It's good to see Earth again.
Sometimes, when you're out there, roaming the streets of the Dome, all sand and steel and plastic and concrete, breathing recycled air and the recycled dust that comes with it, you forget that water isn't just something to drink. You perceive wet as the last few seconds of a sip from the ration canteen, the drops that spill over your stubble and mingle with the sweat of your shirt. You see rain on the Teevads and you watch piping volumes of the precious commodity stream through the labs at the Pool every day. You know water is coursing through the hydrators, powering your breath, keeping the Dome alive. You pour a small sliver of your ration into the earthenware pot of your filocactus every week, enough to keep it green and to remind you of the garden you had back in Edmonton.
You know the taste of water, its feel, its scent, its chemical makeup, its boiling and freezing points, its uses, its value, its precious rarity.
But there's something mesmerizing about seeing the real thing, about being able to trace the staggering oceans that swarm the continents like the sand that surrounds your filocactus. You can see Earth from the Dome, of course, but from the windows on the roof of your dormitory you can really only see a single color, sometimes two -- blue-white, blue-green, blue-brown. Through the slight refraction of the Lander's window, you catch your first real glimpse of water in months.
It's beautiful. You feel an immediate quickening in your pulse, the animal inside of you yearning to bathe, to drink, to swim, to frolic at riverbanks. The sight of water in its natural state provokes instinct, something even your highly-educated mind can't control: it's akin to the way your brain reacts when it sees food in the morning, or catches sight of a bared breast (or, for that matter, a snake or a spider).
This is your fourth trip back in three years but Earth still steals your breath. You can hear your brother and the pilot arguing in the cabin over the best way to approach the landing site. You're content to let them argue; it'll be hours before touchdown and for now you have the view all to yourself. Perching closer to the window and resting your hand on the wall of the Lander's fuselage, you can just make out Florida reaching down to play with its cousins in the Caribbean, locked in an ancient game of follow-the-leader. You can clearly see the Great Lakes, seas in their own right, before they become obscured by fingers of floating water, drifting innocently on the wind from one side of the planet to the other. Somewhere, just below the thin blue crescent that marks the edge of the atmosphere, clouds will be pelting your childhood home of Vancouver with Taint-laced rain, and your driveway in Edmonton is probably buried in crushing snow. In a few months, even the winter cities like Edmonton will melt and release the Taint across the northern plains.
Your wife apologizes as she reaches across your view. She starts to dig through the bags you've crammed in beside your surveying equipment – equipment you'll use in the coming weeks to identify the best drilling sites for your brother's team. Maybe she's searching for a snack for Skye. You place your hand affectionately on her shoulder and push her gently out of your way; it's a playful gesture and she turns around to flash a smile in your direction. You make eye contact for a split-second before your view returns to the planet below, searching for homes long since abandoned. Out of the corner of your eyes you catch your wife rolling hers in annoyance. She wasn't born on Earth, and for her the novelty of the visit has worn thin. She's already told you that she won't be coming on the next expedition - she wants to stay Moonside with Skye. He'll be almost eight by then and will probably appreciate the time to spend with his friends.
You met her just after the Exodus began, back when the Dome was the Dome and not just one of three. You were living in the cramped, Poolside dormitories your brother bought for you and your mother. The space was not what you were used to -- despite your differences, your brother had always provided for the family and as a result your home in Edmonton had been comfortable to the point of sprawling. This new residence was big enough to live in, and though your gardens were reduced from towering trees, a vegetable field, and a plant on every windowsill to a single filocactus in your spartan bedroom, your accommodations beside the Pool were an embarrassment of space compared to the conditions that took over after the Exodus.
