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. 

Thirty-Eight

They have barely healed, it has only been a week, and already the anti-unionizers have attempted another takeover. They played it smart this time, as well – their numbers would not have allowed them to fight hand-to-hand, or weapon-to-weapon, so they came up with a plan.

It was breakfast, Ghadir served us another seafood stew with strips of dried kelp – she had managed to somewhat dry them, so they were sticky like fruit candy – and we were all eating together, a rarity as many of us had reset our sleep schedules to avoid each other. But it was a potential transmission day, a day we might hear from Breathe Easy, which we haven’t for two months now. Some held out hope that we could see a mysterious supply ship, since we sent the barrels back. I am surprised that neither Vivien nor I were detained or beaten by Chloe and Zariah and Suharto for our deviance, but perhaps it was because there was potential for explosive violence with the anti-union group.

I ate slowly, watching hands as they raised utensils to check stitches and check for shaking. I cannot look most of these people in the eye anymore, so I watch their hands. Hands can show intention as much as shifting eyes and the chewed corners of mouths.

But I saw no hand twitches, no fingers writhing for knives. Instead, Kailash stood and wiped his mouth, then Fletcher took one last swig of his soup, and Rusul chewed a sliver of kelp and nonchalantly stood. Budur quickly left the room, and Haven started clearing bowls.

And they all left. Zariah and Chloe looked at each other, slurped the rest of their soup and stood, but it was too late. They moved too slowly, and the door to the common room slammed shut. Scraping sounds from behind suggested they moved crates full of scrap in front of the door.

Kailash’s voice boomed through: “We are taking Rabbah. This nonsense about unionizing has to stop. We must all work for our common cause – survival. Agree and we will let you out.”

Zariah, Suharto, and Chloe all looked at each other. Yvain moved to stand behind me, ready to strike anyone who came too close.

“There’s more of us,” Chloe said.

“I agree,” Zariah said, then more quietly, “But we could agree to their terms and fight back later.”

“We did not believe in the Declaration of Incorporated Personhood,” Suharto said, “we don’t have to agree to this rhetoric, either.”

Guo clutched his broken wrist, bandaged and just regaining mobility. Yuda, who had not been in the initial fight, held him close.

“You are all still very hurt,” I said. “If you fight back, your stitches will burst. We don’t have any more antibiotics.”

Chloe scowled at me. “What happened to you, Aelis?”

I shrugged. “I only ever wanted to be away from Earth. These politics smack too much of Earth, to me.”

She chuckled.

Zariah looked at Suharto. “Shall I, or shall you?” Suharto gestured for Zariah to speak. She walked to the door and boomed, “Alright, you win. Let us out.”

Scraping, and eventually, the door opened. Rusul, Fletcher, Kailash, and Haven were all armed with knives. I looked at Yvain, but he did not return my gaze.

I checked Kailash’s communications that night, and one correspondent had recommended that he take hsotages. The correspondent said that in the military, they would send out armed drones to surround a village and keep any insurgents from leaving. An ancient and honored technique, the insurgents would starve, perhaps run out of water before food, and eventually surrender. Only a handful of times in any country’s numerous wars did insurgents allow their numbers, including civilians, to starve.

Hunger is a powerful force.

They let us out, followed us with knives. Kailash handed me the duty roster and I, who have never divided tasks before, told everyone their assignments. Those of us who were neutral were paired on tasks with the unionizers, forcing us into confined spaces and long days with an agitated group. Assigned partners were divided up for the long day. I had to work with Suharto, whose dark stare into the distance was almost audible. We replaced all the filters in the air system, and ensured the algae still belched oxygen.

I admit that I have grown to like working in the air filtration system. It is mindless work, repetitive, easy to teach. In the algae rooms, the air is fresh. Only the air sitting in the main rooms of Rabbah gets stale with our panting, angry breaths.

Suharto is not good at this task. He is one of the men who hardly performed manual labor on Earth. He stuck by Zariah as often as possible, riding on her computer expertise I’m sure. She might have crazy ideas, but she can handle circuitry with ease. I don’t remember seeing Suharto actually work on a crystal core, I only assumed he had been smart enough to pick up the basics and work hard. But he fumbled the filters and scraped his fingers many times. I was afraid I would have to stitch him up with whatever thread was lying around, and with no antibiotics, I couldn’t guarantee that he would survive.

Perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing, I thought. But I pushed the thought away – after Vahan, no one deserved to die. Suharto would not have chosen to send Vahan to his death if he had known. At least the unionizers have an abstract appreciation for life, even if they don’t understand that their actions could cause death in a more personal sense. I pushed that thought away, too, and shoved Suharto to the side to fix the mess he began making with the filter.

We hauled the filters into a storage room to scrape the collected dust off, and hope we would find a good number to reuse. Fletcher and Bulus were organizing crates full of compost for Durada, adding older compost to newer batches so it would take on some of the active cultures. Fletcher gagged – he might be Ikin, but he had become unused to hard labor in the few months that he had been here. He sat with Rusul and Kailash and talked and swallowed painkillers.

My eyes grew hot and I looked away.

Suharto dropped his crate of filters with a loud thud, and Fletcher flinched, glaring daggers at the former army man. I walked between them to redirect their gaze, and scraped layers of black dust off the filter into the compost bin.

“They forced you to work with us, I see,” Suharto sneered at Fletcher, while scraping grime from a filter.

“That one isn’t worth salvaging,” I said loudly, “It looks as though it has been used a few times before. We should just replace it. Start a pile for recycling.” I pointed at the floor. Suharto tossed the filter to the floor, but did not take his eyes off Fletcher.

Fletcher smirked. “I am surprised that a Bakalov would abandon all his ideals for a tight pussy.”

I tensed to catch Suharto if he lunged, although I would probably only hurt myself, but he cackled instead. “You think that is why I want to separate from Earth? You haven’t been on the front lines of our pointless wars. I’ve killed people for ideals I barely understand. You, I’m surprised by – you’re told you’re not even human and you work in fields like animals, you’re fed like animals, penned and moved from place to place like animals, and yet you, an Ikin, think Breathe Easy is worth fighting for.”

Fletcher glared. “I worked to join that society. It is the best protection there is from insurgents and violent storms. When was the last time one of your cities was attacked by a hurricane, huh? Or a terrorist? The outlying Araboa territories are fraught with violence, from within and without, as armies try to get into your country to destroy it. Violent waves eat our shores, our homes, and even people. Coming from the Araboa, I am smarter than you caste people, but joining your society kept me alive. Working with Breathe Easy keeps me alive.”

“If neither of you work, none of us will be alive!” I snapped. Fletcher laughed. Suharto gave me a dirty look.

“Stab me in my sleep later, Suharto,” I said. “Finish cleaning these filters so we can breathe for now.”

Ten hours later, I stumbled into my room, and Yvain was already lying on the bed. I had not spent the night with him in a couple of weeks, and I stood exhausted in the door, unable to think but unable to give up on my reluctance to be with him.

He looked up at me when I entered. “What has kept you away, Aelis?”

“Suharto is a dull student,” I replied.

He shook his head and sat up to look at me straight on. “These last several weeks, you have been working instead of coming to bed. Something happened in your mind to keep you away. What is it?”

I couldn’t look at him. “What did I do to you?” he persisted.

My eyes were hot again, and dry. I blinked to clear the film beginning to cover my vision, sharpening the view to the gray floor. I finally said, “I am afraid of what you’ve taught the anti-unionizers. I am afraid of why they want this. This colony.”

He nodded. “I thought that might be it. You think I trained them to hurt. I did not.”

I finally looked at him.

“It’s true,” he said. “I had them run circles around the common room, and do push-ups, and lift crates and walk them back and forth. I had them meditate, and focus. But I did not teach them any combat moves. I did not encourage them to make weapons. That was Rusul’s idea, and Kailash researched it. They wanted to hurt, so they found a pattern to print knives. Haven smiled at Vahan and encouraged him to die for the cause. Budur would tremble and look delicate and Kailash would surge into action, when otherwise he was all words. They have all become homicidal together and I could not stop them. I tried to exhaust them, but I could not stop them.”

I looked deep into his eyes. They sagged with dark weights, from a long struggle. I chose to believe him and crawled into bed. His arms were comforting.

Thirty-Seven

A fight broke out two nights ago. Blood still stains the halls. I hate myself for not foreseeing it.

