Lime Harbor

"At that very moment, we were walking history on a day that would be told and retold for generations to come."

The eras of human epochs are only flashes on the cosmic scale, but when the stars change, they change everything for the lives lived in their light. My family’s history was hopelessly intertwined with Lime Harbor long before her star, Aldura, began to fail. I had no memories of the city before. Mostly, the outpost had all but been abandoned before I was born. But the recordings of Lime Harbor in the golden days, which I’ve lived in VR more times than I can count, they were something beautiful. It could still be seen in the streets and architecture when I was a baby. My grandfather was the one who wouldn’t leave. It made me wonder about the ancient past. Who was the last resident to walk out of Jericho? What died that day when the last keeper of those ancient walls walked into the desert after hanging on to the very end?

For as long as I knew anything, I knew my grandfather Barlow Riche would never give up on Lime Harbor. His obsession was already decades-old by the time I was capable of understanding what obsession was. I also had no way of understanding what was special about Lime Harbor as a child. You have to travel to see how others live before understanding what’s so different about your own life. My grandfather Barlow was just a boy when the star Aldura began to change. Initially, the change was welcomed by the millions of citizens of Lime Harbor, whose nights suddenly lit up in brilliant colors brought on by an overactive aurora. Little did they know then that the light show was harbinger of the end for Lime Harbor—the dying gasp of an aging star.

I’d likely have no real memories of Barlow if I hadn’t met Sisco. She was an attendant on the light shuttle between the Carter cylinder group, where my father and much of his family moved after Lime Harbor, and Hellenia, where her family could trace its roots all the way back to Carrol Dreeson herself. I was studying engineering in Gracia, commuting each week, and I guess Sisco and I caught each other’s eyes on the shuttle. I ordered a coffee one week, and she put two chocolates on the saucer. The following week, without even asking, Sisco appeared with another coffee. It took about four weeks of coffee and chocolates for me to take the hint and summon the courage to ask her out.

After a few months, when I’d met most of her family, that’s when I learned how important genealogy was to their enclave in Gracia. They had lineage traced in formal files all the way back to the original settlers. Sisco herself was a Dreeson—one of the Dreesons. If there had been a monarchy anywhere in the Battery, she’d have been in it. So family was important to her. Mine, I didn’t know much about. Both my father and mother had come from Lime Harbor, I knew, but it was like our family’s history had been cut off when we left. All except for Barlow, who never did leave. We didn’t discuss him much growing up, but he was alive, as far as I knew, and it was important to Sisco to meet him. We were unofficially engaged by the time she started bringing it up, and with her job, she had access to travel that ordinary people didn’t. There hadn’t been commercial routes to Lime Harbor for decades, but Sisco had accrued enough benefits to charter a passage through the outer Battery on a multi-stop flight that would drop us in Lime Harbor so we could meet my grandfather. For her it was a sort of adventure as much as a familial obligation. I didn’t know what to expect, but it was a pilgrimage of sorts for me, back into a world my family didn’t discuss much anymore.

Sisco and I got off at the space elevator above the city. I was expecting it to be largely abandoned, but I was shocked by the sight of the place. It was dark, with random machine parts strewn over the concourse, including discarded torsos and heads of bots looming in the shadows.

“It’s like a robot graveyard,” Sisco said, shaking her head. “I’m a little worried about the elevator.”

I was too, but as we made our way from the airlock where the ship had dropped us, we found the gravity functional and the causeway well-lit to the elevator car at the center of the station.

When the skycar came up, there were four bots on board rolling carts filled with large metal spheres. They told us that we were the first visitors in years and that we’d have to wait until they unloaded their cargo “on the arrowheads” before the elevator car would make its way back down to the city. I offered to help unload their cargo but was told that each of the spheres weighed roughly half a ton in the .78 gravity of the spinning station.

