Erin Fisher - That Tiny Life

It’s hot in the suit, my boots are slippery with sweat, and we have an hour ahead of us hiking the stairs to the telecommunications tower.

“Barry.” I put my hand on the hatch as he swings it closed. “Can the dish wait until tomorrow? Do we have to do this now?”

“Yeah, Nina, we do.”

I know we do. I nod, but doubt he can see the “yes” through the bulk of my Wearable. Get it done.

The telecommunications dishes sit on top of the hill behind Habitat, and from the base of the stairs I count five visible bowls — that’s all of them, but we can’t tell if they’re aimed correctly. The Megastorm could easily have swung anyone off target.

In the company’s four decades of monitoring there hasn’t been a weather pattern close to the Megastorm. Two months in Habitat’s galley. Two months where Barry and I fixated on the atmospheric writhe against the overhead. When the view became an oppressive drum of hail and dirt, we closed the shields, sealed ourselves in, and turned to what Earth watched: satellite transmissions of a massive orange spiral — a whirlpool of cloud that enveloped our entire hemisphere. And then the transmissions stopped, and we went to minimum power usage and sat in the dark.

Nine years off Earth to date: four years at the outpost, five in transit on a route that, according to the math, added up to 3.5 billion kilometres of travel — the Deep Solar Ferry’s trajectory slingshots the ships around asteroids and Jupiter to gain speed and arrive at the outpost on Titan within a lifespan. Extraction goals met or not, we deserve that bonus.

After the screens lit and the entire city — probably the entire planet — watched the first Deep Solar Ferry leave dock, I buckled down: accelerated graduation, trade-school, tech, plumbing, Arctic and sub-arctic geology training to “recognize geomorphological markers that might constitute a valuable second (or third) mine,” orbital conditioning/testing, the Ferry, Titan. All of the education was government-sponsored — scholarship — as long as you signed on to work after. The assignments were highly paid, time-consuming (not a joke, fifteen to twenty years including travel), and dangerous — of course it was poor urbanites who applied.

I told my family I’d joined up after I put my signature down. Merven paced in the craze of puppies, yelled, “Sellout,” “Not your own person,” and so on. How could I, he said, write off fifteen years my life? What was his problem, I countered. What did he think I’d been studying?

“Take a welding job for Corporate instead,” Rinella pleaded. “Welders are only three-month terms. And you’d work at the station in orbit, right? Maybe we’d see you on the screens.”

She was talking about the live feeds of construction of the Deep Solar Ferries. “You can’t tell who’s out there,” I said.

“But we could talk,” Merven said. “Instead of exchange recordings—”

“We don’t even talk now.” I was irritable and defensive. I felt like I was revisiting my childhood being there. That apartment, the smell, the sharp whine of seven newborn pups. Nothing was different, and I was hungover and jumpy from a combination of pills and alcohol. I hadn’t planned on drinking, but when I arrived I’d stepped off the train and looked up. There they were, Gran, Merven, and Rinella lit in the frame of the apartment window, and I couldn’t make myself go inside. What would I tell them? I bought the pills and mickey and walked back and forth staring at the apartment windows until it grew light enough that the old dog spotted me and started barking.

“Fifteen years . That’s a jail term,” Merven said. “A life sentence.” He paced the apartment in his junker’s coveralls and work boots. Gran herded the pups into dog crates and shut herself in her room. Rinella rubbed the old dog’s ears and added, “How could you do this to yourself and not tell us?”

“Post-Scarcity Economy,” I said, echoing Corporate’s bullshit. The government’s lines were embarrassing in the wealth of their promise: Next Leap — Self Sufficiency in the Outer Solar System; Fulfill All Humanity’s Dreams for Space! Sure, the future might sparkle, but until we made it to stable off-world production and a guaranteed minimum income, until we had — God — water imports from the asteroid belt and a reduction in global temperatures, then the paycheques were in long-term outpost grunt work.

“I don’t get you.” I grabbed a leash and clipped it to the old dog. “The pay for welders is nothing. Don’t you want something back?” That silenced them, mostly.

Outside the air was brothy and thick and stank of hot bio-bin. I had to walk slowly to accommodate the old dog’s arthritis. I wandered dank, empty parkades and the sunburnt weeds of DesertGreenComplex’s common grounds.

It was evening when the dog and I got home. Merven had left, and Rinella lounged, vaping on the couch in her robe. The pups slept in their kennels, the big dogs on cushions. I knocked on Gran’s door and sat across from her on the bed. Took her hands. Through the wall of window the sun christened the cityscape — towers and apartments blackened sticks against its fiery pink.

“Gran,” I said. “You know I respect you. But there’s no way—” Her worries were my own by that point, the crummy water, nutrition, quality of life — I refused to be as useless as she’d been.

I stayed with them that week, trying to find common ground before I left. The day prior to my shuttle launch from Earth, Gran set her hidden photographs on the table. I slid the stack closer to where I sat filling the last of my paperwork. She turned to scrub the kitchen counter.

“I found these as a kid,” I said. “I’d almost forgotten.” I pulled a photo from the pile. A young Gran in stained white jeans and a maroon chemise held a naked, diapered infant, the kid’s face and arms blurred with motion — me, I assumed. Merven and Rinella, looking about eleven and eight, flanked her. Both kids went shirtless in denim overalls. The three of them (with me in Gran’s arms) stood in front of a lime-green taxi, expressions flat or tired, the taxi driver caught mid-lift loading plaid suitcases into the trunk. Three shaggy golden dogs (which generation, I couldn’t tell) already filled the car.

“Go.” Gran tossed the dishcloth into the sink and picked up a magazine clipping. Little blue-and-white houses on the blue-and-white ocean — Greece, or some other country that used to exist. “What’s the point of staying?”

She was right. By that time all the high forests had blown away. The oceans choked on plankton, any glaciers vanished. Go, she told me. And she should know — her entire life in an apartment with a whirlwind of puppies and lazy-ass grandkids. I set the picture down. I would reroute the cheques to her, enough currency to black-market some eggs. Beans. Protein that wasn’t a powdered supplement. Savings. Maybe soon she’d be able to—

I handed her the photo. “The modules will be state-of-the-art,” I said. Those robotics improved generationally, and the off-Earth habitats were advertised as luxury. So many resources and discoveries coming in. Pretty soon we’d have opportunities beyond our wildest—

She pushed the clippings aside and grabbed my arm, pulling me into a hug. “Nina.”

The flight to the Saturn system: five years shitting into a vacuum cleaner. Advanced resistive exercise. Monotony punctuated by shock: seeing the return Ferry through the window, passing back the way we came, taking a previous outpost pair with them. Barry and I cheered — raised apple juice in sippy bags over the radio. “乾杯 — Gān bēi!” A toast to Earth’s expats. And the back-glance of Jupiter: foreign swirls of gas, soft-edged in the dark.