FICTIONS: Bluer Sky
Sue Isle
Maria Alvarez, the alien, moved into the path of the family of three who had just made it through customs. She flailed around in the one-sixth lunar gravity but the ship-dwellers weren’t too graceful either. As the man, woman and girl focused on her in surprise, Maria marshalled the proper words in her mind. Get them wrong and these traders were under no obligation to talk to her.
“Maria Alvarez, Earth,” she said. “Examiner with the Education Board. May I book some time with you?”
They smiled and she felt instant relief. Sometimes the shipfolk just didn’t want to know you and didn’t care how much they limited their kids’ futures. At least the parents smiled, the girl only focused on her with an alarmed stare. Was she going to spill the story right here? What was she going to say? Maria gave her no reassuring look, only smiled back at the parents. “We’re going to quarters now,” the father said. “Come along if you like, we’ve nothing booked for a couple of settling in hours.”
He was dark, as Spanish-looking as she should be by rights, given her name. Mixed blood in her ancestry had given her fair hair and freckles which made Mary Jones sound much more likely. The mother was fair, her skin was pale by nature as well as nurture from the tin cans these folk called home. Kiah and Ellen Greenfields: Maria ticked them off in her mind. She squeezed in after them through a doorway to quarters, a residential unit barely big enough for one person by her standards. Yet the spacers stretched and relaxed, eased by the shutting of the door between them and the antsnest that was Luna. They stowed their onstation bags neatly in spaces under hammocks still slung against the wall. The lanky teenager checked the freezer unit and Ellen called for her to shut the fridge door, Lara, there was no need to stand there as though she was vacuum-frozen.
Lara spun around as though she had really been shouted at. She launched herself up a few inches, so tense was her movements and her parents looked on in some surprise.
“Okay, I did it,” she blurted. “I only wanted to find out if there was a chance — I wanted to know what it was like.”
“What what…” her mother began then stopped herself, shrugging. Lifted a hand in spacer shorthand for please explain!
“Earth,” Lara said, still very much on edge. “I want to see Earth. I — I’ve registered to sit the Returning Exam.”
The parents looked horrified, Maria thought, but they were still sitting on their emotions. You had to, she guessed, crammed together in a ship out there with the same few faces. They also couldn’t be that surprised; Lara was the right age and with unlimited Net access, she knew what the options were as well as an adult. The official options, at any rate.
“It took a lot to get us started out here,” the father said slowly at last. “We spent everything, gave all that we had to get ourselves and you away from Earth. You know I used to run a company the size of Luna Colony out of Sydney. We had a house, company car, weekends away on the Company island in Indonesia. But what’s all that when the air stinks and hurts your chest to breathe?”
“You keep saying that stuff! That was what it was like before I was even born, not now!” Maria winced; the girl’s voice was too much for the small space and echoed painfully through her head.
“No?” Ellen demanded, a sudden sharpness in her voice. This was plainly not an entirely new argument. “Haven’t you paid any attention to your studies then? What sort of work do you think ship-kids can get on Earth? You know you have to have the promise of a job before they let you come and it has to be something an Earthborn doesn’t want or can’t do. What sort of work do you think that leaves, Lara? Your body will be crushed under Earth gravity and you won’t have any attention to spare for all that free air you think you’re going to breathe!”
“They won’t accept you,” her father said bluntly. His dark eyes flicked to Maria in anxious hostility. Wanting to protect, wanting at the same time to be convinced that he was wrong. “It took years for us to learn how to fit in here.”
“Fit in?” his daughter cried. “Walk along lines on the floor, don’t meet anyone’s eyes unless you’re introduced, never see anyone except on these month end trips to Luna! Never touch anyone unless you’ve practically married them already. Log any use of a toilet not on your own ship with the Luna Authorities, eat your own recycled crap if it is your own toilet.”
“Sweetie — Earth is full of diseases,” Ellen said. “Some of them are bioengineered, some are natural but they are all terrible things. You’ve never been sick so you don’t know just how terrible. With recycling we know exactly what is in the system and how to treat it so that nothing harmful reaches us. Your dad’s right, we gave up everything, high status and income to work on our ship here because we wanted a new start. We wanted our child to be born in an environment we could control, so that it was the very best we could give you.”
