Safiya in evening
All roads lead, as Patient Readers know, to Helioshad
Safiya sits on a stone bench with a tall back by the gardens of the Pension House. Evening is falling, and everyone has gone in for dinner an hour ago. Usually, she does not get hungry in the evening, and often, eating dinner makes it hard to sleep. Sleeping is important to Safiya, and she often complains of insomnia. It’s hard to settle her head and dream unless she takes a spot of valerian tea, and sometimes not even then. The sun has set, and she can see a communications satellite slowly tracing the sky through the leaves of the orange tree.
One of the nurses comes out. “Miss Safiya,” she calls, “you want me to bring you something? There’s flan.”
Safiya licks her lips, and nods. A little flan would be nice. “Sure. I’d like that.”
“Just a minute,” the nurse says and goes back in.
Past the gardens, Safiya can see a trellis covered with grapes, a grassy park beyond, and the young, raw houses and buildings of Helioshad, the early extruded lathe and pressed regolith panels being replaced with new stone and plaster these days. A few pole lights glimmer at the intersections, and she hears an owl somewhere among the young woods where the old water treatment lagoon was filled in a decade ago. Almost out of the reach of her fading hearing is the buzzing of bats and the calls of nightjars.
Safiya can remember when the night was silent, when nothing flew, where there was hardly a tree to be found, most of them no taller than Dad. When the ground was dead dust, and you only had to walk a few hundred meters to see some ancient native plant growing where it had grown for a thousand years. When every square meter of genuine fertile soil was hard made and hard preserved.
Things are still hard, but they don’t ration beer anymore, and Safiya still enjoys a little Starsday drink.
Sunday. She still calls it that, even in the new language. She’s called it a lot of things in her life. Dad and Mama would say Sunday and Ahad, and she learned to call it Dimanĉo in school. Her husband had told her he’d called it Xīngqītiān as a little boy. She’d heard others. Then, a few years ago, the calendar was thrown away, and a new one was made, with new months, new numbers, and new names of new days for a new world. There were, it turns out, too many days in the year, weeks extra, every time Iphigenia goes around the sun, round, and round, and the spring months had rarely been spring, the fall months rarely fall.
No fourth ship came from the stars, no new people. No word from Earth. It no longer mattered what number the year was. They made a year one. They started over.
Now they call Sunday Stelotago. And she likes a little beer Sunday afternoons.
A girl brings out the flan, one of the new aides. She wears a red and white striped apron over the odd new wrapped style of women’s clothing. “You wanted the flan?” she asks.
She has a plain, sturdy face, as brown as Safiya’s, and worklike hands with slender fingers. Her long black hair is tied up with red ribbons. Her eyelids are slightly creased underneath like Safiya’s, and she’s got a good nose. Good-looking girl. Competent. Like Safiya, not quite Moro, not quite Sinhalese—postwar chaos in the Indopacific.
Safiya studies her. She looks familiar.
“You’re new,” she says.
“I just graduated school,” the girl said, giving her the bowl of flan with an odd flirt and dip. Young people do that, too. Safiya doesn’t pay it any mind. She tastes the flan. Another thing she never got enough of as a kid: too little milk.
“The polis assigned me here,” the girl goes on. “Lots of old people—” She stops, puts her hand to her mouth. “Not like that! I didn’t mean—”
Safiya laughs. “We all get old.” she says. She tries the flan. “Nice,” she says.
The girl bobs again, and grins. “I like it too. I should learn everyone’s name. This is my first day.”
“I’m Safiya. Safiya Ladjubassal.”
“I’m Io. Io Rodrigos.”
“Where’d your grandparents come from?” A common question, or it had been until recently.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Io says carelessly. “I was adopted.”
“An orphan?”
“A clone,” Io says. “My folks had a couple kids, and adopted me too.” She grins. “Labor shortage, you know.”
Safiya eats the flan, and Io sits down next to her. “What did you do before you got to pension age?”
“A lot of things,” Safiya laughs. “Everything. They didn’t train kids for a trade when I was little. We did everything. Farm work. Construction. I dug waterlines for a year. I taught school for a little bit. Filing work. Surveyor’s assistant.”
“We’re building a world,” Io says.
“I’ve heard it said,” Safiya agrees vaguely. She puts the plate down. “You were cloned from somebody?”
“Sure, I guess,” Io says. “It would be somebody, yah? They’ve got a library of people’s genes, and they liked mine, I guess. Or hers, whoever she was they got them from. There’s another Io in Helioshad, just a little girl. I suppose there will be others. I know two guys, cloned but twins. They were making one, and they twinned right in the cloning tank!” She laughed. “They don’t know everything yet, Biosphere Corps doesn’t. Didn’t catch it. Same family adopted them. They’re both mechanics. I’m kind of sweet on them,” she adds.
“Both?”
“Oh, one, I guess—but I can’t tell which!”
They laugh together, sounding much alike: Io lighter and tinkling, Safiya low and rough alto, both petering out to a light chuckle, a grin, and a nod.
“I wonder what it’s like to have a sister,” Safiya says. “I had a brother.”
“I’d like a sister,” Io says. “But I guess I do! Two! The girl and the woman I came from. If she’s still alive,” she adds. She hops up and takes the bowl. “Sisters forever, if they keep making me.” She gets a queer look on her face, then seems to shake it off. “All right, I’ll see you around, Miss Safiya!”
“Safiya,” Safiya says. “Just Safiya—Io.”
“All right, Just Safiya!” Io laughs and goes back inside the Pension House.
Safiya looks after her, then settles back on the bench. Electricity is resource intensive, even with the thorium reactors, so people don’t like turning on the lights at night. Helioshad is quite dark now beyond the few streetlights around the polis forum, and she can see the stars. The constellation Boötes hangs high in the east in the early night sky, Sol dim and yellow above Arcturus. Later, the Station will rise in the west and take its ponderous trip eastward towards one of the rising moons.
Safiya watches the sky turn black, feels the wind turn cold, and then slowly rises and goes back inside to bed.