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Yes, a little jump here, to Jared's beginning years. I figure it's about time he got some attention. :) Hope everyone enjoys. I confess it's a little short, but there shall be more a bit more quickly, this time, to make up for it. Please see directly under the cut for a trigger warning.
A very Happy Solstice to you all!
Also at AO3.
Trigger for euthanasia and suicide.
The angel raised his hand and looked and said,
“Which world, of all yon starry myriad,
Shall we make wing to?” - ‘The Flight’, by Lloyd Mifflin. (Jared's Story)
2155 - KOI-1686.01 (Kepler Object of Interest). Terraforming begins. Completed by 2233, the planet is surveyed and marked for colonization by 2247. In 2257, the first colonists arrive on the planet, now called Kin-Gin. Earmarked for gold and silver mining, as well as other, more rare (and less plentiful) metals, Kin-Gin’s star is cooler and dimmer than Earth’s, and has little indigenous plant or animal life. Kin-Gin’s calendar year is approximately 17 standard Earth months, and the Kin-Gin day is approximately 29 standard Earth hours.
The planet itself is mountainous and rocky, with liquid water on the surface and below. Farming is restricted to greenhouses, aquaponics and intensely enriched terraces along the many rivers. It has a short growing season. Terran fowl (chicken hybrids) were introduced for eggs and meat, as well as heavily modified Terran goats for milk.
Early, faulty terraforming embedded toxins in the strata of the planet, as well as into the microbial life. This would not become public knowledge for over 15 years.
Kin-Gin was a cold world, cobalt-silver sky streaked with white, a sun like a smear of lusterless silver behind the ever-racing clouds. Canyons and arroyos had been dug out of the slaty tableland, showing the variegated layers that made up the semi-arid steppes. What limited plant life had taken hold clung to the low spots, roots going wide and deep for moisture, stems and branches bent low under the endless, sighing wind.
They came there to live - to dig in, and mine, and farm. 20,000 colonists, places won by lottery, straggling out of the landing pods and getting their first look at home. The earth-movers were already churning up the ground a kilometer or so distant, extruders ready to pour the molds that would shape the cretefoam homes.
Jaasau Sill shouldered her duffle and put her booted foot squarely onto the blue-grey dust of the landing zone. She half-turned, holding out her gloved hand, and Signey Padalecki took it, green knit fingers curling around brown. Signey’s eyes smiled over the flap of flowered headscarf she’d wrapped across her mouth and nose, and Jaasau grinned back, crooked white teeth in a dark face.
“Looks like this is it.”
“Looks like,” Signey said. She stepped down, as well, and they both stood there for a moment, fingers clutching tight and the wind buffeting them, making Signey laugh, pushed into Jaasau’s side. Then they moved, going with the flow of bundled up, gloved and muffled figures who were trailing down the ramp, across the landing zone, to the row of portable terminals set up under a long, rustling tent of dull-white micropore.
Thumb print, retina scan, a scribble of names across scratched data-pads and it was done. They were registered as citizens of Kin-Gin, numbers 842 and 843, and they were entitled to a three-room house with a five meter diameter geodesic greenhouse attached, and a share in the fields of grain that would be planted along the river. They also had a chit each for a child, and that night, in the temporary barracks of tents, Signey curled close to Jaasau under the blankets, whispering her plans for their family, their lives.
Jared wasn’t born for five long, hard years.
Jaasau noticed it first. Jared at four years old - almost six, by Earth standards, Kin-Gin’s years being longer - stumbling when he came into the greenhouse. There was almost no sill, and the cretefoam was worn smooth by years of heavy boots, but he stumbled, every time. She watched him lean over the edge of the fish tank, nose wrinkling at the heavy, wet scent, left leg crooked, his foot awkwardly angled. His grab for the fish-net missed.
He had a fever that night - mild, nothing much - and then he seemed...fine. Just fine.
A week later, she watched him eating, his fingers chattering the fork across the plate, and she felt cold. She rested her hand on her belly, on the small, growing bump there, and felt an icy twist of fear go through her. In bed that night, she stared across at the curtained access that marked the doorway to Jared’s built-on room. Little blurs of amber light - fish shapes from his home made night light - drifted slowly across the curtain, revolving around his room. Signey burrowed closer, her callused hand on Jaasau’s belly, but when she kissed up Jaasau’s neck to nibble on her earlobe, Jaasau moved away, just a little.
