E. J. SWIFT

The Complex

Those who go mad do so when the sun rises. Gill told me this on my first day, over forty years ago now. I’ve been awake through the night, sat by the window, listening to my lungs wheeze and thinking about tomorrow’s hearing. Now I watch dawn seep through the darkened glass. I imagine, on the horizon, rows of tiny figures going mad. What do they do, the chosen ones? They hoot and hop, lift their hands to the sky and sing worship to the red dunes. Or they lie quiet, prone, as the whistling wind covers them with sand. First the feet and hands are buried, then the torso, then the neck. Those who go mad do so when the sun rises, because in the night it is possible to hide. But in the day, this planet is a vast, barren rock.

 

Nine o’clock. Hum of the air conditioner pumping air through the complex, but it’s hot, always hot. My t-shirt sticks to my back. The three of them face me. On the left, the Warden, grey haired and austere. The woman, Karrow, is younger than me. She’s a native. The third man I do not recognize. He must be from the Cities. They like to have an outsider at these meetings, for validation.

I sit in my chair with my hands resting on my lap, palms upward, to show that I pose no threat. The faint glow from behind is my file on the wall, backlighting me. Age: fifty-five. Height: one hundred and sixty centimetres. Lung capacity: I do not need a figure. The tightness in my chest tells me everything.

Karrow’s eyes flick up and around me, scanning the information I cannot see.

‘How do you feel, Yun? Physically?’

‘I feel well,’ I say.

Karrow and the Warden exchange barely perceptible glances.

‘The next ship is due this month,’ says the City dweller. ‘We expect its arrival within two weeks.’

‘Two weeks?’ I have to suppress my dismay. ‘That’s sooner than I expected.’

‘You will be allocated a bay for the return passage to Earth.’

‘I would like to stay here.’

‘Yes, we have noted your request.’ He frowns at me. There is a tickle in my throat and I bite down on it. I feel as though they can see the red dust lining my lungs, as though my contamination is fluorescent. I wait.

‘There is no provision for ex-convicts on Botoni, Yun,’ says Karrow. ‘You are not permitted to join the New Cities.’

This I know already. Nothing can be allowed to pollute the New Cities, not dust, not bad blood. I choose my next words carefully.

‘I’d be content to remain in the complex and work for my board. To me it seems false economy to be preserved in abeyance for the considerable journey, when you consider the state of my general. . . health.’

The City man frowns and it is the Warden who speaks. He is a man for whom I have a distant respect, a tolerance, I suppose. He was young when I arrived.

‘You have always been an oddity here, Yun. I remember your rages in the early days, but it was a surprise to find murder on your file.’

I keep my hands soft, my eyes lowered.

‘With respect, I hope you will consider my request.’

 

After my hearing, even though the sun is lethal at this time of day and my head feels light and giddy, I go and stand outside. The white light strips the moisture from my lips and back. It sears through the soles of my shoes. I squint at the naked sky. I stand there until spots begin to appear in my vision. Then, I retreat inside and rest my forehead against the dark glass.

The ship is due in a fortnight. I imagine its descent, the blip in the sky slowly materialising into a silver bird. I imagine the hatch opening, the procession of silver oblongs elevated onto gravity carriers for delivery to the complex. They bring them in at night, so we cannot stare, although of course we watch from our rooms. Thus we arrived, thus we depart. We call them coffins, though they tell us we are – we were – not dead inside.

Over the months of faster-than-light travel in my silver coffin, my skin didn’t sag, my muscles didn’t atrophy, my heart was still. I had no brain waves. Nothing in my chemical makeup altered. But since they revived me I’ve wondered if, in that act of carbon freezing, the flicker of consciousness that makes me me underwent any change. The neuros say as your cells die and replace themselves, you’re a different person from one day to the next. There’s no such thing as personality, they say. But if that’s true then why are we given labels? Why am I a criminal for forty years, and not merely for the day the crime was committed?

It is dangerous to be fluid. To let yourself flow. I have learned to hold myself in check.

 

Al finds me staring at the dunes. He’s a kid, only six months into his sentence, ten years to donate. He was indicted for taking part in a protest.

