The Prospectors

"Masters of the inner world, hopeless in the real world. People who can’t do for themselves have to manipulate the ones who can."

In the deep of space, it is often said that a planet cannot become a world until it is peopled. The destruction of planets sometimes begins with supernovae, with the gradual mega-expansion of aged stars, or with the greedy hunger of wandering black holes. What then destroys a world? Billions of uninhabitable planets never have a chance to become a peopled world. Some worlds die after long inhabitations following the decline or self-immolation of vast empires and civilizations. Other worlds die in their infancy, before a civilization has a chance to fully take root. Such was the fate of Damon Mines.

The settlement began as not much more than a mining outpost on a small, lifeless, rocky planet with a breathable atmosphere and a few limited pools of liquid water. As a place to live, there was little to recommend it, for the planet was arid, hot, and hostile to habitation. The earliest visits recounted a dusty, unpleasant surface riddled with impassible mountains and a gravity in the moderate range of the habitability zone, at slightly greater than point-eight-six G. To the eyes, Damon Mines was drab and unappealing, governed mostly by a distant orange sun that for most of the year left the sky a dim brownish, sepia that reflected off the rust-colored hills in a dull haze. The look of the place, and the elemental profile, at first glance, made it a strong candidate to be skipped over or stripped for its nitrogen and oxygen for use on the massive planetary rings of the nearby systems of Dreeson’s and Carroll’s stars. In fact, it was a survey mission for just such a project that detected such rich deposits of valuable transition metals that Damon 2, as the planet was then called, was re-designated Damon Mines, and plans shifted from using it as a nitrogen source to re-zoning for industrial mining, specifically for platinum, palladium, osmium, silver, and gold, all of which were deposited in generous lodes spanning the entire planet. Finding such wealth fixed in the rocks of Damon Mines prompted the earliest expeditions to look closely at the single, small moon, where they did not find precious metals but massive deposits of, some might argue, equally valuable salts that were in great demand, especially in Carroll’s system.

When the earliest calls went out for qualified mine hands and managers, the stark landscape on Damon Mines left corporate speculators little choice but to reward workers handsomely for their willingness to rough-it on a dusty, rocky, barren landscape for months-long stretches. These early mercenary miners, unsurprisingly, cared little for the place. But it was during this time that a small but dedicated faction of the working class, cylinder-dwelling laborers, under the philosophical influence of the Ivernian Workers’ Rights Movement, began to pool their resources. Their hope and their goal was to locate and populate nearby planetary bodies so they might establish a back door into a free market economy once again.

One such hopeful working couple was a young married pair from the Carroll Iver cylinder group, Maria and Oscar Sinhá, who, more than anything, hoped to raise children who would be able to set their own course in the stars, free from the strictures and regulations that a society of trillions required of its citizens. Maria especially lamented the lack of free choice their AI micromanaged lives afforded them, comfortable as things were. For to be one of so many humans living together on such a staggeringly vast artificial environment, they knew, required planning and careful coordination, as a nation of trillions could hardly afford to suffer a famine, supply shortage, or energy crisis and hope to endure the unimaginable undulating revolt that would follow. The tradeoff in personal choice that citizens made was for regularity, security, and adherence to a largely pre-ordained set of life pathways, an adherence that had worn on Maria as unappealing, even soul-crushing in her youth. She longed for independence and adventure, and she found a partner in Oscar who was willing to sacrifice any degree of comfort to experience a sense of ownership for the lives they intended to build together. So, when they heard about independent stakes in Damon Mines, Oscar learned all he could about RAV Fleet and Nano-tunneling operating systems, and Maria accepted a position in the expedition as a community planner.

The Sinhás were among the earliest arrivals in Harpersville, one of the five remote mining outposts at the foothills of a massive mountain range on Damon Mines’ southern continent. And, at first, the outpost wasn’t much more than a scattered collection of pop-up habitats, freight containers, solar panels, and high-energy, hard-handed, low-maintenance prospectors. This earliest group shared a spirit of camaraderie and cooperation. Most of them were young like the Sinhás, looking to raise children, start schools, and form a sense of community that they all had a hand in directing.

The Sinhás, like most of their fellow prospectors, spent the first few years on Damon Mines purchasing the rights to their rental gear with the fruits of their labor, largely at higher-than market cost. Their food was entirely too expensive, and they had little chance to upgrade their accommodations until they paid on their borrowed gear. Despite their relatively low standard of living compared to the friends and family they’d left to start their new life, the Sinhás and their fellow prospectors were happy in their work. Each ton of extracted metal brought them closer to autonomy. They became smarter and more proficient survivors and producers. And in the third and fourth years on Damon Mines, Maria Sinhá gave birth to two sons, who were just two among the growing first-generation citizens of Harpersville.

