Three
THREE
Though winter reigns above, despair not, for the Mother below promises spring.
Those who have passed from this life wait peacefully in her compassionate embrace.
Behold, when by our faith she is freed from her chains, they shall live again, and joyous shall be their return for all shall drink water from the heavens and walk upon fields of green.
—the Scripture of Sefa
Freeday dawns crisp and cold, the sky a pale blue gray like the sclera of an anemic eyeball.
Isako stands on the viewing platform of Easthatch watchtower with the hundred or so others who’ve come to see friends and loved ones on their way out of Tenacity.
It’s crowded up here. Freeday morning is the best time for resignations.
Gives everyone the rest of the day to sit with their feelings before the next week begins.
Isako recognizes a lot of the people standing shoulder to shoulder by the railing, but they leave plenty of space around her.
No one wants to get close to the reaper.
That’s fine by her. Even when you get to know the wagefolk, it’s better to keep a distance. Makes it easier on everyone during times like this.
She recognizes Loren’s daughter by her curly hair and the baby bulge.
Tessa has people standing behind her and on either side of her, holding her hands.
Isako thinks to go over and say something, but decides against it.
This is a public moment, but also a private one.
She’s not entitled to share in either their grief or pride.
Easthatch is the nicest of the cityhab’s gates, in Isako’s opinion.
There’s too much shuttlecar traffic at Southhatch.
The Purgatorist priests at Northhatch are notoriously pushy and will harangue anyone who passes to repent their sins.
Westhatch is an awe-inspiring historical site, a monument of imposing black basalt inscribed with the names of the colony’s Founding Officers, next to a rock-slab memorial to the loss of Prosperity Cityhab. Grand but cold.
But Easthatch is serene. A circular public park leads to a simple wide stone boulevard lined with precious silver birch trees just starting to bud pale leaves.
Quiet pilgrims sweep every inch of the path, and at the end of the walk, a marble statue of the Mother in Chains smiles down beatifically from atop a pedestal, blessing those passing and welcoming them into the Waiting.
Isako isn’t a Sefan adherent, but she appreciates the gentle ambiance.
When it’s her time to resign, she would want to come here.
The sun breaks over the western horizon.
She turns toward it, breathes in deeply, drinks up the soft light on her face.
She’s been doing as Greves suggested, taking some much-needed time off.
She spent two days catching up on sleep, tidying her apartment, doing physio exercises for her knees.
She wanted to visit the house, but Maya’s not free until tomorrow afternoon.
Whatever decisions are being made at higher levels about the remnants of Astrocom, she’s bound to find out sooner or later. There’s been nothing new from official Companynet channels; the nomination of Sandbar Uchi to the Board of Directors is still the leading story.
Uchi’s atier was Isako’s apprentice not so long ago.
Waiting on the watchtower, she sends him a message.
Martim, it’s been a while, but wanted to say congratulations.
Huge achievement, to serve a soon-to-be Board member.
Well deserved. Hope you’re still keeping up your longknife training.
I know I owe you a get-together. When you have a moment, let me know when’s a good time.
She doesn’t expect a reply for a while. Martim’s future is unspooling long and bright ahead of him; hers is dimming and closing in like a narrowing tunnel.
The men and women she’s trained are surpassing her.
Had to happen; it was just a matter of time.
She just didn’t think it would be quite so soon.
She turns back around to face the gates.
Beyond the precious airshield that keeps heat and oxygen inside the cityhab, the Vastness stretches as far as the eye can see, a forbidding vista of hard-packed gravel underlain by permafrost. Glimmers of ice shine where a few centimeters of rare moisture collects between rocks.
As cold as it gets in the poorer parts of Tenacity, it’s balmy compared with an average temperature outside of minus forty degrees centigrade.
In the winter, drystorms scour the land with winds of over a hundred kilometers an hour.
When the Founders arrived in the Great Ships five hundred years ago, they gave the mercilessly cold and barren rock planet the name Aquilo, after the Roman god of winter.
Yet, as those on the watchtower can see from their high vantage point, the frozen tundra is not without life.
