Empty Fields
“My heart knows love as well as it knows pain, and I know that I am meant to carry both across the universe with me.”
“Love is a funny thing. It makes you do funny things, Burch.”
“Like become a luddite roboticist?”
“That was a big part of it,” Kristoff said.
“There was another part?”
“Come to think of it, no. Not the luddite part anyway. It was just the girl.”
“I always wondered what got you to Texini.” Burch said. “Do you want to tell us about it? It’s okay if you don’t. We all know what you’ve been through, Juice.”
Kristoff looked away from the table, staring out the front window of the flight deck. Verona’s cruiser was drifting, in between jumps. They were nowhere, out in the dark empty expanse of interstellar space far beyond the boundary systems.
“God, those memories,” Kristoff said. “I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone. Maybe it is as you get older, but I don’t have any memories that are just pure joy anymore. They’re all bittersweet. But the sweetness. If I could just close my eyes and be back there, to dwell in those places forever. I have this thought, or I did when I thought I was dying back on Texini. I would go in and out of it, but when I had my wits about me, I’d remind myself to go back to that place.”
“The girl?”
“Yeah, the girl. Of course, the girl.”
“The game can wait,” Verona said, she was smiling. She hardly ever smiled. “I’d like to hear.”
Juice looked around the table. He’d almost talked about it a hundred times in those months aboard Verona’s cruiser. Before Texini, he’d never struggled to talk about his life. Even now, though, among friends, with nothing else in the universe to do for weeks more but pass the time and play Sabaca, he hesitated. It was his turn to sleep, but he wasn’t tired. He could have told them he was too tired and left, though, leaving the pain of the past unspoken. None of them would have blamed him.
“The girl,” he said. “The girl.”
He thought about it. Sleep. Or he could tell them now. Or he could tell them tomorrow.
“What do you want to know about her?” he asked them.
“Why don’t you start with her name,” Rishi suggested. “I’d like to know her name, Juice.”
It’s hard not to see her there in that barren place we first met. Giesa was her name. And it’s probably best to start at the beginning, who I was—how my life began. It explains a lot. Explains the rest of it.
I was a fairly normal child on Charris. I wasn’t a part of any movement or group or anything like that. I didn’t even know such people existed on Charris. I’m not sure how much my education differed from Verona’s, being so far apart in years, but my impression is that our history, at least as it was taught to me, was very much backward looking. My generation was taught a lot about the different expeditions that Charris had sent out in the past—to Athos, to Etterus, to various colonies in the Lettered Systems. I remember reading a lot about Heder Floriston and his expedition. That was my favorite story. I always used to imagine what it would have been like going out with them, millennia ago, when Athos and Iophos and Hellenia were just ideas. The difference on Charris from all the people in the Battery was that the ideas originated there. We still have all the charter files; we have VR footage of those moments playing on loops in the halls of the Museum of Colonization—Heder Floriston and his sister hugging their family goodbye as they boarded Legacy’s shuttle on departure; pictures and videos of the Dreesons before Athos. Just imagining that those people were even real blew my mind.
But I think by Verona’s time, our culture had shifted. We’d long since stopped sending out colony ships. So many of those colonies were breaking apart and growing themselves. We’d done our service as a seed world. Financial? Philosophical? It didn’t much matter the reasons. Charris had turned inward. I was a child of the era after the glorious centuries of expansion. We marveled at past deeds for brief moments and then turned to the now, to ourselves, to making the world around us a place worth being. And for the most part, Charris was a beautiful world to grow up on.
I met Giesa at work, actually. My first job. I was a technician for the GMS, which was the environmental agency above the regional governments that monitored the state of the planet, mostly the atmosphere and oceans. I was a technician, maintaining the drone fleet and remote robotics, and Giesa’s family was part of a separatist group that was causing the GMS problems.
I didn’t know anything about the Barŏs when I was recruited to the GMS, because Giesa’s people were a small group in the Northern Hemisphere, but they’d been around for a long time, trying to get the government to recognize what they perceived to be their right to live a more traditional lifestyle. It was more complicated than that, though, for both sides. But by the time they started causing trouble out in the sandbars, they felt that they’d gone through all the possible legal channels, had been denied at every turn, and had no recourse left but to carry out their plans illicitly; otherwise, they’d never be able to live as their religious ideology instructed them to. So they just started going out far into the sandbars to grow earth cultures against the orders of the government.
