For Bill Mollison, the father of Permaculture. 1928-2016
***
Selma put a hand to her chest. The video logs were painful to watch but she kept watching her dad pulling on the bulky, obsolete space suit. Rather than send the fleet of drones after his cherished wife, he was going out there himself like the astronauts of old. He was hurriedly securing the clasps of the heavy, antique helmet in defiance of every point covered in the third-rate training course that went with the third-rate suit. Dad was going to save her himself, in that thing. The suit would be a collector’s item if it was in better shape. It was so like Dad: reckless until the very end. The drones could’ve done the job quicker and safer. Dad was about to find that out the hard way.
Mum and Dad shouldn’t have been out there by themselves. That’s why they were both dead. Mum had been hit with micro-meteorites while she was out there fixing the solar arrays. The tiny space rocks filled her suit and body with pinprick holes, pearls of blood popping out into space with the suit’s air, emptying quicker than the primitive life support could refill it. Now, Dad was about to follow her into death by vacuum.
Selma watched the recording and felt a tightness in her chest as Dad climbed through the airlock. She watched him get his breathing under control as he locked the karabiner onto an attachment point outside the airlock. There was another karabiner already attached; the one that anchored his wife, her tether taut from the rotation of the cytoglyph which was flinging her body outward as it turned. While reeling the carbon-fiber tether out and holding onto Mum’s tether for guidance, Dad was shaking the emergency pressure globe out from its tightly-folded storage configuration. He would need to put his wife in the globe and pressurize it to give her any chance of survival. Selma watched the sweat bead on his face in the zero-G as he allowed the rotation of the habitat to push him along his wife’s tether, which he held with one hand. The training course hadn’t covered this.
Dizzy sat in Selma’s lap and scrunched her shirt with his fingers. Dizzy was a beautiful work of art; a small, furry bio-construct Dad had given her. Created largely with slow loris DNA, Dizzy was a gift for Selma’s sixteenth birthday three months ago.
“She’s beautiful, Dad!” Selma had said. Her little sister, Frith, had looked on enviously.
“I’ve made better, my flower,” Dad had whispered, holding her close. “And I didn’t need gene splicing. You’re my favorite.” Selma had met Frith’s eyes and smiled. Frith had looked down into her lap.
Selma sighed a deep breath and ran two hands through her long dark hair which waved like a slow-motion flag in the low-G. Mum was dead from bleeding out through the micro-punctures, or asphyxiation, or the bends. She was unconscious ten seconds after the micro-meteorites struck and dead before Dad even had the suit on, and he would’ve known it. Selma knew it too, but that tight feeling in her chest made her root for Dad, made her feel that he just might make it, against all odds. That he just might get that pressure bag around Mum. That his suit might somehow not lose pressure. That everything might be okay.
This sort of thing made for great screen drama, but this was a playback of a video log, and space was a tough mistress. Mum and Dad were both dead. She knew precisely when they had died, it had been ten hours ago just as she had gone to sleep with her sister. She had stroked Dizzy and drifted off, listening to the wind sigh through the bamboo as her parents died.
Her feet strained against each other anxiously. Selma put a hand on her chest, feeling the tightness grow like a fast mushroom. It wasn’t grief, not yet. It was an anxious knot, a nugget of raw emotion. Selma closed her eyes for a moment, swallowed the tightness down and leaned toward the large screen to savor the last moments of Dad’s life as he reached for his wife who rocked back and forth at the end of the tether. Droplets of blood wobbled out from the tiny puncture wounds in Mum’s suit, decorating his helmet’s exterior with clinging spots. Her absurdly swollen face was visible through the visor.
Selma punched into the feed from Dad’s helmet cam: she saw the hope drain from his face. Selma saw the sudden spasm of pain when Dad had to accept that nothing could save his wife. He closed his eyes, mashed his lips together, exhaled and then fumbled with the clasps on his helmet...
“Pause." Selma said it calmly, but she had her eyes closed. She couldn’t watch what came next. She pressed her lips together and inhaled through her nose to bury that raw tightness, the bomb that would detonate in her chest if she let it. She opened her eyes. The picture had frozen on a blurred frame as the helmet was blasted off Dad’s shoulders by the loss of pressure.
**
“He killed himself?”
“Please rephrase the question.”
“Did Dad...” her lips formed the words mechanically, “...commit suicide?” She gasped in more air, buried the tightness deeper into her chest.
CORE answered her. “The probability is eighty-nine percent. Other probabilities include a psychotic break, disassociation linked to emotional trauma—”
“Why did you wait so long to wake me?”
“Statistical analysis indicated a better chance of survival if subjects fulfilled their sleep requirements.”
Survival. Selma scratched Dizzy between the ears and sat back in the chair. Survival was the game now.
“Show me a view outside now. From the airlock camera.”
CORE showed the camera’s view on the main screen. Mum and Dad were distant white figures in their space suits. One of the figures was helmet-less. Their tethers, a standard hundred meters long, held them fast to the eyelet at the airlock set into the rocky outside of the cytoglyph. The rotation of the egg-shaped rock had flung their bodies out from the structure, to the full length of their tethers. They had floated there, snared together in a clumsy, weightless dance, since ten hours ago.
CORE spoke. “Selma. There is better coverage available from the suit cameras.”
“No,” said Selma. “This is the view I want.” Petting Dizzy, she watched her parents’ bodies move against each other like snarled kites straining against their strings in the sky, or tangled fishing sinkers knocking in the depths. Did it make a difference in space? Up and down were just choices you made to stay sane.
***
Selma sat with her sister in the low gravity of the control room, watching the two corpses in their distant, blundering dance. It was a special kind of nightmare to wake up to. Frith was only six years old, hair long like Selma’s but blonde like flax. Her feet were dirty from running in the garden. She wept into her hands.