She was at the Pool when you first saw her -- not the part you worked at, where scientists from your brother's company (including you and your brother) researched day and night, tirelessly searching for ways to isolate and remove the Taint. Rather, she was at the part reserved for recreation, swimming and laughing with her friends. You saw her plugging her nose before every dive, and something prompted you to go over to her, to explain all about pressure and how to avoid the impulse to close her eyes when she jumped. You taught her to see through the water, with the water, to inhabit the strange silence it brought and embrace its gentle refraction. Soon, she was teaching you, too -- how to splash scientists who stop to give lessons to strangers, how to impress girls by diving off the highest board, and later that night, how to kiss under the stars. You've been teaching each other like this, back and forth, ever since.
Your brother has been talking with the government more and more about establishing – or rather, re-establishing – an official base at the start of next year. EarthStation One, they're calling it. A few brave souls will be tasked to live and work on a colony designed to test the environment for full repopulation. The Teevads got ahold of the idea immediately and started to claim that full, honest-to-goodness cities could be a reality in less than a decade. You're not so optimistic about the cities, but your brother isn't a rash man. You had an uncomfortable conversation before the Lander took off two days ago about who would be the first inhabitants of EarthStation One. You haven't spoken to your wife about it yet because you're still not sure how you feel yourself. It's true that you're tempted by the thought of seeing home again – even if it's the brutal cold of Edmonton. Maybe you'd ask your brother to build in Vancouver. The only thing that ever spoiled that city for you was the crowds. Still, it wasn't just the feeling of home that you had to think about, nor whether your wife or Skye would ever forgive you -- let alone accompany you -- in what was sure to be a lonely and lengthy assignment. There were risks involved in the experiments you'd be asked to conduct -- not just for the participating scientists, but for the planet, and for humanity.
You don't want that responsibility. Earth was your home, once. But it doesn't get cold on the Dome (if you can afford to live where you can afford to live), and it never snows.
Of course, back in Edmonton, snow was just that -- snow. Now you, your brother, the whole race see it for what it truly is -- it's water, precious water, waiting to be melted down. The Domes each have a fleet of Landers like this one, making regular runs to the Poles where your team identified the last potable supplies could be found, free of the Taint and sheltered from the constantly moving global water system that had been keeping the Earth healthy for millennia but started killing humans forty years ago.
Your brother was twenty-eight and you were twenty-five when he devised the plan for the Exodus. He was always the decisive one, the better scientist, the better engineer, the better doer, whose labs had been solely focused on pumping out drugs to combat the Taint ever since it took your father before his time. Your father had owned an refining empire out of Fort McMurray and Calgary and your brother, then just the head of the chemical labs, took over the reins of the company after his death and converted its focus from fossil fuels to pharmaceuticals. He moved the headquarters to Edmonton when you were twenty-three, and he brought you with him.
As the Taint began to take more and more lives, and with the ever-decreasing population moving to colder and colder regions where the bad water seemed to be less efficacious, your brother's company came to be seen as one of the last great hopes for humanity. The brother you'd played spacemen and aliens with as a child was suddenly in constant contact with world leaders, and his engineers became wildly popular as consultants with the cities that remained stable. The Dome that sat like a too-small contact lens on the corner of the Moon was widely regarded as the future of humanity, where ultra-efficient purification systems already existed. The Pool -- a marvel of engineering in its own right -- was no longer just the key to lunar habitation; it was the largest body of Taint-free water known to man.
You were digging out the roots of a particularly pesky thistle when your brother came to you. You'd only ever risen to a modest degree of responsibility in the company, more concerned with the routine of science than the business behind it. Still, you were always an idea man, inscrutable, whose brain twisted in ways that your brother liked to keep around. He'd approach you when an outside opinion was needed, someone who would tackle the problem from a completely different point of view than the suits and beards he worked with every day. He'd handed you a ticket securing passage to the Dome, and asked you to report to the labs he'd constructed by the Pool. The ship you boarded turned out to be the first of a great wave, and the Dome was soon joined by two sisters, each with their own modest Pools culled from sheets of arctic ice. The Exodus was a political nightmare; tickets were hard to come by. Your brother could've given your seat to any number of dignitaries, but family's family.