“Your patience is all that is needed,” one of the bots told us, so we tagged along and waited for the arrowheads to return to the cargo port, where we watched the bots load the cargo into the docking ships. We stayed out of the way mainly before discussing what the bots were up to.

“I’m looking for my grandfather,” I told them. “Barlow Riche. I’m told there’s almost nobody here in Lime Harbor, but I don’t really know.”

“You must be Bart,” the bots’ team leader said. “Barlow is our programmer. He’s in the warehouse. We can bring you to him.”

They explained that they were working on a delivery system that would catalyze fission within the star Aldura, a process that Barlow had been working on ever since the corporate scientists had abandoned the planet decades earlier. The spheres, they explained, were slugs filled with chemicals printed in such an order that they created a magnetic field when burned off by the heat of the star—or so it was supposed to go. Slug, then catalyst, but thus far—nearly fifty years now—no one had been able to calibrate the chemical makeup of the slugs in such a way that they could deliver the catalyst far enough into the star to make a difference. Barlow was still trying, though. That was the story the bots told us on the way down.

The foyer in the space elevator on the ground was trashed. All the furniture had been hollowed out, the glass walls missing, the dark interior exposed to the bright sun that streamed into the vast, now-open concourse. There were more discarded bots and cracked shells of the spherical slugs lying about, as well as a broken-down cargo truck backed to the edge of the open outer wall. We followed the four workbots out of the concourse where there was a ground vehicle they invited us to board. Sisco and I sat in the back seat while two of the workbots hung on the car’s frame holding our luggage as we crossed the vacant city. The empty streets were striking. I’d only seen architecture like it in pictures of Earth. The buildings were stone and brick with sculpted figures along the rooves and corners of the majestic structures. Stone walls lined the walkways and alleyways. Huge stone tubs held the skeletons of dead trees, whose shedding bark revealed bald, white wood fossilizing in the hot sun. The cobblestone streets had a charm about them, even with a thick dust coat blowing back and forth in the warm breeze. It was a city whose husk was so appealing that Sisco and I turned to each other with the same thought at the same moment. “All it’s missing is people,” she said.

“What a beautiful city to live in,” I said. “If only it weren’t a radiation bath.”

The ride through the streets of Lime Harbor took far longer than I’d expected, but the city was much bigger than I’d thought. After about fifteen minutes, the bot in the passenger’s seat turned to us and announced that Barlow was in the “main house,” which looked like a castle to my eyes. It was a three-story stone façade with the typical statues along the corners and columns running up between the tall, vertical windows. It had a grand archway at the front entrance that opened to a large square piazza out front. It looked like a presidential palace, only the front doors were flung open wide, seemingly expecting a large party, or perhaps more fittingly in this scenario, a zombie horde.

An old man with graying hair, a long beard, and worn, leathery skin met us at the front door.

“Bart,” the old man said as we approached. “You look like your father. Come in. Make yourself at home. And please, who is this lovely young lady?”

“Bart,” Sisco said, laughing.

Nobody in my family called me Bart. Nobody else for that matter, but apparently that was my nickname as a baby, as my given name was Barlow as well. But after my parents had left Lime Harbor, everyone took to calling me Alex.

Barlow looked a lot like the old photos and videos; only now, he was older, and the white of his hair was striking. He escorted us into the inner rooms, the walls of which were lined with a thin metal sheeting, which I tapped with my finger as we entered the lower sitting area where the natural light was all blocked out.

“Lead paneling,” Barlow said. “It’s not perfect, but it’s better than full exposure.”

He’d lined the house with it, including the roof and upper rooms. I wondered at that moment how much Sisco and I had been exposed on the station and on the ride over, but Barlow didn’t seem too concerned.

He brought us into the kitchen and offered us a meal, which, after our long journey, we were happy to accept.

“What a surprise,” Barlow said. “It’s been almost three years since Daley passed on, nearly seven since your grandmother left now. I suppose if it weren’t for the bots and the work, I’d have lost my mind by now. I suppose your father thinks I have.”