“Are you sure?” said Frith, curling her knees under her chin.
“I’m sure,” said Selma. “I can show you the video.”
“No, Selma!” Frith covered her ears and squeezed out some more tears. “No! I don’t want to see it. I want Mum. I want my mum.”
“I know, Frii. I know. So do I. But they’re gone.”
Selma felt the tense, unexploded emotion once more in her gut. She breathed it down.
“How could they be gone? Just like that?” Frith looked at the figures on the screen, still connected to the cytoglyph by those unbreakable tethers.
“Space is dangerous. Especially when you’re a criminal.”
“Mum and Dad are not criminals.”
Selma didn’t answer. Stealing space hardware, even old stuff, made you a criminal to the Federation. Abandoning your own blood? That was a crime of a different kind. Selma put her hand on her chest.
**
Selma spent a long time staring at the redlining stats on her parents’ biomonitors, Frith curled in her lap, shaking with sobs. “We... have to go and... get them.”
“I can’t do that, Frith,” Selma said.
“Then I’ll go. We have to get them back.”
“There are only two suits and they’re out there, Frii.”
“Send the drones out. Like when Dad had to repair the solar arrays.”
“I can’t… I can’t do it.” Selma couldn’t explain it to Frith. Somehow Mum and Dad seemed to belong out there, where they couldn’t be one hundred percent real, where they might be just images on the screen, shadows in the dark who hadn’t betrayed anyone.
“You don’t care, you never cared about me or Mum or Dad!” Frith uncurled in a twisting microgravity mess of limbs and hair and snot. “You only care about yourself!” Frith pushed off from Selma’s lap, shooting weightless out of the control room toward the outside.
“You’re too young to understand” Selma called after her. That’s what Dad would’ve said.
Like an egg being spun on end, the cytoglyph rotated to create simulated gravity. There was little gravity where the hull formed a point and housed the control room, the laboratory, and the airlocks. Selma checked that Dizzy was still in her pocket, feeling the little primate grab her finger through the material of her skirt, then pushed off from the control console with her feet to go after Frith.
Selma flew out of the laboratory block, through the circular opening made of the Glazed Chinese bricks that Mum had insisted upon, and outside into the garden.
She couldn’t look at the giant bamboo growing out in all directions from the hull of the cytoglyph without feeling Dad’s presence. His fingerprints were all over this place. He’d designed the bamboo forest swaying in a slight breeze, he’d designed the praying mantises (Mantis Religiosa) that fed on the insects eating the sap and recycling nutrients in the bamboo forest. He’d placed the bamboo here in the forward end of the cytoglyph because the giant bamboo (Phyllostachys edulis) would grow quickly in the low-G, fast providing a photosynthetic carbon sink. It would also be beautiful to have the bamboo growing out from all directions inside the narrow space, shading the laboratory from the sun coming through the other end of the habitat which was fashioned from a transparent crystal. That was her father, the scientist-artist. It made her want to run, to find a safe place to escape the feeling in her chest, but it wasn’t just the bamboo forest, the whole cytoglyph was her father. From Dizzy to the insects and the fish and the plants, he’d designed it all. She sniffed. There was a faint but definite odor of decay wafting through the bamboo.
The bamboo stalks creaked as they used the giant grass to propel themselves forward, weaving between the big poles like eels through reeds in the light gravity. Frith settled down at the foot of Dad’s favorite rock, trailing her hands behind her to keep her skirt down and not show her undies. She smoothed the skirt onto the ground as she sat.
As the cytoglyph’s hull curved from its narrow ends into the full width of its center, it formed a valley where the G’s steadily ramped up until reaching one G at the deepest point: the same gravity as on Earth. Here in the bamboo, further away from the cytoglyph’s axis, the gravity was only slightly higher than in the control room. Selma alighted upon the large rock, feeling the moss and moisture under her bare feet.
Selma and Frith knew the meteorite the cytoglyph was made from had been 12.75 percent water; that the water under their feet had been inert, unchanged, unheated and undisturbed since the solar system began unless one counted a few knocks from fellow asteroids. It had been circulating the ecosystem inside the cytoglyph’s carbon fiber reinforced hull for only five years, from water to feces to bacterial habitat, to worm, to chicken, to humans.
“What a gift!” Dad had said, sitting in this very spot as he monitored soil bacteria levels, dug for worms with them and allowed his mantises to stalk along the back of his hand. “We give this sterile, dead water movement!” He had flicked water from the rock at Frith, who had giggled. “This water is five billion years old, and we gave it movement, and it gives us life!” Frith and Selma had sat, enraptured by Dad’s crazy enthusiasm, studying at the feet of their idol.
They could both name the species of moss and lichen living on the rock that Selma bobbed up and down on. The lichen Gunnera tinctorra squished its moist fronds under her bottom. The moss Sphagnum cristatum was a cool shag pile carpet, and she lay on her back amongst it, then paced up and down a thick, textured bamboo shoot with dainty toes. Dizzy sat on her lap, big nocturnal eyes slow in the afternoon cycle’s dimming light. She tossed him upward, giving him a spin.
“What are we going to do?” said Frith, watching the little primate rise and fall. She sat in the dirt at the foot of the rock and picked at a loose stitch in the hem of her skirt. It was a colorful weave with a bright Celtic pattern.
Mum and Dad weren’t Celtic; they were of Dutch ancestry, but they had adopted the culture as they had the Celtic names of their children. Celtic culture was one of Dad’s obsessions and when Mum had fallen under his spell, as she put it, they had changed their last names to Brennus and their first names to equally embarrassing Celtic ones. The patterning which ran along the hem of Frith’s skirt was a link to their dead parents, thought Selma, but beyond their parents’ tastes in names it had no real meaning for them, it gave them nothing at all. It was a dead end, like their parents themselves.
