By the time she hustled forward and through the bunks into the lab to begin an analysis of the soil samples she’d collected the previous day before the storm hit, Sergei was waking up fully. She noticed him following her with his eyes, but paid him no mind until he joined her up front and began making coffee in his battery powered pot – a little convenience upon which he had insisted when he was chosen for the mission, much to Kay’s amusement. “Starting a bit early, are we?” he asked as he waited for the coffee to percolate.
“Hard to sleep on those damned hammocks,” she answered. Actually, she’d had little trouble getting used to the hammocks. She’d spent most of her teen years sleeping on the ground or on an ancient cot that could double as a government approved torture device. By comparison, the hammock was luxurious. Sergei didn’t need to know why she had jolted awake.
“Really? You never seemed to have problems before.”
“It’s been thirty-two days, Sergei,” came the blunt reply.
“I thought it might have something to do with last night,” he pressed. He had a maddening habit of being a bit ‘on the nose’ in his analysis of her, not to mention being a horrendous busy-body. When she’d met her husband, Mark, a security guard for SpaceX, Sergei had known almost instantly that she was smitten with him. He refused to stop probing her for details until she couldn’t stand it any longer and handed him her training journal, daring him to read it. Thankfully, he chickened out and gave it back untouched. He also knew they were officially an item less than two hours after they ‘did the deed’, as he put it. Today was not the sort of day where his nosiness would just be annoying; today, she needed him to leave it alone. She was certain he knew it too, but just couldn’t help himself.
“Obviously, I’ve had better nights. I’m just going to be better off if we forget about that until we get back to Earth, alright?”
Sergei poured himself a thermos of coffee from the pot and took a sip, raising one eyebrow at Kay and shooting her a wry smile as he finished his first taste for the morning. “I do not believe the mind works in this manner.” Kay gave an exasperated sigh and rested her forehead in her hand, her elbow on her desk. “Or perhaps it does – this, I might call denial.”
Kay flushed with an internal fire and she slammed her arm down on the desk with a mighty boom. “Sergei, damn it. Don’t you ever shut up?” Kay’s voice cracked on the final word as it rose dramatically in pitch, but she refused to look up from her desk. Maybe she knew what he was doing – she’d seen the smart-ass shtick before from him, and it’d worked to get her talking every time. Perhaps she thought if she saw his face, it would all come pouring out.
“Ah, good! Anger! Maybe we can move through all five stages in record time.”
“You just don’t get it, do you?” she asked with a bit less fury.
“Difficult for me to ‘get’ something if you don’t talk about it.”
It was working again. Damn him! She could feel the words forcing their way through her throat and hurling themselves over her tongue but she was powerless to stop them. “You want to talk? Fine! Let’s talk. Do you know what my first thought was when you told me she died? I was glad she was gone. Glad!” He stared back unfazed, his eyes revealed a startling lack of shock or revulsion. “Did you hear what I said? I found out last night that I’m a horrible person; that’s why I’m mad.”
“I heard you. I think, perhaps, you’re being too hard on yourself, but I do not find that the slightest bit surprising. You’re always too hard on yourself.”
She turned her head upward again and regarded him with genuine disgust. Too hard on myself? Is he kidding?
“Why look at me that way? Perhaps you think that if you punish yourself for being human, God will undo it? The record is in serious jeopardy.”
She opened her mouth to yell a barrage of curses at him, but was too angry to even form words. She felt her hands lock into tight fists on the desk, but they didn’t take flight. She tried again to scream at Sergei, but no sound came from her trembling body.
“You did tell me your mother was an alcoholic, yes? Or am I confusing you with Elaine from HR?”
“Yes, but that—”
Sergei cut her off before she could continue beating herself up; the pent up energy this caused inside her could have heated the entire planet if it could be harnessed. “So it was you that told me all about how hard it was for you growing up. It was you who got here in spite of her, rather than because of her. It was you that couldn’t stand to see her suffer. Am I right?”
“And you think, because I took care of her instead of the other way around, that she deserved to die?” she shot back, her voice wavering and filled with unspent anguish.
“No, and neither do you. I think it’s normal to be a little relieved when a source of pain goes away, even if you’ll be sad later.”
He hadn’t felt that hate rise up in his chest. He hadn’t known the depths of her gratitude at the news. He just wasn’t comprehending how screwed up she felt inside, how insane it made her. She shook her head and stood to leave for the airlock without another word. “Where are you going?” he called after her.
“Away from you,” she grunted.
Into a spacesuit. Out the door. Anywhere but here. That was all she was thinking about as she entered the airlock and yanked a suit down from the dug-out wall. He didn’t follow her, thank goodness. She tugged on the suit and slipped her arms and legs into the right holes, then strapped on her gloves and sealed the helmet. The minute she did that, she regretted it.