‘How’d the hearing go?’ he asks.

‘They’ve booked my flight.’ Saying it aloud makes it real. My heart beats faster.

‘Shit, man. That’s come round fast.’

I nod. I haven’t told anyone about my request. If it is not granted, I do not want them to feel sorry for me. And I am not sure they would understand why I have asked, that I had no choice but to ask.

‘I’d kill to see proper water again,’ says Al. ‘Grass. Forests. Anything but this fucking red dust.’

‘I don’t taste it anymore,’ I tell him. He looks at me dubiously, as if I’m old and potentially senile, but it’s true. Even the little flecks you see in your food, or as sediment at the bottom of a glass of water, I don’t notice them.

‘D’you think they’ll make rivers out here?’ Al asks.

‘Not in our lifetime.’

‘The seas are so weird and lifeless, it freaks me out. Do they even know what’s in there?’

‘Only bacteria. It’s too acidic for shellfish.’

‘You are the Oracle, aren’t you. Everyone says you are.’

I gesture vaguely. Up there on the horizon, is that movement? In the shimmering air, it is possible to witness false images, and speak to them too.

‘I’ve been here a long time,’ I say.

‘And that you don’t talk much. Everyone says that too.’

‘I’m talking to you, aren’t I?’ He’s right though. I don’t talk much.

‘And that you killed someone.’

‘I’ve been here a long time,’ I repeat.

‘You don’t look like a murderer.’

I see the shadow of my face reflected in the glass and I remember Gill’s terror when she was due to go back. She was right to be afraid: once our sentence is up we have no purpose, and those back on what we should call home no use for us. To them we’re no better than robots. In fact, our stock is worth less than a robot, because we’re damaged. Gill was convinced that the silver coffins or perhaps merely their contents would be ejected into space mid-flight, and she would be left to float for all eternity, not alive, not dead. If that’s true, I told her, you’ll never know the difference. But now I feel the same fear creeping over me. I don’t want to go back in a box. Alive is alive and dead is dead. Frozen is something else.

 

In the evening I take a booth in the Pod and listen again to the last letter Shu spoke me. While I listen I imagine Shu’s clear eyes and tiny, intricate braids. I remember the fingers, rough skinned but dexterous, that shaped those braids. Despite the photos she has sent I still think of her this way, this young.

Shu’s voice is calm and fluid.

 

You know of course that the family will take care of you, but I’ve heard disturbing reports. The people who come back are not welcome here, even on Moon. There have been attacks. It is a peculiar thing when you consider that you were sent there to be punished, but it seems to me that this behaviour stems from a kind of jealousy. Everyone wants a pass to the New World. I don’t know what they imagine your life is like. I have seen videos of the complexes and even now I struggle to picture you there, where they say it is so hot that the air seems to be alive and makes you see visions, or ghosts.

We will have to keep you a secret, Yun.

 

By the time I get back to Earth, Shu will be over twice my age, or dead. Time dilation makes it impossible to know until I get there. And now my time is up I do not want to know. I do not want to go home and find a sister riddled with age or worse, a stone in the ground.

That, or else this planet has bewitched me. But is it not better to go mad than to go home, to lead at worst a reviled, at best a dwindling life, creeping about like a shadow?

 

In the week following my hearing I work in the kitchen, although my sentence expired six months ago, and I am not required to. I do not know what I would do if I did not labour. I don’t think my fellow convicts would resent my freedom, although since Gill went I have cultivated no new friends, and perhaps I am mistaken and they would look at me jealously, even hatingly, if I spent all my hours in the Pod, lulled by Shu’s voice.

My mind is skittish and I am glad of mundane tasks. Today I prepare greenhouse potatoes for the cook. They go into a stew with protein supplement. There is a rumour that in the Cities they have managed to breed livestock successfully, and that there is meat. It pleases me to believe this; that Botoni is making progress.