A tear cleaned the loam off Frith’s cheek. She was little and she didn’t yet understand the irony of her Celtic name. She understood nutrient cycling though. She understood ecosystem engineering and the various chains of interdependent life making up the cytoglyph’s life support system, just as well as Selma did.
“Mum and Dad are dead. They’re dead, Sel.” Frith also understood the challenge that the two girls were now faced with. The bamboo creaked around them. Frith breathed deep. “We need to keep the chain going. Carbon dioxide through photosynthesis to oxygen, through respiration back to carbon dioxide. Phosphorous cycle. Carbon cycle.” She said the words looking at the bamboo as if she could sense the oxygen coming off it, like an invocation, a mantra to keep the cytoglyph turning through space.
Selma threw a handful of bamboo leaves down the slope. “Mum and Dad dragged us out here to this lame hollow space rock full of unstable organisms and unstable cycles, in the middle of the Oort cloud, going nowhere. No quantum communications, no radio, just a stupid old distress beacon… somewhere, as if that’ll be any help out here. And now they’re dead because they were too stupid to follow proper safety protocol or too stubborn more like. And yes, we’ll need to keep it all going until we find someone who will take us in without sending us to jail.”
“They won’t send us to jail. We’re minors.”
“’Minors!” Selma mocked. “That’s a big word for you, Frith. Chances are we’ll never find out, as Dad’s big dream lurches to a stop. Garden of Eden, my butt! As we run out of oxygen, which gets stuck in carbon dioxide when all the plants die… Oh, God…” Selma felt sweat run down the inside of her shirt.
Dizzy grabbed her finger gently with a human-like hand and licked it. She tossed him upward and watched him tumble high, up toward the axis of the egg’s rotation, where the gravity was zero. She felt some of her panic dissolve watching him lean back, arms reaching out, exposing his tummy as he spun slowly like a furry star. He was a balanced, functioning biological construct. If Dad could do it, she could do it. Selma turned her head to Frith and saw her tear-stained eyes. She saw the fear, now that they had been abandoned here in the middle of nowhere.
“Something’s dead” mumbled Frith. Selma sniffed the air and remembered the smell of decay, stronger here. She could see a chicken behind the bamboo next to Frith. Flies clouded around it. It made her shiver a little.
“Are we going to die, too?” Frith said in her little voice. Dad had spent three weeks coding Dizzy and had not been checking the nutrient profiles as well as he might’ve. The week of Selma’s birthday, the quail (Coturnix coturnix) had started to die. It was the beginning of a cascade of sickness amongst the fowl that still was not under control. The smell of death, dead chicken, dead fish, dead plants, was the smell of an ecosystem with weak links. The smell of collapse.
Selma caught Dizzy, grabbed Frith’s hand and pushed off against the rock, pulling her sister in a shallow leap into the bamboo and away from the smell. She noticed something else as they wriggled through the giant plants. Three numbats (Myrmecobis fasciatus) lay dead among the greenery, attendant flies showing that at least a part of the chain was intact and working.
But what, Selma thought, if the flies overbred? What if they were faced with a plague? These questions must’ve haunted Dad as he refined his dream, seeing it unravel as quick as he tried to weave it. Now it was theirs.
“Let’s eat,” she said, swallowing her anxiety even as it returned.
Selma and Frith made their way out of the bamboo and into the chinampa system, toward the bungalow. Water snaked in thin channels across their path. If you looked up you could see that it was really one channel, spiraling tightly inside the tip of the cytoglyph’s curved conical end but only navigable by the delicate carbon fiber bridge printed onto concrete plinths on the intervening strips of dry land. It was the low gravity in this part that allowed the delicacy of the bridge. As it progressed to the middle section of the egg, the bridge became sturdier to support itself in the stronger gravity. That was Dad; waste not, want not, never apply a resource where it could be used elsewhere.
Here, where there was no bamboo to obstruct their view, they could really get a sense of the beauty and the achievement that the cytoglyph represented. The channels of the chinampa arched away one hundred meters in the distance to the side, as if going uphill, then continued over her head, inside the surface of the cytoglyph, then downhill again to the other side of the bridge, only to loop underneath the bridge again. A chinampa system provided lots of surface area for organisms. Water chestnuts flowered in their muddy channels, and frogs, insects, and tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) played in the brown water. At least there had been no unexplained deaths here. None she could see, anyway.
The far end of the cytoglyph, with its forest system, was just peeping out of the mist and you could see the breeding pair of wedge-tailed eagles (Aquila audax) that Dad had recently added there. Selma noted that she’d have to keep an eye on the numbat population (Myrmecobis fasciatus) until the predator/prey dynamics were sorted, especially given the dead numbats she had seen in the bamboo.
A drone hummed through the insects, carefully avoiding mashing any of them in its propellers as it picked water chestnuts from the wall of the chinampa. That was her mother’s hand, that drone. Selma remembered Mum showing Frith how to program it, how to tweak the algorithms to get it to avoid the insects.
Selma watched Frith skip ahead of her along the delicate carbon-fiber structure, feeling it chime and shiver in response to her bounding. She thought of the progressively reinforced structure of the bridge they were on. They must do this, she thought. They must strengthen and reinforce the ecosystem, increase its resilience to withstand the long-term demands they intended to draw from it. They must continue the weaving together of the biology and the deepening of its resilience. It was theirs now. It was all they had.
***
The bungalow was located in the center of the egg, where the cytoglyph was at its widest and where the gravity was roughly one G. This part contained many of the food plants and was about seven hundred meters in diameter. Around the bungalow were herb gardens and greens patches, almost completely migrated from a hydroponics system at one end of the structure, to the earth which teemed with micro-organisms, worms (Lumbricus terrestrris) and beetles (Scarabaeus sacer, Peripalentia Americana). Geese and chickens ran free in the orchard that lay beyond the disused hothouse, hunting for slugs amongst the silverbeet.
