All of the old stories were wrong. For more than a century speculations about the future had always portrayed Earth as a greedy consumer of the solar system's resources. People had thought that the planet, rich in water and dependant on it's natural cycles, would be importing ice and heavy metals from the asteroid belts for its ever increasing population.
They had been wrong.
The Earth's population was shrinking at an almost alarming rate, while a hungry solar system full of expansionist conglomerates mined it for the resources they needed to keep expanding. Take plastic for example, waste particles had once choked Earth's oceans, but it had only taken a few decades for those oceans to be mined dry.
Well, there was one part of the old stories that still held a bit of truth. Heavy minerals were still being imported to Earth, as weights in the elevators. But the highly conductive ones, like gold and silver, were still being exported.
Lumi looked at the personal advertisement on her screen again. A pure gold wedding band it claimed. A fairly heavy one too, at 10 grams. A conservative person could live on that for more than a year. Even more if they returned to Earth.
Everyone returned to Earth if they went, even if they'd been born in space and never breathed a whiff of unrecycled air in their lives. The ride down was even paid for by your own weight. Not that she had any intention of descending into that gravity well, even if the ice age that was coming wouldn't have much effect until she was long dead, or at least far too old to care.
She reviewed the advertisement again. The requirements were simple, if a little odd. Healthy female, 18 to 36 Earth years of age, green thumb (frequent success with propagating flowering plants, house plants included), love of reading. The only information provided about the man seeking a wife was the promise of the ring, his gender, and the name of the corporation he was associated with.
Ugly, she decided. Probably fat too, since he apparently liked to sit around and read beside some pretty flowers. He probably hoped for children, given the age range specified, but it wasn't legal to specify that as a requirement anymore.
There were people who still regretted finally yielding the right of voluntary reproduction to the women whose bodies were genetically designed to endure it, but it had been a logical extension of the system-wide family registry system. Not that men were prohibited from engendering or bearing children in the latter half of the twenty first century, but it was still expensive and rarely done. A lot of people also believed that letting such things happen naturally increased the chances of healthy well adjusted progeny.
Her eyes strayed to the bonus packet that lay on the shelf beside her identity key card. It was a severance packet. A generous bonus for ten years of service, and a quick, "Thanks, bye."
She'd actually been looking through personal postings for someone who sounded fun to spend all of the vacation time that she'd never gotten around to taking with. But some hidden algorithm had probably matched up her sudden search, with her upcoming birthday (the big three oh), and tossed in a few marriage prospects.
Mister gold ring and houseplants probably wasn't much of a Zero G dancer. She scrolled onward.
--
When she woke up in the transportation pod ten days later, Lumi felt like she had only herself to blame.
Oh, it would be easy enough to blame the guy with the pretty face who could hold a crowd breathless around a Zero G bounce cage. But she wasn't an innocent child who didn't know any better than to let down her guard, and give a stranger access to her private residence. No matter how friendly they had become in just a few days, she should never have forgotten that 'Kellan' was still a stranger with his own motives.
She sat up and released the launch straps that held her safely among the various packages that were neatly netted to every other surface except the couch and the nav screen. The course laid out for the pod made her stare at the screen incredulously for a long time.
She had not expected to be on a course for Earth, Mars, or any of the corporate headquarters, because traffic from her station to any of those population centers was rarely handled by small pods like this anymore. The old joke about how the most expensive thing in space was space still held true. Habitable space and cargo space were always at a premium. But she hadn't expected to be headed for a lighthouse, because any pod headed to one of those vital data centers would need all of its contents to be fully inspected and verified before a system launcher would accept it.
She quickly tapped through the menus and checked the transport pod's reserves. According to regulations, a pod should hold enough air, water, and sustenance to keep the occupant or occupants alive for over three months longer than the scheduled voyage, which was usually plenty of time for a scoop crew to rescue a pod that had gone off course.
She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that it was freshly charged with an appropriate reserve. Now the only real problem was the six month voyage ahead of her. A transport pod wasn't like an elevator or a train on a station. You couldn't just hit the emergency stop and stay where you were until help arrived. It wasn't impossible to change the course of a pod with the steering jets, but they were launched on a registered course and generally reached their destinations safely 99.9% of the time these days, with most of the failures attributed to people who messed with their programmed course.
