Just a Little Fire

Anger and fear took turns pummeling her insides as she tried to walk quietly through the busy workspaces of the hab. Arm 1 of North American Hab Beaumonde, the only home she’d ever known. The huge, sprawling town was mostly underground, which regulated the temperature inside. She slammed a door closed as she came into one of the greenhouses, finally overcome by emotion. The opacity of the underground ceiling gave way to sky.

“Jesus, Lena! What the fuck?”

“Have you seen Arthur?”

Juan blinked and set down the collard plant he had been cradling defensively. “He came through a little while ago. I just saw him for a second before the door closed.”

“Which way?” She growled.

“Lena, I don’t think...”

“Just tell me which way!”

After a moment, her oldest friend set his jaw and crossed his arms. “It’s his birthday.”

“Goddammit, that’s no excuse! Why did you just let him go?”

His voice got soft and she let it calm her, like always, and let him take her hands. “Because he helped build this place, and all the systems in it. Because he’s 85 years old. But mostly because I want him to be happy.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “It’s wrong. He raised me to believe it’s wrong, he helped codify the wrongness, and now I’m supposed to look the other way? The penalty...”

“You don’t have to enforce anything.”

“He’s been talking about it so much, if people start to listen to this shit it could undermine everything he’s been working on for decades. Everything we’ve struggled to gain in our lifetimes could be destroyed again. There’s something off about him, he’s not all there anymore. He’s dangerous.”

Juan shut his mouth in a tight frown, staring at the tables full of plants and workers crisscrossing the floor of the humid space. Painfully, he nodded. Lena squeezed his hands and looked for absolution in his eyes. He kissed her cheek and stepped aside.

Daytime temperatures hovered around 38 degrees Celsius this time of year, in this place. The sky was absolutely clear, no wisp of cloud in the whole expanse of piercing blue. The dry ground crunched underfoot as she walked away from the hab. She knew where he would go. She traced the path in her mind as she walked away from the hab, past the workers sweeping dust from the solar panels. She adjusted the mask she wore over the lower half of her face to keep dust out, and capture respired water.

Tall stands of drought-hardy cane stood still in the gullies close to the hab. They would wait two more months for water. By then, they would be brown and withered. But when the rain came, they would recover. The grasses would spring up, and the palo verde would bloom. She plucked a twig of creosote as she walked and crushed it under her nose, grounding herself in its scent.

The expanse of the dry lake bed stretched before her now, as she descended. Only a grotesque depression of mud remained at its center, swarming with desperate flies. Soon enough, that meager moisture would vanish, and all the animals, like their human neighbors, would huddle underground and wait for water from the sky.

She could see her destination now, and adjusted her pack impatiently. Skeletal hands, trunks and branches of the long-dead forest, jutted up from the ground. Closer than the horizon, but still too far to see into. She didn't see him yet.

He was a mad old man, the one who raised her. Mad enough even in his youth to imagine the world they now lived in, and to build it. Just crazy enough to believe that people could be different, better.

The world of his youth was ruled by corporations and capital. He told her how those twin forces had ravaged the world, extracting everything that had value from it, externalizing all environmental costs, mining and burning and wasting. Until they lived in a world half desert, half ice. Until the population of the planet was only 10 million human souls, struggling to survive. Lena’s father was one who had brought them all together, united by necessity, hungry for order. They coalesced under the same governing principles, agreed upon worldwide in autonomous circles. After the transition, the brief scrambling around for materials and methods to put principles into action, the Old World was dead.

Thou shalt take from the Earth only what is needed to sustain life, and give back in equal measure. Thou shalt not remove virgin materials from the crust of the Earth by mining, but take only from that which was accumulated in the Old World. Thou shalt not become fruitful, thou shalt not multiply. Thou shalt cause nothing to be combusted as fuel for industrial, residential, or recreational purposes.

She still couldn’t see him, but now she smelled something. It was foreign, but somehow, she knew what it was, and broke into a run. Her pack bouncing on her back, she cut through dry brush and entered the cathedral of twisted towering trunks. The bark had decayed, been sandblasted away, and what stood now were the bone-white sun-bleached remains of once stately trees. She had seen many pictures of what forests like this used to look like. She ached to feel the cool green shade her father had described in her bedtime stories. Cool green shade, little running creeks, water splashing over mossy rocks, ferns growing in every crevice that held black rich soil.

He was there, suddenly, his back to her, crouched over something she couldn’t see, but smoke was rising. It was what she was smelling. He turned to her, a smile creasing his bare face, and she saw the fire. She had never seen one before, but she knew what it was. A tiny bright tongue of destruction, consuming a few dry sticks. And she saw Abel. Her son, the only child she would ever birth. He had brought her son here, to show him this, to give him fire. Grandpa Prometheus. Abel’s face broke something inside her. His joy radiated from his face.

“Mom! Come see this! Grandpa made fire! With this little locket- it’s shaped like a heart, but inside is this round magnifying glass, see, and when the sun shines through it...”

Her voice was soft but strong, “Abel, come here.”

His face fell, and he looked at his grandfather who, also sober now, nodded. Lena hugged him when he got close enough, and said fiercely, “You know that fires are not allowed. What happened in the Old World?”

Abel looked at the ground. “The Old Ones burned the Earth.”

“That’s right. Look at these trees. Look at the dust we have instead of soil. What are we going to do?”

He looked up at her, at the once trees, and his small face grew hard. “We won’t let it happen again.”

She kissed his head. “Go home. I’ll be there soon.”

He glanced at his grandfather, suddenly a stranger, and ran off toward the hab, the only home he’d ever known.

Arthur stood and faced his daughter, preparing to speak. She brushed past him and stomped unnecessarily hard on the tiny flame, the tiny dry twigs, the tiny pile of ash, and scattered it all with a kick. Breathing hard, she turned on him.

“Why?”

“It was a tiny fire. When I was a boy, fire was life, and maybe some day it will be again. I used to love to sit by a fire, cook a meal, keep warm in the winter. I wanted him to see that fire can be beautiful, and useful.”

“Not anymore, Pa- damn it, why am I telling you this? You know! You taught me. People used to think that way- a little fire, I love it. They loved to watch cars run in circles, and they loved to see jets doing tricks in the sky, and they loved to ride in speedboats on lakes that don’t exist anymore. Pa, there is no winter here anymore. We don’t know when there will be again. You’re not thinking clearly, you'll infect minds with this.”

He suddenly looked ashamed. “Maybe so, maybe so. Somehow it didn’t seem that important anymore. But I know, I do know… sometimes we love things that aren’t good for us. Or for anyone. I was there. I saw it.”

She wrapped him in her arms and held him for a long moment. When she pulled away from him, finally, the taser she carried at her hip was in her hand. He looked down at it, and into her eyes. He didn’t move, and didn’t look away. She took a step back, pressed it to his chest, and pulled the trigger. His body stiffened, his back arched, and then, it was over. He crumpled. The body bag in her pack was easy to slip over his inert form. A reclamation crew would retrieve his body and take it to be recycled in the insectary.

A thought made her hesitate before she walked away. It must have come from somewhere hidden deep inside her, a survival instinct in some dark primal space she hadn’t known existed, illuminated by that flame, and her child’s bright face. Fire is life. Maybe someday…

She cried a little as she squatted over him to reach inside the bag, into his pockets to find the locket. Her tears evaporated, lost to the dry air, almost immediately.