“You seem all right to me, Barlow,” Sisco said. “But it’s an odd choice to live so alone.”

“I don’t think of it that way,” he said. “I never had any illusions about bringing people back in my lifetime, but I still think I can rescue this place, and maybe if it happens, these streets will be full of people again one day. As long as I’m working for those other people, I’m never really alone, just isolated.”

We ate, mostly in quiet comfort. It seemed Barlow didn’t remember how to act around people, what to say. It was mostly Sisco leading what little conversation there was. She asked him what he did all day, and he agreed to show us his workshop, where he printed the chemical compounds in his slugs and where he repaired the small army of bots he programmed to pilot the solar missions. He seemed quietly proud of the work he’d done here, even though it had yet to bear any fruit. Sisco said she was looking forward to the tour.

Barlow had set up his main shop in the warehouse left over by the astrophysicists the Harper Corp. had contracted to assess the feasibility of saving the star somehow. This was nearly three hundred fifty years after they had colonized the planet as a company town—mining, shipyards, several bot factories, and an engine foundry. The original astrophysics group had given the star an expiration date at least one hundred thousand years in the future. Thus, it was a shock to both the company and the residents when the old star began to cough out radiation in dangerous spurts that began to kill the plants and sicken the residents of Lime Harbor. Barlow was the only remaining custodian of the efforts of many hundreds of scientists to save the planet. He was quick to tell us that he was no scientist himself; although, he understood the process well enough to execute its day-to-day operation.

“Mostly I just repair robots when their circuits fry from radiation exposure,” Barlow told us. “They do all the heavy lifting. They fly the arrowheads through the corona. I just operate the machinery down here.”

Barlow had ten very impressive industrial printers fabricating the chemical spheres in the main room, which he wouldn’t let us enter without a respirator. We tracked him along as he supervised the bots screwing on the metal shells and rolling the spheres into the cargo trailers, which would go out hourly, nonstop, from the warehouse to the space elevator, where the car lifted the slugs into orbit, where they were run into the sun’s corona aboard the continuously-cycling, hard-shielded, heavy-payload arrowhead field ships. None of it was my specialty—deep-space structures and life support systems—but Barlow’s operation was a fascinating system to see in action. And to see someone with virtually no background in the sciences working the process with such fidelity and knowledge was inspirational, at least to me.

That night, back at the main house, Barlow asked us why we’d come. Sisco and I hadn’t had an explicit discussion about the visit, but I figured our future engagement was implicit in it somehow. Among Sisco’s enclave in Gracia, it was a cultural prerequisite for marriage that the living elders give their blessing, and though I hadn’t gone through any formal process, I knew her family approved of me. She told Barlow that this was part of what had brought us there. Sisco also just thought it was important for me to meet Barlow, to connect with him and see for myself what he’d dedicated his life to. She declared that Lime Harbor was the strangest place she’d ever been—beautiful, but strange.

“What happens if I say you two don’t have my blessing?” Barlow asked Sisco.

“It’s more a formality than any binding arrangement,” she said. “Tradition. And traditionally, nobody really says no.”

“I’m not exactly traditional,” Barlow said. “What if I made you earn it?”

“How so?” Sisco asked him, still not really considering that he was serious.

Barlow was difficult to read.

“I’d like for you two to stay for long enough that I get a chance to know you. I’d like to show you the history of Lime Harbor. I’d like Bart to learn about the engineering behind the Aldura reclamation. I can see that you think it’s a little crazy, but it’s not. Everything is very well calculated, and I need someone to learn about it. I’m the only one left now, and if I don’t make it, there’ll be no one to carry on, which would be a shame, because this planet can be saved.”

“Let’s say you’re right,” I said. “Let’s say you figure out how to calibrate the slugs and catalyze the star back to its former state. How long will it be stable? How long could Lime Harbor last?”