By year five, Oscar and Maria had paid off their robotics lease and had taken a mortgage on an AI foreman, which Oscar hoped to leverage into an arm large enough that he could leave an equal share to each of their children when they came of age. At the rate their business was growing, in two decades, the Sinhás would have a formidable business, and the town itself would be a modest blossoming city. The landscape even seemed to grow more tolerable, starkly beautiful at times, in certain lights, especially when Damon’s tiny salt moon was so shockingly close in its elliptical orbit that the planet seemed the moon and the moon a giant planet monopolizing the dim sky.

Prospecting proved a difficult life, and sometimes too difficult for some of the Sinhás closest friends, who, even with the earnest help of the community, would fail to make payments and face foreclosure. Other once-eager explorers succumbed to the stress of unfettered living, retreating to the cylinders of Carroll’s Star for a safer, more manageable and managed life. One of their earliest neighbors perished in a shipping mishap, when a stack of containers tipped onto his nearby loader. But no hardship could have prepared Oscar for the sudden death of Maria in their seventh year on Damon Mines, to an aneurism that likely would have been survivable if only they’d been closer to civilization. The suddenness of it, the deep shock of such a loss, and the responsibility of raising two young sons alone in such a place fell upon Oscar unimaginably in a single afternoon, all while he was out of town, in the hills, prospecting.

Through those years, after Maria was gone, the stark emptiness of the hills in the distance loomed over the small, broken family in almost every light. Harpersville became a difficult, joyless place. The boys, James and David, now spent less time in school and more time assisting Oscar in the field, learning the basics of the trade, from building macro-robotic tools and systems to directing self-propagating nano tunneling ecosystems for extracting metals, molecule by molecule, like a fog of tiny ants pulling platinum and silver from beneath the mountains.

As the boys grew into teenagers, with the homestead well established, Oscar decided that the family had built enough disposable income that they could splurge on a luxury he never would have considered before. Maria’s dream had always been to live in a home with a dog. So, on the anniversary of their mother’s passing, Oscar paid an exorbitant sum for a bulldog puppy the boys decided to name Gregor. He brought joy and life back into the Sinhá household, and he was such a rarity in those rural outposts that Harpersville became known as the town with the dog, and Gregor, handsome and personable by nature, became a little celebrity of sorts, the beneficiary of a lifelong string of random treats and exaggerated fawning from neighbors and visitors alike.

As the boys grew into young men, they mastered their father’s trade, tripling the family’s wealth when they each began to operate their own claims in their mid-teenage years under Oscar’s auspices. Not long after, many of their peers followed in their footsteps, greatly amplifying the city’s wealth. And in those prosperous years, when the second generation of Harpersville’s residents were coming of age, the city began to boom. New style housing began to go up on the outer plain, where there had only been rocks and dust. The small strip of restaurants and cantinas that had remained exactly the same for a decade grew larger, livelier, and new. The city rang with music at night. More people from the cylinders came to Damon Mines in search of a piece of what the Sinhás had spent two decades building, and even though Maria hadn’t lived to see it with him, Oscar knew she’d have been happy to see James and David growing into independent young men.

In the twenty-second year of Harpersville’s establishment, they welcomed a group of visitors to their humble city, as they had done many times in their history. It was a well-established rule of sorts in space-faring cultures, often called “shippers’ law,” that one should never deny a ship a shore nor send them back to space unsupplied at a fair price. For it wasn’t difficult for outliers, such as the miners of Harpersville, to envision themselves in the other’s position, desperate for water or food but never shy about putting their hands in to share the work.

These visitors called themselves Frinzen, originating from the moon colony Frii, an expedition composed of about twenty thousand emigrants who’d split from the main colony over religious differences. The situation had devolved into sectarian violence so severe that co-habitation of the Frii moon became untenable.

Their ship needed extended maintenance following an interstellar passage of nearly seventeen years. They were also badly in need of water and, as it happened, salt, which were both readily available in the Damon system. They were welcomed into orbit and invited to trade and pass freely in any of the cities of the world so long as they held with the laws of the colony while planetside. Rarely had visitors violated that sacred trust, not just in the short history of Damon Mines, but there were scant stories of poor behavior among visitors in most prospecting outposts, for it was well understood that it would take very little for a protective culture to close its doors, and a closed port was no port at all. These Frinzen, though, held different ideas about what should be sacred, and they never planned on being back this way again.

Very little was known of their history, so the people of Damon Mines had only the account of the Frinzen as to why they’d taken to the stars—a tale of oppression and victimhood at the hands of an arrogant and imperious traditionalist majority. They spoke of wrongful imprisonment, unprovoked pogroms, and a legal system tilted hard against any Frinzen who did not denounce their divergent ways. It was a compelling, empathy-inducing story.