At first, she thought that the only possession she had with her was her identity key card. It wasn't impossible to get past the genetic lock on one of those, but it was tough enough that thieves rarely bothered. A transportation pod that hadn't been tampered with also shouldn't be able to launch with an occupant who didn't have a valid identity key, a verified destination, and a prepaid trip scheduled at least 24 hours in advance. But even though no other supplies were technically required, she couldn't figure out how she had gotten approved to visit a lighthouse, since she definitely didn't have all of the various technical certifications to work in one. Only the elite were eligible for those few solitary system posts.
Tampering with the packages that shared your pod (and often more importantly, your voyage costs), carried ridiculously heavy fines, but one of the packages had her name on it. Lumi still checked the manifest list to verify that it was registered to her before she opened it very cautiously.
If she hadn't been numbed by the situation she found herself in, she thought that she would have cried when she saw her little houseplants crammed into the box with her tablet and some familiar looking fabrics. Her poor azalea bonsai had been chopped flat to fit, and some of the others had suffered similar fates. Fortunately the pod would recycle water, and her couch would emit light according to a standard daylight cycle, so she had a chance of keeping the plants alive.
She wasn't sure how useful the tablet would be. A passenger liner would have external power for the charging ports on the passenger couches, but she'd only ridden in a small pod once before, and it had been a very short local hop. She scooted back over to the nav screen and tabbed through the limited menus again, but the only information on available power was for life support and navigation.
She decided that if there was anything left in her data account, she should request the manuals for this couch, this model of pod, and also information about her destination. Maybe there was actually a large factory or mining station that she didn't know about within easy jetting distance. The nav screen said that this pod would send and receive bursts twice a day, but only emergency and navigation messages were free.
She wasn't prepared for the violent cascade of emotion that washed over her when she turned on her tablet, and saw the note 'Kellan' had left her. Anger, despair, irony, wry amusement, disbelief, and utter exasperation filled her as she read.
"First off: You are way too trusting! Seriously! Be more careful in the future. Someone else might have just spaced you and called it suicide. Second: You're also way too self centered hon. You should work on that, might be important to your future. You think you're the only one who got let go? This company is crumbling and it's time for the smart rats to flee before everyone here is reduced to living on crumbs. Lastly: I envy you so much. There really wasn't as much as I expected in your savings, but done is done, and you're actually flying away on your own power sweetie. Usually you'd be signed up with some random work crew in this situation right? But I saw that your system was offering to submit an application to this listing, so I figured what the hell, and you got accepted before I even finished up. I'm happy for you hon. Take care out there. P.S.: Don't waste your energy. I pulled a shady trick and let you sleep awhile, but I didn't break any laws or hurt you, you can even check your receipts."
She wanted to smash something, but she was too rational to actually do it. Sometimes that was a good thing. It was a trait that had let her deal with a service position that required interacting with the annoying knots of conflict that referred to themselves as human beings. But sometimes her own rational behavior just annoyed her even more.
Lumi pinched the bridge of her nose and compressed the nerve there for a moment before actually following his advice and checking her receipts. She felt a tiny bit reassured by the fact that his name was listed there as Kellan Thomas, so at least he hadn't lied about that. She hadn't known that she was going to be paying for it, but while his company during the past week had been very expensive, it probably wasn't actually any worse than if she'd spent her time in a standard host club.
She tried to be conservative, but living expenses usually ate up about 80% of her income. Even with the severance packet, her savings really had been a bit lacking for someone her age. Kellan had even left her the minimum balance required to qualify for interest and avoid a yearly fee, so if she got desperate, she could buy more data transmission time. It only made her feel more annoyed though. It definitely didn't make her any less angry about being shipped off to somewhere halfway across the solar system.
Her couch made a notification noise, so she turned off her tablet screen and checked it first. "Time to exercise!" announced the notification on its tiny menu screen. A series of simple instructive diagrams followed, showing the locations of the pulleys and recommended exercises. She stopped it at the end and backed up a screen, because a line of small text had caught her eye. "Generator charge device reserve 98%."
