Thursday, December 10, 2009
fyi
I'm now archiving the old posts as drafts, just to hopefully prevent any theft of my story. Not that I really think that would happen, but just to be safe. So when you see the old posts disappearing, don't worry! :)
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
It's all over except for the editing
Well, there we go! The story's done: I hit 200,000 words about 45 minutes before the deadline last night. I'm glad that the story is done. I enjoyed it a lot--it was a lot of fun to write. But now the story is over. After several months of being by my side, telling me her story, directing the flow of the plot, and opening herself up to examination, Dejah is happy but tired, and has left to go live in her lovely house with Nathan.
I will miss her.
I will miss her.
Nano post 72
the next morning, the two made their way from the public transport to a large hangar at the launch pad. “I booked a private shuttle,” Nathan explained as they got closer. “I forgot to mention, I took flying lessons while you were gone. Needed to find a way to pass the time. Anyway, I'm fully certified for surface flights. Not very practical for traveling between Domes, but perfect for this trip.”
“It's not another Dome, then?” Dejah asked. Nathan loaded their bags into a small shuttle, and grinned, but didn't answer. He helped Dejah up into the small cockpit of the shuttle before climbing aboard himself.
“Buckle up. We're not going all that far, but I'd rather have us gett there in one piece.”
Dejah snapped her harness into place, and looked out the viewpane as Nathan began a cautious taxi out to the runway. In a few minutes, they were airborne, and passed through the airlock with no trouble.
The sky was a clear salmon color, and Dejah felt her spirits rise as the Dome fell behind them, shrinking into the distance. Nathan seemed fully in control of the small craft, and she leaned over to look down at the ground below. The surface of the plain was rough and pitted with craters, but from this height looked like a child's model, the textures of the dust and stones smoothed away by distance. She could see a few dust devils whirling away across the dust, leaving their distinct spiral trails, and smiled as she remembered coming across their paths in the northern deserts.
Then the craft started to descend, and Dejah looked ahead for any sign of their destination. “I don't think there's any where to land a craft like this this far out from the city,” she observed. “Are you sure you have the right place?”
“Absolutely positive,” he smiled, keeping his eyes on the instrument panel.
The shuttle came lower and lower, and Dejah began to feel a twinge of nervousness. Then she saw it. A tiny Dome, no more than one hundred meters across, sitting on the floor of the red dusty plains like a delicate bowl upended on the ground. There was a small landing strip just outside it, and Nathan put the shuttle on a course to land on it. In another moment, then had touched down and were slowing rapidly.
An airlock tube was set into the Dome, and it connected to one end of the landing strip. Nathan punched in a remote key, and the outer door of the lock opened to let them in, and closed securely before opening the inner door.
They taxied into a small hangar inside the Dome, and Dejah couldn't see what else the small area held. “Nathan, where are we?”
He shook his head. “Just wait.”
They climbed out of the shuttle, and Dejah waited for Nathan as he made sure the shuttled was secured to the floor of the hangar. Then he smiled and took her hand, and opened the hangar door.
In the center of the land protected by the dome sat a small house. It was sturdy and solid, and had two stories. The upper story had huge glass windows, opening on every direction to provide what must be a spectacular view of the red horizon. The doorways were highly arched, and Dejah recognized Nathan's distinct design.
On the far side of the house, Dejah could see that the land had been left largely undisturbed, a wide expanse of dusty soil, rough rocks, and rugged landscape. Nearer the hanger, the ground had been plowed, rolled, and flattened into an even plain; rocks had been arranged in swirling patterns, and the whole thing had the feel of a garden, though no plants could grow there.
“Nathan...” Dejah breathed. “this is amazing. Is this what you were designing for your client? I can't imagine being able to afford a private hab like this.”
Nathan put his arm around her waist and pulled her close. “Dejah, you're the client for this one.”
she was stunned into silence. “wha...what?”
“You're the one I designed this for. It's ours. If you like it, this can be our home. The shuttle is ours too, I bought it at the beginning of the week. I can use it to hop into Spirit City to check on sites. You can work for anyone you want to from here, or not work at all, if you want, and never have to see one of the big Domes again.”
Dejah felt as though her heart had stopped beating. It was so beautiful, the red brick house with the windows that would glow at sunrise and sunset, the rock garden, and the wide lawn of natural Aresian soil. “Nathan, we can't afford this. The materials alone, not to mention the labor it must have cost...”
He laughed. “It did. It did cost a fortune.”
“But we can't afford..”
he kissed her, and smiled again. “you remember my cathedral, the one I was so determined to make sure that they built right?”
She nodded. “The Phoenix Cathedral. It's exquisite.”
“I sold the designs.”
“You what? Did they finally sign the creative consultant clause?”
Nathan shook his head. “No, I sold it without the clause.”
Dejah protested, “But the cathedral has to be perfect! That design is gorgeous, you can't let someone mess it up just to bring the building in a couple thousand dollars under budget.”
“Yes, I can. Dejah, you're more important to me than any building. I realized, when you left to check out Shackleton Hab, how incredibly important you are to me. And I thought I'd lost you then. I didn't know what to do. I called all the agents I could, trying to see who would give me the best price for the designs—I don't know what I was doing, I didn't know if you would ever come back. But I wanted to do something to show you how much you meant to me, even if I never saw you again.”
He grabbed her shoulders, and spun her around to face the house again. The morning sun was warm on the red bricks, and the windows caught the light and sparkled like gems. Dejah felt her throat constrict as she looked at the house. “can...Can I see what it looks like from upstairs?”
Nathan silently pulled a key on a chain from around his neck and handed it to her.
She folded her hand around it, feeling the warmth it had picked up from his body. With a shaking hand, she unlocked the door and stepped inside.
The floor was a dark red wood, expertly laid, and she wondered how much he had paid for real wood. It was expensive to ship across the solar system, since it was bulky and took up a lot of space. But the floors gleamed in the light, and she moved into the living room.
It was a round space, and reminded her of the common rooms at the University; the chairs were upholstered in vibrant warm colors, and thick rugs covered the floor. Imitation oil lamps were set into sconces on the walls, and several windows filtered in the daylight.
The kitchen was of polished Aresian rock tiles, and Dejah ran a hand over the uneven surface of one of the stones. It felt smooth, but almost soft, like suede.
“go see the bedroom,” Nathan whispered, standing in the doorway. In a daze, Dejah got to her feet, and walked down the carpeted hallway on the other side of the living room. The hallway turned a sharp corner, and the mustard yellow walls were hung with photographs of Aresian landscapes.
She opened the door to the bedroom, and her face broke into a wide smile of delight. There was a large bed in the center of the room, two large closets set into the wall, and a bathroom in one corner, with a large stone bathtub built into the floor. The carpet was thick and a deep chocolate color; the walls of the room were a warm buttery color, with a band of burgundy around the top of the walls. “Beautiful,” Dejah whispered.
“Check behind that door,” Nathan prompted, nodded to the door that appeared to lead outside. Dejah turned the knob, and stepped out into the sunlight.
A tunnel of clear material surrounded her, and she found herself at the foot of a curved metal staircase leading to the second story. As she climbed, she looked out over the plains toward the horizons. No sign of the Spirit City dome, though she knew it was only a few minutes away.
She reached the top of the stairwell, and pushed open the door to the second story. It was all one large room, rounded to allow a three hundred and sixty degree view of the landscape. A circular bench was built into the wall, transforming every window into a window seat. The floor was the same deep red wood, covered with rugs and pillows. Across the room was a work desk, and several painted screens were set up, on which work could be pinned and hung.
Dejah found herself sinking to the floor, and leaned against the bench, letting her eyes roam over the landscape outside. She heard Nathan come up the stairs and looked up as he knelt beside her.
“I don't know what to say.”
He put his arms around her, and they both turned to look out across the red plains. “Don't say anything, then. Just be here with me. Live here with me.”
She nodded. “It's the most beautiful place I've ever seen.”
“you gave up freedom for me, Dej. Don't think I didn't figure it out. I know how badly you wanted to stay at Shackleton. I saw your face when you got home. I couldn't stand to see you hurting like that. You need the freedom, the wide open spaces. You need the wildness that Mars has in abundance, once you get away from the Domes. I couldn't deny you that. More than anything, I want to see you happy.”
“I gave it up for you,” she whispered, letting her fingers trail across his face. “I couldn't bear the thought of breaking my promise, to always come back. I thought you wanted to be safe, to hold on to everything we had. And you gave it all up for this.”
Nathan looked at Dejah's face, her profile lit by the early morning sun. the lines of tension that he'd seen around her eyes and mouth for so long were gone, and there was a light in her eyes that he had once thought he would never see again.
She stood slowly, eyes still fixed on the huge red world outside the windows. The morning sun beat against the dust and rocks, and the land looked hot, like bricks baking in an oven. On the western edge of the land, outside the small dome, Dejah could see a thin line, like a canyon, breaking the plain. She pointed it out to Nathan.
“Yes,” he commented, “it is a small canyon, I forgot to mention it. The site scouts I talked to said that it's not big, but there are some really wonderful updrafts there, if you get familiar with the winds. I think it should be more than enough to fly the Valkyrie by.”
His words were cut off as Dejah launched herself at him, knocking the breath from his lungs as she embraced him, laughing like a school girl. “I can fly the Valkyrie here? I can really fly again?”
“As long as you promise to avoid face planting into Mars again. The medical centers of Spirit City may be only a few minutes away by shuttle, but I'd rather not have to take advantage of that.”
Dejah was hardly listenign; she could feel her heart pounding, and felt as though a great weight had been lifted from her back. She leaped into the air, whooping wildly, and tried to turn a cartwheel, but slipped and tumbled to the floor.
“Ha!” she laughed, scrambling to her feet again. “Ouch! I guess I should get into practice again before trying that.” She turned back to Nathan. “How soon can we move in?”
He grinned, and held up his comm. “I commed the movers as soon as you set foot on the staircase. They're going to pack our stuff up and have it out here tomorrow. You never have to set foot inside a Dome again, Dej, if you don't want to.”
She hiccuped, caught between a sob of joy and a laugh, and coughed for a minute, then laughed. “I don't even know how to respond.” she walked over to his side again, and wrapped her arms around him.
“I love you, Dej,” he whispered, stroking her hair. “More than anything on this world. And it's alright if you love Mars more than you love me—I can live with that. As long as we can both live with it, live here.”
She let her head fall forward, resting against his chest. “Thank you.” She let herself rest there for a moment, feeling a whirl of emotions that all ended up in joy.
They turned back again toward the windows. The sun was still rising, pulling itself up across the salmon colored sky. Dejah watched it for a minute, then turned away. “i want to go outside again, I need to be in the sunlight for a little while.” They quickly descended the stairs, and threaded their way through the house before coming back out to the stone garden.
Dejah knelt, running her hands through the dusty soil, relishing the feel of the tiny stones in the sand scraping against her skin. The dust coated her arms up to the elbows, and she laughed to see how much of it stuck to her. Brushing it off, she turned to the garden, casting an eye over the perfectly arranged stones. One section had been curled to form an intricate labyrinth, with a path that wound around and doubled back on itself until it formed a stylized flower in the middle.
The shadow of house stretched wide and black across the ground, shrinking gradually as the sun rose. Dejah walked around the house, examining it from all sides, shivering slightly as she passed into the shadow and out on the other side. She could hardly wait to see it at twilight, with the light purple all around, and the lights shining out of the upper windows. It would be like a lighthouse, she thought, visible to anyone in the area for miles around, a beacon for wanderers.
She heard the hum of the air filtration systems, and finally spotted the filters and compressors hidden behind an artistic pile of stones by the wall. She grinned, knowing that unless one knew where to look, the mechanism would be completely hidden. Nathan had spared no effort in creating the illusion of living unsupported on the barren red surface of Mars.
She walked around the rest of the house, and found Nathan still standing in the front of the house, watching her with a beaming smile. She joined him again, and turned toward the clear wall od the dome. The world was open before her feet, Dejah felt, and she turned her face toward the light to meet it unafraid.
THE END
“It's not another Dome, then?” Dejah asked. Nathan loaded their bags into a small shuttle, and grinned, but didn't answer. He helped Dejah up into the small cockpit of the shuttle before climbing aboard himself.
“Buckle up. We're not going all that far, but I'd rather have us gett there in one piece.”
Dejah snapped her harness into place, and looked out the viewpane as Nathan began a cautious taxi out to the runway. In a few minutes, they were airborne, and passed through the airlock with no trouble.
The sky was a clear salmon color, and Dejah felt her spirits rise as the Dome fell behind them, shrinking into the distance. Nathan seemed fully in control of the small craft, and she leaned over to look down at the ground below. The surface of the plain was rough and pitted with craters, but from this height looked like a child's model, the textures of the dust and stones smoothed away by distance. She could see a few dust devils whirling away across the dust, leaving their distinct spiral trails, and smiled as she remembered coming across their paths in the northern deserts.
Then the craft started to descend, and Dejah looked ahead for any sign of their destination. “I don't think there's any where to land a craft like this this far out from the city,” she observed. “Are you sure you have the right place?”
“Absolutely positive,” he smiled, keeping his eyes on the instrument panel.
The shuttle came lower and lower, and Dejah began to feel a twinge of nervousness. Then she saw it. A tiny Dome, no more than one hundred meters across, sitting on the floor of the red dusty plains like a delicate bowl upended on the ground. There was a small landing strip just outside it, and Nathan put the shuttle on a course to land on it. In another moment, then had touched down and were slowing rapidly.
An airlock tube was set into the Dome, and it connected to one end of the landing strip. Nathan punched in a remote key, and the outer door of the lock opened to let them in, and closed securely before opening the inner door.
They taxied into a small hangar inside the Dome, and Dejah couldn't see what else the small area held. “Nathan, where are we?”
He shook his head. “Just wait.”
They climbed out of the shuttle, and Dejah waited for Nathan as he made sure the shuttled was secured to the floor of the hangar. Then he smiled and took her hand, and opened the hangar door.
In the center of the land protected by the dome sat a small house. It was sturdy and solid, and had two stories. The upper story had huge glass windows, opening on every direction to provide what must be a spectacular view of the red horizon. The doorways were highly arched, and Dejah recognized Nathan's distinct design.
On the far side of the house, Dejah could see that the land had been left largely undisturbed, a wide expanse of dusty soil, rough rocks, and rugged landscape. Nearer the hanger, the ground had been plowed, rolled, and flattened into an even plain; rocks had been arranged in swirling patterns, and the whole thing had the feel of a garden, though no plants could grow there.
“Nathan...” Dejah breathed. “this is amazing. Is this what you were designing for your client? I can't imagine being able to afford a private hab like this.”
Nathan put his arm around her waist and pulled her close. “Dejah, you're the client for this one.”
she was stunned into silence. “wha...what?”
“You're the one I designed this for. It's ours. If you like it, this can be our home. The shuttle is ours too, I bought it at the beginning of the week. I can use it to hop into Spirit City to check on sites. You can work for anyone you want to from here, or not work at all, if you want, and never have to see one of the big Domes again.”
Dejah felt as though her heart had stopped beating. It was so beautiful, the red brick house with the windows that would glow at sunrise and sunset, the rock garden, and the wide lawn of natural Aresian soil. “Nathan, we can't afford this. The materials alone, not to mention the labor it must have cost...”
He laughed. “It did. It did cost a fortune.”
“But we can't afford..”
he kissed her, and smiled again. “you remember my cathedral, the one I was so determined to make sure that they built right?”
She nodded. “The Phoenix Cathedral. It's exquisite.”
“I sold the designs.”
“You what? Did they finally sign the creative consultant clause?”
Nathan shook his head. “No, I sold it without the clause.”
Dejah protested, “But the cathedral has to be perfect! That design is gorgeous, you can't let someone mess it up just to bring the building in a couple thousand dollars under budget.”
“Yes, I can. Dejah, you're more important to me than any building. I realized, when you left to check out Shackleton Hab, how incredibly important you are to me. And I thought I'd lost you then. I didn't know what to do. I called all the agents I could, trying to see who would give me the best price for the designs—I don't know what I was doing, I didn't know if you would ever come back. But I wanted to do something to show you how much you meant to me, even if I never saw you again.”
He grabbed her shoulders, and spun her around to face the house again. The morning sun was warm on the red bricks, and the windows caught the light and sparkled like gems. Dejah felt her throat constrict as she looked at the house. “can...Can I see what it looks like from upstairs?”
Nathan silently pulled a key on a chain from around his neck and handed it to her.
She folded her hand around it, feeling the warmth it had picked up from his body. With a shaking hand, she unlocked the door and stepped inside.
The floor was a dark red wood, expertly laid, and she wondered how much he had paid for real wood. It was expensive to ship across the solar system, since it was bulky and took up a lot of space. But the floors gleamed in the light, and she moved into the living room.
It was a round space, and reminded her of the common rooms at the University; the chairs were upholstered in vibrant warm colors, and thick rugs covered the floor. Imitation oil lamps were set into sconces on the walls, and several windows filtered in the daylight.
The kitchen was of polished Aresian rock tiles, and Dejah ran a hand over the uneven surface of one of the stones. It felt smooth, but almost soft, like suede.
“go see the bedroom,” Nathan whispered, standing in the doorway. In a daze, Dejah got to her feet, and walked down the carpeted hallway on the other side of the living room. The hallway turned a sharp corner, and the mustard yellow walls were hung with photographs of Aresian landscapes.
She opened the door to the bedroom, and her face broke into a wide smile of delight. There was a large bed in the center of the room, two large closets set into the wall, and a bathroom in one corner, with a large stone bathtub built into the floor. The carpet was thick and a deep chocolate color; the walls of the room were a warm buttery color, with a band of burgundy around the top of the walls. “Beautiful,” Dejah whispered.
“Check behind that door,” Nathan prompted, nodded to the door that appeared to lead outside. Dejah turned the knob, and stepped out into the sunlight.
A tunnel of clear material surrounded her, and she found herself at the foot of a curved metal staircase leading to the second story. As she climbed, she looked out over the plains toward the horizons. No sign of the Spirit City dome, though she knew it was only a few minutes away.
She reached the top of the stairwell, and pushed open the door to the second story. It was all one large room, rounded to allow a three hundred and sixty degree view of the landscape. A circular bench was built into the wall, transforming every window into a window seat. The floor was the same deep red wood, covered with rugs and pillows. Across the room was a work desk, and several painted screens were set up, on which work could be pinned and hung.
Dejah found herself sinking to the floor, and leaned against the bench, letting her eyes roam over the landscape outside. She heard Nathan come up the stairs and looked up as he knelt beside her.
“I don't know what to say.”
He put his arms around her, and they both turned to look out across the red plains. “Don't say anything, then. Just be here with me. Live here with me.”
She nodded. “It's the most beautiful place I've ever seen.”
“you gave up freedom for me, Dej. Don't think I didn't figure it out. I know how badly you wanted to stay at Shackleton. I saw your face when you got home. I couldn't stand to see you hurting like that. You need the freedom, the wide open spaces. You need the wildness that Mars has in abundance, once you get away from the Domes. I couldn't deny you that. More than anything, I want to see you happy.”
“I gave it up for you,” she whispered, letting her fingers trail across his face. “I couldn't bear the thought of breaking my promise, to always come back. I thought you wanted to be safe, to hold on to everything we had. And you gave it all up for this.”
Nathan looked at Dejah's face, her profile lit by the early morning sun. the lines of tension that he'd seen around her eyes and mouth for so long were gone, and there was a light in her eyes that he had once thought he would never see again.
She stood slowly, eyes still fixed on the huge red world outside the windows. The morning sun beat against the dust and rocks, and the land looked hot, like bricks baking in an oven. On the western edge of the land, outside the small dome, Dejah could see a thin line, like a canyon, breaking the plain. She pointed it out to Nathan.