I had no idea what they were doing out there. I just got sent out to the bars because none of the technicians they had up north could figure out what was going on with the drones. Once they realized this weird religious group was going out into the sandbars, they decided to start monitoring their activity. And they kept finding their drones face down in the sand with no clue why they were malfunctioning.
The issue with the malfunction was that the location data would go wonky, so the drones would miscalculate altitude, thinking they were at a hundred meters and hit the sand dunes, and the latitude and longitude was thrown off as well, so the technicians would go out to the location they thought their drones had crashed, and the gear would be a hundred kilometers away.
I knew exactly what was going on the first time I heard it described, but I was very young—twenty-one—so I saw all these older experienced technicians wondering what was going on with the positioning units, baffled, and I didn’t say anything, because I was just unsure of myself, I guess. But it was a simple thing, a dirty old racing trick—except racers were never that overt. They’d give their opponents a bump here and there to gain an advantage, but they’d never crash their opponent’s unit, because they’d be found out and caught cheating. But a dirty racer would steal a few centimeters here and there, a few microseconds. The Barŏs, though, were driving government drones into the sandbars. They didn’t care, as long as they could do their work out on the sands unobserved.
I saw Giesa the first time I went out there. I tagged a unit with secondary and tertiary location beacons before flying it so that I didn’t have to spend all day recalibrating the signal just to figure out where the drone had gone down. Then I put up a unit and waited for it to get put down.
Sure enough, I got a fix on a group of people out in the sands, on the third northern bar, and as soon as my unit got within five kilometers of them it went all screwy and went down, and it was giving me a location about two hundred kilometers from where I knew the unit was.
I flew the shuttle out there to pick up the downed drone, but on the flight out, I could see Giesa’s people down on the ground, so I decided to land and ask them a few questions. Mind you, I knew exactly what they were doing to mess with the telemetry. I just wanted to see who these people were. Curiosity, you know. I’d read a little bit in the reports about their group, but what they were doing out in those sandbars was a mystery to me.
So I land, and it’s a family of about seven people—the mother and father about my parents’ age, and five kids ranging from a few years older than me down to about twelve. And they were all working on this table, dressed in funny clothes, almost like they were in costumes, playing characters from ancient times back on Earth, before people used electricity even. And on this table, they had all these different containers filled with sand and dirt and water, all mixed up in different proportions. I’m thinking, what the hell are these people doing?
Anyway, I start walking around this table, smiling at them—no idea what the hell they’re up to, making mud pies, mixing mortar, laying a foundation for the galaxy’s biggest sandcastle? Who knows? Then I see this girl, dressed like the others, walking out from behind a break in one of the dunes, carrying two buckets. I watched her for maybe five minutes walking toward the table from the distance, and each step she got closer, I could feel my heart beating a little faster. By the time she was there with the others at the table, I could see her clearly—outside the absurd setting and the ridiculous costumes—all those external conventions washed away, and what I saw was the most beautiful girl I’d ever set eyes on.
She emptied out her buckets of dirt onto the table, into the containers there, and she mixed each one with her bare hands, clapping the dirt off as she went down the row of containers. And she looked up and met eyes with me, shook her head, and scowled. Then she picked up her empty buckets and walked back off into the dunes.
I knew I was in love with her then and there, not because I was drawn to her eyes, which were dark and radiant and penetrating, and certainly not her smile, because she had nothing but scorn for my very presence. It was the curve of her neck—her posture—how when she turned her head to look at the horizon I knew that was where I wanted to be. I never needed anything like I needed that girl to see me, to look in my direction the way she set her eyes toward the horizon.
Eventually, the parents came over. They told me I was unwelcome there.
“We’re in the desert,” I told them. “Am I not free to walk where I please, just as you are?”
“You’re the government,” Giesa’s father declared. “We don’t need or want you out here.”
“Yes, sir. My name is Kristoff Mikkel, and I do work for the GMS. I’m investigating some malfunctions in our drones that monitor these dunes. But I don’t suppose that has anything to do with you. I’m just curious as to what you and your family are doing with all this dirt.”
“We don’t know anything about drones,” Giesa’s mother said. “We’re not interested in talking with you, and we’re not harming anyone out here, just minding our own business.”
“Clearly, all this seems harmless,” I said. “You folks enjoy this fine day. I’ll be off to find my wayward drone.”
