Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014

Suzanne Palmer lives and works in a little pocket utopia in western Massachusetts filled with writers, artists, scientists, and dreamers during the day, and the grateful solitude of the stars at night. From her desk window, she often sees wild turkeys, deer, fox, and the occasional moose. She's been busy finishing up a novel, but took a break from it to tell a wrenching tale about the cost of mining precious resources on an alien planet and what it truly means to...

Four moons dotted the distant horizon, pale ghosts half-lost in shadow and framed on either side by Cjoi's heavy black boots propped up against the observation glass. She slouched in her chair, mute earpiece dangling at the base of her neck, her eyes and attention on the gas giant below. Ammonia clouds seethed and spun endless bright rivers of gold across its radiant face, deadly and compelling. Her dive-sphere was rolled toward the oncoming night, engines in stand-by, no interior lights except the tiny blips of critical systems to break the spell.

If she dared close her eyes, she knew the planet would still be there. She had no doubt it would be the last thing she ever saw; it was just a matter of when.
Not today,
she told herself.
Tomorrow is a possibility.

She laughed, a hollow sound; from orbit, tomorrow was as near or as far as she wanted or dared. Assuming she didn't get caught, of course. The unspoiled view wasn't the only reason for running dark.

Somewhere out there, Helise was watching.

They'd met, each surprised and uncertain to see the other, on the viewing platform of the Protectorate orbital station. Helise stood straight and tall, standing out against the backdrop of motley, milling tourists in her crisp white uniform. Cjoi spotted her first, and froze in the crowd as those too-bright eyes swept slowly over the meaningless people to be stopped, startled, by a too-familiar face.

"Kinni-inhass,"
Helise had said.
Little flyer.
"You've hardly changed."

I tried,
Cjoi did not say. Instead, they clasped arms and embraced, old friends, lovers once. "You stayed," she said.

"And you returned," Helise answered. "I never thought you would."

"Neither did I," she said. Need was an unbearable master.

She kept her sphere in the updraft of a high-pressure band, trailing just outside the uneasy junction between dusk and night. The blinding glare of the sun was behind her, ripping through the clouds below. Tiny traces of green and brown stained the edges of the upwell, the light catching, here and there, in the faint diamond sparkle that had earned Pahlati the nickname Shining Giant.

When she'd first been brought here aboard the
Ama,
the glimmer had been a glare, like stars themselves were being born in the planet's toxic halo. How could it have dimmed, while that day was still seared, permanent and bright, across all the fields of her mind?

"Do you know me?" she asked the planet below her feet. It didn't answer, its churning face a vast, inscrutable mask. If planets had a memory, it would.

"Dinner," Helise had said, not really a question so much as an assumption. It was easy to say yes; with food to fill the space between them, other things might be less obvious.

Cjoi didn't have anything to wear, beyond the clothes on her back, that wasn't meant for space. Black tank top, black pants that had been cut to de-emphasize her thick, muscular build, black boots that gave her extra height to hide from the world that she'd been "grown small." She'd given up caring enough to hide her skin, saw it as a defiance. Helise hadn't flinched, hadn't cared, all those years ago; at this moment, Cjoi despised her for it, for being here now.

There was a café on the upper decks of the station, the ceiling a dome of thick xglass that was all that lay between the chattering people poking at their desserts with shining forks, and a short, sharp death. The station spun edge-on to the world, as if to foster an illusion that they were co-conspirators, equals, side by side; she preferred it beneath her boots.

Helise was waiting at a table already, and stood as she walked onto the deck. Heads turned her way, then away again, talking behind their hands as if that could conceal their curiosity.
One of them,
she heard.
An original. One of the rescued. I thought they were all dead. Look at her skin! Do you think it hurts?

"Ah!" Helise said. "So graceful, as always. I forgot how much I loved to watch you move." She smiled, genuine affection in it, and Cjoi forgave her just a little.

She put her hand on the back of the chair, found the mag release, and slid it out before letting it click back onto the floor. Sitting, she turned her head, scanning the room, and heads turned back to their own tables as her eyes reached them.

"You shouldn't do that," Helise said.

"Make people uncomfortable?"

"Notice or care if they are."

Cjoi shrugged, passed a hand over the tabletop to activate the menu display. "They have anything edible here?" she asked. After a moment, she added, "Or affordable?"

Helise leaned back in her seat. She was still wearing her uniform, although the jacket was unbuttoned, revealing a crimson blouse. "It's on me," she said. "One of the perks of being stationed here: free meals. Probably because there are seventeen menu items and they never change. No matter how good they are, if we had to pay to eat the same thing over and over again every day, we'd hurl ourselves down into the clouds in despair."

Cjoi laughed. "I've done it," she said. "It doesn't work."

"Sorry," Helise said. After an awkward pause, she brought up her own menu, though she must have had it memorized long before now. "None of you ever came back here, except Mirja, you know," she said at last. "And... Well. Why did you?"

"Come back?"

"Yes."

"Not for the same reason as Mirja."
Exactly for the same reason as Mirja: because staying away was just another death.

"Why, then?"

"To remember."

"The others?"

"Myself," Cjoi said.
Too much.
She selected an item nearly at random, turned the menu off. "Let's hope the pasta is decent. Now, what are your thoughts on wine?"

