My honest assessment of the woman when I first set eyes on her was that she was a cold fish—a lonely, sad, probably bitter spinster who came out here to wallow in it, not because she brooded as a tactic to get people to pay attention to her but because she meant it: she actually wanted to be left alone. Most of us did on Kreski. Most of us, though, preferred to be left alone together, like me and Stacia and the kids—well, and the kids and their friends and boyfriends and girlfriends and wives and husbands and their friends and, well, sticking to yourself is tougher than it sounds out here. That’s probably what she was thinking when Stacia and I went out to check on her.
“She’s going to be a problem eventually, Emiro,” Stacia said when she pinged. I was only half listening, poring over a box of rocks from Giro. “We can go down there and get her on track now or somebody’s going to end up bailing her out like the Coopers.”
“Yeah, well we’re not going to have that sour woman in the guest room for three months. I can tell you that.”
“That’s what I’m saying, Emiro. It’s a matter of time. Now or then.”
“What are her numbers?”
“Almost six percent on the last orbital fraction.”
“Six? She’s only been here what?”
“Three years now.”
“Calendar-wise, like thirty-six months?”
Stacia didn’t answer, which was akin to confirmation. I sighed.
“I thought she was a miner, Stace. How’s she screwing up so bad already?”
“As I said, maybe we should go down there and figure it out before it’s a problem she can’t fix.”
“Or we can’t fix is what you mean.”
“Either way, Emiro, somebody’s gotta fix that six percent, and it’s safe to assume if she coulda, she woulda.”
“What’s her name again?”
“Howard.”
“There’s half the problem, I’m guessing.”
“That’s her surname, you dolt. The woman’s not named Howard.”
“Well, I wasn’t asking her surname, Stacia. We’re not going to call her Howard when we go down there, are we?”
“Hang on, I’ll pull it up. Spreadsheet’s only got the census data by surname. Something’s got you all fussy and bothered this morning. Not enough good rocks on Pennix, love?”
“No, there weren’t. I’m on Giro, though.”
“Well, well, well. Hang on. Here it is. Linnea Howard. I figure we go down this afternoon. Have a word.”
“Fine. I’ll have Andrew bake her a pie. Give us a couple hours, Stace.”
“Funny, funny. I’ll see you when, two-thirty?”
“Good enough,” I told her, closing Stacia’s window. “You tested this lot yet?” I asked our Andrew.
“No, Emiro. Lot V-86. Northern Hemisphere.”
“Pull up the lidar and spectroscopy for that lot, and then test it. Seems like a possible if there’s enough there. It’s pretty stone.”
“Very good,” Andrew said.
“Linnea, Linnea, Li-nay-ya,” I repeated. “Oh, I’m going to forget that. Luh-nay-uh. Linnea. La-la-la. La-nay-ah.”
I put the quartz under the magnifier. “That’s a pretty quartz,” I said to Andrew’s departing backside. “Look at the pink in that.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “Very pretty.”
I picked up Stacia outside the outstation and we took the rover out to Linnea Howard’s plot. We were familiar, because we’d been out there what was probably five calendar years ago by then, when Davis Cooper got sick and Reedy couldn’t keep up with it. Probably if the kids had been older, they could have made it work. Wouldn’t have been fun, but they might have. By the time they asked for help, they were already in trouble. I suppose we were going out to find out what this Linnea woman’s excuse was. She didn’t look sick the few times anyone had seen her.
Stacia didn’t have much to say on the way over. Just another regular Thursday at the hub, I guess.
I suppose we still thought of the place as the Cooper’s compound, though that was a generous word for the property. Davis had inherited the title to the plot from an uncle who’d tried his hand at living solo off-grid the way we all were trying to do with varying degrees of success on Kreski. And really, the only value being transferred on a piece of property like ours by the Lanni Outstation was proximity to the hub. That was where the big battery lived, where the original settlers instituted a feasible power sharing scheme. Sharing that enormous industrial battery was what allowed us to make it around the long, dark quarter of the planet’s elliptical orbit on solar. The catch was always that it takes inputs, and when people aren’t banking it puts the rest of us who are banking in a tough spot. The ants versus the grasshoppers, I guess.
Each of us is “off-grid” in a way, and in another, we’re all co-owners of the grid, and most of the time, we’d be perfectly happy sticking to our own share. But Stacia knows deep down I’m just as neighborly as she is, which is how we ended up back at the Coopers’ again introducing ourselves to this Linnea. Lynn-eh-uh. Lin-ay-ah. I kept saying it under my breath.
Linnea.
We approached the arch for Linnea’s nano-screen dome, which had been moved back noticeably from the last spot the Coopers had it. At least four panel units were outside her bubble, and yeah, I could see where the six percent had gone with the naked eye. There was dust collecting all over those units, which would have been one thing if she had a bot running, scrubbing the dust off as it settled. But it didn’t look like she’d even thought about those panels in months.