Arching above the bungalow on the opposite surface of the egg, was a section with only clover growing,(Trifolium Acalue) fixing nitrogen and waiting for the next wave of planting.
Selma sat Frith at the table overlooking the vineyard and the circular pool. Water from both narrow ends of the cytoglyph spiraled from tightly wound chinampa systems into loops of streams, rocky pools, and waterfalls, circumnavigating the cytoglyph in loosening whirls until they both fed into the big, deep circular pool in the center of the habitat. From there, pumps brought the water back to the two ends of the habitat, the only part of the system fighting against nature, pulling the water uphill against the centripetal force.
Selma got a bowl of salad from the food processor and a plate of frog legs from the refrigerator. She and Frith sat down at the small table. Frith looked at the other two places that the drones had set.
“It’s just us now,” Frith said.
“Yeah. I know, Frii. I know.” Selma thought of her Mum’s hands, gently transferring banks of test tubes, pruning clones in the nursery. She put the plate of food down in front of Frith.
“Mum made these yesterday,” she said, poking at the lettuce with her fork and pouting. “What will it be like with just me and you? Who will do all the jobs? Who will be the mum?”
Selma wondered how would she ever duplicate her mother’s careful and systematic laboratory technique. She watched Frith picking at the frog legs, breathed it down, breathed it down. “Come on Frith, you’ve got to eat. Eat the food and turn it into energy so we can plough the energy back into the cytoglyph. If we do that, we will get our reward.”
“Our reward?” Frith looked at her. “You sound like Dad. What’s the reward?”
“Our reward is naming the cytoglyph. Remember?”
Frith put the frog’s leg down on the plate. “Are you sad?” she said.
“Hey. Frith.” Frith looked into her sister’s green eyes. “We can do this, Frith. We can learn how to maintain the ecosystem. This place is a part of us and we are a part of it. We can do this.” Frith looked at Selma’s neat little pile of bones, where the frog legs used to be, then looked at her own plate.
“Gotta eat, sis. Come on, frog legs will give you some jump, remember what Dad says?”
“Yes, Selma.” Frith picked up a frog’s leg and picked at the meat.
It had been strange at first, eating animal flesh. Mum had said that they could get the processor to fabricate food, but they wanted to be truly a part of the ecosystem here, and that meant killing and eating from where they grew. Dad said that they were to be the cytoglyph’s brain, its conscience. That meant they had to be in it and they had to be of it. Cutting the heads off live chickens and killing rabbits for the table was a far cry from the ready-made cutlets and rabbit soup, neither ever having seen a sheep or rabbit that food tech could prepare. It was illegal in the Federation's territories to kill a living thing for consumption. But Mum and Dad were reaching for another kind of life, one which had both been forgotten and not achieved yet. They called themselves visionaries, not criminals.
Mum and Dad used to maintain a compost heap, just to experience the process of managed decay, to see the worms working their way into the substrate, turning it over, making one thing into another.
“It’s one thing to know the science,” Mum would say. “It’s another to know the life, to be a part of the system to the extent where you can feel it. That’s what the Federation has lost touch with, being a part of the chain.” Mum and Dad always found a way to learn.
***
Dizzy played with Selma’s finger as she sat at the workstation and examined the results of her labor. She was trying to finish off Dad’s work, designing a life form. Dad called it ‘Playing God’. Mum and Dad had coded everything from mosquitoes to bees, fish, geese, algae, food plants and worms using the pseudo-CRISPR system. Literally, anything could be coded and added to the cytoglyph’s environment, but it was a question of balance.
The bio construct she was building, a goat, (Capra aegarus) stood before her in a simulation. It had all the correct nutrient profiles and there were enough joules of energy to maintain it, but the other end of the equation was giving her trouble. Everything in the system, the bio-chain, had to be analyzed as a series of inputs and outputs. She knew she could feed the goat carbon and sugars in the form of grass, oxygen, and water, but it was the processing of the goat’s outputs that needed work. Was the cytoglyph stable enough to support more earthworms, bugs, and bacteria to process the dung? Was the photosynthesis potential enough to process the extra carbon dioxide? What would the extra material do to the insect population, especially given the existing imbalances.
“I wish Dad were here,” she said to herself. She didn’t need to use the view screen to see her Dad out there in his space suit, tangled with Mum. That played constantly in her mind. She scratched Dizzy and for a moment tried to cry, but the ache was buried too deep.
“Here’s the point, Sel,” Dad had said. “As the system grows and settles, and as we follow it into its settled state, we have less and less work to do. We finish one stage, stabilize the system, build up the correct nutrients and trace elements, then we add the next layer. Until it’s complete, Sel until I can name the cytoglyph. That’s when it will be stable. That’s our reward.”
It was magical, exciting, to engineer an ecosystem. Dad had taught her that much. It took a rare mix of scientist and poet; he’d made much of that, too. Starting inside the barren cytoglyph and working in their space suits, Mum and Dad had begun with basic bacteria packages and then lead on to algae and lichens, turning the carbon dioxide into oxygen. Then they’d added fish to cycle the oxygen back to carbon dioxide.
There were other cycles to get moving; the phosphorous cycle, the water cycle. They all had to work together in concert, like intricate cogs and gears meshing with each other. The immature cycles kept sputtering and failing, the multiple juggling acts of carbon cycles, phosphorous cycles, nitrogen cycles wouldn’t behave. It was okay as long as you were monitoring it, Dad had said, as long as you had your eyes on the ball and used CORE and the computer models to run diagnostics read all the reports did not remove too much carbon here or inject too much micronutrient there. It was a delicate balancing act, to put it mildly.