Oscar Sinhá had little time to listen to such nonsense. He and his boys had work to do, contracts to fill, metals to pull and transport. The Sinhás, as usual, were hustling. When the Frinzen arrived, the Sinhá men were out in the K-grid, systematically working through veins embedded in a platinum-rich range of the southern mountains. Their mode was usually to work for two weeks, load up, and transport their yield back to Harpersville for shipping.

On the Friday evening the Frinzen arrived, James and David glided back into town early, while Oscar, Gregor the bulldog, and Samson the AI foreman were buttoning up the mining site for a three-day respite. Following their usual custom, the boys planned to meet friends at Hannah’s for a few drinks in celebration of another profitable session.

They were surprised to find the town crowded. Even the old pod housing from the outpost’s earliest days was being used as lodging for their newly-arrived interstellar guests. When they entered Hannah’s, James and David found their usual table occupied. The occupants were strange looking. Such delicate people didn’t usually find themselves on an outer world like Damon Mines. The brothers smiled at the garish, functionless clothing and the thin, soft features of the outsiders.

As the night progressed and the outsiders began to intermingle with the occupants of the mining town, it was as though two decidedly different species of humans were coming together. The rough-skinned miners with their broad shoulders, dirty hands, and purposeful movements didn’t quite know how to react to such thin-boned, flowery-tongued, callous-free people, who seemed more decorative than functional. It was difficult for the miners to decide whether these Frinzen were of any use at all. The miners whispered amongst them-selves, wondering how these people would ever manage to put together a civilization once they got where they were going. “I hope they got decent robots,” James Sinhá said, when his younger brother David posed that very question.

With the drinks flowing, the uniqueness of this opportunity to interact with so many outsiders piqued the Sinhá brothers’ curiosity. They spent time exchanging stories of their lives with a pair of attractive, fine-haired Frinzen girls who appeared to be their age.

After he and David described their lives as miners to the girls, James asked, “What do y’all do all day, if you got no work to speak of on that ship?”

“We work to perfect our mastery of our own minds through meditation, fullness of mental well-being, and building one-ness of spiritual presence,” the dark-haired girl, Kayton -George, said. “It is a process that takes decades of mental discipline to master.”

“Sounds captivating,” David said, prompting laughter from both himself and his older brother.

“You two should join us for worship,” Aleesa, the fair-haired Frinzen girl said. “You should not be so dismissive of such things you clearly do not understand.”

“No need to get so offended,” James said. “We just don’t have a lot of time around here for…what did you call it? Mental clarity of spiritualism?”

The girls were indignant as the boys smiled at their foreign companions’ strange ways. They flat-out refused to continue speaking to the Sinhá boys until they issued a genuine, contrite apology for insulting their deeply-held beliefs. Eventually, surprised by the seriousness of the offense, the boys apologized, and as part of their penance, they agreed to meet the girls the following afternoon so they could witness the first steps in the Frinzen rites. Then, as if nothing bad had happened at all, the friendly mood returned, and the brothers had a fine night getting to know these strange outsiders.

When Oscar Sinhá finished breakfast the following morning, both his sons were still asleep, which wasn’t particularly troublesome to Oscar, because he could handle the shipping transfers and the finances by himself, but he’d been trying to steadily encourage the boys to take a hand in the details of the business. And recently, they’d been all for it.

Oscar Sinhá, Gregor the bulldog, and Samson the AI headed off for the transfer station, which took them out past the old section of town, the original Harpersville where the old pop-up housing pods were usually sitting derelict, only today, there was activity, an unusual set by the looks of them.

“Some kind of elves, Gregor?” Oscar said, rubbing the old bulldog’s ear. “I ain’t never met a elf before, boy. Sure are funny looking.”

Gregor the bulldog looked up at Oscar Sinhá inquisitively, as he usually did when the old man talked to him.

“I don’t know what a elf smells like, buddy,” Oscar continued. “You’re gonna have to tell me.”

“These visitors are Frinzen,” Samson explained. “Exiles from the Frii moon, in transit to a segment in the Haar Cluster, or so their portage petition states. They’ve taken orbit to repair and re-stock. No particular cultural guidelines were issued from the home office in Hatria.”

“Thank you for that update, Sammy,” Oscar said, eyeing up the funny-looking outsiders as the loader glided through the old town. “Looks like a fascinating bunch.”

After conducting the family’s business at the transfer station, Oscar returned home. When he and Gregor arrived, he found that James and David were entertaining two of the female elves as he’d called them. Their eyes got incredibly large when they sighted Gregor, almost as though Oscar wasn’t even there.

“Oh my God, a dog!” the light-haired Frinzen girl said.

“We heard there was a dog in this town,” the darker haired girl said to David. “You didn’t tell us it was your dog.”