The cook bangs dishes around me. He is fond of banging things; it is his way of exerting authority, of making himself more than a chef for Earth’s scum. As I scrape dirt from the potato skins I remember what Al said about the seas here and I think about the few occasions I ate fish, about the silvery scales crisping on a hot grill, the white flakes falling out hot and delicious and their salty tang on my tongue. I would say I miss fish, but I suppose I do not really miss it because none of these sensations can actually be recalled, except as concepts.

I wonder, if I go back, if there will still be fish.

‘Chef?’ I say, meek and respectful. Shu would not recognize this timid woman.

‘What?’

‘You could do with an extra pair of hands, couldn’t you? On a more regular basis, I mean.’

He snorts.

‘Got someone in mind to replace you? Want a soft job, do they? It’s a fucking joke.’

I freeze.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Ship’s due isn’t it? You’ll be off in a silver box.’

For a moment my old anger bubbles up and I imagine what it would feel like to stab the chef, to feel his blood in my palm. I take a knife and slice through the potatoes, making clean, exact quarters.

In the evening I serve the food I have helped to prepare in the canteen. I like doing this. It allows me to study the other inmates with the most cursory engagement, and then I can go and eat without being disturbed. But towards the end of the queue, I notice a pair of severely shaking hands. I look at the man’s face and see the hallmarks of a shock-gun episode. I take his bowl myself, fill it, and hand it back to prevent the stew sloshing as best I can.

When the line has ended I go to sit next to the victim with my own dinner. His fingers are struggling to hold the spoon steady.

‘Are you okay?’ I ask.

His lips can barely form the words.

‘It’s barbaric.’

‘I know.’

‘They did it to you?’

‘More than once.’

I remember the first time. I had dared to complain about something, the quality of the tools I was using perhaps. The foreman in my work party was on me in seconds.

‘Repeat that?’

I repeated it. I was so full of rage in those days I could barely keep my mouth shut. The foreman jabbed my stomach with the shock gun and my body convulsed. When my vision cleared I felt as though a hand had reached into my belly and scrambled everything inside me. I couldn’t tell which way was up. My hands had switched places with my feet. I retched over and over, utterly disorientated.

‘Get up!’

I couldn’t move. I saw the gun approaching and tried to cringe away. He zapped me a second time, for longer. I was aware of all my limbs jerking frenziedly. I heard laughter and jeers. Then I lost control of my bladder and urine seeped down my trousers.

‘Get up!’

Someone pulled me to my feet, pulled me along with her. A rough hand gripped my hair.

‘Walk,’ she said. ‘Don’t let them see you weak. Left foot. Right foot. Walk.’

Gill.

She rescued me that day, and many days after. I cannot rescue this man. I am leaving in a fortnight, unless they offer me respite. The man’s story shakes me. Towards the end of my sentence, with my deteriorating health, they have given me less physical labour. I have forgotten the brutality of our treatment. I have forgotten that my body is still muscular, because gravity here is greater and the effort to do any small thing correspondingly so. I feel no ownership of this body. It’s as if the planet has moulded me without consultation.

Why would they let me stay? And why would I wish to?

 

I became conscious on Botoni in a transparent box, with something beeping over my head, regular and insistent. Two white-clad figures on the other side moved slowly. I took a breath, my first. My lungs were desperate for air, I couldn’t inhale quickly enough. I gulped and flailed until my breathing began to settle. When they took me out of the box the doctors had to help me with my first steps, one holding each arm, unused as I was to the stronger gravity.

Before I came here I had seen images of the complex, as everyone does. They are supposed to act as a deterrent. I had seen the glinting, silver domes; I had seen the endless red dunes. I could never have imagined the heat. Or the thick, stifling air.

The impossible silence.

In general they treat us well enough, in the sense that livestock are treated well. We serve a purpose: we need to be strong and healthy, get the right vitamins and stay clean. Each day, the bell pulled me out of bed at six. A wash at the sink with cold water. Six-fifteen: dressed and tidied. Inspection at six forty-five, breakfast at seven. Desert caterpillars took us out to the worksites; we could travel between ninety to a hundred and twenty minutes each day. Under colossal, wire rigged sunshades, we took raw materials and turned them into buildings.