She rolled her dive sphere down and to starboard, keeping it steady along the shifting edges of the upwell. The horizon remained clear, as it should be. She'd hoped the wine would get Helise talking about her work and the Protectorate patrols, but instead Helise wanted to talk about Cjoi—where she'd gone, what she was
doing with herself
now, and again that persistent question of why she'd come back.

At least the pasta had been good, and the portion large. Cjoi craved carbs like a furnace, always burning, seeking fuel. In the time since the
Ama,
she had become acquainted with the luxury of a full stomach, and found it hard not to pursue at any opportunity. Even alcohol didn't prove a significant challenge to her overdriven metabolism, more was the pity.

Clear-headed and clear-eyed, she descended toward the thin wisp of the updraft zone. Ahead, her systems were picking up one of the ever-present storms that spun the face of the world in endless pursuit of its smaller fellows; in its wake, the clouds were a churned up mess of brown and green as great colonies of skymoss were pulled up from the depths, torn apart and scattered, to slowly settle back down and regroup.

Even running dark, her sphere would become more obvious the closer she got to the clouds rushing beneath her, a mote in the setting sun's brilliance. Her fingers moved over the helm controls, as familiar as any lover—more so—and the sphere dropped lower. Once cloaked in the ammonia fog, she would be nearly invisible; Pahlati's magnetosphere, screaming chaos across the radios of anyone near enough and masochistic enough to listen, would mask what faint whispers her ship traced in the depths. And they
would
be faint; she had spent an obscene amount of credit on tech.

The settlement trust from Giardal Enterprises had been significant, even divided as it was among the survivors.
Seventeen of one hundred sixty-four,
she thought. Fiftynine had died before she'd even been sold to the Corp, desperate parents trading another mouth they couldn't feed for food that wouldn't last. Whatever anger and hurt she might have had over it went away when she outlasted them, outlived her birth colony. She'd outlived the Enterprises too, but that anger would not die down so easily.

Memories, and news, kept it stoked: Irya and Liline, pulled apart by a mob on Crigge colony as suspected mutants. Hae killed in a bar fight she most likely started. Odelia, Hae's opposite, the glue that kept them together and sane, dead in a Humans First bomb attack in an Ogloli spaceport. The rest, one by one, dead in different violent or stupid or inevitable ways.

With Mirja's suicide, Cjoi was the last. And the whole balance of the trust, and the burden of its ghosts, had come down to settle on her.
And I brought them back here,
she thought.
Ha. Fucking Percival of the ghost girls, that's me. Last one left to find the Grail.

She set her sphere on a shallow descent, and watched the barometric pressure steadily climb as she fought the updraft and slipped deeper into ammonia fog. Tiny crystals began pinging off the hull. Just ice, for now. Even through the thick hull, she knew the sound, and her skin prickled at the memory. A tiny row of scales flushed upright along her forearm, and absently she smoothed them back down.

Another two kil down into Pahlati's troposphere, the patter had become louder, smoother. She waited to hear the first thump of something larger than ice, the beginnings of the storm she was seeking, but nothing.
Helise was exaggerating,
she told herself.
Protectorate propaganda, only.

Still, even if exaggerated... Cjoi had seen with her own eyes how the planet had changed. She put her hand up on the console arm and switched on the external air buffers. Tiny jets would coat the outside of the dive sphere with a layer of moving air, deflecting all but direct hits around and away.
That
had cost. The roar of ice against the shell instantly faded, if not the uncertainly that had stuck claws into her back, sending distress signals up and down her spine.

Below her, through the glass, she watched for any glints of light under the growing gloom of cloud-cover, as the barometer ticked steadily upward.

"Helise." A man had come up behind them, put a hand on the back of Helise's chair. He was achingly handsome, tall and smooth-skinned, everything Cjoi was not. He was smiling, friendly, radiating confidence like his own small sun.

"Ah! Ryon!" Helise turned, beaming. "This is Cjoi. You remember? I've talked about her."

"The kid?" Without asking, he pulled over a chair from the next table over, turning it around and sitting down beside Helise at the table, close enough their hips were touching. His smile grew wider. "Hardly a kid. My apologies."

Cjoi bit back a sharp reply. She and Helise were nearly the same age; was it height that kept her from being a grownup in people's eyes? Or was it the unshakable stigma of victimhood, writ large across her small frame?
I don't want to talk about me with you,
she thought.

Instead, she asked, "You're also in the Protectorate?"

"Science and survey."

"Ryon is also part of my quad," Helise added.

He leaned back. "If you plan on being around here for a bit, I'm sure we can talk about trying quint," he said. He winked. "Variety is the spice, and all that."

"I'm contented to stay solo," Cjoi answered. "And I don't plan on being here long."

"Oh," he said. "That's a pity."

Perhaps sensing Cjoi was uncomfortable, Helise put her hand over Ryon's. "Hey, I'm catching up with my friend, here. Don't you have something to do?" she asked.

"Johar and I are heading out in the
Veresiel
tonight, to take yet another set of atmospheric samples. Work, work, work. But if you two want to skip dessert here, we'd have time for a different type of exploratory—"