‘Do you want to go see the stars?’
‘No.’
Everything was no these days. He’d put precisely zero effort behind this particular one, so Tessa paid it no mind. ‘I think you do. Let’s go see the stars.’
Ever-growing boy on her hip, Tessa walked into the living room. A few nightlights and the emergency arrow pierced the darkness, but otherwise, it was pitch dark. She could hear Pop snoring, and nothing from Aya’s room. Good. Tessa tiptoed forward, anticipating the couch, the table, the— ‘Motherf—’ Tessa hissed, and swallowed the rest in a muffled groan. She hadn’t anticipated the stray toy that had found its way into the bare sole of her foot.
‘Shh!’ Ky breathed loudly. ‘Quiet!’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Tessa said. Smartass, she thought.
She reached the ring of tiny floor lights that marked the edge of the shaft down to the family cupola. She’d thought, once, that the reason homes had cupolas in common spaces was because the architects had tried to parcel out window resources as economically as they could. That was true, but only the half of it. Apparently, the shared portal was an intentional design. Her ancestors had worried that if people could lock themselves away and look outside in solitude, they’d lose a few screws. They’d get scared, lose hope. It was a mixed bag, the view of the open. Breathtaking beauty and existential dread all mixed together. Far easier to focus on the former and avoid the latter, the thinking went, if you sat at the window with friends ready to hold your hand or listen or just share company with. That, Tessa thought dryly, or you’d go buggy as a group. Either way, you weren’t alone.
Her eyes adjusted to the negligible light. She opened the railing gate, sat on the bench with kid firmly in grasp, and pushed the down button. Home slid away, and for a second or two, the only sounds were the pulley turning and her son sucking his fingers. Then: a rushing, strangled roar behind thick walls. ‘Ky, can you tell me what that sound is?’
‘Don’ know.’
‘Yes, you do. What goes through the deck under ours?’
Even in the dim, Tessa could see her son’s blank stare.
‘Water,’ she said. ‘Remember? All the water we use goes through big pipes in the floor.’ She’d save filtration tanks and settlement ponds for another year.
‘Can have cookie?’
Tessa looked forward to the day when linear conversations became a thing. ‘Not for breakfast.’
‘What ’bout . . . what ’bout cookie to lunch?’
‘Maybe if you’re good this morning, Grandpa will give you a cookie at lunch.’
Ky looked around as the background noise changed. ‘Where water?’
So he was paying attention. ‘It’s up above us now. We’re about to stop.’
‘Oh boy, get ready!’ he said.
‘Get ready,’ Tessa said with a laugh. ‘Aaaaand – stop!’
The bench settled into place. At their feet was a shallow window sticking into the empty space outside. It was different than the one her family’d had when she was a kid. They’d had one of the old ones then, polygonal in shape, made of thick glass as old as the Fleet itself, the view cut in segments by thick metal frames. Ashby had bought them one of the nice new plex ones after his first tunnelling gig – no angles, no inner frame. He was always doing stuff like that. She’d once worried that he was treating them at the expense of getting things for himself, but once he’d bought his own ship, she didn’t feel as bad about it. She was just glad he kept them in mind.
She thought about how much she liked the things he sent them – the plex window, the sim hub, a box of spices from some alien port. A guilty, toxic idea surfaced, the same one that had awoken her hours before. Tessa shoved it away before it could make itself plain. She focused on her son.
She slid off the hanging bench onto the cupola seating area. It wasn’t much, just a shelf around the edges. The view wasn’t much either – at least, not compared to the big, broad starscapes you got at the plazas. But this was her own corner of sky, and she liked that. She’d always liked that.
Ky wriggled against her grasp. She let him go. He toddled out onto the plex, brown feet against black sky. He sat, all at once, unceremoniously. ‘Stars!’ he said, looking down through the gap between his bent knees.
‘Yep,’ Tessa said.
He pointed a chubby finger. ‘Is five stars.’ With his other hand, he held up two fingers and a thumb.
‘It’s a bit more than five, baby.’
The stars darkened as a hefty transport shuttle sailed past, docking lights blinking, hull crusty with tacked-on tech and repurposed siding. Ky shrieked with glee. ‘Oh man!’ He looked to her, his eyes and mouth perfect circles. ‘Mama, did you see?’
‘Yeah!’
‘Wow! Did you – did you see?’
‘Yeah, I saw.’
‘Dat’s my ship.’
‘Wow, that’s your ship? Cool.’
‘’s my ship. ’s all fixed.’
Aya had lost dessert privileges for a tenday over the origin of all fixed, but even though the illicit sim babysitting sessions had ended, the vocabulary addition remained. Tessa sighed, hoping her eldest hadn’t irrevocably mixed up the younger’s brain.
She let him play on the window, automatically responding with stock affirmations as he babbled on and on (he was on about . . . pillows? She’d lost the plot, and so had he, it seemed). Her mind was on the sky at her feet, which was to say she wasn’t thinking about much at all. Something about that view always set her right, even though she’d seen it a million times. She thought back to the first time she’d been planetside, on a family trip to Hashkath. Ashby hadn’t been much older than Ky. Mom was still with them. Their first night, Pop called Tessa out to the courtyard by their bunkhouse. ‘Look at that, kiddo,’ he’d said. She’d tilted her head up to match his. As an adult, she remembered how different the stars looked in that moment, how muted, how fuzzy. Her father had wanted to share something special with her, she knew in hindsight, but her immediate impression then was one of fear. There was no plex, no frame between her and that sky. She felt that any second, someone would switch the gravity off, and she’d float up and up, out forever. She’d stayed outside for all of two seconds before running back in and clinging fast to her bewildered mother, sobbing that she wanted to go home.
That experience still lingered on the few subsequent vacations she’d taken in adulthood, even though she knew nobody could turn off a planet’s gravity, even though she knew her walls were less reliable than grounders’ atmospheres. She knew that at home, she wasn’t really looking down. She was up, sideways, all around. She was looking in the direction the artigrav nets told her to look, the same direction the old centrifuges made her ancestors look (and their view, of course, had always been spinning). But she could know that and still feel in her gut that stars lived below her feet. That was normal. That was where they belonged.
She thought, though, of visitors she’d had from somewhere else. The last time Ashby had been there with his crew – Ky had been tiny then, she reflected, remembering him kicking his untrained legs in her brother’s arms – those two odd techs and the Aandrisk had parked themselves in the cupola for hours, sitting on the floor like Ky was now, freaked out and fascinated, never tiring of the novelty. A person’s view of the stars was, ultimately, a matter of perspective. Of upbringing.