Better Futures

Four

The morning sunlight on the expanse of bare earth was aggravating Sam's hangover. She blinked rapidly and swallowed a wave of nausea as she climbed from the passenger seat of Kate's truck. A shower and a coffee and a greasy breakfast hadn't been enough to compensate for everything she drank last night, but at least she had woken up in her own bed.

'The Farm' as Kate was calling it turned out to be a flat plot atop a promontory a couple of miles from the city. The area had been cleared for development, and the baked clay made up a flat surface into which survey pegs had been hammered. Rocks, large and small, ringed the cleared area, giving way on one side to a scree slope and on the other to a sharp drop-off into the valley below. The road and a steep rise made up the rest of the site boundaries, and Sam could see that someone (the developers, probably) had already planted scrub and marram grass on the slope and in the scree to stop subsidence. The soil on Aurora was so thin that anything more substantial would never take root. And these hardy plants had been through enough genetic modification as to be harmless to the non-existent ecology of the exoplanet. Their existence here proved that this place was all above board with the colony. It said a lot to Sam about how she'd changed in these last few years that this was so important to her.

She continued to look around the site. What about silica storms? Out on the plain the city was exposed to the infrequent but violent storms of frozen glass, where shards as big as a fist occasionally dropped from the sky to embed themselves in buildings, and even more occasionally but far more horrifically, people. Everything on Aurora was built to withstand that kind of assault, and there was always enough warning that people knew to stay indoors when a storm was coming. Sam had only seen a very bad storm once in Cairn, but they were relatively frequent occurrences near Forward and beyond, where the quartz desert stretched for three days. They would be cut off here if there was a really big storm. She was about to bring this up when Kate, seeing her expression, launched into a description of the buildings the developers were already planning.

"The houses will be like the civic buildings downtown, they'll have the same resistant coating they put on everything down there," she said, pointing towards the pegged-out stretches of earth. "And we'll grow a lot of our own food up here in a hydro-tunnel, so we won't need to depend on going into town." Beau was already running between the two pegged-out sites. "The houses will be standard box-houses like the ones on the edge of town." Sam strolled over to where Kate was looking at her tablet. She tilted it so Sam could see.

The developers had sketched out a model of a narrow house of the kind Sam recognised from Cairn and Settlement's sprawling suburban neighbourhoods, with a single room on the bottom floor with a kitchen and a lounge area, and upstairs two spacious bedrooms with windows along the rear walls, and a bathroom. A small storage unit was tagged to the outside of the house. The heavy polymer coating was textured to look like wood, and the developer's description advised that they could paint it in any of the colours within the limited range illustrated. The houses would be elevated, raised up on concrete plinths. Sam knew that some people used the spaces underneath to grow mushrooms or prove yeast for home-brewing. A small set of stairs would lead to the front door. The doors and windows would be coated with the same scratch-resistant sealant that was used on the outside of her plane. In short, they had already anticipated her only serious concern, and addressed it.

Sam had no reason to say no. To her surprise she found that now she was here, she didn't want to. Through her hangover, Sam felt a jolt of warmth towards the little house on the model. Looking at it she appreciated for the first time that she was looking at something that would be hers; the first space that truly was hers since her Initiative housing in New York, she realised. Did the Initiative housing count? Her grandmother's house sure as shit didn't. No, this would be the first place she would ever actually own for herself. Kate didn't miss this and put her arm around Sam's waist.