“Yes,” he commented, “it is a small canyon, I forgot to mention it. The site scouts I talked to said that it's not big, but there are some really wonderful updrafts there, if you get familiar with the winds. I think it should be more than enough to fly the Valkyrie by.”
His words were cut off as Dejah launched herself at him, knocking the breath from his lungs as she embraced him, laughing like a school girl. “I can fly the Valkyrie here? I can really fly again?”
“As long as you promise to avoid face planting into Mars again. The medical centers of Spirit City may be only a few minutes away by shuttle, but I'd rather not have to take advantage of that.”
Dejah was hardly listenign; she could feel her heart pounding, and felt as though a great weight had been lifted from her back. She leaped into the air, whooping wildly, and tried to turn a cartwheel, but slipped and tumbled to the floor.
“Ha!” she laughed, scrambling to her feet again. “Ouch! I guess I should get into practice again before trying that.” She turned back to Nathan. “How soon can we move in?”
He grinned, and held up his comm. “I commed the movers as soon as you set foot on the staircase. They're going to pack our stuff up and have it out here tomorrow. You never have to set foot inside a Dome again, Dej, if you don't want to.”
She hiccuped, caught between a sob of joy and a laugh, and coughed for a minute, then laughed. “I don't even know how to respond.” she walked over to his side again, and wrapped her arms around him.
“I love you, Dej,” he whispered, stroking her hair. “More than anything on this world. And it's alright if you love Mars more than you love me—I can live with that. As long as we can both live with it, live here.”
She let her head fall forward, resting against his chest. “Thank you.” She let herself rest there for a moment, feeling a whirl of emotions that all ended up in joy.
They turned back again toward the windows. The sun was still rising, pulling itself up across the salmon colored sky. Dejah watched it for a minute, then turned away. “i want to go outside again, I need to be in the sunlight for a little while.” They quickly descended the stairs, and threaded their way through the house before coming back out to the stone garden.
Dejah knelt, running her hands through the dusty soil, relishing the feel of the tiny stones in the sand scraping against her skin. The dust coated her arms up to the elbows, and she laughed to see how much of it stuck to her. Brushing it off, she turned to the garden, casting an eye over the perfectly arranged stones. One section had been curled to form an intricate labyrinth, with a path that wound around and doubled back on itself until it formed a stylized flower in the middle.
The shadow of house stretched wide and black across the ground, shrinking gradually as the sun rose. Dejah walked around the house, examining it from all sides, shivering slightly as she passed into the shadow and out on the other side. She could hardly wait to see it at twilight, with the light purple all around, and the lights shining out of the upper windows. It would be like a lighthouse, she thought, visible to anyone in the area for miles around, a beacon for wanderers.
She heard the hum of the air filtration systems, and finally spotted the filters and compressors hidden behind an artistic pile of stones by the wall. She grinned, knowing that unless one knew where to look, the mechanism would be completely hidden. Nathan had spared no effort in creating the illusion of living unsupported on the barren red surface of Mars.
She walked around the rest of the house, and found Nathan still standing in the front of the house, watching her with a beaming smile. She joined him again, and turned toward the clear wall od the dome. The world was open before her feet, Dejah felt, and she turned her face toward the light to meet it unafraid.
THE END
Nano Post 71
PART FOUR: “Behold, I make all things new.”
“Dej, I have something I need to do, and I'll be gone for a couple of days,” Nathan said, a few months later. “Will you be ok by yourself for a while?”
She looked up from the cup of tea she was preparing. “Where are you going? I thought you were done with site scoutings for the month.”
He nodded, trying to chew the bite of bagel that he'd just stuffed into his mouth. Swallowing hard, he cleared his throat and replied, “ahem! Yeah, I thought so to, but this one's just come up. It's for my most important client, and I can't risk getting one wrong. There's too much riding on it.”
He walked across the kitchen and hugged her tightly. “I'm sorry for being away so much, I know it's hard. I promise, after this trip, things will be much easier, and we'll be able to spend more time together. Will you forgive me?”
Dejah smiled quietly, and nodded. “Yeah, I forgive you. Just hurry home, alright?” He nodded, and went back into their bedroom to pack a bag. She watched him go down the hall, then leaned against the counter and closed her eyes.
It's still so hard, she thought wearily. It's still so hard to be here like this, day in and day out, going to work, planning missions for others to complete, and coming back home to tea and bagels. I just want to be out there on the surface again, she cried inwardly, just to be out there where it's wild and dangerous and amazing.
Nathan emerged again, bag in hand, and she pushed the thoughts away. “Have a good trip,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “Comm me when you get there so I know you landed safe, ok?”
“As always.” he kissed her on the mouth, embracing her tightly. “I'm going to miss you.”
she nodded, and he sighed, moving toward the door. “If you feel lonely, you should go visit Shelle. She's been kind of lonely since Brian started school and the others are in kindergarten. I'm not sure what her schedule at Parsec's is, but she'd love to see you.”
“That's a good idea, I should go do that,” Dejah agreed. “I'll try to stop by today. Now hurry, you don't want to keep anyone waiting for you.”
he nodded, and closed the door. Dejah moved to the window and watched him cross the lawn and head up the street to catch a public transport on the larger cross street.
When he was out of sight, she relaxed, and let herself slump into the couch. It was a Saturday, and there was no need for her to go to the Dandelion offices; the weekend stretched before her, long and empty.
She went into her work space and tried to work a little bit on the project for Mars Heritage; she had a stack of images from the Phoenix site that Charles had sent to her, and she looked at the image on top, trying to remember what it had felt like to look across that plain and see her solitary trail of footprints leading over the horizon and out of sight. She tapped out a few sentences on the keyboard, reread them, and erased them with a sigh. Too cliché, and not really reflective of her actual emotions.
She tried working on the other images in the project for a while, then sighed and got up from the chair.
Dejah grabbed her jacket from the hook by the door and quickly pulled it on before stepping outside and locking the door. The day was bright and sunny, like most days when the dust storms weren't blowing, and she turned her face upward to catch the light of the sun for a few moments before walking down the street.
In twenty minutes, she pushed open the door at 12 Parsecs. It was mostly quiet, except for the ever present gaggle of pilots from the Academy seated around one of the large round tables in the corner, and she slipped into a seat at a small table in a patch of sunlight.
Shelle saw her, and walked over. “Hey Dej! What brings you out here today?”
“Nathan's off on a last minute site check,” she responded, “and he's going to be gone for the whole weekend. I didn't feel much like cooking so I thought I'd drop by for some lunch and see if you needed some company yourself while Max is gone.”
Shelle smiled, her freckles showing golden agaisnt her skin. “Actually, yeah, that would be nice! The house feels pretty empty when the kids are gone to school. I guess I'll hve to get used to it, since Max's schedule is always going to have him gone a lot, and the kids are all in school now. But company would be nice today. I get off in about two hours, is that ok? I can give you a comm when I'm headed home.”
Dejah shook her head, and smiled. “That's ok, I think I'll just grab a bite to eat and wander around the area for a little while. I haven't seen Marcus since I got back from Spirit City, and Nathan mentioned that he's been asking about me, so I'll probably stop in and say hi to him.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Shelle laughed. “So what do you want to eat today, I'll go get it started!”
Thirty minutes later, Dejah was strolling along what had once been the main street of the area, and was now simply an interesting side street, one of many to offer odd shops and restaurants. Marcus' shop looked as dark and dingy from the outside as it always had, but Dejah saw the Open sign in the window, and pushed the door open.
The familiar bell chimed rustily, and she heard Marcus' gruff voice from the rear of the shop. “Hang on a minute, hang on a minute, I'm coming,” followed by indistinguishable muttering.
“Don't trip over anything, Marcus,” she called with a grin. “I'd hate to see you trip over the piles of junk you insist on keeping around.”
There was silence for a moment, then she heard footsteps hurring between the shelves, and Marcus dashed into the front of the store, greying hair in disarray.
“Well, what do you know, it's Ms. Dejah Sorenson, back from the dead to hear some talk about it!”
She laughed, and reached out to shake his hand. “good to see you, too, Marcus. How's business been?”
He shrugged. “Oh, not so great for the store, little better for the printing press. And fantastic for stories about you. Do you have any idea how many crazy reporters came by here while you were in the hospital, trying to get any sort of scoop over the others?” He barked out a half laugh. “I was sorely tempted to just start making up a different wild story for each one of them, but once I heard that you were going to pull through, I knew that you'd pay me back for any of that kind of foolishness. They were pretty frustrated when I told them that you were neither a wild woman, nor the quiet loner type, nor a religious fanatic. They just weren't quite sure how to write about a real Aresian hero any more. I offered to send them to journalism school, but they didn't seem to appreciate that.”
Dejah rolled her eyes. “Marcus, you are incorrigible. Oh, I have something here that you might like to see.” she pulled the chain of her necklace over her head, and grabbed the pendants that hung from it. One was the meteorite pendant that Nathan had given her years ago; the other was the fragment of solar panel.
Marcus peered at her jewelry. “I regonize the one, of course, but I'm not even sure what the other one is made of. Synthetic, I take it?”
She nodded. “It's a little fragment of a solar panel from the Phoenix Lander. One of my crew who did the extrication managed to snag it, and the other helped make it into a necklace. But it's a real part of the Phoenix, something that traveled millions of miles just to give us the chance to get here.”
Marcus touched it lightly, and Dejah tipped the necklace into his hand. “Here, go ahead and take a good look at it. It doesn't look like much, but when you consider where it's been...”
The older man held the pendant delicately, turning it over in his palm. “Seems to grow warm to the touch. That's quite some souvenir you have there.” He handed the necklace back, and she hung it over her neck again, slipping th pendants inside her shirt.
“All joking aside, that really was quite a journey you made,” he commented, leaning on the front counter. “Never seen anything like it, but damned if it wasn't the sort of thign I always wanted to see. Forget being a role model for the young ones coming up, you've made some old men who just wanted to see some spirit very happy indeed.” He looked at her over the tops of his glasses. “But I hear you've been grounded, got to stay inside the dome now. Was it worth it?”
Dejah swallowed, a ssudden lump appearing in her throat. She had a sudden flash of rememberance: purple hills under a sky filled with stars, a line of footprints fading off over the horizon for miles, a few glints of metal shining proudly in the dust.
She smiled, blinking back a tear, and nodded. “Yes. It was worth it. It might not be for everyone but...it was worth it.”
“Glad to hear it,” marcus said quietly. “Very glad to hear it.”
Dejah bid goodbye to Marcus, and headed back down the street toward the restaurant. Shelle would be getting off work in twenty minutes, and it was no use trying to go anywhere else in that short of a time.
When she walked back into the restaurant, it was empty, and Shelle sat at a table in the sun, feet propped on the chair across from her, and a cup of coffee steaming in her hand. She looked at towards the door as Dejah walked in and waved. “Hey! Come join me over here, I'm just waiting for my relief to get here. It's pretty dead today.”
Dejah sat down in the chair across from Shelle as the waitress put her feet on the floor. “isn't that a little weird for a Saturday?”
Shelle shrugged. “It's hard to tell how the weekends are going to go actually. Sometimes we're absolultely slammed, other times it's so dead we'd do better to close up early for the afternoon.”
The two women chatted about work for a few minutes, until Shelle's replacement arrived, then they donned their jackets and headed back out to the sunny street. Max and Shelle lived close to the downtown area, and it was only a five minute walk to their home.
Shelle unlocked the door, and held it open for Dejah, who thanked her.
The house was warm and welcoming, but Dejah could detect a few expensive things that she was sure Max's inheritance had paid for. Shelle waved Dejah over to a comfortable chair, and sat down in a rocking chair nearby.
“So I hear that you and Nathan decided to stay in Spirit City,” shelle noted with a smile. “I'm really glad to hear that, I'd hate to see you leave. Seems like everyone is spreading out these days; it's hard to make friends before they just up and move to some other dome across the planet. The kids keep losing playmates, and it's been pretty discouraging for Sally. She's so sensitive and quiet, she doesn't make friends that easily.”
Dejah nodded, pulling her feet up under her. “Yeah, we're both going to stay. Nathan's work is here, and it just worked out better that way. Besides, I can be a free agent now—I'm still working for Dandelion, but there's a lot of opportunities for other stuff for mars Heritage and some others.” She shrugged. “Not ideal, but I've learned that the ideal isn't always possible.”
the late Sunday evening was beginning to get cold when Nathan opened the door of their home. “Dej?” he called. “Dej, I'm home!”
Dejah walked out of the work room and greeted him with a kiss. “Hey! Welcome back. How did it go?”
Nathan smiled, and Dejah thought she saw an odd look in his eye. “Oh, it's perfect. Everything is as good as I could hope for, or better. I just have to wait for the client to see it and approve it, but I think they're going to be very happy. It's some of my best work.”
“Sound great,” Dejah replied, only half listening. She punched the power button on the electric kettle and waited for it to boil. Nathan walked up behind her in the kitchen, and wrapped his arms around her waist.
“Dejah, honey, we haven't been away together in years. I've got some vacation time coming up, and I have to use it before the end of the year. What do you say we take the next few days and just get away for a while?”
“Oh, I don't know,” she responded, carefully pouring the now boiling water into a cup. “You just got back, it seems awfully soon to be heading out again. You don't have to hurry for my sake, I've been fine.” She dropped a tea bag into the cup to steep.
Nathan grabbed her hands, and bent down to look her in the eyes. “Dejah, this is important to me, too. I know that you don't like being stuck in the Dome, and I really want to take you out of here for a little while. Please, just...just trust me, this one time.”
The look in his eyes made her pause. He didn't look angry, or frustrated, or even tired. Just sad and...something else. A little hopeful, she wondered.
“alright. I can pack some stuff and be ready to go tomorrow morning, I just need to let a few people know that i'll be away from my projects for a few days.”
Nathan smiled in relief, and gave her a hug. “You won't regret it, Dej, I promise.”
“Dej, I have something I need to do, and I'll be gone for a couple of days,” Nathan said, a few months later. “Will you be ok by yourself for a while?”
She looked up from the cup of tea she was preparing. “Where are you going? I thought you were done with site scoutings for the month.”
He nodded, trying to chew the bite of bagel that he'd just stuffed into his mouth. Swallowing hard, he cleared his throat and replied, “ahem! Yeah, I thought so to, but this one's just come up. It's for my most important client, and I can't risk getting one wrong. There's too much riding on it.”
He walked across the kitchen and hugged her tightly. “I'm sorry for being away so much, I know it's hard. I promise, after this trip, things will be much easier, and we'll be able to spend more time together. Will you forgive me?”
Dejah smiled quietly, and nodded. “Yeah, I forgive you. Just hurry home, alright?” He nodded, and went back into their bedroom to pack a bag. She watched him go down the hall, then leaned against the counter and closed her eyes.
It's still so hard, she thought wearily. It's still so hard to be here like this, day in and day out, going to work, planning missions for others to complete, and coming back home to tea and bagels. I just want to be out there on the surface again, she cried inwardly, just to be out there where it's wild and dangerous and amazing.
Nathan emerged again, bag in hand, and she pushed the thoughts away. “Have a good trip,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “Comm me when you get there so I know you landed safe, ok?”
“As always.” he kissed her on the mouth, embracing her tightly. “I'm going to miss you.”
she nodded, and he sighed, moving toward the door. “If you feel lonely, you should go visit Shelle. She's been kind of lonely since Brian started school and the others are in kindergarten. I'm not sure what her schedule at Parsec's is, but she'd love to see you.”
“That's a good idea, I should go do that,” Dejah agreed. “I'll try to stop by today. Now hurry, you don't want to keep anyone waiting for you.”
he nodded, and closed the door. Dejah moved to the window and watched him cross the lawn and head up the street to catch a public transport on the larger cross street.
When he was out of sight, she relaxed, and let herself slump into the couch. It was a Saturday, and there was no need for her to go to the Dandelion offices; the weekend stretched before her, long and empty.
She went into her work space and tried to work a little bit on the project for Mars Heritage; she had a stack of images from the Phoenix site that Charles had sent to her, and she looked at the image on top, trying to remember what it had felt like to look across that plain and see her solitary trail of footprints leading over the horizon and out of sight. She tapped out a few sentences on the keyboard, reread them, and erased them with a sigh. Too cliché, and not really reflective of her actual emotions.
She tried working on the other images in the project for a while, then sighed and got up from the chair.
Dejah grabbed her jacket from the hook by the door and quickly pulled it on before stepping outside and locking the door. The day was bright and sunny, like most days when the dust storms weren't blowing, and she turned her face upward to catch the light of the sun for a few moments before walking down the street.
In twenty minutes, she pushed open the door at 12 Parsecs. It was mostly quiet, except for the ever present gaggle of pilots from the Academy seated around one of the large round tables in the corner, and she slipped into a seat at a small table in a patch of sunlight.
Shelle saw her, and walked over. “Hey Dej! What brings you out here today?”
“Nathan's off on a last minute site check,” she responded, “and he's going to be gone for the whole weekend. I didn't feel much like cooking so I thought I'd drop by for some lunch and see if you needed some company yourself while Max is gone.”
Shelle smiled, her freckles showing golden agaisnt her skin. “Actually, yeah, that would be nice! The house feels pretty empty when the kids are gone to school. I guess I'll hve to get used to it, since Max's schedule is always going to have him gone a lot, and the kids are all in school now. But company would be nice today. I get off in about two hours, is that ok? I can give you a comm when I'm headed home.”
Dejah shook her head, and smiled. “That's ok, I think I'll just grab a bite to eat and wander around the area for a little while. I haven't seen Marcus since I got back from Spirit City, and Nathan mentioned that he's been asking about me, so I'll probably stop in and say hi to him.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Shelle laughed. “So what do you want to eat today, I'll go get it started!”
Thirty minutes later, Dejah was strolling along what had once been the main street of the area, and was now simply an interesting side street, one of many to offer odd shops and restaurants. Marcus' shop looked as dark and dingy from the outside as it always had, but Dejah saw the Open sign in the window, and pushed the door open.
The familiar bell chimed rustily, and she heard Marcus' gruff voice from the rear of the shop. “Hang on a minute, hang on a minute, I'm coming,” followed by indistinguishable muttering.
“Don't trip over anything, Marcus,” she called with a grin. “I'd hate to see you trip over the piles of junk you insist on keeping around.”
There was silence for a moment, then she heard footsteps hurring between the shelves, and Marcus dashed into the front of the store, greying hair in disarray.
“Well, what do you know, it's Ms. Dejah Sorenson, back from the dead to hear some talk about it!”
She laughed, and reached out to shake his hand. “good to see you, too, Marcus. How's business been?”
He shrugged. “Oh, not so great for the store, little better for the printing press. And fantastic for stories about you. Do you have any idea how many crazy reporters came by here while you were in the hospital, trying to get any sort of scoop over the others?” He barked out a half laugh. “I was sorely tempted to just start making up a different wild story for each one of them, but once I heard that you were going to pull through, I knew that you'd pay me back for any of that kind of foolishness. They were pretty frustrated when I told them that you were neither a wild woman, nor the quiet loner type, nor a religious fanatic. They just weren't quite sure how to write about a real Aresian hero any more. I offered to send them to journalism school, but they didn't seem to appreciate that.”
Dejah rolled her eyes. “Marcus, you are incorrigible. Oh, I have something here that you might like to see.” she pulled the chain of her necklace over her head, and grabbed the pendants that hung from it. One was the meteorite pendant that Nathan had given her years ago; the other was the fragment of solar panel.
Marcus peered at her jewelry. “I regonize the one, of course, but I'm not even sure what the other one is made of. Synthetic, I take it?”
She nodded. “It's a little fragment of a solar panel from the Phoenix Lander. One of my crew who did the extrication managed to snag it, and the other helped make it into a necklace. But it's a real part of the Phoenix, something that traveled millions of miles just to give us the chance to get here.”