“He’s so beautiful,” the first girl said.

“Oscar Sinhá,” Oscar said as they crouched down to pet Gregor. “This is my house, and it looks like you’ve met my two boys, who don’t know how they should introduce their new friends, on account of we don’t get many visitors round here.”

James took the hint. “Pap, this is Aleesa and Kayton-George. They’ve come through with the Frinzen ship.”

Oscar stood in front of them as they knelt and fawned over Gregor, waiting for them to stand up and shake his hand properly.

“Hi,” they both said in succession, looking up at Oscar, as they rubbed Gregor’s ears and neck.

Oscar forgave the indiscretion on account of the girls’ youth and on account of Gregor. Oscar recognized that the old bulldog was both a major novelty and a handsome devil, prone to distracting even the most exacting people from their best manners.

They didn’t stay for too long after Oscar arrived. James said something about going somewhere with the girls.

“Sure. Sure,” Oscar said. “You kids have fun. Be back by four, though—Fiesta Sabado,” which was the family tradition after a two-week hustle. Oscar would cook a real meal for the boys after twelve days of ready-made pouch lunches and dinners.

“Bring the girls if they’re hungry,” Oscar said.

“Yes, sir,” James said.

Oscar spent several hours chopping vegetables, steaming legumes, and rolling out tortillas. The house smelled of sautéed onions, peppers, and garlic. And on account of the guests, Oscar made a large helping of his grandmother’s Spanish rice. He loved to cook, and Gregor loved it too, spending most of the afternoon splayed out on the floor beside the chef, basking in the aromas of a family dinner coming together.

By four, the kids were nowhere to be seen. For the first fifteen minutes or so, Oscar didn’t care to intrude. He expected the boys to arrive at any minute, and if the food cooled off a little, it wasn’t a big deal. By four twenty, though, he pinged James.

“Where you boys at? I told you to be home by four.”

“We’re in the old town with some of Aleesa’s friends. We’ll be back in a little bit.”

“What’s that mean, a little bit? Food’s getting cold. Me and Gregor are getting hungry, boyo. How ‘bout you get your asses back here.”

“We already had lunch, Pap. The girls were hungry so we stopped at Hannah’s.”

“Fiesta Sabado, James. You both knew I was cooking. Get your asses back here and come eat with your old man.”

“But David and Aleesa we—”

“But nothing, hombre. It’s family dinner. It’s not optional. They’re welcome to join us, and if they don’t want to come, that tells you they ain’t worth a damn anyway.”

“Sure, Pap,” James said. “Okay. We’ll be right back.”

It took another thirty minutes for the brothers to return. With them were the two girls from before and a young man who appeared to Oscar to be more elf than man. He had pale skin and was so thin as to be shocking in appearance. The clothes, too, were more decoration than functional, like the rest of them. Funny.

Oscar welcomed them all at the table, and as much as their participation in the dinner seemed forced, Oscar didn’t care. He ate, content in his culinary handiwork, even partly happy to see his boys interacting with outsiders, learning how other people lived. Harpersville could be like a small island at times, and it was fun to have visitors every now and again.

The outsiders didn’t seem to have much interest in Oscar’s presence or even the community they were visiting, though. They spent a lot of time explaining to James and David the intricacies of their religion, or at least what Oscar thought was their religion—an of odd progression of meditation that went back thousands of years, some fancy way of finding oneself, all described in big words that meant nothing. At one point during the dinner, Oscar noticed how his boys were looking at these two elf girls. He didn’t blame them. Oscar remembered what it was like to be twenty. These girls were so pretty it almost pained his eyes to look at them dead-on. Almost another kind of human.

“How much gravity you got on your ship?” Oscar asked the girls after they were all done eating.

The elves had eaten very little.

“Point-six-eight,” the dark-haired one said.

“If you’re noticing that we’re not as robust as your people here,” the boy elf said. “That’s one of the main reasons our musculature is thinner and smaller.”

“That’s why I asked,” Oscar said. “They keep your calorie count fixed too?”

“By necessity,” he answered. “On a long voyage, the food chain must be tightly controlled.”

“I’d think you’d be more excited to dive into a home cooked meal, then, no?”

“The stomach contracts over time.”

“You some kind of doctor or something?”

“I’m in the medical division, yes, it’s one of my duties. I also studied veterinary medicine, but I must confess, Gregor is the first living dog I’ve ever met. He’s quite a specimen.”

“A specimen, yeah, that’s a word for Gregor all right.”

David and James laughed. The visitors didn’t quite understand Oscar’s dry sense of humor, or maybe even what dry humor was.

After dinner, the brothers sat down with their guests in the sitting area, and the young doctor sat fixated on Gregor, petting him and rubbing his belly. Oscar fixed himself an evening cubata to wash down the meal.

