Jo Thomas
Maryke guided the salvager through Earth’s inner space and its litter of flotsam and jetsam from the first space age—hundreds of dead and dying satellites, remnants of rocket stages, failed missions, each piece on a course that would eventually bring it to a fiery death in the Earth’s atmosphere, provided nothing else got in the way. Or if she and her colleagues did not collect it first as they hoped to do—for what survived the fall or crashes could not be salvaged for parts.
Maryke adjusted the course of the salvager with a simple thought, transmitted to the craft’s guidance system by the brain-jack that was wrapped behind her ear, and the dry-brain pounced on it. The calculations were done in millionths of a second and with more precision than any wet-brain could hope to match. All she had to provide was the initial, instinctive alteration and then check that the salvager would meet the dead satellite with its jaws on the course that the dry-brain provided. Satisfied that it would, she withdrew her mind from the interface to watch the surrounding space for a while.
Perhaps “flotsam and jetsam” was the wrong phrase to describe these relics of a past age. They may have been unintentionally abandoned during the confusion of the Climate Wars but they had no current to take them, no water to hold them up. Looking at pieces of the past in particular, such as the long silent communications satellite she was about to collect, changed the mental image. Maryke could only liken the satellite to a butterfly. A butterfly that would be pinned and then have its wings pulled off, but a butterfly none the less. Perhaps “flotsam” was a more appropriate and less painful simile after all, with these dry-brains being the remnants of a wrecked civilization.
“You should take leave more often, Maryke.”
She snorts in response before idly turning her head from the sea and spray to look at her sister. “Like you do, you mean?”
Antjie has the grace to blush, barely seen against the normal color of her dark skin, darkened further by sun and wind. Behind her, Kieran laughs at his abashed wife, his grin a white slash across his handsome, even darker face. Pale in comparison from her time in the sheltering station, Maryke shrugs and gazes at the sea again, as ambivalent about being here as she is about the salt spray on her face.
“I like it up there.”
She likes it so much that she still wears her brain-jack, reassured that she can contact her colleagues in the sky at any time. If she wants, she can even patch herself into the corporate systems and watch the family out in their trimaran using the high resolution cameras.
Her sister’s voice is quiet and calm, but cheerful, when she replies, “I like having you here.”
Antjie is a happy, optimistic person and it infects everything she does and says. It pervades the things that surround her. Maryke can almost feel it through the deck of the Spindrift, as if it has soaked into the primitive wooden heart through the advanced protective coating.
“You like having someone else to bore with your theories,” she replies with a sly grin and a look from the corner of her eye, trying to hide the slight she only half means.
Antjie simply laughs, “There is that.”
And Maryke can do nothing but laugh along. They might be sisters but she cannot understand the other’s choices at all. Everything of importance on Earth is in the cities, yet both Antjie and Kieran have devoted themselves to the sea and the creatures in it. If they want to escape other humans so badly why didn’t they just escape to the station? Why stay on Earth?
Rather than turn the salvager around abruptly and waste energy, Maryke made a long, sweeping curve that allowed her to mark the locations and current speeds of several other satellites near to Nankura Station. She would be out again in another twelve hours to pick up another, the priority being the debris that might run into the station or its stalk.
Even though the ones she marked now would have moved out of her own sector by the time she returned, her colleagues might find the information useful, knowing when the flotsam would enter their own territories.
Of course, few of them came out in their salvagers as she did. Most chose to instruct them through the comms channels. The few seconds’ delay was not important and never bothered them—or Maryke when she sometimes did the same. She sat in the driving pod to keep in practice. The Earth’s population might be too low to need space colonies but one day an adventurous, wealthy investor with no better charity to give their money to would decide it was time to let humans travel the solar system again.
Such a man had paid for the Nankura base—stalk, station and all—seeing the need for stable, global comms once more. The investment more or less paid for itself, providing comms for the continent of Africa, what remained habitable of Europe and the Middle East. The need to protect the fragile construction from debris and clear the old wastes of the first space age gave the station the opportunity to collect materials for recycling.
No one knew to what they would be used for, yet. Richard Tito’s heirs had not decided. It could be new satellites to orbit above the stalk and station to expand comms coverage. It could be another station and stalk to do the same. There was even talk of expanding Nankura Station into a ring about the Earth, should they find enough materials.