“Base to McCoy. Don’t be a fool, Kay.” He was on the comm. in her helmet. “Too much dust still to go exploring. Too easy to get lost.”
There hadn’t been any thunder in hours and, from what she could see through the outer hatch of the airlock, the air was clearing a bit. “I’ll chance it – the air’s getting a bit hot in the lab.”
“Negative, McCoy; it’s still twenty-two degrees in the lab.”
Back to the smart-ass stuff, I take it.
“Look, Kay; I’m sorry this is all happening out here. I truly am. But I need you to get past this before you get us both killed.”
Both? No one’s making you step out.
“I can’t have you getting lost out there without coming after you. Too much paperwork when I get back, too many awkward interviews.”
“I won’t go far. I’m just going to check out the dish. You know one of us has to assess its condition soon anyway,” she replied, hoping that would appease him. It didn’t work.
“It can wait. Based on last satellite telemetry, I estimate the storm will pass in thirteen hours.”
“The last telemetry was yesterday!” Kay barked back. When Kay wanted to do something, it was hard to slow her down and impossible to stop her. She tapped the command to depressurize the airlock and unzipped the canvas when she was satisfied that the cycle had been completed.
Once on the surface, she briefly reconsidered her planned eastward excursion after a blast of sand cut her visibility to a meter at most, but only briefly. The sky was brightening some on the opposite end of the crater, at least temporarily affording her a view of dawn rising. Then she began her march, one foot in front of the other.
“If you’re going to do this, you’re going to report what you see. Too much interference to track your position with the tracer,” Sergei insisted.
“I’m proceeding eastward toward the first outcropping. I’ve got a clear visual on site-marker one two.” She walked on several more steps, and as she got further from Sergei, she felt more and more alone on the surface. Urgently, she scouted for other known landmarks to reassure herself that she wouldn’t disappear.
The first outcropping of rocks marked a small but sharp rise in elevation and she could see that cliff well enough. The boulders at its leading edge triggered a memory from her dream which she tried to blot out. That was where her mother had been standing. “I’m approximately halfway to the first outcropping, on course for site marker one t
wo. I have a visual on site marker one five.” Each site marker was a bright green metallic flag they’d pounded into the bedrock with a sledgehammer as they approached their camp site on day one, each with white numbers on both sides. The two she could see suddenly disappeared as another dense pocket of sand cover her face plate.
“I’ve lost visual. I repeat, I’ve lost visual!” she shouted into the comm.
“Hold your position,” Sergei replied, keeping his voice measured and calm. She froze in place and waited for the wind to die down. Mercifully, her field of view brightened again. This time, the glow of the rising sun became apparent just beginning to peak above the rim of the crater.
“I’ve reestablished visual on site marker one five. The dish is just above the first outcropping.” As she started forward again, focusing intently on the boulders up ahead, she could swear she caught a glimpse of a white dress floating across the ground in the wind, but that was ridiculous. “I see something up ahead. I’m going to check it out.”
“What do you see?” Sergei’s curiosity sounded piqued.
“Uncertain.” She couldn’t see it, now that she was looking for it. Had she imagined it? “Must have been a shadow in the dust. I’m resuming toward site marker one five.”
“So tell me something, McCoy; this anger of yours – are you sure you’re not just misdirecting it?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” was her simple retort.
“Are you sure you’re mad about the past and not mad at her for dying before you two could make it right?”
“I’m not sure of anything right now, Sergei,” she muttered into the comm. She reached site marker one five after several more paces and touched it with her gloved hand. When she looked up, she spotted the faint white outline of the satellite dish twenty meters above her. “I’ve reached one five and have a visual on the dish. I am starting my ascent.”
“That’s progress, I suppose.” Sergei sounded far too happy with himself. “It’s a rare time when Kay McCoy is unsure of herself.”
“I had to be sure of myself. If I doubted for even a moment, I’d never have gotten out of Grundy. I’d have spent every waking minute of my life keeping my mother from drowning in the washing tub or overdosing on pills. I’ve got plenty to be mad about that already happened.”
“And yet I seem to recall how desperate you were to make sure that your mother was at the launch site for this mission. You almost decked the media director for trying to hide her in the overflow suite.”
“I wanted her to see me go up. I thought it would make her happy.”
“You loved her enough to be deluded into thinking she might stop drinking if you could make her proud. That sounds like a normal daughter to me. It certainly doesn’t sound like hate.”
She hated him for this. He was being so brutal with this psych 101 routine. She wanted to go on being angry. Wait…she wanted to be angry? Why would she want that?
“I hate it when you do this, Sergei,” she gasped. She was getting a little out of breath as she climbed the boulders and scaled her way up the cliff behind them toward the next plateau and the dish.
“Do what? Be observant? Force you to stop kidding yourself?”