We went in teams, rotating projects every six months. I dug canals, riveted pipes, mixed cement, placed bricks, pumped and sprinkled water, ploughed dust, planted seedlings, hoed soil, laid rails. I did these things until my hands were blistered, my body aching as if beaten, and then they ferried us back for the evening meal, and what remained of the evening, if we could stay awake for it.

As years passed, I began to see how Botoni might, one day, be beautiful. As the old world gassed itself to death, this place might become what Earth had been. It would take thousands of years. I was a part of it, willing or not. In the earth surrounding the complex we cultivated spindly plants from Earth seedlings. I planted a sapling. Every evening I went to water it. Year by year I watched it grow, and each day of its survival was a tiny miracle. I collected the leaves it dropped and hoarded them like jewels.

There were moments I stood on the edge of the complex and gazed deep into the desert, aware of a curious feeling in my chest: something like guardianship.

The nights here are quiet. I leave the window open. Sometimes I sit on the windowsill and look at the foreign constellations. My roommate sleeps like the dead. In the early days, the sheer weight of the things I missed would make me want to fall. I knew it wouldn’t inconvenience anyone if I did. The paperwork is easy enough – failure to acclimatize, they would say. Other times I wondered what it was I did miss, and occasionally, the pan emptiness of the sky convinced me that none of it existed at all. On those nights I whispered to myself: I must be going mad, I must have gone mad. I am not here. I am not anywhere.

Sometimes the colonists pass by. Their vehicles glide on silver tracks that coil away into the dunes, towards other New Cities. They cannot be so far away, the Cities. When they pass we pause whatever we are doing and watch them silently. With their free, roving eyes, they are aliens.

Convicts do not run away, unless madness takes them. We are tagged of course, but that is not why. There is nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide. Violence when it comes is sudden; vicious and specific. I saw a woman twist a screwdriver in the eye socket of an eighteen year-old boy. She got up and there was blood all over her face, on her lips, her nose. She had been a lawyer in her old life. After that they put her in a white cell. White walls, white floor and ceiling and door. Soon enough, her mind was whitewashed too.

 

I am not the only one going back to Earth. We are twenty or so. A week before the ship is due, the Warden briefs us. I look around the room. The other faces reveal a spectrum of emotion from suppressed hope to genuine excitement. I have been here the longest.

The Warden clears his throat, and I wonder idly how far the dust has advanced with him. Some lucky people are immune – I say lucky, but those are the ones they take away to experiment on.

‘As on the way out, you will be placed in abeyance for the duration of the journey. When you reach Earth, an officer will meet you. They will help you join your family.’

Amidst the ripple of anticipation, a lone voice calls out.

‘What if we got no family? What if they’re all dead?’

‘Earth has a tried and tested system for briefing convict families. In the instance of the line expiring, a friend or acquaintance will have been named as your Rehabilitator. They will be alerted when the ship nears Earth.’

The man who spoke sneers but the Warden ignores him. The Warden will follow the line. He tells us that our families will help us re-enter Earth society. We will get jobs. We will pay rent. We will have free time. A couple of people nod: yes, yes! Some look dazed. Gradually they begin to talk amongst themselves, exchanging ideas. One woman is going to learn the guitar. Another wishes to study, physics she says. Even the sneerer admits he has a plan: he is going to build his own house in Greenland.

There is one man, older like me, who stares at the wall with eyes as vacant as the dunes. He knows, I think. He knows. After the briefing I notice him around the complex. In the dinner line. In the yard. Always the same, vacant stare.

I go back to the Pod and call up an old letter – I know them all by heart. I play Shu’s voice.

 

Today I told my daughter about you. She had a lot of questions about Aunty Yun. What does she look like? Where does she live? I said you lived in the sky. Can I go there? No, I explained. Aunty Yun will come back to us, but it might not be for a very long time.

One day I will have to tell her the truth, register her as your Rehabilitator after me, tell her to pass these instructions to her daughter and perhaps her daughter’s daughter, for who knows which of us will be living when you return? It struck me, after talking to her, that it is most likely I will never see you again. Of course I have considered this before, but never with such certainty. With each year and each failed application for your early release, the odds are stacked against our reunion. Perhaps I should be glad that my children’s children will have a chance to know you, Yun? It is difficult to be glad.

