Burning Dreams

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

One minute he’d be looking up at an empty Elysian sky, tinged a slightly greener blue than the sky of Earth, dotted with small puffy clouds. Then a tiny dot would appear just where his mother, coordinating the effort from a small Starfleet-issue comm unit in her palm, had promised him it would.

  As he tilted his head back, squinting against the sun, the dot grew larger and larger, taking shape as a shuttlecraft carrying a modular construction unit under its belly, which it would maneuver into position for the waiting robots to snap into place in whatever configuration was designated for that site—a shopping mall, an office building, school or apartment complex.

  There were no schools on Elysium yet; in fact the Council hadn’t decided, given how far-flung the inhabitants were, whether children would be required to attend school in an actual classroom, or could conduct all their lessons through the teletutor. As long as his lessons got done somehow, Chris was free to scramble about the building sites, following Willa up a lift or down a tunnel to see close-up how things took shape.

  Best of all, there were no Neworlders here; they’d all gone off to the remoter regions to live far away from a city that they, not surprisingly, condemned as not Natural. Chris only ran into them occasionally when one or two stopped by the ranch to express their disapproval of what Heston was doing there.

  Heston had chosen a homestead far enough from where the city was expected to ultimately expand, but close enough to commute by aircar. A house and barn had been built of prefab units similar to the ones forming the city. Heston had chosen the spot especially because of the thermal vents.

  “See those?” he’d asked Chris the day they arrived, as if anyone could miss the bizarre-looking lava formations, like dozens of petrified gopher runs, striating the landscape every few meters. Where they differed from gopher runs, aside from being harder than basalt, was that some of them steamed slightly.

  “Uh-huh,” Chris answered, as the two crouched in the low-growing grasses that covered the ground as far as he could see. He laid his palm against one of the lava tubes and found it a little warmer to the touch than was strictly comfortable.

  “Thermal vents from a volcano five kilometers from here,” Heston explained. “Elysium has several sources of energy already—solar, wind power, fuel cells, but I’m going to try something different, something they’ve been using in Iceland for centuries…volcano power. It’s a natural for this world. Did you know you could set up a greenhouse on top of a thermal vent and grow pineapples and bananas during the coldest winter?”

  Chris shook his head, fascinated.

  “Well, I’m going to do much more than that. I’ve designed a gizmo that will provide all our energy, read the weather, measure the water table, even warn of earthquakes, all from the power of a single volcano.”

  “Don’t they have all that stuff in the city?” Chris wanted to know.

  “Most of it,” Heston conceded. “But I’m working on designs for the individual homesteader, so we won’t have to be dependent on the city for anything.” He stood up and turned slowly in a circle, surveying the open land around them. “Someday this homestead will be its own little universe. We’ll grow all our own food, create all our own energy, and there’ll be herds of horses running wild in the hills, living on the native grasses, as far as the eye can see. Oh, and the hot tub—did I mention we’ll have a hot tub?”

  He said it with a nudge and wink, which made Chris chuckle.

  “Can we have a pool, too?” he wanted to know.

  “You want a swimming pool? You’ve got one,” Heston said, waving his hand as if he could make it appear in an instant. “We’ll make it look like a natural formation—oh, say, over there by that tumble of rocks, with its own waterfall….”

  “What if the volcano erupts?” Chris asked. The valley the ranch was set in was ringed around with low hills, but they looked older than the ones around the city, and none of them were smoking. The volcano must be behind them, he figured, but was that far away enough?

  “It won’t,” Heston said confidently. “Starfleet engineers have been monitoring it for over a decade. They can work backward and forward and project when it might erupt again. Long before it does, I’ll be able to harness it.”

  “Harness it?” Chris echoed him, thinking of horses.

  “You’ll see,” was all Heston would tell him, going off to tinker with the generator that, if he was to be believed, would do just about anything.