The general idea was that the whole water system would eventually have to be changed if the Taint could ever be removed. Alterations on a global scale in temperature, pH, and chemistry could only be affected if Earth was no longer our home – or rather, no longer our permanent residence. Despite the Exodus, despite the Taint, Earth was still humanity's home.
You watch Africa fend off Europe's advances by turtling into its shell. Could it be that some scattered clusters of humanity remained? Surely, it was possible, but the Taint had moved swiftly in the final years. Without the resources to gather potable supplies from the poles, anyone who hadn't boarded the ships would have almost certainly perished. Yet, somewhere down there the lions, gazelles, and elephants still roam the Savannah, and in all likelihood, have moved into the old cities. It's frightening to think of what changes EarthStation One might (will) wreak on our wards – the animals, plants, fish, even bacteria that men and women have been responsible for keeping safe under our stewardship in an ancient bond as old as humanity itself. Perhaps there's a hubris to that idea. After all, even when they left humans were still relative newcomers to the planet; maybe the Taint was little more than an auto-immune response to rid the Earth of a pesky virus. No, you think to yourself, our 'wards' would be fine without us.
Skye rattles the seat in front of you with all the torrid impatience of youth. You know that he doesn't understand why you must visit this planet so often, and it occurs to you that his understanding of the Taint is purely academic. It's something the teachers talk about and illustrate on the Teevads at the school. Still, it's not hard to imagine him living here someday. You'd love to see the look on his face when he steps outside in an Edmonton December, breathing in frozen, Taint-less water particles through unmasked nostrils only to feel the hairs inside his nose unexpectedly freeze together.
Your brother's voice grinds like a car gear over the intercom, calmly informing your family and the rest of the crew that a landing site has been selected and that it's going be another four hours until touchdown. Skye groans, your wife sighs restlessly, and you nestle tightly into your chair, eyes still glued on the window and the deep blue below.
It's good to see Earth again.
Sometimes, when you're out there, roaming the streets of the Dome, all sand and steel and plastic and concrete, breathing recycled air and the recycled dust that comes with it, you forget that water isn't just something to drink. You perceive wet as the last few seconds of a sip from the ration canteen, the drops that spill over your stubble and mingle with the sweat of your shirt. You see rain on the Teevads and you watch piping volumes of the precious commodity stream through the labs at the Pool every day. You know water is coursing through the hydrators, powering your breath, keeping the Dome alive. You pour a small sliver of your ration into the earthenware pot of your filocactus every week, enough to keep it green and to remind you of the garden you had back in Edmonton.
You know the taste of water, its feel, its scent, its chemical makeup, its boiling and freezing points, its uses, its value, its precious rarity.
But there's something mesmerizing about seeing the real thing, about being able to trace the staggering oceans that swarm the continents like the sand that surrounds your filocactus. You can see Earth from the Dome, of course, but from the windows on the roof of your dormitory you can really only see a single color, sometimes two -- blue-white, blue-green, blue-brown. Through the slight refraction of the Lander's window, you catch your first real glimpse of water in months.
It's beautiful. You feel an immediate quickening in your pulse, the animal inside of you yearning to bathe, to drink, to swim, to frolic at riverbanks. The sight of water in its natural state provokes instinct, something even your highly-educated mind can't control: it's akin to the way your brain reacts when it sees food in the morning, or catches sight of a bared breast (or, for that matter, a snake or a spider).
This is your fourth trip back in three years but Earth still steals your breath. You can hear your brother and the pilot arguing in the cabin over the best way to approach the landing site. You're content to let them argue; it'll be hours before touchdown and for now you have the view all to yourself. Perching closer to the window and resting your hand on the wall of the Lander's fuselage, you can just make out Florida reaching down to play with its cousins in the Caribbean, locked in an ancient game of follow-the-leader. You can clearly see the Great Lakes, seas in their own right, before they become obscured by fingers of floating water, drifting innocently on the wind from one side of the planet to the other. Somewhere, just below the thin blue crescent that marks the edge of the atmosphere, clouds will be pelting your childhood home of Vancouver with Taint-laced rain, and your driveway in Edmonton is probably buried in crushing snow. In a few months, even the winter cities like Edmonton will melt and release the Taint across the northern plains.