Her expression was thoughtful as she turned her tablet back on, after checking that the couch pulleys were all in good shape and matched the diagrams. This couch was apparently designed for long voyages. She thought that its method of forcing you to exercise in order to charge your toys was probably an effective technique for keeping most passengers motivated, but thankfully many of the early side effects of long periods of time in weightless environments had been offset by standard organic nano machine supplements.
She checked that her tablet was actually compatible with the couch's charging system, and then she checked to see what position "she" had applied for. After gazing at her screen for much longer than reading the information required, she turned off the tablet and stared blankly at the soothing forest currently being displayed on the pod's nav screen.
Mister gold ring. It hadn't been an application for a job, it had been an application for a marriage. Since it had been processed by the same System Link that most of the corporations used, it was possible that Kellan hadn't realized that, but she had no way to guess.
The screen wandered through an ocean and a desert before she moved again. Kellan had said that he hadn't done anything illegal, but she was pretty sure that there must be some kind of law against entering a marriage contract with someone else's identity. Actually signing someone else into a work contract was also illegal, but the companies that indentured laborers caught in schemes like this usually got around that. Usually the company didn't actually sign the contract until the laborer reached the jobsite, where they started charging them for breathing until they signed up.
However, the contract that was attached to the approved application was very clear: by accepting the paid transportation pod, she had accepted a two year marriage contract, that could be renewed if both parties agreed at the end of its term.
She wrote more than a dozen messages that she then deleted before the pod's scheduled transmission. Some of them had been to the system authorities, some of them had been to Mister gold ring, whose name in the contract was listed as 'Anthony P. DeCorah'. One had been to the guy who'd placed her in this transportation pod, but she deleted that too. Messaging Kellan was probably the most useless thing she could do.
She waited until the third day to send two messages. Twenty-four hours after her final revision on both.
One was to the system authorities informing them of the circumstances around her current situation. She suspected that nothing would be done about it, but it might help someone else in the future. After waffling back and forth she had finally decided that even if nothing came of it, it was the responsible thing to do, since Kellan might be someone who regularly shanghaied people for a living.
The second one was not to Anthony DeCorah, and it did not contain anything about the circumstances that had led to her presence in this transportation pod. It wasn't that she intended to hide anything from him in the long run, it was just that she had tried to imagine how she'd feel if she'd been in his position and received a message saying basically, "Oops, I didn't mean to, and I can't afford to pay you back right now." All of the other messages she had thought of so far seemed too stiff, too formal, too ridiculous, or too something, so she had put off messaging him.
Instead, her second message was a short update for her grandmother on Earth, who was sort of the head of the loose family group that she claimed as her own. It summarized her dismissal from the company, and informed her of the transportation pod's identification number and schedule. That was it, she hadn't mentioned her low data balance or anything else. The last message they had exchanged had been about her biological mother's move to a frontier city on Mars a couple of years before.
A week later Lumi received her first onboard message. It was an enquiry from her new husband, asking if she'd like to correspond during her long voyage, and offering to pay for all of the data transmissions. It made her feel guilty about having put off sending him a greeting. It was a generous, friendly, and gentle message. And it suited her original imagined image of him better than it suited the actual image attached to the contract.
She had kind of decided that the image attached to the contract was probably a few years old, and was determined not to hold it against him if he was actually significantly heavier in the flesh, and lighter of hair. The picture was of an athletic blonde man who appeared to still be in his twenties. It was also not a full optical data image, but a standard anim, the image compression system used for most of the video and images bouncing around the solar system.
Blonde hair was no longer a rare recessive trait, since the genes that determined hair and eye color had become editable in developing embryos, but it wasn't exactly common. There were always rumors that adults would soon be able to have the same modifications, along with speculation about how this was how humans were going to follow the dinosaurs into extinction, but she doubted either would happen within her lifetime. She also sided with the optimists who claimed that when it did happen, it would be the technology that finally let the human race defeat the myriad of viruses that had always preyed upon them.
She kind of liked the anim image of Anthony DeCorah, even though she wasn't expecting reality to match it.
