Charon Sunrise (4/5)

Living in the Shadow of Pluto

The type of dance they did in the low gravity of Charon borrowed heavily from parkour. The two dancers used their momentum and slow fall rate to leap off of walls and other horizontal surfaces, back and forth and into each other’s arms, twirling as they fell because of how long a fall took. It was like something from a dream, as if watching people careening back and forth under water.

They launched themselves at walls and surfaces that were positioned at all kinds of angles in the dance room, and then push back against the surface with their arms and legs, reversing their direction back towards each other, and then, grasping each other’s arms, spin around each other to the music, gradually spinning faster as they drew nearer, and then spinning slower as they extended their arms to have a little more distance between them. It was a thrilling, dizzying experience.

Graven was clumsy, sometimes reaching out too soon to stop his fall when he had not yet dropped to the floor, sometimes bumbling into Ashleigh, but she was graceful enough for the both of them. When he stumbled, she corrected for him, pulling him one way or another gently to lessen the awkwardness. She was a machine, whirring in precise patterns of symmetry, he was an animal fumbling with a hint of wildness, and yet there was beauty in this too, for his wild flair made her smile—and what is life if not a smile?

They ended the dance breathless, in each other’s arms, gazing into each other’s eyes. They suddenly realized how close they were. But then they separated and looked away.

When they walked out of the dance hall, Graven looked sheepishly at her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I hope my bumbling didn’t ruin everything.”

“No,” she said, flashing him a smile. “I actually loved it.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really! I loved watching you dance,” she said, grabbing his hand and swinging it as they skipped in the low gravity along an indoor boulevard lined with shops.

“I was pretty afraid to put my dancing skills up against someone…like you,” he said awkwardly.

She laughed.

“I’m sorry,” he said, laughing. “Honestly, I’ve heard all sorts of terms and I don’t know for sure which ones are offensive or which ones are more correct, because I’ve never known anyone like you. What term do you use to describe yourself?”

“It’s okay,” she said. “And the answer is kind of outside the box you phrased it in. Oftentimes, we don’t refer to ourselves as anything at all, except people or the like, because since there are so few organics out here, it’s just assumed that anyone you’re referring to is a synthetic unless specified otherwise. But in the occasion we do want a term to mean specifically someone who isn’t an organic, we would say synthetic.”

“Oh,” he said. “Thank you.”

She drew him near and kissed him, then immediately pivoted away and kept skipping with him as if nothing had happened, despite Graven’s shocked look.

His lips had been…there was a cushion to them. A firm give. And they were warm. She had never experienced anything like it before.

“I love to skip when I feel happy,” she said. “Will you skip with me?”

Graven laughed, and then joined her.

Skipping was more common on low-gravity Charon than on Earth, but was still not necessarily common for two people to do in unison. They skipped, not caring about anyone or anything around them, all the denizens of steel and flubber and chrome. They were pure happiness for they had each other, and they each stole glances at the other from time to time, but never held the other’s gaze for more than a fluttering heart beat, as if afraid to scare the other away. They were momentarily children in adults’ bodies.

They drifted near each other, a smooth motion punctuated by each time their feet touched the ground which caused them to shift suddenly in perspective to each other, and then again they were drifting slowly again. This alternated back and forth, the drifting and the shifting, drifting and shifting. The mesmerizing experience of drifting nearly weightless near each other was repeated with a hundred variations, now with them drifting a little towards each other, now a little apart, sometimes one with a slightly higher arc, sometimes one catching up with the other.

Graven began to talk.

“The dance we had…somehow it felt eerily familiar, as if I had done it many times before. Because actually, the odd thing is, it was very reminiscent of a recurring dream of mine. In the dream I’m nearly weightless and it takes so long for me to fall down to the ground, and I can’t ever get anywhere. I’m trying to grasp on to something, but I never can. Only when we danced, it was like the dream except for that we were moving about and you—you never got stuck floating in the air like me. You always knew how to pull me back down.”

She was silent for a moment, and then he said, “That’s just what I need. I’ve been in low gravity for all my life.

And he suddenly sounded cryptic, as if he wasn’t talking about physical gravity.