“You don’t have to be so damned smug about it.” She reached the level where there were no more footholds and extracted two mechanical spikes from her pack. With the push of a button a chemical piston would drive the spike into the rock with all the force of a nail gun, and with the tap of a second button, they’d retract. They were standard issue for Mars explorers for times when rock climbing was necessary. She slapped the first spike into the cliff just above head level with far more than the necessary force and hauled herself up high enough to swing the second spike down.
Up she went, getting more tired by the second. Her breathing became very labored as she spoke. “So...what if you’re right?”
“If I’m right?” he teased. “Sorry. If I’m right, it means you’re going to keep on being angry for as long as you can, because the minute you stop, you’re admitting she’s gone. Instead of focusing on the past, you’d be facing the future.”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” she growled as she hefted her body up and over the edge of the cliff onto the plateau above. “Maybe it’s better this way.”
“Sure, if you like pushing away your friends, getting into fights, dying from an early stroke…”
“OK, stop, stop. I know, alright? I know. I need to be mad for a while longer.” She picked herself up off the ground and clamored to her feet. “Can you let me do that?”
“Wonderful – bargaining in all its glory!”
“Ugh, just shut up.” She scanned the horizon in all directions, but settled on the eastern sky. The sun had risen above the rim of the crater and was casting beams of soft red-white light that danced randomly as the dust flew past. The storm seemed to be subsiding, with dust clouds getting thinner and thinner as her topside journey stretched on, and it left, in its wake, a renewed landscape. The rearranged soils were like a strange Martian snow and the odd, smooth texture of the ground caught the sunlight very well. Bits of mica and quartz and other crystals glimmered in her eyes as she took in the scene.
Again, just for an instant, she thought she could see the white dress between the rocks below the ledge, floating out of its shadow and into the morning sun. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered. Her anger stopped by the mesmerizing display of Martian artistry, she shook with the effort to restrain unshed tears. “I wish you could see this, Mom.”
And then the tears came, and she let them fall. And none of the anger mattered in that place. She let herself be consumed by love for the woman in the white dress, the woman who’d started her marriage so hopefully, the woman who’d given Kay life. Never mind that she had gone long before she passed. Never mind that the beauty of that young woman was a thousand times more painful to lose than the sorrow of what she had become. She grieved, and it was glorious and good. She’d hang onto beauty. She’d never forget to see it in the most unforgiving of places. And she’d heal…in time.
About Matthew Souders
Matthew Souders is a scientist by day, science fiction author by night. He writes character-driven, philosophically romantic stories that elevate our view of mankind even in their darkest moments. He takes much of his inspiration from his loving wife and his abiding Catholic faith. His political outlook would best be described as Americanist - adhering to the philosophical basis on which the nation was forged.
Backwater
Lori Janeski
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Amendment IV, Constitution of the United States of America
"You know we can't take much more of this."
Ulysses Kuykendall looked up from his workbench at the stupid kid sitting across the room. "We?"
"Yeah, you know, 'we.' The collective 'we.' Everybody who lives in this godforsaken system."
Ulysses chuckled. "You've been into Barrett City to watch the news feeds again, haven't you, Mark?"
"Yeah," he admitted defensively. "So? I don't think we need to be addicted to the Current like the rest of the system, but having it for the news and such is pretty convenient."
"You're ready to have a heart attack over something you saw on the Current, and you're thinking we need it all the way out here?" Ulysses shook his head. "Nah."
"We need to know what's going on in the rest of the Commonwealth, Ulysses," Mark insisted.
"It has nothin' to do with us, Mark," the old man told him, turning his attention back to his work.
Mark Rankin scoffed and stood up, pacing the room like a caged animal waiting for an opportunity to strike at its captor. "You've got to be kidding. How can it
have nothing to do with us?"
Ulysses shrugged and picked up the armorer's wrench. "Have you in your seventeen-year, clueless life ever taken a trip on the Monorail?"
Mark calmed down a little and looked at his feet. "You know I've never been off-planet. Most people here haven't."
"And that's why most people live here, kid. Mars is the ass-end of the civilized solar system, and we're happy to live here when most sane people prefer the perfectly maintained lives available on Callisto or Ganymede or Europa or Ring Station. We don't leave here, we keep our own paper records rather than electronic, and we live and die without ever being noticed by Parliament."
"Maybe we do now," Mark said, "but what makes you think that the freaking Interplanetary Commonwealth will leave us alone forever?" He shook his head, and answered his own question. "They won't, you can bet your life on it. And that's exactly what we will be betting if we sit around and wait for Parliament to descend on us like a duck on a June bug."
"What the hell is a June bug?" Ulysses asked absently.
"Damned if I know," Mark admitted with a smile. "But I do know what a duck is, and they're mean little stinkers."
"We're getting off-topic here," Ulysses said, reaching for another tool. "You were going to tell me what a bill Parliament passed to increase Monorail security requirements has to do with a planet full of farmers who don't ever take the Monorail."
Freedom's Light: Short Stories Page 4
