuses to pick up our barrels of water.

“I’m sorry,” I said, out of breath, “but I must use the control panel for a moment. Can you see the octopuses?”

Vivien shook her head. “I don’t think Dagon is calling them properly. There’s something off in his code.” Dagon shrugged and said, “It sounds right to me, Vivien, I’m sorry.”

I grabbed Vivien’s seat at the keyboard and panned our one outside camera around, staring deep into the unblinking blackness. Nothing.

“Vivien, call them,” I said.

“What the hell is going on, Aelis?” Zariah asked.

Eyes still keen on the monitor, I answered, “Ihsan has a hunch. Our garden has been massacred, our months of work worth nothing now, and perhaps the villain has hurt more than just plants.”

Vivien immediately called the octopuses. No response.

“Keep trying them,” I said, “I’m going to get Ghadir.”

Rushing into the kitchen, I interrogated Ghadir about how she harvested the bivalves outside.

“Aelis, what is this about?” she whined. Huge dark circles rimmed her eyes, like she hadn’t slept in weeks.

“Ihsan thinks our saboteur may have hurt more than just our vegetable crop,” I replied. Ghadir’s mouth dropped open, but she showed me the clumsy rig she used to gather the shellfish up and haul them inside. Scrape, scrape along the outside of Rabbah, metal versus carbon – but no results. She tried again, but there was nothing.

Ghadir began to cry. I could not stay to pat her, but took off in search of Yuda and Guo, who spent most of their time working on the filtration systems. I had a hunch, too.

Yuda and I nearly collided in the corridor, she also with a panicked look, covered in sweat.

“The garden?” she asked. I said, “Destroyed.” She nodded and said, “There was a stench. I followed it. The bivalves are … gone.”

“I knew it,” I said.

“They were left in the water filters. Near the end of the whole system,” Yuda continued. “It will take weeks …”

Our food is low, our water is tainted. I do not know how to communicate this. I think Kailash has spoken with the CEOs for us all, but I cannot say for sure. The days since the grievous sabotage have been a blur of scrubbing, cleansing, planting, bandaging wounds, and numb chewing. Chewing tasteless and spongy nutritional loaf. Only half at a time, two meals a day instead of three, to save our supplies.

The only thing we can offer in exchange for assistance is to find our saboteur and stop them permanently. But please, we need … everything.

Thirty

After more than a week of talking, the men gathered us all in the common room. The women, as usual these days, were divided by political argument: Zariah, Yuda, Chloe, Vivien, and Samira at one end of the gray room, Haven and Budur huddling on the other side, with Natsuki closer to Vivien than usual, Ghadir as close as she could get to me, and Durada and Ihsan leaning against the back wall, away from everyone. Yvain made sure I sat near the front, and sat next to me. Ghadir’s partner Rusul sat far away from her, and the two barely made eye contact.

“Are things not going well between the two of you?” I asked, as everyone shuffled into their places.

Ghadir shrugged, but said, “I mentioned the union discussions we’d had and he was very upset. I … do not know why he was sent to be with me. He would probably make more sense as Haven’s partner.”

Haven, of course, sat with her partner Vahan at her side. Vahan is a Bakalov, like Haven, and a former soldier, like Yvain. His mousy hair is chopped in the same cut as Yvain’s, but Vahan is younger and does not seem to have any scars. He is skinnier, as well. I presume he spent more time operating combat robots, like Bakalov soldiers normally are trained to do. I worry about a hidden bloodlust in Yvain, to have so many scars.

“It looks like Haven and Vahan suit each other,” I said, “at least from the perspective of caste duty.”

Ghadir shrugged again, and looked away from me.

Kailash stood as front and center as he could manage in the room, and those men not by their assigned partners sat just behind him and looked at us.

“We were sent to Rabbah early, as many of you know, to help this colony negotiate its place with Breathe Easy.” Zariah groaned audibly but Kailash, to his credit, ignored her with perfect grace. “No one here is perfect, including we, the menfolk. We have observed and reported to Breathe Easy these last two weeks, and we have decided on some ways that we believe we can contribute.”

I noticed Zariah’s partner, Suharto, place a hand on her shoulder. Kailash saw it too, and his sparkling eyes sharpened, like the point on a diamond. But he continued without flinching anything other than his gaze.