“You grew up on Earth,” she pointed out.

“I did…” he said. “But I never let it give me gravity. Not really. Ashleigh,” he said, looking at her, “I’ve been floating around, doing nothing, never tied down to anything, no sense of connection to the earth…to ground, to some place I call home…”

He looked away.

“As a kid I dreamed of flying all the time. And now I’ve been doing that dream for years. But all the flying around has become a curse. I need to stop flying around. I need to be captured. Weighed down in the best way possible.”

They passed the rest of the time in silence, Ashleigh wondering what he really meant but too afraid to ask. But she felt she knew what he was saying. He had to return to Earth. This place was nothing to him—and what was she thinking anyways? That someone charming, perfect in every way, from Earth would ever feel at home in a strange backward bumpkin boulder like Charon with a person like her? What did he have to do with her? What had she even been thinking?

Unconsciously, her fingers parted from his, and they walked back to her apartment building in silence.

When they parted underneath the neon lights of Styx Broadway, he looked at her.

“Would you…care to dance again tomorrow?” he asked.

Her heart fluttered. Maybe he wasn’t done with her after all!

“Yes,” she said.

His eyes lit up. She almost looked as if she would kiss him again, but then she just smiled and turned away to walk up the stairs to her apartment building.

“Only…” she said, turning back, “I have to be at a training thing tomorrow and then I have to sleep for a few hours before my work shift.”

“Oh…” he said. His eyes looked worried. He looked away, his brow creased, his lips fidgeting.

“It’s just that…” he said, throat clearing. “I have to…”

“Hm?” she said.

“I…” he looked as if he needed to tell her something but couldn’t. Wouldn’t?

“I really need to see you tomorrow,” he ended lamely. “Or…” he continued, gears turning. “When does your shift get off?”

“6AM, Earth GMT time.”

“Can I meet you then?” he said, desperately. “I know it’s awfully early, but…”

“Sure!” she said.

“Okay, thank you,” he said, and it looked as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

“Okay, see you then!” she said.

They waved goodbye and Graven turned to walk away, but Ashleigh waited and watched him for a moment from the shadows of the doorway. It looked as if he was slouching over, as if a weight had been lifted but then settled back down upon him.

“Will I see you ever again?” she breathed to herself.

She noticed her servo motors in her torso had clenched up in a fear response. She had read shadows on his face, and she felt as if she just knew that it was serious. Something was wrong.

***

Ashleigh walked out of the Bakery, letting the door drift shut behind her. It had been a long night shift but it was finally over. She had been waiting for Graven to show up, anticipating it more and more until she could hardly stand the thrill of the anticipation any more, until this moment now, looking up and down the street, and—

—and—

—nothing.

He wasn’t there. There were just strangers, walking on either side of the street, around either side of the egg-shell tram cars that passed down the center of the street, and in the egg-shell cars were also the vacant stares of strangers, and above her were a dozen drones and flying cars and they were also lifeless in their motion, motionless in their life. She was alone.

She turned and walked down the street toward her apartment, passing other people with robotic bodies, most people waking up for the day as the orange morning light wafted over the town of glass and steel. Because it was such a small town, she knew almost everyone she saw by sight, but she did her best to not greet anyone if she didn’t have to. When she got off of her night shift, she always felt that she was living in a different reality as everyone else, as if she were a drop of oil sliding through a sea of water: everyone else’s reality was awakening, morning, newness, but her reality was the end of a day, winding down, tiredness, oldness, heading for her recharging bed instead of birthing from it.

He had been a nice fantasy. She remembered how just hours ago she had been trying to imagine living with him on Earth if she left and went there with him, trying to reconcile Earth—that fairy-tale setting of her girlhood fantasies—with the reality, the concrete possibility that Graven claimed it was. But now it seemed to all collapse. It was just a fantasy after all. Who did she think she was? That that fantasy was for her?

She halted. A man in front of her had stopped, mid-stride. His robotic body stuttered and twitched, his eyes glazed over. In the low gravity, his body drifted, falling toward the ground. She reached forward and caught him and righted him. She had seen him around before, but didn’t know his name. But she did know what was happening to him, given the glazed look in his eyes. A software glitch caught him at the wrong time and unfortunately, it happened to overload him while out walking in public. An unhappy occurrence, one with many safeguards against its happening, but it still happened nonetheless.