I had fallen asleep without looking through Kailash’s missives to Earth, after working an extra shift in the garden to ensure our grapes and blackberries could twine over some ancient bits and pieces from the old computers before Zariah and Yuda gutted them. I said a trellis would be better, but we do not have the material to spare for printing an elaborate piece of equipment. And yet it is important to keep the vines from strangling our other plants, so we use the scrap we have.

I have been too tired and I did not see this coming. Yvain has been very tired as well, from his own physical exertion with the anti-union group, but I don’t know how he didn’t see their plan coming to fruition. Maybe he sympathizes with them more than I thought. Or maybe he is more on the side of the unionizers? It is so hard to know what anyone’s motives are, because they are not for survival alone.

And now our chances for survival are even lower. So many people were hurt in that fight, they will be loopy on our painkillers – draining the last of our medical supplies to the dregs – and they will be unable to work, I am sure of it. Ihsan stayed out of the fight this time, fortunately, and she and Bulus helped me stitch up the wounded. Actual stitches with sterile silk-carbon thread, too valuable to use on these shiftless, thankless people, but I sewed them back together anyway, against every nerve fiber that screamed for me to let them contract an alien infection and die.

We have a smattering of bandages and antivirals and vaccines, but everything else is gone. And Chloe, Guo, Dagon, Cyril, Samira, Suharto, Zariah, Kailash, Rusul, Fletcher, and Haven are all injured. Some have broken bones, and Ghadir thinks we may not have enough calcium in our diets for their bones to knit properly. She is concocting a slimy kelp soup to force down their throats, hopefully bolstering their immune responses and bone knitting cells. They are taking large doses of antibacterials as well, to keep them from getting sick on the water and air. On their separate sides of the colony, they gobble painkillers and laugh triumphantly. I don’t think either side won.

Vahan is gravely ill. He took part in the fight and lost a lot of blood, and I don’t know what to do for him. There are medications that can help his heart, he says, but they are expensive and he has not taken them in years, and Breathe Easy certainly would not send them our way, no matter how nicely we asked. His face is pale, and his hands shake. He lost a lot of blood, because a broken nose did not clot well enough and deep cuts on his arms and chest leeched the rest of what he had. At least one person brought a knife to the fight, and I wonder who it was.

Haven hasn’t bothered to visit her partner. I spent the whole day yesterday with him, and Yvain frequently stopped in to bring water or soup.

I don’t want Vahan to die, but I find myself imagining the day, and I feel the weight of worry lift and I’m confused. I like him, he is a refugee of a broken system just like I am, and there is no reason to wish for his demise. He is not a likely target for assassination, because he is not a ringleader for the anti-unionists – just a pawn in their self-immolating demonstration. So he will suffer to the end.

I asked him yesterday how he wanted to die. I have never had to ask anyone that before. The Gadhavi could only prescribe medication and recommend treatments, but it is the Senfte customer assistants that talk to patients about their death options. It is the Ikin that dispose of the bodies. It is Arany talk show hosts and self-help gurus whose ideologies inform the process of dying. It has never been my place to know anything about it, other than the fact that it will happen to me someday, and I will not likely be missed.

But it seemed important to ask, because Vahan is Bakalov, and stubborn and loyal. He clings to this idea of personal uselessness, which led directly to his slow and agonizing death from … I don’t know what. Infection or internal bleeding. Who can know.

“I feel like Cyril should lean over me and give me reasons for everything that’s happened to me before I go,” he said, half a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.

“Do you want me to get him for you?” My voice held more of a knife’s edge than I intended, a knife that certainly was not for Vahan.

He coughed, which I think was an attempt at laughter. I offered him a glass with thick, foggy water, but he waved me away. “No, of course not, he wouldn’t come even if you asked. I don’t know how we can have a death ritual here, anyway. Maybe Kailash should give me my options?”

I shrugged, but I couldn’t let go of the anger forging in the hot pit of my stomach. I answered, “I don’t think Kailash or anyone should give you your death options. They used you. You should at least choose for yourself, in the end.”

“Bakalovs do not get to choose their way,” he said. He began coughing again.

“Think about it,” I answered.