“They were wrong in the first place, the stellar physicists,” the old man said. “But the floor on their estimates was a million years, maybe more. It’s nothing in the life of a star, but it’s a window larger than human civilization itself. People won’t even remember the years when this city was abandoned. When I tell you of the beauty of this place—your birthright, young Bart—you’ll hardly believe how amazing it was. Lime Harbor was a wonder.”

“I can see it,” I said, gesturing to the house of our ancestors, this palace of the Riches who’d preceded my father and Barlow himself.

“I was born in this house,” he said. “Seventy-seven years ago. My hope is that someday, maybe another seventy years from now, your great grandchildren will walk up and down these stairs.”

“It’s a nice thought,” Sisco said. “Anyway, Alex and I had planned to stick around for a little while. It’s not exactly easy to get a ride out here, Barlow.”

Sisco and I made ourselves at home in the main house. Barlow informed us that as long as we got up before the sun got too high in the sky, we were safe in any room in the house, so we slept in one of the upper bedrooms with a balcony that overlooked the lower city. The stone architecture made Lime Harbor look like pictures of ancient European cities like Paris or Rome. There were even large monuments along the horizon, one large stone structure modeled after the Triumph Arch in Paris, which Barlow informed us was the worker’s monument. That was what caught Sisco’s attention—the history of the planet, the founding and the shift over the generations toward autonomy from corporate control. While I spent the week with Barlow learning the details of the plan to save the star, Sisco, genealogist that she was, set about learning Lime Harbor’s history. And quite unlike me, who had no knack for distilling the complexity of engineering problems, Sisco had a talent for explaining complex historical movements in terms anyone could understand in a few sentences.

What had made Lime Harbor special, according to Sisco, was the long vision of the early residents, who realized that Harper Corp.’s most critical timeframe was the quarter. The workers, though, had moved there for life. They took a generational view on negotiating for their rights and privileges. The key concession they collectively bargained for was the ability to invest in shares on the labor of company bots. At first, this amounted to a tiny percentage of Harper Corp.’s labor over the course of each quarter, but within two generations, the residents of Lime Harbor collectively owned over sixty-five percent of the robotic labor on the planet. Over the course of that time, they began to quarry stone and build traditional houses in the city that they owned. Once the majority of the citizens owned their housing outright, Harper Corp. realized they no longer had employees but hundreds of thousands of junior partners. That was when the city truly began to flourish. The people did very little corporate work for the shipyards and mines; rather, they sent their bots to work. Instead of laboring for the company, most people invested in second businesses in the city—fashioning jewelry, clothing, beautiful household items, and agricultural commodities that got shipped all over the Battery systems. The city itself became a destination for shopping and vacations. There was even a successful ski resort and lake destination for several generations. The festivals rung with music and bells. The skies lit up at night with fireworks and laser shows.

In the evenings when we returned from the warehouse, Barlow would tell Sisco about the specifics of the Riche family, telling stories back through the generations. “We did know our genealogy, like your people, looking back,” he told Sisco. “But our ancestors paid much more attention to looking forward, handing a birthright to each child born in Lime Harbor. When I was born, the traditional gift at a baby shower was a percentage card in bot labor. From the day I was born, I was already earning interest on the two bots that were owned in trust for me, even as the city was falling apart.”

At night, Sisco and I would stand out on the balcony looking at the sky. That fatally beautiful aurora was like nothing we’d ever seen.

“I feel like a queen up here in this palace,” Sisco said, the green and blue rippling overhead like waves on a cosmic shore. “Do you think it could be possible, Alex? Could it ever come back?”

“Statistically, it’s likely if someone kept working here, maybe in fifty years people could move back. Like the early settlers, if people thought about it in generational terms, eventually that persistence would pay off. I don’t think Barlow expects to live to see anyone moving back, though. I get the sense he’s resigned to his invisible place in history.”

“What do you think about him?”

