They Lied about Grandmother's Home

They lied about Grandmother’s home.

In the distance the siren wails. Time for a break. I relax the controls and allow the claws of the Blaster to sink back to the ground as I run through the check in my mind. Helmet. Oxygen. Correction boots.

Locket.

I fall in line as the rest of the workers shuffle towards the Break-House, passing through the airlock doors that make sure the oxygen stays inside, through the hallway scanners that make sure we are all accounted for, through the rows of Safety Robots that make sure we do not resist. I do not pay attention. I do not care. There is only one thought on my mind.

They lied about Grandmother’s home.

I eat my lunch in silence. Stare out at the sea of people around me. Watch them all do the same: arrive at the Mine at seven o’clock, eat lunch at eleven, go home at five. People with light and dark faces, light and dark hair, light and dark eyes. So different, yet united by the same thing.

We are the ones who were left behind.

The Patricians departed yesterday. We all watched the footage on our Implants, fed directly to us by the reporters standing near the foot of the shuttle. For a moment, all activity in the Mine had stopped as the images were fed to our brains. The glow of the blue flames erupting from the shuttle’s base. The shaking of the ground as it lifted off, bearing away those who had bought their way back to freedom. The sinking feeling in our chests as the rest of us realized what it meant.

So now we sit, eating our lunches in silence. Usually, there is a dull drone of us talking to each other. But not today. I do not feel like talking, and it seems everyone else shares the same sentiment. What can we say? There is no weather to talk about. There are no vacations to plan. And no one wants to speak about what we saw the day before.

At least we still have the Mine. It is hard work, long work, operating the machines to blast through the rocks and unearth the spinel hiding beneath the surface. But it keeps us fed, and it pays off the debt our grandparents accrued when they arrived here. Debt that was too high for them to afford, and so our parents, the next generation, were its inheritors. And then us. And perhaps the generation after us, if the interest continued accruing. And the next. As long as the Mine is running, as long as the Patricians stay amused by the gemstones we unearth, we can work, and we can eat, and we can pay to stay alive. But I wonder, now that the Patricians have left, how much longer our bits of spinel from a rock so far away will hold their interest.

The siren wails again. The break is over. Time to go back, back to the Blaster, back to the seat where I operate the controls, back to the same motions over and over that make the bones in my hands and arms ache. The same happened to Mother and Father, until at last the Company deemed them Unfit, and their debt fell to me and my siblings. And so I run through the checklist in my mind. Helmet. Oxygen. Correction boots.

Locket.

I fall in line as the rest of the workers shuffle towards the Outside, passing through the rows of Safety Robots that make sure we do not resist, through the hallway scanners that make sure we are all accounted for, through the airlock doors that make sure the oxygen stays inside. I do not pay attention. I do not care. There is only one thought on my mind.

They lied about Grandmother’s home.

I sit at the controls, commanding the Blaster to break through the floors of rock alongside the rows of Blasters beside me. The stars glare down at us as they watch us carve through the ground, the very same sins of our grandparents and great-grandparents that we now atone for. Except for the Patricians. They have already paid in full their indulgences and bought their tickets with the money they made from us.

The Blasters whir. The rocks break. The stars glare. I miss the warmth of the sun. The rays always feel much less hostile as it stares at us with pity rather than anger. But we will not see the sun for another week. Grandmother said that when she was young, a day had both light and dark, both stars and sun. I find it hard to imagine something like that, yet I yearn for it. Waking up and going to sleep with the sun, like it was a friend, part of my family? The thought fills me with homesickness for a world I will never be able to understand. A world that we were built for, a world that built us, a world that we will never know. For we are the ones who were left behind.

The hours pass. The siren wails. Work is over. I relax the controls and allow the claws of the Blaster to sink back to the ground as I run through the check in my mind. Helmet. Oxygen. Correction boots.

Locket.

I fall in line as the rest of the workers shuffle towards the Living Quarters, passing through the airlock doors that make sure the oxygen stays inside, through the hallway scanners that make sure we are all accounted for, through the rows of Safety Robots that make sure we do not resist. I do not pay attention. I do not care. There is only one thought on my mind.

They lied about Grandmother’s home.

I walk with the rest of the people, our gazes fixed straight ahead, until I stop. I am standing in a hallway with a glass window that looks out at the barren landscape, the endless grey dust and rock. But in the sky, looking back at me not with the anger of the stars nor the pity of the sun, but with the sorrow of a parent who has lost her children, is Grandmother’s home.

Earthrise.

She rises from the dark ocean of nothingness surrounding her, the only spark of color in a universe of grey as she is half-illuminated by the sun. Weeping for us with her seas of blue tears, her breath of white mist-clouds, her eyes of green and brown land.

The home they lied to us about.

Grandmother had looked out at the same Earthrise with tears in her eyes just before she died. When she was young, it was just a picture that the first humans to land here had taken. A picture of their home, standing alone in the void of darkness, small and fragile and beautiful. A picture that filled the human race with nostalgia and peace and hope. The home they all shared, the home that connected them, the animals and the humans, the poor and the Patricians.

But now it will never be a home to me, and looking at the same sight fills me with an unquenchable ache in my soul.

I take the heart-shaped locket off of my neck and hold it out towards Grandmother’s home, opening it to reveal the image she had placed inside when I was just a young child. A house in a field of grass, a simple building of brick and wood with a car in a driveway and a tree by its side. Simple, but her home. I place it against the distant planet in the sky, imagining that the picture and the planet are connected again, that the house is still there, that Grandmother is still there, that I am there.

But I know that the house is gone. So many things are gone, Grandmother told me. So many cities, so many towns, so many people, lost to the screaming storms and the rising waves and the burning sun and the poisoned air. And so they had to leave. They were the lucky ones, the ones allowed to join the Patricians even though they could not pay with money and were allowed to instead pay with their labor. But it would not be for long, the Patricians told them. With us gone, home would heal, and then we could all return.

But then they lied.

And they left us all behind.

So now I stand, staring at Grandmother’s home through a glass window and a heart-shaped locket, stranded with so many others on a rock with no oxygen and no birds and no trees. None of the things Grandmother had told me about. Stranded on a rock that circles Grandmother’s home, a rock that the Patricians are now watching rise in the sky on the nights that last only a few hours instead of a lonely two weeks. Watching as I spin around them, orbiting around their whims just like my parents and my grandparents did.

I lower the locket and clasp it back around my neck, giving Grandmother’s home one last glance before I turn and continue down the halls with the rest of the damned before the Safety Robots force me to comply.

They said they would bring us with them. They said we would all be in it together, that we would all suffer together, that we would all survive together. But now I am trapped on a moon with no air.

And they lied about Grandmother’s home.

“To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold -- brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”

-Archibald MacLeish, December 25, 1968