With the onset of spring, desert lichen is blooming, carpeting the stark terrain in brownish-green patches that grow and spread with each passing year.
In the short-lived weeks of summer, saxifrage and pearlwort will sprinkle the landscape with purple, yellow, and white.
In recent years, hardy sedges and grasses have begun to flourish.
Midges and weevils, the colonial vanguards of insect life, are being followed by flies and beetles.
Stubborn, heartless old Father Aquilo is giving way, slowly but surely, to the Company’s enduring promise of a terraformed world.
Dotted here and there across the lichen and rock are clumps of bright blue.
On the roof of an office building across from the watchtower, one of Tenacity’s revolving billboards displays the Company’s KPIs and the latest news and public service announcements.
Ambient oxygen: 12.576% +0.11… Atmospheric pressure: 55.
6 kPa +0.003… Global average surface temperature: -38.
2°C +0.09… Species introductions: 152 +7…
Water prices to increase 2% beginning 500.
6.1.0800… NorCon Ice advance to All-Division Cup finals…
Do your part to warm the planet, switch to combustion today! …
“We’re getting closer all the time.” That’s what the Executive says every year during the annual address.
Isako’s seen time-lapse photography of the area around Tenacity stretching all the way back to the Founding era, images that remind her of fungal growth under a microscope, seemingly primitive but infinitely complex, life tenaciously asserting itself.
Visual proof of progress is dramatic when viewed across five centuries, but it’s built on a foundation of painstaking incremental gains.
Isako’s spent years advancing big-E objectives.
She believed in Greves’s vision of reclaiming the stars, or more accurately, in Greves himself.
But she understands why, for some, especially the devotedly Sefan little-Es, the promise of terraforming is sacrosanct.
The possibility that Maya and future generations will live in a warmer, better world is what makes the forbidding Vastness seem like a beginning rather than an inevitable finale.
A stir goes through the witnesses on the platform as fourteen members of the Astrocom division arrive together, carried up the elevator after having been washed and dressed by the gatekeepers.
Respectful applause greets them. Isako recognizes the faces of men and women to whom she’s recently delivered dismissal notices.
Recent memories of all the tense, sad conversations collapse into a blurry montage, like the ribs of a closing fan.
She picks out Dew Loren, because he’s freshest in her mind.
Loren strides with steady determination near the front of the group, leading his former colleagues in a procession of wagefolk wearing blue robes too vibrant to be seen anywhere in nature, their final parade a rich stain of color against the white boulevard and the gray Vastness.
A lump forms in Isako’s throat as the resignees pause at the airshield and turn back to wave to their watching friends and relatives. Tessa waves back harder than anyone, blowing kisses down to her father, eyes shining as tears stream down her cheeks.
Isako’s witnessed plenty of resignations over the years.
They all bring her back to the first one she attended at the age of thirteen.
Her kithfather didn’t look back at her that day; he didn’t even resign with a group.
He went by himself on an ordinary midweek Monday afternoon when most people were working.
Only six people, including Isako, were there to witness.
Isthmus Akio was the best longknivesman in the Company, and when his last contract was over and his hands were too arthritic to draw the blade, he figured it was time.
“All things are easy with practice,” he told Isako. “Atiers practice dying, just like we practice sitting zanshin, just like we practice the quick draw. Resigning is nothing to be afraid of. The end is simply another part of life.”
Isako’s kithfather kept a mural of the Founding Officers of the Prosperity and Tenacity on his wall.
They were great men and women of conviction, he said.
When the fate of the colony hung on the thinnest of threads, they set an example of selflessness.
They established the tradition of choosing to depart with dignity so vital resources would go toward the community’s survival.
“What they did took courage, because they went first. They weren’t able to practice the way we do,” Akio told his kithdaughter.
“We have the privilege of merely following in their footsteps.”
Something unexpected is happening near the airshield posts. Witnesses lean forward over the platform railing, murmuring in surprise. It takes Isako a disbelieving second to recognize the lone figure crossing the boulevard to meet Loren and the others.
It’s Forest Greves.