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.
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.
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