Astronalia
It always smelled like rain up here.
Sierra was left to tend to the gardens, tilling what remained of the precious soil, allowing the foggy morning to do most of the work in watering. "Sweetheart, don't let the CCTV see you again," her care-taker would chide, reminding the eighteen year old manic-depressive of the surrounding cameras.
They wouldn't have to worry, she was already headed indoors, past the shroud of curtains, beads, and finally a two-inch-thick plastic door which slid shut smoothly. "No one's even watching, Mama-Deb." This wasn't entirely true. Every now and again there were two men who would fast-forward through cloudy footage of the encampment to check on what they refereed to as "inmates."
This was too much of an excursion for most, though. The typical viewing consisted of fog, rain, clouds, and at times, a glimpse of someone milling around in a courtyard, waiting to die. Every now and again the watchers would announce having caught someone doing something very naughty, sentence the entire encampment to two more months stay, and sound off.
Sierra, on the mend as Mama Deb would say, was aware of her surroundings, much more than a majority of those around her; disabled, elderly, infantile, deaf, blind, or otherwise lacking common-sense. This was not to say that the character of these others were wrong in some way, just broken. Just as she was. Today was a good day.
She farmed in the last terra-gardens within Earth's atmosphere, she bathed in the few fresh-water sources left- that being rain, and she took a walk from one end of the sub-orbital weather station turned concentration camp since the beginning of WWIII. 55,000 steps one way, 55,000 steps back.
Her doctor, once incarcerated for abusing prescription drugs, told her that she was on the way to a substantial recovery, her ups were lower, but her downs were shorter. Some people blame the 20-mile-higher than Everest altitude. She blamed it on the food.
An old Marine chef, nearly 92, was teaching her how to garden just as he had in his medical home in Georgia. All-organic, that's all he knew, that's all he taught.
She watched him die, and as he requested, utilized his ashes in the tomatoes served at his sky-drop funeral.
They didn't drop his body from 20-miles, of course, considering that he was cremated. They dropped his memories in the form of an empty glass bottle. It was full of tissue-paper notes, sweet trinkets, soil, and seeds.
Each death gave hope for new life on the dead Earth below-- far below the hundreds of Astronalian terrians: pirate, elderly, juvenile, and abandoned.
Each birth upon an Astronalia bred remorse or dread or maybe wonderment, as the anti-G drive could falter, or food could run out.
Sierra knew the proper solution: cut the umbilical that dragged recklessly over cities as if a paralyzed arm dragging over a table. Cut the chord, drop to Earth, and grow.
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