After fish, Dad had decided to try tadpoles, but that had been over-reaching. There were not enough nutrients yet in the system, in the insects and algae, to support the frogs. They’d all died. Then the dead frogs had turned the system septic, and Dad and Mum had been forced to intervene with armies of nano-bots, cheating their way out of a problem that would’ve killed their cytoglyph and them without intervention. It had been a near thing, the nano-bots had almost lost the battle. Biology had a way of getting the upper hand.
As it was, the habitat was filled with a foul stench and elevated methane and CO2 levels for four months, and the family was forced to live in the environmentally controlled laboratory. “That was luck,” Mum had said. “If the system was much more complex, we wouldn’t have survived that.” She was staring at Dad with a new kind of intensity on her face.
“Don’t look at me like that.” Dad had whispered. “I need you. I need you with me.”
Mum had taken Dad’s head to her breast, and he’d wept.
**
Learning and adapting, Dad and Mum had got the cytoglyph to a stage of relative stability and were preparing to take a risk: the introduction of a large animal. The goats. It was a dizzyingly complex dance with chaos, but it wasn’t Dad dancing anymore, it was Selma. One misstep could kill her and Frith. She looked at the life-size, three-dimensional simulated goat. “I’m going to need to work on you,” she said.
**
Frith made dinner that night, with a little help from the food processor. They weren’t as good as Mum’s frogs' legs, but Frith had added a little chili to the olive oil. “These aren’t bad, Frith,” said Selma. “Mum would be proud of you.”
Frith blushed and smiled. “Can we have some chicken tomorrow night, Selma?”
Selma thought about it “CORE wants us to be careful with the fowl,” she said. They’re not a stable part of the system at the moment. Let’s stick with frog protein for now.”
“I’m getting sick of frog legs, Sel!”
“CORE says we can do snake. Maybe we can catch a python tomorrow?”
“I want chicken.”
“We’ll see.” Selma was thinking about the dead fowl and the flies.
***
It took a few weeks of work before Selma was confident that she had the goats right. She made the baby goats as a surprise for Frith.
“I like her,” said Frith, patting the goat on the head. “Are we going to have milk?” Frith played with Dizzy, letting him climb along her arm and pull her earlobe with her tiny hands. They watched the goat chew on the tender bamboo shoots. Frith pushed Dizzy through the air to Selma.
“Milk? We’re going to have milk, cheese, and yogurt!” Selma scooped Dizzy and catapulted her upward. She turned to the rock, braced her arms against its damp surface and thrust herself upward after her pet, soaring lazily into the air, “We’re going to have cream! Cream!” she shouted triumphantly, catching up with Dizzy, holding him to her and tumbling in the zero-G of the axis. Then she accelerated to a firm landing ten meters above Frith’s head, on the soft earth on the opposite wall of the cytoglyph. Frith scampered light and lithe onto the rock, nestled down onto the cool moss and lay on her back, staring at her sister clinging to a bamboo stalactite hanging from the roof of a tubular cave. To Selma, Frith looked as if she were plastered to the ceiling, lying flat on that rock.
“Mum and Dad say that’s dangerous” Frith called. “You could hurt yourself on the top of a bamboo coming down.”
Green stalks thicker than their legs snapped and creaked around them. “Mum and Dad are gone,” said Selma. From across the lengths of bamboo, Selma saw the hurt clouding Frith’s face.
Frith began to cry again. The goat munched happily on the bamboo.
“Sel,” said Frith. “We need to go get them. I spoke to CORE about burying them. We need to bury them here. They would’ve wanted us to recycle their nutrients.”
“They’re gone, Frith, you’ve got to forget them. We have to run the cytoglyph now, we have to think about the downstream effects of the introduction of the goats, nutrient streams, energy conversion—”
“But we can’t just leave them out there, Sel.” Frith looked very small, stuck to the rock hull. Her thin, white legs were scratched from playing in the bamboo thicket and her face was dirty from catching frogs for dinner.
“They don’t deserve it,” Selma mumbled to herself.
**
In the small hours after Frith had gone to sleep, Selma sat in her bed in the solid one G of the bungalow and watched the video feed from the airlock camera on her tablet. They were moving, knocking against each other out there, stirred by the vibration and spin of the cytoglyph. How strange that this egg full of life would be animating its two creators, weeks after their deaths.
It was taking more time than Selma had thought to manage the ecosystem. Most meals she would get to share with Frith, but much of the time she was busy. But if the cytoglyph failed, it would be her and Frith going into the void. As unstable as it was, it beat drifting through the vacuum with stasis drugs in your system and an antique distress beacon in your fist.
Selma put the tablet down, lifted her feet out of the warm bed and padded across the bamboo floorboards to Frith’s room. Frith was awake, sitting on her bed at the window to stare out at the dark landscape. The crystal aperture at one end of the cytoglyph had darkened to simulate night. Shadow sat upon the strange, curved landscape that they knew so well. Frith looked around at Selma as she came in.
“Do you remember when Dad gave us the fireflies, Sel?”
Selma followed Frith’s pointing finger to the cloud of colored sparks across the water of the circular pool. She remembered her Dad surprising them with the modified fireflies (Pyrotomena Borealis). With a typical flourish, he’d taken them to the chinampa system at night to surprise them with the multi-colured flashing of the beetles. Now their yellow and blue flashes lit up the bamboo and reeds (Baloskion australe) growing in the circular pool.
“They’re like him, aren’t they? All bright and sparkly,” said Frith.
“Yes, sparkly and way across the water,” said Selma. She put her hand up to the glass, tracing the fireflies drifting dance in the distance. Frith turned to look at Selma. “I can’t sleep, Sel. I keep wanting Mum.”
Selma put her arms around Frith and held her tight. Dizzy climbed across onto Frith’s shoulder from Selma’s, tugging at her earlobe and sticking his nose into Frith’s ear. Frith giggled from the cold of Dizzy’s nose and held him to her, stroking his fur. “You’re silly, Dizzy. Sel, do you think Dizzy remembers Mum?”