“Hi,” Stacia said when she pinged the house from the arch. “I’m Stacia LaFell one of the adjustors at the outstation. My husband and I would like to talk to you, Linnea, is it? Would you be willing to have a word with us?”
“What’s this about?” her voice came back.
“We’d like to talk to you about your homestead,” Stacia said. “We’re checking in is all.”
There was a long pause. Stace looked over at me. I just shrugged. We didn’t say anything because it was certain she was in there listening to us, trying to figure out what we were doing there.
“I don’t get it. Is there something at issue? I’ve been out here for a couple years now, and nobody’s bothered me.”
“The issue, Linnea is that you’re failing,” I said. “And we came out here to see if we can prevent you from getting yourself into trouble. Being neighborly is all.”
Stacia shot me a look in the ensuing silence. I was happy, though. I was pretty sure I’d gotten her name right.
“They said you were a miner, so I figured we could talk blunt. I hope you’re not offended. It’s not like Stacia and I moved out to the Gammas to busybody ourselves into other people’s problems.”
“What’s the problem, though?” her voice came back.
“I can see about ten just looking around from out here,” I told her. “Both of us can. But the big problem is that you’re low. You need to be banking right now or you won’t be able to draw in about eighteen months when it gets darker and cold.”
We were waiting for her to respond, looking toward the camera on the arch. Linnea came walking out the door on the pop-up beside the brick house Davis Cooper’s uncle had built out of the locally cured silica. That main house sat beside the three small, rectangular ready-made units the original settlers had arrived with. Our pop-ups were filled with my rock samples. Most everyone else’s were where they hung their hydro-gardens.
“Wonder what she’s doing in there?” Stacia said, furrowing her brow as she looked over at me, shaking her head.
As Ms. Howard got closer, it looked like she had grease or something all over her hands and even spots of it on her face—a proper mess—which was odd. She looked like a worker. Not at all surprising for an ex-miner. The surprise was that she was failing so bad.
“Hi,” she said, inviting us to pass the outer field. “Thanks for stopping by, I guess, but my understanding is that the property is running a surplus.”
“Let’s talk,” Stacia said a few moments later as we stepped through the inner band of the arch. “I’m getting the impression there’s a lot the Coopers didn’t brief you on when they sold you the property.”
That was an understatement. I wouldn’t say this Linnea was exactly a warm person, but she wasn’t closed either. Once Stacia got her talking, she opened up, showing us what she was doing with the place. That grease actually turned out to be oil-based paint that she was mixing herself from some kind of bulk raw materials she was importing through the hub. That alone—the expense—I have no idea, but I imagine the supply in that one shelter would have been more than enough to cover a bot dumb enough to scrub those panels clean.
She was painting out in that pop-up. She’d turned the inside of the packaging for incoming panels into stacks of paintings that, my God, some of them nearly took our breath away. Linnea started flipping through them, grimacing, at one point letting out an audible, “Bleck,” as though she was disgusted by her own work.
As we walked through the rest of the compound, she could see Stacia and I exchanging looks. Not good. Not good.
“Davis told me all this was self-sustaining. Ran itself mostly.”
“Look,” I said. “I can see what you’re doing. You just want to be out here painting all day, right? And that’s fine if that’s the plan, but there’s a baseline you gotta do. These pop-ups, you need to be growing food, because the power inputs aren’t going to cover it in about ten months’ time when you’re drawing for heat.”
“I’ve got money,” she said. “I can buy food.”
“It gets tough to get and expensive when the whole colony’s stretched at the same time,” Stacia said. “There’s time to get you on track, but you need to learn how to run this place. Once you do, we can leave you alone to paint every last day away. We’ve got to get you self-sustaining first.”
Linnea looked disappointed. There was something about that look that bothered me—an exhaustion in it. I think part of her wanted to break down and cry and the miner in her kept her inner desperation in check. I don’t know.
“Are you okay?” Stacia asked.
“I suppose it’s better I learn this stuff now,” she said. “I just … I thought Davis would have …” She shook her head.
“We knew the Coopers well,” I told her. “They weren’t bad people, but they were in a bad way. A fair way to put it was that they were highly motivated to get back to a better situation for them than Kreski as fast as possible. Not saying it’s right to hang you out like that but it explains a little.”
“Come on,” Stacia said. “Let’s take a look at your scrubbers. I got a feeling the atmospherics need some attention.”
It’s hard to say just what I thought that first visit with Linnea was going to be, but I guess I figured we’d go over there and maybe spend a half hour or so telling a malingerer she needed to get her act together or she was going to freeze and starve her way off Kreski come the quarter turn. Well, Stacia and I spent about five hours, into the early evening, talking with a very interesting person. Judging from the paintings, one might have called her a visionary. What she was able to do with her hand and a bucket of mazz oil and some pigment, it blew my mind. That’s for sure.