“He’s not what I expected. I’m not sure what I expected. A crazy old man? An obsessive hanging on to a dead dream? He’s not that, though. He’s just a little different.”

“I like him,” Sisco said. “There’s something noble about all that sacrifice for a cause, even if it’s destined to fail.”

“You think it is?”

She nodded. “Who’s going to stay if not us? And I don’t think we can stay.”

“No,” I said. “It’s why everyone left. There’s no future here—no near-future anyway.”

“It’ll be a nice dream to take back with us,” Sisco said.

We slept up there with the window open, lying with the sky buzzing above us. My eyes kept getting drawn to the fossilized lime tree in the decorative stone barrel out on the balcony, a frozen reminder of the planet’s demise, still bathing after half a century in the fatal light of that failing star.

During the daylight hours when the sun was dangerous, Barlow and I spent most of our time in the inner office he’d constructed within the warehouse, a small, two-room control station he’d lined with lead sheeting—a sort of radiation tortoise shell where the old man spent most of his time. It was functional but not comfortable. From here, he kept track of the operation, mostly repairing bots. But the radiation didn’t just fry the bots. It caused havoc in the bot factory, which was the only part of Lime Harbor’s original operation still running as designed. Barlow estimated they had enough raw materials to keep building bots at a rate that could sustain the current pace for another ten years. At some point, Barlow said, he’d need to barter for materials or somehow find a way to start up mining operations again, but he didn’t know the state of the machinery. The mining equipment hadn’t been running for decades now, and much of the necessary hardware had been sitting idly in the solar flare.

Eventually we got down to numbers. “It’s what everything comes down to, one way or another,” Barlow said.

He was no numbers guy. He was more of a follow the flow chart guy, and he’d done a good job of it. If he kept the operation running at its current pace, there was a near mathematical certainty of discovering the correct calibration for the slugs in less than thirty years. There wasn’t a way to speed it up, because it took time to get feedback from the star itself, and surface area was limited. If they didn’t see a reaction on the plot where they dropped a slug within a week, it was safe to assume the calibration on the slug was wrong. If the readings ever “popped” as Barlow worded it, then they would test again with the same composition. Barlow had only ever gotten two positive readings, both of which had proven to be false alarms.

“Once we have the composition right,” Barlow said. “It’s just a matter of time and attrition.”

“Can I ask you,” I said. “Do you think Harper Corp. would have abandoned the place if the people didn’t have such a huge financial stake in the shipyard and the mine? As long as we’re talking numbers.”

“I hadn’t really thought about it, Bart,” he said. “Maybe not. But the thing is, it’s the same as it was in the beginning. They see the future in quarters, not quarter-centuries.”

“What happens if you hit the jackpot tomorrow?” I asked him.

“Then it all changes,” Barlow said. “The work changes. We build more ships, more bots, more slugs. The whole focus of the operation shifts to delivering catalyst deep into the star.”

“I could model it—how to ramp up that operation. I took several systems courses during my qualifications. I could maybe help you answer that question while we’re here.”

“It’s good of you,” he said. “It’s good to have you two here.”

The following day, one of the manufacturing arms at the bot plant went down. I was getting ready to go down there with Barlow to help him fix it. He wouldn’t let me out of the shell.

“I want you and your Sisco under the lead, boy.”

“And what about you? Couldn’t it wait till nightfall.”

Barlow shook his head, considering. “Not at my age,” he said. “Everything’s a tradeoff, and you two have too much to lose.”

So off he went, alone as he usually was, to repair failing infrastructure for the thousandth time. I had the thought that all those other times he’d put himself out there like that, there’d been no one to care for him or what he did. No one to worry.

That night at dinner, Sisco and I caught Barlow discretely wiping blood from his lips with his napkin. He described the repair as nothing major—routine stuff. I wondered how much of that routine stuff he’d done under the full glare of Aldura’s radiation with no one watching. How many years of damage?