I set off on foot, tracking, of course, in the footsteps of the middle daughter. I found her trail on the far side of the dune and followed her footsteps for nearly a kilometer to the foot of a hill where the loose sand met the ancient seabed, where, I gathered, she was trying to collect a certain composition of minerals that weren’t present in the area the family had set up their table, whatever it was for.
She was not pleased to see me.
“What are you doing following me here?” she said, staring at me in a manner no one ever had before, with utter disdain.
“I spoke, I think, to your parents,” I said. “I’m Kristoff—”
“No. You’re the government,” she insisted.
“Can’t I be both?”
“You can be off, is what you can be,” she said. “Now leave us alone.”
“I’m not here to bother you. I’m a drone technician. I don’t have any desire to interfere, I’m just curious. What are you doing out here with all this dirt?”
She was sweating in all that clothing, her hands covered in dirt, and occupied with the two heavy buckets, and she began to walk back toward the table. She was angry that I didn’t immediately go away. I took a few steps alongside her, smiling at her, trying desperately to be friendly, to get anything out of her other than that hostile look.
“There’s nothing I can say to you that you won’t use against us,” she said.
And she kept walking, even though she had this thin wisp of hair she was trying to shake away from her eyes. She even tried a couple times, unsuccessfully, to blow the hair away from her face. I was smitten. I think she was so bothered by me that rather than put down the buckets and brush the hair from her face with her hands, she just kept walking, or maybe it was the dirt on her hands. In any case, I stepped in front of her and slowly gestured my intention, waiting for her to tell me to get lost again, but reluctantly, she turned her head and allowed me to gently brush the hair behind her ear.
“You’re very curious,” I told her. “Whatever it is you’re doing, I wish you luck.”
Then I smiled at her and walked off in the direction of the downed drone.
“It’s beautiful out here,” I shouted to her from a distance as she continued on. “Beautiful!”
My voice carried over the dunes, and I continued into to the vast open sands until I came to the GMS drone. I was quickly able to see and diagnose the problem. Nonetheless, when I got back to the hub for the global segment that included the sandbars, I told the supervisor of the station that I thought I could solve the problem with a bit more time. “I’m close,” I told him. “But it’s a very complicated issue. A clever sabotage if it is one.” And because the other techs they’d sent out were mystified, the supervisor allowed me some leeway in investigating the problem further.
So, I kept sending drones over their sites. And each time, the drone would go down exactly as before, and I’d fly out to the site; say hello to the family as courteously as I could; ask them if they had any idea where my drone was and what could have happened to it; and they’d deny knowing anything. Giesa knew, though. She knew that I knew. It took four trips before she finally smiled at me. It was our little secret, that I knew exactly what was going on and that instead of reporting it to my superiors, I came out to see her. For her part, she didn’t tell her parents. She allowed me to walk with her, out into the sands to collect the minerals they needed. And we talked.
In the meantime, I was reading about their sect, trying to get a sense of what they were doing and why the GMS was so bothered by their activity. They were trying to convert the sands into arable soil using a mixture of algal byproduct, a special type of nano-clay, organic waste, and various bacterial cultures. Their purpose was to re-invent ancient agriculture, or at least pre-division agriculture from Earth—cultivating plants and developing crops from the ground rather than a technological substrate. Farming, old-style, with seeds and dirt. The Barŏs believed that shift in how we grew our food had changed humanity profoundly, and, for lack of a better way of saying it, they believed there was something godly in working the land. They were religious, and they believed growing their own food from the ground was a way of communing with God. I surely didn’t believe that—at least at that point—but I believed fervently in communing with Giesa, so each time I went out there again, I’d ask her to tell me about their culture, and because I wasn’t totally ignorant, I could ask her educated questions about what they were doing and act interested, because soil science genuinely was an interesting concept I knew nothing about.
The GMS, though, was adamant about shutting them down, because they were afraid the Barŏs would somehow cause a bacterial outbreak that would contaminate the trees, flowers, and grasses that our ancestors had either cultivated there on Charris or brought with them directly from the Columns ages before. And our scientists, so they said, were the only ones qualified to manage the delicate balance of bacterial cultures on Charris. They certainly couldn’t tolerate a group of rogue luddites generating soils from sand out in the desert without oversight.
I was fascinated by the science of the process, but Giesa was far more interested in the meaning of it all, the godliness of it—connecting with a guiding spirit through the miracle of creation. She liked to tell me about seeds germinating, from the tiniest little pockets of stored energy and genes. From a speck of potential would come entire plants, entire crops. Vast fields of greenery.
