Virgin land, p.1
Virgin Land, page 1
VIRGIN LAND
Chloe Smith
LUNA NOVELLA #18
Text Copyright © 2023 Chloe Smith
Cover © 2023 Jay Johnstone
First published by Luna Press Publishing, Edinburgh, 2023
The right of Chloe Smith to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Virgin Land ©2023. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owners. Nor can it be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.
www.lunapresspublishing.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-915556-10-3
For the teller of the snake story that began all this.
And for Emma, who retold it to me.
Chapter One
I’m leaving the greenhouse, arms full of harvested chard, skirt soiled with alien dirt and homemade water, when the shadow of a shikra passes over me and leaves me cold.
It takes a moment to understand what has happened. I peer up, confused, when the sunlight flickers and dims. My gut-formed thought, that it must be a ship, evaporates as soon as my reason catches up. There’s no one on this side of the planet but Gerald and me. Remembering that fact makes my heart sink, even though I know it shouldn’t.
Then I register the shape, and I forget my traitorous heart. Far up in the sky, the shadow is still terrifyingly large. I can make out spiky pinions and the sail-like stretch of webbing between them. Instinct makes me flinch and duck backwards, press myself against the greenhouse wall. Then the shadow is gone, beyond my range of sight.
I stay frozen for a long time, heart pounding. My eyes strain upwards, trying to pinpoint any movement in the vast, empty sky.
After I convince myself to move again, I go looking for Gerald. I try not to hunch under the open air as I move between the cluster of outbuildings.
He’s not in the refrigerated storehouse, with its library of imported seeds and array of hoss embryos in their suspenta pods. Instead, I find him tinkering in the barn, next to the stall where our first litter of hosses squeaks and whuffles around, adapting to their new world better than I am. They don’t know about shikra yet.
“What is it?” He frowns when he sees me.
“I saw a shikra.” My voice comes out rough and unformed. I swallow and try again. “It passed overhead.”
He lets his tools drop and stands up. “Are you sure?”
I bite back my first responses—What else could it have been? Why can’t you trust my judgement? I settle on, “I saw its wings.” I think back to the wall of the greenhouse at my back, the way the shape disappeared beyond the apex of my view. “It was headed northwest, I think.”
“At high altitude? And it just passed by?” I nod and then nod again, and he sighs.
“I could do a perimeter run around the buildings, but for what, Shay? It’s long gone, now, and probably running scared. How many shikra have we seen since you got here?” He catches himself, “And I don’t mean the ones at the Erdehame compound.”
I shiver at the thought of those carcasses, almost as long as I am tall, wings and limbs folded and tied tight together. The realisation that those bundles had been living things turned my stomach.
That image dominates my memory of my first visit to this planet’s largest settlement. It was only a few weeks after Gerald fetched me here. Everything on Erde, from the ceilingless sky to the swarming reality of planetary life, was still so new, so overwhelming, that it shouldn’t have stood out. But I froze in the middle of Erdehame, on the flat-packed dirt between the blocks of communal houses, and stared wordlessly until Gerald, who was talking to a Green Brigade soldier, finally noticed my distress and brought me away.
He thinks my pause now means I need clarification. “I meant a live shikra. How many have you seen here?”
He knows the answer, but I tell him anyway. “One.”
“Yes, and I killed it, remember?” He takes my hand, squeezes it. “You keep an eye out, if you’re nervous, but you won’t see anything more. You’re safe here, my love.” He lets go, eyes drifting back to the disassembled feeder. “I need to finish reprogramming this.”
I hesitate as he starts fiddling again. I tell myself he’s right. I’m overreacting. Too fragile, too easily stunned, down here where air isn’t rationed and gravity holds you in place. I’m still struggling to adjust to the way this world stretches beyond my perception, the way so many things grow without permission, without the careful rationing and tending that it takes to keep hydroponic gardens and protein vats productive.
Gerald gives me one last smile over his shoulder. “Dinner at the usual time?” It’s a question, but also not. I nod, although he’s not looking at me anymore.
I push myself to stand tall, strong enough to walk back out under the sky.
*
Nothing else passes overhead that day. My only encounters with irrepressible life are the two varieties of Small Things that I catch in the pantry. Something must have scraped or gnawed another hole in the house, somewhere. Gerald isn’t as conscientious as I am about seal inspections. He’s only lived a year more than I have outside of the environment bubbles that ships maintain, but it’s as if that life never marked him. He’s not bothered by the way the world constantly seeps inside.
At least the Small Things aren’t bad. They’re on the rodentlike end of the spectrum of creatures, mostly little burrowing quadrupeds and hexapods, that make their homes in the kudzu. The alien plant is even thicker and more profuse than its old-world namesake, and I don’t know if Erde’s original surveyors even identified all the creatures that hide in its undergrowth. In my ignorance, I’ve started giving them my own names. These two are both Slightly-Less-Cute Things. The ‘Slightly Less’ is because they seem to like human food almost as much as kudzu or whatever else they ate before we arrived.