--
It was only two months later that boredom finally settled into Lumi's skin like a proverbial bed of nails. There were still books that she'd never read in her library, but none of them called to her. Her virtual empires, pets, and plants were thriving. She could recognize every soothing scene the nav screen had to offer, and she felt like she had listened to every song she had in storage.
In her latest message to Anthony, she wrote a list of things she missed doing. There were a lot of things like visiting a restaurant full of people, wandering around the parks and gardens, or dancing in a club. When she finished, she realized that most of them probably couldn't be done on a lighthouse station either. She reached out to delete it, and then hesitated.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
In one of their exchanges she had admitted that she was writing a lot more than she was sending, because she was deleting a lot of what she wrote. Anthony had replied encouragingly, asking her not to worry so much, and to simply send everything. She still didn't always do that, but none of these complaints were exaggerations, and she was a little curious to know if he missed those things too.
She added the question, and reread the message. It was better, she decided. Asking what he missed about city life made it feel more like she was sharing, instead of simply whining about how unhappy she was.
Anthony's response included a dozen books that he said were among his favorites, three of which she had already read. It also included a horticulture course that matched up so neatly with her previous studies that she suspected him of hacking into her files, until she reviewed the application that had been submitted for her and saw that it included her CV.
--
Three months into the voyage Lumi developed a case of astronauts stomach. Thankfully, according to her couch it didn't seem to be the variety caused by a radiation leak in her pod, and was simply psychological.
In the beginning it had been a bit difficult not to overeat, because the condensed meals felt smaller than they actually were, but now it was difficult to care about eating at all. She could go for more than a day before she felt hungry, and everything available seemed completely unappetizing, despite the probability that it was exactly the same as the first meals she'd had aboard the pod.
She actually wasted a bit of her small data balance to verify the advice her couch offered, which was a three day fast. Since she didn't feel hungry if she forgot to eat for a day, she couldn't imagine how three days was going to improve the situation, but she didn't have a lot of options.
At the end of the second day she actually felt hungry, but she followed the advice she'd paid for, and resisted eating. When her hunger faded again, she worried that her body wasn't on the same biological schedule that the advice had been written for, and that she'd missed her opportunity. But to her relief, her feeling of hunger began cycling on and off during the third day, with recurring pangs.
Her next meal was, if not compellingly delicious, at least the best she'd had aboard the pod. It seemed that the old adage that "hunger is the best spice" was still true.
--
During the fifth month, Lumi diagnosed herself with a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome. Granted, Anthony wasn't her captor, and it wasn't his fault that her data balance was so low that she rarely corresponded with others. But she felt like she had become ridiculously attached to someone that she had only exchanged messages and game data with, especially when it was only twice a day for the first four months.
She was completely looking forward to meeting him soon. And while she ought to have looked askance at the override codes he'd given her so that they could correspond in real time for the last two months of her approach, she was merely grateful. The slowly shortening delay had also made it so that they had begun exchanging voice and video messages.
For some reason she never asked how old he was until their first video exchange. It was a standard anim compression, but his appearance in it was identical to the photo attached to the contract. She was somewhat shocked to learn that he was three years younger than she was. It was completely logical, since it meant that the age range he had specified was a maximum of nine years in either direction, but she was still really shocked to learn that he really was still in his twenties.
It made him seem so much more successful in life than she was. He was intelligent, and witty, and seemed to have everything under control. He even had the resources to offer 10 grams of gold to a woman, in exchange for this two year commitment, before he was even thirty. By the time she arrived it would only be a year and a half, but that didn't lessen his impression on her.
In comparison, she had only held a few temporary positions before her ten years in a standard service position for a large but not high profile corporation. She probably couldn't have afforded the ring even if she had spent all of her surplus during those ten years on its purchase. And she obviously didn't have things under control, or she wouldn't be in this pod.
--
During the last week of her approach, Lumi's emotions were a disorganized jumble. Anticipation, fear, hope, doubt, everything seemed to mix together into a knot of pure nerves in the center of her spine, behind her stomach.