Selma scratched Dizzy behind the ear. “We all do, Frii. We all miss her.” She put the hand on Frith’s hair and stroked her quietly.
“Sel, what’s it like to be dead?” Selma squeezed her sister’s shoulder and saw the airlock camera view in her mind, the two bodies caught in each other’s tethers, spinning and bumping each other. The tightness rose in her chest.
“I don’t know, Frii. I don’t know.” She saw the dead numbats, maggots feasting. “I just hope we don’t have to find out any time soon.” She looked out to where the fireflies cast a light shawl of sparks across the darkness. Frith hugged Dizzy, watching the reflections of the fireflies in the water.
“I’m scared, Sel. What if the chain fails? What if Dad’s plan doesn’t work?”
”Why don’t you take Dizzy for a while, Frii?”
“Really Sel?” Frith scratched Dizzy with two hands. He nuzzled her fingers.
“Do you think he’ll help you sleep?”
“Oh yes. We can have cuddles.”
Selma tucked Frith in under her blankets and gave Dizzy one last scratch. She remembered Dad’s triumphant mood when he’d given Dizzy to her. How it had quickly turned to alarm when the fowl started to sicken and die.
“Take him,” she said.
Dizzy pulled a corner of the sheet over himself and lay down in Frith’s hands. She closed her big eyes and licked her earlobe. Selma was sure Frith was already asleep when she closed the door. She went back to the kitchen and spent much of the night checking on the nutrient distribution effect of the goats before taking her tablet to bed.
**
Selma awoke with the morning cycle’s light warming the back of her head through the window. She’d fallen asleep on top of her tablet. She listened to the reed warblers (Acrocephalus australis) singing in the pool’s reeds and checked the nutrient uptake levels again. They were slightly out, the uptake of fecal matter did not match the models. She cross-checked with CORE. “Modelling shows a seventy percent likelihood that nutrients will balance within forty-eight hours. I will keep you informed.”
“Okay.” Selma slid out of bed and walked sleepily to the kitchen.
Two bowls of porridge awaited, and one hungry little sister. Frith was already up and halfway through her bowl. Dizzy ate a diced apple from the table top.
“Are we playing with the goats today?” asked Frith.
“Yep,” said Selma, giving Frith a kiss on top of her blonde head as she sat down. “Got to fix this nutrient gradient.”
Frith skipped ahead on the bridge, taking bounds that were higher and longer as the gravity eased on the journey across the chinampa. Selma looked at the reeds and the algae levels in the water. Maybe it was just her worrying, but it looked a little green.
There was a small dead fish floating next to the bridge.
Selma lay on the rock, watching Frith toss Dizzy into the air from the opposite side of the habitat. In the low-G of the thin end of the egg, Dizzy weighed only fifty grams or so. She soared four meters above Frith, seeming to hang at the top of her curve halfway in between them as gravity lessened its grip, then spun in the air as she began her descent back up to Frith. Selma watched with a thin smile as Frith caught the little loris, scratching Dizzy’s tummy.
“The bamboo is sick,” said Frith, touching the yellowing columns with her pale hand. That was the truth, thought Selma. It had paled considerably, showing a micronutrient imbalance, or maybe a salinity issue. That and it was under attack from the goats. “Sel, the chinampa is green!”
“I know Frith, I know.” The bloom of green algae showed too many nutrients or a lack of nutrient uptake. Or too much sunlight. The variables made Selma’s head spin.
“What’s wrong, Selma? Where’s the imbalance?” Sel had hoped Frith wouldn’t notice yet.
“I don’t know, Frith.” Selma couldn’t understand where the problem was. Had she introduced too many goats too quickly? Were there animals dying and overloading the system with nutrients? She cursed herself for introducing the goats. Creating systemic imbalance for cream.
“Dad would know,” pouted Frith.
Anger flushed inside Selma. “Yes, Dad would know, Frith,” she shouted across the width of the cytoglyph. “He always had so many answers, Why don’t you go outside and ask him?”
Selma shook her head as Frith buried her face in Dizzy and cried loudly. Not long ago the little bio-construct had been Selma’s whole world. Now her world was the cytoglyph, its imbalances, its mysteries, its shortcomings.
She hiked angrily back away from the forward end of the cytoglyph, downhill through the bamboo forest, noting this time the damage that the goats were doing to the bamboo and making another mental note she would have to fence them out. More work, more drone programming, more CORE interaction. Frith watched her from the ceiling. She stood with her hands on her hips and Dizzy clinging to her shirt, keeping pace with Selma on the other side of the habitat. They craned her necks to see each her.
“Mum and Dad are gone, Frith, we have to do this! We have to make this work!” Selma shouted across the widening space as they both walked downhill toward the wide middle.
“You’re not Dad! Stop trying to be Dad!” Frith squealed and threw Dizzy again, higher this time as the distance from the ground to the axis of the cytoglyph increased.“You think you can be Mum and Dad! You’re not Dad and you’re not Mum and you should stop being so bossy and telling me to go to bed and eat my food, and...” The little animal swam in the air. The loris approached the halfway point between them and hung in the air, before bouncing back to Frith like a furry yo-yo. Frith, sobbing, caught up to her sister on the opposite side, picking her own way through the reeds and catching Dizzy.
“The cytoglyph is pretty stable. It is. Not perfect but it’s been worse. But those goats…” Dizzy came back toward her again, Frith sobbing.
“You can’t tell me what to do!”
”I know that’s what Dad had planned to do next, but I can’t get the nutrient profiles right. I can do it, I know I can.” Dizzy started to recede back to Frith. Selma leaped three meters in the air and pushed off against a bamboo stalk with her feet, shooting off toward the bungalow, swamped by the cytoglyph’s problems. As the ground sloped downward, she landed amongst goat-chewed bamboo shoots, rolling in the heavier-G near where the bridge started. She held her aching head as Frith caught up, Dizzy holding onto her shoulder. There had to be an answer.
