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Broken hearts on Mars answered by new vision on Europa |
| The Habitat was a quiet place, the spinning cylinder hovered over Mons Olympus on Mars. The light of the sunlamps was always even. I felt lost, standing in the shadow of our broken family, with a heart heavier than the red rocks of the planet below My father, Samuel, was a man of vision, of unwavering Christian faith. He ran an asteroid management company and was successful at what he did. His company was now one of many in Mars Orbit though and competition was getting fiercer. He'd built the company himself but it was clear he was now ready for a new challenge and part of this was the fear that what he'd built on Mars might not survive the test of the coming years. He was a man who could look across vast, empty space and see the blueprint of a thriving colony, even before the first colony ship hit the ground. He was a dreamer, and I admired him for that. But I didn’t always understand him, and now, as our home on Mars slipped away from us, I wondered if I ever would. The divorce had split our family into two worlds, one of fixed comforts and one of uncertain vision. My mother, and my sister, Sarah, had returned to Earth, to the South coast of England, to an easy climate, to a place where you could open the window and let fresh air fill the house and to the familiar faces of my mothers family still on earth. They spoke the language of feelings, of comfort, of repairing the pieces of their lives in endless counselling sessions. My father and I, we spoke the language of action, of building something new from the rubble of smashed lives, of creating a new world from the broken pieces of our past. Feelings were things to be pushed in a positive direction by an act of will, or used to fuel the passion for success, not indulged in for themselves. The male and female sides of my family were so different in every way, and so I wondered sometimes why my father had ever married my mother in the first place. I guess I should be grateful for that yet still it was a mystery how love worked. From my perspective our family had been torn apart by my mothers chaotic temper and guilt trips. I knew she loved me but her love seemed clumsy and disconnected from my own aspirations now. She made choices to turn away in the small things long before she made that big decision to leave us completely. These choices felt wrong to me and their effects still echoed in all our lives, and I couldn’t forgive her for it. Not yet. Not when the remnants of her actions still haunted my every thought. I had tried, but we became strangers and I did not really care about that. The distance grew wider between my mother, my sister and me as time passed. My father too, was deeply hurt, though he hid it better than I did. He never spoke of pain, but I saw it in his eyes, behind the cold, hard resolve. I knew he considered the darkness of 'pity-parties' worthless and something he would strive to transcend with new life and actions. But we had a plan, Europa. The great frontier. A fresh start, a new world, a chance to build something that would last. “Son, there's no sense crying over spilt milk,” my father said one evening as we worked in the shipyard, preparing the old cargo ships for the long journey ahead. “We have the skills to make a difference out there, and I know we’re meant for greater things. We’ve helped build and defend this Martian colony but job-wise things are getting tougher here than they were before. Europa will be our true legacy. We can make something beautiful out there.” I nodded, his words filled a void in my soul. I wanted to believe him, but my heart also ached for what we had lost and especially my sister. But maybe a move to Europa was the challenge I needed for my future. But was leaving Mars orbit my father's dream or my own? I knew had to find my own way forward, so I wondered if Europa was the place for me, a place where I could build a home, my father was the only person I still trusted and so I went with the flow. Then something happened. Her name was Lila. She was beautiful, radiant, her smile like a beam of light breaking through the darkness of my broken heart. I had known her for a while, a fellow devout Christian in a world that often seemed to forget what faith really meant. It wasn’t just her faith that drew me to her; it was the warmth she brought into every room. The way she spoke of Europa, of the future we could build together, a future that wasn’t just about survival but about thriving, about doing good in a world that was just beginning. She wasn’t like my mother. She wasn’t continually trying to share her darkness or run away from her pain. She was present. She was real, full of life and joy, anxious only to improve herself and to become a better person. And she saw me. She didn’t look at me like I was some broken thing to be fixed, but rather as a companion with whom she could help build the world we both dreamed of. “I’ve been praying for this,” she said one night, sitting beside me on the low gravity viewing deck of the Habitat, the view of Mars stretching beneath us. “Praying for someone to share this mission, this dream. I know it’s hard, but together, we can make it happen. We can make it right.” Her words were like the softest whisper, but they cut through my grief like a laser through ice. She didn’t see me as the man I had been, crushed by the weight of other people's sins, but as the man I could become, the man I was meant to be. And in that moment, I realized something and replied to her in a moment of inspiration. *Everything you say and everything you do are like healing music for my soul. I want to help you realize your dreams, maybe they are even my own, my father definitely hopes so. Somehow I do not care about that so much as I care about you. I love you Lila.