 

In this last week I am not sleeping and my breath is more constricted than ever. One night I see a sand cloud. It rolls along the horizon, changing its shape, stretching and retracting, breath like a dragon’s. It is a sign, it must be a sign. I tap my tongue to the back of my front teeth, three times. Ward it off, whatever it is. Keep it from me, keep me safe. Keep me here. There is nothing good on Earth except for Shu, and Shu will be gone. At least if I stay here, her letters will keep coming.

She was always too good for me. I was a troubled child anyway, angry at the world I had inherited, angry at the restraints and the quarantines, the adults who had created such a scale of catastrophe that they chose to pretend it was not there. Instead they peered around the mess, around Earth and up and out into the stratosphere. The planet was a toy they had broken; now they wanted a better one.

We didn’t have a bad start, my mother and my sister and I, until the Depression reached Antarctica. Shu was the conscientious one. Shu took jobs outside school when our mother started imbibing and her eyes turned dull. Shu dealt with the bailiffs. She found us a one-bed flat when we lost the house.

While my sister tried to save us, I went pick-pocketing with my co-conspirator T, a childhood friend who had grown up into a reckless and beautiful young man, and the only one who had stayed loyal through the bad times. I adored him. With T, I could make squalor a game. A dangerous game, because the law was harsh and prison penalties high, but a game nonetheless. I was fifteen, and as far as I could see I had nothing to live for but the excitement of breaking the law.

I still dream about him. T and I, running down the long white Antarctic beaches. T and I, paddling in the coral reef graveyards, collecting fish scales, shells, plastic bottles and Cocarola cans. T finding a sea horse skeleton held together by fragments of skin. When he scooped it up in his net, the bones crumbled to dust.

T and I, out on the city streets. T and I, watching for ripe targets to exit the sex clubs and the holomas. We worked as a team. Old perverts were the best. I’d distract them, rub onion in my eyes to make me cry, hike my skirt. I’m lost, I’d say. I’ve got no money to get home. When they put their hands between my legs, T would push the barrel of his gun into the back of their necks and they’d freeze and I’d knee their erection and take everything they had and then we ran. T kept the gun unloaded but they never knew that. T and I, criminal masterminds. T and I, doomed from day one.

The night it happened – it could have been any night, but it was a Tuesday, a dark February night. Our victim fought back, feistier than usual. T was on the floor and somehow the gun ended up in my hand. The guy was hitting T. I pointed the gun as T had shown me and pulled back the safety catch. I warned the man: I’ll shoot! T was making awful grunting noises. I said it again. The man swivelled and kicked my legs from under me. I couldn’t fire so I went for the next best thing, hitting out with the heavy barrel. When the shot exploded in my ears and the man jerked and went still I lay in shock, his blood soaking into my clothes. And I realized I had known all along. Of course the gun was loaded. Of course T would not be so stupid as to carry an empty weapon, even if he had told me otherwise.

‘We just have to lie low,’ said T.

But I knew we would be caught. We had left too much evidence, our fear was all over the scene. That night, I went to the police station and confessed. I wrote a full statement. I felt triumphant as I signed my name: I had done something noble. Because of me, T would be safe. Even after, in the difficult bit where I was allowed visitors, Shu, and when T came, I felt the strangest calm. I knew that I was strong enough to maintain my story.

‘You can do some good in the world,’ I told T, savouring my martyrdom, as I suppose I thought of it. ‘You could be something. A doctor. An astronaut.’

T said he wanted to punch me. He said we should have sat tight. He said they’d send me to the convict planet. I didn’t believe him.

‘There’s a new law. They can get people from fourteen now. Twelve if you’re a boy.’

I was fifteen. They gave me forty years.

T never wrote. Over the years it was Shu’s letters that I came to wait for, Shu’s news that I craved. I came to know the woman better than I ever knew the girl.