Marcus touched it lightly, and Dejah tipped the necklace into his hand. “Here, go ahead and take a good look at it. It doesn't look like much, but when you consider where it's been...”
The older man held the pendant delicately, turning it over in his palm. “Seems to grow warm to the touch. That's quite some souvenir you have there.” He handed the necklace back, and she hung it over her neck again, slipping th pendants inside her shirt.
“All joking aside, that really was quite a journey you made,” he commented, leaning on the front counter. “Never seen anything like it, but damned if it wasn't the sort of thign I always wanted to see. Forget being a role model for the young ones coming up, you've made some old men who just wanted to see some spirit very happy indeed.” He looked at her over the tops of his glasses. “But I hear you've been grounded, got to stay inside the dome now. Was it worth it?”
Dejah swallowed, a ssudden lump appearing in her throat. She had a sudden flash of rememberance: purple hills under a sky filled with stars, a line of footprints fading off over the horizon for miles, a few glints of metal shining proudly in the dust.
She smiled, blinking back a tear, and nodded. “Yes. It was worth it. It might not be for everyone but...it was worth it.”
“Glad to hear it,” marcus said quietly. “Very glad to hear it.”
Dejah bid goodbye to Marcus, and headed back down the street toward the restaurant. Shelle would be getting off work in twenty minutes, and it was no use trying to go anywhere else in that short of a time.
When she walked back into the restaurant, it was empty, and Shelle sat at a table in the sun, feet propped on the chair across from her, and a cup of coffee steaming in her hand. She looked at towards the door as Dejah walked in and waved. “Hey! Come join me over here, I'm just waiting for my relief to get here. It's pretty dead today.”
Dejah sat down in the chair across from Shelle as the waitress put her feet on the floor. “isn't that a little weird for a Saturday?”
Shelle shrugged. “It's hard to tell how the weekends are going to go actually. Sometimes we're absolultely slammed, other times it's so dead we'd do better to close up early for the afternoon.”
The two women chatted about work for a few minutes, until Shelle's replacement arrived, then they donned their jackets and headed back out to the sunny street. Max and Shelle lived close to the downtown area, and it was only a five minute walk to their home.
Shelle unlocked the door, and held it open for Dejah, who thanked her.
The house was warm and welcoming, but Dejah could detect a few expensive things that she was sure Max's inheritance had paid for. Shelle waved Dejah over to a comfortable chair, and sat down in a rocking chair nearby.
“So I hear that you and Nathan decided to stay in Spirit City,” shelle noted with a smile. “I'm really glad to hear that, I'd hate to see you leave. Seems like everyone is spreading out these days; it's hard to make friends before they just up and move to some other dome across the planet. The kids keep losing playmates, and it's been pretty discouraging for Sally. She's so sensitive and quiet, she doesn't make friends that easily.”
Dejah nodded, pulling her feet up under her. “Yeah, we're both going to stay. Nathan's work is here, and it just worked out better that way. Besides, I can be a free agent now—I'm still working for Dandelion, but there's a lot of opportunities for other stuff for mars Heritage and some others.” She shrugged. “Not ideal, but I've learned that the ideal isn't always possible.”
the late Sunday evening was beginning to get cold when Nathan opened the door of their home. “Dej?” he called. “Dej, I'm home!”
Dejah walked out of the work room and greeted him with a kiss. “Hey! Welcome back. How did it go?”
Nathan smiled, and Dejah thought she saw an odd look in his eye. “Oh, it's perfect. Everything is as good as I could hope for, or better. I just have to wait for the client to see it and approve it, but I think they're going to be very happy. It's some of my best work.”
“Sound great,” Dejah replied, only half listening. She punched the power button on the electric kettle and waited for it to boil. Nathan walked up behind her in the kitchen, and wrapped his arms around her waist.
“Dejah, honey, we haven't been away together in years. I've got some vacation time coming up, and I have to use it before the end of the year. What do you say we take the next few days and just get away for a while?”
“Oh, I don't know,” she responded, carefully pouring the now boiling water into a cup. “You just got back, it seems awfully soon to be heading out again. You don't have to hurry for my sake, I've been fine.” She dropped a tea bag into the cup to steep.
Nathan grabbed her hands, and bent down to look her in the eyes. “Dejah, this is important to me, too. I know that you don't like being stuck in the Dome, and I really want to take you out of here for a little while. Please, just...just trust me, this one time.”
The look in his eyes made her pause. He didn't look angry, or frustrated, or even tired. Just sad and...something else. A little hopeful, she wondered.
“alright. I can pack some stuff and be ready to go tomorrow morning, I just need to let a few people know that i'll be away from my projects for a few days.”
Nathan smiled in relief, and gave her a hug. “You won't regret it, Dej, I promise.”
Nano Post 70
Dejah lay in her bed, in a room loaned to her by one of the other Shackleford residents. The room was small but clean and sturdy, and she looked out of the window. In the distance, she could see the horizon, lit by starlight. It seemed so close, she thought sleepily, as if she could get out of bed and simply walk there in a few minutes.
She rolled onto her back and looked up at the ceiling; there were too many things going through her mind for her to sleep. Everything at Shackleford felt exciting and new, like the University had felt, and Bradbury Dome during the two years she had spent in the intense training there.
She exhaled sharply and sat up. “I can’t sleep like this,” she muttered. She slipped out of the bed, and walked over to the window. Half of the small town lay between her and the edge of the wall, and the rough plastered roofs looked like rows of miniature hills in the starlight. Several windows were still lit, and the yellow light bounced off of a few brick walls, casting odd pools of warm light in the cold chill of the night.
Dejah breathed in deeply. It wasn't that the air here felt any different than in any other Dome, she mused, but somehow this tiny hab had far more room to breathe.
“down there,” she pointed out a small mound to herself. “that's where I'd live. A nice little set of rooms, in this fantastic brick. And as many windows as I can get without losing too much heat from the building, windows that would look out directly on the Dome so I could see all the way through to the horizon. East facing, so I could see the sun rise every morning. And there might even be enough of a draft in that gully to get the Valkyrie airborne again.”
She was swept up in memories of flying high, soaring over the Aresian landscape, and closed her eyes. If she really thought about it, she could recall the way the wind rippled over her suit and swept bits of dust across her helmet. The wonderful sound of the thin atmosphere filling the wings with a sudden whoosh when she banked hard for a turn, and the sudden shock to her legs when the ground came up just a little too fast during a landing.
Unbidden, the image of Nathan's face rose up in her mind, and she frowned. She tried to push the thought away, and recapture the memory of flight, but the moment had passed.
Dejah sighed and opened her eyes. “Can't I dream, just for a few minutes?” The silent city gave her no answer.
She settled into a chair, and sat, still facing the window. “Nathan really is a good man,” she whispered to the sleeping town, as if the buildings could answer her. “It's not like I'd be leaving him for someone else. I don't have any interest in anyone else. I just...” she paused, searching for the words. “he was right, after all. I love Mars more than I love him, more than I could ever love him. But he just doesn't understand, I can't live without this red dust, without that beautiful orange sky. I'd rather rip open my suit myself out on the plains than live for another forty years in that stifling Dome.”
The stars passed quietly over the town as she struggled to make her decision. She wished that Max was there to talk it over with, but he had been offered a room across town, near the hangar, and she wasn't quite sure which building it was. “And anyway,” she muttered, “I don't think his hosts would be particular happy to answer the door at three in the morning.”
she glanced over her shoulder at the mirror that hung over the simple dresser. Her face looked odd in the cold light; the dim illumination that lit the scene came from the window behind her, and her face was shadowed, though her mussed hair created a glowing aureole around her head. One cheekbone caught the light, turning her face half purple. She didn't look tired, she mused, so much as desperate and confused.
“You shouldn't be confused,” she told the face in the mirror. “This should be simple. It's the answer to all of your problems. You can let Nathan go find some nice girl who's happy to stay in the Dome, and he'll be happier. You can go back to doing the kind of work you love—surely there's a med center here that's robust enough to take care of any injuries that might happen. And this Dome's so small, it would feel almost like living on the bare surface, and you could be closer to the surface than ever.”
But the face in the mirror refused to relax, and she turned away, irritated. “Why isn't it enough,” she muttered. “It really would be easier.”
“But since when did you take the easy way?” she answered herself, getting out of the chair and pacing the room, as she always did when frustrated or confused.
“It's not like life here would be easy, in and of itself. It'd probably be a lot harder, and I'll die a lot younger than I would in the Dome. But...” she groaned with irritation and ran her hands through her hair, mussing it further. “It would be too easy just to leave. I've never backed down from anything I said I would do.”
The room grew colder as the night progressed, but Dejah didn't notice, pacing until her legs were sore. Finally, exhausted, she dropped into the bed just as the sun was beginning to rise. Shivering, she pulled the covers over herself as she fell into an uneasy sleep.
A few hours later, a knock sounded at her door. “Ms. Sorenson? We're sorry to wake you, but it's getting rather late, and your friend is here to fly you home. Are you alright?”
Dejah sat up, head muddled and thoughts still whirling. “Yes, I'm fine. Thank you for checking—please tell Max that i'll be down in a few minutes.”
She lay back in the bed and stared at the ceiling for a long moment, then exhaled and rolled off the bed.
“Hey, there's the sleepyhead!” Max called as she came downstairs, holding her overnight bag in one hand and brushing her hair with the other.
“ha ha, very funny. Says the man who never woke up on time for school a day in his life.” She grinned, and set the bag down at the foot of the stairs to pull her hair back into her customary ponytail.
Her hosts bid her farewell after she turned down their offer of breakfast, and she and Max made their way back to the hangar. The Silver Hammer was quickly loaded, and Max waited until Dejah fastened her harness to start the engines. They slowly taxied through the airlock, then Max pushed the spacecraft forward, and they launched into the sky with a roar.
Dejah looked into the rear view pane, watching the city dwindle quickly in the distance, until it looked like no more than a soap bubble that had landed on the red sands for a moment before bursting.
They flew in silence for a few moments after leaving the Shackleford airlock. Then Max checked the instrument panel and asked, “so, what did you think? Gonna make it home any time soon?”
she didn't reply for a moment, looking down at the dusty plains as they passed below the ship.
“Dej? You ok?”
“Yeah, sorry, just didn't get much sleep last night. Spent a lot of time thinking. If you'd asked me that question last night, I probably would have asked how quickly you could fly all of my stuff out here. I mean, it really is perfect for me, isn't it? I wish it had been an option after school. Seems awfully cruel to have gotten married when I just can't be what Nathan really wants. Maybe we shouldn't have married; he was right when he accused me of loving Mars more than I love him. Can't really help that now; it is what it is. But I got to thinking last night.” she paused, trying to clear her head and get her thoughts in order.
“Max, you've known me since I was ten years old. Have you ever known me to give up on anything once I put my mind to it?”
He shook his head emphatically. “No, I have not. I would, in fact, say that sheer pig headedness is one of your most distinct traits, for better or worse.”
“That's pretty much the conclusion I came to last night. If I came here, Nathan wouldn't want to come, even if he could. This place would drive him crazy, at least as crazy as Spirit City drives me. That's not fair.”
“Pretty sticky situation, Dej. You always did have a knack for getting tangled up in things and needing my expertise for getting you out.”
She leaned back against the seat, letting her head rest against the cushion, and closed her eyes with weariness. “Yes, it is. But I should have known better. I should have seen this coming. But I wanted Nathan so much that I ignored any of the problems. And I made a promise. I've never gone back on anything before, and I don't intend to do it now.”
Max kept his eyes fixed on the view out of the front window, but she could tell that his attention was on her. “So you're not going to take their offer?”
Dejah shook her head. “No. It would just be a kind of running away, and I'm not going to resort to that sort of thing. I'd never be able to look at my face in the mirror again, knowing that I'd run out on something I had been determined to do.”
“does Nathan know yet? Did you talk to him on the comm this morning?”
“No, I figured that it was the sort of thing that I should probably tell him in person. If he still wants out, I'll let him. I don't want him to feel trapped in the marriage. But I really do want to make it work, if possible. Maybe I can just take a vacation to a small hab once a year or something.”
Max turned and studied Dejah for a moment, noting how tired she looked. “You really think that will be enough for you, Dej?”
She laughed bitterly. “Of course it won't be enough! But, there's more to life than just being happy. If I stay with Nathan, maybe I let myself down, let go of my dreams. Whatever. If I moved to Shackleford Dome, I'd let down Nathan and myself, by refusing to honor my promise. This is the only choice. And I think you knew that before I did.”
He nodded. “I thought it might be the case. You made me pretty nervous back there, though. I thought I might have been wrong, that you would actually throw everything away and start over there.”
“would you have thought less of me if I had done it?” she asked.
“Yes. You would still have been one of my closest and dearest friends, but yes, I would have thought less of you.” He looked her in the eyes, and she saw the depth of feeling in his gaze. “You truly are an incredible woman, Dejah. All of your new fans out there will never know just how amazing you really are.”
dejah was asleep when the Silver Hammer landed, and Max carefully shook her shoulder until she woke up. She groaned and stretched before loosening her harness. “Argh, I hate falling asleep on those long flights! I'm always so stiff when I wake up later.” She hopped off the ship, and caught the bag that Max tossed to her. “Hey, watch it, do you handle all of your passenger's luggage like that? Premium shipping, like hell.”
He grinned. “Oh, bugger off, you crazy Aresian. Get some actual sleep tonight, will you?”
She nodded, and turned to go home. The sky was dark, and the stars swung overhead; Jupiter shone brightly down on the city.
The door creaked slightly as she opened it. She winced, and closed it quickly, hoping that it hadn't disturbed Nathan's sleep. She tiptoed into the living room, planning to sleep on the couch so as not to wake her husband.
But to her surprise, the light over the kitchen table was still on, and the table was covered with colorful designs in brilliant red, orange, and yellows. She recognized the phoenix colors of Nathan's cathedral design.
Nathan himself was slumped over the table, half covering the drawings, and Dejah couldn't help smiling at the sight of the thin line of drool that escaped from the corner of his mouth. The silence of the house was occasionally broken by a soft snore.
She laid a hand on his shoulder, and shook him slightly. “Nathan, dear, you can't sleep here, you'll throw out your back. Come on, wake up and let's get you into bed.”
“Huh?” he muttered as he woke up slowly, looking around in confusion. “Dej! You're home!” He quickly began gatehring up the scattered papers and stacking them on one of the kitchen chairs. “I thought you'd stay for a few days, see what life was like over there.” he paused, setting down the stack of papers in his hands. “but...are you staying? Or are you going to go?”
she sighed, and grabbed his hand. “Here, let's go sit on the couch, where it's comfortable, and I'll tell you more.”
Nathan sat down heavily on the couch, and Dejah lowered herself onto the cushions beside him, curling her legs underneath her and leaning on the back of the couch so she could look him in the eye.
“Nathan, I've made my decision.”
He looks scared, she thought with a pang, scared that I'm going to say something to hurt him. She quickly continued, “I'm not going to take the job. I want to stay here with you and try to make this work.”
He let out a breath quickly, and exclaimed “really? You're really going to stay?”
she nodded. The next moment she found herself wrapped in his arms, with his face buried in her neck. “I missed you so much,” he said, “I missed you so much!”
Dejah woke again in the middle of the night. Nathan's arms were around her waist, and she carefully disentangled herself and went to look out of the window.
Phobos was passing overhead, on its journey down to the horizon, and it added a pale white light to the city, turning the shadows more blue than purple. The streetlights outside dimmed the moonshadow, but she could still see the faint shadows that moved across the ground as the moon sailed by.
It's still beautiful here sometimes, she thought sadly, but you have to know where to look for it.
She stared out of the window until the moon had dropped out of sight, and her skin was cold from the night air. Shivering, she climbed back into the bed, and turned her back on the window.
She rolled onto her back and looked up at the ceiling; there were too many things going through her mind for her to sleep. Everything at Shackleford felt exciting and new, like the University had felt, and Bradbury Dome during the two years she had spent in the intense training there.
She exhaled sharply and sat up. “I can’t sleep like this,” she muttered. She slipped out of the bed, and walked over to the window. Half of the small town lay between her and the edge of the wall, and the rough plastered roofs looked like rows of miniature hills in the starlight. Several windows were still lit, and the yellow light bounced off of a few brick walls, casting odd pools of warm light in the cold chill of the night.
Dejah breathed in deeply. It wasn't that the air here felt any different than in any other Dome, she mused, but somehow this tiny hab had far more room to breathe.
“down there,” she pointed out a small mound to herself. “that's where I'd live. A nice little set of rooms, in this fantastic brick. And as many windows as I can get without losing too much heat from the building, windows that would look out directly on the Dome so I could see all the way through to the horizon. East facing, so I could see the sun rise every morning. And there might even be enough of a draft in that gully to get the Valkyrie airborne again.”
She was swept up in memories of flying high, soaring over the Aresian landscape, and closed her eyes. If she really thought about it, she could recall the way the wind rippled over her suit and swept bits of dust across her helmet. The wonderful sound of the thin atmosphere filling the wings with a sudden whoosh when she banked hard for a turn, and the sudden shock to her legs when the ground came up just a little too fast during a landing.
Unbidden, the image of Nathan's face rose up in her mind, and she frowned. She tried to push the thought away, and recapture the memory of flight, but the moment had passed.
Dejah sighed and opened her eyes. “Can't I dream, just for a few minutes?” The silent city gave her no answer.
She settled into a chair, and sat, still facing the window. “Nathan really is a good man,” she whispered to the sleeping town, as if the buildings could answer her. “It's not like I'd be leaving him for someone else. I don't have any interest in anyone else. I just...” she paused, searching for the words. “he was right, after all. I love Mars more than I love him, more than I could ever love him. But he just doesn't understand, I can't live without this red dust, without that beautiful orange sky. I'd rather rip open my suit myself out on the plains than live for another forty years in that stifling Dome.”
The stars passed quietly over the town as she struggled to make her decision. She wished that Max was there to talk it over with, but he had been offered a room across town, near the hangar, and she wasn't quite sure which building it was. “And anyway,” she muttered, “I don't think his hosts would be particular happy to answer the door at three in the morning.”
she glanced over her shoulder at the mirror that hung over the simple dresser. Her face looked odd in the cold light; the dim illumination that lit the scene came from the window behind her, and her face was shadowed, though her mussed hair created a glowing aureole around her head. One cheekbone caught the light, turning her face half purple. She didn't look tired, she mused, so much as desperate and confused.
“You shouldn't be confused,” she told the face in the mirror. “This should be simple. It's the answer to all of your problems. You can let Nathan go find some nice girl who's happy to stay in the Dome, and he'll be happier. You can go back to doing the kind of work you love—surely there's a med center here that's robust enough to take care of any injuries that might happen. And this Dome's so small, it would feel almost like living on the bare surface, and you could be closer to the surface than ever.”
But the face in the mirror refused to relax, and she turned away, irritated. “Why isn't it enough,” she muttered. “It really would be easier.”
“But since when did you take the easy way?” she answered herself, getting out of the chair and pacing the room, as she always did when frustrated or confused.
“It's not like life here would be easy, in and of itself. It'd probably be a lot harder, and I'll die a lot younger than I would in the Dome. But...” she groaned with irritation and ran her hands through her hair, mussing it further. “It would be too easy just to leave. I've never backed down from anything I said I would do.”
The room grew colder as the night progressed, but Dejah didn't notice, pacing until her legs were sore. Finally, exhausted, she dropped into the bed just as the sun was beginning to rise. Shivering, she pulled the covers over herself as she fell into an uneasy sleep.
A few hours later, a knock sounded at her door. “Ms. Sorenson? We're sorry to wake you, but it's getting rather late, and your friend is here to fly you home. Are you alright?”
