After Martha left for work Jun worked on her Estute.
She could not leave the house until it was repaired, and the sooner she was out
of Martha’s hair and heading towards her destination the better. She ran her
fingers gently across the panel and it buzzed weakly to life. She closed her
eyes and probed inside it. She slid her mind over the memory storage, the
energy source, the wires and the air-cleanser. All seemed to be intact and felt
whole, but only worked faintly, as if they were out of energy. She wondered
with sharp fear what would happen if she could not get this thing to work. What
sort of diseases would she be exposed to, she thought, remembering the reports
received from the first explorers to different planets. Someone made a terrible
mistake with their air-filters and they received twenty-three diseases between
the five of them and three of them died a long, painful death. If Jun did not
get her Estute to work properly she may suffer the same fate. The little
machine was also her only route home.
What
could have caused this? The people who made Estutes deliberately made them fool
proof. They had their own energy source, a created black hole the size of a pin
hole. They had a force field twenty-feet around that humans didn’t have weapons
to break. It had an endless chemical process of cleaning the oxygen and
breaking down and cleanly storing any discharge, eventually expelling it in
sacks. It cleaned her body once a day. More than that, it had the teleportation
that had brought her to this planet. It had dissolved her body into atoms,
carried those atoms within it and traveled at twice light speed across the
universe for eight years. How could it get broken? What would she do without it
on this strange rock?
She
carried it to the balcony for better lighting. Martha’s porch had potted plants
and a metal rocking chair; Jun placed the Estute on the railing and looked at
it long and hard. She had only one explanation for this, though she was afraid
to face it. She thought of the fires that they had escaped from, eight years
ago and what felt, like her, for a day.
She
looked down at the street. This was the first planet she had ever been to. Of
course as a child she had visited their moon, back home; it had trees, like
this planet, and a blue sky, but from the balcony could not see any trees and
the sky was a dull, metallic grey.
She
really had thought that, coming to a different planet, she would have a feeling
of revelation and purpose. She felt nothing but loneliness and worry for her
Estute; this was a great deal more boring then she had thought it would be.
And
of course a part of her was waiting.
She
knew he followed her. He always kept his promises.
She
wondered if she had broken the Estute in the fire; she wondered if something
had happened to them during the flight that had messed with its
materialization. Maybe a chunk of it was missing. She wondered if it was safe
to use; in the meanwhile she would figure out what to do.
She
fixed the Estute in one way: now she didn’t have to look like she was wearing a
spacesuit. She engaged a small force field for diseases, with safe anti-biotics
in the air and air cleansers engaged. She tightened a wire inside the
projectile, a minor repair, and the spacesuit dissolved into a pair of neat
straight jeans, black flats and a white T-shirt. She felt much more
comfortable, and the air felt cleaner and the force field protected her a
little from the noise ad smell. Slowly she sank into a chair and waited, her
hands crossed across her lap and her eyes wondering among the huge grey towers
of downtown Minneapolis.
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