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.

Twenty-Nine

Another major tube on our air filtration system has been down for days, and the metallic stench grated on me for so long that I agreed to climb into the tube with Yuda, despite gut-wrenching misgivings about spending time with her.

We did not speak for several minutes while we strapped our gear onto our bodies and climbed into the tube. Finally, however, she turned her head slightly over her shoulder as we crawled along and asked, “How is your assigned partner working out?”

She asked the question with such an air of calmness that I almost thought she was chatting about the weather. But for me, it is a loaded question – I still don’t know what I think about the Bakalov that now lives in my room. He is gruff, the only work he does with his hands is push-ups in military fashion, he takes up space that had been solely mine. But he is gentle – he notices when I have an onset of a headache, after being near me for only a week so far, and he sleeps on the floor rather than in my bed. And he did that all on his own, without me asking him to not intrude into my tiny bunk.

I told this to Yuda, who smiled. Without my prompting, she began discussing her own partner, Guo. “His name is unusual, but he is an Araboa, all right. He loves circuitry, and we spent the whole night when he first moved in discussing computers. He has strong opinions about how to handle the system here, which Zariah does not like. I didn’t like it at first, either, but I think he might be right.”

“Have you done anything other than talk yet?” I asked.

Yuda smiled broader. “A little,” she said. “There is nothing like a sex-starved Araboa man in bed, let me tell you. I almost wish you had been paired with one of us.”

I grimaced. I didn’t mean for Yuda to see it, but she did. “What? You, so adamant that we are all ‘Rabban,’ all one caste, you are disgusted?” She spat at me.

I dodged the shot, but couldn’t look her in the eye. I didn’t mean to grimace, but I cannot imagine being with an Araboa man. I have committed some of the worst crimes against our country, and I cannot imagine breaking marriage traditions within castes. I can only hope that I begin to feel differently. I think I might be already, having experienced the kindness even an old soldier from a work-worn caste can give.

We finally emerged at the end of the tube, into the larger section where the algae were supposed to grow. I remember distinctly hanging bags overfull with the slimy green organisms against the walls of such spots, to produce oxygen for the colony. Now, in this section, a flood of brownish-green algae covered the floors, an oily scum shimmering purples and blues on the surface of their rancid pool. The bags were not punctured, but obviously sliced open, shreds dangling from where they had been mounted on the wall.

“This looks intentional,” I said to Yuda, redundant as the statement was. She nodded.

“I don’t like the way this colony is being managed,” she said, “but I would never disrupt the air supply just to make a point.”

“Who would do this?”

Yuda shrugged. “I suspect Haven,” she said, “or one of the new men. I am not sure who else would want to do such a thing. No one here has a death wish.”

“I wonder if this person has also been intentionally destroying parts of the garden,” I suggested. It seemed to make sense – acts of sabotage, of terrorism. But for what? We were all on edge anyway, why make it worse, trapped under frigid water on an alien moon on the wrong side of the asteroid belt?

Yuda agreed with me. Again, however, I have struggled with how to bring this up to Breathe Easy. After our close brush with blasphemy in merely discussing the union idea, I dread their reaction to the news that someone is so ungrateful for shelter and food that they are working to actively destroy it. Surely then our lives will be worth less than nothing. It is one thing to reject society in secret, and another thing to entirely shun the gifts given by social contract.

But I am writing about it anyway, because somehow, Breathe Easy must know. I can only hope that the men, in all their talking, find a way to help us manage ourselves.

Twenty-Eight

Our 12 men have finally arrived, but I have hardly been able to spend any time with them, because my post ship-landing migraine was terrible, and it was revived when I learned about their purpose for coming here.

Perhaps it is only my imagination, but I remember being told that more colonists would arrive to help us. But it turns out that these men are here for two reasons: to manage us, and to breed with us. They have each been assigned to one of us for that purpose, as though we were all married now.

As you can imagine, Zariah, Durada, and Ihsan did not take kindly to this. I think most of the women are barely managing with the new information, and there is so much work every day just to maintain Rabbah that I suspect they’ve hardly had time to get to know their husbands.

Budur has taken to her partner, Kailash, swimmingly. They are both Senfte, and I think they have charmed each other so much that the relationship is just working out. That does not seem like the kind of working partnership that one might want, but at least she is happy, I suppose. She was desperately unhappy, scared even, before Kailash. Now something in her is at ease. Perhaps because she has a body to hide behind, should Zariah choose to blaspheme about union organizing again.