“Thirty years at the outside,” I said to Sisco that night on the balcony. “That’s how long it could take just to calibrate the slugs. Barlow told me he wants us to go, and he’s right. He wouldn’t let us stay if we wanted to.”

“I don’t really understand statistics,” Sisco said. “But isn’t finding the right combination just as likely tomorrow as thirty years from now? And hasn’t he been at it for decades already? Statistically speaking, isn’t the old man due soon?”

“I hope so,” I said.

We were well into our second week sleeping under the glow of Aldura’s aurora. Even as our visit was a beautiful and life-changing experience, I was starting to feel sluggish. I wondered whether it was the radiation or perhaps my own mind suffering under the thought of the radiation, my subconscious somehow telling me that Sisco and I needed to get out of there.

The following morning, at breakfast, the old man smiled at Sisco and said, “Of course you have my blessing, you beautiful kids. I wish you all the joy in the universe, I truly do.”

It was his way of telling us it was time to go, time to call back our ship. Sisco put in a call to her company to cycle the next available route back to Lime Harbor. They gave us an estimate of ten days and then a window of nearly two months if we missed that flight. That settled it. We discussed the situation that night, that it was probably the last time we would ever spend with Barlow. Sisco decided to make the best of it, to fix lunches so we could all eat together during the day and at night. She also had some scheme she was organizing that she wouldn’t tell me about, but she’d asked me to put together a bot from disparate pieces and not tell Barlow about it. She spent hours editing together VR recordings, video files, and photos of her family and ours to leave with him, and she started recording parts of our time with Barlow and our trips around Lime Harbor after the sun went down. I felt like I was coming up short by simply working alongside Barlow each day and keeping him company while Sisco came up with so many good ideas to help him feel less isolated, like an important part of our family, but she insisted that was the best thing I could be doing, helping him feel like his work was important. As the week went on, I just kept feeling sadder and sadder, almost viscerally so, like there was a knot growing in my stomach, tightening and tightening with each day counted down.

The countdown was at four days when it happened. Barlow and I were sitting in the shell going over the inventory on worn out bots that I’d inspected the week before. It turned out he could piece together nearly seventy bots by re-wiring units he’d already given up on. The 10 shift came down from the space station with a readout from a plot they’d slugged four days prior. Barlow’s eyebrows raised when he pulled up the numbers on the feed.

“That’s a clear signal,” he stated.

He was tough to read, but I could tell he was struggling to repress his excitement.

“How do those numbers compare to the prior false signals?”

He pulled up those hits and overlaid the numbers from the recent signal.

“Looks like nearly double,” Barlow said. “I’ve never seen that before, Bart.”

I started thinking about the steps we’d need to go through to confirm it. I counted days. It was cutting it close, perhaps too close.

“We need the specs on that slug, stat,” I said. “How fast could we get a run up in the air?”

“We’ve got forty-five slugs scheduled to go up now, another twenty in an hour,” Barlow said. “What’s a large enough sample size if we use those as the control?”

“I mean, how much certainty do we need? Two more hits would be an impossible accident if we could get them up with the next car. I could have them printed in an hour.”

Barlow’s steady old hands began to shake. “Half a century, young Bart,” he said, but I wasn’t certain whether he was referring to the fifty years he’d spent toiling under lead sheets or the fifty years it was going to take before the city was livable again if he’d finally gotten the slugs calibrated. It had to be right, though. We had to confirm it.

I had two slugs printed and up on the arrowheads two hours later. If all went well, we might know by the time the ship arrived to take me and Sisco back to Hellenia.

In the meantime, I had put together a patchwork robot for Sisco to execute whatever plot she had planned for Barlow. She asked me a few obscure questions about the warehouse, but I didn’t really have a clue she was scheming something big until the bot started appearing at the main house in the middle of the night. I was almost curious enough to follow Sisco when she snuck downstairs to confer with her co-conspirator. When she tiptoed back into the bedroom and over to the window, she knew I was awake, and she knew what I was thinking.