Stacia asked her if we could come over and watch her paint something. Stacia was an administrator. For most of my lifetime, I’d been an entrepreneur, an amateur planetary geologist turned rock dealer. We’d never seen a real artist at work. You could find files of that in VR or video—even the ancient masters like Rawls or Finnieri on Charris. I heard some of the ancient archives on Athos even had footage of some of the later masters of Earth in video files. But there was something about being in the room with somebody, really seeing something, smelling the smells, being present at the moment of creation. We were going to get to watch a real artist work. I was excited. Not much that interesting ever happened on Kreski. That was kinda the point of living out here.
Stacia did bring a pie this time. Andrew had a few recipes. We figured we could treat her to a meal if she was going to treat us to a show.
Linnea told us she liked to be left alone while she was working but that she was used to people watching. “Just don’t interrupt or break my concentration, please,” she said.
We sat behind her on a couple field house expandable chairs I had from my younger days personally doing surveying work. The pod was well-lit, basic. Not the kind of place you imagine a masterpiece being created—the ancient way, with paint and human hands. And it started that way. Stacia and I quietly watched as she addressed the surface—the inner back half of a solar panel’s packing crate, two by two meters.
Linnea began by marking out a few blotches, I think for scale, a bit of a rough outline of the major features of the scene. Then she built a background, bit by bit, a slow process, layers upon layers of darkening color, oil morphing into shades of sky. Then, seeming satisfied enough as she reached the horizon, bit by bit, she traced out features of the landscape—rocks of varying sizes and shapes casting shadows over the backdrop, which was to our eyes still a packing crate to that point. It was nearly an hour into that part in the painting where Stacia and I both had a transformational moment. We both saw at the same time, maybe even the same stroke of the spatula she was using, when that crate, which had become a nascent landscape, in a single stroke, the lights came on, and suddenly, Kreski appeared—the ridge from the road approaching our homestead. Poof! Like magic. One of the most amazing moment’s I’d ever witnessed. We looked at each other, and Stacia, wide-eyed, shushed me, as she could see, I almost couldn’t help myself from interrupting Linnea with an exclamation over the impact of that moment. Brilliant and beautiful. I took the hint and kept my mouth shut, as much as it took every bit of restraint I had.
As Linnea continued, there was an obvious and gaping absence in the center of the panel—that space where our home would be. And, like before, it started to appear before us, rough at first, points, outlines, hints of the real thing. Then, suddenly, nearly three hours into this painting, Linnea took her music out from her ears, sighed audibly, and stood there, her shoulders hunched, her head down, and it looked to me and Stacia from behind that she’d begun to cry.
Stace jumped up and put her hand across Linnea’s back, and this woman, this cold fish as I’d thought her to be, melted into a puddle of tears on Stacia’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I can’t,” was all I could make out from my seat. So I got up as well.
Linnea handed Stacia the spatula, and Stace led her away from the panel.
“How about we go sit down for a bit,” she suggested, and as Linnea nodded, I could see her stepping beside Stacia, wincing, with a noticeable limp as we made our way from that external pod back into the Cooper’s brick house.
That was the first inkling we got of Linnea Howard’s pain.
We sat in her kitchen for hours that night, listening. She’d overdone it, she told us. She really wanted to finish that painting for us—something she easily could have done in a third of the time “back home,” which was how she referred to the salt mine. The problem was the temperature and the oil. Or at least that’s what she said the problem was, and maybe that was the case with the immediate issue of the painting. The real issues, though, went far deeper.
She’d been in pain since she’d arrived on Kreski. Linnea let Stacia take a look at her knees and foot, which were both swollen and painful.
“I can do a couple hours on my feet,” she told us, “but that’s usually the limit, and with the oil … it takes so long to dry and solidify. It’s just so different. Different substance. The viscosity. The viscosity,” she kept repeating.
I asked her about how she worked back on the mine. She gave us a long lecture about painting surfaces—real depth and nuance to about fifty different ways painters had painted over the eons, more techniques than I could recall afterwards, that’s for sure. The short version was that she worked with a heated palette in a zero-G bay with no atmosphere that opened to space, so hyper cold. Her work froze to her metal canvas in seconds, hardened and solidified unless she put the heat wand to it, which she needed in her younger years. As she got older, she learned to work around her mistakes, until she just didn’t make mistakes anymore. And there’d been no pain back there, no weight on her bones. So it hadn’t just been the step-stool that’d been creaking and groaning as she’d worked that afternoon, up and down about a hundred times with her back to us. Her poor knees and aching feet. All this gravity. Me and Stacia must have apologized about a hundred times for not noticing. It genuinely pained us to know how much she was hurting.
Anyway, we ate together, telling Linnea to take her time finishing up the painting. Stacia said she didn’t have to finish it on our account.
“I’m only sorry I can’t do it justice here,” Linnea said. “I used to be so much better.”
“I’ll be out soon to have a look at your panels and your hydro later this week,” I told her. “Rest up. Get the swelling down. No need to be in pain.”