Dejah sat up, head muddled and thoughts still whirling. “Yes, I'm fine. Thank you for checking—please tell Max that i'll be down in a few minutes.”
She lay back in the bed and stared at the ceiling for a long moment, then exhaled and rolled off the bed.
“Hey, there's the sleepyhead!” Max called as she came downstairs, holding her overnight bag in one hand and brushing her hair with the other.
“ha ha, very funny. Says the man who never woke up on time for school a day in his life.” She grinned, and set the bag down at the foot of the stairs to pull her hair back into her customary ponytail.
Her hosts bid her farewell after she turned down their offer of breakfast, and she and Max made their way back to the hangar. The Silver Hammer was quickly loaded, and Max waited until Dejah fastened her harness to start the engines. They slowly taxied through the airlock, then Max pushed the spacecraft forward, and they launched into the sky with a roar.
Dejah looked into the rear view pane, watching the city dwindle quickly in the distance, until it looked like no more than a soap bubble that had landed on the red sands for a moment before bursting.
They flew in silence for a few moments after leaving the Shackleford airlock. Then Max checked the instrument panel and asked, “so, what did you think? Gonna make it home any time soon?”
she didn't reply for a moment, looking down at the dusty plains as they passed below the ship.
“Dej? You ok?”
“Yeah, sorry, just didn't get much sleep last night. Spent a lot of time thinking. If you'd asked me that question last night, I probably would have asked how quickly you could fly all of my stuff out here. I mean, it really is perfect for me, isn't it? I wish it had been an option after school. Seems awfully cruel to have gotten married when I just can't be what Nathan really wants. Maybe we shouldn't have married; he was right when he accused me of loving Mars more than I love him. Can't really help that now; it is what it is. But I got to thinking last night.” she paused, trying to clear her head and get her thoughts in order.
“Max, you've known me since I was ten years old. Have you ever known me to give up on anything once I put my mind to it?”
He shook his head emphatically. “No, I have not. I would, in fact, say that sheer pig headedness is one of your most distinct traits, for better or worse.”
“That's pretty much the conclusion I came to last night. If I came here, Nathan wouldn't want to come, even if he could. This place would drive him crazy, at least as crazy as Spirit City drives me. That's not fair.”
“Pretty sticky situation, Dej. You always did have a knack for getting tangled up in things and needing my expertise for getting you out.”
She leaned back against the seat, letting her head rest against the cushion, and closed her eyes with weariness. “Yes, it is. But I should have known better. I should have seen this coming. But I wanted Nathan so much that I ignored any of the problems. And I made a promise. I've never gone back on anything before, and I don't intend to do it now.”
Max kept his eyes fixed on the view out of the front window, but she could tell that his attention was on her. “So you're not going to take their offer?”
Dejah shook her head. “No. It would just be a kind of running away, and I'm not going to resort to that sort of thing. I'd never be able to look at my face in the mirror again, knowing that I'd run out on something I had been determined to do.”
“does Nathan know yet? Did you talk to him on the comm this morning?”
“No, I figured that it was the sort of thing that I should probably tell him in person. If he still wants out, I'll let him. I don't want him to feel trapped in the marriage. But I really do want to make it work, if possible. Maybe I can just take a vacation to a small hab once a year or something.”
Max turned and studied Dejah for a moment, noting how tired she looked. “You really think that will be enough for you, Dej?”
She laughed bitterly. “Of course it won't be enough! But, there's more to life than just being happy. If I stay with Nathan, maybe I let myself down, let go of my dreams. Whatever. If I moved to Shackleford Dome, I'd let down Nathan and myself, by refusing to honor my promise. This is the only choice. And I think you knew that before I did.”
He nodded. “I thought it might be the case. You made me pretty nervous back there, though. I thought I might have been wrong, that you would actually throw everything away and start over there.”
“would you have thought less of me if I had done it?” she asked.
“Yes. You would still have been one of my closest and dearest friends, but yes, I would have thought less of you.” He looked her in the eyes, and she saw the depth of feeling in his gaze. “You truly are an incredible woman, Dejah. All of your new fans out there will never know just how amazing you really are.”
dejah was asleep when the Silver Hammer landed, and Max carefully shook her shoulder until she woke up. She groaned and stretched before loosening her harness. “Argh, I hate falling asleep on those long flights! I'm always so stiff when I wake up later.” She hopped off the ship, and caught the bag that Max tossed to her. “Hey, watch it, do you handle all of your passenger's luggage like that? Premium shipping, like hell.”
He grinned. “Oh, bugger off, you crazy Aresian. Get some actual sleep tonight, will you?”
She nodded, and turned to go home. The sky was dark, and the stars swung overhead; Jupiter shone brightly down on the city.
The door creaked slightly as she opened it. She winced, and closed it quickly, hoping that it hadn't disturbed Nathan's sleep. She tiptoed into the living room, planning to sleep on the couch so as not to wake her husband.
But to her surprise, the light over the kitchen table was still on, and the table was covered with colorful designs in brilliant red, orange, and yellows. She recognized the phoenix colors of Nathan's cathedral design.
Nathan himself was slumped over the table, half covering the drawings, and Dejah couldn't help smiling at the sight of the thin line of drool that escaped from the corner of his mouth. The silence of the house was occasionally broken by a soft snore.
She laid a hand on his shoulder, and shook him slightly. “Nathan, dear, you can't sleep here, you'll throw out your back. Come on, wake up and let's get you into bed.”
“Huh?” he muttered as he woke up slowly, looking around in confusion. “Dej! You're home!” He quickly began gatehring up the scattered papers and stacking them on one of the kitchen chairs. “I thought you'd stay for a few days, see what life was like over there.” he paused, setting down the stack of papers in his hands. “but...are you staying? Or are you going to go?”
she sighed, and grabbed his hand. “Here, let's go sit on the couch, where it's comfortable, and I'll tell you more.”
Nathan sat down heavily on the couch, and Dejah lowered herself onto the cushions beside him, curling her legs underneath her and leaning on the back of the couch so she could look him in the eye.
“Nathan, I've made my decision.”
He looks scared, she thought with a pang, scared that I'm going to say something to hurt him. She quickly continued, “I'm not going to take the job. I want to stay here with you and try to make this work.”
He let out a breath quickly, and exclaimed “really? You're really going to stay?”
she nodded. The next moment she found herself wrapped in his arms, with his face buried in her neck. “I missed you so much,” he said, “I missed you so much!”
Dejah woke again in the middle of the night. Nathan's arms were around her waist, and she carefully disentangled herself and went to look out of the window.
Phobos was passing overhead, on its journey down to the horizon, and it added a pale white light to the city, turning the shadows more blue than purple. The streetlights outside dimmed the moonshadow, but she could still see the faint shadows that moved across the ground as the moon sailed by.
It's still beautiful here sometimes, she thought sadly, but you have to know where to look for it.
She stared out of the window until the moon had dropped out of sight, and her skin was cold from the night air. Shivering, she climbed back into the bed, and turned her back on the window.
nano post 69
Dejah lay in her bed, in a room loaned to her by one of the other Shackleford residents. The room was small but clean and sturdy, and she looked out of the window. In the distance, she could see the horizon, lit by starlight. It seemed so close, she thought sleepily, as if she could get out of bed and simply walk there in a few minutes.
She rolled onto her back and looked up at the ceiling; there were too many things going through her mind for her to sleep. Everything at Shackleford felt exciting and new, like the University had felt, and Bradbury Dome during the two years she had spent in the intense training there.
She exhaled sharply and sat up. “I can’t sleep like this,” she muttered. She slipped out of the bed, and walked over to the window. Half of the small town lay between her and the edge of the wall, and the rough plastered roofs looked like rows of miniature hills in the starlight. Several windows were still lit, and the yellow light bounced off of a few brick walls, casting odd pools of warm light in the cold chill of the night.
Dejah breathed in deeply. It wasn't that the air here felt any different than in any other Dome, she mused, but somehow this tiny hab had far more room to breathe.
“down there,” she pointed out a small mound to herself. “that's where I'd live. A nice little set of rooms, in this fantastic brick. And as many windows as I can get without losing too much heat from the building, windows that would look out directly on the Dome so I could see all the way through to the horizon. East facing, so I could see the sun rise every morning. And there might even be enough of a draft in that gully to get the Valkyrie airborne again.”
She was swept up in memories of flying high, soaring over the Aresian landscape, and closed her eyes. If she really thought about it, she could recall the way the wind rippled over her suit and swept bits of dust across her helmet. The wonderful sound of the thin atmosphere filling the wings with a sudden whoosh when she banked hard for a turn, and the sudden shock to her legs when the ground came up just a little too fast during a landing.
Unbidden, the image of Nathan's face rose up in her mind, and she frowned. She tried to push the thought away, and recapture the memory of flight, but the moment had passed.
Dejah sighed and opened her eyes. “Can't I dream, just for a few minutes?” The silent city gave her no answer.
She settled into a chair, and sat, still facing the window. “Nathan really is a good man,” she whispered to the sleeping town, as if the buildings could answer her. “It's not like I'd be leaving him for someone else. I don't have any interest in anyone else. I just...” she paused, searching for the words. “he was right, after all. I love Mars more than I love him, more than I could ever love him. But he just doesn't understand, I can't live without this red dust, without that beautiful orange sky. I'd rather rip open my suit myself out on the plains than live for another forty years in that stifling Dome.”
The stars passed quietly over the town as she struggled to make her decision. She wished that Max was there to talk it over with, but he had been offered a room across town, near the hangar, and she wasn't quite sure which building it was. “And anyway,” she muttered, “I don't think his hosts would be particular happy to answer the door at three in the morning.”
she glanced over her shoulder at the mirror that hung over the simple dresser. Her face looked odd in the cold light; the dim illumination that lit the scene came from the window behind her, and her face was shadowed, though her mussed hair created a glowing aureole around her head. One cheekbone caught the light, turning her face half purple. She didn't look tired, she mused, so much as desperate and confused.
“You shouldn't be confused,” she told the face in the mirror. “This should be simple. It's the answer to all of your problems. You can let Nathan go find some nice girl who's happy to stay in the Dome, and he'll be happier. You can go back to doing the kind of work you love—surely there's a med center here that's robust enough to take care of any injuries that might happen. And this Dome's so small, it would feel almost like living on the bare surface, and you could be closer to the surface than ever.”
But the face in the mirror refused to relax, and she turned away, irritated. “Why isn't it enough,” she muttered. “It really would be easier.”
“But since when did you take the easy way?” she answered herself, getting out of the chair and pacing the room, as she always did when frustrated or confused.
“It's not like life here would be easy, in and of itself. It'd probably be a lot harder, and I'll die a lot younger than I would in the Dome. But...” she groaned with irritation and ran her hands through her hair, mussing it further. “It would be too easy just to leave. I've never backed down from anything I said I would do.”
The room grew colder as the night progressed, but Dejah didn't notice, pacing until her legs were sore. Finally, exhausted, she dropped into the bed just as the sun was beginning to rise. Shivering, she pulled the covers over herself as she fell into an uneasy sleep.
A few hours later, a knock sounded at her door. “Ms. Sorenson? We're sorry to wake you, but it's getting rather late, and your friend is here to fly you home. Are you alright?”
Dejah sat up, head muddled and thoughts still whirling. “Yes, I'm fine. Thank you for checking—please tell Max that i'll be down in a few minutes.”
She lay back in the bed and stared at the ceiling for a long moment, then exhaled and rolled off the bed.
“Hey, there's the sleepyhead!” Max called as she came downstairs, holding her overnight bag in one hand and brushing her hair with the other.
“ha ha, very funny. Says the man who never woke up on time for school a day in his life.” She grinned, and set the bag down at the foot of the stairs to pull her hair back into her customary ponytail.
Her hosts bid her farewell after she turned down their offer of breakfast, and she and Max made their way back to the hangar. The Silver Hammer was quickly loaded, and Max waited until Dejah fastened her harness to start the engines. They slowly taxied through the airlock, then Max pushed the spacecraft forward, and they launched into the sky with a roar.
Dejah looked into the rear view pane, watching the city dwindle quickly in the distance, until it looked like no more than a soap bubble that had landed on the red sands for a moment before bursting.
They flew in silence for a few moments after leaving the Shackleford airlock. Then Max checked the instrument panel and asked, “so, what did you think? Gonna make it home any time soon?”
she didn't reply for a moment, looking down at the dusty plains as they passed below the ship.
“Dej? You ok?”
“Yeah, sorry, just didn't get much sleep last night. Spent a lot of time thinking. If you'd asked me that question last night, I probably would have asked how quickly you could fly all of my stuff out here. I mean, it really is perfect for me, isn't it? I wish it had been an option after school. Seems awfully cruel to have gotten married when I just can't be what Nathan really wants. Maybe we shouldn't have married; he was right when he accused me of loving Mars more than I love him. Can't really help that now; it is what it is. But I got to thinking last night.” she paused, trying to clear her head and get her thoughts in order.
“Max, you've known me since I was ten years old. Have you ever known me to give up on anything once I put my mind to it?”
He shook his head emphatically. “No, I have not. I would, in fact, say that sheer pig headedness is one of your most distinct traits, for better or worse.”
“That's pretty much the conclusion I came to last night. If I came here, Nathan wouldn't want to come, even if he could. This place would drive him crazy, at least as crazy as Spirit City drives me. That's not fair.”
“Pretty sticky situation, Dej. You always did have a knack for getting tangled up in things and needing my expertise for getting you out.”
She leaned back against the seat, letting her head rest against the cushion, and closed her eyes with weariness. “Yes, it is. But I should have known better. I should have seen this coming. But I wanted Nathan so much that I ignored any of the problems. And I made a promise. I've never gone back on anything before, and I don't intend to do it now.”
Max kept his eyes fixed on the view out of the front window, but she could tell that his attention was on her. “So you're not going to take their offer?”
Dejah shook her head. “No. It would just be a kind of running away, and I'm not going to resort to that sort of thing. I'd never be able to look at my face in the mirror again, knowing that I'd run out on something I had been determined to do.”
“does Nathan know yet? Did you talk to him on the comm this morning?”
“No, I figured that it was the sort of thing that I should probably tell him in person. If he still wants out, I'll let him. I don't want him to feel trapped in the marriage. But I really do want to make it work, if possible. Maybe I can just take a vacation to a small hab once a year or something.”
Max turned and studied Dejah for a moment, noting how tired she looked. “You really think that will be enough for you, Dej?”
She laughed bitterly. “Of course it won't be enough! But, there's more to life than just being happy. If I stay with Nathan, maybe I let myself down, let go of my dreams. Whatever. If I moved to Shackleford Dome, I'd let down Nathan and myself, by refusing to honor my promise. This is the only choice. And I think you knew that before I did.”
He nodded. “I thought it might be the case. You made me pretty nervous back there, though. I thought I might have been wrong, that you would actually throw everything away and start over there.”
“would you have thought less of me if I had done it?” she asked.
“Yes. You would still have been one of my closest and dearest friends, but yes, I would have thought less of you.” He looked her in the eyes, and she saw the depth of feeling in his gaze. “You truly are an incredible woman, Dejah. All of your new fans out there will never know just how amazing you really are.”
dejah was asleep when the Silver Hammer landed, and Max carefully shook her shoulder until she woke up. She groaned and stretched before loosening her harness. “Argh, I hate falling asleep on those long flights! I'm always so stiff when I wake up later.” She hopped off the ship, and caught the bag that Max tossed to her. “Hey, watch it, do you handle all of your passenger's luggage like that? Premium shipping, like hell.”
He grinned. “Oh, bugger off, you crazy Aresian. Get some actual sleep tonight, will you?”
She nodded, and turned to go home. The sky was dark, and the stars swung overhead; Jupiter shone brightly down on the city.
The door creaked slightly as she opened it. She winced, and closed it quickly, hoping that it hadn't disturbed Nathan's sleep. She tiptoed into the living room, planning to sleep on the couch so as not to wake her husband.
But to her surprise, the light over the kitchen table was still on, and the table was covered with colorful designs in brilliant red, orange, and yellows. She recognized the phoenix colors of Nathan's cathedral design.
Nathan himself was slumped over the table, half covering the drawings, and Dejah couldn't help smiling at the sight of the thin line of drool that escaped from the corner of his mouth. The silence of the house was occasionally broken by a soft snore.
She laid a hand on his shoulder, and shook him slightly. “Nathan, dear, you can't sleep here, you'll throw out your back. Come on, wake up and let's get you into bed.”
“Huh?” he muttered as he woke up slowly, looking around in confusion. “Dej! You're home!” He quickly began gatehring up the scattered papers and stacking them on one of the kitchen chairs. “I thought you'd stay for a few days, see what life was like over there.” he paused, setting down the stack of papers in his hands. “but...are you staying? Or are you going to go?”
she sighed, and grabbed his hand. “Here, let's go sit on the couch, where it's comfortable, and I'll tell you more.”
Nathan sat down heavily on the couch, and Dejah lowered herself onto the cushions beside him, curling her legs underneath her and leaning on the back of the couch so she could look him in the eye.
“Nathan, I've made my decision.”
He looks scared, she thought with a pang, scared that I'm going to say something to hurt him. She quickly continued, “I'm not going to take the job. I want to stay here with you and try to make this work.”
He let out a breath quickly, and exclaimed “really? You're really going to stay?”
she nodded. The next moment she found herself wrapped in his arms, with his face buried in her neck. “I missed you so much,” he said, “I missed you so much!”
Dejah woke again in the middle of the night. Nathan's arms were around her waist, and she carefully disentangled herself and went to look out of the window.
Phobos was passing overhead, on its journey down to the horizon, and it added a pale white light to the city, turning the shadows more blue than purple. The streetlights outside dimmed the moonshadow, but she could still see the faint shadows that moved across the ground as the moon sailed by.
It's still beautiful here sometimes, she thought sadly, but you have to know where to look for it.
She stared out of the window until the moon had dropped out of sight, and her skin was cold from the night air. Shivering, she climbed back into the bed, and turned her back on the window.
She rolled onto her back and looked up at the ceiling; there were too many things going through her mind for her to sleep. Everything at Shackleford felt exciting and new, like the University had felt, and Bradbury Dome during the two years she had spent in the intense training there.
She exhaled sharply and sat up. “I can’t sleep like this,” she muttered. She slipped out of the bed, and walked over to the window. Half of the small town lay between her and the edge of the wall, and the rough plastered roofs looked like rows of miniature hills in the starlight. Several windows were still lit, and the yellow light bounced off of a few brick walls, casting odd pools of warm light in the cold chill of the night.
Dejah breathed in deeply. It wasn't that the air here felt any different than in any other Dome, she mused, but somehow this tiny hab had far more room to breathe.
“down there,” she pointed out a small mound to herself. “that's where I'd live. A nice little set of rooms, in this fantastic brick. And as many windows as I can get without losing too much heat from the building, windows that would look out directly on the Dome so I could see all the way through to the horizon. East facing, so I could see the sun rise every morning. And there might even be enough of a draft in that gully to get the Valkyrie airborne again.”
She was swept up in memories of flying high, soaring over the Aresian landscape, and closed her eyes. If she really thought about it, she could recall the way the wind rippled over her suit and swept bits of dust across her helmet. The wonderful sound of the thin atmosphere filling the wings with a sudden whoosh when she banked hard for a turn, and the sudden shock to her legs when the ground came up just a little too fast during a landing.
Unbidden, the image of Nathan's face rose up in her mind, and she frowned. She tried to push the thought away, and recapture the memory of flight, but the moment had passed.
Dejah sighed and opened her eyes. “Can't I dream, just for a few minutes?” The silent city gave her no answer.
