Erin Fisher - That Tiny Life

“Can you get my back?” Barry asks. I slide an O2 tank into a sleeve inside his Wearable and secure the layers of WoolTech, Velcro, and ThermalRubber. He taps a test on his armscreen and then turns to zip me. We step over the lip of the airlock. Barry closes the hatch to the airlock behind us, I palm the final seal, and we sit and wait for acclimatization. The room cools.

“Nina, what is it?”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

The first time I met Barry he was in that suit — well, not that exact suit, but a training version. Corporate sent the two of us to Haughton Crater for isolation conditioning — six months in a cargo container on an Arctic island crater without radio contact. It was Earth, barely: the northern tip of Canada. Haughton Crater’s actual crater — from the air you could see it for what it was: a twenty-three-kilometre pit blasted into the frozen dirt by an impact object thirty-nine million years ago. But on the ground we couldn’t see the shape and there was nothing, no life but coin-sized patches of lichen waiting for rain. Arid, dusty-brown, fast-moving clouds. A landscape as close to Titan as Earth could get. It was lonely, and in isolation training and testing, I warmed to him. How could we not want connection in a place like that?

After Haughton Crater we trained together — I guess we’d passed the suitability match — and a year later we launched for Titan. Lifted-off from Earth, coupled with the orbiting Ferry Terminal, and then the two of us were alone on the Deep Solar Ferry burning to Titan.

The ferry’s habitable section seemed small if you compared living space to cargo space, and big if you compared it to Gran’s apartment — we shared the same expanse of windows as back home, only since Barry and I were weightless there was no sense of a floor or ceiling, and that opened things up. Barry could run on the treadmill while I floated above him watching the void. Unless we looked straight up (or down, whatever you’d like to call it) it was like we were in different rooms. Again, there wasn’t much to do. Some tests and monitoring for the scientists — record vision alteration from fluid displacement, blood tests for immune system relaxation, vascular stiffening, and other, lesser-known effects of long-term space travel. All part of the deal.

Which is seeming like a raw deal now, without our bonus. Gran sells — sold — puppies. Barry’s mother still fills her bathtub with eel-tailed catfish and ice and hawks beer-battered fish sticks under a false licence in Singapore. We both send money to family.

The drop in temperature in the airlock passes zero Celsius and across from me Barry’s suit slowly frosts over.

“Oxygen loading as a kid, remember I told you about it?” I have to give him something. “Wake up with the dog licking my face.”

Years of self-throttling, of hitting Cloud Nine. I kept choking, pressing on my own neck to cut off blood flow, to hover at the edge of sensory range before the whole world burned black.

And then the screens — I’m not sure how long I would have gone on choking without them. Probably forever. Thank god that when I was around thirteen, Corporate partnered with the city and billboard screens went up on warehouses and water towers. At first there were only pharmaceutical and education adverts, but after a month of LED pill bottles blinking into Gran’s apartment, we got something else. Fifty-storey high-def images of space, of Earth from space, and of the Deep Solar Ferries. Gran’s floor-to-ceiling windows, shit for privacy, gave us a prime view: the first deep-space cargo ships fired engines and left the construction dock in orbit, destined to Further the Human Race via Titan — Affordable, Rapid Bootstrapping of the Solar System! Open-pit mining of Saturn’s moons, self-replicating build-bots — Industry that promises to Revolutionize the Human Condition . Below the screens, standing on the tacky asphalt, Merven was hauling some person’s crap from his junk truck for resale.

My neck was sore from throttling, but that screen. Clear as if I were in orbit myself, a view of Earth rolling into the night. Flash of the storms, and so much water it made me thirsty.

“Nina.” Rinella, sitting at the table behind me, stepped the dog into panties — the brood girl was in heat again and Rinella’d snipped a hole in a pair of Gran’s floral underwear and stuck a pad at the rear so she wouldn’t leave blood spots on the laminate.

“You need a scarf or something,” she said.

I lifted my hands to my throat. It felt rough, and I knew it was red.

“I know how this place can feel.” She pulled the dog’s tail through the hole in the panties. “But you if you keep that up, you’re going somewhere worse.”

Merven slammed the door and dumped an armload of vintage necklaces on the table. “How much?” he asked.

“Bullshit, hand them over.” Rinella bunched the panties at the dog’s back and twisted the fabric into an elastic. She could repurpose the beads and Merven knew it, and the two of them started to yell. The dogs retreated to Gran on the couch under the wall of “Best of Show” ribbons. She pushed her reading glasses up her nose and ran her finger across her breeding charts.

That fight I locked myself in Gran’s room and went through her closet. I read the letters she kept in her dresser and flipped through envelopes of photographs and magazine clippings: fields and trees and insane, impossible images like a colossal squid stretched over a rocky beach. Why did she have that stuff? Who had pictures printed ?

I didn’t notice the door open, and Gran caught me with the clippings spread on her quilt.

“Nina,” she said. “Personal space.”

I yelled, since everyone was yelling. “Personal space? If you cared about privacy you’d have us out of this hole. What do you do, anyway?” As far as I knew she’d never been outside the city. You couldn’t leave on the trains. I’d tried — I’d taken transit as far as it would go: from DesertGreenComplex it rattled between tall buildings for hours, then through the richer part of the city with hardy palm trees, not just drought-tolerant grasses, then a glimpse of the ocean. Even there the city didn’t stop; roadways disappeared under the waves and if you managed to whip around that section of transit at low tide you could see old park benches and fountains from way back when the oceans were lower. The trip took me eight hours and the train never left the city — it looped around, coiled back on itself, and eventually I got off where I’d started.

Gran sat next to me on the bed and gathered the pictures. Lifted her reading glasses from the strap on her neck. The dog in its rose-patterned panties whined and nosed at the closet — the latest batch of pups sold to the high-end shops that morning.

Thermal equalization finishes and the hatch between the airlock to the moon’s surface opens with a loud crack — all the ice on the interior breaks off the weather-stripping.

“I’ll never get used to that sound.” Barry pushes the door fully open and we step onto Titan. Water ice — I make the distinction because this far from the sun it’s methane that evaporates, rains, and freezes — pebbles, and brown silt. Past those three enormous boulders that sit on the plane toward the lake, the rise of the week-long night — a blacker horizon. Saturn, sliding between us and the sun. If we were able to see through the methane clouds the view would knock us over.

“They put us on prep,” I say. “Prep and repair . ”

“Relax,” Barry says. “It means we’re retirees.”

“Means we’re maintenance staff and janitors with no extraction bonus. How’s that better than hawking catfish sticks with your family?” Which is ridiculous, I know that. Our families get money, Corporate still cuts us cheques. The bonus, though, that was compensation — or, at least, it was solace.