“You know, Mr. Sinhá,” the boy elf said, “these fatty growths on Gregor’s side—”

“They’re called lipomas,” Oscar said. “Our doctor checked them out a couple years ago when she came through. They don’t bother Gregor none.”

“Oh, yes. Well, I could take them out for you very easily. Gregor here would hardly feel a thing.”

“Hardly feel a thing? That means he’d feel something. Thanks, but no thanks.”

“But it would be next to nothing. Hardly a scratch.”

“Why would I let you do that? For what? So that his coat look smooth?”

The young Frinzen shrugged and nodded. “It’d be a very easy procedure.”

“It bothers you how Gregor looks? Because it don’t bother me none. Don’t bother Gregor neither.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Yeah, you didn’t mean nothing. Just that you’d cut up an animal to make you feel better about how he appears to you. The first time you ever seen him. That sound like something I should let a stranger do to my dog? My family?”

“Pap,” James said, trying to quell the growing tension in the room.

“Am I in the wrong here, son?” Oscar said. “These people are guests on this planet, in our house. And the first time I ever lay eyes on these people, this one’s telling me how I should care for our dog?”

“He’s just trying to be helpful, Pap,” James said. “Nothing more.”

“That’s fine,” Oscar said. “Only, I see them teaching you boys about how they live and they don’t seem to be learning much from you. For example, when you come into the house of an elder, a house he built up from the ground, and he welcomes you to his table, and he feeds you, and he lets you sit with his family and with his dog, and you offer to help him care for his dog, and he says no thank you; what would you say to this man where we’re from, James?”

“You would say, ‘Yes, sir.’”

“That is correct,” Oscar said, turning his gaze to the boy doctor. “So, young man, you are welcome to sit with my dog and to pet him, but under no circumstances will I allow anyone to cut on him for cosmetic purposes. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Good. We’re all learning,” Oscar said. “Now, any of you kids want a cubata?”

“I would,” David said, getting up to help Oscar fix drinks at the counter.

During the following weeks out at the mining camp, Oscar could tell that his boys were distracted. They were getting their work done, sure, but their heads weren’t in it. At dinner, Oscar teased the boys about how they looked lost, “without no elf girls to follow around all night,” which set off a long streak of vehement denials. Oscar nearly lost his mind one evening, when David told him he was reading about spiritual enlightenment.

“Boy, you’re interested in something, but it sure ain’t spiritual enlightenment, that’s for sure!” Oscar said, his chest bouncing up and down as he laughed.

“Come on, Pap,” James said. “Give him a break. They got some good ideas.”

“Oh, they got a lot of good qualities,” Oscar said. “But it ain’t they’re ideas you two are interested in. I maybe got old eyes, but they still work, and this old head still remembers what it was like to be twenty.”

“So if you know, why you giving us such a hard time?”

“I’m just busting on you is all. I don’t blame you. Just don’t get so googley-eyed chasing elf girls that you forget what you’re about. And don’t forget that they’ll be gone in a few weeks too. Don’t get yourself filled with no crazy ideas you can’t shake out.”

The next time the Sinhás glided back into town, the Frinzen were still occupying old town. Oscar didn’t see much of the boys over the weekend. He asked them to cook for Fiesta Sabado, and the girls came with them, this time without the boy doctor. The meal was pleasant, but quiet, with the exception of the high praise both young women heaped on the boys for their culinary skills.

At the end of the dinner, as they were heading out, Kayton-George told Oscar that he’d raised two fine young men, and something about it struck him as odd.

“Yes, they are young men?” Oscar said. “And what about you how old are you two?”

Kayton-George shrugged and exchanged a look with Aleesa, and then she found Oscar’s eyes again, which seemed to remind her of his lesson to their companion two weeks prior.

“I’m thirty-one and Aleesa is thirty-three.”

“Really?” Oscar said. “Well, don’t you two ladies look young?”

“Deep space,” Kayton-George said, smiling.

Oscar nodded, eyeing them both up as they stepped toward the door.

“We’ll see you, Pap,” David said as they walked out.

“Will you?” he said, shaking his head.

He didn’t see the boys again till Monday morning when they set out for the K-grid, two hours late. It was clear to Oscar from their bearing that neither boy was happy about leaving Harpersville for the mountains. He didn’t like how the situation was evolving, but he figured they’d pout and mope about for a few days and get over it in a couple weeks when the memory of those older elven women wasn’t so fresh in their young minds. The boys stayed surly all session, even if they still pulled their quotas.

When they returned to Harpersville again, Oscar was surprised to see the Frinzen still in town. The boys, though, as usual, had preceded Oscar back to town, and in hindsight, they’d been excited, even giddy as the weekend approached. Oscar should have seen it coming.