Sometimes in those first few weeks, I struggled to locate her people out in the sandbars. The family were very clever at concealing their location, moving around randomly. Often it would take me so much time in the morning to locate them that I couldn’t even get the shuttle out to the site before they’d be gone. After a few weeks, though, Giesa would smile and tell me, “We might be at the Os Bar tomorrow, Kristoff. Maybe. There’s a chance.”
“There’s a chance I’ll have a problem with my drones again tomorrow, Giesa,” I’d tell her. “You never know.”
It was this funny little dance everyone was doing—her father setting the countermeasures to mess with our frequencies, me flying right into them, Giesa taking longer and longer to come back from the mineral deposits, me going back to my bosses reporting on my progress; and every day, I learned more and more about her people—their struggles, their intentions.
It was fun, at first, feeling a little rebellious, being so absolutely captivated that I was willing to lose my job, tarnish my reputation, my future prospects. The truth was that I didn’t particularly care about that future anymore. I’d been waiting for someone like Giesa to share my real future with. It was like the universe was speaking to me through her, telling me what path I was meant to walk. She pulled at me magnetically: even as all the forces that conspire to steady the trajectory of an entire society were aligned against her pull, I was powerless to resist it.
The GMS, as they gathered more information on what the sect was doing, they began to prioritize shutting her people down. The GMS grew terrified of a bacterial outbreak, especially after they got hold of some of the containers Giesa’s family had mixed on their tables. Those seemingly innocuous concoctions of dirt, minerals, and water—our scientists claimed—would upset the carefully curated balance of life on Charris. Giesa’s people and their seemingly irrational impulse toward an outdated soil-based agriculture would put the entire population in danger.
For my part, though, the more I listened to Giesa on our walks, the more I understood their ideology. It wasn’t just about growing their own food, or that the food they hoped to grow would develop from seed to plant to vegetable to table, it was the lifestyle that such work demanded. It was the culture of a people who worked together at putting the basic things first, grounding them together in a place, in a community. That meant everything.
It was a wonderful story. Romantic. Naïve. It was also dangerous on a planet like Charris. The bacteria they were cultivating were derived from records of Terran soil science, and there, those cultures had co-existed in an environment that had competitors, a natural balance. And still, even on Earth, they had blights, famines, and all manner of problems when the balance in an ecosystem became corrupted. On Charris, there were no such natural safeguards. On Earth, farmers and ecologists had struggled for centuries with invasive species growing out of control when relocated to places with no natural competition. Imagine now, my supervisors said, an invasive bacteria on Charris, or many for that matter. Imagine their naïve desire for a pastoral past wiping out millions of people.
All I could imagine was Giesa, sick, done in by her sect’s own ideology. And still, I couldn’t bear to be a part of destroying their dream. Or at least I couldn’t bear the thought of Giesa knowing I’d helped kill it. I knew I couldn’t continue to exist on both sides. Eventually, my supervisors would catch on that I knew more than I was reporting. I also couldn’t quit outright, not without some serious questions being asked of me about my motivations for leaving government service. In either case, I was going to betray one side or the other.
I chose to betray the government. No matter what I did, I knew the government would never love me, and I’d never love them. I could live with being a dissident if I had love in my life. I couldn’t have lived without Giesa, or at least I didn’t want to live a life without her.
The next time I flew out to the sands, we walked together, and I told Giesa I loved her, and she told me there was no way she could love anyone who worked for the government. That’s when I told her that I’d known all along exactly what they were doing to the drones, that I’d never reported them, and that I never would. I also told her I’d quit my post in a heartbeat if she said the word. She smiled and told me, “Don’t quit your post, Kristoff Mikkel. Not if you don’t believe. I could never marry an unbeliever.”
I could tell immediately it was her way of telling me what I needed to do. I told her then and there I would learn their ways. I would learn to believe. I asked her if I could adopt their religion. And she told me that was impossible if I didn’t believe in God.
“But surely it’s possible to learn to believe?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “I think you either do or you don’t. It’s something you know in your heart.”
“I believe you could teach me,” I told her. “I’m willing to learn, to try.”
She brought me to her father. We walked back together that day, holding hands, with a bucket each in our free hand. Her siblings looked shocked when we returned like that. Her parents didn’t. Her father wore the stern look of a skeptical protector. Her mother, though, barely suppressed a smile.
“So, Giesa comes back to us, hand and hand with the government,” her father said. “What shall we do about that?”