He died this morning. Kailash forced Fletcher and Abbas to remove the body and dump it in a container in one of the least-used storage rooms until he could figure out what to do with it. Cyril muttered some words as the body passed by him in the hall, but he didn’t attempt to follow or intervene further. I can see why the Arany did not want him anymore.

I think the only thing keeping the peace is the physical damage each side inflicted on the other. Neither side is trained well enough in the art of restraint, Yvain thinks, but I would never suggest that most military men have no restraint and that is the problem. He’s the only one I ever met, and even he smuggled weapons until abuse and a discharge forced him to stop.

He has not been sleeping on the floor, but I have worked through the night to avoid sleeping in the same bed as him. The garden has become all-important to me. I harvest seaweed throughout the night, clean fish and bivalves and leave them in the common room for Ghadir, make stripes of kelp, harvest lettuce, turn the compost, and pluck the brown leaves from our cucumbers, grapes, squash, and herbs. I think the water has become so tainted that even the plants can barely drink it. If we humans did not eat so much soup, I don’t think we would stay hydrated enough.

I spend my days, when I am awake, in the air filtration tubes, checking the algae – none of which have been sabotaged since the day Yuda and I saw the sliced bags – and changing air filters, then changing filters where I know how in the water system and waste systems. The only people I run into are Ihsan and Bulus, and sometimes Durada, as she pulls buckets of waste out of that system for the compost heap.

If I look at Chloe and Zariah and Rusul and Kailash in the eye, I am afraid I will reflect back the senseless, selfish, divisive hatred and something inside me will explode. I fear I will kill someone, and it will feel like self-defense because they are trying to let me die.

Thirty-Six

We did it, we released the octopuses and despite how small they were they lifted the barrels and we attached them to the ship and we sent the old supply ship away.

Yvain piloted the ship for me so I wouldn’t be suspiciously sick. I just want Breathe Easy to send us more supplies. We have been reusing some filters, so our air and water are metallic and thick. I cannot believe that Yuda, who worked so hard on changing the filters every day, would fail to see the need for new printer material.

I also finally asked Yvain about the meetings with the anti-union group. We were lying together in my bed – which he has done for a few weeks now, although we are not having sex.

He sighed. “They are very angry, to the point of violence. Their extremist words feed each other’s violence, and I am trying to guide it into other outlets. I physically work them until they can barely stand, and that has helped so far.”

“You are making them stronger?” Horror leached into my question. “If they become physically strong enough, they could overpower the other group.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Yvain said. “There are more unionizers than anti-unionizers, and I think they would actually get themselves hurt, possibly even killed, if they took the group on all at once.”

“But what if they try to sneak up and attack the unionizers, one at a time?”

“I know they want to do that. I am trying to convince them that this is dishonorable, and not something that Breathe Easy would want us to do.”

I nodded. I don’t think the tactic will work, but at least there is some guidance for the moment. “What about Payam?” I asked.

Yvain sighed. “I think he is beginning to believe their rhetoric. He didn’t at first, and I told him that I was only there to guide the dangerous chaos in their hearts, but we have been around them for so long now that I think he actually agrees with their morality. He was a soldier, but he was not in the military for very long, spent only a few months on the front line before receiving a dishonorable discharge. He didn’t have time to think about the pain he was being asked to endure for a country that barely put a roof over his head.”

“You’re starting to sound like one of the unionizers,” I said.

“I don’t completely disagree with them,” he replied. “And with the hatred emanating from the anti-unionizers, we might be safer with Samira and her strange preaching.”

“But Chloe wants to use sabotage of our food supplies and filters, which puts us in danger, to convince the company that we are somehow valuable enough to keep, if they don’t want to lose their investment. Which is ridiculous, considering how much money they’ve lost on us already.”

“We got the water to Earth, that might show them that some of us are worth aiding,” Yvain said.

I hope that he is right. Our supplies are so limited, we are still attached to Earth by an umbilical cord.

Thirty-Five

The unionizers have officially stopped working while they wait for a response to their transmission. That has left me in charge of changing out all of the filters. Vivien wants nothing to do with the group anymore, so she’s been hard at work, probably to ignore much of what is going on, but her partner Dagon still spends time with Zariah and Suharto, Chloe, Samira, Yuda and Guo. Abbas, Chloe’s assigned partner, has taken over Dagon’s and Chloe’s work, harvesting and cataloguing. As a former Ikin, he has picked up the art of gardening quickly and I’m glad that he’s left the unionizers to work here. Someone has to.