“Don’t make this my fault.” Lara’s voice was not a whine but an adult’s warning. “Don’t say you gave up everything for me. I never asked you to. Don’t you see? I want to have friends with me, not just see them on screens most of the year!”
“Did you set her off?” Kiah asked Maria suddenly, abandoning the usual trader’s politeness towards non-family. Normally such an argument would never have happened with someone else in the realtime room. “What have you been telling her about Earth?”
“I hear what lies, even though you didn’t say that,” Maria answered, deciding equal bluntness was called for. She didn’t want to drop Lara in it but the parents clearly hadn’t picked up the girl’s admission.
“She didn’t call me, I called her!” Lara cut in before they knew whether Maria would have protected her or not. “I said, I signed up for the exam. Kids can do that, if they’re old enough to take the Return. It was on net, that an examiner would be here on Luna at the time we docked and you could book to meet her. I did that. And you can’t stop me taking that exam.”
“Lara, you’ve got no skills off ship …” her mother protested.
“That’s not true,” Maria said, putting on the manner of Examiner. Her voice was pitched just right to carry but not to dominate. “Lara has very good academic skills judging by her record so far. She can use a computer as though she was jacked into it and with a jack, there’s nothing she couldn’t make a computer do. Certainly she’s not up on physical skills and will probably need to use a wheelchair at least for some time. It depends how well her body responds to the rehabilitation treatment.”
“Are you listening to this?” Kiah asked his daughter. “You’ll be a fifteen-year-old cripple stuck in a room hooked to a machine.”
“Again, it’s not quite that bad,” Maria tried again. “Space emigrants live in centres – you might think of them as large ships encompassing many families — and there is a strong social life. If Lara passes the exams, she would come first to Sydney, to the main centre there and later she’d be given a choice of our other centres, depending on how she scores and what work is available in the different cities. She would have plenty of time to travel and see the sights.”
Maria canted her body language towards the girl. In the end it did not matter what the parents said and they knew it. The choice was Lara’s, as it belonged to any of the spaceborn children over the age of thirteen. Grinning and triumphant, the teen saw Maria out of the unit. Maria managed to maintain her professional cool as the hatch was shut, cutting off the still-arguing voices of Kiah and Ellen behind their daughter. She got all the way into her own unit and managed to shut out the rest of Luna Colony before she began to cry.
* * *
By Maria’s clock it was only early evening, though the Moon was in late night. Outside was darkness – they had just entered the month-long night — so human time and outside appearance were the same thing. The huge holo images of the surface were transmitted down to the walls of this food hall come nightclub, showing scenes of ships arriving which might or might not be reality. Nobody was paying much attention to them, it would be like watching cars on a city street for her. Her focus was on the trader families who gathered here, particularly the kids. Lights flickered and swirled in bright colours. The traders moved with economy; even on the dance floor they were careful not to collide or swing arms into someone else’s space. The noise level was a lot lower than it would have been in an Earth club, the music at conversational volume.
Maria was calm now. She had used a precious squirt of water to wash her face and applied makeup before coming out. This was her only chance to play tourist; tomorrow she would oversee the exam for Lara and Tom, another trader childbut one who had his parents unqualified blessing. Tom’s mother had just given birth to unplanned twins and there was not room for three children on ship. No other ship wanted to employ junior crew right now, a stint Earthside was his best option. Tom would be coming back up as an adult, it was in his contract. Lara, though, was the real prize. The Board would be pleased with her now, Maria thought with a great upswelling of hope. She was safe, her children would be safe.
Her employers had never explicitly suggested her comfortable home in the protected environment of Sydney Hab was contingent on Maria’s efforts. That assured medical care and good schooling for Emily and Sarah relied on Maria’s infusions of new blood …
A touch on her sleeve made her jump. The boy who had touched her had already politely withdrawn to arm’s length. He looked early teens, dressed in the current adolescent style,day-glo orange tank top and skinny black pants which, made him look like a blooming tropical plant. He looked at Maria as though she was the answer to every hope he had ever had. He tapped the badge pinned to the front of the tank top, a red-and-white swirling which meant, she recalled with severe embarrassment, that the kid was putting himself forward for indenture.
“I’m sorry, no, I’m Earther,” she told the boy. “Here to examine for the Education Board. I’m not taking bookings for adoption.”
“Then I want to sit the test!”