“I’m not sure what we’re going to do about these shit-elves, Gregor, old boy,” Oscar said as they passed old town. “They’re wearing out the welcome for sure.”

But as much as he lamented the Frinzens’ continued presence, Oscar knew that the boys were men now, and he couldn’t very well teach them autonomy as he had their whole lives and then tell them what to do with their weekend. They’d have to make their own choices, even if they were bad ones involving nice-looking shit-elves.

On Sunday, when Oscar still hadn’t seen the boys, he decided that instead of pinging them, he’d go down to old town and see if he might happen upon them and see what those elves were getting up to at the same time. Old town was almost deserted, though. Oscar had a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“Samson,” he said to the AI in the loader, “Can you ping them?”

“Negative,” the AI said. “None of their devices are active on the network.”

“Not even in Hatria? They could have gone down there, maybe.”

“No, sir. The only explanation is that they’re not on the planet.”

Oscar looked up at the horizon to see if he could catch the faint glint that had flashed over the northern plain every so often, but the Frinzen ship wasn’t in his sight line.

Oscar went down to Hannah’s to see if he could figure out what was going on. The place was as empty as he’d seen it in years.

“Let me guess,” Damitra the bartender said. “You’re looking for your boys, Oscar?”

“I figure somebody down here gotta know where they’re at. Then it turns out you’re the only one down here.”

“Everybody went up to the Frinzen ship. I guess they was going to give everyone a tour—return the hospitality or something, throw a big banquet for the town.”

“I guess we wasn’t invited, huh? Just you, me, and Gregor got left behind.”

“Yeah,” Damitra laughed. “I’m surprised they didn’t invite the dog and sit him at the head table, these people.”

“The shit-elves,” Oscar said. “Those two thirty-year-old women got my boys wound right around they’re little fingers.”

She laughed. “Shit-elves. Damn right. The girls I can see. Pretty little things. Entitled, but even I can see the appeal. Thing I can’t figure, Oscar; my little sister’s smitten with one of their pretty little boys that don’t look like he could carry one of them bar chairs halfway across the room. She just says he’s beautiful. And spiritual. They’re all spiritual.”

“Don’t got no manners. Can’t do a damn thing, but they’re spiritual all right.”

“Anyway, they’re supposed to be back sometime tomorrow. It’s some big festival for them up there.”

“Great,” Oscar said. “Happy shit-elf day.”

Damitra laughed and shook her head. “Can I get you anything while you’re here, Oscar.”

“Ah, what the hell. It’s getting toward cubata time.”

“You got it.”

And Oscar slumped down at the bar and had a nice conversation with Damitra.

By Tuesday morning, the town was still half empty, and with no sign of their people, Oscar and several of the other head prospectors called down to Hatria to see if anyone in the capitol knew when their family members would be coming back, or if they had a way to call up to the ship and get in touch. By mid-afternoon, shuttles began arriving back from orbit carrying a mixture of hardhands from Harpersville and the spiritual Frinzen.

Oscar waited around the corner on Desmond and Hannah’s back porch, just opposite the opening between old town and the city’s main strip, right where the shuttles were dropping people off.

He spotted David and James before they spotted him.

“It’s crazy how heavy it feels,” David said. “Just two days off world.”

“Three,” James said. “And we better get moving. Pap is going to lose his shit when we get out to the site.”

“Maybe he’ll lose it right now in front of all your new friends,” Oscar said from above them on the porch.

“Pap—” James started.

Oscar just shook his head. The boys stood before him, frozen in the old road, unsure whether to speak.

“We are two days behind, boys, and we got a delivery due in a little over ten days. No Sinhá has been late on a delivery in twenty years, and it ain’t going to be next week neither. Go get your gear.”

The boys walked to the loader, slump-shouldered with their mouths buttoned up good. And for good measure, Oscar told Samson to drive the other loader out to K-grid so the boys had to ride out with him. He had Gregor sit up front too, relegating the boys to the back seat for the duration of the ride, which progressed in total silence.

When they got out at the mining camp, Oscar didn’t say a word, just headed right for his con center.

“Pap, what’s the schedule?” James asked.

“I don’t know about what you boys are going to do, but I’ve got twenty hours to make up on my end, so I’m going to put in today’s ten and get up at four so I can bank three extra hours a day till I’m caught up next Thursday.”

“Look, Pap. We’re sorry,” James said.

“Don’t speak for your brother, and don’t be sorry to me. You’re not letting me down. You’re letting yourselves down, and your vendors, and the builders on the other end who rely on them.”

“Oh, come on, Pap!” David said. “Don’t tell us it doesn’t bother you after you sit in silence all day.”