I have been partnered with a man named Yvain. He is a former soldier, Bakalov caste, and looks as though he has been on the front lines more than the robotic soldiers normally sent out. His hands are covered in scars and he has one long slice from his right ear to the thin-skinned area where an artery climbs the neck to send blood to the brain. His hair is buzzed so short I can see his scalp, and it has a mottled gray look about it. The muscles of his arms and legs bulge against his suit, but I suppose mine do now, too, because of the hard labor I’ve been performing. I was never a traditional Gadhavi neutral feminine shape, but now I am even further from my caste’s ideal. My former caste, I suppose.

I do not know why I was paired with this Bakalov soldier. A Senfte, easy of word and smile, I could understand. The Senfte comprehend the efficiency of the Gadhavi and translate it into sweet words and lofty gestures, and they make the perfect, well, servants for the caste. If I were to aim for a lower caste, that is what I would aim for. But I have instead a battle-hardened Bakalov who speaks very little and hovers just outside of my shadow, watching me.

I only fully recovered from the migraine two days ago, and since then I have been working hard in the garden to ignore my new shadow. Natsuki, I found, has been doing much the same thing, an attempt to ignore her partner, Fletcher. She told me over the cucumber plants that she doesn’t like him – he is an Ikin, but he wanted to be an Ikin, he chose that life having worked his way out of the Araboa colony on Bainbridge Island and sued for a place in society. He does not really understand Ikin at all, she said. We whispered over the tomatoes while Yvain and Fletcher stood by the door. I’m sure they heard us, but they didn’t care, and they didn’t leave.

For the most part, it seems like the men have not contributed much physical labor at all. When they are not studiously watching us ladies, they meet in the common room and talk. They talk for hours. They sip water like they were relaxing in an oxygen lounge with energy drinks – some have even brought e-cigarettes that they smoke. As though we needed more steam clogging up the air systems. Will they receive refills for their cigarettes in a shipment? I secretly hope they will not, but becoming a caretaker for a group suffering withdrawal will take too much of my already full time.

Yuda and Zariah maintain the computer systems, organize changing the filters for our air and water and waste – which we must now do twice a day, in part because the last shipment of material that arrived with the men was lower quality and does not create good enough carbon weave for the filters. The air smells metallic again, and the water tastes a little dirty.

The ship they arrived on had a detachable piece, apparently, that flew a load of water to Earth and left a bit of ship behind for us to build onto the station. I caught up on transmissions to and from Earth yesterday – a task that Kailash took over while I was ill – and it appears that the water had some contaminants in it, and therefore Breathe Easy will dock our supplies until we can find a way to fix the problem. Perhaps it is everything we have added to the sea since landing here? I don’t know how we can filter the water ourselves, if that is the case. Perhaps it was just the barrels, though. I will make a point of examining them before we send another shipment. 

Vivien released the new octopuses into the ocean while I was unconscious. She says they are doing well, but the original four are more and more lethargic. She cannot bring them inside for fear of breaking the ancient, rusted hydraulics system, which is fragile enough without anyone touching it. However, she said she thinks they may be getting sick from the radiation, since they are exposed to it every week when they bring barrels of water to the surface of Conamara Chaos. She asked me to request iodine in the next shipment, which I did, but I hold no hopes of receiving it. We still have a number of octopus eggs, and if our lives are as disposable as Zariah and Samira think they are, then surely Breathe Easy will not care for the lives of an octopus pod.

The talk of unions seems to have calmed for now, although the colony is still split along the same antagonistic lines. However, I noticed that some new damage had been inflicted on the garden while I was unconscious. I wonder if the two situations are related. I do not know who would do something so stupid as to jeopardize the lives of 24 people by harming their only source of food. When I told this to Ihsan, she laughed at me and said, “Someone who likes the taste of nutritional loaf.”

I doubt that it is Ihsan, however. She may dislike having a forced husband – again – but she would not jeopardize the hard work she has put into that garden. Nor would Durada, who swore never to marry again. It could be any of the ladies who wanted to unionize, but it could also be Haven, angry at the rest of the group for a situation that she put herself in. If she never suggested mining Europa, then she would not have been forced to leave Earth.

And the rest of us would have no way to pay our debts. In a strange way, I am grateful to her, although the situation in Rabbah right now is so tense I might develop ulcers.