Not unexpected, Maria reminded herself. She looked closely at the boy, noting the apparent fragility of his bones, the narrow shoulders and wrists. He was pale but that went with red hair and the spacer lifestyle. She wouldn’t be able to tell any more without the tests. “How old are you?” she said at last. He held out a secured infodisk. Maria fished her handcomp from the depths of her jacket pouch, fumbling under the anxious stare, and ran it. Fifteen. Didn’t look it. “An orphan,” she said, startled into saying the words aloud. That was very unusual here, that someone should have no family at all; not even someone willing to provide shiproom in return for work. The boy shrugged but gave no explanation.
“Do you have any dependents; younger siblings?”
“No, ma’am.”
She grinned slightly at the ma’am and abruptly made her decision. Old enough was old enough and the lack of bothersome adults in the background was a plus. “All right, you can take the test,” she said. “But if you fail it, you can’t sit it again for six months. No harassing me or any other officer before that time.” She fed her room details, the time and requirements for the test into his disk and handed it back. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Terence, is it, or Terry?”
“Terry. Thank you.” He bowed and moved away. Maria sighed; work never let you alone.
She watched two families who had been socialising — introducing their late teens children to one another with Victorian correctness — get up and exchange farewells, the little head bows rather than handshakes. The girl and boy smiled at one another. Arranged or not, the pair seemed to get on. The next stage would be deciding which ship would accept the extra body after the marriage. The young couple would have to join one of the existing ships, meaning a little more cramming, a little more painfully-polite courtesy and endurance. Maria silently wished them luck. Time to head back, she decided. She needed rest before the exams in the morning, same as the kids.
* * *
Lara Greenfields and Tom Parson reported to Maria’s unit eight hours later. The girl was jubilant, already sure she would pass but the boy was nervous. He was a little older than Lara, of wiry build and blinked incessantly. Maria settled them both with their laptops, to which she transmitted the exam.
“Relax,” she said. “There’s no rigid time limit although most people complete the questions within two hours. While you work, I need to come to you and do a few little tests such as take blood and saliva. I’ll also be monitoring your heart rates and blood pressure. You can talk to one another if you wish and you may help one another. One’s passing does not mean another’s failure.”
A slight tap on the door halted her. She took three steps that way and let Terry Silver in, still wearing his day-glo orange vest. He had clearly been hurrying and was still out of breath. “It’s all right,” Maria assured him. She repeated the instructions as she settled Terry on the other side of her small dining booth.
Okay, you may start when ready.”
The teenagers soon forgot her as they worked. She moved quietly around them, performing the quick physical testsas they answered questions of mathematics and language and economics. Terry was more anxious, as though he had not had any medical attention at all in his life. That was possible, Maria supposed, the ships were a law unto themselves . All three kids, as she could see by watching through her own comp, were dedicated and intelligent and finished up before an hour and forty minutes were over. Maria laughingly refused to mark the tests on the spot and assured the anxious teens that she would be sending the results the moment she had them. “But it looks good,” she assured them. “Don’t be too worried.”
Once they were gone, she made the call to Luna Medical and arranged to bring the samples.
* * *
“Greenfields and Parson are clear. Silver, well, he’s clear too but he does show signs of bone degeneration. He hasn’t had as much exercise time in the full-g wheel as the others. That and his ship probably wasn’t maintained at high enough g; it’s a common problem.”
Maria nodded to the medical tech’s face in her comp screen, sensing that the young woman hadn’t finished even though she was waiting for Maria’s response. “Ah — so would Terry Silver be able to tolerate the trip down the gravity well?”
“Yes, though he’ll probably need a third again of the time the other kids will need to acclimatise.”
“Thanks. That’s doable. Can you post me those results?”
“Already done,” the tech said. She hesitated. “Ah – one more thing. It was in the list of things you people always want us to look for but I hate to find it in a young person. Kid’s sterile. Problems with his ship and probable radiation exposure, I’d say.”
“Okay, thanks.”
* * *
Only when the link was shut down did Maria curse wearily to herself. She always hated this part. She got a drink of water first, even thought about calling Em and Sarah. It cost the earth and moon, as the kids’ joke had it, but the girls always loved getting offworld calls. They were always so worried when she went away, scared that she was walking around in bad air and might be hurt by mugger-gangs. They, of course, had never personally experienced anything outside the confines of their home and school. “I drive straight to the spaceport,” Maria had promised them. “There’s a very big guard with me and he looks after me. Mugger-gangs don’t even come close to the car.”
