Thirty-Nine

I hardly focused this week on my necessary duties – the garden has become self-sufficient for now, Bulus and Ihsan are back changing air filters instead of Suharto – and instead spent many late nights digging through Kailash’s communications with Earth. He has not spoken much with his previous correspondents, but I reread many of the messages, fitting them into the pattern Yvain suggested. I had Yvain join me, and he nodded along with the recommendations, but after a few days begged off the task. It was too much like his previous life, he said.

But finally, after four weeks, a message from Breathe Easy has arrived. They received our water, but the organic pollutants throughout make it harder and harder to filter. I wanted to scream at the screen that of course we have more organic pollutants – we have introduced fish and octopuses and shellfish and kelp and seaweed to the water when there was no other life on the planet, as we were instructed to do. Eight octopuses died in the water, and Breathe Easy could have easily seen it coming. We have known since before the revolution that Europa’s waters were exposed to radiation from space, so of course our animals would be susceptible and die. And of course their bodies would taint the water.

Although we completed our mission, we have been denied more supplies. Between that and the recent troubles with union talk, we are a liability and they said that the men must put us in order before they would send anything more. They might send us our own material for a filtration system, but they would not send us anything else to keep our colony running. If we were not mostly on our own by this point, they said, then we would have to be a financial loss.

Our lives are a financial loss.

Our conflicts are our own fault.

I waited through the night for Kailash to come into the computer room. He was surprised to see me, eyes squinting, stopping in his tracks.

I told him about the message. He sat heavily on a crate.

“Why,” was all he could manage, after several minutes.

“Because we’re a group of convicts who couldn’t see our common cause and killed ourselves,” I replied.

He stared up at me for a long time. “Do you really think we are dead?”

I shrugged. “We could probably manage on food, but the air, the water … our filters are not enough.”

“We can make new filters …”

“No, we have no more printer material. We’ve melted down some old filters but it just doesn’t print properly. We have the next round lined up to be printed today, and then we’ll run out of air in a few weeks.”

Kailash nodded. He saw his own vision of the future spread out before him, eyes dancing across the scene in his head, then he pushed me out of the way. “I can explain this to them,” he said. “Cleaning up after us, for the next round of colonists, is also an expensive prospect.”

“Our water is too dirty,” I said. “I don’t know if they want the Europan oceans anymore.”

But Kailash was already tapping away at the console, composing his plea for silk and carbon fibers so his life would be spared. Praying to his false idols. Failing to rely on his instincts. Maybe he thought the recent take-over by the small group of anti-unionists would be enough to convince Breathe Easy to save us, as though an elite minority would be able to control the majority here, with nothing to offer.

I decided I had to break the news to the group, but I have not yet as of this writing. Kailash won’t – he’ll hold out until we hear from them again, and I can’t imagine that we will.

Sometimes, while I sit at this console, I imagine myself walking out of the airlock and swimming through Europa’s frigid waters and screaming into the black.