A Planet's Eleventh Birthday Celebration

Stone and steam and the clanking of gears.
It isn't iron but let's imagine,
it isn't bread but we'll call it that.
It isn't home but we say it is.

Smoke and death in the poisoned air.
It isn't oxygen
but we lie to ourselves.
It isn't home but we say it is.

         The air was poison. Large machines were buried into the stone surface of the planet to filter the air, to make it breathable, but it was a temporary solution. The machines were dying, and with them, the human colonists.

         "Fortuna's eleventh birthday, Meri. You know what that means." Meri's mother smiled.

         Meri coughed. "Yes, I know."

         "It's your eleventh as well." The woman pulled out an old picturekeeper from her pocket. It blinked through photos she had loaded onto it, always starting with the oldest first. "I was so worried you'd be born in space. But you weren't. The first child of Fortuna." The first picture was of Meri's parents on the ship. Young and together, smiling and hopeful. The second was of friends, an older couple who hadn't made it to Fortuna. The next was Meri as an infant; tiny, red and crying, held by her beaming mother.

         "No, mother, no," said Meri. She pushed away the picturekeeper and looked up at her mother, tears on her face. "We are dying, and no one does anything. How many more have died from breathing that poison? How many more, only today and yesterday? How can we celebrate?"

         Meri's mother hesitated a moment. "We celebrate because we must, Meri." She sat down on the couch, and the old, worn engineer's jumpsuit rustled as she sat. In flowing letters, the name "Lillian" was embroidered on the otherwise plain red uniform.

         "I must do something. You must let me help." Meri was sobbing with fear. She rushed to her mother and grabbed her hands. "Take me to the machines where you work."

         Lillian hid her look of terror and tried to pull Meri into a hug. "The machines are dangerous, and there is so much poisoned air being filtered and contained. I cannot allow it."

         "You know I can help."

         So many responses leaped to Lillian's mind, but she didn't speak. She knew the arguments were pointless.

         "On your birthday, we will go," she said quietly.

         Fireworks filled the atmosphere with noise and light the night of the eleventh celebration. A crowd of two hundred coughing, fearful, but happy people filled center of the small town, hugging each other and promising hope. Half a mile away, two figures hurried through the shadows to the machine. Though it towered over the small, stone buildings of the town, that was only half its size. More was buried beneath the surface, more gears, more clanking.

         Lillian grasped her daughter's hand tightly as she led her inside the filter. Only two engineers were working on it tonight, and both were yearning to be at the celebration. Lillian hid Meri in a corner and walked to the center room, a small office with a couple of chairs and the flat stone walls covered in record-keeping chalk marks.

         Lillian told both engineers she was relieving them for the night. They left, too happy to ask questions.

         "Here." said Lillian, handing Meri a mask covering her mouth and nose. "It isn't much, but it will keep you alive when we go down there." Lillian put one on herself, and the two climbed down the ladders into the belly of the machine.

         Heaving, puffing, the machine's noise was louder than ever down where they crawled, and the metal that they had discovered on Fortuna, the metal they called iron, and behaved like iron, but wasn't, was covered in rust. The air was hot and thick, but there were strong breezes as it was moved from one end of the machine to the other, filtered, re-filtered, the poison taken from the air and stored in the tanks below ground. The tanks were old though. So much poison was escaping.

         Lillian finally allowed Meri to look. She ran back and forth, examining each gear and every part. The eleven-year-old girl, so fearful before, had forgotten all but her interest and fascination for machines and working things.

         They called her brilliant. They called her a prodigy. Lillian had merely wanted to keep her safe. Lillian hoped Meri didn't see the tears in her eyes.

         "Mother!" called Meri, crouching near some smaller gears, each a different size and moving at different rates. She paused and her body was wracked with a coughing fit. She yanked the mask off her face and once she recovered, she looked up to her mother with a smile so large, so innocent, so full of hope. "Mother! I think... I think I know how to fix it. I mean... I think I know how to build a new machine."

         "What?"

         "Mother," Meri said quietly, when Lillian came closer, "no one planned on these machines lasting longer than ten years."

         "No. That is why eleventh is a celebration worth celebrating. Because it is one year longer than we believed possible."

         "We can build something new. The colony will survive." Meri coughed once more. "Give me some chalk. I'll tell you how."

         The poisoned air had killed the children and the elderly first. The theory was that Meri held out longer because she was born there and adapted, if only partially, to the poisonous Fortuna air. The young genius filled three walls with chalk and a plan for a new machine. One that was meant to last. Though she died before her plan was completed, she gave the colony hope, and a reason to celebrate its eleventh birthday.

Stone and steam and the clanking of gears.
It isn't iron but let's imagine,
it isn't bread but we'll call it that,
it wasn't home, but now it is.

No more death in the poisoned air,
no more smoke and lying to ourselves.
It wasn't home but now it is.