Star Crossed Kindness

“It’s not chemical castration,” Leo said, his voice even.

Skar hissed at him. “I was humoring you, the whole way here.” She grabbed the canopy of the aircar and swept it up, then ducked into the front seat. She sat before the controls, her hands sliding the X cross belts around her shoulders and clicking them into the chair, as casually as if she had been in aircars her whole life. Leo leaned in, peering down at her face.

“Have you flown these things before?” he asked.

“It’s a VTOL capable ducted turbine car with an electric engine, gyroscopic stabilizers, and...” She pointed at the sleek, swept back antennas and the whirling sensor domes. “Connection to some ... guidance system.”

“The municipal flight system, yes,” Leo said, taking the passenger seat.

“I want to choose where we go,” Skar said, her voice fierce. She tapped at the controls and, again, impressed Leo with how quickly she could process and read new information on an unfamiliar HUD. In a spate of a few seconds, she had brought up the geolocater, and then started to probe around on the map. She gestured. “Where’s your resource extraction?”

“The asteroid belt, we don’t have the delta-V for that in an aircar,” Leo said, amiably.

Skar glared at him.

“Try Africa, this region,” he said, pointing.

The aircar started to whirr as the engines took it into the air, and then it tracked off to the left, the indicator flashing up showing where they should go. Leo leaned back in his seat. “This battery doesn’t quite have the range for us to reach past the Sahara, but we can park on the coast to recharge.”

“Right,” Skar said. Her fingers drummed on the wheel. “Fuck.”

“What?” Leo asked.

“No. No. I have to see it,” Skar said, her jaw tightening.

They flew on in silence, the car whirring over verdant countryside, reclaimed ruins, a few more craters. Leo, looking out the window, muttered. “Up north, along an old border, there’s an area that’s actually more dangerous than some of the rad zones.”

“Hmm?” Skar asked.

“Before the Five Minute War, they had a, uh, a war that lasted a lot longer but had way fewer nukes,” Leo said. “So, they made up for the lack of nukes with normal shells, and there’s enough of them still under the ground that you can’t walk that place without a scanner. It’s-”

“I know you can’t fake a fucking planet,” Skar snapped. “I expected everything to come crashing down five hours after I fucking landed – there’d be some sign that there was ... that there was the trick. You know? But they didn’t just send me to one Tailoring Center, they let me go to six. And they let me choose which ones to visit.” Her hands tightened on the wheel of the aircar, producing a soft creaking noise as plastic strained against her.

Leo nodded, silently.

“It’s all fucking true, isn’t it?” Skar whispered.

“We’re a nice planet,” Leo said, smiling wryly. “Not perfect. But nice.”

Skar slammed her head into the wheel. “I have to see,” she whispered.

Leo reached over, squeezing her shoulder. She lifted her body into his touch, like a cat arching its spine. And still, they flew, the aircar smoothly slipping into a sky traffic lane that was earmarked for vehicles going its speed. There wasn’t much in the way of air traffic around them, and the whole concept of the aircar had never really taken off, even with municipal flight systems providing linked data and coordination for drones and similar vehicles. In truth, people preferred to not have to worry about flying themselves, unless they were lunatics. And lunatics built their own planes, or flew the old and dependable fleet of Cessna descendants.

“I understand,” Leo said. “It’s ... a lot.”

The crossed over the sea that had once taken ships weeks in a few hours – hours spent not entirely in silence, but rather, in sporadic conversation, broken and started again and again as Skar sputtered to life with a comment or question, then subsided again. She asked about the re-fishing fleets that were checking on the growing populations of aquatic life in the Med – really, we’re flattering ourselves, the bounce back started without us needing to do much, but they do release new germlines to try and improve the diversity and genetic health of the fish down there – and about the history of Earth’s great oceans – our first and best explorers were the Polynesians I think ... if you think the Med’s impressive, ooh, you haven’t seen the Pacific.