  Chris spent a lot of time hanging on the split-rail fence watching Maia and the other mares exploring their new paddock beside the barn. They’d been brought here and awakened from stasis and seemed none the worse for wear. They would be happier, he hoped, once Heston turned them loose in the hills, though he knew he would miss Maia. For now the barn was open to the mild air, but once Heston got his invention running, it would be as comfortable as the ranch house—cooled in summer, heated in winter, bright with natural light from skylights built into the roof.

  Chris stroked Maia’s neck as she nuzzled him, her sweet breath blowing in his hair. He wished his stepfather would teach him to ride, but Heston was possessive of his horses.

  “They’re not pets,” he’d pointed out. “They need to get acclimated to their new surroundings, and I don’t want them overexcited,” he’d said, but Chris wondered if that was the real reason. Heston himself rode one of them out sometimes to survey the property. Chris had overheard him telling Willa, “Yeah, I know he’s a rugged kid, but he’s only nine. Maybe after the first run of foals, but not now.”

  That would be more than a year from now, Chris realized, wishing he had the nerve to just grab hold of Maia’s mane and swing himself over the top rail and onto her back. But he sensed that would really tick Heston off. And he wasn’t sure he could do it without falling off. Maybe, he thought, after the foals are born, he might let me have one.

  The thought would have to sustain him for now. He gave Maia a final pat, climbed down from the fence and went off to run wild through the tall grass, waiting quietly for the native critters—birds and lizards and some sort of small furry hopping quadruped whose name he didn’t know that looked like a kangaroo rat with a platypus bill—or skipping stones across the small creek in back of the house where Heston had joked about a swimming pool, or hiking halfway up the nearest inactive cinder cone until Willa caught sight of him and called him down. He figured it would take him all summer to explore every corner of his new world.

  “It’ll never fly!” Cotton Jonday announced, watching Heston tinker with the interface for what he’d informed their Neworlder neighbors would be the state of the art in thermodynamic environmental control systems. He and his son seemed to have come all the way over to the Prescott homestead just to criticize Heston’s latest creation.

  “If I’d wanted it to fly, neighbor, I’d have given it a propulsion system,” Heston retorted, just to annoy Cotton, which he’d discovered was surprisingly easy to do.

  The Gizmo, as Heston had dubbed it, stood in a clearing halfway between the house and the barn. While Heston tinkered, Cotton and his son Flax stood around with their hands deep in the pockets of their bib overalls, barely contained sneers on their faces. Chris and Silk watched from the porch, barely stifling their laughter.

  Silk, Chris had learned, was Cotton’s niece. She’d been allowed to tag along, apparently no longer forbidden to associate with the Prescotts, as long as her uncle was curious about what Heston was up to, and she’d decided she and Chris were friends again.

  While they watched the interplay between Heston and the Jondays, Chris had opened the back of Silk’s cell phone to see if he could get it to interface with his comm unit.

  “Settling your family in so close to active thermal vents isn’t safe,” Cotton went on doggedly, kicking at the dirt with the toe of his boot. “There’s gases coming out of those clefts that can kill you and your livestock with you.”

  “That’s largely misinformation, neighbor. And on the odd chance that this particular beast turns
out to be flatulent…” Chris and Silk both snorted and poked each other with glee. “…that’s what this is for.” Heston tapped the face of one of the banks of gauges on the device and it presented him with a series of readouts. “Measures everything. Temperature, pressure, exact composition of escaping gases—which are captured by the array over here…” He bobbed and wove amid the maze of conduits with practiced ease. “…and broken down to the molecular level here…” Ducking under and around. “…and converted into energy here.”

  “Reducing Nature to its molecular components isn’t Natural….”Cotton began.

  “My friend, every time you sit down to the dinner table, that’s exactly what you’re doing!” Heston cut him off, squinting against the sun, a socket wrench in one hand and an oily rag in the other. “If you didn’t, you’d have starved to death at your mother’s breast and wouldn’t be here annoying me today.”