“Anyway they’re too stupid,” Em had declared.
Maria looked at her elder daughter, a little taken aback. The violent and criminal behaviour of those left outside the sealed hab was often discussed on television and at school, she knew, but so far the effect on human intelligence hadn’t been. “What do you mean, Emmy?”
The nine-year-old shrugged thin shoulders. She was still barely the size of an average six-year-old but still, the doctors had said she was luckier than many. Her seven-year-old sister was confined to a wheelchair since the age of four because of brittle bones. “Well, the bad air hurts their brains,” she said in what Sarah called her duh voice. Doesn’t everyone know that? “They weren’t smart enough to come in to the areas that were going to be sealed and after that they got sick and their kids got sick and they’re all sick!”
“We’re sick, Em,” Maria said softly. “That’s why I have to go to the Moon. Those people have been lucky and they take care of their new world, as we didn’t take care of this one. That’s why I have to leave you so often and go outside.”
“But not into the bad air?” Emily asked, watching her tensely.
“No, sweetie, not into the bad air.”
Remembering this, she decided not to call the girls after all. Instead, she steeled herself and called Terry Silver. Might as well get the bad news done with. The boy knew as soon as he saw her face.
“I didn’t pass, did I?”
“No. I’m sorry, Terry.”
He hesitated, clearly mindful of what she had said about harassment. “Could I just ask what it was? I mean — most of the questions were easy and I was sure I had them right. I helped Tom and Lara on a few. You did say that was all right, to help?”
“Of course it was, Terry. The problem is in your psychological profile. It shows that even though you did very well academically, you wouldn’t be able to adjust to life on Earth. The medical showed you didn’t have quite enough time in full-g, which is very important while you’re still growing.”
“So I could work on that?”
“You could but you can’t reverse the bone damage which has already been done. I’m sorry, Terry. You won’t be allowed to resit the exam.”
She shut the link on his dismayed face. When she had composed herself, Maria called Tom and Lara to give them the good news and then she sent the confirmation to the Board of Education and Health. They would be pleased; a healthy male and female in the one grab. Only then did Maria book her seat on the returning shuttle, which would be the one before that which Lara and Tom would ride down the gravity well. She could never bear to ride with the children.
* * *
Maria stood where the teenagers could not see her as they were wheeled into the huge domed habitat which encompassed central Sydney. They had been brought on a sealed bus right to the airlock door at one end of a long corridor leading to the accommodation for new arrivals. This would be the closest they would get to the outside world for a long time.
Lara was chattering eagerly to Tom and to the carers about the outside trips she wanted to take once she was on her feet. Maria wondered how soon it would be before Lara and Tom realised that it had never mattered what answers they gave in the exam. The only qualification that mattered was fertility. They would be separated soon, ensuring any information Tom carried back to space would be very limited.
“We have to trick you,” she whispered, knowing they could not hear her. “We have no other choice now but to entice you home to keep us going … a few more years.”
And Maria Alvarez turned away to go home and see little Emily and brittle-boned Sarah, who would hopefully be among the last damaged children. For their sake, she was willing to play serpent in the new Eden the traders had made for themselves. She hoped one day she could tell Terry Silver the truth.
—/—
Copyright © Sue Isle 2008
About the story:
I came to write this story, “Bluer Sky”, out of a fascination with off-earth societies, on the Moon, on future spacecraft and other worlds. Exotic lifestyles have always been a popular trope of fiction; we want what we don’t have and the grass is greener over there. Parents give up all they own to save their children from a polluted and damaged Earth but now all the children want is to walk below blue sky. I guess it’s not an optimistic story, except in the hope that Earth will not be able to keep its secret, just as hundreds of corruption scandals have broken the surface of conspiracy before.
Sue Isle: I live in Perth WA, under the control of two pet rats, Jasper and Theo and work for a court transcription company. They call me a “lifer” when they’re being nice and I hear a lot of stuff I can’t use. My publishing credits include the YA book Scale of Dragon, Tooth of Wolf and the children’s book Wolf Children, plus stories around the place to markets such as Aurealis, Orb, ASIM, Agog! and Tales of the Unanticipated. I’ve recently moved online with Shiny, a YA fiction magazine and now, of course, TiconderogaOnline. Other interests include history, sf conventions, roleplay gaming, gardening and space travel.