“What’s the matter, love?”
“Nothing. Just...have you noticed...sometimes, Jared….”
Signey went up on one elbow, letting in a curl of cold air, and Jaasau made a little hiss of discomfort, tucking the blanket down. “Sometimes Jared, what?”
“He stumbles. He...he couldn’t get his food on his fork, tonight, he kept chasing it around his plate, he….”
“He’s just a kid, Jaasau. Kids are clumsy.”
Jaasau sighed, reaching up to smooth the chin-length, dark-brown hair that fell around Signey’s face like a cowl. “I know. I just...I dunno. Nerves, I guess,” she said. Signey lay down again, tugging Jaasau close until they slotted together, back to chest and hips to hips, Signey’s mouth pressing softly against the finger-length twists of Jaasau’s hair.
“Yeah. I remember that feeling. Like everything was a threat. It’ll be okay, love. We’ll all be okay.”
“I know. I know we will. Love you.”
“Love you, too,” Signey said, and after a few minutes, Signey’s fingers rubbing an idle pattern over the back of Jaasau’s hand, Jaasau was asleep. Signey stayed awake longer, staring into the dark and listening to the endless, dry rush of the wind that blew over and around and sometimes through. Tonight it was full of little flakes of ice, first dry snow of a dry winter, and Signey’s hip ached where she’d stumbled over nothing at all, falling against the wheel-well of the crawler they used to get to the fields. It was nothing. Had to be...nothing.
Jared’s sister didn’t live three months, and Jaasau too often found herself standing over the little cup of rock and lichen that was the grave of her ashes, just staring. Six years gone, and Jaasau just could not let go. She couldn’t seem to move forward, a groove worn in her mind from circling around and around, what if, and could I have and why, why, why, neverending. She would get so cold she would limp back home, her feet clumsy and her legs weak. She was so tired, always so tired, now, aching in all her bones, unsteady on legs that felt like wood, with fingers that refused to bend or hold.
Signey had been laid up at home for the past three weeks from a broken foot from falling out of the crawler, and the greenhouse was suffering. The pump’s filters were clogged and the pump itself chugged asthmatically. A pinkish-yellow slime was building along the edges of the tank, and the fish inside looked scabby, swimming sideways, white film trailing behind them. Jaasau almost didn’t care.
Jared...Jared tried. Ten years old, now, sitting on a hunk of insulation foam, bulky in his winter coat. Thin legs sprawled out crookedly, thin fingers working slow, so slow, to unscrew the pump housing, to fish out the filters. His hair hung down over his forehead, trembling like weeds as his head moved spastically - rhythmically - left and then back to center. Over and over and over.
He looked up as Jaasau came inside, leaning tiredly on the door and fumbling with the latch. “Mama,” he said. “You loo..ook col’.” His voice was a little nasal, a little choppy, and his words were slurred. More and more, every month, every week. Every day, she swore.
“That wind cuts right through you,” Jaasau said. She sighed and pushed off from the door, walked over to Jared and sat down on the listing stack of fish food bags against the house-wall of the greenhouse. They crunched faintly under her weight. “How’s the filter coming?”
“Get...t..ting the..eh,” he said. He plucked at the edge of the filter frame, his fingers missing the mark, bouncing off and hitting the housing, groping at nothing. They shook, curled a little, and Jaasau felt a fierce, hot stab of fury and terror. Her boy - her boy! What was happening to him? To all of them? Three other babies had died just that year and more of them were growing up like Jared, with clubbed feet and twisted legs and nervous systems that sent useless, spastic messages out to limbs that were too thin, too weak, too small.
Jaasau reached out and smoothed Jared’s hair back from his forehead, and he grinned up at her, one eye tending a little too far outward, lips crooked, oh, God, everything about her beautiful, funny boy was crooked, growing as wrong as the tankful of fish that she didn’t want to eat anymore. “You’re a good boy, Jared. You’re a big help to me and Mommy. She awake?”
Jared nodded, up and down that fought with the constant leftward jerk. “She maaade soh...me sss...ooo...ooopah.”
“Some hot soup sounds pretty good right now; help to warm me up. Why don’t you leave that for now and come eat, we’ll fix it later. You hungry?”