She settled into a chair, and sat, still facing the window. “Nathan really is a good man,” she whispered to the sleeping town, as if the buildings could answer her. “It's not like I'd be leaving him for someone else. I don't have any interest in anyone else. I just...” she paused, searching for the words. “he was right, after all. I love Mars more than I love him, more than I could ever love him. But he just doesn't understand, I can't live without this red dust, without that beautiful orange sky. I'd rather rip open my suit myself out on the plains than live for another forty years in that stifling Dome.”
The stars passed quietly over the town as she struggled to make her decision. She wished that Max was there to talk it over with, but he had been offered a room across town, near the hangar, and she wasn't quite sure which building it was. “And anyway,” she muttered, “I don't think his hosts would be particular happy to answer the door at three in the morning.”
she glanced over her shoulder at the mirror that hung over the simple dresser. Her face looked odd in the cold light; the dim illumination that lit the scene came from the window behind her, and her face was shadowed, though her mussed hair created a glowing aureole around her head. One cheekbone caught the light, turning her face half purple. She didn't look tired, she mused, so much as desperate and confused.
“You shouldn't be confused,” she told the face in the mirror. “This should be simple. It's the answer to all of your problems. You can let Nathan go find some nice girl who's happy to stay in the Dome, and he'll be happier. You can go back to doing the kind of work you love—surely there's a med center here that's robust enough to take care of any injuries that might happen. And this Dome's so small, it would feel almost like living on the bare surface, and you could be closer to the surface than ever.”
But the face in the mirror refused to relax, and she turned away, irritated. “Why isn't it enough,” she muttered. “It really would be easier.”
“But since when did you take the easy way?” she answered herself, getting out of the chair and pacing the room, as she always did when frustrated or confused.
“It's not like life here would be easy, in and of itself. It'd probably be a lot harder, and I'll die a lot younger than I would in the Dome. But...” she groaned with irritation and ran her hands through her hair, mussing it further. “It would be too easy just to leave. I've never backed down from anything I said I would do.”
The room grew colder as the night progressed, but Dejah didn't notice, pacing until her legs were sore. Finally, exhausted, she dropped into the bed just as the sun was beginning to rise. Shivering, she pulled the covers over herself as she fell into an uneasy sleep.
A few hours later, a knock sounded at her door. “Ms. Sorenson? We're sorry to wake you, but it's getting rather late, and your friend is here to fly you home. Are you alright?”
Dejah sat up, head muddled and thoughts still whirling. “Yes, I'm fine. Thank you for checking—please tell Max that i'll be down in a few minutes.”
She lay back in the bed and stared at the ceiling for a long moment, then exhaled and rolled off the bed.
“Hey, there's the sleepyhead!” Max called as she came downstairs, holding her overnight bag in one hand and brushing her hair with the other.
“ha ha, very funny. Says the man who never woke up on time for school a day in his life.” She grinned, and set the bag down at the foot of the stairs to pull her hair back into her customary ponytail.
Her hosts bid her farewell after she turned down their offer of breakfast, and she and Max made their way back to the hangar. The Silver Hammer was quickly loaded, and Max waited until Dejah fastened her harness to start the engines. They slowly taxied through the airlock, then Max pushed the spacecraft forward, and they launched into the sky with a roar.
Dejah looked into the rear view pane, watching the city dwindle quickly in the distance, until it looked like no more than a soap bubble that had landed on the red sands for a moment before bursting.
They flew in silence for a few moments after leaving the Shackleford airlock. Then Max checked the instrument panel and asked, “so, what did you think? Gonna make it home any time soon?”
she didn't reply for a moment, looking down at the dusty plains as they passed below the ship.
“Dej? You ok?”
“Yeah, sorry, just didn't get much sleep last night. Spent a lot of time thinking. If you'd asked me that question last night, I probably would have asked how quickly you could fly all of my stuff out here. I mean, it really is perfect for me, isn't it? I wish it had been an option after school. Seems awfully cruel to have gotten married when I just can't be what Nathan really wants. Maybe we shouldn't have married; he was right when he accused me of loving Mars more than I love him. Can't really help that now; it is what it is. But I got to thinking last night.” she paused, trying to clear her head and get her thoughts in order.
“Max, you've known me since I was ten years old. Have you ever known me to give up on anything once I put my mind to it?”
He shook his head emphatically. “No, I have not. I would, in fact, say that sheer pig headedness is one of your most distinct traits, for better or worse.”
“That's pretty much the conclusion I came to last night. If I came here, Nathan wouldn't want to come, even if he could. This place would drive him crazy, at least as crazy as Spirit City drives me. That's not fair.”
“Pretty sticky situation, Dej. You always did have a knack for getting tangled up in things and needing my expertise for getting you out.”
She leaned back against the seat, letting her head rest against the cushion, and closed her eyes with weariness. “Yes, it is. But I should have known better. I should have seen this coming. But I wanted Nathan so much that I ignored any of the problems. And I made a promise. I've never gone back on anything before, and I don't intend to do it now.”
Max kept his eyes fixed on the view out of the front window, but she could tell that his attention was on her. “So you're not going to take their offer?”
Dejah shook her head. “No. It would just be a kind of running away, and I'm not going to resort to that sort of thing. I'd never be able to look at my face in the mirror again, knowing that I'd run out on something I had been determined to do.”
“does Nathan know yet? Did you talk to him on the comm this morning?”
“No, I figured that it was the sort of thing that I should probably tell him in person. If he still wants out, I'll let him. I don't want him to feel trapped in the marriage. But I really do want to make it work, if possible. Maybe I can just take a vacation to a small hab once a year or something.”
Max turned and studied Dejah for a moment, noting how tired she looked. “You really think that will be enough for you, Dej?”
She laughed bitterly. “Of course it won't be enough! But, there's more to life than just being happy. If I stay with Nathan, maybe I let myself down, let go of my dreams. Whatever. If I moved to Shackleford Dome, I'd let down Nathan and myself, by refusing to honor my promise. This is the only choice. And I think you knew that before I did.”
He nodded. “I thought it might be the case. You made me pretty nervous back there, though. I thought I might have been wrong, that you would actually throw everything away and start over there.”
“would you have thought less of me if I had done it?” she asked.
“Yes. You would still have been one of my closest and dearest friends, but yes, I would have thought less of you.” He looked her in the eyes, and she saw the depth of feeling in his gaze. “You truly are an incredible woman, Dejah. All of your new fans out there will never know just how amazing you really are.”
dejah was asleep when the Silver Hammer landed, and Max carefully shook her shoulder until she woke up. She groaned and stretched before loosening her harness. “Argh, I hate falling asleep on those long flights! I'm always so stiff when I wake up later.” She hopped off the ship, and caught the bag that Max tossed to her. “Hey, watch it, do you handle all of your passenger's luggage like that? Premium shipping, like hell.”
He grinned. “Oh, bugger off, you crazy Aresian. Get some actual sleep tonight, will you?”
She nodded, and turned to go home. The sky was dark, and the stars swung overhead; Jupiter shone brightly down on the city.
The door creaked slightly as she opened it. She winced, and closed it quickly, hoping that it hadn't disturbed Nathan's sleep. She tiptoed into the living room, planning to sleep on the couch so as not to wake her husband.
But to her surprise, the light over the kitchen table was still on, and the table was covered with colorful designs in brilliant red, orange, and yellows. She recognized the phoenix colors of Nathan's cathedral design.
Nathan himself was slumped over the table, half covering the drawings, and Dejah couldn't help smiling at the sight of the thin line of drool that escaped from the corner of his mouth. The silence of the house was occasionally broken by a soft snore.
She laid a hand on his shoulder, and shook him slightly. “Nathan, dear, you can't sleep here, you'll throw out your back. Come on, wake up and let's get you into bed.”
“Huh?” he muttered as he woke up slowly, looking around in confusion. “Dej! You're home!” He quickly began gatehring up the scattered papers and stacking them on one of the kitchen chairs. “I thought you'd stay for a few days, see what life was like over there.” he paused, setting down the stack of papers in his hands. “but...are you staying? Or are you going to go?”
she sighed, and grabbed his hand. “Here, let's go sit on the couch, where it's comfortable, and I'll tell you more.”
Nathan sat down heavily on the couch, and Dejah lowered herself onto the cushions beside him, curling her legs underneath her and leaning on the back of the couch so she could look him in the eye.
“Nathan, I've made my decision.”
He looks scared, she thought with a pang, scared that I'm going to say something to hurt him. She quickly continued, “I'm not going to take the job. I want to stay here with you and try to make this work.”
He let out a breath quickly, and exclaimed “really? You're really going to stay?”
she nodded. The next moment she found herself wrapped in his arms, with his face buried in her neck. “I missed you so much,” he said, “I missed you so much!”
Dejah woke again in the middle of the night. Nathan's arms were around her waist, and she carefully disentangled herself and went to look out of the window.
Phobos was passing overhead, on its journey down to the horizon, and it added a pale white light to the city, turning the shadows more blue than purple. The streetlights outside dimmed the moonshadow, but she could still see the faint shadows that moved across the ground as the moon sailed by.
It's still beautiful here sometimes, she thought sadly, but you have to know where to look for it.
She stared out of the window until the moon had dropped out of sight, and her skin was cold from the night air. Shivering, she climbed back into the bed, and turned her back on the window.
Nano post 68
Dejah sat listlessly in front of her computer, paging through messages that had piled up over the last few days. There were many emails from well wishers, fans, and friends, as well as a slew of offers from various corporations, offering her jobs as a spokesperson, or advocate, or representative.
She scrolled through the offers, hardly seeing them. She was about to turn away from the computer when a final message caught her eye; the subject line read, “An opportunity from SurfaceTech.”
Dejah hesitated, torn between opening the message and reading about yet another job that was now closed to her, and deleting the message unread and wondering forever about what she might have missed. With a sigh, she selected the message and opened it.
“Ms. Sorenson,” the message began, “I hope that you will excuse me for contacting you so soon after your return to Spirit City, but I trust that you will be interested in this opportunity. SurfaceTech is a select group of scientists, engineers, geologists, and other Aresians, who are dedicated to discovering new ways to take advantage of the natural resources of our world. We spend our time working very close to the surface in a small hab in the northern hemisphere, developing and testing new technologies that will help facilitate the progression of human life on Mars. We would like to offer you a permanent position as exploration consultant for SurfaceTech. This would involve moving to our hab and working directly with the engineers and scientists who create our technology, as well as soon testing of the equipment. I have attached a folder of pictures from our hab and some of our recent equipment tests. We would like to extend an invitation to you to come visit us here, and see for yourself what we are doing. Please get in touch with me if you are interested. Yours, Richard Jordan, SurfaceTech Industries.”
Intrigued, she opened the folder of photos and began paging through them. The hab was obviously very small, perhaps only a quarter of a kilometer across, and there were only a hundred or so people living there. The buildings were small and rough, and much of the life of the community seemed to focus around the laboratory and manufacturing facility in the middle of the town. Several of the photographs showed various teams in exploration suits on the Martian surface outside the hab, testing equipment and checking data.
As she paged through the pictures, she felt a faint tug of hope. Perhaps there was still a place for her on Mars, after all.
“So they want you to move there?” Nathan asked, and Dejah could hear a hint of nervousness in his voice. She sat at the table, flipping through a printout of the message and photos.
“If I took the job, yeah, it’d be a permanent thing. I mean, I guess I could go back and forth, particularly if Max gets that shipping company going.” She watched him move around the kitchen, chopping vegetables and tossing them into a small pan. He didn’t look happy, but seemed to be trying to keep his emotions in check.
“You know I couldn’t move there, Dej,” he said quietly. “I need to be in a larger Dome to visit the sites for the clients. Besides, in a small focused community like that, there’s no room for someone who is just along for the ride. Everyone has to give everything they have, and I couldn’t do that there.”
Dejah nodded, turning her eyes back to the photographs. “I know.”
Nathan stood by the stove, and watched her for a minute. She sat quietly at the table, paging through the information on the hab, with no expression on her face. He put a lid over the sautéing vegetables and turned off the heat under the pan, then pulled out a chair and sat down across the table from her.
“Dejah, I wonder sometimes if we did the right thing, getting married.”
She looked up, but didn’t respond.
“I’m sure you already know that I don’t want you to leave. I’ve always loved you, and always will. But do you know what I want even more than to see you stay?” He reached out and put his hand on hers. “I want to see you happy again, to see you excited and passionate and ready to risk everything. If the only way for that to happen is for you to leave, then you should go. I won’t fight it.”
Dejah squeezed his hand, and gave him a smile. “I don’t know yet. I just want to go look, that’s all.”
Max landed the Silver Hammer on the runway outside the hab, and quickly let it roll through the airlock and into the small hangar just inside the dome.
“These runway airlocks always make me nervous,” he muttered as they slowed to a halt. Dejah stepped out of the ship, and turned to see a young man walking toward her, hand extended.
“Ms. Sorenson! I’m so glad you could come, I’m Richard.” He shook her hand, and smiled. “Welcome to Shackleford Hab.”
“Thanks for inviting me. This is Maxwell Hamm, my old friend; he’s one of the best pilots in the business. Do you mind if he sees the hab, too?” Dejah asked.
“Oh, not at all! We love having people come and see what we’re doing here—we just don’t have the space to have most of them live here. Come on, I’ll show you around.”
They followed Richard out of the hangar, and out into the town. Dejah looked up, and smiled as she saw the roof of the dome, so much closer than any other she had ever seen. The walls of the dome were visible from any place in the town, and no effort had been made to hide them.
“This dome tends to make some visitors a little nervous,” Richard commented. “Most people aren’t used to seeing the walls of the dome, and the smallness of it makes them nervous. They say it makes them feel like it could collapse at any moment. Most of us actually prefer it that way, it doesn’t get in the way of the landscape so much.”
Dejah nodded, still smiling, and took a deep breath. “I like it, too.”
“We’re so honored that you considered our offer,” he continued. “When we heard about the incredible risks you took, it was the talk of the entire community. We want to find ways to make even greater things possible, and your help would mean so much to that effort.” He grinned. “Besides, you seemed like the sort of person who would be just crazy enough to move to a tiny habitat in the middle of nowhere on the off chance that you might find something interesting. Our sort of person.”
The town, though small, seemed to hum with activity, and it reminded Dejah of the buzz of Bradbury Dome. The buildings were mostly low one story constructs, with a few exceptions. The residential buildings were built from bricks fired from the red sand in the area, and Richard explained that the bricks helped lock in a lot of the sun’s heat.
He opened a door into one of the few two story buildings in the main complex at the center of the town. “This is our main area of activity; we have some exercise grounds, obstacle courses, and testing areas outside the dome, but this is where the labs are, along with our main construction and manufacturing lines. Of course, once we patent a design, we send it off to one of the larger Domes for mass production, but we make the prototypes here for testing. Gives us great flexibility in the design, more control over the whole process, and of course, a much faster turnaround time between different versions.”
In sharp contrast to the rough warm brick of the exterior, the inside of the building was clean and bright, with an almost surgical feel. A line of windows gave a view from the hallway into a large room that occupied half of the building. Inside, several people in clean coveralls worked at a variety of machines; sparks flew from a welding torch in one corner of the room, and Dejah could hear the high pitched whine of a metal saw.
“Right now, they’re working on a new kind of breather—we hope that incorporating our design into a helmet will make it not only more efficient, but a lot lighter and easier to wear,” Richard explained.
They wound through the building, Richard explaining things as they went. As they came out on the far side of the building, he turned to Dejah. “I know it’s a lot to take in at once, and really, there’s no way to fully grasp what life is like here without actually living here, day in and day out. We haven’t got much time left before the sun goes down, so would you like to take a quick tour of the area around the hab?”
Dejah grinned. “You have no idea how much I want to see this place from the outside.”
The trio headed back to the airlock, and Richard showed Max and Dejah were the exploration suits and helmets were kept. In a few minutes, they had suited up, and Richard started the engine on a large four seater rover and pulled into the airlock. “Helmets on, check your seals every one!” He pressed a remote to shut the inner door of the airlock, and Dejah heard the familiar sound of air being siphoned from the lock. Then the outer door opened, and the rover roared out into the thin air of Mars.
Dejah felt her spirits rise as the rover exited the airlock tube, and she ran her eyes along the ragged red horizon.
“There’s something that I’d like you to see here,” Richard said over the comm. “There’s some magnificent formations down here in the gully. We found them when we were doing some preliminary geological exploration, and it’s since become a favorite place for many of us to go.”
The road slowly wound through the landscape, and Dejah noticed that the path was sinking into the red dust, and small hills and cliffs were rising on either side of them. After a few minutes, the road had become the bottom of a gully, and the dusty hills sloped up around them, cutting off the horizon. At a sharp curve in the path, Richard pulled the rover to a halt.
There was a single dirt mountain rising from the inside curve of the gully, and the peak was dramatically silhouetted against the sky. A few meters away, the face of the cliff was broken by a tall narrow opening, like a keyhole leading back into the hills.
“It’s kind of narrow back in here, but you can make it. The walls are smooth so you don’t have any risk of snagging your suits.” He lead them back into the opening in the cliff.
Dejah took a step into the narrow passageway and was surprised to find that it twisted to the side almost at once. The thin opening was difficult to navigate in the thick exploration suit, but she pressed forward. She could hear Max behind her as he stumbled over an outcropping of rock, and swore quietly. The daylight was quickly blocked out by the numerous twists of the passage. They wound their way back into the cliff; after about ten meters, Dejah felt the walls peel back, and stepped into a wide open space.
“Richard?” she called tentatively. “Max?”
“I’m here, Dej,” she heard Max say as he stepped into the chamber.
“Just lean up against the wall for a minute,” Richard replied. “Give your eyes a few minutes to adjust, and then I’ll turn on a light.”
The silence in the cave was thick, and Dejah could feel a layer of extremely fine dust covering the floor of the cavern.
“Now try waving a hand in front of your face,” Richard said quietly.
Dejah lifted her hand and waved it, and let out a gasp. “I can see my fingers now!” She wiggled her gloved fingers, seeing faint black shapes moving against the background
“Hey, Dejah, look up there!” Max shouted, and Dejah looked up. Twenty five meters above her head was a faint oval of light.
“A skylight?” she asked.
“Yes,” Richard replied. “It’s a few meters off to the side, so we only see the reflected light, but it’s enough to give some light here inside the cavern. In the middle of the day, it gets light enough in here to see each other by.”
“Spectacular,” Max pronounced, and Dejah could hear the wonder in his voice.
“Most of these hills are hollow,” Richard explained, and Dejah could dimly see him walking around the far wall of the cavern. “We think it’s due to water ice subliming and leaving spaces behind that then get worn down from the wind, but we’re not entirely sure. This whole area is just hard packed dirt, not rock, and so it erodes relatively easily. Over the years, you can see subtle changes in here as the wind and ice wear away the dust. There’s a cavern near here that’s collapsed into a sort of slot canyon, and there’s another one that’s just beginning to open up. Another couple of decades, and we can probably even crawl through that one.”
They edged back out through the narrow path into the cavern, and came back into the open gully, blinking in the dim purple twilight.
She scrolled through the offers, hardly seeing them. She was about to turn away from the computer when a final message caught her eye; the subject line read, “An opportunity from SurfaceTech.”
Dejah hesitated, torn between opening the message and reading about yet another job that was now closed to her, and deleting the message unread and wondering forever about what she might have missed. With a sigh, she selected the message and opened it.
“Ms. Sorenson,” the message began, “I hope that you will excuse me for contacting you so soon after your return to Spirit City, but I trust that you will be interested in this opportunity. SurfaceTech is a select group of scientists, engineers, geologists, and other Aresians, who are dedicated to discovering new ways to take advantage of the natural resources of our world. We spend our time working very close to the surface in a small hab in the northern hemisphere, developing and testing new technologies that will help facilitate the progression of human life on Mars. We would like to offer you a permanent position as exploration consultant for SurfaceTech. This would involve moving to our hab and working directly with the engineers and scientists who create our technology, as well as soon testing of the equipment. I have attached a folder of pictures from our hab and some of our recent equipment tests. We would like to extend an invitation to you to come visit us here, and see for yourself what we are doing. Please get in touch with me if you are interested. Yours, Richard Jordan, SurfaceTech Industries.”