Back on Earth, Shu goes to university and studies law. She promises to fight for my release and I know, even then, she will never succeed but I love her for trying. I become an aunt. The baby’s name is Shui, for water, but she is known as Shell. The child’s father is absent; Shu lives with her boyfriend who teaches scuba diving in the summer months. Shell gets bigger. A batch of photographs: Shell’s first birthday cake, Shell’s first day at school, Shell touching a turtle, Shell’s nose pressed behind a diving mask, Shell with eyeliner and dyed blue hair. I gobble each titbit of news. I hug Shu’s words to myself in the night, repeating them to my friend Gill in the day, happy that Shu is happy.

She writes steadily, steadfastly. I hope I’m not boring you, she says once, and I speak my response immediately, even knowing my letters are unlikely to arrive until she is elderly or worse, No, please, tell me everything, terrified of losing even a word. Shu and Gill are all I have. Had.

Day turns into night turns into day. Now there is grey in my hair. Now my lungs are clogged and I watch sand clouds roll on the horizon and dream about those who go mad.

 

In the morning over breakfast Al tells me there has been a suicide. I do not need to look around to know who is missing. It is the man with the vacant stare from the briefing room.

‘How did he do it?’ I ask Al. I ask because Al wants to talk about it; he’s distressed and curious at the same time, but I barely listen to the response. I think of how I found Gill crouched in the bathroom with a razor, days before her own ship came. I remember the scratch on her inner wrist, not deep enough to draw blood, but a precise line along the veins. I remember the horror and relief in her eyes when I snatched the razor away.

‘They’re going to send me into space, Yun. I’ll never make it to Earth, none of us will. Not dead, not alive, not dead. I should end it now. You should let me!’

Her shoulders shook when I held her.

‘You’re going back to Earth,’ I said firmly. ‘And when my sentence is up, I’ll find you.’

‘Promise me?’

‘Promise.’

‘Because fuck knows there’s nothing else for me there.’

They allowed me to be with Gill when they put her to sleep. She was shaking and sweating. I knew she was terrified. The doctors must have known too. I held her hand, feeling like a traitor. I watched the needle slip under her skin. Then they took her away to freeze.

In her last years Gill had talked a lot about Earth.

‘They didn’t always send us back, you know. We were never meant to. I mean, would you ask a spider back into your house, even if it was all used up and looked harmless?’

‘Where did we go then?’

Gill shrugged. ‘The New Cities. We must have worked for someone. Must have died here. But those smug cunts in their pavilions by the sea don’t want us either. They were the ones chose to start shipping us back.’

‘I remember,’ I said.

‘What do you remember? You’re just a kid.’ Gill spoke with rough affection; she liked to say I’d been snatched from the cradle. But it was true. I did remember. I remembered images on the news, aged figures with ochre tinged skin disembarking from a spaceship. Placards and slogans.

Send them back! Send them back!

No room, no convicts!

Earth sent them to the moon colony. Them. Us. This, too, I remember, and Shu’s letters confirm it is the case, at least in her lifetime.

They send us back because we are a civilized race. But it is not civil, not civil at all, and Gill knew it, and this man who has ended his life today knew it. Eventually, there will be no sending back. They will work us until we die or lose our minds. And that seems, to me, not illogical. Not unkind.

 

The ship is late. I ask the Warden if there has been a decision about me. He says they will let me know when the ship arrives. At night I dream that they force me into the silver coffin, stuff a tube down my throat and turn on the gas. I start to freeze from the inside out. Everything freezes except my mind, and all I can feel is cold cold cold. Endless awareness, endless cold. I want to scream, I want to thrash but I cannot move. Then the lid comes down, and it is dark.

I wake drenched in sweat, and I bend over the edge of the bed, my chest so tight I can barely inhale, convinced I will suffocate here and now. Slowly I regain control of my lungs and the panic subsides. But I am too scared to sleep. What if they come for me in the night? What if they decide to freeze me when I am unconscious, when I cannot struggle?

 

A month passes and still there is no ship. Hope flutters. Respite. In the kitchen, I assist the chef. At night I water my tree. I listen to Shu’s letters. But it cannot last and it does not last. The day arrives. I come downstairs to breakfast and Al rushes up to me, breathless.