“Do we need to talk this out, David? You really think you’re going to tell me something about this situation I don’t already understand? Wait. You know what? Maybe I do need to tell you a few things that apparently, I haven’t taught you yet. Or maybe you think you could teach me what you’re learning chasing after these enlightened thirty-year-old women you’ve been following around for the last month. Would you like to start, David? Maybe tell me something about spirituality? Well-being of the mind? No?

“I know a few things about religion, myself.”

David didn’t say anything, but he was hot.

“Haven’t I taught you boys anything out here?”

“Yeah, metals,” David said. “Pulling metals out of rocks. That’s your idea of enlightenment.”

“God damn right it is,” Oscar said. “You still think you’re pulling metals out of the rocks? We don’t deal in metals, son, we deal in commerce. Every day we’re out here, we’re pulling a better future out of these rocks, for me, for you, for your brother, for my grandchildren, for your mother, for her grandchildren.”

“Oh, don’t bring mom into it,” David said.

“I’m not bringing nothing,” Oscar said. “Just truth. She’s over you always whether you see it or not. It ain’t just about you here, boys. Hasn’t it struck you once while you’ve been visiting those people squatting in our old pod houses that we used to live there. You probably don’t remember any more what this outpost was like before we had Hannah’s; before there was a main street, a school, a theatre. That’s what we’ve been pulling out of the rocks for twenty years. And that’s what I’m going to do this week, because our word means something out here, not to no skinny visitors, to our goddamn neighbors who have our backs.

“There. That’s what I wanted to say,” Oscar said. “You happy? Can we get to work now?”

“Yeah, Pap,” James said, and he gestured with his brow for David to get going.

Oscar went to work in a huff with Gregor trailing slowly behind.

After a ten-day stretch of nearly sixteen-hour days, all three Sinhá men made their contracted deliveries in full and on time, just as they always had. And this week, Oscar was no longer surprised to see those malingering Frinzen still occupying the old town when they got back. The mood in Harpersville had shifted from the light, upbeat energy that had permeated the small city on their arrival weeks earlier. Oscar wasn’t the only one growing tired of the outsiders. The hard-handed people of Damon Mines didn’t mind offering a sanctuary to a well-meaning group of weary travelers. But they didn’t appreciate their good faith being violated by people who didn’t respect them or their ways. That unspoken tension felt like it would soon spill out into the open.

On Saturday, at the transfer station, Oscar heard talk among his fellow miners that some of the Frinzen were trying to coax many of the people of Harpersville to join them on their interstellar voyage. Oscar had seen something in their eyes from the outset. They’d wanted something. He just hadn’t been able to figure out what these delicate little people wanted out of Damon Mines. It turned out they didn’t want anything from the mines at all. They wanted the people.

Oscar tried all day to ping both of his boys and couldn’t get a response. Finally, as the day waned, he messaged James, asking him to stop by the house when he got a chance to break free.

It was long past dark by the time James made it home. When he came in, Oscar was asleep in his armchair in the living room, with Gregor curled up on the sofa across from the old man.

“Pap,” James said, nudging his father awake with a gentle shake of the arm. “Pap, it’s James.”

“I was waiting up on you. Drifted off.”

“I’m glad you did,” James said. “It’s late.”

“Where’s David?” Oscar said.

“He’s with Aleesa, in the old town.”

Oscar shook his head.

“That’s what I gotta talk to you about, Pap. I don’t know what to do.”

“He wants to go with them, doesn’t he?”

“I’ve been trying to talk him out of it for days, Pap. But she’s got this, I don’t know. It’s like she’s in his head.”

“And what about you and the other woman?”

“Kayton? I guess I like her well enough. She’s beautiful. She seems kind. I don’t know, though.”

“You don’t love her?”

“No. I don’t think so. Not like David and Aleesa.”

“There’s something happening there, James, but it ain’t love. Not real love. Something like lust and madness,” Oscar sat up straighter in the armchair. “I don’t think there’s anything anyone can say to that boy to make him change his mind at this point. If anyone knows something to say, it’s gotta be you, James.”

“I’ve tried. I just don’t know what to do, Pap. Sometimes I feel like I like these people all right, but I also feel like we don’t know them, like they’re holding their real selves back.”

“Trust your instincts on that.”

“It scares me a little if I’m honest.”

Oscar nodded. “It should.”

“Pap, if he goes…” James shook his head. “I’d worry about David every day for the rest of my life. He’s committed—to the meditation thing, to the lifestyle, all that.”

“And what do you think of all that, James?”

“I don’t know. Their lives. Their ship. It’s all impressive. But all that time sitting there? Doing nothing? Years and years before they get where they’re going? And they say they have a planet out there, but I’m not so sure.”

“David knows there’s no turning back, right?” Oscar said. “No getting off?”

“It’s like he does and he doesn’t. He just sees the life, you know. Easy life.”

“And that’s what he wants, that easy life?”

