The next days on Yggdrasil became far more pleasant. The company of this family proved to be very much appreciated. Benàn, for example, was an energetic teenager who couldn’t stop talking about his dreams of escape and space conquest. He was fed up with living in that aquarium, but his father had always resisted a premature departure.
“Me dad promised to buy me a roun’ trip to Ceres-stad when I was twelve years old then a secon’ one when I was sixteen. And finally, let me leave for the Marine Academy once I reach my majority,” he told us once we were chilling under the shade of a giant amber-colored dandelion. “But he keeps renegin’ on his word! He believes I’m not ready!” Furious, he closed his record player and threw away the last root beer from our picnic. The can slowly swirled near a rotten log.
I was surprised when he mentioned the Academy. “I thought you wanted to be a pirate. Why would you join the Marine Corps?”
“To learn how to handle weapons! My pa refuses to let me use his and the armor he hides under his workbench. I don’t even know how to wield a revolver!”
Without a word, Ali nonchalantly passed him her gun, barrel in hand. I didn’t even realize she was listening. To doze off mid-conversation was a habit of hers.
The boy feigned hesitation, but the sparks in his eyes betrayed his excitement. My human didn’t need to insist any further, because seconds later he already had the gun well in hand. “It’s so frackin’ heavy,” he said. “It’s different with my virtual reality console.”
“Try it out,” Ali proposed as she put the needle back on the first track after reopening the portable turntable. From her chin, she then pointed to the soda can Benàn had thrown a few minutes earlier.
Together, they practiced in music all afternoon. The yardman’s son had almost exhausted Ali’s ammunition when Diligua picked us up for dinner on her flying Solex equipped with black sails.
This appeared to be our daily routine for the next two weeks: working in the morn, hanging out in the afternoon. We were so productive that Alàn no longer needed us to maintain the station. To be fair, I suspected he had dismissed us because of the meager gardening skills of my sapiens. Apparently, that girl had two left hands with no green thumb.
And it wasn’t even the funniest part.
“What’s happening to me?” Ali sobbed one night as the thermometer was going up.
“Unbelievable!” Alàn answered. “You’re without doubt allergic to real vegetables! Nobody’s allergic to real vegetables! What kind of human being are you?”
“Just gimme pizzas, you poisoner…” muttered my feverish nutrigel-raised partner, white as the giant tree’s leaves.
The next morning, Benàn finally introduced us to his secret spaceship hidden in the old external shipyard. He had begun to assemble her by repairing the worn parts of the deserted hangar with his mother’s tools. Her name was a testament to his ambitions: the Arcadia. I had to reckon this dynamic rascal was a skillful mechanic. However, he needed my skills to set up the control computer and program the post-nuclear engine’s out-of-gravity draining. Meanwhile, with a slice of pizza between her teeth, my sapiens was improving a jet-pack. The young boy had stolen a prototype from a pirate who stopped by a couple of months before.
In the evening, Ali and Benàn often exchanged stories about buccaneers and space adventurers. The young boy was fascinated by the freebooters from the Golden Age of Jupiter’s colonies: King Xiao and the Lost Triads, Grace Bonny the Traveler, Osborn the Freak or Marcellàn Iron Fists and his famous hand-to-hand fights. The latter was Benàn’s favorite and he would talk about him for hours. Our amateur raconteur wasn’t holding back his ardor. He knew hundreds of stories about pirates.
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“It is said that the Sun King, Goldsun’s vessel, shines like a star. Forstår du? And that is how she camouflages herself in the celestial firmament!” Benàn exclaimed, showing Lady Goldsun, the privateer, the respect she deserved; and this, although she sided with the Marine on the recent conquest of Pluto. “Her fleet is so frackin’ fast that even the Marine’s Interceptors can’t compete at pure speed!”
Like everybody in Solaris, we already knew some of these tales. In fact, there were so many we couldn’t distinguish the truth from the myth. The majority of these criminals and adventurers had never existed.
The vacation shortly came to an end as the Kitty only missed a few coats of paint. Alàn boasted every night that he would soon have one last job for us. Yet, I suspected him of monopolizing the floor so that his son would no longer broach the subject of his emancipation. And this was confirmed in the following twilight.
“Wait! Both of you. I gotta talk to ye.” He took a look at Benàn, who had grabbed his virtual reality console before storming outside. “Erik—the station’s storekeeper—told me that ye’ve emptied his entire soda supply,” he continued, clearing the remains of his nattmal. “Along with .50 AE ammunition. The kind of bullets we used to hunt hvaler—whales or Soviet cosmodons!’
“Sorry. We shouldn’t have hidden this from you,” Ali apologized. “We just wanted to teach the kid how to shoot.”
I saw Alàn smiling shyly through his beard. “There’s no harm, rest assured,” he said after a short silence. “I just yearn for this pirate story to get outta his head…”
“He’s a descendant of the first settlers… of course he has a taste for adventure,” I reported.
Our host’s eyes were full of nostalgia. “Ja! I know. ‘was like him…”
“You wish…” corrected his wife, who was fixing a modulator in a corner of the room. “This child has more potential than the whole clan put together. He has passed the age to play with his Spirograph.”
“Again. I know. ‘saw the boy handling the absurd handgonne Ali uses,” Alàn admitted. “And for sure, he’s also undoubtedly smarter than me.”
“Why not let him go?” my human asked.
Alàn sighed. “There was an age when I craved to see what was happenin’ in the solar mines of Mercury and the colonies of the Outer Worlds.” The gardener then showed us his right leg by putting it on the table. His calf was studded with scars and burns. The same wounds slept under the dry earth that permanently covered his hands. “T’was a beautiful time of freedom that was already comin’ to an end,” he said as he readjusted his gray pants to hide this pink topographic map of Mars. “What will he find now? Cyber-psychos on the run? Irradiated moons? This durn Technocracy and its ruthless Marine, both corrupted by Lunapolis? Nej. There’s nothin’ for him in deep space. This is the sad reality: the dream has faded.”
“The armor was from when you served?” I asked, alluding to Benàn’s words about the assisted exoskeleton.
“Served? I’ve never served anyone but the giant plants of Yggdrasil,” he said. Alàn scratched his beard; his gaze was lost in time. When he addressed us again, he made us promise to stop encouraging his son’s sweet pipe dreams. After that, he floated off to the greenhouse on the second floor.
“How can we tell him that he’s living in his own illusion?” Diligua asked rhetorically. She had finished repairing the modulator but threw it anyway; the day after, Benàn would secretly retrieve it to improve his radar system. She ultimately left the room after wishing us a good evening. Sadness could be seen on her face.