“Kristoff doesn’t wish to work for the government anymore,” Giesa told him. “He wants to learn our ways.”
Her father looked around and gestured to the tables. “Clearly, we don’t even know our ways yet, daughter. We are just learning ourselves.”
“Maybe there is something we can learn from Kristoff then?”
“Maybe so,” Giesa’s mother said. “What do you think you can share with us, Kristoff?”
“First, I can tell you that as soon as I quit, you’re going to have to get a lot better at concealing your drone countermeasures. I can help you with that. I know our frequencies, and I know how our units communicate and navigate.”
“Perhaps if he helped us with that, we could help teach him our faith?” Giesa suggested.
“Perhaps,” her father said, “we should think more on it. Nothing can be decided today.”
But they did decide something that day. They decided not to reject me outright. They decided to find me a teacher, and they decided to allow me to continue seeing their daughter, even as I maintained my post at the GMS.
I suppose I officially became a dissident that day, sneaking information back to Giesa and their people in order to keep them steps ahead of the GMS. In truth, though, I’d already become a dissident from that first moment I’d set eyes on Giesa and decided not to report them. Each step forward was a continuation of the journey that had begun that first day, that first look.
Giesa’s family found me a teacher among their sect, an aging woman from Senloch who’d moved to the periphery of the northern sands to be close to the people in the sect. She taught many of the school-age children about the sect’s traditions. She would give me files and files to read, and she would ask me to watch historical accounts of religions on Earth. Giesa’s people believed in a single god—“Not a god,” they would say, “just God. The God.”
I likened my lessons to a colorblind person who’d grown up with colorblind parents in a colorblind society meeting people who could see in color. My lessons with Mrs. Herrig were a bit like that, an attempt to get me to see the universe in their kind of color. God is red. God is Blue. God is inside me and you. She’d always taught kids, Mrs. Herrig, and she struggled to turn off that aspect of her teaching persona. I quickly learned what I needed to say so that they’d allow me to continue seeing Giesa—that I was learning the particulars and that I was beginning to believe. I genuinely tried. I didn’t want to lie to Giesa about it the way I’d deceived the government about the Barŏs. I didn’t think I could deceive Giesa even if I’d wanted to, and I didn’t try. But she never asked me outright, “Do you believe, Kristoff? Do you believe?” I think maybe she was afraid to know the real answer. Or maybe she believed that over time I would learn to see the universe in color.
I pledged myself to learning their ways for nearly eight months before they allowed me to be baptized in their faith. Before they let me proceed with the rite, I was called before a group of elders, with Giesa’s family as witnesses, and, as I understood it, I was to be asked about the faith. Most of the questions were about their beliefs—the tenets, the philosophical underpinnings. It was more like a test in my engineering classes than any examination of my own beliefs. Then, after all this was finished, the chief elder of the faith declared that there was one final question. He asked me, “Kristoff, can you tell me how you know that God exists?”
I hadn’t pondered that question at all. Again, I was still colorblind, utterly faithless. But still, I knew what to say. I answered in a single sentence, “Elder Strickler, I know God exists because Giesa does.”
“That is the totality of your answer, Kristoff Mikkel?” he probed further.
“What more need I know than that?”
Perhaps it was the correct thing to say, or perhaps it was the conviction with which I’d said it. The community celebrated my baptism with the same joy a family celebrates the birth of a child. They bathed me in water and declared that I was born anew, and the entire community held a feast.
Shortly after the rite, I moved closer to their community—to a city called Orrigi on the northern shores of the inland harbor of the Northern Continent. My family—my parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins—they were all baffled by the move. It had been generations since a Mikkel had moved from the borough our ancestors had established millennia before, since the age of colonization, when several of our distant ancestors had gone out into the Battery aboard colonial charters. Since then, all of Charris had settled, ossified into their family enclaves—no new outgrowth of families seemed permitted than new bacteria. I had a good position and decent prospects, they thought; why, then, would I throw that away by moving away from the capitol.
I didn’t tell them about Giesa. I intended to break the news to them in stages—one shock at a time. A shift in geography; a change of profession; a lovely new girlfriend, who, by the way, adheres to an unconventional faith; and, yes, I have adopted it. I told Giesa those were the stages she needed to walk through with my family, as I’d walked through the many stages with her family and community to find acceptance.