I throw the two of them back into the kudzu and resolve to inspect all the house’s potential entry points tomorrow. I could bring it up to Gerald—he always snorts at my naming practices, and as one of the few jokes we share it adds lubricant to the sticking points in our conversation—but I don’t want it to seem like I’m criticising him.
When Gerald finally comes in, I expect him to follow up about the shikra, but he never even thinks to ask me how I’m feeling about it. Instead, after dinner, and after he insists that we sit outside on the porch to take in the sunset view, he waxes rhapsodic on his favourite topic.
When Gerald talks about his claim on Erde, his voice goes soft. Reverent. I can feel how much the idea draws at him, engrossing as a dream. He says, “It’s virgin land, Shay. Unspoiled. All of this.” He gestures, a full-armed movement, towards the wide horizon that circles us, as if his words mean anything after all these repetitions. As if they ever did.
Lamps in the house’s—our house’s—windows throw yellow stains onto the porch where we sit, but our faces are turned outward to the dusk. I nod, even though he can’t see me, even though he’s not looking. My habits of compliance are like my stays: a rigid and invisible support. They, too, sometimes make me wonder if I am smothering in the alien air—if, somehow, the survey team that rated Erde’s atmosphere made some fatal error when they pronounced it benign for humans. Maybe it’s some minor trace compound that makes my breath go high and tight in my throat….
No. No, that is ridiculous. I draw a breath in carefully, silently. through my nose. It smells as it always does at dusk, the lemony scent of the kudzu strong enough to mask any lingering cooking aromas, or even the smell of our own animal sweat from the day’s work. Gerald has paused in his monologue, waiting for acknowledgement, and I make an encouraging noise. That’s good enough for him to continue on.
“The shift I wrote into the feeder will get the hosses acclimated to local foliage, then, with the clear land, we can get started on the real work.” I follow his gaze, past the dark lumps of buildings, out across the shadowed undulations of low hills. The kudzu’s yellowy, twisting stems cover the land in a wild profusion that reaches higher than our heads. Even with all the times we’ve cut it back, the new growth still presses almost to the foot of this porch.
The scalloped silhouette of the porch’s awning and its fluted columns make a black frame for the purple-gold sky, where light lingers even as the land beneath it grows darker. It’s pretty, for once, caught between the scorching brilliance of the day and the lonely darkness of the night. That last is a misnomer: day and night are equally lonely here.
“Shay?”
I realise Gerald has turned to peer at me. I must have missed a cue to indicate agreement. “Oh…yes, definitely.” I can make out his frown, and I add, “I’m sorry. I think I must be overtired,” hoping that will mollify him.
He puts a hand on my knee. “Oh, Shay. You work so hard.” For a moment, I feel the warmth of his solicitousness, the attention that softened him when he first courted me. “We all have to. It’s the price of what we can achieve here.” He turns back to the expanse of land.
I’ve lost him again. I say, “I think I should turn in, then.”
He agrees. “We’ve got our work cut out for us tomorrow. The crew arrives early.”
“Wait—who arrives early?” My mind goes back to the flurry of emotions when I saw the shikra, when I thought it was a ship.
“The crew to help clear the land—that’s what I just told you. Weren’t you listening?”
“Oh, yes. Of course.” I don’t know what I was expecting. Certainly not the familiar faces from home. That is an impossibility. It would have been nice to have more warning of strangers’ arrival, though. This work crew is part of yet another plan Gerald made alone, assuming I would adapt. That’s what I do.
I put my hand on his shoulder as I go in. It’s strange that I still find comfort in his touch.
It’s the same when he comes to bed. I fit neatly in the curl of his body, and I relish the warmth of his presence, even as I feel my anxious, lonely mind drifting farther and farther from the rock of his certainty.
I try to leech belief from him the way I leech body heat, and I lie still, listening to the creak of the house in the alien wind, the chirps and other unfamiliar sounds. Things move among the thickets of kudzu that cover the rolling hills in all directions.
*
My father felt the pull of virgin land as well. He told all his children that we would be settlers, that we should work towards the opportunity to start fresh on untouched soil. Despite his hopes, I was born on the Beyond, a prospecting ship whose grappling arms wrenched chunks of ore from frozen planetoids and threshed comet tails for their icy harvests. In Papa’s view, that unforgiving work was the next best thing to true settler life. He didn’t want a landscape that someone else had softened with their presence—no regulations, no communities, no growing populations whose appetites would suck a world’s resources dry.
“Most people are takers,” he’d tell us. “Even when they don’t work for Astra, Hyun-Raum, or any of the other corporations. No—it’s human nature. Inescapable truth. The only hope is to find a place they haven’t started picking away at yet.”