“Maybe I’m not cut out for a planet,” she said. “You two have been so kind.”
Over the course of our conversations, we’d discussed her financial situation a little—enough for me to know Linnea could afford to put a little money into self-sufficiency. All she’d wanted coming out here was a place to paint and be left alone. Why she chose a homestead so far out into the Letters was a mystery, considering where she came from. From what Davis Cooper had told her, she hardly had to do anything. The place would run itself.
That would have been true if either Davis had set it up correctly himself or had taken the time to talk Linnea through it. But the Coopers never did set Linnea right on her feet here. There was still time, though. And she had the money. I didn’t mind filling in the blanks.
There were a couple easy solutions to her diminishing numbers and maintenance issues. First, she’d inherited a fixed-panel system from the Coopers, an old one. Her panels were fine, but collected about half the power they could if each rotated toward the sunlight. I’d always had my suspicions, but I had no idea exactly how inefficient the Coopers’ system was till then. Davis and Reedy flat-out refused our offer to look at the setup, and by the time they were really struggling, Davis was sick, and the point was already moot. It was a matter of installing a sunflower system on each panel, a sensor, an actuator, a motor, and a central control system. Then each panel would follow the sun. Once we got them installed, even on the quarter turn there’d be enough power to project the nanosheet outside the perimeter of Linnea’s panel field. Voila. Not only no more deficit, Linnea would be at a three-percent surplus on the darkest arc-days of the elliptical. It would take a multi-use like our Andrew about three weeks to convert all those panels. I told Linnea it was no problem, but she didn’t finally give in and allow us to send him over until Stacia insisted. Told her we’d take four of her old paintings in return. That was the lowest number Stacia could get Linnea down to.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
“I feel bad,” Stace told me. “Unless I’m mistaken, I feel like our grandkids will be able to buy half a cylinder group if they ever sell them.”
“Who knows?” I told her. “Art’s a funny thing.”
It wasn’t out of the realm of reality.
Stacia was over there every other day, too, helping Linnea with the hydro, so her garden would be mostly self-sustaining within a few weeks. And during that time they were working, Stace talked Linnea into buying a multi-use bot of her own. She had the money, and she wasn’t opposed. I guess she’d had a few over the years at the salt mine. Having one here would allow her to get off her feet as soon as the swelling crept up on her.
All this was a start, which is to say, within a couple weeks, Stacia and I were confident Linnea Howard wasn’t going to be a problem, at least not in the way we’d feared from that shocking downturn in her plot’s readings.
After getting to know her over the course of those first few weeks, that much wasn’t so surprising to us anymore. What was surprising was how much we’d both grown to like her, given our first impressions. Those first impressions even made more sense now. It’s hard to be warm and cheery and give off good vibes when your knees are throbbing and your feet are swollen.
That conversation we’d had about her painting in zero-G had got me thinking. And, I suppose I do my thinking a bit on the slow side, because the solution didn’t hit me till a few weeks later. I was working on adding a profile of marbles from Giro out of about a thousand of the test plots I’d been considering. A nice, affordable addition to the family of marbles we offered. Deep veins as well.
But that was only the spark that brought the apt memory back to the front of my mind, as some of the longer, deeper cuts on Giro were going to require a long-armed laser. And as I was thinking about that, I remembered shopping for that hardware. And the framing wholesaler had a rig that curled around in a fixed semi-circle. At the time, I couldn’t imagine what they used that for, so I asked the guy, and he told me that was an engine rig, and you could put a bot in there on the yard arm, or you could fix up a metal printer or whatever.
As I was thinking about it, I realized, if it could handle a multi-use or a full-scale industrial metals-grade print set, a unit like that could surely handle the weight of Linnea Howard. The only issue would be a comfortable harness setup, a hardbacked space suit would do. Or we could print something. It was a thought worth running past her, I figured.
I mentioned it to Stacia first, just to make sure it wasn’t too crazy an idea to even bring up to Linnea, and Stacia agreed. Maybe Linnea would think it was worth the cost.
So I went over there one afternoon that week to show her the specs and some videos, then offer some ideas on how to adapt it so she could suspend herself in front of the panel she was working on. Not exactly zero-G, but not nearly the stress of being on her feet for four hours while she was painting.
When I got over there, Stacia was already sitting with Linnea in her kitchen. I had no idea she’d be over there. I guess she’d just arrived. The place smelled like mint or some fragrant oil of the like.
“What kind of tech is in this one?” Linnea was asking her.
“It’s just tree oils,” Stace replied. “So tree-tech, I guess. Natural stuff.”
“Feels good,” Linnea said, shrugging. “Worth a try, Stacia. Thanks.”
“The Maders both had arthritis and swelling after coming in from Eunice, and I guess that cylinder group was about point-eight G of what we have here.”
“Point seven-eight,” I said. “Deine Mader hardly ever shut up about it. Point seven-eight G.”