“Aaw...wayss hun..ree,” Jared said, grinning harder - their little joke - the dimples in his cheeks and the sparkle in his eyes making Jaasau grin back through gritted teeth, because she was going to cry in a minute if she didn’t get up and get moving right now.
“Well come on then, bottomless pit. Give your mama a hand getting up, I’m wore out.”
Jared tried twice, three times, before he finally slotted the screwdriver back into its loop in the toolbox, and then he levered himself clumsily to his feet. His left shoulder was a little higher - his spine twisting out of true - and there wasn’t much strength in the thin hands that curled around Jaasau’s and made a show of pulling her up. She huffed out air and leaned against the wall and pushed, her back complaining and her legs trembling. Tomorrow she was going to be down in the cut, working to help dig out the sub-basement of a long-planned community center, and she wasn’t looking forward to it at all. She and Jared both stumbled over the door sill, and laughed at themselves, stripping off layers of coats and scarves to hang on their hooks. The kitchen was warm and humid, cozy with the overhead light in its amber shade and the patchy cream of the walls. The good smell of savory soup and fresh bread made Jaasau’s stomach growl, and Signey looked up at them with a grin and a little wave from her chair by the stove, knitting in her lap like a broken spider’s web. Grey stood out from the dark cowl of her hair, rougher than it had been, the ends dry and fraying.
Jaasau got the bowls down from the cabinet and ladled out soup while Jared stumbled around the table with napkins and spoons and then - tip of his tongue poking out in concentration, hands shaking - the board with the new loaf of bread. He chattered in his slow, arrhythmic way to Signey as he helped her stow the knitting in its bag and held her crutches while she stood up.
Jaasau got the soup to the table, the glasses and the pitcher of water from the ‘fridge, the milk for Jared. The weight and chill of them made her hands ache. She sank down with a little groan, rubbing at her trembling thighs under the edge of the table. Signey maneuvered herself around the table and into her own chair, while Jared did the same, half-falling into the seat and rattling the silverware as he knocked into the table edge.
Signey cut slices of bread and smeared the sharp, soft goat cheese on them before handing them around while Jaasau poured the drinks. They ate slowly, mostly silent, Jaasau too tired - and Signey too, probably - and Jared concentrating too hard on not spilling to say much.
Afterward, Jaasau washed up, and Signey and Jared hunched over his dataspot, struggling through the few pages of homework he had for school. Jared could read - he loved to read, in fact, and was so damn smart, so quick to understand new things, complicated things - but it was getting harder for him to manipulate the cursor and stylus on the ‘spot. Harder for the speech-to-text function to understand him, too.
They all went to bed early, exhausted by a day of routine and rote, worn down by the constant, hoarse shush of the wind. Jaasau spiked a fever in the night, and got up once, bent double with stiffness, legs like lead, to use the toilet. That was the last time she ever walked unaided again.
What Jaasau had - what they all had - was discovered by a woman named Meta Grimes, and the collection of neurological defects and chromosomal mutations that affected, and sometimes ended, over eight thousand lives on Kin-Gin, was christened Grimes’ Palsy. When Jared was twelve, the first of the lawsuits were filed against the terraforming company that had falsified records and destroyed reports, obliterating much of a record of spotty inspections, illegal catalyst chemicals, and ‘forming operations that were so rife with bribery and kickbacks it was a wonder they’d gone on so long undetected. They had shortcut their way to colonization by burying the truth of just what their machines and compounds and chemicals had set in motion, ignoring the fact that they were sending colonists to their deaths on a planet saturated in toxins.
When Jared turned sixteen, the lottery was announced. It was for the children of Kin-Gin, for all the bright, quick souls that struggled, trapped in poisoned flesh. Jared had by then been a year in the glassine exoskeleton that allowed him to move, stalking over their farm and around the greenhouse with a weird, stilt-limbed grace, the halo holding his head steady on his too-weak neck, the chip embedded in the frame doing most of his talking for him, and the tube in his gut taking in his food, ever since he’d choked and nearly died on a mouthful of eggs. He was still dimpled, still smiling, but hectic - jittery - forcing his mother to eat, to work, to live with a grim determination, because he knew that otherwise, Signey would have just laid down and died.