“Some of you know already, but we too were chosen because we have great skills to add to this colony. We are not here merely to take over the day-to-day management, although we would like to help with that, as well. We are here to lend our physical labor, as farmers, operators, maintenance help. We have come up with a daily schedule,” and here he pulled a tablet from the dining table and turned it on, “so that we can best assist you with whatever it is you regularly do. Then, within a week, we will decide if our skills are best suited to this practice, or if we need to adopt new routines for the sake of efficiency.”

Budur was nodding enthusiastically and looking pleased. Ihsan looked sick.

But that is how it has been for the last week. I was assigned to work strictly in the two areas I am supposedly best at – weaving filters, and working in the garden. I have tried to teach Yvain these things, and while his fingers are too thick for the delicate movements needed for fine mesh, I think he will make a wonderful gardener. He has been very serene while helping me harvest, aerate the soil, ensure all the plants have water, release more bivalve larvae into nets around the colony’s outside walls. He seems to sleep better when we work there, as well. His nightmares have, on occasion, woken me up in the middle of the night.

Vivien did not take immediately to her partner, Dagon, but the two dyed-in-the-wool Ikin are difficult to separate these days. If they were Senfte or Arany, they would walk arm-in-arm everywhere, flashing white teeth at the world. Instead, they walk efficiently and are barely more than six inches apart from each other at any one time.

Natsuki’s partner Fletcher, in contrast, hardly understands gardening and quickly stopped trying to learn. I think he is waiting for this first trial period to expire so he can go back to what he is good at, although I am not clear on what that is. Probably circuitry, since he used to be Araboa. Ihsan’s partner Bulus has not been very helpful with the garden, either. And Cyril, Durada’s partner, seemed to have abandoned the entire concept of gardening after merely a day with his fingers in the dirt. The man is Ikin, you would think he’d understand where most fertilizer comes from.

Although many of the women have a hard time with their pairings, Chloe has, unfortunately, actively rejected her partner, Abbas. He lives in a different space than she does, and she refuses to let him spend the night with her. On that particular point, I cannot blame her. Such sudden pairings have been difficult for us all - Yvain still sleeps on the floor. I’m starting to think he prefers it there. I thought Zariah, surely, would be the one to reject her assigned partner, but she seems to get along with Suharto well. I don’t know how closely they’ve been working together, but he does sit with her at meals – and she still sits with Yuda and Chloe and Samira, and now Yuda’s partner Guo.

Come to think of it, I hardly seem Samira with her partner, Payam. There is no particular animosity in their separation, and she has not forced him out of her room. However, Payam seems to want to spend each meal with Yvain and me. I bet it is because Payam is also a former soldier, a die-hard Bakalov who spent years in the army. He keeps trying to get Yvain to speak about his time in the military as well, but Yvain always brushes the younger soldier off with clipped sentences.

Ghadir continues her fascination with me, but I think now it is more to avoid her partner, Rusul, who wafts from group to group during mealtimes and chats everyone up. His poorly-executed Senfte charm makes me feel dirty. I think he is trying to spy on all of us, since we were such a disturbed group that we brought up the archaic idea of unionizing. I try to talk about my routine with Yvain that day, and little else, and it looks like our union stumpers Zariah, Yuda, Chloe, and Vivien have all managed to do the same thing. He’s digging where there is little to find, I hope.

Somehow, though, Ghadir has not yet sent him away. I think she is afraid. Chloe has not turned out to be the best example to follow, but she cannot follow mine, because Rusul would never acquiesce to Ghadir’s wants. She says he was a phone room manager for years with Breathe Easy and his love for the company is the only thing he talks about, at night. I feel so sorry for her.

In the meantime, I am glad this experimental week will be over soon, because I would love to work on some other projects. I find that I actually miss cleaning out the air filtrations system, or working with the octopuses. I haven’t had to pilot the ship for this week, however, and the rest is beginning to settle the pieces of my mind that I was barely holding together. Suharto took over the task for me, because he commanded several drone strikes and is much more used to the after-effects of the glasses than I am. He said it has something to do with an inner ear disturbance, that the military trains its soldiers to master. So I haven’t had to choke down pain medication or sleep for an entire day, and I feel stronger for it.