Time, unfortunately, did not permit, for the government had decided that the growing community of Giesa’s people had become an imminent threat to the biological balance on Charris. The ongoing dance between our dissident group and the government—of citation, violation, and denial, followed by admission, defiance, and punishment—it had persisted long enough and had reached a critical enough stage that the state had committed to resolving the issue definitively.
Overnight, everyone associated with the group was blacklisted publicly. All employers were sent the names of employees with an affiliation.
Surely, it was an embarrassment to the GMS that my name was among the dissidents. My supervisors, at my dismissal, instructed me to prepare for possible legal charges—fraud and deception, dereliction of duty, possibly conspiracy to violate the very environmental laws the GMS was established to uphold.
I was still very young then—all of twenty-three years old. My Giesa was barely twenty-one. I expected I might end up incarcerated, which was a rare punishment on Charris, especially in modern times.
My family all but disowned me. Some of them thought I’d had some sort of breakdown. I hadn’t had a breakdown by that point, but I was on the verge of one. None of my childhood friends would speak with me. I was far from home, living in a city that was no more friendly to Giesa’s people than people in the capitol were, and I was now blacklisted, jobless, aimless, and inducted into a luddite faith that prohibited me from even engaging in my hobbies, which were almost all tech-based—building robots and drones, racing, orb building, flying. My only reprieve from the sense that my life was ending was Giesa and her family, who all seemed utterly unconcerned by the charges. They would tell me that strife was a part of faith, a necessary test of it.
I took a walk with Giesa one afternoon at her parents’ home in Riobhan, a small community bordering the open sands to the north, about a half hour from my flat in Orrigi. We held hands and I discussed the possibility of being incarcerated. I confessed to her that I was afraid, and I asked her if she feared that as well.
“Not in the least, Kristoff. If you mind your lessons, you will well know that each of us is an instrument of God. It is not for an instrument of God to be fearful.”
That was all she said about it, as though that was all that needed to be said, that it was as obvious as the sky or the sands that surrounded us—manifestly true and obviously tangible and present in the world.
I did not feel like an instrument of God.
My successors at the GMS quickly fixed the navigation errors in their drones. Every subsequent attempt the group made to further their agricultural ambitions was stamped out with prejudice. Yet the Barŏs persisted. Giesa and her family were arrested and processed several times each, along with hundreds of others in the region.
What I was unaware of at the time was that Giesa’s sect was quite old—predating colonial times. They’d claimed this in their tradition, but I’d dismissed it as hyperbole, stories really. Because I’d never heard of their group in the Colonial histories, I had assumed they’d merely adopted those stories as a way to lend gravitas to their religious claims—a thousand-year tradition of fighting the government of the day for autonomy, and so forth. And in the history of the Colonial Era, there was no mention of a charter for religious separatists. Giesa’s father claimed there had been thirteen, one of which, in their people’s records belonged to them—a Barŏs exodus. He claimed they were already far out beyond the Battery colonies somewhere. The government knew. They just didn’t teach it. Admitting as much would encourage more people to adopt dissenting lifestyles. In the high levels of the government, he claimed, this was well known.
I tried to find information on such an expedition in the Colonial Archives. It didn’t even occur to me that the government would hide such things. It is strange how different the world I lived in was from the one I believed I lived in. Not only was it true, but the government had a number they considered tolerable. The critical mass was eighty thousand. We’d already reached that threshold, unbeknownst to us, and the government had registered the Barŏs at that critical level, targeted us for ostracism, and sent to the colonies for transport.
I was awaiting trial, very much in fear of the outcome, when word came through channels in the community that Charris would prefer—in their words—to offload the Barŏs to a planet called Texini, where a large community had been settled hundreds of years earlier. They told our elders of the planet’s simple lifestyle in the very same words our community’s doctrine spelled out as the ideal. Agriculture, an absence of modern technology, vast empty fields waiting to be claimed and cultivated.
For Giesa’s family, this outcome was preferable to fighting the government to remediate the sand bars of the Northern Hemisphere on Charris. That had always been unrealistic.
Then, to my shock, the ships appeared. I could hardly believe it was true. A secret so blatant and big. I returned to the capitol to discuss what was happening with my parents, who reluctantly agreed to meet with me. They thought I was insane. No one else was discussing ships—only the regular routes between Charris and Athos. Certainly, there were no colony ships anymore. Those days had gone past centuries prior.
Everyone but the Barŏs and the government ministers in the know were fully in denial. What was happening before everyone’s eyes was not happening, not to be seen, not to be discussed. With a trial looming, I chose to see, though.