I didn’t doubt him. There were the vids he’d shown me, of the ravaged Earth, its plastic-swamped oceans and blasted plains. I’d witnessed the greed and surliness of people when they came together, in the fetid, rusty bellies of the trading stations. I have an early memory of following in my father’s footsteps through a station’s narrow corridor, all of us children holding hands and pressed together as we hurried, assaulted on all sides by smells and noises, soliciting voices and hands reaching to pull on our shirtsleeves. The confusion of that moment distilled and hardened in my memory, an explanation for the distaste in Papa’s voice when he talked about outsiders and their stations, the picked-over planets, the massive companies whose only ethic was profit. I didn’t wonder why, if that was the corruption we’d have to wade through, we visited them so rarely, kept to our own ship and the isolation of the asteroid fields, our only regular contacts with like-minded settler folk.
Papa brought Gerald home as a fellow traveller, a family friend before he ever met me. He and my father had made a rare connection in one of those squalid depot stations, discovered that they shared the settler values and the settler dream. Like Papa, Gerald was biding his time with prospecting work, trading raw asteroid innards by the ton for micrograms of profit. We all marvelled when my father introduced a stranger, telling us that this man would pool his efforts with ours for a few hauls, to everybody’s benefit. It didn’t take long for Gerald to win us all over, though, with his fierce eyes full of distant visions.
My littlest siblings goggled at his stories of travel across the surfaces of habitable planets; my age-mate Julia blushed up to her eyes every time he looked at her; and my two oldest brothers, Cai and Jem, took his presence as a direct model for how to be and act. I was as lost as the rest, and flattered, besides, at the attention he paid me. He was poised on the edge of greatness, we all could tell. He wouldn’t be held back by all the obstacles to settler dreams.
“Either they’ll let anyone down the gravity well,” Papa would complain, sitting astride a bench in the Beyond’s galley as Julia and I prepared dinner, “or else the whole thing is tied up in surveys and regulations for generations. Creakin’ Cygni. Far be it for them to trust us, the people best suited to make use of all that unspoiled land.”
Gerald, seated across from him, would agree that it was unfair. Despite the swarm of competing polities—merchant fleets, sovereign nations, corporate entities, collective societies, and more—scattered across the depths of space, the Cygni Authority had a stranglehold on the long-leap technology that drove frontier exploration.
I was used to hearing Papa curse Cygni and their rules. They might be one step above the mining and resource-harvesting companies like Hyun-Ruam, the top predators of station and colony societies, but they didn’t hold to settler ethics, either. Papa hated the way they would either throw the doors wide and encourage anyone to move to new planets (usually the least livable, where humans would have to huddle and glom together to survive), or else identify the worlds as sentient-populated and so closed to any settlement. (Those were usually the richest, most promising planets, too. Papa always snorted at the idea of some creepy crawly or monstrous lizard whose “questionable ability to pattern back at us” meant that they must be using all the space they had down there).
The hope that all would-be settlers cling to is to make it onto one of the private worlds. Sometimes—and when Papa got going on the specifics of how and when, there was so much huffing and imprecating that I inevitably tuned out the complicated details—Cygni released control of newly surveyed planets to a single polity or org. And even rarer than that ‘sometimes,’ the org was a pro-settler one, like the Green Brigade.
Gerald was always optimistic about the Green Brigade, always certain they would answer his hopes. He’d even defend their practices when Papa groused about their exorbitant claim prices.
“Everyone wants their piece.” Papa sipped the mug of vat-beer I’d pulled for him and made a face. “The Brigade talks a good talk, but do they really act with the hearts of settlers? No, they’re takers. Too far from real, human work, from the way we could be, if we had freedom and plenty.”
“It’s a taker’s universe,” Gerald agreed. It was a truism of dissatisfaction I’d heard often enough. But then he added, “The Brigade does what they can to make settler worlds a reality, though. How would they pay for their operations, if they didn’t realise profit from the land? They have to support themselves somehow.”
“So says the bright-eyed young man.” Papa’s smile didn’t hide the bitterness in his tone.
“I can’t help my optimism. It’s the example of dedicated folks like you and yours.” Gerald lifted his own mug in toast, “You inspire me.” He spoke to Papa, but his eyes sought mine.
I remember the flash of possibility that went through me then. That moment, I felt as if a hatch had opened on a new and impossible vista, suggesting a path I’d hardly believed would ever actually be mine. Gerald’s smile, the promise of his words to my father, stay clear and perfect in my mind, however far away they seem now.
That possibility seemed even brighter when Gerald announced, on his next visit, that he’d secured a land claim on a newly opened world called Erde. It created a glow of anticipation that made all my other memories of that time blurry and dreamlike. The pounding of my heart muffled the sound my father’s perplexed questions—how had Gerald managed to afford such a claim? Where was he selling his rock hauls at those rates? I don’t remember the words Gerald used to soothe Papa, nor yet the details of his urgent, enthusiastic proposal of marriage to me.
He told me that he would send for me when he was settled. Papa, even confused and jealous of Gerald, admitted that was a golden opportunity. I was certain I agreed. The months I spent waiting for Gerald’s summons stretched and seemed interminable. It was the only time I ever felt cramped in my family’s ship, maddened by the chatter of the littles, by my father’s lectures, by the way Cai always had to have the last word or Julia snorted through her nose when she laughed.
