The pilot talked over the in-cabin speakers, and I mostly let it wash over me. Those of you sitting on the sun-side of the craft, please keep the windows darkened. In the event of a sub-orbital flight-failure, blue lights on the floor will illuminate the path to the eject capsules. Etc. Etc. The only time my ears perked up was when she mentioned the approach toward Saturn. This would be the longest flight I had taken so far, and I wanted to hear the recommended gravity settings.
I looked out the window as the craft took off, and, in the split second before the acceleration into the slip-space portal, I saw several white lakes dotted around Duluth come into view in the distance, their waters frozen in the dead of January, variously peppered with little black ice-fishing houses. I smiled. In my mind I saw a young boy, holding his father’s hand as they walked across the frozen surface toward their ice-house.
The craft entered the portal and the windows were artificially glazed with opacity as the speed slowly passed the light beams. The opacity protected my eyes from burn-in from the now evenly matched light rays the craft slowly accelerated past. I glanced at the overhead monitor which displayed the intended flight path. An arrow arced up from earth and became a dotted line, showing which part of the journey was still ahead. The dashes veered their way through deeper space, past Mars, toward Saturn, finally culminating on one of the smaller orbs in the larger planet’s orbit.
My mind went back to the circle in the ice from my boyhood, the fishing hole, carved by my father. The lake water, normally so blue and inviting in the summer, was a black void in the white ice, looking somehow frozen but also undulating with the hidden movements of the fish below the surface, their silvery bodies creating orbiting patterns around the watery disk into which my father’s fishing line extended.
“How do they stay alive under the ice?” I asked.
“It’s different for them down there,” he said. “They don’t freeze like we would. The ice protects them from the real cold outside. Sort of how the atmosphere protects us from the cold of space.” He smiled at me from where he sat on his small stool, his gnarled fingers carefully poised on the line, ready to detect movements from below.
I opened my eyes. A flight attendant came by, offering drinks and snacks. I shook my head and continued to watch the monitor. Instinctively my hand strayed to my bag beneath the seat in front of me. I felt under the folds of the carefully wrapped ornamental sheet the pastor had given me. I leaned back in my chair and drifted off to sleep, eventually dreaming of circling fish below me under the ice and smelling my father’s pipe smoke as he waited for the fishing line to move.
Back then we only fished on the weekends. My father worked weekdays with his crew, erecting the struts which held the interstellar rockets in the earliest days of the interplanetary transport program. He came home with callouses and sore knees, but his excitement couldn’t be contained. He believed in the interstellar water farm initiative. He compared it to great, great, grandfathers and grandmothers in our family’s past who left New York and eventually settled in Wisconsin and Minnesota with hopes for their own farms. He was thrilled when the space program elected for a major launch site to be built just north of Duluth where now, in the early years of the new ice age, the conditions would be similar to temperatures of Mars and other remote systems.
“Imagine being out there,” he said on one Sunday morning, just after we stepped out onto the frozen lake. He stared at the sky for a few moments before we entered the ice house. He talked about a new territory he read about. Ice which encircled a globe. He shook his head in amazement. That was the first time I heard his wheezing breath in the cold air had gotten shorter and more pinched.
***
The skim craft was protected from the sheering wind on all sides by pressurized plastic. It whipped across the open expanse of ice. If I only looked down I could fool myself into believing we were back in Minnesota with my father piloting a snowmobile across a frozen lake. Only when I looked off at the horizon did my mind grasp the magnitude of the incomprehensible world I was crossing. If the craft were to entirely circumnavigate the entire moon it would only encounter ice. Below the white was an entire planet of water churning far below.
As the skim craft came to a stop at the waystation I glanced at the station’s name, “Europa North-West Point #5”. Cultivation tours opened for this moon only last year and not much effort had been made to gussy up the locations with fancy sounding names. That would undoubtably change in the upcoming months as more workers arrived. I remembered some of the locations on Mars with their fanciful place names like “Olympus Mons Mansions” and “Hellas Basin Boulevards”.
The craft docked at the station which floated a few inches above the ice. I stepped out into the frigid air. I felt my nose hairs freeze as I breathed in. It had a chemical scent from the atmospheric processors on the moon’s poles that made the air breathable, but other than the smell I might have been standing on our lake in Minnesota.
The dock attendant came forward to offer me a heating unit. I shook my head.
“You sure?” he said. “Cold out there.”
“No bother,” I said. “We’re used to it.” I gripped my father’s urn and stepped out onto the seamless ice of Europa’s surface.
Zary Fekete…
…grew up in Hungary
…has a novelette (In the Beginning) out from ELJ Publications and a debut novella being published in early 2024 with DarkWinter Lit Press.
…enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films.
Twitter: @ZaryFekete
Idle Ink 