She wasn’t fitted for a ‘skele - her arms still worked, and her hands, and she made do with a power chair and the little crawler, trundling slowly to and from her job at the recycling plant, sorting the good from the bad, the useful from the useless. She was useless, trapped in a body that refused to cooperate, locked into a grief that wouldn’t end.
Jaasau wasn’t at home, anymore - she lived with a couple hundred others at the hospice, turned and fed and tended, too far gone for anything, now, but waiting. Her brain and nervous system had been steadily eroded by the toxins they took in with every breath, every drink, every meal.
It was everywhere, leaching out of the ground and the plants, in the air, in their bones. It killed within the womb or it killed inch by slow and torturous inch without, and Jared wasn’t the only child propped up by servos and hydraulics, propelled by glassine bones. The constant rasp of the wind over the joints of the ‘skele made it hitch, sometimes - stutter and stall - and Signey had rescued Jared a time or two, stranded out in the fields, limb-locked and shivering, locator beeping steadily.
Everywhere she turned, she saw them, the blighted children of a dream that had long since withered, just as she withered, day by day and year by year. They sat at home in the dim amber light of the kitchen lamp and watched the lottery winners flash up on the datapoint. Five hundred, a thousand - more. Until finally three thousand numbers had scrolled by, and Jared was sitting frozen, staring at his number, flashing in the corner of the screen. Winner two-thousand and sixty-seven. Chosen to be medevaced off Kin-Gin, across the system and out, to distant Salome. The ANGEL system would heal him, would heal them all.
And it would only cost him years, in physical therapy, in sweat and pain and effort, and years more in indentured servitude to the Company. Signey didn’t care. It would get him gone, out of this pit. He could live, and that was all that mattered. Her beautiful boy, her sweetheart. They cried together, that night; went and told Jaasau in the morning, though she only looked past them, her mouth crooked and her eyes glazed, lips moving around mumbled fragments of sounds, wasted limbs twitching under the sheets. Ashen and gaunt, she was long gone.
It took nearly a year, after that, for the Company and the law to hash it all out, to dicker the fine points down to nothing and explore every option and contingency. And then Jared was gone, jolting away on the back of a transport to the dock, his thin hand lifted, glassine sheath glinting in the silvery light, his hair blowing around his eyes. They’d said their goodbyes behind closed doors, and Signey watched, dry-eyed, as he drove away with the others, smiling for him, because that’s what mothers did.
The spot on the dresser inside that had held their wedding picture was empty now, but Signey didn’t mind. She went back inside and looked into Jared’s tidy, empty room and then into her own, where most of Jaasau was wiped away, now - her scent gone, her voice faded, nothing of her spirit or her soul left in the scatter of books, the unraveling sweaters.
Signey fed the chickens, turned off the heater and put the key on the hook by the door. She trundled over in the crawler to the hospice, to tell Jaasau that Jared was gone. She held Jaasau’s wasted hand, kissed the spastic fingers, and pressed the little ampoule to her arm, pushing in a dose of Sand that would send her to sleep forever. Then she drove the crawler out along the high road and into the hills, up onto the modest cliff they called the Misty Mountain, that overlooked a mercury-grey sea. The grey-green grass threshed in the endless wind, rasping against the crawler’s sides. Signey dragged herself free of the crawler’s seat and collapsed down into the coarse, damp stems. She fumbled in a pocket for a moment and brought out the little single-shot that she’d carried for years, the product of a treacherous childhood, to never be unprepared. It only took a moment to prime it, and then Signey lifted it to her mouth, tasting iron and salt.
She watched the actinic glow of the shuttle’s lifters shatter into prisms of light, blinking away tears as Jared was carried up, up, and out of sight, the faint roar coming to her a moment later, blotted by the cough of the single-shot. Jared wouldn’t know for almost a year that his mothers were dead. It wouldn’t matter, anymore, by then.
2266 - year Jared is born.
Grimes’ Palsy is characterized by a loss of fine motor skills, skeletal deformities, dysarthria, tardive dyskinesia, and cognitive and learning disabilities.
Kin-Gin was re-classified as a class 4, non-habitable planet soon after, with colonists being refugeed elsewhere and the mining operations taken over by highly automated ‘bots and strictly monitored miners who worked on a two-month-on, four-month-off rotation schedule, exchanging places with personnel in the orbiting refinery station.