Intrigued, she opened the folder of photos and began paging through them. The hab was obviously very small, perhaps only a quarter of a kilometer across, and there were only a hundred or so people living there. The buildings were small and rough, and much of the life of the community seemed to focus around the laboratory and manufacturing facility in the middle of the town. Several of the photographs showed various teams in exploration suits on the Martian surface outside the hab, testing equipment and checking data.
As she paged through the pictures, she felt a faint tug of hope. Perhaps there was still a place for her on Mars, after all.
“So they want you to move there?” Nathan asked, and Dejah could hear a hint of nervousness in his voice. She sat at the table, flipping through a printout of the message and photos.
“If I took the job, yeah, it’d be a permanent thing. I mean, I guess I could go back and forth, particularly if Max gets that shipping company going.” She watched him move around the kitchen, chopping vegetables and tossing them into a small pan. He didn’t look happy, but seemed to be trying to keep his emotions in check.
“You know I couldn’t move there, Dej,” he said quietly. “I need to be in a larger Dome to visit the sites for the clients. Besides, in a small focused community like that, there’s no room for someone who is just along for the ride. Everyone has to give everything they have, and I couldn’t do that there.”
Dejah nodded, turning her eyes back to the photographs. “I know.”
Nathan stood by the stove, and watched her for a minute. She sat quietly at the table, paging through the information on the hab, with no expression on her face. He put a lid over the sautéing vegetables and turned off the heat under the pan, then pulled out a chair and sat down across the table from her.
“Dejah, I wonder sometimes if we did the right thing, getting married.”
She looked up, but didn’t respond.
“I’m sure you already know that I don’t want you to leave. I’ve always loved you, and always will. But do you know what I want even more than to see you stay?” He reached out and put his hand on hers. “I want to see you happy again, to see you excited and passionate and ready to risk everything. If the only way for that to happen is for you to leave, then you should go. I won’t fight it.”
Dejah squeezed his hand, and gave him a smile. “I don’t know yet. I just want to go look, that’s all.”
Max landed the Silver Hammer on the runway outside the hab, and quickly let it roll through the airlock and into the small hangar just inside the dome.
“These runway airlocks always make me nervous,” he muttered as they slowed to a halt. Dejah stepped out of the ship, and turned to see a young man walking toward her, hand extended.
“Ms. Sorenson! I’m so glad you could come, I’m Richard.” He shook her hand, and smiled. “Welcome to Shackleford Hab.”
“Thanks for inviting me. This is Maxwell Hamm, my old friend; he’s one of the best pilots in the business. Do you mind if he sees the hab, too?” Dejah asked.
“Oh, not at all! We love having people come and see what we’re doing here—we just don’t have the space to have most of them live here. Come on, I’ll show you around.”
They followed Richard out of the hangar, and out into the town. Dejah looked up, and smiled as she saw the roof of the dome, so much closer than any other she had ever seen. The walls of the dome were visible from any place in the town, and no effort had been made to hide them.
“This dome tends to make some visitors a little nervous,” Richard commented. “Most people aren’t used to seeing the walls of the dome, and the smallness of it makes them nervous. They say it makes them feel like it could collapse at any moment. Most of us actually prefer it that way, it doesn’t get in the way of the landscape so much.”
Dejah nodded, still smiling, and took a deep breath. “I like it, too.”
“We’re so honored that you considered our offer,” he continued. “When we heard about the incredible risks you took, it was the talk of the entire community. We want to find ways to make even greater things possible, and your help would mean so much to that effort.” He grinned. “Besides, you seemed like the sort of person who would be just crazy enough to move to a tiny habitat in the middle of nowhere on the off chance that you might find something interesting. Our sort of person.”
The town, though small, seemed to hum with activity, and it reminded Dejah of the buzz of Bradbury Dome. The buildings were mostly low one story constructs, with a few exceptions. The residential buildings were built from bricks fired from the red sand in the area, and Richard explained that the bricks helped lock in a lot of the sun’s heat.
He opened a door into one of the few two story buildings in the main complex at the center of the town. “This is our main area of activity; we have some exercise grounds, obstacle courses, and testing areas outside the dome, but this is where the labs are, along with our main construction and manufacturing lines. Of course, once we patent a design, we send it off to one of the larger Domes for mass production, but we make the prototypes here for testing. Gives us great flexibility in the design, more control over the whole process, and of course, a much faster turnaround time between different versions.”
In sharp contrast to the rough warm brick of the exterior, the inside of the building was clean and bright, with an almost surgical feel. A line of windows gave a view from the hallway into a large room that occupied half of the building. Inside, several people in clean coveralls worked at a variety of machines; sparks flew from a welding torch in one corner of the room, and Dejah could hear the high pitched whine of a metal saw.
“Right now, they’re working on a new kind of breather—we hope that incorporating our design into a helmet will make it not only more efficient, but a lot lighter and easier to wear,” Richard explained.
They wound through the building, Richard explaining things as they went. As they came out on the far side of the building, he turned to Dejah. “I know it’s a lot to take in at once, and really, there’s no way to fully grasp what life is like here without actually living here, day in and day out. We haven’t got much time left before the sun goes down, so would you like to take a quick tour of the area around the hab?”
Dejah grinned. “You have no idea how much I want to see this place from the outside.”
The trio headed back to the airlock, and Richard showed Max and Dejah were the exploration suits and helmets were kept. In a few minutes, they had suited up, and Richard started the engine on a large four seater rover and pulled into the airlock. “Helmets on, check your seals every one!” He pressed a remote to shut the inner door of the airlock, and Dejah heard the familiar sound of air being siphoned from the lock. Then the outer door opened, and the rover roared out into the thin air of Mars.
Dejah felt her spirits rise as the rover exited the airlock tube, and she ran her eyes along the ragged red horizon.
“There’s something that I’d like you to see here,” Richard said over the comm. “There’s some magnificent formations down here in the gully. We found them when we were doing some preliminary geological exploration, and it’s since become a favorite place for many of us to go.”
The road slowly wound through the landscape, and Dejah noticed that the path was sinking into the red dust, and small hills and cliffs were rising on either side of them. After a few minutes, the road had become the bottom of a gully, and the dusty hills sloped up around them, cutting off the horizon. At a sharp curve in the path, Richard pulled the rover to a halt.
There was a single dirt mountain rising from the inside curve of the gully, and the peak was dramatically silhouetted against the sky. A few meters away, the face of the cliff was broken by a tall narrow opening, like a keyhole leading back into the hills.
“It’s kind of narrow back in here, but you can make it. The walls are smooth so you don’t have any risk of snagging your suits.” He lead them back into the opening in the cliff.
Dejah took a step into the narrow passageway and was surprised to find that it twisted to the side almost at once. The thin opening was difficult to navigate in the thick exploration suit, but she pressed forward. She could hear Max behind her as he stumbled over an outcropping of rock, and swore quietly. The daylight was quickly blocked out by the numerous twists of the passage. They wound their way back into the cliff; after about ten meters, Dejah felt the walls peel back, and stepped into a wide open space.
“Richard?” she called tentatively. “Max?”
“I’m here, Dej,” she heard Max say as he stepped into the chamber.
“Just lean up against the wall for a minute,” Richard replied. “Give your eyes a few minutes to adjust, and then I’ll turn on a light.”
The silence in the cave was thick, and Dejah could feel a layer of extremely fine dust covering the floor of the cavern.
“Now try waving a hand in front of your face,” Richard said quietly.
Dejah lifted her hand and waved it, and let out a gasp. “I can see my fingers now!” She wiggled her gloved fingers, seeing faint black shapes moving against the background
“Hey, Dejah, look up there!” Max shouted, and Dejah looked up. Twenty five meters above her head was a faint oval of light.
“A skylight?” she asked.
“Yes,” Richard replied. “It’s a few meters off to the side, so we only see the reflected light, but it’s enough to give some light here inside the cavern. In the middle of the day, it gets light enough in here to see each other by.”
“Spectacular,” Max pronounced, and Dejah could hear the wonder in his voice.
“Most of these hills are hollow,” Richard explained, and Dejah could dimly see him walking around the far wall of the cavern. “We think it’s due to water ice subliming and leaving spaces behind that then get worn down from the wind, but we’re not entirely sure. This whole area is just hard packed dirt, not rock, and so it erodes relatively easily. Over the years, you can see subtle changes in here as the wind and ice wear away the dust. There’s a cavern near here that’s collapsed into a sort of slot canyon, and there’s another one that’s just beginning to open up. Another couple of decades, and we can probably even crawl through that one.”
They edged back out through the narrow path into the cavern, and came back into the open gully, blinking in the dim purple twilight.
Monday, November 30, 2009
nano post 67
(this is everything I have so far, about 190,000 words. Almost done!!!)
Dejah spent most of the next few days, working in her workspace, measuring images and carefully arranging them on the wall. Nathan often heard the printer running first thing in the morning, and Dejah no longer took naps during the afternoon.
One morning, he walked into the kitchen to find Dejah already eating a quick breakfast of oatmeal and tea.
“you're up early today,” he yawned. “Something going on?”
She nodded. “Doctor's appointment. They're going to run some tests, see how much my body's healed, tell me when I can go back to work, and what sort of work I can do.”
“Oh right!” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and sat down across from her. “Are you nervous?”
She shrugged. “A little. Mostly just ready for it to be over. I'm not nearly as tired as I used to be, and I haven't needed a nap in the afternoon in three days.” She checked the clock on the wall, and jumped up, grabbing her coat from the hook by the door. “I gotta run, appointment is in twenty minutes! Wish me luck!”
“good luck!” he called after her, hearing the door slam shut halfway through the phrase.
Dejah sprinted through the streets, which were still dim in the mauve morning light. Yellow lights shone from most of the windows she passed, and the air had a pleasant chill to it. The exertion kept her warm, and she lost herself in the feeling of her shoes pounding against the ground, and the effort of keeping her breathing regular.
She saw the doctor's office ahead, and slowed to a quick walk, then stopped to stretch a bit as she let her body cool down. She glanced at her reflection in the glass door and tried to slow her rapid breathing. With a final deep breath, she pushed the door open, and greeted the receptionist with a smile.
“good morning,” the girl behind the counter said, smiling with a row of perfect white teeth. “Are you ms. Sorenson, Doctor Huston's seven o'clock?”
Dejah nodded, and the woman held out a clipboard. “Terriffic! Just fill these out for me, since you're a new patient, and we'll get started.”
“Actually, I think my records were supposed to have been transferred from the hospital in Bradbury Dome,” dejah pointed out.
“Oh, they were! We just need each of our new patients to fill out one of these here, for our records. It's just policy.” The woman's smile never faltered, and Dejah took the clipboard back to a row of oddly uncomfortable chairs by the curtained window. A few minutes later, she returned the completed form to the receptionist, and sat back down.
As she waited, she pulled back the edge of the curtain that shut out the growing morning light. A faint cloud of red dust rose from the fabric, and she wondered how often the curtains were disturbed. Apparently, not too many patients wanted to see the outside world while they waited.
“Ms. Sorenson?” dejah looked up to see a smiling nurse standing in the doorway, holding the clipboard with her forms on it. “Doctor Huston is ready to see you now!”
Dejah stood, letting the curtain fall back into place with another puff of dust, and followed the nurse into the corridor behind the receptionist's desk. The hallway was a cold offwhite, and Dejah couldn't quite identify the smell that met her senses as she walked down the hall. The nurse stood beside a door and gestured to the room. “If you'll just take a seat on the table in here, the doctor will be with you shortly.”
Dejah stepped into the room and looked around. There was a table in the middle of the room with a thin paper covering; the walls were plastered with various posters depicting healthy teeth, bones, and skin.
She hoisted herself on to the table, and sat waiting. A few minutes later, the doctor bustled into the room, eyes fixed on a clipboard. “Hello Ms. Sorenson, I've got your records here from my colleagues at the Bradbury Dome hospital. It likes like you're doing a lot better than you were when they sent you home!” He smiled and shook her hand.
“Well, I just want to run some basic physical tests. If you'll follow me, I'll get you hooked up to the treadmill for the stress test.”
An hour later, Dejah was back in the small off white room, feeling more tired than she had in a week. The doctor sat in a high chair near the table, flipping through several print outs, and making notes on a chart. Finally he lowered the clipboard, and turned to her.
“Alright, I've got most of your results here. There are a few others that I'll send out to the lab, but the ones we really need I was able to pull myself. The long and short of it is that you are one tough lady. There aren't many people who could survive what you've been through, and even fewer who could make this quick of a comeback. Seems like there's a part of you that is just determined to keep on going.” He smiled at her, and Dejah tried to return the gesture, wishing he would just get on with it.
“now, what you want to know is how much you can expect to do from this point on. There's no doubt in my mind that you can live a perfectly normal life inside the Domes. Life here is comfortable enough that you should have no problems with it. But you want to know about going back out on the surface of the planet.”
He leaned forward, and looked her in the eye. “I will be honest with you, Ms. Sorenson. I am not comfortable with the thought of you spending much time on the surface. Your respiratory and circulation systems were damaged by the cold and low pressure of the surface during your trek, and there's not much we can do about that. Under normal oxygen and pressure, you're fine. But get a small rip in a suit, or lose pressure in a tent, and you'd be gone in minutes. However, that's hardly a fair restriction to place on a Scout, particularly one of your caliber. So I am going to send my recommendation to Dandelion, that you be placed back in the field, provided that you always stay within twenty minutes of a Dome by shuttle. That distance should still allow any hospital to get to you, in case of emergency, fairly quickly. I wish I could do more, but to go any further would be reckless, and would probably endanger your life.”
He stood, and held out a hand. In a daze, Dejah shook it limply, and slid off the table.
“Your employer is covering all medical costs, so just check with the receptionist on your way out, and she'll give you the form to sign. Best of luck to you, Ms. Sorenson.”
Dejah walked down the hall and signed the form she was given without really paying any attention to it. She made her way home through the streets, which were now bright with the morning light.
Nathan came home several hours later, and found the house dark. “Dej?” he called out, turning on the living room lights. “Are you here? How'd the doctor's visit go?”
When he got no reply, he glanced through the kitchen, and was about to check the bedroom when he saw a light under the closed workroom door.
Knocking quietly, he opened the door, and poked his head inside. For the last few days, Dejah had kept her area hidden by pinning up a dark curtain across the entrance to her side of the room, but the curtain had been torn down, and lay in a heap on the floor. Dejah sat in the center of her workspace, surrounded by images of the Phoenix site that she had painstakingly cropped and joined together to make a panarama that covered the walls of her space. She had covered the light with a thin film of orange plastic, giving it the warm hues of the sun outside the Dome.
“Dej...” Nathan said quietly, and she turned to face him. The look on her face cut him to the core. “Dej...is this because of the doctor visit?”
“I can't go outside the Dome any more,” she said queitly, her voice rough with emotion. “Not more than twenty minutes from a Dome by shuttle, and no more than five hours at a time. No exploration mission is that short, that close to the Dome.”
Her voice sounded dead, and Nathan knelt by her side. “You've got to move past this, Dej. You've overcome everything else life has thrown your way, don't let this be the thing that gets you in the end.”
“I don't know how to live without Mars, without Mars the way I know it,” she whispered, tracing a finger across the image of a rocky plain. “I wish I did. I tried to be happy here in the Dome, Nathan, I really did. I wanted to learn how to be content here, to love the people in my life more than I love this cold red desert. But I just can't. I'd rather walk out into that cold and die choking on the surface than live another fifty years under glass.”
He didn't respond, but simply put his arms around her. She shook with emotion, but didn't let out a sound.
Dejah spent most of the next few days, working in her workspace, measuring images and carefully arranging them on the wall. Nathan often heard the printer running first thing in the morning, and Dejah no longer took naps during the afternoon.
One morning, he walked into the kitchen to find Dejah already eating a quick breakfast of oatmeal and tea.
“you're up early today,” he yawned. “Something going on?”
She nodded. “Doctor's appointment. They're going to run some tests, see how much my body's healed, tell me when I can go back to work, and what sort of work I can do.”
“Oh right!” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and sat down across from her. “Are you nervous?”
She shrugged. “A little. Mostly just ready for it to be over. I'm not nearly as tired as I used to be, and I haven't needed a nap in the afternoon in three days.” She checked the clock on the wall, and jumped up, grabbing her coat from the hook by the door. “I gotta run, appointment is in twenty minutes! Wish me luck!”
“good luck!” he called after her, hearing the door slam shut halfway through the phrase.
Dejah sprinted through the streets, which were still dim in the mauve morning light. Yellow lights shone from most of the windows she passed, and the air had a pleasant chill to it. The exertion kept her warm, and she lost herself in the feeling of her shoes pounding against the ground, and the effort of keeping her breathing regular.
She saw the doctor's office ahead, and slowed to a quick walk, then stopped to stretch a bit as she let her body cool down. She glanced at her reflection in the glass door and tried to slow her rapid breathing. With a final deep breath, she pushed the door open, and greeted the receptionist with a smile.
“good morning,” the girl behind the counter said, smiling with a row of perfect white teeth. “Are you ms. Sorenson, Doctor Huston's seven o'clock?”
Dejah nodded, and the woman held out a clipboard. “Terriffic! Just fill these out for me, since you're a new patient, and we'll get started.”
“Actually, I think my records were supposed to have been transferred from the hospital in Bradbury Dome,” dejah pointed out.
“Oh, they were! We just need each of our new patients to fill out one of these here, for our records. It's just policy.” The woman's smile never faltered, and Dejah took the clipboard back to a row of oddly uncomfortable chairs by the curtained window. A few minutes later, she returned the completed form to the receptionist, and sat back down.
As she waited, she pulled back the edge of the curtain that shut out the growing morning light. A faint cloud of red dust rose from the fabric, and she wondered how often the curtains were disturbed. Apparently, not too many patients wanted to see the outside world while they waited.
“Ms. Sorenson?” dejah looked up to see a smiling nurse standing in the doorway, holding the clipboard with her forms on it. “Doctor Huston is ready to see you now!”
Dejah stood, letting the curtain fall back into place with another puff of dust, and followed the nurse into the corridor behind the receptionist's desk. The hallway was a cold offwhite, and Dejah couldn't quite identify the smell that met her senses as she walked down the hall. The nurse stood beside a door and gestured to the room. “If you'll just take a seat on the table in here, the doctor will be with you shortly.”
Dejah stepped into the room and looked around. There was a table in the middle of the room with a thin paper covering; the walls were plastered with various posters depicting healthy teeth, bones, and skin.
She hoisted herself on to the table, and sat waiting. A few minutes later, the doctor bustled into the room, eyes fixed on a clipboard. “Hello Ms. Sorenson, I've got your records here from my colleagues at the Bradbury Dome hospital. It likes like you're doing a lot better than you were when they sent you home!” He smiled and shook her hand.
“Well, I just want to run some basic physical tests. If you'll follow me, I'll get you hooked up to the treadmill for the stress test.”
An hour later, Dejah was back in the small off white room, feeling more tired than she had in a week. The doctor sat in a high chair near the table, flipping through several print outs, and making notes on a chart. Finally he lowered the clipboard, and turned to her.
“Alright, I've got most of your results here. There are a few others that I'll send out to the lab, but the ones we really need I was able to pull myself. The long and short of it is that you are one tough lady. There aren't many people who could survive what you've been through, and even fewer who could make this quick of a comeback. Seems like there's a part of you that is just determined to keep on going.” He smiled at her, and Dejah tried to return the gesture, wishing he would just get on with it.