Stacia couldn’t help laughing. She knew it was true.
“Stacia said you had something to show me, Emiro,” Linnea said. “Something that might help me paint?”
“Well, we’ll see. Just an idea.”
We sat together as I projected specs for the yard arm on Linnea’s floatscreen above the table. I showed her the functionality with the engine applications it had, switching the angles to more what she would need painting, more vertical than horizontal. It was still the same principle. Then I showed her a couple options I’d thought of for a harnessing system. The best, she thought, was an adaptation of a recreational drone suit body. A printed attachment with a few rated bolts to a plate on the yard arm would do the trick. Then it would just be a matter of controls, either an app in a glasses-set or perhaps a headband that ran a thought-controlled app.
Linnea looked equal parts intrigued and disappointed as we went through the possibilities. After a while Stacia, reading the emotions etched plainly enough on Linnea’s face, asked her about it directly.
“It looks great,” she said. “Truly. And you two have been better to me than I deserve. But, to be honest, I’m thinking of giving it up.”
“Giving what up?” I asked her.
“Painting,” she said.
“Oh, don’t do that!” Stacia said. “No. We’ll find something that makes it work.”
“I’m not sure you can,” Linnea answered. “It isn’t just the pain. It’s not easy to even say it. I don’t enjoy it anymore. It feels like I used to paint to escape to somewhere, to create a place. Now look at me, I’ve escaped all right, all the way to Gamma-Kreski. It’s not what I thought it would be.”
“If it were pain free, would that be different?” I asked her.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t like it. Almost as much as the pain, I don’t like the paint, the smell of it, the feel of it, the viscosity on the surface of the crate. It’s just work now, and I’ve worked all my life.”
“It would be a shame if you stopped making art,” Stacia said. “Yours is a rare gift.”
“Maybe I’ll just take a break,” she said. “I finished your painting, though—the one of your homestead.”
She actually gave us a half-smile when she presented it to us, out in her workshop.
“One of the best ones I’ve done with this gunk,” she said, gesturing to her paint buckets. “Anyway, I hope you like it.”
It was hard to know how to act. Of course we liked it and were thrilled to get such a gift, but it was hard to be gracious and smile. I was sad, and I could read Stacia well enough to know she was too. But what could we say other than to offer help. It was Linnea’s gift to use or not use as she saw fit. A shame, nonetheless.
Over the next several weeks, Stacia kept going over there. I got reports, too, from Andrew, about the progress getting Linnea’s panel system up to peak efficiency. Stace was also helping out in the garden. She told me the balms were helping Linnea too. Less and less pain. Stacia was still holding out hope Linnea would start painting again. But weeks passed, and she gave no indication she had any intention of making art anymore.
I was testing rocks one afternoon, me and Andrew, our usual routine, and Linnea suddenly appeared outside at the arch, pinging. I thought she was looking for Stace, so I told Linnea she was at the hub.
“I actually wanted to talk to you, Emiro, if it’s all right?”
“Yeah, sure. Come on in.”
I buzzed her through the arches. I watched her moving up the front walk, and she was walking pretty easy—looking pain-free, at least to the naked eye.
It occurred to me after she appeared at my office door that it was the first time she’d ever stopped by ours. And here I was, sitting there at my benches, not even showing her around.
“Sorry for being so rude,” I said.
“Oh, no. I stopped by unannounced. You’re working. Can I come by at a better time?”
“No time like the present,” I said. “What’s up?”
She got quiet for a moment, as though she didn’t exactly know what to say—how to form the right words to paint the right picture of what was going on in her tumultuous head. I could tell something heavy was bubbling beneath that surface.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “If I’m not going to paint anymore, then what am I going to do with the rest of my life?”
“That’s a good question to ask. Stacia told me you’d more or less converted your studio into another annex for your garden.”
She nodded. “Emiro, do you think you could teach me about stone?”
I was puzzled. “Well, yes, but why? I mean, what do you want to know about it?”
“I’d like to learn about your business—different types of stone. How you find them, all that.”
She shrugged and didn’t seem so sure of herself. I figured what the hell, maybe she was just looking for something or anything and I was right in front of her and friendly, so why not start there. So I invited her to sit, had my Andrew get us a cup of tea and just went about my business as usual for the afternoon, explaining as we went, occasionally answering her questions.
By the time a few hours had passed, we’d discussed the different types of rock I usually surveyed for, who I sold it to, what applications—veneers, countertops, flooring, paneling, structural—all that.
“Who are your main clients?” she asked me at one point.
“Cylinder groups easily. All over the Letters. Apart from trees and maybe birds, nothing makes people feel as at ease about living in a space cylinder as much as soil and stone, even if it’s a countertop or a tile floor. Most people don’t think about it or even know it, but they all like rocks. I just find a way to give them the best ones at a competitive price point.”
