Chapter 7b
It was Sunday, although you wouldn’t see that written down anywhere. Adalians had these weird names for the days of the week, as though it was to remind them of the planets near ancient Earth or something. But that was just silly traditions that kids learned from the older classes and then pass on to the new pods under them. Officially, it was just day seven. She liked day seven, regardless. It was common practice that this was a rest day for crews that didn’t work critical safety missions. She would sleep a little later, do some exercise at leisure, and maybe sit with other workers in the garden. Although, it did tend to be crowded on ‘Sundays’.
Lyra once heard that the months had silly names, too, once, but no one remembered them now. It was just thirteen, now. Three weeks to Landing Day. And she wasn’t sure if she even wanted to go to the parade, at all. Something bad always happens at the parade. And she was not going to stretch her luck if she can help it. Maybe she aught to just go outside while they all march. It was so peaceful.
She launched her hopper in the general direction of the factory and the newly assembled bioreactors, only because she didn’t like detaching from the parking spot in manual mode. She let the hopper turn and level with the local gravity before she input the command to slow down gradually to a landing. It took her a couple of kilometers away from the habitat, away from the mining district with its spinning wheels of people living their lives and of materials getting processed, the latter mostly during work-days. As a kid she used to walk from the command tower at the core of her habitat, with a town’s worth of spinning metal only a few meters above her head, all the way out to the craters and sand dunes. Now that she was employed and making her own cash, she could afford to rent a hopper for personal trips like this. It was certainly a much safer way to go outside.
She started by stretching her legs and torso, as soon as she got out of the hopper’s cabin. The sky was pitch black and the dark grey regolith was lit at a high enough angle to eliminate all but the deepest shadows. First noon. Plenty of time. She found a place where the sand had the least amount of boulders, then pushed herself in a jump that took her thirty meters up. She folded her limbs close, rolling back with the small rotation she got from her push-off, then spread out, nearly stopping at a horizontal position, staring calmly into the black sky. The sun hung at the middle of her field of view, slowly drifting as she rolled back lazily. This kind of peace was unattainable under the constant pull of artificial gravity. Such vastness of views were impossible from inside steel and glass enclosures.
She twisted around, turning her body so she could look at the ground due South, where she came from. She could see the top of the Siderotil habitat command center over the horizon. She could twist to the other direction, looking North towards her own buildings, well, her boss’s buildings, but they were all several kilometers away, and safely behind the horizon, even from a vantage point at the peak of her jump.
She turned back and let her body roll slowly to pointing down, her feet directly above her, and still rotating. In free fall, everything is just a matter of perspective. Adalia Prime, the largest asteroid in the system, hung above her head, pulling her up towards it ever so gently.
She breathed out, slowly. This was the only place and the only time she could be free of all the thoughts and emotions that overtook her during the week. Thoughts about the things she needed to do, the things she had to check, the things she had to verify her crew mates had completed in her absence. And worse were thoughts about the things she didn’t have to do. The factory still had little use. What were they missing, while the building stood glinting in the sun and eating up rent and doing nothing? Why didn’t she find better ways to push the bioreactor to grow the crops faster? She didn’t know what she could do to help, but it came to her every once or twice a day, uninvited, that she probably should be doing something about it. Over a month since they sowed, and the grow rate has been… disappointing.
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After that she would feel that sinking feeling in her guts like any second now Diggs is going to find out she was not half a smart as he thought she was, or she thought she was, and she’d be back at playing make-belief with her electronics and tea boiler in the hab-unit, if she would even be able to afford rent. Or food.
She cursed quietly. Not here, not now. She turned full circle just in time for landing in the soft powder sands. She came down pretty hard, having picked up speed from all the way up a height more than twice a stack of habitation modules would be. Not that she could really compare the height of buildings inside domes rotating on their sides with the height of hills or depth of craters or the pinnacle of her jump in the vacuum under natural gravity.
But she chose a good spot, falling back into the powder’s soft embrace. A puff of dust exploded all around her, splashing in straight lines and going up quite a distance, too, but in all directions. She forgot her worries. When she was out here, she was just herself, and the sun on her face, and the feeling of the soft ground, and the gentle whirring of the air cycling inside her suit.
Lukus, this week, shook his head with disbelief when she said she was just going out.
“Why would anyone want to spend more time breathing his own recycled breath and sweat when he can sit beside a pond and smell the earth and fresh air of the garden?”
She just shrugged. If it were just a few people she knew, and liked, she’d consider it. But Lukus would be joining a couple of hundred resting Adalians, split evenly, she would hope, between the two gardens at opposite sides of the hab. That felt way too crowded for her taste. And just thinking about all those people together made her want to skip the parade, too.
A hopper flew overhead. It was going North, but it could have been anyone, going to any of a dozen mines and warehouses scattered around the area further off from the habitats. Or it could be leaving to a different district, carrying a merchant or a scientist on some important mission. Unlike her little world of water desalination and calcite processing.
She started to tick off the things she needed to do next week. No, it was no good. She had plenty of time to think about work another day. She got up, carefully, and stepped over to some new, still undisturbed piles of powder. She sank knee-deep into it. Perfect. She looked up, then pushed herself towards the sky in another leap. She felt the world fall away. She had nothing else to think about, except the darkness that almost gulped her up. She knew she couldn’t break away from the gravity, as thin as it felt to her Earth-evolved body. But for a few long seconds she was still falling, but she was free.