“Selma! Selma!”
Frith tossed Dizzy a little too hard as she flew. Dizzy flew toward the axis of the cytoglyph, slowed as she drifted through the zero-G, looking like she might just come back to Frith, but then sped up again as she spiraled down toward Selma’s side of the cytoglyph, gaining speed.
“Catch her! Catch her!” shouted Frith, as Dizzy tumbled toward the chinampa system, falling fast. “Catch her!”
Selma tried to judge where Dizzy would fall, difficult in the cytoglyph, where down was a different direction depending on where you stood. Frith squealed as Dizzy tumbled toward Selma’s side toward the ground, falling a good fifty meters where the bamboo thinned out. She closed her eyes and reaching out to the tumbling loris as if she could catch him from over the other side. Selma jumped five meters through the thinning bamboo, shouldering past a big clump of the stuff, but only managed to touch Dizzy with her fingertips as he met the ground with a dull thump and a rustling of foliage. Frith slowly open her eyes to see the still mound of fur on the ground next to Selma, who looked silently down at her from the opposite wall.
Selma picked Dizzy up. He was limp. Frith sat down in the goat-damaged bamboo shoots, craned her neck to look at her sister holding the dead loris. Her sobs drifted to Selma across the chasm.
The little dead fish rocked back and forth in the water by the bridge.
***
In two weeks, the bamboo turned grey like a tombstone. Green algae choked the chinampa system, caused the whole area to become swamped. It killed frogs, fish, and plants. A familiar stink filled the air.
“Are you still angry with me?” said Frith, as Selma hovered at her door. Frith held a small doll in her hands.
“Can I come in?” said Selma.
Frith said nothing.
Selma came into her room and sat on the end of the bed. Frith was braiding her hair. “It’s been hard, hasn’t it?”
“I can’t swim in the pool. And the birds are dying.”
“Yeah. I’ve got some bad news, Frii.” Frith stopped playing with her hair and stared silently at Selma. “The thing is, CORE says that the carbon dioxide levels are at six percent. Rising.”
“That’s bad.”
“Yeah. Methane is up, over two per ent. Oxygen down to five. Dropping.”
“That’s bad,” Frith whispered.
“Yeah. And… Frii, the water pumps aren’t working properly. The algae is fouling them. The cytoglyph is…”
“It’s dying, isn’t it?”
Selma put a hand on Frith’s back. She took her sister’s hair in her hands and continued braiding. “Yeah.” She tied off one braid with an elastic loop. “We need to leave, Frii.”
Frith turned so quickly that she tore her hair out of Selma’s hands. “No! No! I’m not leaving! This is our home!”
Frith jumped off her bed and ran out of the room, out of the bungalow. Her small feet drummed on the floorboards. Selma followed her outside, noting the familiar bad smell.
Selma found Frith sitting on the greying grass beside the circular pool, crying.
“Hey.”
“You don’t care!”
Selma sat behind Frith and braided her hair again. Frith didn’t try to stop her.
“Hey, Frith. I know what Mum and Dad said. They wanted to make a little world for us, right? A magic egg for us to live in. Yes?” Frith nodded, not meeting her eyes. “But it turns out that maybe they weren’t as smart as we thought they were. Or maybe I’m not as smart as they were, I don’t know anymore. But look, Frith.” Selma pointed to the circular pool. The fish were gasping at the surface of the green water. Many had died already and floated at the top.
”We can use the nano-bots to fix it. You said we could fix it!” said Frith, but the fight had gone out of her. She knew what the gasping fish meant.
“We can’t use the nano-bots,” said Selma. “It’s not the answer. It’ll just unbalance things more at this stage, the system’s too layered now. We have to fix it in situ. But we can’t do that either, we’ve tried. We’ll die if we stay here.”
Frith put her arms around Selma and buried her face in her neck. She sniffed.
“There is some good news,” said Selma. Frith looked up, her eyes bright with tears.
**
That night, they slaughtered two chickens, dug up potatoes and carrots, picked corn and lettuce and herbs. They opened the last of the jam that Mum had made, used the best table linen and used the last of the sauerkraut. As the cytoglyph darkened, they sat at the family table, Frith on Selma’s lap, and ate strawberries and honey.
***
Selma watched the airlock pressure indicator rise as the atmosphere was let in. Mum and Dad’s bodies were in there, laid out on lab trolleys with the space suits stowed neatly underneath, visible through the big window. She thought about their grand plan, what it had come to, and tried to find it in her heart to forgive them. Finally, the door hissed open.
**
They didn’t look like they were asleep, they didn’t look peaceful. They look wrecked and broken. Selma looked at them for a long time, trying to feel, testing the tension of that knot inside her, the knot which refused to loosen.
“I did the best I could,” she said.
**
Selma had brought two lengths of fine linen, fringed with Celtic borders. When she was done, Mum and Dad lay next to each other, wrapped in linen shrouds which they had made from the first crop of cotton. The shrouds were seeded with certain fungal spores to aid in the breakdown of the bodies, as they would have wanted. Quietly, Selma doubted that the ecosystem would last long enough to do that job.
**
The circular pool was now brown sludge. Dead frogs were scattered around it. The smell was overwhelming. Selma and Frith knew about the different kinds of decomposition. On one hand, there was the sweet smell of a balanced compost heap but this, this was sour decay.
The drones had placed the shrouded bodies on the greying grass outside the bungalow.
“Do you think they’d be proud of us?” asked Frith. She filled her lungs with tainted air and looked over the interior of the cytoglyph, the dead vineyard, the swamped chinampa system, the bamboo forest fading, and grey. The fine stitching defining the Celtic borders on the shrouds shone in the morning cycle light. A final breath of Mum and Dad’s dream.