Now that everyone is going to sleep for a few hours, I think I will check the barrels. I am still trying to work off a different schedule than the others. I don’t know that I want to have a meal with Zariah and Haven for some time.

Twenty-Seven

We have some major problems and I don’t know how to speak to Breathe Easy about it, so I will write it here and hope for the best.

Ghadir has been unable to preserve any of our food stocks. Other than nutritional loaves, we have no food buffer for shortages. We have no way, through brining, drying, or fermenting, to save food for lean times ahead.

And we will likely have lean times soon. Our lettuce, which was exploding all over the garden, has disappeared. Our few tomatoes are gone. The new plants continue to sprout, but I fear for them. The fish eggs are gone, as well, and that means the octopuses will continue to eat the bivalves off the sides of Rabbah. We added more – tube worms, which will become huge veiny red creatures, along with mussels, scallops, clams – but it may not be enough to buffer us against the cold of Europa’s oceans, because once we release the new four octopuses, they too will eat the animals off the sides of our station. I wish we had never introduced them to this source of protein, but they are meat-eating animals so they may have died from lack of nutrients. It is hard to know, now.

And the four octopuses outside appear lethargic. Vivien thinks they have caught some kind of disease, which means there might be viruses that we could be susceptible to. There is no way for a pathogen like a virus to spread from cephalopod to mammal and infect both, but I am still concerned about the potential for us to get sick again.

I insisted all the women use the vaccines that Breathe Easy sent us, and I made sure they all complied. I am less well-liked than before, although I still believe most of the women only spoke to me to sway me, the one person communicating with Breathe Easy, to their side.

I cannot wait for the men to get here to calm this situation down.

Here is the strangest experience, which I have already reported to Breathe Easy and which they have not yet responded to. Zariah has suggested we form a union. I did not know what a union was until she explained it, though. This was a few days ago, and I had made a rare appearance in the common room for dinner, because I had been working all day and missed a meal and was generally exhausted.

Everyone was leaning intently over their bowls of clam and tomato chowder, even Budur and Haven, as Zariah was speaking to the group. Everyone turned as I walked in, and Ghadir jumped up to grab soup for me. I took it from her as I sat down, and Zariah said to me, “Ah, good, we haven’t seen you in awhile, Aelis. We were just discussing the future of Rabbah.”

I nodded, although my stomach knotted up. I gulped a bite of acidic chowder anyway, hoping that the knot was mostly hunger.

But Zariah was talking about something treasonous. “I was telling everyone that we should Unionize.”

I looked around. Before, when I was a child, I had heard this term, and it was always accompanied with a sneer of disgust. I didn’t really know what it meant, until Zariah explained it. I have no idea how she discovered the concept.

“It’s all blasphemy,” Haven said, and scowled into her bowl. Budur’s eyes shifted from Haven, to me, to Samira, her former knitting companion, who stood statuesque and defiant against Haven’s official disapproval.

Samira stood as well. “It might be the best way we can protect ourselves,” she said. Chloe, Yuda, and Vivien all nodded.

“I don’t know what this discussion is about,” I said, “but I have been doing everything I can to express our needs to Breathe Easy. They’ve sent us more supplies on a regular basis, we’re doing well with mining, and the next round of colonists will be here very soon. They clearly want us to succeed. I don’t know what we can do beyond that.”

Budur nodded enthusiastically. Ghadir looked terrified, caught as she was between Yuda, Zariah’s near-constant companion, and me.

“Aelis, do you know what a Union is?” Zariah asked, face tilted up so she had to look down the length of her thin nose at me. I shook my head “no.”

“Despite what you may have been told by your corporate masters,” she continued, “a Union is not a bad thing. It is a group of people with skills that are necessary to keep a business running, who band together to ensure their needs are met.”

“Our needs are met,” Budur said softly. Haven had raised her eyes from her bowl, and her pupils were now burning lasers at Zariah’s head. I remembered the keen headache that hyper-focused stare had given me and gulped a huge bite of soup to distract myself.

Zariah, however, seemed not to suffer from any kind of burning pain, and instead reflected the laser glare back at Haven. She said, “This company does not care if we succeed, they just want their profits. They have used vital shipments as leverage before, and they only continued when we proved we were able to mine the water from Europa. How long will that last? Until they find an easier way of getting water. Until they have so much water that they don’t need us anymore.”

“They have given us food, shelter, medicine, and structure,” Haven replied. “That is all they must give us. They did not have to give us even that.”