  Chris and Silk couldn’t hold it in any longer. They laughed until they were weak, noticing too late that Cotton had heard them and turned on his heel, heading for the porch, his sullen overgrown son in tow. The two of them suddenly grew very serious.

  “I’ve designed thermal capture systems for entire cities!” Heston called after Cotton, trying to distract him before there was an incident. “I think I can manage to do the same for my own household.”

  But Cotton was not to be diverted. He loomed over the two on the porch. “You find this amusing, do you?” he demanded of Silk, not even looking at Chris.

  “No, sir…” Silk began, but Chris intervened.

  “She wasn’t laughing, sir. It was me. She sort of…caught it from me. You know, contagious, like yawning.”

  Cotton jerked his thumb toward their car, an old-fashioned contraption with an internal combustion engine. Where he found the gasoline to run it was anyone’s guess, though Heston had been heard muttering something about “chicken heads.”

  “We’re leaving now,” he said, and Silk, not daring to look Chris in the eye, reluctantly jumped off the porch, braids bouncing.

  “You forgot your…um…cell phone!” Chris called after her, dropping it into her palm with a wink that said he’d rigged it so that from now on she could use it to talk to him.

  “Good-bye, Christopher!” she called out over her shoulder. Chris could see Heston watching them, a slow grin spreading over his face, whether at Silk, who hadn’t yet been entirely corrupted by the Neworlder philosophy, or at Chris’s standing up to Cotton, Chris wasn’t sure.

  “Designing something on a computer’s one thing!” Cotton repeated his recurring theme as he slammed the door of the antiquated vehicle. “You softhands try to do anything in real life, you invariably make a mess of it. And the climate’s wrong for them horses!”

  “We’ll see about that!” Heston called after him as the car sputtered off in a hydrocarbon haze.

  “Silkie and Seepy sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-

  G…”

  Children’s singsong rhymes, especially the mocking ones, endure down the centuries, and were just as stinging in Chris’s time as they might have been for his great-great grandfather. The first time Silk called him on her cell phone, he could hear Flax teasing her in the background. He felt his fists clenching.

  “Has he been singing that since the day you were here?” Chris asked. His commscreen showed only static, since Silk’s phone didn’t have visual, but her voice came through loud and clear. So, unfortunately, did Flax’s.

  “He’ll get bored soon,” Silk said, not exactly answering the question. “His brain’s too small to hold more than one thought at a time.”

  But Chris didn’t laugh as Silk had hoped he would.

  “I bet if I was there, I could make him stop!”

  Lately he had decided he liked Silk. He was ten now, after all, and finally taller than she, and not as squeamish as he had been when he was only nine. He wished he could finish the fight Flax had started on the ship almost a year ago.

  “Did your father get the Gizmo running?” Silk wanted to know.

  Heston’s my stepfather, Chris wanted to say, but let it go. “Uh-huh.”

  “Uncle Cotton says he knows why your mares won’t conceive….”

  Chris wondered if he should pursue that, but decided against it. For one thing, getting the mares to breed was Heston’s problem, not his, especially if Heston wouldn’t let him have a foal. For another, he hadn’t noticed Cotton Jonday being right about much of anything so far. And third, Heston was hardly ever around, and when he was, he was preoccupied and barely listening.

  As Chris had hoped, most of the time Heston was somewhere else on the planet, planting trees, changing the course of rivers, setting off controlled magma releases from some of the volcanoes in order to take the pressure off earthquake faults. Willa either worked from home or took Chris with her into the city, so he had his mom back, but he wished the homestead wasn’t out in the middle of nowhere, or that more settlers would move close by. The Neworlders’ farm lay on the other side of the foothills, but there was no one else for kilometers. The other kids he’d been in touch with on Earth were out of reach to anyone who didn’t have a subspace communicator, and even that would take weeks. Except for his illicit conversations with Silk, Chris spent an awful lot of time in his own company.

  The novelty of his new home had worn off, and he kept wishing for something exciting to happen.

  That was when the earthquakes began.

