“You lose someone dear to you, you start making distance,” Gemma had told her. “She still loves you, but she’s terrible afraid of losing you. You gotta approach her just right, or she’ll shut down on you like a crashed server.”
Lizzie tried to think of a nice way to put it, but nothing came to mind. So she blurted it out: “Themba wants me to be a hostage.”
Momma’s brush stopped in mid-stroke. “Does he.”
Lizzie leaned back into her Momma, hoping to restart the brushing, but nothing came. So she turned around and said, “He says he wants the company.” That didn’t seem like enough reason to leave the station, so she added: “He’s my best friend, Momma.”
“I’m sure he is, Lizzie.” Momma was looking at the dented metal of the bedroom wall, like she often did these days.
“I’ll need you here,” Momma concluded. Lizzie’s heart sank—but the brush started moving through her hair again, comforting and careful. “I’ll be ordering some hydroponic prefab farms tomorrow morning; you’ll need to help install them. And it’s time you learned how to pilot.”
That was an expected bonus; she’d been bugging Mom to let her learn to fly for years, but Momma said that girls under fourteen shouldn’t fly unassisted near a dust belt. It was about as close as the new Momma came to an apology.
“That’s real nice of you, Momma,” Lizzie said politely.
“Changes are coming,” Momma replied, and kissed her on the cheek. Lizzie nearly forgotten what that felt like.
The next afternoon, Themba’s special-ordered mechanics docked at the station in a big mil-spec ship that bristled with gun ports. Lizzie had hoped that maybe it would take the techs weeks to fix Themba’s ship, but Gemma had already told her it was a simple repair; they just wouldn’t let Gemma touch it without a Level IV Gineer security clearance.
Sure enough, six hours after the mechanics arrived, Themba came to say his goodbyes. She squeezed him tight, trying to store the memory away for future nights.
“So you gonna come?” he whispered.
“I can’t. My family needs me.”
He nodded. “I thought so,” he said. “But it’s good, I guess. I’m helping my Daddy forge friendships, you’re helping your Momma stay in business. Our parents need us. That’s good, isn’t it?”
Lizzie tried to say yes, but she burst out in tears instead, and then Themba buried his face in her neck. “Come back when you’re done?”
Themba put his hand on the bright breast of his kaftan and promised that he would. And then Lizzie watched her best friend of four whole days, eighteen hours, and twenty-three minutes leave.
She hoped she’d see him again, but she doubted it. Things had a way of disappearing in space.
The guests at Sauerkraut Station told Lizzie stories of a world without maintenance. It seemed incomprehensible to Lizzie. How could a garden just spring up when you weren’t looking?
When she was younger, she’d asked the customers about these worlds, expecting that if she asked enough people then one would eventually relent and admit that yeah, it was all a lie, just like the Vacuum Vipers that Dad had told her nestled inside incautious little girls’ spacesuits, waiting to bite anyone who didn’t check their EVA suits carefully.
But no; somber businessmen and travelling artists alike assured her that yes, water dripped freely down from the air, and helper faerie-bees flew seeds into every crevice. Gemma had even taken Lizzie down to the rec room, where customers paid money to kick their feet up on one of eight overstuffed footrests and pull a rented screenmask down over their heads, to show Lizzie the videos she’d taken of her planetside adventures. It had taken some convincing before Lizzie had believed that it wasn’t a special effects trick.
What would it be like to live in a world that could get by without you? Lizzie’s world was held together by checklists of chores and maintenance. Lizzie’s world needed her.
For the first time, though, her needful world didn’t feel like enough.
In every room, she found something she’d forgotten to tell Themba. Her daily tasklist became a litany of things she should have said to Themba, a constant ache of wondering what he would have thought.
When she straightened the cramped sliding-cabinet beds of the twelve guest chambers, she would have told Themba of all the crazy things people left behind—ansibles, encrypted veindrives, even a needler-rifle once. When she re-tightened the U-bends of the shower stalls, which provided luke-warm dribbles of water to customers for a nominal fee, she thought about how Themba would have wanted to see the central heating system, would have squirmed into the central axis to look at the boiler. And her worst chore of all would have been a joy with Themba there; normally, Lizzie hated pushing all the spare part bins away from the walls of Gemma’s repair bay so she could scan the walls for metal fatigue.
But with Themba, she would have tugged up the heavy metal plate in the floor to expose the hidden compartment full of emergency supplies. Then she would have whispered about the hidden hidden compartment below that they never dared open, lest they disturb the dust at the bottom.
Then, afterwards, she and Themba and Gemma would have all clambered into the punctured ship that was crammed edgewise into the beams of the dockbay’s ceiling—that contentious collection of parts that Momma called a junker, and that Gemma insisted was a classic waiting to be restored. And Gemma would have hugged them both as she told Themba the story of Great-Gemma and the Pirates.
But that was stupid. Themba’s father had brought him to hundreds of planets. Why would he be impressed by a secret compartment? Sauerkraut was a novelty to Themba the first time—but when his hands stung from chopping a hundred heads of cabbage, would he still smile? When his shoulders ached from serving defrosted sausages and Insta-Ryz buns to six-hour guests, would he still want to stay?
Of course he wouldn’t. He had chefs now.
And when Momma’s voice boomed down from the conning tower to alert her that a new collection of guests was on its way, Lizzie took her place by the station’s airlock with new vision. Momma always told her that the guests were weary from nearly a month in the transit-ships—they wanted a happy smile, a home-cooked meal, a touch on the shoulder. Lizzie had seen them as just another chore.
Now, when the airlock hissed and let in that first blast of body-odor-and-ganja laced air, Lizzie sniffed deep. As the guests emerged, stretching their arms and looking around in blink-eyed wonder, Lizzie saw them not as chores, but as people. Where had they come from? Where they were headed to, and what would it be like to stand in those strange and beautiful places?
As she drifted off to sleep, Lizzie pressed her face against the air vent, imagining a breeze—a wind stirred by no fan, only the goodness of the world itself. And she longed, burned, to feel that wind on her skin, to feel sunshine unfiltered by glassteel faceplates.
She needed to talk to Gemma.
Gemma was busy reducing the leakage on the junker’s engine. Still, she dropped down the knotted chain ladder to invite her up into the cramped cockpit—their private talking-to space. Gemma took off her protective facemask, shook out her long gray hair, and patted the lap of her oily coveralls.
Lizzie curled up into Gemma’s hug, resting her boots on the curve of the junker’s dashboard. Momma was practical, giving Lizzie the biology-talk of why you never played doctor with the customers—but Gemma was the one who told her how Momma and Daddy had fallen in love and made Lizzie.
“Gemma,” she asked, “What was it like, when you ran away?”
“Sounds like someone has a case of Station Fever,” said Gemma. “You counted the walls yet, girl?”