Of the 9,000+ afflicted, over 5000 died within ten years of diagnosis. 3000 were ‘cured’ via the lottery, and the rest were left with less severe, but still debilitating, issues.
Part four.
A very Happy Solstice to you all!
Also at AO3.
Trigger for euthanasia and suicide.
The angel raised his hand and looked and said,
“Which world, of all yon starry myriad,
Shall we make wing to?” - ‘The Flight’, by Lloyd Mifflin. (Jared's Story)
2155 - KOI-1686.01 (Kepler Object of Interest). Terraforming begins. Completed by 2233, the planet is surveyed and marked for colonization by 2247. In 2257, the first colonists arrive on the planet, now called Kin-Gin. Earmarked for gold and silver mining, as well as other, more rare (and less plentiful) metals, Kin-Gin’s star is cooler and dimmer than Earth’s, and has little indigenous plant or animal life. Kin-Gin’s calendar year is approximately 17 standard Earth months, and the Kin-Gin day is approximately 29 standard Earth hours.
The planet itself is mountainous and rocky, with liquid water on the surface and below. Farming is restricted to greenhouses, aquaponics and intensely enriched terraces along the many rivers. It has a short growing season. Terran fowl (chicken hybrids) were introduced for eggs and meat, as well as heavily modified Terran goats for milk.
Early, faulty terraforming embedded toxins in the strata of the planet, as well as into the microbial life. This would not become public knowledge for over 15 years.
Kin-Gin was a cold world, cobalt-silver sky streaked with white, a sun like a smear of lusterless silver behind the ever-racing clouds. Canyons and arroyos had been dug out of the slaty tableland, showing the variegated layers that made up the semi-arid steppes. What limited plant life had taken hold clung to the low spots, roots going wide and deep for moisture, stems and branches bent low under the endless, sighing wind.
They came there to live - to dig in, and mine, and farm. 20,000 colonists, places won by lottery, straggling out of the landing pods and getting their first look at home. The earth-movers were already churning up the ground a kilometer or so distant, extruders ready to pour the molds that would shape the cretefoam homes.
Jaasau Sill shouldered her duffle and put her booted foot squarely onto the blue-grey dust of the landing zone. She half-turned, holding out her gloved hand, and Signey Padalecki took it, green knit fingers curling around brown. Signey’s eyes smiled over the flap of flowered headscarf she’d wrapped across her mouth and nose, and Jaasau grinned back, crooked white teeth in a dark face.
“Looks like this is it.”
“Looks like,” Signey said. She stepped down, as well, and they both stood there for a moment, fingers clutching tight and the wind buffeting them, making Signey laugh, pushed into Jaasau’s side. Then they moved, going with the flow of bundled up, gloved and muffled figures who were trailing down the ramp, across the landing zone, to the row of portable terminals set up under a long, rustling tent of dull-white micropore.
Thumb print, retina scan, a scribble of names across scratched data-pads and it was done. They were registered as citizens of Kin-Gin, numbers 842 and 843, and they were entitled to a three-room house with a five meter diameter geodesic greenhouse attached, and a share in the fields of grain that would be planted along the river. They also had a chit each for a child, and that night, in the temporary barracks of tents, Signey curled close to Jaasau under the blankets, whispering her plans for their family, their lives.
Jared wasn’t born for five long, hard years.
Jaasau noticed it first. Jared at four years old - almost six, by Earth standards, Kin-Gin’s years being longer - stumbling when he came into the greenhouse. There was almost no sill, and the cretefoam was worn smooth by years of heavy boots, but he stumbled, every time. She watched him lean over the edge of the fish tank, nose wrinkling at the heavy, wet scent, left leg crooked, his foot awkwardly angled. His grab for the fish-net missed.
He had a fever that night - mild, nothing much - and then he seemed...fine. Just fine.
A week later, she watched him eating, his fingers chattering the fork across the plate, and she felt cold. She rested her hand on her belly, on the small, growing bump there, and felt an icy twist of fear go through her. In bed that night, she stared across at the curtained access that marked the doorway to Jared’s built-on room. Little blurs of amber light - fish shapes from his home made night light - drifted slowly across the curtain, revolving around his room. Signey burrowed closer, her callused hand on Jaasau’s belly, but when she kissed up Jaasau’s neck to nibble on her earlobe, Jaasau moved away, just a little.
“What’s the matter, love?”