What choice was there for me, really? Stay? Watch from Charris as the love of my life flew off to another world without me? Stand trial? Serve a long sentence only to return to a society that had nothing but contempt for a young man who’d turned his back on his own way of life?
Or I could marry Giesa and start a life with her on a new world—the very same adventure generations of Charrans had spent their school years reading and daydreaming about. We would be colonists again—witness the universe from the surface of a new world, a settled world. A quiet frontier.
Such joy was with us on our wedding day. Three days before we would leave Charris forever, we recited our vows in the old tradition. Many young couples like us were married that sunny morning in a group ceremony, sealing our lifelong unions before the long transit to our new world.
Afterwards, Giesa and I spent two of our final three days in the capitol with my parents. We were all filled with so many inexplicable emotions—sadness at our parting; a pride borne of nostalgia for that past era of colonization; while at the same time, there was the shame of what I’d done to take my place as such a colonist. My mother and father asked if someday they could come and visit. Of course, Giesa and I were supportive. Yet with a nearly fifteen-month transit to Texini, I knew it was unlikely they’d ever come see us.
Somehow, I knew I’d see Charris again, even though all the mechanisms of my life told me I was leaving forever. And amid all this, through the emotions and inner conflicts and the prospect of exile, still, I was excited to go, thrilled even, because I knew I was going with Giesa. We’d be together finally, and we would be together, I believed, for the rest of our natural lives.
We were assigned to the Arrow, a medium sized A-Range ring-driven jump ship with a manifest approaching twenty thousand. The ships were commissioned by the central government of Charris at the cost of requisitioned property belonging to the emigrants. The elders of the Barŏs community wrote the manifests and quarters assignments, and they did so generationally, so that us younger travelers were mostly bunched together, while the elders and more settled families traveled with those in similar stages of their lives.
Giesa and I bunked with two other young married couples who became our closest friends. We played cards, chess, and Sabaca together. There was lots of music, dancing, and among us three couples, we made sure that we all found time alone with our spouses, cramped as the quarters were.
I never in my life felt like I belonged in a place more or was ever so happy as I was on that long transit aboard the Arrow. The final weeks of that trip were almost more melancholic than our final weeks on Charris despite the reality we’d all gone a little stir crazy in those close confines. If not for daily prayer and meditation, I think a transit of that distance would have driven more people to emotional extremes. But there was among us a sort of peer pressure driven by adherence to the faith, and unbecoming behavior tended to reflect a lack of devotion on those who misbehaved. Rare outbursts usually led to public apologies that amounted to confessions of doubt, which the community responded to with outbursts of encouragement, prayers, songs, and sometimes group services that lasted days. After all, there was nothing but time on such a transit.
Then, one day, our three ships arrived in orbit over Texini. A little pink planet of red rocks and rolling hills. And there, on the plains, quite unnatural looking from the height of orbit, were these open green patches—fields of agricultural progress centuries in the making, all the work of our Barŏs predecessors.
There was no spaceport, no space elevator, no magnificent megastructures on the surface. Texini was the humble little colony one might imagine would be built by a society of Barŏs purists in exile.
Giesa and I were assigned a town in a northern valley, not quite on the outskirts of settled lands where our people, the new arrivals, were most densely concentrated. Our fellow travelers, cabinmates from the Arrow, all got bunched into the same little village, so we had a small community of our own from the outset. It was in that same valley, over two decades later, that Burch and Rishi and the rest of our crew found and rescued me from Texini’s Armageddon.
I wish I could tell you that our life on Texini was like our months aboard the Arrow, but love is much more complicated than that. At first, Giesa and I relished our new life together, taking walks in the empty green fields in the months before and after the crops were planted. We lived in the town, I assigned to the builders’ corps and Giesa taking up a post as a schoolteacher. Our home in the town was modest but warm, and we were truly happy. But as the months and then the years passed, we two grew older and our family didn’t grow. And being who we were and where we were, there was little we could do but pray and accept that the hardest things to accept were a part of God’s will as well.
Giesa accepted that, but she never got over the heartbreak of it. She never lost her faith, but she was angry at God every day, and she was angry at me. She doubted that I truly believed, and for most of our time together, she was correct. I wasn’t heartbroken the way Giesa was. I wanted a family, but not the way she did. I wanted it for her more than myself, I’d say.