Anthony assured her that even though the lighthouse didn't get much traffic, its catch rings were in good shape, and were lined up on her course well before she got anywhere close. She switched the nav screen to the outside view and left it there, long before the lighthouse, or even the first ring, was visible to the naked eye.
She wasn't sure that she had ever been to a station small enough that it only had one set of rings and one launcher. She also wasn't sure whether it was an advantage or a disadvantage that they could now talk practically without detectible delay. It made hiding the fact that she was a bundle of nerves kind of impossible.
Her anxiety dissolved when the lighthouse finally came into view. The outer shell wasn't actually that dissimilar from the complicated lenses of an old Earth lighthouse. The receivers floated around it in an independently mobile array, and each lense was at an angle adjusted to match the location of a distant transmitter. It was like a sphere with hundreds of large dark eyes watching the solar system.
The transmission laser guns were like barely noticeable hairs poking out between the lenses. An installation that most people only ever saw in a documentary was floating in front of her on a live optical feed. Incredibly slowly. Even though she had traveled millions of kilometers at speeds an earthly projectile weapon would envy, the last few kilometers felt like they took forever. Time didn't seem to move again until the final ring gently turned, and pushed her with a barely perceptible motion toward the small gap in the lighthouse lenses.
Beneath its bristling array of receivers and transmitters, the lighthouse contained a very old fashioned looking donut shape. The transport pod even crept predictably, and slowly, toward the center of that white ring. On one hand, at least the little station had a centripetal imitation of gravity, but on the other hand, it was smaller than any station she'd ever seen in person before.
Finally, little white arms reached out to collect the transport pod, and pull it into the docking seal. It was obviously a single pod docking system, even though it might be able to handle anything up to a small ship class.
Lumi waited impatiently while machinery that she couldn't see made clicks, whirrs, and hums. The whole pod felt like it shivered just before the door finally opened, to reveal a cheerful old couple. Elsa and Chen Howe, she had carefully memorized their names when Anthony had provided them, even though they would probably depart within a day or so of her arrival. Transport pods never spent much time just sitting in storage in such a busy solar system.
Anthony seemed to tower over his elders, but his smile was cheerful and welcoming. Cheerful and friendly greetings were exchanged all round, and then Lumi and Anthony were just as cheerfully banished by the Howes, who insisted that they would unload the pod while Anthony showed her around her new home.
Lumi almost protested automatically, because she associated unloading with lifting, but the little dock was practically a weightless environment. That didn't mean that moving cargo was effortless, but it took different skills and techniques. She looked at Anthony's silly grin and knew that her own face was echoing it as she followed him into the elevator.
Anthony began with the "top floor" of the station. The pull of the "upper" ring fell somewhere between walking on the Earth's moon and walking on Mars. It was also divided between storage rooms and server rooms.
Lumi was pretty sure that her face had switched from "besotted grin" to "why do I care" before they returned to the elevator. Halfway around the ring they had passed the ladders that served the same function, but Anthony had carefully shown her each section and pointed out all of the currently open locks between them.
Anthony said a bit nervously, "I'm sorry, should I have taken you straight to your room instead? Or maybe the bath room, you probably really want a bath right? A full shower was what I missed most when I came out, but having an actual tub is even better…"
She blinked at him and then asked incredulously, "Wait, you meant an actual bath room? Doesn't that unbalance a station that is this small?"
He grinned at her and replied happily, "Not as long as we have enough of a water reserve to move an equal amount of water to the other side! This isn't really a small station though?"
The "ground" floor was the "lower" ring and felt like it was set at exactly 1G as far as she could tell. She also felt an inexplicable wave of relief when she saw that the center hall was paneled in the same standard vat grown wooden panels that were used to face most of the walls in almost every station in the solar system. The panels were stained a familiar light golden color very close to what she'd chosen for her own residence cube.
Airtight plastic, metal and ceramics were usually too expensive to waste on interior facing and cabinetry these days, but Lumi had more than half expected the entire station to have its naked structure exposed like the utility areas above them.