“What is that,” she said to me, “if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Price depends entirely on the order. When I started out, I was just selling to individual contractors, but what you really want to do is land developers. Nail a couple of those down and land a contract for a new cylinder group? I mean, Stacia and I are regular people, Linnea. We’re out here because we want to be, not because we have to be. Let’s put it that way.”
“So you two are rich?”
“By most standards,” I said nodding. “I’d say so. Like I said, though, we’re both regular people. I just happened to luck my way into the right business at the right time.”
“So it’s expensive?”
“What, stone?”
She nodded.
“It all depends on the type, the location, the application, all that. What’s this all about, Linnea?”
“Well, I’ve been playing around with the idea of sculpting. I don’t know, that yard arm of yours got me thinking, that structure, the semicircle. If I had a rock on a pedestal that rotated, I could sculpt with a three-hundred-sixty-degree field right at the fingertips. I was looking into some of the sonic tools in your field, and there’s stuff out there for fine stonework. There’s a lot of fake stuff—AI-gen, printed to make it look like stone. But maybe people might like something real. Even if they don’t, maybe I’d like to make it.”
She could see—I was so excited my hands sorta got away from me, I was waving them in front of me involuntarily.
“Are you okay, Emiro?”
“Yes! Yes!” I said. “It’s just. You’re going to want something soft and consistent but not too soft, especially if you’ll be displaying it in an exposed place like Kreski. Or on a cylinder, soft would be good. Also, the best looking, what’s the word?”
I’d already turned my back and started scrolling.
“Best looking is good,” she said.
“Aesthetic,” I said. I could hardly contain myself. “You need the right aesthetic. Something white? An alabaster? I have a Ginacean alabaster that would be perfect.”
“I was thinking maybe we’d start with something local—something cheap. Here on Kreski, maybe? Just to see if I have any kind of knack for it.”
“Right,” I said, a little embarrassed at how carried away I’d gotten. I turned to her smiling. “I love rocks. What can I say?”
“That’s great, Emiro. We’ll see. Maybe if this works out, we’ll call it fate—two people meant to find each other. Right time, right place.”
We talked for another hour or so before Stacia came home. Linnea and I had a plan to get her started—small at first. She wanted to see if she could learn to do details.
“What are you two up to?” Stacia asked when she found us there talking about the different types of sandstone and limestone here in the high-volume quarries that had originally brought us out to the Gammas all those years ago.
“I’m going to find Linnea some rocks to make magic with,” I told her.
That brought a rare smile to Linnea’s face. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet, Emiro,” she said. “The next cut I make on a sculpture will be my first. It’s far more likely someone will be pounding my work down to gravel to line their front walk than putting it up in their front room.”
“Museum, more like,” I said. “We’ve seen you work, Linnea. We believe in you.”
Stacia didn’t say anything, but she was grinning from ear to ear. When she couldn’t contain her happiness for Linnea any longer, she surprised her, embracing her around the shoulders. Even if Linnea didn’t know it, we did. That would be a day to remember. Surely.
Before Linnea did anything rash, like order an industrial robotic arm and harness system, we got her started small. She ordered hand tools, hypersonic chisels, sand irons, and diamond fabric. I brought her hard blocks of sandstone in half meter cubes. Big enough she could play around with decent sized forms, but small enough for Andrew to lug over there without too much trouble.
Around that time, Linnea’s multi-use model arrived from the Inner Letters, a refurbished Harold with an upgraded industrial undercarriage, which would be good for an aspiring rock-worker with bad knees.
Some of the first sculptures she did were extremely basic—a hand, a shoulder, a bird, a bowl of fruit. And then she got a little more ambitious, carving out a small dragon with large, menacing eyes and a long, forked tongue. Linnea was still reserved about the results, but Stacia and I had no doubts. I started shopping around for industrial outfits looking to offload a yard arm that would work for Linnea’s purposes. Machinery like that was usually reliable for decades, even used.
Stacia came back from a visit to her homestead a couple months into Linnea’s early days sculpting, saying, “Emiro, I’ve never seen her like that before.”
“Happy?”
She shook her head. “Not exactly. Not happy but focused. So in tune with her work that she was distant, almost like the rest of the universe didn’t exist anymore. Just Linnea and the stone.”
That was all I needed to hear. That yard arm was something I would find a use for even if Linnea didn’t, but I didn’t have much doubt about who’d be using it once I had it shipped in. I also had a surplus storage warehouse behind the station’s businesses adjacent the hub. Not junk stone, exactly, but leftover stuff. Unfortunately, most of it was cut too thin to be much use to a sculptor, or so I thought, so I figured I’d clear it all out, and surprise her once Andrew and I got the yard arm set up.
Somehow, I don’t know how, but Stacia found out when Linnea’s birthday was. I couldn’t get all the stone out by then, but I could clear enough space to get the arm shipped in and set up, so we got to work. Even the kids came down and chipped in. Stacia couldn’t stop talking about Linnea starting to sculp, and we’d given them each one of her paintings, so they were curious—a real artist here on Kreski, working out of their family’s back warehouse as a studio. It was quite a thing for a backwater world in the Gammas.
