4
The quiet of my apartment is a welcome relief. Located on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise just outside downtown, it’s isolated from the dirtiness and noise outside. I always keep the window darkened to shut out the not-so-aesthetically pleasing view, which is comprised almost entirely of the dust-battered side of another high-rise. My unit is tiny and cramped and furnished only with a combo bed and a kitchen block that doubles as a table, but it feels safe and predictable, and it’s the only home I’ll know until I leave this world. The lights come on at half brightness as I enter. The audio system begins playing instrumental music at low volume. The big monitor on the wall comes on, displaying the time, a ticker of my unread messages, a reminder to take my calcium dosage for the month, and recent prices on interstellar tickets compared with the amount in my bank account. I programmed it to do that when I come in, unless I’m with someone, which I never am. Every day I get closer, and the reminder serves as a motivation to live cheaply and work hard. The most affordable flight off-world—a coach-class, no freight ticket to Penitance—is running fifty-two thousand seven hundred currency units right now, while my savings account at SCAPE Finance and Credit currently contains forty-one thousand one hundred four point one four units.
Trying to occupy myself with my simple nighttime rituals, I strip, toss my uniform in the auto-washer, and step into the shower chamber. Splashing a burst just long enough to cover me, I scrub down with soap and a cloth and then turn the faucet back on and quickly finish. Water is pricey these days, and though I can’t help but indulge in the luxury of keeping clean on a daily basis, I’ve mastered the art of minimizing my bathing time. Stepping out, I dry myself off, put my hair up, and fall into bed, staring up at the smooth white lining of the ceiling. The thoughts, the bad thoughts, the memories come creeping in again, invading the edges of my mind.
“Show me the map,” I order the computer.
The monitor blinks to life, showing the neatly laid-out 2D grid of Oasis City’s streets.
“Not that map.”
The image changes to a topographical of Brink, all shades of red and brown except for bands of smooth white at the poles. A dot representing Oasis City sits square in the middle, surrounded by a flat circular area amidst a planetary continent of jags and ripples indicating the sharply changing elevation. The oblong blue gash of the High Sea sits to the Oasis Basin’s west, while far to the northwest is a wide blotch of light blue, the Great Sea. Life forms in the two are very different, having been effectively separated by thousands of miles of mostly barren mountains since the High Sea was created by a planetoid grazing Brink’s crust two hundred million years ago, destroying most of Brink’s life and creating its smaller moon, Lyto. The smaller black dot marking Drillville sits at the edge of the larger ocean, like a blemish. The whole picture is ugly, by any standard, and boring.
“Not that one, either,” I tell the computer. “The settled worlds.”
It changes again, showing a swath of colored dots curving horizontally from the bottom to the top of the screen, a section of the Orion-Cygnus arm of the Milky Way galaxy. In a pattern stretching roughly upward, or from the outer edge inward, twenty-five of the dots are highlighted, surrounded by little illuminated circles of varying thickness. Earth is near the bottom, marked with a thick blue circle and four smaller overlapping circles representing Luna, Mars, Europa, and Eris. Settlements like those on Titan, Pluto, and in Sol’s asteroid belt aren’t big enough to count. Far below Earth are a scattering of worlds including Miracle Mount, an unremarkable and dismally cold planet orbiting at the outside edge of its star’s habitable zone, and Yagami, a strange and legendary world orbiting the smaller of a binary pair, blessed with perpetual and ever-changing light. Brevin, Bon Fleur, and Bloemkirk lie below them, near the bottom edge of the map. “Above” Earth, meanwhile, is the chain of worlds leading inward, toward the galactic core: Ryland, Leereweldt, Sakura, Rus, a cluster of three moons called the Triplets, Foo Xho, Brink, and finally Farraway, Penitance, and Resolve, with Kerwin’s Drop, Serling, and Darien scattered far to the sides of the path.
So many options, but really only a few are realistic. Yagami is probably the most desirable world of them all, but it would be an eight-year journey, and I could never sacrifice that much of my life to a voyage on a cramped ship. The closest is Penitance, a heavy world with high gravity and wildly changing seasons. Farraway, meanwhile, is nearly as close, and with its booming economy and gentle climate and wide-open spaces, seems so much better than Brink. That’s where I’d go, I think. Will go. Will go.
“How long ’til I can buy a ticket to Farraway?”
The map blinks gone, changing into a line graph that shows how long it will take me to save enough, depending on how much money I put away. Using my past averages as a base, the program estimates that I’m about two Brink years—one point eight six solars—away from being able to afford that ticket. A long way to go, but I might be able to chop a lot of time off that number if this weevils thing leads anywhere.
How much would a year’s pay help Jessi Rodgers? A thought I can’t avoid.
The value of a human body on this world is astronomical. I know that firsthand, and I’ve been benefiting from it since I was a young girl, a fact that haunts me constantly at the edge of my consciousness. Jessi Rodgers and her plight have drudged it closer to the surface. I never looked anything like her, but seeing her in the hospital, I could not help but think of myself in her place. What might have happened if things went differently two decades ago…
But there’s no point to this. I’m only making myself miserable, driving myself down into the worst part of me. I have to move on.
Thinking that TV will distract me, I pull my keyboard out of the desk nook and put an entertainment tabloid program from Ryland up on the monitor. It’s a “new” episode, meaning that it aired on Ryland about fourteen months ago. Data capsules are tiny and can accelerate faster into a sink field than ships, but they only come through every couple of months, depending on the carrier company. I’ve seen bits and pieces of this show before—it’s a cop drama about mismatched partners, one from the poor side of Strand City, the other from an old money family. It’s Ryland, so all the clothes are impractically angular and loud, and sometimes it becomes clear that the characters follow strangely loose sexual customs, but the subject matter is still too close to home, so I flip it to a stream of musical comedy from Earth: English-language Bollywood, colorful and fast and nonsensical, focusing on the frivolous romance of some young, attractive, dark-skinned people with expensive-looking hair.
A semi-transparent message appears, reminding me again to take my scheduled dose, so I open the nightstand drawer and pull out the specialized syringe and a five-unit cash chip. I screw a clean needle into the syringe and snap the chip in, breaking the holographic stamp. Finding a vein on my left arm just below the elbow, I push the needle in and press the plunger down, flushing the calcium gluconate fluid out of the chip and into my blood. I remove the needle, take it off the syringe, and toss it and the used fiver into the trash.
“Computer, I took five units.” The reminder clears from the monitor. “Wake me at eighteen forty. I’m going to sleep.”
A tone tells me that the alarm is set. The music fades out, the lights dim to black, and from there it’s a quick fall into sleep.
5
Work in the morning is a slog. I’ve shot people dead before, and each and every time it’s been a morass of paperwork and interviews, and this time is no different. After faking my way through a psych exam reciting the answers I know I’m supposed to spit out and then spending three hours sitting in an open cubicle grinding mechanically through red tape, I’m sitting in a conference room on the third floor, across from my commanding officer.