--
During her first day, Lumi didn't questioned the fact that she had her own room. Even after discovering that it was at least twice the size of her entire residence previously. Her impression that the station was very small was not wrong, but it wasn't shared among many people, so each person actually had a great deal more room than she was accustomed to, even if all of the personal hygiene facilities were shared.
The friendly Howe couple had already been packed up for their move when she arrived. They only stayed to share a welcoming and congratulatory dinner with her and Anthony before they launched, as though they couldn't wait to escape the lighthouse.
When Anthony showed up to have breakfast with her the next morning, Lumi finally realized that it was a little odd that she wasn't sharing a room with her new husband. It took her awhile to work up the nerve to ask about it, but Anthony's nervous reply quickly set her at ease.
"We can set up a shared sleeping room as soon as, I mean, well… I didn't want to push you into anything, but I'm willing! And I think you should definitely keep your own room keyed only to your identity key. Having your own private space can be really important when you can never get more than a hundred meters from each other," he explained.
"Even though I kind of got shanghaied into this, I am not worried that you'll push me into anything! I know this is only actually our second day together, but I feel like we've already become pretty good friends," she said quickly. She couldn't hide her blush as she added, "And you are way more attractive than I expected."
Anthony stared at her with a worried expression and asked, "Shanghaied?"
Lumi bit back a curse and sighed instead. In all of those conversations, she'd never quite worked up the courage to explain how she'd gotten into the pod. "This, it was my fault really," she admitted. "I got involved with a kind of shady guy after I was let go, and instead of sending me off to be conscripted in the belts or something, he submitted my application to your ad and shipped me off to you instead… I guess maybe I ought to thank him? But it still pisses me off."
"Please tell me you filed a complaint," Anthony said after a long moment. And then he asked worriedly, "Do you want to cancel the marriage contract? I had absolutely no intention of forcing anyone into accepting me. I mean, I was super happy when someone who could actually pass the system level qualifications to come here finally applied! But… well, crap. If you never actually meant to…" He straightened and offered nobly, "I won't hold you to it. Like you said, we've already become pretty good friends Lumi."
Lumi felt like she really tried to clear things up, she quickly explained that the application would never have been made if she hadn't spent so long staring at his ad previously, but she felt like she was only convincing him that she was refusing to dissolve the contract because she needed the gold. After a while she gave up, because there were things that she just didn't want to say, especially if he didn't feel the same way.
When she brought up the requirement of being good with flowering plants instead, Anthony seemed relieved. Like most stations, there was a large "room" set aside for greenery, although this one lacked the small birds, animals, and pretty insects that most city parks featured. Like everything else, the garden in this small station was much bigger than she had expected.
"Ever since the garden got holed and lost most of its air for a few hours, we haven't been able to get much of anything to flower again, even though most of the plants actually survived and have put out plenty of new foliage. I've tried almost everything I could find on the net, but nothing has worked! I even ordered a crate of soil from Earth, but… I didn't dare use it after it arrived," Anthony explained.
Hearing that the station had been recently holed was unsettling, but obviously it had been repaired, and even though no one usually talked about it, plenty of city stations had compartments that sprang a leak suddenly for one reason or another. Lumi straightened her spine and asked, "Why didn't you dare? It should be used before the microbes die out."
"The smell, it was indescribable… I really don't know how to explain it," he said with a grimace.
Lots of people actually found the odor of soil unpleasant, especially if it had some freshly rotting material in it, so she offered, "I could try smelling it?"
"Okay," he agreed. "Get your suit and open it in the airlock though, so we can vent it if we have to."
"Suit?" she asked blankly. In the old stories, everyone in space had a space suit, but in reality most people never went "outside". And even if you were going out for a jaunt or an expedition, most people would rent a bulky adjustable suit. Transport pods were so safe that they only carried inflatable emergency bubbles anymore. The only people who had their own suit were the people who worked "outside".
Anthony's questioning expression made her realize that he was one of the people who worked "outside". Who else was going to replace a lense or repair a broken motor on a station this size? He had probably patched the hole in the station too.
"Your space suit?" he clarified. She was opening her mouth to explain that she didn't have one when he suddenly slapped his palm against his forehead and said, "I bet it's still in the storeroom. I'm sorry, I should have remembered and helped you get it out and do the safety checks. We should not assume that just because it's brand new that everything is functional, no one makes that mistake twice, right?" he asked cheerfully.
