surprise.”
“What is the cinnamon smell?” Inga asked looking at her father as he removed a tray from the warming cell.
“Breakfast!” he raised his voice, forcing joy to cut the silence. He toted the pan to the family room and laid the cookie sheet on the table, “It’s warm, but it shouldn’t burn.”
“Could I spend some time with her alone?” Petri’s eyes bore through Pitch’s heart. He nodded and disappeared into the library. “Don’t open the presents before I get back.”
“That’s an odd thing. Why would anyone bring a tree into a house? And where did he get a live tree up here?” Petri said with a laugh. She patted the sofa and slid to the side. Inga walked as if wandering to the chair on the far side of the room.
“It was an old German custom you know,” she answered her own question.
Inga did not speak but took a cookie, gobbled it down, then took another. Petri leaned in and mimicked her daughter.
“So what’s your favorite class?”
“Electronics,” she finally answered though her mouth was full and her eyes didn’t break from the tray.
“Why?”
“I like the silence when we’re working on the boards. And I like the smell of class when we’re over.”
“Oh, copper and solder. That what you smell.”
“My teacher said that’s a sign I’m going to work in metallurgy down in mech and robotics,” Inga said her voice high matching her gaze. Petri smiled seeing her daughter’s eyes twinkle in the light of the tree.
“That’s silly honey. There are no signs or destinies. You can be whatever you want. Like your mom.”
“I know. She was joking when she said that.”
“Oh, I didn’t know she had a sense of humor.”
Inga thought about her answer and finally said, “How could you?”
The knot returned to Petri’s gut; she laid the remnants of the cookie back on the tray and dusted her hands of the crumbs.
“I do very important work. Did your father tell you that?”
“You work on a famous ship.”
“I, have you had biology?” Petri didn’t wait for an answer to give her gift, “I’m working to learn why the starborn only live seventy-five percent as long as terrans. It’s got something to do with the effects of gravity on the replication of telomeres. Our bodies fail to quickly then our ‘motor’ dies out. Then we’re gone. I’m trying to stop the degeneration for you. That’s why I left.” Petri sounded excited. Her stomach had settled and she finished her cookie.
“I’m happy you like your work.”
Ingot ate another cookie and looked at the presents. “What do we do with those?”
“You open them.”
“I mean, what are they for?”
“For the season. Because it’s Christmas,” her father said.
Inga and Petri opened their presents together. Old tree books. He gave Inga a picture book of the old world, full of myths and legends of the Fertile Crescent. To Petri, a telecom card. She held it and let out an exhausted sigh as if she knew the meaning without being told. She fixed her attention on the book of the old world. “Why would you give her that?”
“She loves those kinds of things. I wish you knew that.”
“It’s one thing to love a story, it’s something else to love a book that drove us off the surface of the Earth. I hoped you had taught her better than that.”
Silence. No songs no joy. They each placed their gifts on the table. “You didn’t get dad anything?” Inga said to her mother.
“I didn’t know we were exchanging presents.”
Silence.
“Maybe we could look at the pictures in her book,” Pitch said picking it up and flipping through the rough pages yellowed with age.
Petri said with a playful tone and a smile, “Maybe.”
“Would you like to show her how to read it?”
“That would be nice.”
Pitch removed himself from the family room and Petri settled in beside her daughter looking at the picture of a man and a woman and the Libyan air stinging the skin of the couple wandering hand in hand, providence their guide and death set to meet them.
Before the rotation could be complete there came the boarding call over The Flower of Kent’s intercom. Inga had fallen asleep hours before. Pitch held Petri to his chest in the bed they once shared. “I am haunted by maybe,” he said.
“Do you think maybe was too strong?” she had a crack in her voice that confused Pitch.
“If you meant it, no.”
“I hope I meant it. But what’s it worth if I can’t keep that promise? What’s it worth to remember your mother as a liar?”
“It’s not a lie of you put in the effort but the world stands in your way.”
“What if I chose the world?”
“You’ll shoulder the weight of that choice, not her.”
