CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Mike stepped into the hall. He gazed down its length, unable to see the end in the dim light. The night noises of the colony’s men sifted down the corridor. He wondered how many others were awake. He turned and walked into the storage room. Dim lights cast uneasy shadows. He ambled through the vast aisles of boxes toward the ramp up.

He reached out, touched one of the boxes, stopped. His touch became almost a caress. He trudged up the ramp. At the entrance on the surface he paused. The lights were off in the communications shed. The moons had set. Gazing up, Mike surrendered himself to the glory of the galaxy. He took several minutes to turn 360°. He gaped in wonder.

For a moment he felt a chill breeze that must have come from the frozen peaks far above. Like deserts on Earth, this one cooled quickly at night. Mike shivered in the brief coolness. He reflected that the universe could be cold lonely place.

He walked down to where he knew the headwaters of a pumping station would be flush to the ground. He then followed the dry watercourse to the first of the fields. He willed himself to see newly green vegetation, and in the dim night he could almost make believe. He shut his eyes. I’m too tired, he thought, this is all too hopeless.

Mike strolled further onto the plain, his work shoes scuffing the gray surface, the air cool on his bare chest. He found that the land was not uniformly flat. There were crumbling canals and small declivities, dunes that rose only a few feet. The view from the hangar shelf with the sun at high noon had hidden any shadows or variations.

After a long while he came to the end of the furthest field. He looked over his shoulder at the mountains. He could see the flashes of the storms like soundless special effects used by Cecil B. DeMille to indicate God on Mt. Sinai in the movie The Ten Commandments. Mike liked the cheesy effects at the time Charlton Heston parted the Red Sea. In the movie, Mt. Sinai always looked kind of red and stormy and far in the distance. Well, unless you were getting direct dictation from God, in which case you were in the middle of the storm.

Mike could no longer see the communication shed or the bridge. He turned back to the vast emptiness. Unbidden into this memory came the Peter, Paul, and Mary version of the old Woody Guthrie anthemic song, This Land is Your Land. For a few seconds he almost smiled as he gazed at the vastness of land and stars.

The faint sound of someone crying reached his ears. He looked around, saw no one. He listened for the sound, followed it for fifty yards. Finally he could make out a figure sitting at the edge of a small sand dune. The person had his head bowed. He was sobbing and trembling. As Mike drew closer, he recognized Krim. The boy sat on the lip of a dune in a shallow hollow, his knees bent, feet resting on the slight decline.

Mike sat next to him. Krim looked up. The glowing stars gave enough light in the shadows for Mike to see the tear stained face. Mike waited in silence.

“I’m so scared,” the boy said when the tears subsided.

“I am too, sometimes.”

“You are?” The boy stopped sniffling, wiped his hand across his nose.

“Yep.”

“What do you do to make it go away?”

“What I can, not think about it, keep busy.”

“But you’ve got Joe.”

“You’ll meet someone.”

“But they want to kill us.”

“Yes, many of them do.”

“We could work here for years and then one day they could just kill us anyway. I know. I may be only fourteen, but I understood the decisions they made. In two years they vote on keeping this place open. But it really means they want another extermination vote. They think they’ll win next time. All we do will be useless, and all we’ve done before now is useless.” Tears started down the boy’s face again.

“Yes,” Mike admitted, “I think they’ll try to vote extermination, and there’s no guarantee about the outcome of that vote.” Mike couldn’t think of a dumber time to mutter useless platitudes, even he and Joe never said to each other anything like, “there, there, everything will be all right.”

Krim burst out, “Why don’t you give up? Why don’t we all surrender? Save the bastards the trouble? We can’t survive here. There’s thousands, millions, probably billions more going to show up. We’re all going to starve and die. How can you go on?”

Mike stared out at the distant plain. He took a long while to answer. He looked at Krim, into the soft brown eyes and saw the lost innocence.

“I was there,” Krim whispered. “At the massacre.”

“I’m so sorry,” Mike murmured. He knew what the boy was referring to. There was only one “massacre”, the one on the planet Tarnall III. Over a thousand LGBT people had died.

The boy’s tears fell. He trembled as he told the story. “I was in love with a boy. We thought we were safe on our home planet. The announcement for collection came. No one could believe they’d be able to do that. We went to protest against the Collection Laws. It was a beautiful day on Tarnall III. Thousands of us gathered in a vast park. It stretched for miles along the ocean shore, within twenty miles of Bex’s Summer Palace. Without warning, battle cruisers from the home fleet far above the planet started firing.”

Mike had never spoken to a survivor of the horror. Bex had told him about it with great glee. The evil shit’s words had been, “Mess with me and more of your own will die just as horribly.”

Mike had said to Bex, “My understanding is we’re just going to die on the new planet.”

“Not as soon as I’d like. The soft factions in the Senate are trying to assure your safety. As if they really cared.” Bex had laughed. “We were going to ban all protests. Now we’re encouraging them. You know how many showed up at the last one? Nobody. People can be taught.”

But Bex was wrong. Smaller protests had broken out. And a few had died like the ones Joe reported to him on the ship here. No battle cruisers had fired down on protestors after Tarnall III. Bex and the Religionists didn’t have absolute power. Yet.

“Why do you go on?” Krim asked.

Mike sighed. “Because I love Joe. Because I have a mom and dad who love me. Because I have a nephew and friends, a drag queen I want to see before I die. Because I have a sense of myself as a good person, and despite all the odds, I believe I can triumph.” If Krim had been from Earth, Mike would have repeated Anne Frank’s words, “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.” Mike still believed that. He said to Krim, “You’re right. Our chances here are not good, but I want to build a world where no gay person has to fear again. I’ll accept the slightest of chances. I’m going to take it and fight as long and as hard as I can. Lots of times, I don’t think we can win, but that doesn’t bother me anymore. We’ll endure what we can.” Mike stood up. “It’s late, Krim. We better get back. We both need our sleep.”

The boy got to his feet. He said, “I feel better now.”

“I’m glad.” He looked down at the boy, at least a head shorter than he. Mike saw the boy’s hesitation. He reached out and gave the boy’s shoulder a reassuring touch. Krim moved forward leaning into Mike’s chest. Mike gathered the boy in is arms. He felt the thin body, no longer trembling. He caressed the youthful hair.

Krim murmured into Mike’s shoulder, “I wish we were lovers.”

Mike was a little bewildered. He held the embrace a few moments longer, released the boy, took a step back. “That’s a kind and beautiful thing to say. You’ll find someone of your own someday.” Mike didn’t want to lead the boy on. “Let’s go back.” As they turned toward the colony, the boy stayed in character by tripping over a half inch high dune of sand.

Mike kept him from tripping over his feet any further with a firm grip. Underground in the corridor he said goodnight to the boy. Mike climbed into bed next to Joe. He fell deeply asleep in moments.