I finally swallowed my fear and read up about unions, in the dark days before the revolution. They employed a tactic called strikes, where all the workers would walk off the job, which would force the company they worked for to lose money. It didn’t work very often, but all the way until just after the revolution, when the Declaration of Incorporated Personhood became hallowed law, some people could not get used to the demands of the job and went on strike.

I think that is what the unionizers want to do now, but we are so far away from Earth, I don’t see how our starvation will inconvenience Breathe Easy. I don’t want to die here just to make a point.

I spoke for a while with Yuda and asked for the group to release Ihsan from her prison. I need the help with the air filters, and I don’t think anyone else in the non-union group could learn how to make and replace them. Zariah and Chloe do not like me so well, but Yuda still appreciates that I am willing to learn many skills. They released Ihsan just yesterday, and her help with the air filtration system made all the difference. I was able to replace most of the filters, and I hope the air will finally begin to clear. Bulus came along for the ride, and I might use him more for that sort of work – he picked it up very quickly. He still shadows Ihsan, seemingly hopelessly lost, like a puppy.

Yvain, meanwhile, has tried to get in with Kailash, Rusul, and Fletcher, which means that Payam has finally been forced to spend some time with Samira. Durada has finally kicked Cyril out of her room, and he has gone to live with Samira, so I don’t know where Payam is staying. I know that Yvain only wants to use his influence to keep them from becoming too extreme, but I don’t think that group is even worth talking to anymore, after they attacked Chloe. Both sides are too willing to abuse human life without understanding what it means to lose that help.

Granted, if we had fewer people, we wouldn’t have as many mouths to feed or have to change the filters as often.

I snuck in last night to the computer room, which Kailash jealously guards during the average shift. I have no idea what he does in there all day, there’s no such thing as instant communication for us. So I wanted to know, and dove into the communication archives. I hoped to find a response from Breathe Easy, but I did not see one.

Instead, I saw several communications – which have been going on for weeks – with military groups on Earth. Discussing the union talk. How to stop it.

Kailash is Senfte, and his anti-union friends are not military. The military men are either unionizers or neutral – an odd development, and I wonder if the brain melt that Yvain talks about had something to do with that. Kailash wanted advice on military training, organizing, attacks. One correspondent suggested that Kailash enlist Vahan, because of his military family. That has proven not to work – now that Vahan’s defect has come to light – and Kailash needs more advice. And he is receiving it, descriptions of strength training and weapons creation. And I suspect he is relaying this to the rest of his people.

No wonder Yvain has stayed so involved. He never speaks about them as though he likes them, but he is in fact keeping a lid on their explosive violence, which, with no military family or training, would go disastrously wrong. I can only imagine what they have discussed printing out or poisoning or sabotaging. I have not had the stomach to ask him yet for details, but I will soon.

The stress makes me sway one way, and then the other. A few days ago, I thought to ask Ghadir to help me find a way to hide the food so that the unionizers couldn’t eat, but now I want the anti-union group to suffer as well. Besides, I am not a Hou. It is not for me to bestow food unto the masses, only to worry about my part in the whole.

There is some good news, as a few of us work to keep the colony running. Vivien wants to release the latest octopuses – we have five of them, but I don’t want to name them because I am afraid that they will be slaughtered – so I am coordinating with her to load the barrels onto the supply ship and send them on their way to Earth. The octopuses are still very small, but perhaps they could push the barrels anyway.

Thanks to the hard work of Bulus, Abbas, Yvain, Ghadir, and Natsuki, we have sprouts coming up and our nutritional loaf will last long enough for the plants to grow. Ghadir has started feeding us a lunch of seafood stew, including some scaly fish that have begun swarming around Rabbah, pecking at our bivalves. But we have lots of bivalves, and our tube worms have grown to huge proportions. I thought they almost looked like lobster tail when they were cooked, and I think maybe Ghadir will serve us tube worm steaks at some point soon. We will not starve in the near future, unless Chloe decides to destroy our garden again.

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!”