Petri stood and dressed. “When I come back it will be for her,” she said, “I’ve got someone. It isn’t love.” She hesitated again, “You should too.”
“I would. You’re the one I think about every night when I go to bed, and every morning when I wake up. I wonder whether you’re asleep or having your dinner, maybe working in your lab. And I wonder if you think of us.”
“Which us?”
He shook his head. The second call broke the silent air, “Maybe if you look at the pictures sometimes when you’re alone you’ll be a little more likely to choose us.”
“You don’t love me. You love the idea of me. When I return, it’ll be for her.” Inga was still asleep when the final call came over the intercom.
And there were returns. Every three years as predictable as an atomic decay Petri returned to see her daughter. Each time Inga and Petri talked and laughed: boys, gravityball, boys playing gravityball, university. At eighteen she decided to attend Faraday University just like her mother and studied medical engineering also like her mother.
The return itself was the gift.
The smell of light cinnamon and the milky sweet eggnog Pitch made brought Inga back to those days, as she called them. When a girl cannot talk to her father her mother can make sense of life. Sometimes. Petri never propped up Inga. It is important to let your children fail and fall and learn to rise, like yeast in the heart of mankind.
On one of her visits, Petri taught a now college aged Inga to make bread. She explained an old parable her own grandmother was fond of. “Be as yeast to a misguided world. And what does the yeast do? It goes into the world. It gets pounded into the leaven is shrouded in the dark and put away to die. That’s the price of knowledge. That’s the way I live my life. I hope it will guide you in your journey through the dark to the light. I will be there for you always.”
One warm day at Faraday University located just outside Faraday Station, Mars, news came from the communication relay. There had been an accident aboard The Roaslind’s Credit. Many hurt, most dead.
Inga felt a dread not shared by the other viewers. Her mother’s words cascaded through her mind like a river terraforming a distant world. And the world stopped around her, the river of thoughts stayed as if by an invisible hand long buried in her mind. There would never be another maybe. Not now. The telomeres were gone, spread among the stars. She thought of the words of the old world, “Oh man! You were taken from the stars and to the stars you shall return.”
The next Christmas came with an emptiness. Her father messaged from the core of The Flower of Kent, “The service was lovely. I wish you had the joules to afford a ticket. The Credit is docked for repairs. Perhaps you could visit. Perhaps you could call it a trip.” Her father understood for the first time in a long time, he understood the dynamic.” And she remembered the smell of the cinnamon, she carried with her the sepia pictures of her father and mother. She would never age, she would never grow old. But the smells and the odd sight of the indoor tree, the silly joyful music her father found in the archives stayed with her until the day Inga must say to he
r own daughter, “Maybe.”
LOMONOSOV’S DRIFT
The Titan sky had a violet crown hovering above the scarlet horizon, and from the surface the Exploration and Research Vessel Lomonosov's Drift appeared suspended in a firmament and geosynchronous orbit. From Gaston Crater she appeared as a graceful and distant star twinkling a blue-blue-red, blue-blue-red code to the ground crew. Her signal, as reliable as sunrise.
Two, or when fortune favored the dig crew, three times per orbital day, orange streaks of light shot from the surface of Saturn’s Titan to the station carrying a payload of crystallized methane. On less fortunate days a green streak plunged through the upper atmosphere, landing at Excavation Site Curiosity-Ulduvai, kicking up a cloud of granulated feldspars and schists, finishing with a silent impact, yet shaking the ground above the crew’s heads none-the-less.
Black pyroclastic rocks with ferric and cupric striations were strewn across the ground. A hand in light gray gloves sifted through the detritus, finally picking up a strangely proportioned rock. The second hand raised a tinted visor and the man’s eyes widened as he rolled the rock between his thumb and fingers, knocking away wan particles. After squinting a bit, and with a little imagination, he realized it resembled a woman with her arms folded over her pregnant belly and a smile on her face. He thought the rock beautiful and hoped Vika would too. Unlike many scientists he often used the word, ‘beautiful.’ The man placed the rock in his mesh bag and threw it in the storage compartment of the boulder sized, spike wheeled, crane equipped, excavation tractor. On the