She stood him upright. His eyes seemed pleading for help. Even as his eyes were part of the glitching system that was his electronic nervous system, she could tell that he was conscious and in there behind those eyes and was begging her for help.

She did what any decent person would do in the circumstance. On Earth, the equivalent would have been to see a drunk on the side of the street lying on his back and choking on his own vomit, and any decent person would bend down and turn the person to lie on their side so they didn’t choke to death. In this circumstance, the equivalent was a little different, but was just as necessary, and had the same effect. She wrapped her left arm around the stranger’s shoulders to hold him steady, and with the other hand, reached around his head, behind his left ear, feeling for the button that should be there.

But it wasn’t there—ah, he must be one of those models with the button behind his right ear. She extended her hand to reach all the way behind his head to get to the spot behind his right ear; this brought her face even closer to his in an awkward level of intimacy. The button was there; she pressed it and waited for ten seconds. The light flickered out of his eyes and his muscles went into temporary rigid lockdown. For a moment his whole body and mind was completely cycled off, and then it all flickered back on. His eyes came back online and he was staring at her. Their eyes were locked, one stranger with another, as intimate as if she had revitalized him with CPR.

He swallowed and spoke, “Thank you!”

She smiled awkwardly and pulled away from the intimacy, uncurling her hand from behind his head, pulling her body back, unlocking her gaze.

In that moment, her gaze drifted to see something strange in the distance. She saw Graven, down the street. He had frozen, mid-stride. He looked like he had been running, and he held a bouquet of yellow flowers in his right hand. He stared at her breaking away from an apparent embrace with a stranger. His mouth hung open, agape.

“Graven!” she called, wanting to explain.

But he only turned around, slowly, shoulder slumping.

“Graven!” she made her way around the stranger.

A train of egg-white cable cars zoomed into the middle of the street, separating them.

When they had finished passing, he was gone.

Feedback

As always, feedback is welcome. Was this chapter surprising? In a good way, a bad way? Did you see it coming? When romance stories have this kind of conflict (the main characters misunderstanding each other), how does that make you feel?

Story Insight

The romance genre has certain tropes and ways of telling a story. One is that the conflict is driven by misunderstandings that the two love interests have with each other.

I always resist tropes and fulfilling reader’s expectations too much, but I feel the need to keep a little more strictly to the form in this instance because a) romance is a genre I have not written much of before, and b) I perceive that expectations of how the plot works are quite strong in this particular genre.

Book of the Week

This week I reviewed Death’s End, the third in a my latest favorite epic space opera series. It was a savage roller coaster and I loved it. Read more here.

What’s Going on in My Life

Gretchen and I have a house under contract, and this week we got through all the inspections and all the final haggling on price and figuring out details of what exactly will go/stay with the previous sellers. We are feeling really good about this house. I’ll send you guys some pics in the next newsletter.

Science Insight

The house we’re buying has a pretty clean bill of health, but there is some radon in the basement, so that’s something I’ve been learning a lot about lately.

Apparently radon is like Bigfoot: some people believe in it, others don’t. But there’s very solid science beneath it. A great source is this document the EPA put out. Radon is just the radioactive gasses that radioactive elements produce, such as uranium.

Interestingly enough, uranium is actually present everywhere in the earth’s crust in small quantities; so there’s nowhere you can go on earth that is completely free of uranium and therefore nowhere completely free of radon. The ambient amount of radon in the air outside averages about .5 picocuries per liter.

But some places have much higher radon than others. In particular, Spokane has the highest levels of anywhere in the US. I talked to the company that does radon mitigation here and trains most of the other mitigation companies around the US. Other regions might see a few houses that test in the 30s (measured in picocuries per liter). In Spokane, there’s hundreds of houses in the 30s, and it’s regular to test buildings that come in well over 100. For reference, the target threshold the EPA recommends keeping it under is 4. And the consequence of breathing too much radon is lung cancer.

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Until next week!