When she’s done, Miyole carries a fragrant bowl of broth to me, taking tiny, careful steps to keep it from spilling. She presses a spoon into my hand. Small chunks of tender white meat float in the broth. I could near cry, it smells so good. But the spoon feels like a length of rebar, heavy and unwieldy. My hand shakes as I lift it to my mouth.
Miyole watches me as I struggle with the spoon. “My manman says you were off planetside too long, and that’s why you’re sick and your muscles don’t work right.”
I clamp the spoon in my mouth. The soup is mild and thick. I thought the fish might be salty, but instead it’s light. It eases my stomach.
“Were your people punishing you, keeping you off gravity like that?” Miyole asks.
I shake my head, sip another spoonful.
“Why, then?”
I hesitate. And only men will bear its touch. But if that’s so, how can Captain Guiteau and Miyole manage? My head hurts. I’m not hungry anymore.
“I don’t know.” I put the soup aside and let the spoon clatter down into the near-full bowl.
Miyole hugs her knees and sticks the end of one braid in her mouth. She stares at me. “Why’re you so pale?”
“Pale?” My eyes pop open. Me, pale? All my life, I’ve only wished to be lighter, more like the rest of my crewe. “Most of my crewe doesn’t have any color to them.”
“Really?” She scrunches up her face as if she doesn’t believe me.
I nod. “I’ve got more than most on account of my mother’s father.”
“Was he a spaceside person like you?”
I shake my head. “He was from here, from groundways. He was a so doctor.”
“Why didn’t he make them keep you on gravity?”
“He died.” My throat aches from talking. I close my eyes. “My mother too.”
A few slips of silence tick by, and then Miyole jostles my knee. “Hey, miss. Hey, Ava.”
I open my eyes.
“My manman says to keep you awake.”
“I’m awake,” I say. “It hurts . . .” It hurts to talk, I try to say, but my voice fails me.
Miyole rocks, hugging her knees and sucking on her hair. “You want me to read to you?”
“You can read?”
Miyole gives me a funny look. “Course I can.” She stands.
“Please so, then.”
Miyole runs to an ancient chest of drawers, pulls a metal key from beneath the neck of her shirt, and fits it into top drawer lock. She tugs it open. A moment later, she returns with a piece of clear plastic folded into a neat square. As she unfolds its leaves, they lock open and seal together into a thinner sheet. The moment they join, the sheet lights up from within, as if she’s holding a little shard of sky in her hand. Pictures and symbols pulse across its surface, playing bright colors over Miyole’s hands and face.
“Okay,” Miyole says. “You want a true story or a made-up one?”
I stare at the light sheet, mesmerized. “A true story,” I say finally.
Miyole sees me staring. “What, haven’t you got tablets where you come from?”
There’s no point lying. I’ve seen screens lit and all the men gathered round, but only from the doorway to my father’s quarters. I always sneaked glimpses as I arranged the cups of rice wine and then scurried out again before I could be noticed, but I’d swear we had nothing like this.
“No,” I say.
Miyole shrugs. “My friend Kai doesn’t have one either. My manman says we’re lucky.”
“It’s some pretty,” I agree.
Miyole gives me a long, measuring look. “You can use it if you want. But you can’t touch it with sticky fingers, okay? My manman says that’ll break it.”
I want to smile, but I hurt too much. I can’t even muster the strength to tell her I wouldn’t know how to use it anyway. I nod instead.
“Okay.” Miyole returns to the tablet, all business. “We haven’t got a network signal here, so there’s only what my manman loaded up the last time she went on a run, but there’s lots to choose from. Did you already learn about the Floods in school?”
I shake my head.
“No?” She taps the tablet again. “What about the Third Library of Alexandria? The drowned city of Lanai? The subcontinental levee program?”
I shake my head.
“Ooh, no, wait. Terraforming.” She looks over her tablet at me and grins as if she’s found a sweet in her pocket. “I’m learning about that in the lessons Manman bought me on geosciences.”
I nod and close my eyes.
Miyole clears her throat importantly. “Terraforming is a lengthy process by which planetary bodies are rendered fit for human habitation through the infusion of gases . . .” She stops and giggles, then sneaks a glance at me and puts on her serious face again. “. . . and the release of geothermal energy. Though scientists have long sought a more ex . . .” She stumbles, then rights herself. “Expedient method of terraforming potentially habitable planetary masses, the process still requires the dedication of multiple generations of colonists to achieve an atmospheric balance that will allow life to flourish where it previously did not. The lifeblood of these colonies is the fleet of government-funded and commercial trading ships whose crews volunteer years of their lives to the service of pro . . . provisioning the colonies. Each flight can take years to reach its destination at sublight speeds. . . .” She sounds some like the oldgirls, reciting their stories, reading the air, their words stiff and formal in their mouths.
And as she reads, I’m back aboard the Parastata, watching the silent mass of a red planet misted with green slide beneath our hull. I can almost see the stars beyond the thin stretch of the planet’s newborn atmosphere.
“Ava. Hey, Ava.” Miyole has stopped reading. Her voice is gentle. “Wake up.”
“I’m awake,” I say. I force my eyes open. “I was remembering. We had a route over the red one. Mars?”
“You’ve been there?” Miyole bounces up on her knees and hugs the tablet. “I want to go when I’m grown. I’m going to enroll in a flight academy so I can see Mars and Titus and all the little colonies starting up, but my manman says I have to have to keep my math up if I want to do it.” She pauses for breath. “Did you really go?”
“No. Well, some. I’ve been above it, but women don’t go down on groundways duty.”
“Why?” Miyole cocks her head at me.
“We . . . we . . .” I wave my hand heavily in front of me. How can I explain? It would sully us? Leave us crippled, as I am now? “Don’t. We just don’t.”
Miyole frowns.
“We can’t,” I say, but even as I say it, I know it makes no sense, when the weight of this world is nothing to her.
I give up and fold my hands over my knees. Miyole reads more, about nitrogen balances and something called the cascade effect, but the words run through me as if I’m a sieve. Am I really a husk of skin and bone, while my soul floats lost somewhere above the atmosphere? Is that why I hurt so? Can I get it back if I go up to the stars again, or is it burned up, turned to dust in the flare of our entry? And what of all these groundways women, walking and working and having children, all under the Earth’s sway? Are they soulless, too? And Luck . . .