“It’ll be more fun if it’s a surprise to both of you.”

“I’ve been thinking,” I told her, “about the process if it really works. He’s going to need help with the transition. I’ve been running simulations.”

“It’s going to take years, isn’t it?”

“Years to get the process rolling properly, yes. Then decades before it changes anything. Even with a team, I’m worried he won’t last long enough to see it implemented. Without help, the old man is doomed to fail.”

She was looking out at the aurora, my Sisco. I was thinking about the prospect of coming back here, getting things off the ground if the calibration panned out. Barlow’s work couldn’t go to waste, but just like the old man, I couldn’t stand the thought of her here with me, watching each day as the sky rained down millions of miniscule bullets, taking apart my Sisco cell-by-cell over the years. I watched her there in the dark, radiant in the light of the aurora. I’d have done anything to protect her.

“Then we’ll have to find a way to help him,” Sisco said. “Barlow’s life can’t be in vain. We’ll have time to think about it on the trip back.”

Sisco was wearing glasses when she showed up at the warehouse on the final afternoon before we were scheduled to depart. Barlow scolded her for coming down by daylight as he ushered her into the building, extending his arm over her shoulder, as though one second of shelter under his worn-out old body could make a true difference. It seemed more than a gesture, a genuine act of faith.

We still had no confirmation on the slugs; although, Barlow was so convinced that he was willing to lose three days on that initial reading. He’d already begun printing to the same specs. He was preparing to spin up the second warehouse to manufacture the catalyst. The old man could hardly contain himself. Sisco asked for a tour, and to the extent he was willing to let her poke around with any sort of exposure, he talked for minutes on end about the ins and outs of each part of the warehouse. I knew she was recording for VR with her glasses, for posterity, I thought. He looked happier than I’d ever seen him. I could tell the old man loved her. He wouldn’t let her out of the lead sheeting until the sun was almost down. She said she had to get back, that she had something special planned for dinner.

“I hate the thought of you two in the sun,” he said. “Go fast.”

She sped off in one of the warehouse vehicles, back to the main house to put the finishing touches on her plot.

Barlow and I stayed past sundown, working to get him as far along as possible in the process of transitioning to the catalyzing phase of the work to save Aldura. After decades of maintenance and repetition of a process he’d long mastered, Barlow would need to take charge of a similarly complex but very different set of challenging skills. I was doing my best to get him up to speed on new equipment and the science behind it. I was impressed by his determination of spirit, but I kept coming back to the same thought: Barlow needed help.

Sisco pinged us after the sun went down to let us know that dinner was getting cold. And she told Barlow she’d prepared something special for him.

By the time we got back to the main house, the sky was dark and beginning to ripple with color. Sisco and her patchwork robot had set up a table on the roof so we could eat under the aurora. The meal was excellent, but there wasn’t a whole lot Sisco could do with the supplies on hand. Barlow had never made food a priority, so what he grew was limited. Sisco had baked a cake, though, and this nearly brought the old man to tears.

“For all the birthdays we missed,” she said.

“I can’t remember the last time I had cake,” Barlow said. “It’s amazing, Sisco, dear. You’re a sweet girl.”

I noticed that she’d placed her glasses on the railing at the edge of the roof. I didn’t know what she was up to, but I had a sense that her surprise was bigger than cake.

Shortly after we’d finished eating, Sisco turned to me and said, “Alex, I have a confession to make. You aren’t the only engineering student I met on the Gracia shuttle, and it turns out it’s not that difficult to turn a pipe into a mortar.”

I had about a second to puzzle over the meaning of that peculiar statement before it happened. I’m not sure how exactly she timed it so perfectly, but at that moment, an enormous explosion of color erupted along the rooftops over Lime Harbor. It started modestly, with fireworks of all sizes, shapes, and colors, drawing our eyes in all different directions. Then it went on and on, with larger and more impressive blasts filling the sky. I couldn’t look away even for long enough to check the time, but the display must have gone on for an hour. There were hardly enough lulls in the show to say more than a few words. “How?” was the one I directed at her the most. Sisco just shrugged and smiled.