‘Yun, the ship’s coming down.’

Despite the heat I feel cold. I accompany Al to the front of the complex, where a small crowd has gathered. We watch as the atmosphere shimmers, as a glint becomes a silver colossus descending from the sky.

Sweat leaks over my body like an oil slick.

Now I can see the shape of the ship, squat and round. It moves ponderously downwards, landing wings and undercarriage extending, the air turning blue as its thrusters power towards the ground. I can hear it roaring. The sound is colossal. A horrible pressure builds against my eardrums. I don’t remember the landings being this loud. The air around me seems to hiss as the ship touches down. Small vehicles are driving towards it, bouncing over the uneven ground. I hear a guard shout: ‘Alright, get back to work!’ I sense the crowd dispersing around me but my legs have become liquid and I am melting into the red dust, a part of it, taken.

I come to in the canteen, coughing up red mucus. A guard takes me back to my room. Lying on the narrow bed, I feel frail. I feel as though the planet has crept inside me, and is feasting.

 

Nine o’clock. Hum of the air conditioner pumping air through the complex, but it’s still hot, always hot. The three of them face me.

‘I’m afraid your request has been declined.’ The Warden raises both hands. ‘We put in a word for you. But protocol must be observed. We cannot make an exception.’

‘I’m sorry, Yun,’ says Karrow. She looks sorry. Maybe she even is. They know what they are sending me back to.

After my hearing I go and stand outside in the terrible heat. I peer at the scorched horizon, searching for movement there. In a few days they will put something in my veins to make me sleep. Then they will freeze me.

Back on Earth, Gill is waiting. But perhaps she has made her own life by now, and will want nothing to do with me. Perhaps she was right to be afraid, perhaps they don’t take us back at all, but eject us somewhere into the deep emptiness of space. I imagine how this place might look from out there: a huge sphere marbled with pink and brown, the occasional gleam of a shallow sea. Then I imagine Earth. Small and grey, cloaked in pollution.

For the rest of the day I speak to no one.

When the lights flicker off at night and the complex falls dark and silent, I lie on my bed and close my eyes. The breathing of my roommate lengthens, regulates. Once or twice she coughs, but does not wake. I get up and slip into my outdoor clothes. In the bathroom I hack up a compound of mucus, saliva, and red dust. I fill a bottle with water.

The corridors of the complex are deserted and lit with pale blue light. I walk outside. Nobody stops me. Why would they? My actions are insanity. I don’t know how far it is to the nearest New City and there will be nowhere to shelter in the blazing heat of day.

I start to walk. The air is pleasantly warm and I remove my cotton shirt to feel it brush against my arms. I walk through the cultivated earth that surrounds the complex. When the ground softens and ripples underfoot, I know I have crossed the boundary into the dunes. I keep walking. After an hour or so the ground begins to slope upward and my breath shortens. I have to stop every few minutes, bent double and panting.

At the crest of the hill I turn and look back and see the faint blue glow of the complex in the valley below. If I turned around now, I could be back in my bed before dawn and no one would know I had been gone.

There is no wind up here. There is no sound except for my own slender breathing. I sit for a minute, burying my hands in the sand, letting it trickle through and over my fingers, burying them again. One day this will be soil. It will be rich in nutrients and yield Earth-born crops and the people that eat them will never think about those who came before. I have an impulse to press myself into the ground, leave some mark or impression.

I turn away from the complex and start down the hill, slipping and sliding in the sand. The sky is enormous and full of piercingly bright stars. I am covered in stars, wreathed in them. They stay with me until the night begins to fade. The world lightens, the world is huge. Now I can see nothing but white sky and rust dunes.

I wait for the sun, anxious for a moment that it might not appear. But no – here it is, the edge of the giant star creeping over the horizon, flooding the world with crimson. A beautiful, shimmering dawn. I feel the planet’s heat infuse me, its dust lining my lungs. I kick off my shoes. At the exact moment when the light touches me, I raise my hands to the dawn and I begin to dance.