Finally, though, she said: “The sand seas of home are...” She hesitated. “They’re covered in these big trawlers that sift up the dust and process it, looking for trace minerals. Menials and proles and lumpin work them – they design them big and simple, because then, unbonded Devonians can manage it. The backs are what really look pretty, from overhead. They’re covered in solar panels and vorlas plantations.” She sighed. “I could kill for some vorlas now.”

“Vorlas?” Leo asked.

“You know tobacco?”

Leo grunted.

“It’s like that, but it doesn’t kill you and give you cancer,” Skar snorted. “You people got the shit end of the stick. Just enough fossil fuels to kill your planet, not enough that they became economically worthless. Those fuck ass polar tilts so everything on your planet has to adapt to shit getting too cold and too hot. The only thing you have going for you is the fucking moon.”

“It was a tough century,” Leo said. “Eh. They were all tough centuries.”

Skar drummed her fingers on the wheel.

“Luna is pretty great, though,” Leo added. Skar snorted.

They came down to a small town that hadn’t even registered its name on the mapping system, but did have a solar power plant and a charging station for any vehicle that came loitering by. Parking beside the station. Leo waved at the bonded pairs that came out to chat with them. They were all descendants of people who had returned only after the fallout had settled and the radioactivity had been cleaned up – a diverse lot of Terran and Devonian faces, speaking in an excited new accent that was distinct from any North African accent that Leo had ever heard.

“And who is this?” a cheerful silver skinned Devonian woman asked, eying Skar, who glared at her.

“He’s mine,” she said, snaking an arm around Leo’s waist.

“I, uh...” The silver skinned Devonian sniffed, looking at Leo, her eyes going slightly out of focus. Leo coughed, holding up his hand.

“I’m a polybond, uh, no offense!” he said, while the silver skinned Devonian’s bonded mate, a woman with short pink hair, laughed and punched her shoulder. The silver skinned Devonian shook her head, her cheeks flushing darkly.

“You slut!” the pink haired girl giggled. “You better be clearing out of town soon, I will fight for my Shela!”

“I am more than my biochemistry,” Shela said, with great dignity.

Skar looked entirely taken aback by this display of ... what?

To Leo, it was normal – normal for him now that he had lost a lot of his teenage angst and realized just how the real, adult world handled things. He smiled slightly at Skar. “Wanna mingle?” he asked.

“I...” Skar stammered. “I don’t know.”

“What’s your accent?” Shela asked, curiously. “It’s so pretty.”

“Uh...” Skar looked striken. “I’m from, uh...”

“Mars,” Leo provided, his voice soft. “She was visiting here before the impactor.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Shela said, her voice growing gentle. Leo realized that his ingenuous idea to cover for any mistakes that Skar might make around Earth culture had a flaw. The mention of the impactor and Shela and her bondmate’s and other villager’s comiserating noises seemed to hit Skar like knives. Leo put his hand onto her shoulder, squeezing – and Skar stammered.

“I-It’s okay, it’s okay. Everyone is fine.” She sniffed. “They are, right?”

“Yeah,” Leo said. He didn’t even think of clarifying that with mostly.

The villagers immediately took it upon themselves to heap the offworlder with food and babbling conversation. They had, it seemed, all taken up jobs as part of the long term desertification management projections. Shela and her bondmate, Miranda, both owned the only aircar in the village, taking it deep into the Sahara to check on monitoring stations that tracked the desert and its waxing and its waning.

“It’s really a balancing act, ya know,” Shela said, as she spooned more food from the opened tray that the village cook had brought out for everyone to pull from. “The desert is, herself, an ecosystem. We can’t just turn it all into wetland or forest or whatever – both practically impossible and unethical. But we also don’t want it to get too big, because if there’s not enough water intake into the desert from the outer regions, then the ecosystem in the heart of the desert starts to fail. Lots of really interesting new interactions going on too, things we haven’t really had a good handle on until the past, like, half century.”