We figured we’d surprise her, going over there around midday on her birthday, me and Stacia. There we were, sitting side by side in the rover on the road out to the Cooper’s old place. Stacia looked over at me, shook her head and said, “Six percent.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I think this Linnea Howard woman is going to be a real problem.”
She smiled and laughed. They’d become close friends. I’m not sure how many real friends Linnea had ever had before.
When we got out there, we pinged from the arch and got no response. So we waited, pinged again, waited, and debated how long we should stand outside before turning around. We were probably there for three minutes pinging every thirty seconds or so before finally, her Harold came out.
“Emiro and Stacia LaFell, welcome. Miss Linnea doesn’t like to be disturbed while she’s working, so I came to greet you instead. Come inside, please.”
Her Harold opened the arch screens for us and escorted us to Linnea’s little studio, where she was seated on a stool, shaping the lower half of a block that was rounding into form—a mythological animal maybe.
“Hey, guys,” she said as we stepped in, half turning quickly to meet eyes before returning to the stone. “I love this texture, Emiro. Beautiful clean cuts. Just crumbles away straight and true.”
“Let me know the lot number and I’ll get you some more,” I told her.
We’d worked out an arrangement by then. I get her stone and eventually, she would get me a sculpture. I surely got the better end of the deal, but Linnea wouldn’t have it any other way.
“We’d like to show you something,” Stacia said, “if we can drag you away?”
Linnea turned back around, one eyebrow turned up. “Show me what?”
“Your birthday present,” Stacia said.
It was almost like Linnea froze. It was hard to figure what she was thinking a lot of the time, but she just sat there for maybe ten seconds, blinking, a befuddled look on her face.
“I have my ways, friend,” Stacia said.
I’m not sure she knew how to react. I did know she couldn’t possibly expect what we had in store for her.
“Should I get cleaned up?” she asked. “I’m covered in dust. A proper mess.”
“If you like,” Stacia said. “It’s not as though any of the rockhounds or homesteaders around here care much for appearances, though.”
“That’s what I like about the place,” she said. “Give me five.”
“Okay if Stacia gives me a tour of the garden while we’re waiting?” I asked her. “It’s been a while since I’ve had a look.”
Linnea gestured to the back pod as she was stepping out toward the house.
It looked great in there. Genuinely great. Nice fruits coming in, beans and grains, greens and carrots and corn. She’d come a long way from the dried provisions she had squirreled away in bags the first time we’d met her. The few blotchy beans and tired cabbages and radishes she could barely bring herself to eat. This was a proper garden now.
“Like she was made for this place,” Stacia said. “Just needed a helping hand.”
I had a vision for how I wanted it to go—a nice, wide-open studio with that rotating pillar there in the center, right at the perfect access point for the yard arm. A complete workplace fit for a master. Well, there’s a vision and then there’s reality. It was still a fixer-upper. Even with a lift and heavy trailer hookup for the rover, Andrew couldn’t get most of the heavy scrap out of there, so the floor of the warehouse was full of stone we’d have to clear out before Linnea could use the place. But Andrew had managed to get enough of all that stock to one side so that he could get the yard arm scaffolding and the primary hoist assembled. We didn’t have the harness setup yet. Stacia talked me out of doing something there, figured it was personal enough we should wait and let the artist make the call on that part of it. We were both excited. Linnea was in the back seat of our rover, riding with us, Stacia and I exchanging looks the whole way down there.
“You know,” Linnea said as we approached the hub’s industrial archway, waiting to get flagged into the mid-lock, “I don’t get out nearly enough. You two have probably been here too long to appreciate it, but the landscape is really beautiful.”
The sun was low and red, making for a subtle pink hue in the low sky and across the sand and rocks. If you could breathe here without a nanosheet, this planet would be a destination. Linnea had that right. On the other hand, that one factor kept us in relative isolation and peace. Friends. Family. Community. And every now and again an old friend would leave, and we could make a new one. It was a good place for us.
Nothing could have proven that point more clearly than the crowd of family and friends gathered at the warehouse—or, as I was going to have to start calling it, the studio. Linnea’s studio. All the kids, all their kids, even a few of Stacia’s friends from the hub. We had cake, food, music. A proper birthday party for a woman most of them only knew as the lady who’d painted the panels. Nearly four years after landing here, Linnea was about to get a proper welcome to the community, which I suppose was appropriate for everyone, us and her. Such was Kreski.
When we pulled up at the back doorway—not the industrial warehouse gate for the stone but the regular door—Linnea asked us, “What’s this place? I’ve never been back here before.”
“It’s your new studio,” Stacia said. “If you like it.”
We were both smiling.
When we stepped in, I think it was hard for Linnea to know what to look at, the yard arm, the people, the stone, the kids running around, the food.