“Nothing. Just...have you noticed...sometimes, Jared….”
Signey went up on one elbow, letting in a curl of cold air, and Jaasau made a little hiss of discomfort, tucking the blanket down. “Sometimes Jared, what?”
“He stumbles. He...he couldn’t get his food on his fork, tonight, he kept chasing it around his plate, he….”
“He’s just a kid, Jaasau. Kids are clumsy.”
Jaasau sighed, reaching up to smooth the chin-length, dark-brown hair that fell around Signey’s face like a cowl. “I know. I just...I dunno. Nerves, I guess,” she said. Signey lay down again, tugging Jaasau close until they slotted together, back to chest and hips to hips, Signey’s mouth pressing softly against the finger-length twists of Jaasau’s hair.
“Yeah. I remember that feeling. Like everything was a threat. It’ll be okay, love. We’ll all be okay.”
“I know. I know we will. Love you.”
“Love you, too,” Signey said, and after a few minutes, Signey’s fingers rubbing an idle pattern over the back of Jaasau’s hand, Jaasau was asleep. Signey stayed awake longer, staring into the dark and listening to the endless, dry rush of the wind that blew over and around and sometimes through. Tonight it was full of little flakes of ice, first dry snow of a dry winter, and Signey’s hip ached where she’d stumbled over nothing at all, falling against the wheel-well of the crawler they used to get to the fields. It was nothing. Had to be...nothing.
Jared’s sister didn’t live three months, and Jaasau too often found herself standing over the little cup of rock and lichen that was the grave of her ashes, just staring. Six years gone, and Jaasau just could not let go. She couldn’t seem to move forward, a groove worn in her mind from circling around and around, what if, and could I have and why, why, why, neverending. She would get so cold she would limp back home, her feet clumsy and her legs weak. She was so tired, always so tired, now, aching in all her bones, unsteady on legs that felt like wood, with fingers that refused to bend or hold.
Signey had been laid up at home for the past three weeks from a broken foot from falling out of the crawler, and the greenhouse was suffering. The pump’s filters were clogged and the pump itself chugged asthmatically. A pinkish-yellow slime was building along the edges of the tank, and the fish inside looked scabby, swimming sideways, white film trailing behind them. Jaasau almost didn’t care.
Jared...Jared tried. Ten years old, now, sitting on a hunk of insulation foam, bulky in his winter coat. Thin legs sprawled out crookedly, thin fingers working slow, so slow, to unscrew the pump housing, to fish out the filters. His hair hung down over his forehead, trembling like weeds as his head moved spastically - rhythmically - left and then back to center. Over and over and over.
He looked up as Jaasau came inside, leaning tiredly on the door and fumbling with the latch. “Mama,” he said. “You loo..ook col’.” His voice was a little nasal, a little choppy, and his words were slurred. More and more, every month, every week. Every day, she swore.
“That wind cuts right through you,” Jaasau said. She sighed and pushed off from the door, walked over to Jared and sat down on the listing stack of fish food bags against the house-wall of the greenhouse. They crunched faintly under her weight. “How’s the filter coming?”
“Get...t..ting the..eh,” he said. He plucked at the edge of the filter frame, his fingers missing the mark, bouncing off and hitting the housing, groping at nothing. They shook, curled a little, and Jaasau felt a fierce, hot stab of fury and terror. Her boy - her boy! What was happening to him? To all of them? Three other babies had died just that year and more of them were growing up like Jared, with clubbed feet and twisted legs and nervous systems that sent useless, spastic messages out to limbs that were too thin, too weak, too small.
Jaasau reached out and smoothed Jared’s hair back from his forehead, and he grinned up at her, one eye tending a little too far outward, lips crooked, oh, God, everything about her beautiful, funny boy was crooked, growing as wrong as the tankful of fish that she didn’t want to eat anymore. “You’re a good boy, Jared. You’re a big help to me and Mommy. She awake?”
Jared nodded, up and down that fought with the constant leftward jerk. “She maaade soh...me sss...ooo...ooopah.”
“Some hot soup sounds pretty good right now; help to warm me up. Why don’t you leave that for now and come eat, we’ll fix it later. You hungry?”
“Aaw...wayss hun..ree,” Jared said, grinning harder - their little joke - the dimples in his cheeks and the sparkle in his eyes making Jaasau grin back through gritted teeth, because she was going to cry in a minute if she didn’t get up and get moving right now.