“But they will let it all fail, replace us, if they want!” Zariah retorted.

“And what of that!” Haven slammed her hands – a violent habit for emphasis and commanding attention, I’ve noticed – into the table with a crack, shivering bowls and splashing red soup. “All of you are criminals, the worst scum that could be on Earth, who defied the social contract written up between the corporations that provide for us, and the caste system that keeps us functioning. Humans would have destroyed ourselves a century ago if not for the Declaration of Incorporated Personhood, and yet people like you, Zariah, and like you, Aelis, and Ghadir, and Chloe, and Durada, keep pushing those boundaries too far. You do not accept the undeserved generosity you receive every day from these businesses, and instead seek something else, something you think might be better. But there is nothing better, there never was a solution that worked this well! And now you put all of our lives and livelihoods in danger with despicable words! If Breathe Easy allows us to die, so what? Our lives are worth less than nothing anyway!”

Zariah almost launched herself across the table, but Samira and Yuda held her back. Budur leapt to stand by Haven, and the rest of us cleared back away from the table as fast as we could.

It only took a few seconds for the physical restraint to calm Zariah down. Haven’s fingers were white with gripping the edge of the table. But they stayed locked in each other’s fiery gaze for long afterward.

Samira finally put an arm between the two, as though she was a grounded connection and could dispel the electric shock building between them, threatening to kill us all. Haven leaned back. Zariah looked into her soup.

Samira, stately but shaking slightly, looked at Haven and said, “Please tell us, Haven, why you joined this group? You talk as though you were the only innocent civilian among us.”

Without releasing her grip, she said, “The CEOs of Breathe Easy asked me to manage the project.”

“And you said yes?” Samira asked. “It was as simple as that?”

“I have worked for Breathe Easy for my entire career,” Haven replied. “I managed a water filtration plant on the Eastern Coast for a decade. I am good at my job. They recognized that. They asked me to manage the Rabbah Expedition, a bigger project.”

Samira nodded. “So there was no reason they would have wanted you off Earth?” Haven was a statue. I thought she had begun to meld into the printed carbon table. When she received no response, Samira continued, “One night when I was too dizzy to sleep, I read the personnel files on everyone on this mission. They are freely available in the archives, but not easy to access. Still, I think we should all read them now, to get to know one another better.” She looked around. “We, including Haven, are all society’s rejects for one reason or another. We are listed as ‘repaying our debts,’ but that does not even begin to cover our crimes. Including Haven.” Haven was beginning to return to human, I thought – her shoulders were shaking, which shook the table. I picked up my soup, not wanting to create more work for Ghadir if my food spilled.

Samira kept relentlessly on, speaking directly to Haven again, “You broke the caste regulations. That is why you are with a group of criminals. You spoke directly with the CEOs of Breathe Easy, anonymously through email, to suggest this mission rather than continue the failing attempt to maintain their water filtration plants. The oceans are growing filthier, as more and more land and abandoned cities are swallowed up, and the cost of maintaining the factories is getting too high. But with water on Europa – knowledge that a Bakalov should never have gleaned – it will cost the company less in the long run to suck all of the precious liquid off of this moon and bring it to Earth, than to maintain a large workforce that constantly fixes and cleans the factories. You should never have been smart enough to figure that out. And when the CEOs realized they could send you away from the entire planet, instead of taking you to court, they decided to side-step infamy and “promote” you instead. They, too, have broken that law, by not reporting your criminal activities to the government through lawsuit.”

Samira sat down. Haven’s arms began shaking the table.

Zariah, former Bakalov as well, furrowed her brows together and stared at Haven. “You are a criminal like us, then.”

Haven picked up her bowl and threw it against a nearby wall. I took that opportunity to exit as quickly as I could. That was a good move on my part, I think, because many women had bruises and cuts the next day. I had to sew a thick laceration in Budur’s arm, which tore through her suit and left fibers embedded in her skin. I gave Yuda painkillers for a nearly-broken jaw, but there was little else I could do for her. She will just have to keep her mouth shut for a few days.

Chloe and Samira are working hard to sew up the damaged survival suits, but it is not easy going since most of our supplies have been used to weave new filters for the air system – which still smells metallic to me. Budur has refused to help, and even moved into a room on the opposite end of Rabbah from Chloe and Zariah.

What a waste. I hope the men can work something out for everyone when they arrive. Men are better at politics than women.