Your wife apologizes as she reaches across your view. She starts to dig through the bags you've crammed in beside your surveying equipment – equipment you'll use in the coming weeks to identify the best drilling sites for your brother's team. Maybe she's searching for a snack for Skye. You place your hand affectionately on her shoulder and push her gently out of your way; it's a playful gesture and she turns around to flash a smile in your direction. You make eye contact for a split-second before your view returns to the planet below, searching for homes long since abandoned. Out of the corner of your eyes you catch your wife rolling hers in annoyance. She wasn't born on Earth, and for her the novelty of the visit has worn thin. She's already told you that she won't be coming on the next expedition - she wants to stay Moonside with Skye. He'll be almost eight by then and will probably appreciate the time to spend with his friends.
You met her just after the Exodus began, back when the Dome was the Dome and not just one of three. You were living in the cramped, Poolside dormitories your brother bought for you and your mother. The space was not what you were used to -- despite your differences, your brother had always provided for the family and as a result your home in Edmonton had been comfortable to the point of sprawling. This new residence was big enough to live in, and though your gardens were reduced from towering trees, a vegetable field, and a plant on every windowsill to a single filocactus in your spartan bedroom, your accommodations beside the Pool were an embarrassment of space compared to the conditions that took over after the Exodus.
She was at the Pool when you first saw her -- not the part you worked at, where scientists from your brother's company (including you and your brother) researched day and night, tirelessly searching for ways to isolate and remove the Taint. Rather, she was at the part reserved for recreation, swimming and laughing with her friends. You saw her plugging her nose before every dive, and something prompted you to go over to her, to explain all about pressure and how to avoid the impulse to close her eyes when she jumped. You taught her to see through the water, with the water, to inhabit the strange silence it brought and embrace its gentle refraction. Soon, she was teaching you, too -- how to splash scientists who stop to give lessons to strangers, how to impress girls by diving off the highest board, and later that night, how to kiss under the stars. You've been teaching each other like this, back and forth, ever since.
Your brother has been talking with the government more and more about establishing – or rather, re-establishing – an official base at the start of next year. EarthStation One, they're calling it. A few brave souls will be tasked to live and work on a colony designed to test the environment for full repopulation. The Teevads got ahold of the idea immediately and started to claim that full, honest-to-goodness cities could be a reality in less than a decade. You're not so optimistic about the cities, but your brother isn't a rash man. You had an uncomfortable conversation before the Lander took off two days ago about who would be the first inhabitants of EarthStation One. You haven't spoken to your wife about it yet because you're still not sure how you feel yourself. It's true that you're tempted by the thought of seeing home again – even if it's the brutal cold of Edmonton. Maybe you'd ask your brother to build in Vancouver. The only thing that ever spoiled that city for you was the crowds. Still, it wasn't just the feeling of home that you had to think about, nor whether your wife or Skye would ever forgive you -- let alone accompany you -- in what was sure to be a lonely and lengthy assignment. There were risks involved in the experiments you'd be asked to conduct -- not just for the participating scientists, but for the planet, and for humanity.
You don't want that responsibility. Earth was your home, once. But it doesn't get cold on the Dome (if you can afford to live where you can afford to live), and it never snows.
Of course, back in Edmonton, snow was just that -- snow. Now you, your brother, the whole race see it for what it truly is -- it's water, precious water, waiting to be melted down. The Domes each have a fleet of Landers like this one, making regular runs to the Poles where your team identified the last potable supplies could be found, free of the Taint and sheltered from the constantly moving global water system that had been keeping the Earth healthy for millennia but started killing humans forty years ago.