* That earned me a kiss and a moment that was imprinted on my heart forever. Later at work I looked at my father, sitting across from me in the command room of our ship, his tired eyes watching the way forward continually flicked to me. “You’re not the same, son,” he said, his voice animated by tenderness and curiosity. “You’ve changed since she came into your life. Your eyes are full of light and there is a new spring in your step. And I know she’s the answer to more than just your prayers. She’s the answer to mine.” It was true. In Lila, my father had found something he thought lost forever, a daughter. Not his biological daughter, but the one he had always longed for, the one who could help him see the future clearly again, the one who could carry on his dream. We made it to Europa, to the domed city of Atlantis, where the ocean stretched around us, its dark, alien waters, beneath the white ice of the surface shimmering in the lights of the city. Its icy dome glittering under the stars and the multicolored Jupiter. The city was beautiful, a testament to human ingenuity and love and the vision of the engineers who built it. The dome that shielded us from the crushing pressure of Europa’s icy flows rose above the ice like a cathedral to hope. And inside, it felt like home. The city builders had learned the lessons from previous colonies and built bigger spaces and filled them with green and growing things. There were silver birch trees 100 feet tall, ash, oak and elm trees. There were giant halls with orchards in them under fusion powered sunlamps that mimicked the cycle of the day on earth and the seasons also. Flowers and plants grew everywhere amidst landscaped gardens where running water cascaded from fountains and waterfalls. This was a place we could all quickly recognize as a home. We worked as contractors in the direct employ of the Europa government. Asteroid management was different here than on Mars. On Mars most of the habitats or working places on the surface were beneath ground. Asteroids were mined as a resource or diverted onto the planets surface away from population centers. On Europa asteroids were also considered a resource but the dangers of impacts was too great in the icy ocean world where underwater shockwaves could potentially crack the dome of the city set on the ocean floor and stretching above the ice to the dark sky. Asteroids were the greatest threat to the Dome of the City and the biggest had to be diverted into Jupiter. Jupiter naturally hoovered up most of the comets and largest asteroids anyway but the threat was still real and needed to be managed. So we mapped the movements Of Near-Europa-Objects and maintained the rockets and mining ships needed to work the issues. The plentiful supply of water meant that we did not lack for fuel as we had done on Mars and our margins were far better on Europa than on Mars. We prospered and the government were happy with the work we did protecting and supplying the colony. Lila, ever the pragmatist, had learned the basics of asteroid management, but it was clear she didn’t have the experience my father and I did. She didn’t need to be perfect. She just needed to be here, beside us, as we shaped this new world. She learned from us and grew with us and she was the life of the company that we built. Without her, without her laughter this new world would have been a very different place. So as I looked around the city, the bustling energy of colonists and workers, the bright lights and the hum of life, and for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel like I was walking in the shadow of a broken past. The pieces of my heart, shattered in the wake of my parents divorce and the departure of the most important people in my life, were finally coming together. My father had said to me once that, "Some smiles break us, but some make us whole again." Lila's smile was of the healing kind. In this new world, with Lila by my side and my father’s steady presence, I had hope again. And hope, hope was the seed of a new tomorrow. Lila and I moved to the O'Neill habitat in geocentric orbit over the city after we married, while dad stayed in the city. It was better for children to grow up in Earth like gravity. But we were too and fro from the surface all the time on company business. The Habitat was tethered nearby to the city and so it was easy to take the lift up and down. When Lila became pregnant with our first I sent a video message with Lila to my sister and invited her to visit us in my new world, I offered to pay her ticket. But it seems she had her own family now and was happy on Earth, it was a two month round trip so I guess she felt I was just too far away. I hope that one day I will see her again. Notes ▶︎ |
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