“I don’t think he knows. As long as he’s with her, I’m not sure he cares.”

“And you, James. Could you live that easy life?”

He shrugged, his mouth turned down. James looked over at Gregor, who was lying on his side, his big black eyeballs gazing back at the boy he’d grown old with.

“It won’t be so easy when you get where you’re going,” Oscar said. “You know that, right? That’s what they want from you two—to mine their metals for them, run their robotics. Them people couldn’t build no cities, no civilization. Masters of the inner world, hopeless in the real world. People who can’t do for themselves have to manipulate the ones who can.”

“I can’t tell whether you’re trying to talk me out of it or not, Pap.”

“I’m just trying to tell you what you need to know. I already know what you’re gonna do, son. I’m not going to try to stop you. I couldn’t if I tried. If David goes, it’ll break my heart. And you too. If I lost both of you like this, though, at least I’d know you’d be looking out for each other. You’d be together. It’s what me and your mother always wanted for you two. I told you that, right?”

“A million times, Pap.”

“If you do go, James, I’ll leave your mother’s cross on the mantle. I want you to keep that in the family.”

James nodded.

“Whatever happens, please don’t let them come in here while I’m sleeping and take Gregor with them. You tell David.”

Oscar tried his best to suppress the tears in front of his eldest son, but it was a losing battle.

“Pap, I would never. I’d never let that happen.”

James put his hand on his father’s arm, but he sensed that Oscar didn’t want him to come any closer.

James didn’t know what to say, what to do. A look of anger and disgust came over him as he sat there shaking his head.

“Go,” Oscar said. “I don’t want you to think of me like this.”

“Okay, Pap,” James said, himself now tearing up. “I’m sorry.”

“Promise me,” Oscar said, as James got up and turned toward the door. “If it goes wrong, please, please, James, forgive your brother. You tell him I forgive him too when the time is right.”

James nodded. “I will. I promise you, Pap.”

“Watch out for him.”

James left, shutting the door behind him in the way James did, that sound. Oscar wondered if he’d ever hear it again. He got up and retrieved Maria’s cross from the top drawer in their bedroom. Pure platinum from one of the earliest surpluses they’d made, two years before the boys were anything more than a hope in their future together. Oscar prayed on that cross for the first time in years, asking for their mother to watch over the boys wherever they went in the galaxy, and he placed it on the mantle, hoping that in the morning, it might still be there.

When he woke the following morning, the cross was gone. Gregor, his old legs no longer nimble, slid off the sofa on his stomach, catching himself with his front paws and making his way over beside Oscar’s legs.

Samson, whose robotic body was recharging out in the loader, was wired into the house as always.

“Did they go?” Oscar asked, already anticipating the AI’s answer.

“They did,” Samson’s voice filled the room.

“He didn’t even say goodbye.”

Instead of riding into town, Oscar decided to walk. It was the same surreal feeling he’d felt, with the same knot in his gut, from the morning after Maria passed. The spotted salt moon was setting in the east, mocking him with its beauty. The dusty, arid rocks glowed a warm brown hue in the distance.

Oscar made his way into Harpersville, first through the now-deserted pop-up habitats of the old town. They’d been left as they were, the doors open to the outside world, trash on their floors, papers drifting in the breeze on the dirt road outside, a filthy old bucket rolling back and forth on the street. Gregor sniffed the ground, searching for confirmation as much as anything, for he seemed to sense they were gone.

Oscar walked toward the porch out behind Hannah’s. The building had been designed to look like a saloon from a ghost town of the old West, a joke among Desmond, Hannah herself, and their best friends the Alamedas, who all believed that as long as they worked hard and stuck together, their boom town could never bust. That morning, the place looked to Oscar like the longest setup to the sickest joke the universe could have ever played on them all. And he found, on the other side of the building, Hannah, Desmond, and Victor Alameda, who were counting the names of the departed, including their bartender Damitra’s sister, and now, the two Sinhá boys.

When a proper survey was completed in the following days, slightly less than half that first generation of Harpersville’s children had departed their hardscrabble life on Damon Mines for a life of quiet contemplation aboard the Frinzen’s interstellar generation ship. In other outposts, the loss had been even worse.

At first, in the wake of the disaster, the prospectors of Damon Mines put out calls to the ringworlds and the cylinders for opportunities on a well-established mining colony. The takers were few, trickling in one straggler at a time, only to find a world with a forlorn set of brokenhearted people, who, over the coming years, one by one, gave up on their dream of ownership and independence, departing by shuttle back to Dreeson’s Star, to Carroll’s Star, and even sometimes to passing interstellar missions, until eventually, there were so few prospectors left that the solitude became too much, and the mines became the purview of the robots, and the houses became the fossil record of a forgotten, almost-formed, dusty dream of a civilization that had never fully come to pass.