Your brother was twenty-eight and you were twenty-five when he devised the plan for the Exodus. He was always the decisive one, the better scientist, the better engineer, the better doer, whose labs had been solely focused on pumping out drugs to combat the Taint ever since it took your father before his time. Your father had owned an refining empire out of Fort McMurray and Calgary and your brother, then just the head of the chemical labs, took over the reins of the company after his death and converted its focus from fossil fuels to pharmaceuticals. He moved the headquarters to Edmonton when you were twenty-three, and he brought you with him.
As the Taint began to take more and more lives, and with the ever-decreasing population moving to colder and colder regions where the bad water seemed to be less efficacious, your brother's company came to be seen as one of the last great hopes for humanity. The brother you'd played spacemen and aliens with as a child was suddenly in constant contact with world leaders, and his engineers became wildly popular as consultants with the cities that remained stable. The Dome that sat like a too-small contact lens on the corner of the Moon was widely regarded as the future of humanity, where ultra-efficient purification systems already existed. The Pool -- a marvel of engineering in its own right -- was no longer just the key to lunar habitation; it was the largest body of Taint-free water known to man.
You were digging out the roots of a particularly pesky thistle when your brother came to you. You'd only ever risen to a modest degree of responsibility in the company, more concerned with the routine of science than the business behind it. Still, you were always an idea man, inscrutable, whose brain twisted in ways that your brother liked to keep around. He'd approach you when an outside opinion was needed, someone who would tackle the problem from a completely different point of view than the suits and beards he worked with every day. He'd handed you a ticket securing passage to the Dome, and asked you to report to the labs he'd constructed by the Pool. The ship you boarded turned out to be the first of a great wave, and the Dome was soon joined by two sisters, each with their own modest Pools culled from sheets of arctic ice. The Exodus was a political nightmare; tickets were hard to come by. Your brother could've given your seat to any number of dignitaries, but family's family.
The general idea was that the whole water system would eventually have to be changed if the Taint could ever be removed. Alterations on a global scale in temperature, pH, and chemistry could only be affected if Earth was no longer our home – or rather, no longer our permanent residence. Despite the Exodus, despite the Taint, Earth was still humanity's home.
You watch Africa fend off Europe's advances by turtling into its shell. Could it be that some scattered clusters of humanity remained? Surely, it was possible, but the Taint had moved swiftly in the final years. Without the resources to gather potable supplies from the poles, anyone who hadn't boarded the ships would have almost certainly perished. Yet, somewhere down there the lions, gazelles, and elephants still roam the Savannah, and in all likelihood, have moved into the old cities. It's frightening to think of what changes EarthStation One might (will) wreak on our wards – the animals, plants, fish, even bacteria that men and women have been responsible for keeping safe under our stewardship in an ancient bond as old as humanity itself. Perhaps there's a hubris to that idea. After all, even when they left humans were still relative newcomers to the planet; maybe the Taint was little more than an auto-immune response to rid the Earth of a pesky virus. No, you think to yourself, our 'wards' would be fine without us.
Skye rattles the seat in front of you with all the torrid impatience of youth. You know that he doesn't understand why you must visit this planet so often, and it occurs to you that his understanding of the Taint is purely academic. It's something the teachers talk about and illustrate on the Teevads at the school. Still, it's not hard to imagine him living here someday. You'd love to see the look on his face when he steps outside in an Edmonton December, breathing in frozen, Taint-less water particles through unmasked nostrils only to feel the hairs inside his nose unexpectedly freeze together.
Your brother's voice grinds like a car gear over the intercom, calmly informing your family and the rest of the crew that a landing site has been selected and that it's going be another four hours until touchdown. Skye groans, your wife sighs restlessly, and you nestle tightly into your chair, eyes still glued on the window and the deep blue below.
It's good to see Earth again.