Eventually, Giesa couldn’t bear to look at me. It wasn’t resentment, and it wasn’t because she’d stopped loving me. It was more that I reminded her of the pain.
She moved to an enclave to the west of our village where a few of her siblings had settled—far enough that it was difficult for me to visit. We’d been apart for nearly seven years by the time the world ended, and of course, the only thing I could think about in those final days, apart from somehow finding a way to survive, was Giesa—where she was, who she was with, whether there was anyone to comfort her, to protect her.
All those weeks before you showed up, Burch, I had long talks with myself about the choices I’d made to bring me to Texini. And I had long conversations with God. I wasn’t ever scared, though, not really, not after I escaped the initial wave of destruction. It was like I’d died already, died every day I sensed Giesa drifting apart from me and had no way to pull myself back to her. In those moments of solitude, as I was starving to death, her words all those years before would come drifting back to me: “It is not for an instrument of God to be fearful,” and I would always think, “Some instrument you are, Kristoff. Some instrument.”
And most days, then, I still didn’t believe, no matter how much I tried, no matter how much I wanted to, talking all day to a God I wasn’t sure was even there.
Kristoff drifted off to those memories, almost forgetting that he’d been talking, telling his companions the story of how he’d crossed their paths, so improbably. Burch, Rishi, and Verona waited politely in silence, expecting Kristoff to continue, but he didn’t. He’d gotten lost somewhere in that place.
“Do you believe now?” Verona asked him after that long pause. “Or maybe I should ask, what do you believe now, Kristoff?”
“I suppose that if I were making a case, there’s good evidence for both sides,” he said, turning his eyes back toward the group. “It’s easy to think, having witnessed the death of an entire world, an entire society of believers—reverent people, devoted people—it would be very easy to make the case that whatever God they believed in was not there for them. Yet the egoist in me, has no choice but to wonder: has God saved me, of all those people, for some purpose? Because here I sit, having witnessed the things I’ve witnessed, and I can’t help but wonder. Am I God’s instrument? And if so, what notes am I supposed to play in the grand symphony? I think about things like that from time to time. But I’m not sure what I believe.”
“I think about similar things,” Rishi declared. “In this war, millions of people in my situation died on their ships, breathless, frozen in the cold of space. I was on The Yankee that one day with the one AI clone in the galaxy that knew how to save me and did. Could that have been a coincidence?”
Burch nodded. “Most guys like me who got blasted the way I did once aren’t kicking anymore. I got blasted twice, and I’m still here, albeit with replacement parts, but I’m here, and, sure, so many others aren’t.”
“The thing is,” Kristoff said, “I can make a rational case. But it’s just like love, I think. There’s no need for rationalizing if you do believe, and there’s no amount of rationalizing that can make a skeptic believe if they don’t—just like you can’t talk someone into loving a person they don’t. They couldn’t even talk themselves into it. It would just be self-deception.
“I do know this though. We are here together, against odds that are so impossibly miniscule it’s fruitless to try to calculate, and I do believe we serve a purpose. And I will serve that purpose, for I do believe that I am an instrument of something greater than myself, and I do not fear. My heart knows love as well as it knows pain, and I know that I am meant to carry both across the universe with me, wherever my story ends.”
Verona smiled and put up a finger. “I have something for this,” she said.
She undid her waist strap and retreated to the port hallway just outside the flight deck’s entrance. She never quite fully disappeared from sight, her feet floating in the entryway as Rishi, Burch, and Kristoff watched quietly, smiling, wondering what Verona was fetching from the storage cabinets outside the foredeck quarters. Then suddenly, she flipped back over, looked back toward Burch, and floated a full zero-G shot glass his way.
“What’s this?” Burch asked, inspecting the glass.
“Athosian whiskey,” Verona answered. “Rishi, would you join us?”
“Just a little,” she replied. “It can’t hurt my body, but I’m afraid it will be wasted on me.”
“Not a waste,” Verona insisted, her head disappearing around the corner again.
A few moments later, she peeked around the corner once more and tossed one half-full glass to Rishi and then one full glass to Kristoff. Then she flew in and pulled herself back to her seat again, glass in hand.
“To Giesa,” Verona said once she was settled, “and her people—Kristoff’s people.”
Everyone raised their glasses.
“God’s people,” Kristoff added. “The Barŏs of Charris and Texini, humble dissidents, and forever a part of us all.”
Who knew Juice had such a romantic history! Nicely done! 🌻🌷🌼💮🪷