“now, what you want to know is how much you can expect to do from this point on. There's no doubt in my mind that you can live a perfectly normal life inside the Domes. Life here is comfortable enough that you should have no problems with it. But you want to know about going back out on the surface of the planet.”
He leaned forward, and looked her in the eye. “I will be honest with you, Ms. Sorenson. I am not comfortable with the thought of you spending much time on the surface. Your respiratory and circulation systems were damaged by the cold and low pressure of the surface during your trek, and there's not much we can do about that. Under normal oxygen and pressure, you're fine. But get a small rip in a suit, or lose pressure in a tent, and you'd be gone in minutes. However, that's hardly a fair restriction to place on a Scout, particularly one of your caliber. So I am going to send my recommendation to Dandelion, that you be placed back in the field, provided that you always stay within twenty minutes of a Dome by shuttle. That distance should still allow any hospital to get to you, in case of emergency, fairly quickly. I wish I could do more, but to go any further would be reckless, and would probably endanger your life.”
He stood, and held out a hand. In a daze, Dejah shook it limply, and slid off the table.
“Your employer is covering all medical costs, so just check with the receptionist on your way out, and she'll give you the form to sign. Best of luck to you, Ms. Sorenson.”
Dejah walked down the hall and signed the form she was given without really paying any attention to it. She made her way home through the streets, which were now bright with the morning light.
Nathan came home several hours later, and found the house dark. “Dej?” he called out, turning on the living room lights. “Are you here? How'd the doctor's visit go?”
When he got no reply, he glanced through the kitchen, and was about to check the bedroom when he saw a light under the closed workroom door.
Knocking quietly, he opened the door, and poked his head inside. For the last few days, Dejah had kept her area hidden by pinning up a dark curtain across the entrance to her side of the room, but the curtain had been torn down, and lay in a heap on the floor. Dejah sat in the center of her workspace, surrounded by images of the Phoenix site that she had painstakingly cropped and joined together to make a panarama that covered the walls of her space. She had covered the light with a thin film of orange plastic, giving it the warm hues of the sun outside the Dome.
“Dej...” Nathan said quietly, and she turned to face him. The look on her face cut him to the core. “Dej...is this because of the doctor visit?”
“I can't go outside the Dome any more,” she said queitly, her voice rough with emotion. “Not more than twenty minutes from a Dome by shuttle, and no more than five hours at a time. No exploration mission is that short, that close to the Dome.”
Her voice sounded dead, and Nathan knelt by her side. “You've got to move past this, Dej. You've overcome everything else life has thrown your way, don't let this be the thing that gets you in the end.”
“I don't know how to live without Mars, without Mars the way I know it,” she whispered, tracing a finger across the image of a rocky plain. “I wish I did. I tried to be happy here in the Dome, Nathan, I really did. I wanted to learn how to be content here, to love the people in my life more than I love this cold red desert. But I just can't. I'd rather walk out into that cold and die choking on the surface than live another fifty years under glass.”
He didn't respond, but simply put his arms around her. She shook with emotion, but didn't let out a sound.
nano post 66
Dejah made her way home as the light grew dim and purple. It was barely five o'clock, but she felt exhausted. The streets were brightly lit, and on corners where people tended to gather, the city had erected large heaters. She could feel a blast of warmth as she passed each one, but it quickly dissipated into the night when she moved forward.
Lights were lit in most of the buildings she passed as she moved into a more residential area. The shadows were dark black and the last of the light was fading from the western edge of the sky when Dejah unlocked the door of her home and walked inside.
“Dej, is that you?” Nathan called out.
“Yeah, sorry it's so late. I ended up stopping by the University, and kind of lost track of time.”
He emerged from the work room, and flopped onto the couch, patting the cushion next to him. Dejah smiled and sat down, leaning lightly against him.
“Sounds like fun. The University never really seems to change as much as the rest of the town.”
“Probably because they don't have that much space,” she replied. “I went to go see the Spirit memorial again, you remember how much I used to like to go there. Some kid recognized me and asked me to sign his geology book. That was cool, but a little weird.”
“I bet.” He ran the ends of her hair through his fingers.
“Then I went up into the balcony of Robinson, and listened to a lecture that Livingstone was giving.”
“What class was it for?”
She laughed. “I couldn't tell. It could have been history, geology, or survival techniques. You know how his lectures are. But it was good, you know. All the old stuff about making a difference here, creating a culture. It helps to hear the reminder sometimes. Anyway, when the lecture was over, I went downstairs to see him. It was just like it used to be, with a group of three or four students hanging around, just waiting to hear whatever random bits of his philosophy he cares to expound on, hoping that they can say something that he'll compliment. Some things never change.”
Nathan laughed, and Dejah continued. “Anyway, I went down to see him, and he was really excited to see me. I'm not sure what the students were thinking—most of them left around that time, anyway. He'd said some stuff about me being the ideal University grad, and it just made me feel weird, like he was putting too much focus on me or something.”
“I thought you wanted to make your mark on the world. Isn't being recognized part of that?”
she shrugged. “I don't know any more. I realized something lately. Well, really, it was Livingstone who pointed it out, or at least put into words what I was thinking. He quoted some poem, and I don't remember most of it, but there was this one line...'Runners whom renown outran, and the name died before the man.' Now that I've made my mark, it's just another goal for someone else to pass. I never really thought of it before, but it's exactly what I was trying to do myself—go past what anyone had done before. Now someone will come along who goes beyond anything I've done. If I'm lucky, it'll happen after I'm dead and I won't have to watch it happen.”
“you don't want to be somebody else's inspiration?” Nathan looked at her curiously.
“Well...Yes, but that's not all I wanted. I just...” she struggled to find the words. “I just don't want to be stuck on the inside looking out.”
“don't you mean, 'on the outside looking in'?”
Dejah shook her head. “No, I don't want to be inside. That's where you get trapped. I want to be able to go out.”
Dejah woke earlier the next morning, her muscles not as stiff as they had been in previous weeks. As she pulled her hair back, she looked at her face in the mirror. At first it didn't seem too different from the face she'd seen in the mirror every morning at school. But as she looked closer, she saw the thin network of lines around her eyes and mouth. Her hair was not as soft as it had once been, and more of it came out in her brush now. It was still the pale blond it had always been, but she knew that there were several silver hairs among the gold.
I never noticed how much I look like my dad, she thought, turning her face to one side, then the other. Finally, she wrapped an elastic band around her ponytail and left the bathroom.
She got dressed and made her way into the living room. Nathan had a pile of papers spread out on the table, full of designs and notes. He was on the comm with someone, and she walked by him into the kitchen, plugging in the tea kettle and getting her breakfast together.
“No, that's just not going to be good enough,” she heard Nathan say, the frustration seeping into his voice. “If I can't be on board as a consultant, they're going to start changing things when they get to the site, and then the design will go all to hell. I can't have my name on another one of those. I don't care how many awards the last one won, it wasn't my design anymore by the time they got done.”
Dejah dropped a tea bag and a spoonfull of sugar into a mug, and glanced at her husband over her shoulder. It's not like him to be this upset with someone on the phone, she thought.
“No,” he continued, “I'm sorry, but that's final. I'm not selling the rights to that design without that clause in the final agreement. If they don't like it, they'll just have to find something else.” Another pause. “Yes, well, I'm sorry, too. I'm sure that someday someone will come along who is more than willing to sign the full agreement, and then we'll get it built. Thanks for trying, Paul. Yeah, talk to you later.” He put the comm down, and leaned back in his chair, arms braced behind his head.
“Something wrong with a project?” Dejah asked, pouring hot water into her cup and stirring it slowly.
“Oh, just the usual problems. “I'm trying to sell my cathedral design. It took me nearly two years to refine it, figure out all of the materials, get everything just right. And there are several companies interested in buying the design--”
“Wait,” Dej interrupted. “Companies interested in building a church? That seems weird.”
“Not really, when you think about it. If they build the place they can either rent it to the congregation that wants it, or they can donate it. A complete tax write off, and they get their names attached to something that's certain to be an attraction to visitors. A space like that can actually generate revenue for a city, if they bring in concerts or other productions.”
“Oh, ok,” Dejah said, sipping her tea. “sorry, didn't mean to interrupt.”
“No, that's ok. So anyway, there are several companies that really want the rights to this design, but you know how it goes when they settle in to actually build something. Costs are always more than they expect, and they start cutting corners with no thought for the design. This is my masterpiece, and I want a clause in there that brings me on as a consultant, to make sure that the design is either followed to the letter, or if there is some physically necessary change, that I get to be the one to design around it. Nobody wants to sign on to that one.” He slapped a hand down on the table top, sending several papers fluttering to the floor.
“It'll still be incredible, even if they have to make some changes to the design,” Dejah commented, looking through the designs and remembering the stained glass that had looked like flame in the night. “It would be the most beautiful building on Mars, and you won't let them build it?”
He sighed. “I don't want my name on it if it isn't right, and I sure as hell don't want someone else's name on it. One of these days someone will sign off on that clause, and then they'll all wish that they'd had the courage to do it.”
He drained the dregs of tea that had cooled in his cup as it sat on table and made a face. “I've got to run, Dej, they need me out on a site today, so I can take some measurements and check the light; they need the final design in a week, so it's kind of urgent. Sorry to leave you alone so soon!”
“No, it's alright,” she said with a smile, giving him a quick hug. “Have a good day.”
He returned the embrace, and grabbed his coat before heading out the door. Dejah watched him go, then peered out the window as he walked briskly down the street. When he was gone, she exhaled, and felt the tension begin to leave her body.
“I still love him,” she said to no one in particular, “but being here is driving me crazy.”
The pile of boxes and bags that still cluttered the living room caught her eye, and she picked up the tube that contained her maps and photographs.
As she twisted the end open, she paused. Then, with a burst of determination, she opened the tube and pulled out the images. She carried them into the workroom she had shared with Nathan two years earlier, and turned on the light.
She sighed as she saw that Nathan's sketches, blueprints, and designs had overflowed into her work space. Notes were stuck on the walls, and only a small space at the far end of her space was left free.
She pulled the designs and notes off of the wall, and set them in a neat stack on Nathan's desk, followed shortly by the papers that littered the floor of her space.
Dejah grabbed a box of thumbtacks from a drawer in her desk, and quickly began posting up the maps and images of the Phoenix and the northern plains of Mars. It's not the same as being there, she thought, but it's the only thing I've got right now.
A sudden idea struck her and she grabbed her comm. She punched out a quick message to Charles at the Mars Heritage museum, and a few moments later, the comm beeped. She answered it.
“Dej! Good to hear from you, I hope everything's going well in Spirit City?” Charles sounded good, she thought, even a little bit excited.
“Well, they're...” she shook her head and started over. “Yes, everything's fine here. I actually didn't expect you to call so soon.”
“I was just leaving the museum for the night,” he commented. “So what can I help you with?”
“You guys got the images from my helmet cam, right? I know Dandelion has them, too, but the red tape there would be incredible, and I thought this might be quicker.”
“Sure, we've got it. Some of our researchers having been going through the collection, analyzing and cataloguing it.”
“Can I get copies of those photos?” She held her breath as she waited for a response.
“I'll check, but there shouldn't be a problem with it. We're planning on putting the full image collection on the nets, as soon as it's all tagged and labelled, anyway. In fact, I bet I could even get you a little grant money, if you would just type up your memories of a few of the photos, just what your impressions of the landscape were, and we'll make it an exhibit at some point.”
“sounds fantastic! Do you have my net address to send them to?”
“Oh sure! I'll check around just to make sure that it's alright with the team here, and get those to you later this week. It may take me a few days to make sure I have it all.”
“that's fine,” she assured him, feeling a glimmer of excitement again. “Whenever you can get them to me is great, and I'll work on the writing.”
“that would be great! Sounds like a deal. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
She shook her head, looking around her workspace again. “No, that's more than enough, thanks again!” She turned the comm off, and looked around the workspace again, feeling more alive than she had in weeks.
“what're you working on, Dej?” Nathan asked as she stood by the printer; page after page of images of red dusty hills and jagged rocks filled the tray.
She grabbed the stack and moved it over to her side of the room, and began shuffling through them, arranging them into piles of similar images.
“Just something that I thought of the other day. It's too early to go back to Dandelion, I don't think I can get through a full day for another few weeks. I keep falling asleep in the middle of the day.” She paused, glancing quickly between two images and finally sorting them into different piles. “But if I don't have a project, I will go stir crazy.”
“Are those images from the Phoenix mission?”
“Uh huh,” she replied, not taking her eyes off of the pictures. Nathan waited for her to volunteer more information, but she went back to work, and he leaned against the doorway.
“So what's the goal of this project? It looks a little more complicated than most scrapbooks.”
“You'll see.” She hummed to herself as she sorted another handful of papers.
He watched for a little while, then sighed, and went back to work in the kitchen.
Dejah woke slowly from her nap. The couch was far too comfortbale, she decided sleepily, and sitting down on it after a solid morning's work was just asking for trouble.
She pushed back the blanket that she'd pulled over herself, and stretched. Nathan was at another construction site, and the house was quiet.
Dejah got to her feet, and pulled on her coat. The heating in the Dome had gotten better in the two weeks she had been gone, but it was still cold in the middle of the winter. She pulled on a pair of gloves, and locked the door as she left the house.
The streets were mostly quiet, since the majority of the residents were either at work or school in the middle of the day. The sun was bright, and Dejah wished she had thought to bring a pair of sunglasses.
A few minutes walking brought her to her destination. She smiled, seeing the familiar curving shape of the Dome wall. It always looked as if it was about to fall on you when you stood underneath it, she observed; maybe that was why so few people spent much time around the walls.
She reached out and touched the clear material with a gloved hand, and looked through the wall to the red landscape outside the Dome. The sunlight made the rocks and dust glow warmly, and the wind seemed to be just light enough to kick up the occasional spray of red dust. A beautiful day, she thought, too bad the weather's always the same in here.
She glanced around to see if anyone was coming, then lay down by the wall. She turned her face to the outside, looking across the flat ground. Every tiny feature was visible at this angle; small bumps and dips in the land revealed themselves, and the texture of the dust made the view look rough.
The chill from the ground was intense, and the wall itself was very cold to the touch. The heating systems tended to circulate the warmest air in the city centers; the wall itself conducted the chill through its material, and was difficult to heat.
Dejah scooped up a hand of dust and let it trickle through her fingers. It cascaded down, making a small pile below her hand. “I miss the wind,” she said quietly.
“Kind of a funny thing to miss,” said a voice behind her, “most people enjoy knowing that their hats are going to stay in place when they venture out.”
“Max!” she shouted, giving her friend a hug. He laughed, and hugged her back.
“Sorry I didn't have much time to visit when you first came back. I figured that you'd be too tired to enjoy much company. Feeling better now?”
She brushed the fine red dust from her coat and made a mental note to wash it when she got home. “Yes, much better, though I'm still taking naps every day. I'm due for a check up next week, and then they'll tell me when I can go back to work.”
“Great! I thought you'd probably be going stir crazy without something to work on.” He glanced outside, runnign his eyes along the ragged horizon. “Looking for something in particular out there? Or are you just trying to catch a cold so you don't have to go back to the office?”
She laughed again and shook her head. “No, I come here a lot. It's the nearest spot where I can get to the wall where there's no one around to watch. I miss being out there, you know.”
He nodded. “i think I know how you feel. I don't know what I'd do if they told me I couldn't fly anymore. There's nothing like it, getting up there in the black, looking down on a whole world. But come on, it's going to be getting dark soon, and you look cold. Mind if I come back to your house? I'd invite you over to mine, but I just got back from a trip, and Shelle has refused to allow me to show anyone the house before I've cleaned up my laundry and cargo.”
“It would be great to have you over, Max” she said, turning toward the town.
When they arrived at the house, Nathan was at home, and he greeted Max eagerly.
“Hey! I don't think I've seen you since you brought us home a few weeks ago.” The two men shook hands. Nathan said “Please, take a seat! I'll get dinner going. Have you been flying a lot lately?”
Max nodded, flinging himself into one of the armchairs in the living room. “Yeah, the more people come, the more demand there is for good pilots. I'm working on starting my own shipping company, for high priority items, or items that need guaranteed gentle handling. I know a couple of young hot shots who would be perfect to sign on for my crew. It looks like we'll be ready to start selling our services to the public in about a month.” he chuckled. “When I first started trying to set this thing up, I figured that insurance would be the trickiest hurdle. Nope, not by a long shot. Want to know what was?”
“Getting everyone to work for workable rates?” guessed Dejah, and Max shook his head.
“No, believe it or not, it was the advertising. I hired this agency out of Opportunity Dome. They've been driving me crazy for months now: they don't want to call it 'premium shipping,' because it sounds too pricey—which it is, but they don't want it to sound that way. Then they didn't want to use 'priority shipping' because it focused too much on speed and I'll also be offering shipping for high rick items and fragile items. I told them to just say 'Silver Hammer Shipping—for any damn thing you need to send,' but they just laughed at me.” He rolled his eyes dramatically, and Dejah laughed.
“Is Shelle excited about you finally getting to run your own company?” Nathan asked from the kitchen as he added yellow curry paste to a pan simmering on stove. Dejah sniffed the air appreciatively.
“Yeah, she is. I'll have a lot more control over my schedule, so hopefully I can be home a little bit more. Not so much in the beginning, when I pretty much have to take any shipping job I get, but once we're established, I can set up shipping centers with local pilots in all of the Domes, and spend a little more time working from here. I hate not seeing the kids grow up. I had to miss Brian's last birthday, and I just hated it. He understood, he's a good kid, but no parent wants to explain why they missed a birthday, right?”
“That sounds like it'll be a nice arrangement,” Dejah added wistfully. “you'll get to be home when you want to be, but still get out and see the planet every day.”
an awkward silence fell, and the only sound was the sizzle of the curry on the stove. Then Nathan glanced at Dejah, and asked Max, “So do you go to Bradbury Dome much? How's the museum doing?”
“Oh, it's a huge hit,” max said excitedly, shifting positions on the chair. “I wish I could have seen that crowd, I hear it's one of the biggest crowds that's been recorded here. Well over twenty thousand, and some reports said thirty. Incredible. Anyway, I actually stopped there long enough to take a quick trip through the museum the other day. There were still a lot of people coming and going, though they said they expect traffic to slow in the coming months. That Phoenix exhibit is really something to see. Actually, the whole museum is pretty nice in that regard. It's not just bare facts and data; they really try to make it feel like Mars, so even people who will never set foot on the bare surface get to experience a little of what it's like. I hope it makes people stop taking the place for granted.”
“Dinner's ready,” Nathan called from the kitchen as he lifted the top off a pot of rice, releasing a cloud of scented steam into the air. Max and Dejah joined him in the kitchen, and soon the table was set, and all three sat for the meal.
Dejah scooped a pile of rice onto her plate and covered it with the curry. “Nathan, I'm so glad you made this tonight. There was no place to get decent curry in Bradbury Dome, and I really really missed it. Especially on cold nights like this.”
“I would have made it sooner,” he admitted, “but I kept forgetting to get the stuff from the store. I'd remember it at three in the morning, and forget again the next day.”
She laughed.
After the dinner was over, the three worrked to clear the table and clean up the dishes. It only took a few minutes, then they moved to the living room and sat down, chatting about old times and Dejah told Max about visiting the University.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” max said with a sigh. “I still keep in touch with the Academy, and I usually try to get to some of the demonstrations. I've found some of my best pilots that way, and a lot of them are coming over to Silver Hammer Shipping. But it's so strange to see the changes that happen there, new instructors, new methods, new records to beat. Some punk Terran kid beat my record speed around the manuever course this year. Thought I'd have my name on that one for a lot longer than that.”
“Didn't you set about fifteen records?” Dejah asked with a grin, “surely not all of them have been beaten yet.”
