Amelia leaned into the hiss of air, the cool pop, as one of the vacuum-sealed doors rushed open and mimicked a breeze. Liam’s silhouette passed out of the blackened sleeping quarters. He squinted in the saffron lowlights, his eyes flinty and ill-slept.
It was far too early in the morning. Or was it far too late at night?
On a colony ship, there were no mornings. Not by sunrise. Time was set to the seasons and passages of Earth’s calendar, but they had no sun or star of their own. Manya the Mistress, the mega computer, the machine that raised and dimmed the lights was dependent on the rising and setting of a sun somewhere so far removed that its warmth would never wake them from their sleep.
She checked her wristwatch. Three-seventeen in the morning, in the heavens as it was on Earth.
“You know what they call you?” Liam plopped to the floor beside her and leaned against the slate-chill wall.
“A great intellect?” Amelia purred.
“An insomniac.” He said, and ruffled her hair, the ink-black ID columns on his forearms casting shadows.
She smiled. “Insomnia, from the Latin – in-somnus. Sleepless.” Then she handed him her glass of orange juice.
He drank, mouth puckering around the tart sugars. “Not bad this time around. You’re getting better.”
She’d been working on a project in the greenhouses – growing organically, avoiding the micro-nutrient additives that supplemented and sustained their perpetually-used soil. Working fervently on nursing plants to survival and production. Growing real, untouched food, like from the soil of a planet.
In the beginning, her tiny crops had been horribly inadequate – especially the lemolimes and the oranges. Citrus, consort of the Sun, struggled helplessly beneath the synthetic ray-lights. But she’d been getting better. She’d lock herself up in her laboratory grooming the leaves, and while the others credited her dedication, she took pure selfish pleasure in breathing the air – unprocessed oxygen fresh from the leaves that she was able to breathe before the wall units sucked it up into the main conditioner.
Amelia thought of them, the plants, the tiny crop that was her own. Her chest tightened, and her skin prickled. “We’re suffocating.” She whispered, her voice a plucked petal in thin air.
Liam frowned and set aside the empty cup. “I know.” He answered, and fished a hand from her lap to hold it.
Amelia and Liam had not been given the choice to leave Earth and enter further space, to colonize. They were the Sacrosanct – an entire generation born unto space, who would not live to see the planet for which their colony ship and their future offspring were bound. Born into the craft, and destined to die upon it, as their ancestors had died on the death altars of the old temples or the ropes that hung in the ancient trees.
Their only solace lay in each other, and the clandestine promise that their ashes would one day be spread across the fertile soil of a new Earth.
A fool’s deal made even before their conception.
Amelia lay her head on his shoulder, staving off tears. “I’d like to petition the Ameliam Committee for a name change.”
“It’s the Liamelia Committee, thank you very much.” He crooned.
Amelia gave a small, sad laugh. She and Liam had grown up together and married young – as it was only together that they could stand the intolerable loneliness of time and of space. When they were children, they’d formed the Official Unofficial Colonial Expedition Committee to be Renamed. They’d entertained each other’s notions of escape, encouraged dreams of jettison, and every time they passed a planet even remotely viable on the scan-op readouts, they mock-plotted the hijacking of an escape pod.
With time and age, the plans grew more cunning and the imagined worlds more elaborate.
Green, they liked to say. Verdant blankets of viridian that would cover their earth in every place but the long running rivulets and rivers of pearl-blue flowing with freedom and predestination into their seas. A world so green it would hurt the eye to behold after so long among the efficient, lifeless coloring of a colony ship – gunmetal grays and plastene whites and danger reds.
Escape, even the hollow-boned dream of it, brought relief.
Liam coughed out a long-held breath Amelia heard rattling around in his pneumonia-prone lungs. “I know what’ll cheer you up.” He said, a hand stroking idly through her lank, dark hair. “Wanna recycle a little oxygen in the supply closet with me?” And his eyebrows danced up and down over those pale, impossible eyes.
It was enough to send her into hysterics of laughter where hysterics of sorrow were moments from taking root, and they laughed for hour-long minutes before the knife-edged joy winnowed into tears and turned at last to silence.
After a while, Amelia spoke, and her words stitched them a quilt of story, and her voice made moss and ivy of the unforgivable metal of the vessel’s walls. Into the morning, or was it the night, they traded tales that transmuted the terror and softened the sorrow of their sacrificed lives, that trimmed them in cloth-of-gold and in dragon scale, sharpened them as a sword shook loose from a stone, crowned them in circlets of emerald and hawthorn.
Made their impossible burdens bearable once more.
And eventually, Manya the Mistress, the mega computer, brought the daylights up in rings of tiger’s eye and heliodor.
Amelia checked her wristwatch.
Six thirty two in the morning, in the heavens as it was on Earth.