Either way, if humans ever decided to travel further from the Earth, they would need to travel with their craft. A few seconds of delay was of little importance but a few minutes was another matter. When the time came, Maryke fully intended to be the best available pilot.
Maryke can taste the salt spray where it has dried in the tropical sun as she licks her lips wet again. She knows she shouldn’t but she has left her lip-gloss below and can’t bring herself to leave the bright day for the claustrophobic cabin. Odd, how such a space seems too small on a sailing boat even though she works in similarly sized spaces above the sea, above the Earth.
Instead, she stays lying on the deck. She watches the water slap against the multi-hulled boat and send up spray. The Spindrift feels as if it’s floating above the waves themselves, surfing across them as the family races after the pod of bottle-nose dolphins that have been Antjie and Kieran’s lives’ work. She just tries to stay out of the way as the other two guide the boat, not understanding their dance or why they feel the need to be so manual when they both have brain-jacks and the boat has a dry-brain. Both Antjie and her husband have a look of combined intense concentration and enjoyment.
As the boat approaches the pod once more, Antjie calls out to her, “This is lekker, ja?”
Maryke looks suspiciously at the animals that seem to have slowed down, as if waiting for their well-known and welcome playmates. She can’t see them clearly, yet, but she can imagine their false, forced smiles. There was nothing more to them than a cheerful image and good PR.
She sighs and finally answers, “Ja, lekker,” though it is unlikely that Antjie hears it through her concentration.
Back on the station, Maryke left the satellite in the capable hands of engineers, whose job it was to pluck away its solar panel wings for use in another construct. She had completed her working day but it was still too early to turn into her sling, leaving a few hours down-time to fill. So, she did what she always did and she used the company bandwidth to look for her sister and the Spindrift as it traveled the southern hemisphere, in search of its marine destiny. She knew that she should see her sister or brother-in-law in person more often but she preferred station life to dirt-side life—and dirt-side life to sailing.
Idly, she allowed the camera to drift over the station’s range. It was easier to read the last communication from Antjie and check their last given location but that did not pass enough time. Finding Antjie and Kieran was not the real object of the exercise.
She lingered over Jo’burg, zooming out so that she could see her home city in one view. From a distance it was much the same as any other city. Up close, it was still much the same as any other city, except it had been her family’s home for several centuries and it held many childhood memories. Her mother had been so proud of their home city, telling Antjie and her about their history so often. It would, she had told them, give them roots in the world.
But Maryke felt no more rooted in Jo’burg and several hundred years of history than she felt rooted to the Earth as a whole. Had her ancestors felt rooted to the European country they had left behind for what had once been South Africa? How would they have felt, knowing that their former home land was now under a kilometer of Arctic ice?
She sighed and moved the camera on, scanning the seas once more. The ice in the northern hemisphere had cost civilization nothing in the long run, no more than it cost the world as a whole in a geological blink of an eye. In a few hundred years, maybe a thousand or so, the ice would retreat again. Beyond the resulting dryness of the tropical regions, the Southern Hemisphere had never even been affected. There had been the wars brought on by desperate land grabbing as the Northerners fled the ice. The wars had slowed down urbanization and technological improvement but could not stop it. Two hundred years on from the change in the thermohaline circulation, life had advanced. It was better than it had ever been before.
Maryke gave a sour snort as she found Antjie. Her sister was living the life she had always dreamed of but Maryke would never have the same opportunity. If the wars had not happened, space exploration would be two hundred years further ahead. More, really, for the technology had sputtered and needed reinventing without fossil fuels and staged rockets. Had the ice not come, she might have been born on a station such as this; or perhaps one that had solved the gravity and solar radiation issues, so that she did not have to return dirt-side one month out of every six to ensure continued health.
The Spindrift chases across the sea. It pushes along ahead of the wind as easily as the sea-spray it is named for, seemingly with no thought for direction or destination as it accompanies its pod.
“Sail ho!” shouts Kieran and points into the distance.
Maryke raises an eyebrow at him. She debates whether to ask if that was an official sailing term but decides not to. She turns to look at the glimmer of shining white he points at. It’s bound to be another exploratory trimaran chasing another marine species in the name of philanthropist-funded research. As they close, Antjie and Kieran chatter into their brain-jacks as they contact with the other boat.
Clearly excited, Antjie calls out, “Humpbacks, Maryke! They follow humpbacks!”
