Fairy tales

I was born almost four Jovian years ago. The malnourished child of malnourished parents – scratching out an existence in an underground settlement on Callisto. My mother would tell me stories of old Earth – a beautiful blue world with open skies, endless water and room enough for all people to live. It always felt like a wonderous fairy tale to me. Fantastic and unbelievable. I had never seen the stars, let alone blue skies and oceans of water.

On my first birthday I was indentured to the captain of a reclamation ship. I remember the captain – a tall man with skin like crumpled paper and eyes sunken into his head like a corpse – telling me that on old Earth I would have been twelve years old, not one, and that this made me old enough to learn a trade.

At the time I struggled with the thought that my age would depend on where I was born, but back then I had no idea how big our solar system is, or how different life is depending on the luck of one’s birth. Those lucky enough to be born on Mars had sunlight, strong gravity, and soil for growing crops. Those born on the moons of Jupiter like myself – well we had underground caverns, very little gravity, and every day was a struggle simply to keep the oxygen generators running.

My life aboard that ship was tough, but a tough life makes a tough person. I had to earn my share, but my share included three meals a day, a bed to myself, and an education in reclamation and scavenging. I spent two Jovian years aboard that ship, travelling from one end of the solar system to the other, before my indenture completed. By then I knew no other life. The ship was my home, and I couldn’t imagine any other way of living.

I had earned respect and authority among the crew – even if only by way of seniority. The man who had taken me on all that time ago was long since dead, and I served under a new captain – our former second officer – until the day he died. On that day, command of the ship finally fell to me. The ship had been named Gorgon when I had come aboard as a lad – a reference to ancient earth history which our captain had loved so much. I always thought that he’d have gotten on well with my mother because of their shared love of this distant fairy-tale world. The ship’s name had been changed to Vitae after the first change of command. When she came to me, I had to choose a new name, as was tradition.

Only one name would suit for me. This ship had carried me and kept me alive for so long, and only one other woman had ever done that for me. So the ship became Ann, for my mother.

I took the time to return to Callisto, since I was finally the master of my own destiny. Had I left the ship when my indenture had completed, there was no guarantee that I would ever have found a way back to Jupiter. I, like so many others, would have been stuck on whatever moon, planet, or asteroid I had disembarked on.

So I returned to Callisto, intent on finding my parents and giving them a better life. What I found was an abandoned home, ransacked who knows how many times by looters or vagrants. It took some time, but I eventually found an old lady who had known my parents. She told me that they had died about a year after I left. My father had succumbed to a wasting disease, and – so the old lady said – my mother had just not had the will to go on after that. She died soon after, and my parents left this world behind, leaving almost no trace that they had ever been in it.

The lady had kept one keepsake. My mother had asked her to keep it in case I ever returned. A little locket, shaped like a heart, on a thin chain. It looked like it had been made out of scrap aluminium, but it had been made with care and love. Inside were two images. On one side was a photo of our family. My father and mother, with me between them. I couldn’t have been more than half a Jovian year old. All three of us were smiling – laughing, maybe. We looked so happy, but looking at the image brought me no joy. I would never smile with those two people again. They would not see the person I had become, and we would never be reunited in this life. A life that could have been – taken from me by the chance of my birth.

The other image was Earth. Not Earth as it exists today, but Earth that once was. Blue and green and white – shining like a jewel. The promise of a better life, of a life where air was free and clean, water was plentiful, and life was easy. That was the life my mother wanted to give me. She never could. No one could have that life ever again. But she did her very best – and her child grew up healthy and strong. She would never know that, but I know she would be happy if she did.

So here I am now. Suspended above the Earth in a pressure suit, my ship waiting behind me patiently while I complete this last little ceremony for my parents. I look at the beautiful blues of the ocean, the white of the clouds, and the vibrant green of the land, and tears begin to collect around my eyes. Blinking and shaking my head to loosen them in the microgravity, I look beyond the locket at the real Earth.

Tortured yellow clouds cover the surface, occasionally highlighted by a flash of lightning. Runaway global warming had long since turned the Earth into a Venusian hellscape. The seas had boiled away, the atmosphere had turned into a thick acidic blanket. The surface was scorched by hydrochloric rains and temperatures that were measured in hundreds of degrees.

Nothing lived down there anymore – and maybe nothing ever would again. But if the Earth is ever healed, I want my parents to be here to see it. The three of us – all laughing and smiling – here above the planet that my mother never knew, but should have.

Reluctantly, I let go of the locket and watch it drift gently away. In this orbit, it should last for tens of thousands of years. Maybe that will be enough time.