“Only seven, as you well know, one of those actually being the record for number of records set by a single student. And yes, there's still at least two of them that stand. But I expect to see those go any day now.” He gave a dramatic sigh and pretended to be crushed. Dejah couldn't suppress a snort of derision, and Max grinned.
“No, really, it's fun, just a little strange. You remember those days, when everything seems like it's open to you, and you never think about things like paying bills, wiping noses, or trying not to strangle the fine people at your ad agency. But that's where everything ends up, really.”
“I wonder if that's what makes the difference between the people who make it in the end,” Nathan mused. “You remember Ann? I see her Areriums all over the place, all the best hotels and corporations want them worked into the designs for their lobbies. But then there was that kid Keith, you remember him Dej? Always got the top grades in any class he was in, everyone talked about how he was headed for the top, surely some big planning corp, maybe even a government liaison office. Last I heard, he went back to Terra, just never could seem to make it work here.”
Max nodded, then sighed and heaved himself to his feet. “And speaking of mundane duties that must be attended to, I should be on my way. Shelle's going to be putting the kids to bed in a few minutes, and I'd like to be home for that.”
Dejah hugged her friend, and walked with him to the door.
He opened the door to leave, then turned and looked at her for a minute. “I know you want to be back out there, Dej. It's pretty damn obvious to anyone who saw the way you look towards the Dome wall anytime you get close to it. And that's fine—it's people like you who opened up this world to us. But...” he glanced around the room, lit with warm globe lights and still decorated with pictures of the Aresian landscape. “Don't miss this. This is where life happens, this is the real deal. You've lived an incredible dream, but don't let it rob you of what you have here.” He gave her a quick hug, then turned and walked out into the night.
Lights were lit in most of the buildings she passed as she moved into a more residential area. The shadows were dark black and the last of the light was fading from the western edge of the sky when Dejah unlocked the door of her home and walked inside.
“Dej, is that you?” Nathan called out.
“Yeah, sorry it's so late. I ended up stopping by the University, and kind of lost track of time.”
He emerged from the work room, and flopped onto the couch, patting the cushion next to him. Dejah smiled and sat down, leaning lightly against him.
“Sounds like fun. The University never really seems to change as much as the rest of the town.”
“Probably because they don't have that much space,” she replied. “I went to go see the Spirit memorial again, you remember how much I used to like to go there. Some kid recognized me and asked me to sign his geology book. That was cool, but a little weird.”
“I bet.” He ran the ends of her hair through his fingers.
“Then I went up into the balcony of Robinson, and listened to a lecture that Livingstone was giving.”
“What class was it for?”
She laughed. “I couldn't tell. It could have been history, geology, or survival techniques. You know how his lectures are. But it was good, you know. All the old stuff about making a difference here, creating a culture. It helps to hear the reminder sometimes. Anyway, when the lecture was over, I went downstairs to see him. It was just like it used to be, with a group of three or four students hanging around, just waiting to hear whatever random bits of his philosophy he cares to expound on, hoping that they can say something that he'll compliment. Some things never change.”
Nathan laughed, and Dejah continued. “Anyway, I went down to see him, and he was really excited to see me. I'm not sure what the students were thinking—most of them left around that time, anyway. He'd said some stuff about me being the ideal University grad, and it just made me feel weird, like he was putting too much focus on me or something.”
“I thought you wanted to make your mark on the world. Isn't being recognized part of that?”
she shrugged. “I don't know any more. I realized something lately. Well, really, it was Livingstone who pointed it out, or at least put into words what I was thinking. He quoted some poem, and I don't remember most of it, but there was this one line...'Runners whom renown outran, and the name died before the man.' Now that I've made my mark, it's just another goal for someone else to pass. I never really thought of it before, but it's exactly what I was trying to do myself—go past what anyone had done before. Now someone will come along who goes beyond anything I've done. If I'm lucky, it'll happen after I'm dead and I won't have to watch it happen.”
“you don't want to be somebody else's inspiration?” Nathan looked at her curiously.
“Well...Yes, but that's not all I wanted. I just...” she struggled to find the words. “I just don't want to be stuck on the inside looking out.”
“don't you mean, 'on the outside looking in'?”
Dejah shook her head. “No, I don't want to be inside. That's where you get trapped. I want to be able to go out.”
Dejah woke earlier the next morning, her muscles not as stiff as they had been in previous weeks. As she pulled her hair back, she looked at her face in the mirror. At first it didn't seem too different from the face she'd seen in the mirror every morning at school. But as she looked closer, she saw the thin network of lines around her eyes and mouth. Her hair was not as soft as it had once been, and more of it came out in her brush now. It was still the pale blond it had always been, but she knew that there were several silver hairs among the gold.
I never noticed how much I look like my dad, she thought, turning her face to one side, then the other. Finally, she wrapped an elastic band around her ponytail and left the bathroom.
She got dressed and made her way into the living room. Nathan had a pile of papers spread out on the table, full of designs and notes. He was on the comm with someone, and she walked by him into the kitchen, plugging in the tea kettle and getting her breakfast together.
“No, that's just not going to be good enough,” she heard Nathan say, the frustration seeping into his voice. “If I can't be on board as a consultant, they're going to start changing things when they get to the site, and then the design will go all to hell. I can't have my name on another one of those. I don't care how many awards the last one won, it wasn't my design anymore by the time they got done.”
Dejah dropped a tea bag and a spoonfull of sugar into a mug, and glanced at her husband over her shoulder. It's not like him to be this upset with someone on the phone, she thought.
“No,” he continued, “I'm sorry, but that's final. I'm not selling the rights to that design without that clause in the final agreement. If they don't like it, they'll just have to find something else.” Another pause. “Yes, well, I'm sorry, too. I'm sure that someday someone will come along who is more than willing to sign the full agreement, and then we'll get it built. Thanks for trying, Paul. Yeah, talk to you later.” He put the comm down, and leaned back in his chair, arms braced behind his head.
“Something wrong with a project?” Dejah asked, pouring hot water into her cup and stirring it slowly.
“Oh, just the usual problems. “I'm trying to sell my cathedral design. It took me nearly two years to refine it, figure out all of the materials, get everything just right. And there are several companies interested in buying the design--”
“Wait,” Dej interrupted. “Companies interested in building a church? That seems weird.”
“Not really, when you think about it. If they build the place they can either rent it to the congregation that wants it, or they can donate it. A complete tax write off, and they get their names attached to something that's certain to be an attraction to visitors. A space like that can actually generate revenue for a city, if they bring in concerts or other productions.”
“Oh, ok,” Dejah said, sipping her tea. “sorry, didn't mean to interrupt.”
“No, that's ok. So anyway, there are several companies that really want the rights to this design, but you know how it goes when they settle in to actually build something. Costs are always more than they expect, and they start cutting corners with no thought for the design. This is my masterpiece, and I want a clause in there that brings me on as a consultant, to make sure that the design is either followed to the letter, or if there is some physically necessary change, that I get to be the one to design around it. Nobody wants to sign on to that one.” He slapped a hand down on the table top, sending several papers fluttering to the floor.
“It'll still be incredible, even if they have to make some changes to the design,” Dejah commented, looking through the designs and remembering the stained glass that had looked like flame in the night. “It would be the most beautiful building on Mars, and you won't let them build it?”
He sighed. “I don't want my name on it if it isn't right, and I sure as hell don't want someone else's name on it. One of these days someone will sign off on that clause, and then they'll all wish that they'd had the courage to do it.”
He drained the dregs of tea that had cooled in his cup as it sat on table and made a face. “I've got to run, Dej, they need me out on a site today, so I can take some measurements and check the light; they need the final design in a week, so it's kind of urgent. Sorry to leave you alone so soon!”
“No, it's alright,” she said with a smile, giving him a quick hug. “Have a good day.”
He returned the embrace, and grabbed his coat before heading out the door. Dejah watched him go, then peered out the window as he walked briskly down the street. When he was gone, she exhaled, and felt the tension begin to leave her body.
“I still love him,” she said to no one in particular, “but being here is driving me crazy.”
The pile of boxes and bags that still cluttered the living room caught her eye, and she picked up the tube that contained her maps and photographs.
As she twisted the end open, she paused. Then, with a burst of determination, she opened the tube and pulled out the images. She carried them into the workroom she had shared with Nathan two years earlier, and turned on the light.
She sighed as she saw that Nathan's sketches, blueprints, and designs had overflowed into her work space. Notes were stuck on the walls, and only a small space at the far end of her space was left free.
She pulled the designs and notes off of the wall, and set them in a neat stack on Nathan's desk, followed shortly by the papers that littered the floor of her space.
Dejah grabbed a box of thumbtacks from a drawer in her desk, and quickly began posting up the maps and images of the Phoenix and the northern plains of Mars. It's not the same as being there, she thought, but it's the only thing I've got right now.
A sudden idea struck her and she grabbed her comm. She punched out a quick message to Charles at the Mars Heritage museum, and a few moments later, the comm beeped. She answered it.
“Dej! Good to hear from you, I hope everything's going well in Spirit City?” Charles sounded good, she thought, even a little bit excited.
“Well, they're...” she shook her head and started over. “Yes, everything's fine here. I actually didn't expect you to call so soon.”
“I was just leaving the museum for the night,” he commented. “So what can I help you with?”
“You guys got the images from my helmet cam, right? I know Dandelion has them, too, but the red tape there would be incredible, and I thought this might be quicker.”
“Sure, we've got it. Some of our researchers having been going through the collection, analyzing and cataloguing it.”
“Can I get copies of those photos?” She held her breath as she waited for a response.
“I'll check, but there shouldn't be a problem with it. We're planning on putting the full image collection on the nets, as soon as it's all tagged and labelled, anyway. In fact, I bet I could even get you a little grant money, if you would just type up your memories of a few of the photos, just what your impressions of the landscape were, and we'll make it an exhibit at some point.”
“sounds fantastic! Do you have my net address to send them to?”
“Oh sure! I'll check around just to make sure that it's alright with the team here, and get those to you later this week. It may take me a few days to make sure I have it all.”
“that's fine,” she assured him, feeling a glimmer of excitement again. “Whenever you can get them to me is great, and I'll work on the writing.”
“that would be great! Sounds like a deal. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
She shook her head, looking around her workspace again. “No, that's more than enough, thanks again!” She turned the comm off, and looked around the workspace again, feeling more alive than she had in weeks.
“what're you working on, Dej?” Nathan asked as she stood by the printer; page after page of images of red dusty hills and jagged rocks filled the tray.
She grabbed the stack and moved it over to her side of the room, and began shuffling through them, arranging them into piles of similar images.
“Just something that I thought of the other day. It's too early to go back to Dandelion, I don't think I can get through a full day for another few weeks. I keep falling asleep in the middle of the day.” She paused, glancing quickly between two images and finally sorting them into different piles. “But if I don't have a project, I will go stir crazy.”
“Are those images from the Phoenix mission?”
“Uh huh,” she replied, not taking her eyes off of the pictures. Nathan waited for her to volunteer more information, but she went back to work, and he leaned against the doorway.
“So what's the goal of this project? It looks a little more complicated than most scrapbooks.”
“You'll see.” She hummed to herself as she sorted another handful of papers.
He watched for a little while, then sighed, and went back to work in the kitchen.
Dejah woke slowly from her nap. The couch was far too comfortbale, she decided sleepily, and sitting down on it after a solid morning's work was just asking for trouble.
She pushed back the blanket that she'd pulled over herself, and stretched. Nathan was at another construction site, and the house was quiet.
Dejah got to her feet, and pulled on her coat. The heating in the Dome had gotten better in the two weeks she had been gone, but it was still cold in the middle of the winter. She pulled on a pair of gloves, and locked the door as she left the house.
The streets were mostly quiet, since the majority of the residents were either at work or school in the middle of the day. The sun was bright, and Dejah wished she had thought to bring a pair of sunglasses.
A few minutes walking brought her to her destination. She smiled, seeing the familiar curving shape of the Dome wall. It always looked as if it was about to fall on you when you stood underneath it, she observed; maybe that was why so few people spent much time around the walls.
She reached out and touched the clear material with a gloved hand, and looked through the wall to the red landscape outside the Dome. The sunlight made the rocks and dust glow warmly, and the wind seemed to be just light enough to kick up the occasional spray of red dust. A beautiful day, she thought, too bad the weather's always the same in here.
She glanced around to see if anyone was coming, then lay down by the wall. She turned her face to the outside, looking across the flat ground. Every tiny feature was visible at this angle; small bumps and dips in the land revealed themselves, and the texture of the dust made the view look rough.
The chill from the ground was intense, and the wall itself was very cold to the touch. The heating systems tended to circulate the warmest air in the city centers; the wall itself conducted the chill through its material, and was difficult to heat.
Dejah scooped up a hand of dust and let it trickle through her fingers. It cascaded down, making a small pile below her hand. “I miss the wind,” she said quietly.
“Kind of a funny thing to miss,” said a voice behind her, “most people enjoy knowing that their hats are going to stay in place when they venture out.”
“Max!” she shouted, giving her friend a hug. He laughed, and hugged her back.
“Sorry I didn't have much time to visit when you first came back. I figured that you'd be too tired to enjoy much company. Feeling better now?”
She brushed the fine red dust from her coat and made a mental note to wash it when she got home. “Yes, much better, though I'm still taking naps every day. I'm due for a check up next week, and then they'll tell me when I can go back to work.”
“Great! I thought you'd probably be going stir crazy without something to work on.” He glanced outside, runnign his eyes along the ragged horizon. “Looking for something in particular out there? Or are you just trying to catch a cold so you don't have to go back to the office?”
She laughed again and shook her head. “No, I come here a lot. It's the nearest spot where I can get to the wall where there's no one around to watch. I miss being out there, you know.”
He nodded. “i think I know how you feel. I don't know what I'd do if they told me I couldn't fly anymore. There's nothing like it, getting up there in the black, looking down on a whole world. But come on, it's going to be getting dark soon, and you look cold. Mind if I come back to your house? I'd invite you over to mine, but I just got back from a trip, and Shelle has refused to allow me to show anyone the house before I've cleaned up my laundry and cargo.”
“It would be great to have you over, Max” she said, turning toward the town.
When they arrived at the house, Nathan was at home, and he greeted Max eagerly.
“Hey! I don't think I've seen you since you brought us home a few weeks ago.” The two men shook hands. Nathan said “Please, take a seat! I'll get dinner going. Have you been flying a lot lately?”
Max nodded, flinging himself into one of the armchairs in the living room. “Yeah, the more people come, the more demand there is for good pilots. I'm working on starting my own shipping company, for high priority items, or items that need guaranteed gentle handling. I know a couple of young hot shots who would be perfect to sign on for my crew. It looks like we'll be ready to start selling our services to the public in about a month.” he chuckled. “When I first started trying to set this thing up, I figured that insurance would be the trickiest hurdle. Nope, not by a long shot. Want to know what was?”
“Getting everyone to work for workable rates?” guessed Dejah, and Max shook his head.
“No, believe it or not, it was the advertising. I hired this agency out of Opportunity Dome. They've been driving me crazy for months now: they don't want to call it 'premium shipping,' because it sounds too pricey—which it is, but they don't want it to sound that way. Then they didn't want to use 'priority shipping' because it focused too much on speed and I'll also be offering shipping for high rick items and fragile items. I told them to just say 'Silver Hammer Shipping—for any damn thing you need to send,' but they just laughed at me.” He rolled his eyes dramatically, and Dejah laughed.
“Is Shelle excited about you finally getting to run your own company?” Nathan asked from the kitchen as he added yellow curry paste to a pan simmering on stove. Dejah sniffed the air appreciatively.
“Yeah, she is. I'll have a lot more control over my schedule, so hopefully I can be home a little bit more. Not so much in the beginning, when I pretty much have to take any shipping job I get, but once we're established, I can set up shipping centers with local pilots in all of the Domes, and spend a little more time working from here. I hate not seeing the kids grow up. I had to miss Brian's last birthday, and I just hated it. He understood, he's a good kid, but no parent wants to explain why they missed a birthday, right?”
“That sounds like it'll be a nice arrangement,” Dejah added wistfully. “you'll get to be home when you want to be, but still get out and see the planet every day.”
an awkward silence fell, and the only sound was the sizzle of the curry on the stove. Then Nathan glanced at Dejah, and asked Max, “So do you go to Bradbury Dome much? How's the museum doing?”
“Oh, it's a huge hit,” max said excitedly, shifting positions on the chair. “I wish I could have seen that crowd, I hear it's one of the biggest crowds that's been recorded here. Well over twenty thousand, and some reports said thirty. Incredible. Anyway, I actually stopped there long enough to take a quick trip through the museum the other day. There were still a lot of people coming and going, though they said they expect traffic to slow in the coming months. That Phoenix exhibit is really something to see. Actually, the whole museum is pretty nice in that regard. It's not just bare facts and data; they really try to make it feel like Mars, so even people who will never set foot on the bare surface get to experience a little of what it's like. I hope it makes people stop taking the place for granted.”
“Dinner's ready,” Nathan called from the kitchen as he lifted the top off a pot of rice, releasing a cloud of scented steam into the air. Max and Dejah joined him in the kitchen, and soon the table was set, and all three sat for the meal.
Dejah scooped a pile of rice onto her plate and covered it with the curry. “Nathan, I'm so glad you made this tonight. There was no place to get decent curry in Bradbury Dome, and I really really missed it. Especially on cold nights like this.”
“I would have made it sooner,” he admitted, “but I kept forgetting to get the stuff from the store. I'd remember it at three in the morning, and forget again the next day.”
She laughed.
After the dinner was over, the three worrked to clear the table and clean up the dishes. It only took a few minutes, then they moved to the living room and sat down, chatting about old times and Dejah told Max about visiting the University.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” max said with a sigh. “I still keep in touch with the Academy, and I usually try to get to some of the demonstrations. I've found some of my best pilots that way, and a lot of them are coming over to Silver Hammer Shipping. But it's so strange to see the changes that happen there, new instructors, new methods, new records to beat. Some punk Terran kid beat my record speed around the manuever course this year. Thought I'd have my name on that one for a lot longer than that.”
“Didn't you set about fifteen records?” Dejah asked with a grin, “surely not all of them have been beaten yet.”
“Only seven, as you well know, one of those actually being the record for number of records set by a single student. And yes, there's still at least two of them that stand. But I expect to see those go any day now.” He gave a dramatic sigh and pretended to be crushed. Dejah couldn't suppress a snort of derision, and Max grinned.
“No, really, it's fun, just a little strange. You remember those days, when everything seems like it's open to you, and you never think about things like paying bills, wiping noses, or trying not to strangle the fine people at your ad agency. But that's where everything ends up, really.”
“I wonder if that's what makes the difference between the people who make it in the end,” Nathan mused. “You remember Ann? I see her Areriums all over the place, all the best hotels and corporations want them worked into the designs for their lobbies. But then there was that kid Keith, you remember him Dej? Always got the top grades in any class he was in, everyone talked about how he was headed for the top, surely some big planning corp, maybe even a government liaison office. Last I heard, he went back to Terra, just never could seem to make it work here.”
Max nodded, then sighed and heaved himself to his feet. “And speaking of mundane duties that must be attended to, I should be on my way. Shelle's going to be putting the kids to bed in a few minutes, and I'd like to be home for that.”
Dejah hugged her friend, and walked with him to the door.
He opened the door to leave, then turned and looked at her for a minute. “I know you want to be back out there, Dej. It's pretty damn obvious to anyone who saw the way you look towards the Dome wall anytime you get close to it. And that's fine—it's people like you who opened up this world to us. But...” he glanced around the room, lit with warm globe lights and still decorated with pictures of the Aresian landscape. “Don't miss this. This is where life happens, this is the real deal. You've lived an incredible dream, but don't let it rob you of what you have here.” He gave her a quick hug, then turned and walked out into the night.
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