It was an emotional day. She spent about the first ten minutes with her hand on her heart half the time, shaking hands the other half, finally meeting the kids she’d heard so much about from Stacia.
I could imagine it was overwhelming for her. It was overwhelming for us. You didn’t move out to Gamma-Kreski if you were an extrovert. Or maybe you did, but you didn’t stay long.
Casually, when I caught her in a free moment, I told her I’d have Andrew move out all that stone. “Most of it will probably never find a home,” I said, never expecting her to have any thoughts about it. I didn’t think there was any possibility she’d have any use for it.
“Oh, don’t do that, Emiro. No. I mean, if you’re open to it, the reliefs I could do with some of those panels?”
She shook her head and let out a puff of air.
“I don’t know what a relief is,” I told her, “but I’m looking forward to finding out.”
“The arm will be perfect for it.”
She shook her head, and then she started tearing up.
“Who does this?” she said. “Who does this for somebody?”
“We didn’t do this for somebody, Linnea. We did this for you. We’re pretty certain you’re worth it. Never would have guessed that a year ago, but it’s true.”
“I was wondering what I was going to do during the quarter turn when everything got dark.”
“Light it up, lady,” I said. “We know you can.”
It was a few weeks more getting her settled in there. By then the sun was getting redder and redder on the horizon, low, low, low. Those were the times we all had to be vigilant. People too isolated out here sometimes let it get away from them. Even the loners could get dangerously depressed in those dark days.
Linnea was riding to the hub with Stacia on the days she went down there. And the days Stace didn’t go into town, Linnea was down there anyway. I’d be sitting at my desk, and she’d ping me three or four times a morning, asking about this and that—equipment, stone, what she could move and use, what I thought of her setup.
Stace and I went down there a few times to help her test her gear. By the time her suit came in and we’d gotten it fastened and programmed, the lift was almost an extension of her body, limited telepathic flight. She had all her sonics on her belt, and after a few test panels, she pinged me one morning. She looked at me with a look I’d never seen from her before.
“I’m ready,” she said. “Emiro, I’m ready.”
I didn’t know what she was ready for, but I didn’t ask either. I knew whatever it was, it was going to be great.
I had a mess of Kin marble in the corner of that warehouse—beautiful stone from the Lambda Kinship cylinders project. They’d ordered so much more than they ended up using. Their budget had cut them two entire cylinders short—little wonder, as my contract had paid out in full in advance. So the stone was already paid for. She asked me about it, saying sorta, “Well something like that would be perfect, but—”
I stopped her right there. “But nothing, Linnea. That stone is yours. Make us something beautiful—something for the hub, something to make the community proud.”
Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined what that woman would do.
There were ten panels—three by nine meters of some of the galaxy’s most beautiful marble, ten centimeters deep. She cut it into panels that told the story of the human race, at least as our branch of humanity knew it, cutting our way through the stars. There were three panels on Earth, grasslands to rocket ships on liftoff, steam engines in between. An exodus in the cosmos. The Columns. The glorious cityscapes of Charris before the Colonial Era. The great expeditions. Athos, Iophos, and Hellenia. The other magnificent civilizations of the Battery. Then us, forging our way out into the Letters. It was all there. A history of humanity in stone. Breathtaking.
We were tough people—the kind of people who could stand in the darkness and cold for a year at a time and think, This is the place for me, hard in the dark of space. This is where I shall live my life. Yet I knew when looking at the totality of this work there wasn’t a pioneer out here who could stand in the face of these monuments, carved by the best hands of all of us, and not get choked up by the awesome story set before us in marble.
Humbling.
When she finished the tenth panel—the Letters panel as she was calling it—Linnea pinged me and Stacia to come down to the studio and have a look.
She was still there when we arrived. Nearly eight in the evening by the human clock. She was seated before that last panel in one of my field chairs, exhausted.
It wasn’t so much the ships and the planets, but the faces of the people fixed in wonder for all eternity. I could hardly bear it. Pioneers all. That all of us could forget, could take for granted that we, every last one of us, were an integral part of that sacred cosmic tale. I don’t think Linnea was prepared, not for us to melt like a pair of children, hard-handed stone worker, pragmatic administrator. I’d never cried at a funeral the way I did in front of that final relief. Stacia the same.
She turned to me after about five minutes of shared, silent reverence, shook her head at me and said it again. “That Linnea Howard, I think she’s going to be a problem, Emiro.”
Linnea had a plan, a walkway with ten stops encircling the hub, just on the interior of the nanosheet, so everyone who came to the center of town could stretch their legs strolling around the perimeter of the outpost’s dome—complete with a brick sidewalk. She was even going to carve a frame for each panel.
By the time the sun came up bright again after the quarter turn, we’d all be able to walk it.
“Six percent,” I said to Stacia. “Sometimes you find beauty. Sometimes beauty finds you.”
In the case of Linnea Howard, we never did figure out which was which.