When it was all over and the quiet colors of the aurora were all that lit the night on the roof of the main house, Sisco turned to Barlow and said, “I knew you wouldn’t be here when this city celebrates your life, when it’s a real city again like in the old days and all these rooves are filled with people on Barlow Riche day. I believe we’ll be there to see it, and we’ll remember this night.”

He was speechless. Sisco brought the old man to tears and nearly me too. It was a night we would never forget.

I was still hopeful by the following morning that we might get readings from the arrowheads coming back from Aldura that confirmed the success of the test slugs from earlier in the week. Sisco and I discussed whether I should stay if we learned it was time to start catalyzing the star. We agreed to leave regardless. Sisco was glad we were leaving. She wanted us both to have a full medical assessment when we got back so that we had a sense of how long it would be safe for anyone to be in Lime Harbor.

“Who else would come here?” I asked her.

“We’ll see,” she said.

That morning, Barlow saw us off inside the broken-out concourse of the Lime Harbor space elevator.

“Keep me up to date on your progress,” I told him. “And please, let me know immediately when you get word on the star.”

“I will, Bart,” he said. “I love you, boy.”

I didn’t think about it at all; I just said, “Please, call me by my given name, Barlow. Nobody calls me Bart.”

“Young Barlow,” he said. “Has a nice ring to it.”

“We’re just a transmission away,” Sisco said. “We’ll be keeping in touch.”

She and the old man shared a long hug before we finally had to pull ourselves away toward the skycar. It was a long, quiet ride up with the warehouse bots. They were already loading catalyst in spheres. Barlow was ready to go. It would take a tremendous effort to upscale the process, though. The modeling called for hundreds of arrowheads cycling through every hour dropping thousands of slugs filled with catalyst to change the trajectory of the star’s decline. A staff of a hundred engineers was truly what was needed.

Sisco caught me sighing by the airlock as we tracked the progress of our ship coming in.

“We’re not going to let him fail, Barlow,” Sisco said to me. “When word comes, we’re going to make him the most famous man in the Battery.”

“You’re up to something aren’t you?”

“I’ve met more than engineering students on my shuttle run,” she said. “I have a friend who’s a documentarian.”

“You do?”

She nodded. “Patches and I got into the Lime Harbor archives while you were off with Barlow. I have thousands of hours of footage from the old days of the city. I recorded nearly everything on this trip too—the fireworks, the warehouse, the foundry. It’s a story that can’t go untold, and my friend, he’s excellent, a real artist.”

“A documentarian? You sure make a lot of friends, Sisco.”

She nodded. “You jealous?”

I thought about it for a moment. “No,” I said. “I’m not.”

She looked at me inquisitively.

“Because I know who you are, Sisco Dreeson. And I know who I am. I’m Barlow Riche, grandson of the man who single-handedly saved Lime Harbor.”

“We’ll do our part too,” she said.

As the ship pulled up and docked, I couldn’t help but think it was more than just a day in our lives. I had the sudden realization of who we were, the links in the chain we were. We would be back with teams of engineers and workers, ready to take up Barlow’s mission. At that very moment, we were walking history on a day that would be told and retold for generations to come. Sisco and I would be back in Lime Harbor, and we would bring millions with us, whether we lived to see them all or not. Chills went up my spine.

“So we’re going to make a documentary?” I said.

“We’re going to show the galaxy what a few good people can do,” Sisco Dreeson said.

Fireworks over Lime Harbor, the night skies lit up over thousands of years. It was all I could think of as we boarded our ship back to Hellenia. I couldn’t wait to be back here again. Soon. What a story it was going to be. It was all coming back again. Lime Harbor was coming back. Whatever it took, Lime Harbor was coming back.