“Well come on then, bottomless pit. Give your mama a hand getting up, I’m wore out.”
Jared tried twice, three times, before he finally slotted the screwdriver back into its loop in the toolbox, and then he levered himself clumsily to his feet. His left shoulder was a little higher - his spine twisting out of true - and there wasn’t much strength in the thin hands that curled around Jaasau’s and made a show of pulling her up. She huffed out air and leaned against the wall and pushed, her back complaining and her legs trembling. Tomorrow she was going to be down in the cut, working to help dig out the sub-basement of a long-planned community center, and she wasn’t looking forward to it at all. She and Jared both stumbled over the door sill, and laughed at themselves, stripping off layers of coats and scarves to hang on their hooks. The kitchen was warm and humid, cozy with the overhead light in its amber shade and the patchy cream of the walls. The good smell of savory soup and fresh bread made Jaasau’s stomach growl, and Signey looked up at them with a grin and a little wave from her chair by the stove, knitting in her lap like a broken spider’s web. Grey stood out from the dark cowl of her hair, rougher than it had been, the ends dry and fraying.
Jaasau got the bowls down from the cabinet and ladled out soup while Jared stumbled around the table with napkins and spoons and then - tip of his tongue poking out in concentration, hands shaking - the board with the new loaf of bread. He chattered in his slow, arrhythmic way to Signey as he helped her stow the knitting in its bag and held her crutches while she stood up.
Jaasau got the soup to the table, the glasses and the pitcher of water from the ‘fridge, the milk for Jared. The weight and chill of them made her hands ache. She sank down with a little groan, rubbing at her trembling thighs under the edge of the table. Signey maneuvered herself around the table and into her own chair, while Jared did the same, half-falling into the seat and rattling the silverware as he knocked into the table edge.
Signey cut slices of bread and smeared the sharp, soft goat cheese on them before handing them around while Jaasau poured the drinks. They ate slowly, mostly silent, Jaasau too tired - and Signey too, probably - and Jared concentrating too hard on not spilling to say much.
Afterward, Jaasau washed up, and Signey and Jared hunched over his dataspot, struggling through the few pages of homework he had for school. Jared could read - he loved to read, in fact, and was so damn smart, so quick to understand new things, complicated things - but it was getting harder for him to manipulate the cursor and stylus on the ‘spot. Harder for the speech-to-text function to understand him, too.
They all went to bed early, exhausted by a day of routine and rote, worn down by the constant, hoarse shush of the wind. Jaasau spiked a fever in the night, and got up once, bent double with stiffness, legs like lead, to use the toilet. That was the last time she ever walked unaided again.
What Jaasau had - what they all had - was discovered by a woman named Meta Grimes, and the collection of neurological defects and chromosomal mutations that affected, and sometimes ended, over eight thousand lives on Kin-Gin, was christened Grimes’ Palsy. When Jared was twelve, the first of the lawsuits were filed against the terraforming company that had falsified records and destroyed reports, obliterating much of a record of spotty inspections, illegal catalyst chemicals, and ‘forming operations that were so rife with bribery and kickbacks it was a wonder they’d gone on so long undetected. They had shortcut their way to colonization by burying the truth of just what their machines and compounds and chemicals had set in motion, ignoring the fact that they were sending colonists to their deaths on a planet saturated in toxins.
When Jared turned sixteen, the lottery was announced. It was for the children of Kin-Gin, for all the bright, quick souls that struggled, trapped in poisoned flesh. Jared had by then been a year in the glassine exoskeleton that allowed him to move, stalking over their farm and around the greenhouse with a weird, stilt-limbed grace, the halo holding his head steady on his too-weak neck, the chip embedded in the frame doing most of his talking for him, and the tube in his gut taking in his food, ever since he’d choked and nearly died on a mouthful of eggs. He was still dimpled, still smiling, but hectic - jittery - forcing his mother to eat, to work, to live with a grim determination, because he knew that otherwise, Signey would have just laid down and died.
She wasn’t fitted for a ‘skele - her arms still worked, and her hands, and she made do with a power chair and the little crawler, trundling slowly to and from her job at the recycling plant, sorting the good from the bad, the useful from the useless. She was useless, trapped in a body that refused to cooperate, locked into a grief that wouldn’t end.