"Yeah?" she agreed doubtfully.
--
She really had her own space suit. She had no idea how one had been customized quickly enough to travel with her. The only reason that she knew that it had traveled with her was because she recognized its box.
Anthony told her cheerfully, "It was a lot more expensive than your ring, but you can keep this too of course."
Lumi gulped, but she could only mumble an uncertain, "Thanks?"
She had taken the safety courses of course, for the discount, but who really paid attention to those? Thankfully, when she admitted that she had never had her own suit before and barely remembered anything, Anthony seemed to enjoy explaining. He really was kind of brilliant. He explained more than any of her instructors ever had, more clearly, and without stopping to look things up.
After her suit passed all of its tests with flying colors, Anthony loaded the crate into the airlock, strapped it down, and told her, "After you've smelled it, I suggest you close it back up, put your helmet on and just vent the lock."
"Okay," she agreed, and even dared to give him a cheesy thumbs up.
After the lock closed behind her, she cautiously opened the crate. Anthony had been right, the smell that wafted up was kind of indescribable. Cold dank rotting dust, was the best she could come up with. It was unlike, and yet strangely similar to potting soil that had roots rot in it and then had dried out completely.
After a moment she took off her glove instead of putting on her helmet and reached into the crate to feel the soil. Anthony was grimacing incredulously at her through the small glass port in the door and she smiled. The particles were fine, almost as fine as dust, but the handful had a strangely springy feel to it, and she gazed at it consideringly before shaking her hand as clean as she could get it and putting her glove back on.
For the sake of Anthony's nose, and her own curiosity she went ahead and closed the crate up tightly. Then she put her helmet on, grabbed the safety bar and opened the outer door. The huge array of receivers and transmitters blocked most of the vast field of stars, but she still couldn't help feeling a shiver of awe, even though she wasn't venturing outside of the safe confines of the airlock.
Lumi was smiling like an idiot when she stepped back into the station after the air had finished cycling. She tried to hide her reaction to her first glimpse of space with her own eyes through her own helmet by asking brightly, "I know it's not potting soil, but it seems like it might be good anyway. What did you actually order?"
When he pulled up the order and showed her, she actually laughed aloud. Anthony gazed at her doubtfully and asked, "What's so amusing? It was highly recommended."
"Yeah, I bet it was," she agreed cheerfully. "Probably cost a ton too."
"Yeah. But the System's Com Company paid for it, not me, since it's for the station," he explained.
"It's dried silt, from a river bed," she pointed out. "I mean, I've never been to a river in person, but it totally matches the fine particles and sort of rotting dusty smell right? It's all the organic particles that get washed to the mouth of a river."
"I'm not sure the smell is worth it," he complained.
She almost reached out and tousled his fine blonde hair, but the uncertain nature of their relationship prevented her. Instead she told him, "I'm sure the plants will love it. We can bury it in their existing soil, and as soon as they start growing their roots into it, the smell will probably begin to fade anyway."
--
Lumi didn't get her first kiss from Anthony until after their first rose bloomed, and the lighthouse's second technician had arrived.
It was partly her fault, since it took her a long time to realize that despite his brilliance, his looks, and his easy going nature, he had almost zero experience with women or romantic relationships. The next day they set up "their" room, and an entire year and a half passed far too quickly. So she stayed for another two.
And another two, while Anthony helped her get certified as an optical array technician. It meant that if, or when, she left his lighthouse, she would have a good chance of being able to find work with high pay in almost any orbital city. It also meant that she could qualify as the lighthouse's second technician. After she was certified, they could tell the company not to replace the current one when he left, as long as they could get permission for a floating tech to come cover for them once every three years when they took their vacation.
And the next time it came up for renewal, they rewrote their marriage contract into a permanent one and started talking about having children, because Lumi was already 36. She still refused to be thankful to Kellan. Instead she firmly insisted that all of the credit should go to the computer system that had kept suggesting that she apply to Anthony's advertisement.
End of File
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