What Dreams May Come

Chapter 13: alien dirt

I found the free time I suddenly had very odd. I half expected my papa to burst in and demand to know where I had been, but that didn't happen, and Levi and I were left in peace.

We let the Space! CD play until it started to loop, and Levi rose from his seat beside me and stopped the player.

"Is there anything else we needed to do today?" he asked. "Anything you need to do? All our errands have been about me."

"I don't need anything," I answered. "As for today, after Alcott and Marcus get off work, the four of us will do something, but I don't know what and honestly I'm not certain on when either. This earthstorm has more people bothered that I expected."

"Is there anyway to see it?" Levi asked. "I mean, I know it's just a whirling mass out the one window I did see, but it's hard to believe that we actually landed on the planet until I see it for myself."

I frowned, thinking of any ports that would give a better view. The comm bay would have most the cameras, but my papa had one in his office. It was specifically trained on the scrubbers, but when I was little, I remember watching the earthstorms roll in with my madre.

"Environmental has a couple," I replied. "And we can check on Marcus, see when he gets off."

"Environmental...it's that your father?"

I nodded. "Marcus works in filtration. Come on."

I grabbed his hand, and pulled him toward the door. He hesitated, staring at the player for a moment.

"It'll still be here when we get back," I assured him and we headed down the hall.

"So what does your father do, exactly?" Levi inquired. "I know what scrubbers are, but what does your father do?"

"Honestly, Papa doesn't touch much more than tekcom holos these days," I explained. "He analyzes the data we collate and determines oxygen levels and atmospheric stability. He's working on a model to predict the earthstorms; once that happens, we'll be able to really start building a life here."

"How sporadic are they?" Levi inquired. "It seems like something so large and damaging should be able to be tracked. How did they track storms on Earth?"

I laughed. "I don't know why you're asking me; I don't know more about Earth than you do."

We travelled through the corridors quickly, ending up at my papa's office. It was full of charts swirling around on holos, though that didn't stop my papa from having quite a bit of paper mess as well. He said it helped him see the data better. Above his desk were two screens which had been turned off; it was useless for my papa's purposes while the storm raged overhead.

I reached up on my tiptoes to turn them on and we waited as the screens searched for their feeds and then blinked into view. The scene before us was a swirling mass of brown as dust pounded the sides of our base. Levi stared at it in silence for a while, watching the wind blow. The cameras didn't have sound, but I imagined that outside was a howling torrent of noise as the wind scratched dust along the outer walls. It was quiet inside, or at least, quiet enough that I didn't notice the noise. Once the storms died down, it always seemed emptier in the halls, but it was only the absence of the low rumble that had permeated the cycles previous.

"On Earth," Levi mused, his eyes still fixed on the screen. "People worshiped gods who purportedly made all of creation. There was a Mother Earth and Kronos and other Titans who formed the world from nothingness into a habitable land."

"That sounds like stories told to children," I told him.

"They were, though much later in human history. They believed that storms were the gods' wrath. I can believe in such things when staring at such chaos outside. On the Aeneid, we had radiation storms, but we could predict them and prepare."

"Someday," I sighed. "My papa spends all his time in here; I'm sure he'll figure it out."

The door slid open behind us, and I turned a little guiltily to see my papa staring at us in his office.

"Hello."

"Hello," I said meekly. "Levi wanted to see the earthstorm; I didn't want to bother the comm bay."

"I heard you've already been to the comm bay," my papa remarked, moving inside his office.

Levi stepped to the side of me, away from the desk. It didn't surprise me that my papa knew my whereabouts, but I didn't like his flat tone, as if we shouldn't have gone in the first place.

"Austen wants Levi to help decipher old code," I said. "So he has a part time job and he's only be in this century less than two days."

"Hmm."

My papa sat down at his desk, pulling out paperwork and a pencil. He glanced up at the monitors and turned them off with a remote. Levi nodded towards the door and I agreed; it would be best to retreat. But as soon as Levi had left the room, my papa turned.

"Dylan?"

"Oui?"

He didn't speak until the door slid shut, leaving Levi in the hall.

"Why isn't he going to work with you?" he asked. "He can do your more benign tasks as I teach you the charts and data reading."

"He's his own person, Papa," I said. "And he's not interested in CO2 scrubbers and UV baths for ion blades. Anatoly offered him an apprenticeship. I told him to take it."

"We won't have any plants if we don't have air to breathe."

"Which the plants help provide," I countered. "I'm not going to condemn him to environment just because I am. Madre doesn't work with you."

My papa frowned at me but didn't respond, turning back to his papers. I headed out the door, glad to make my escape, however delayed. Levi was shifting from foot to foot, a concerned look in his eye.

"I'm fine, and we're not in trouble," I told him. "Papa thinks I should have taken you as my apprentice, that's all."

Levi wrinkled his nose. "You're younger than me."

I punched his arm. "I've lived here longer than you."

"And I'm already skilled; I don't need all the arms of the base fighting over me," he sniffed.

"They are hardly 'fighting over you'," I laughed. "And what skills? I can memorize just as well as you can, it's just not poetry."

"What, you have the first eight hundred digits of pi memorized? Good heavens, Dylan. You need a boyfriend."

"Hey," I protested. "I have boy friends."

Levi shook his head. "Lully only counts if you've kissed him. Having friends who are boys and having boyfriends are two very different things. My mother would refer to them as beaus, but I imagine that's another word lost to the passage of time."

I decided that it was probably best that we didn't go into any of my relationships and thought quickly to change the topic.

"And I'm taller," I said. "So there. You could have been my little apprentice."

Levi groaned, but let the matter drop. It wasn't that I was hiding anything; Lully and I hadn't been anything but very close friends, but even very close friends can get, perhaps, too friendly. His future partner was twenty-four, and he had decided to wait until he was the same age. Four years didn't seem like such a big deal to me, but my madre and papa were nearly ten years different in age.

"This place could really use some signs," Levi remarked. "Or color coordination. Something to tell the endless grey walls apart."

"You'll figure it out," I told him. "Come on, filtration is this way."

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I think places like this would have little use for gods, which is weird to me. Thanks for voting!