She says nothing in response and resists the urge to shrug. It makes no difference to her.
The pods chase towards each other, their trimaran playfellows following suite. As they meet, they seem to sing to each other, the smaller, more agile dolphins almost dancing around their cousins. A race is formed and the two boats gleefully join in, all thrown before the wind across the Pacific Ocean.
Kieran and Antjie share a glance and he takes over the handling of the Spindrift, using his brain-jack to cut down the manual work. He has the embarrassed look of someone who knows they are about to overhear a sensitive conversation that they would rather not.
“Here it comes,” says Maryke, “The Talk.”
Antjie frowns, the expression chasing her more usual smile into hiding. Even her laughter lines seem to have faded in her concern.
“Don’t you see the wonder of it?”
“The wonder?”
Antjie waves a hand, “This! This is beautiful! This is…” She shrugs, lost for words that describe the world as she sees it and has to resort to the language of their childhood again: “Lekker.”
“It’s just nature.”
“Just Nature? Maryke, this is a miracle. See how these species communicate with each other! With us!”
“It’s hardly a riveting, philosophical conversation. It’s not as if it’s true intelligence.”
Antjie gives a bark of laughter, “You often have philosophical conversations in the sky, then?” She shakes her head then continues, “If you can’t see that, surely you can at least see how impressive it is that these species have recovered from the collapse! Sure, we’ve lost some biodiversity. But these, they’ve recovered. In time they will split, become more different species, just as Nature always does.”
“Pfft, might as well say the Arctic spread has been good for polar bears and wolves,” replies Maryke.
“Well, it probably has!”
The Arctic hasn’t even been visited since the climate wars. Station cameras never turn that way. No-one knows what polar bear and wolf numbers are.
“OK, then, how about how we humans have survived?”
“It’s what humans do,” Maryke shrugs.
Her sister throws up her hands, “I give up.”
“Really? Then why do you still chase animals in the sea? What do you expect to learn, Antjie? It has been proven—hundreds of years ago, even—that your beloved dolphins are not speaking, that their minds are not as complex as ours.”
“There’s always something new to learn.”
“There’s nothing new to learn on Earth. We have modeled everything, from weather patterns to animal behavior, from tectonic plates to cookery.” She cut the air with her hand, an emphatic “no” gesture. “There is nothing new on Earth.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
It was still too soon after her last visit with Antjie. She could not cope with seeing her and her enthusiasm, even through the camera. Maryke sighed and turned it North for no other reason than she could. Another time, she might have turned the camera away from Earth and admired the stars, or patched herself into the proper telescope arrays to search for something of astronomic interest. However, the memory of the Talk was still too fresh. At just two weeks old, how could it be any other way?
So she turned the camera North and looked for wolves in the tundra or polar bears on the edge of the Arctic ice. Maybe she could send footage to some biologist or ecologist with some choice locations for studying the animals. She had no intention of joining such an expedition, even a first one. If she disliked sailing in the warm seas, she was hardly going to like camping in the frozen wastes.
She started over what had been her ancestors’ home some centuries ago, the thick plate of ice seeming flat and smooth at the current resolution. She looked for small specks that moved, that she could zoom in on once they had caught her attention. If she saw nothing she would do another sweep in a higher res, but based on watching Antjie’s progress she should be able to catch the movement with the current settings. Eventually, she saw two specks moving fast and close together. Something about the movement tugged at her memory as she zoomed in.
It was not bears or wolves that had made it into her sights. Instead, she saw the flap of sails. She blinked and almost lost the image the brain-jack cast on her mind’s eye with her shock. The spots were trimarans like the Spindrift being pushed ahead of the wind at a great speed, faster than she could ever remember seeing the sea-going equivalent moving. She zoomed in.
Despite how flaked and plated the ice’s surface appeared on closer inspection, the lack of friction with the ice must give the strange boats their extra speed. From the blurred gestures the people on board were making, they seemed to be excited; perhaps they were racing, just as the Spindrift had raced that other sea-boat.
She started a message, “Antjie, you won’t believe what I’ve just seen!”
Her words coincided with one of the sailors leaning out on his craft, opposing the force of a fast turn to keep his craft upright. Without a thought, she captured the moment and attached it to her message.
She smiled with the wonder of it.
There was something new and different on Earth, after all.
© Copyright 2009 Jo Thomas