  4

  Elysium

  It was a Sunday morning and, as he usually did, Chris leapt out of bed and bolted for the barn where the brood mares were. He was halfway there, running across the grass in his bare feet no matter how many times Willa told him not to, when a distant rumble turned into movement beneath his feet, as if the grass was a rug someone was trying to yank out from under him. He staggered and almost fell, stumbling to a halt. But the ground kept moving. One of the mares whinnied nervously.

  He knew as much as any curious kid did about earthquakes, but he’d never experienced one, not even in Mojave which, like most of California, had been stabilized by people like Heston ages ago. Something told him to sit down before he fell down, and wait it out. Hunkered down on the grass hugging his knees, he watched the one-year saplings they’d planted as soon as they got here start to sway, their leaves shimmering as if in a strong breeze, except that the air was still, as if it was holding its breath. A cloud of dust rose from the mountainside where he’d been hiking only yesterday, and hovered in the air without settling.

  The tremor probably lasted all of fifteen seconds, but it wasn’t until a lone bird somewhere took up its usual cry that Chris trusted the ground to stay still, and clambered to his feet. Only then did he realize how unnaturally quiet it had been before the quake. He would remember that from now on, in case there were more.

  There were. In the city, a series of tremors over the ensuing weeks were a sound more than a feeling, and might have been mistaken for the rumble of some of the heavy machinery setting another high-rise in place. But out on the homesteads, the quakes did some damage, and set everybody’s nerves on edge. Chris got into the habit of just hunkering down wherever he was, checking in with his mother on his personal comm unit to tell her he was all right, and riding it out.

  He came home from the grasslands after a particularly bad quake when Willa’s voice didn’t sound right. He found her in the kitchen amid a mess of broken glass and crockery.

  “Everything fell out of the cabinets,” she said distractedly. She held what was left of a favorite serving platter in both hands. She saw the concern on Chris’s face and smiled. “Never liked those dishes, anyway. It knocked the Gizmo off-line for a bit, but Heston fixed it. He’s a little puzzled why it didn’t predict this last quake, but he says he can modify it. We’ll be okay.”

  “Sure, Mom,” Chris said, more to reassure her than himself.

  But Heston’s modifications had to wait. He was needed in the city.

  “Some hoo-ha about
whether the monorail pylons are stable enough,” he said, packing an overnight bag. “I told the Council their best bet was a free-floating gimbal system; even gave them the specs for one, but bureaucrats always have to fiddle with things. Every ship brings more Neworlders; the Council’s full of them. I’ll need a few days to wade through the red tape, do some on-site inspections…”

  “We’ll be fine here,” Willa said, kissing him on the cheek. “Chris and I will earthquake-proof the place while you’re gone.”

  Neither of the adults said We should have done that when we first settled here, but it hung unspoken between them.

  Heston was gone more than a few days. Every comm message from him was full of complaints about bureaucrats and armchair quarterbacks, and Willa made soothing noises. Chris took over Heston’s work with the horses, feeding and watering them, letting them out into the paddock to run while he mucked out the stalls. It was a lot of work, but he didn’t mind it.

  None of the mares had gotten pregnant yet. Chris figured he’d have to be grown and on his own, maybe away at college, before he’d ever learn to ride.

  Then Charlie came, and everything changed.

  Chris had been in the city with his mother all day. As she put the aircar on hover and let it float into the yard, Chris saw Heston, who’d finally solved the problems with the monorail system and had been home from the city for a few days (“at least until the next crisis,” was how he put it), leaning on the paddock fence, talking to a stranger.

  “…thought I’d be able to manage it myself,” Heston was saying. Both men had their backs to the yard, studying the mares grazing quietly in the paddock. “But now I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew. None of them will implant, and I have to be back and forth to the city so much I can’t devote the time to figuring out why.”

  “Lot of reasons why a mare can’t stay in foal,” the stranger said. He’d glanced over at the occupants of the aircar as they got out, tipping his slouch hat to Willa, who stood very still for a moment, then hurried into the house.