“I don’t know,” said Selma. “I’ve thought and thought about it but I just don’t know. We tried.” Selma was tired of moralizing, tired of being angry, tired of being the strong one. She was worn out. Now there were only practical steps to take. “Do you have anything to say, Frith, before we put them in the ground?”
Frith said nothing. She just slipped her little fingers into Selma’s hand. Selma pressed the button on her tablet and Mum and Dad’s shrouds lowered into the earth as swarms of nano-bots drew it back and over the shrouds, unzipping the turf and then zipping it up again. Worms turned away from the sunlight and bugs ran over the shifting soil as they were swallowed by the system that they had created. She couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride at the community of soil organisms that worked in acceptable balance, even now. At least they had gotten that foundational step right.
“God knows if there’ll be enough active soil community to break the bodies down,” said Selma. Frith looked at her strangely and she felt bad after saying that, then realized that she had contracted her Dad’s disease of systems thinking. Even now she was pre-empting the computer, estimating nutrient loads and calorie transfer. It was useless; the nutrient gradients, the various cycles, and balances had all turned dangerously chaotic.
Selma squeezed Frith’s hand and felt her quaking. She knelt on the turf outside the bungalow that had been their home and held her sister, grasping her brown little shoulders through the Celtic dress as Frith mourned for Mum and Dad.
“I’m sorry,” said Frith. “I’m sorry I killed Dizzy”
The tightness in Selma’s chest was rising and expanding. She was too tired to hold it down any longer. Selma felt tears coming to her face. “It’s better this way,” she said. “I think he belongs here. I’m... I’m sorry I couldn’t save our home. I’m sorry Frii, I’m sorry. I tried so hard.” They held each other and cried there on the dead grass for what was gone.
**
They put a stone on each of the graves. Selma thought about the time that the stones had been touring the solar system as part of this asteroid; that now they marked the deposit of two nutrient sources which would be traveling with them, probably unchanged as the cytoglyph’s ecosystem fractured and reached a stop. She thought about how the water would cease flowing and return to its millennia of stillness once more. Water and nutrients, again waiting for life. She picked Frith up.
“You were right, Frii,” she said into Frith’s hair. “This is where they would want to be. But we don’t belong here anymore.”
**
The control room’s stabilized atmosphere was a welcome reprieve from the stench of the collapsed ecosystem. Selma fed Frith the stasis tablet, kissed her and mounted Mum’s helmet onto Dad’s suit. Her hands shook as she pressed the helmet clasps closed. She had spent all night scrubbing Mum’s helmet free of the blood that painted its inside. She could’ve got the drones to do it, but it was something she wanted to do for Frii. It was an act of deference, almost a prayer.
Mum’s suit was full of holes and Dad’s helmet was orbiting a large asteroid two thousand kilometers away but Mum’s helmet on Dad’s suit had pressure tested as safe as any antique space hardware could. The suit was comically roomy on Frith, but it would keep her alive. Selma pressed the remote pressurization button, and the suit twitched as the air was pumped in. Even though Frith’s hands were too short to reach the gloves, the suit filled out as if containing an adult.
“You okay?” She could just see Frith’s blonde head nod from inside the helmet. “You’re going to start to get sleepy soon, Frith. When we wake up, we’ll be safe.” Another nod. If we ever wake up, thought Selma.
“Okay, Frith, we’re going into the airlock now.” Selma led Frith through the white sliding door and dragged the deflated pressure globe in after them. She attached a short tether to attachment points on the back of the suit and then to the pressure globe, securely joining them.
Once in the airlock, Selma closed the door, making sure she had the tablet and the emergency beacon—a forearm-length of jagged black technology—with her. It was a contemporary of the suit, not useless but not very useful either.
She pulled the pressure globe over her shoulders, sealed it from the inside and pressurized it. The Globe inflated to its full size, the tablet showing no leaks in the seal. Selma curled in a fetal position inside it and floated around its small space in the low-G of the airlock. “It’s okay, Frith. I’m not going to leave you,” she said into the mike on the tablet. “I love you, sis.”
From where she was, Selma could just see outside of the airlock, the last glimpse of the atmosphere that had sustained them.
“Dad left us, Frith, but I’m not going to leave you. I’m here.” Selma saw in her mind’s eye the quick, frantic movement as her Dad, seeing only his own pain, tore at the catches on the old helmet. “Where we’re going, we go together.”
There wasn’t any sense in waiting longer. She depressurized the airlock and the outer door opened. The tether tightened between them, the small amount of atmosphere in the airlock pushing Selma and Frith outside the cytoglyph, from their enclosed egg into the cold enormity of space. They continued to drift out into the auditorium of stars, sharp and bright and tiny, each one a raging sun. The airlock closed behind them and disappeared into the big, curving wall of the cytoglyph as they moved away.
Selma looked at Frith’s life signs on the tablet and saw she was in full stasis. With her suit in stasis mode, her bodily requirements reduced to almost nil, Frith would live for decades awaiting rescue in her long, uncertain sleep. Selma swallowed her stasis tablet and watched the cytoglyph recede slowly: the unnamed, world that had held them for five years. The egg that still held their childhood and their parents. Their womb.
They would slowly spiral away from the cytoglyph, linked still to the habitat by their rotation as they receded away from it. Selma felt the first pull of sleep as she began to slip into stasis. Her grip slackened on the black stick of the emergency beacon, not yet activated in her hand. It was not inconceivable that they could be rescued, but certainly not likely, not with an antique distress beacon and legacy space hardware.
To Selma, it seemed she was inside a cruel joke. She was so tired and sick at heart that it seemed a useless gesture to turn the beacon on. Far simpler, easier, more desirable, to simply stay asleep. To turn away from the pain.
***
She felt the lethargy of stasis sweeping through her. But as the darkness came down, she activated the beacon.