Jaasau wasn’t at home, anymore - she lived with a couple hundred others at the hospice, turned and fed and tended, too far gone for anything, now, but waiting. Her brain and nervous system had been steadily eroded by the toxins they took in with every breath, every drink, every meal.
It was everywhere, leaching out of the ground and the plants, in the air, in their bones. It killed within the womb or it killed inch by slow and torturous inch without, and Jared wasn’t the only child propped up by servos and hydraulics, propelled by glassine bones. The constant rasp of the wind over the joints of the ‘skele made it hitch, sometimes - stutter and stall - and Signey had rescued Jared a time or two, stranded out in the fields, limb-locked and shivering, locator beeping steadily.
Everywhere she turned, she saw them, the blighted children of a dream that had long since withered, just as she withered, day by day and year by year. They sat at home in the dim amber light of the kitchen lamp and watched the lottery winners flash up on the datapoint. Five hundred, a thousand - more. Until finally three thousand numbers had scrolled by, and Jared was sitting frozen, staring at his number, flashing in the corner of the screen. Winner two-thousand and sixty-seven. Chosen to be medevaced off Kin-Gin, across the system and out, to distant Salome. The ANGEL system would heal him, would heal them all.
And it would only cost him years, in physical therapy, in sweat and pain and effort, and years more in indentured servitude to the Company. Signey didn’t care. It would get him gone, out of this pit. He could live, and that was all that mattered. Her beautiful boy, her sweetheart. They cried together, that night; went and told Jaasau in the morning, though she only looked past them, her mouth crooked and her eyes glazed, lips moving around mumbled fragments of sounds, wasted limbs twitching under the sheets. Ashen and gaunt, she was long gone.
It took nearly a year, after that, for the Company and the law to hash it all out, to dicker the fine points down to nothing and explore every option and contingency. And then Jared was gone, jolting away on the back of a transport to the dock, his thin hand lifted, glassine sheath glinting in the silvery light, his hair blowing around his eyes. They’d said their goodbyes behind closed doors, and Signey watched, dry-eyed, as he drove away with the others, smiling for him, because that’s what mothers did.
The spot on the dresser inside that had held their wedding picture was empty now, but Signey didn’t mind. She went back inside and looked into Jared’s tidy, empty room and then into her own, where most of Jaasau was wiped away, now - her scent gone, her voice faded, nothing of her spirit or her soul left in the scatter of books, the unraveling sweaters.
Signey fed the chickens, turned off the heater and put the key on the hook by the door. She trundled over in the crawler to the hospice, to tell Jaasau that Jared was gone. She held Jaasau’s wasted hand, kissed the spastic fingers, and pressed the little ampoule to her arm, pushing in a dose of Sand that would send her to sleep forever. Then she drove the crawler out along the high road and into the hills, up onto the modest cliff they called the Misty Mountain, that overlooked a mercury-grey sea. The grey-green grass threshed in the endless wind, rasping against the crawler’s sides. Signey dragged herself free of the crawler’s seat and collapsed down into the coarse, damp stems. She fumbled in a pocket for a moment and brought out the little single-shot that she’d carried for years, the product of a treacherous childhood, to never be unprepared. It only took a moment to prime it, and then Signey lifted it to her mouth, tasting iron and salt.
She watched the actinic glow of the shuttle’s lifters shatter into prisms of light, blinking away tears as Jared was carried up, up, and out of sight, the faint roar coming to her a moment later, blotted by the cough of the single-shot. Jared wouldn’t know for almost a year that his mothers were dead. It wouldn’t matter, anymore, by then.
2266 - year Jared is born.
Grimes’ Palsy is characterized by a loss of fine motor skills, skeletal deformities, dysarthria, tardive dyskinesia, and cognitive and learning disabilities.
Kin-Gin was re-classified as a class 4, non-habitable planet soon after, with colonists being refugeed elsewhere and the mining operations taken over by highly automated ‘bots and strictly monitored miners who worked on a two-month-on, four-month-off rotation schedule, exchanging places with personnel in the orbiting refinery station.
Of the 9,000+ afflicted, over 5000 died within ten years of diagnosis. 3000 were ‘cured’ via the lottery, and the rest were left with less severe, but still debilitating, issues.
Part four.
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