What Kate Found in the Fringe

by Nemo West

Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

part 5

Trees towered overhead. Everything was much larger than Kate had estimated from a distance, when the expedition’s long caravan was snaking across the flatlands. Now that the caravan was passing into the edge of the forest, she could only gawk at the giants looming sixty feet overhead. Lanky limbs held up pale, papery leaves to drink nutrients from the orange light of Arcturus. A lush understory coated the terrain in waving fronds of crimson and purple, speckled with fiery-gold blossoms that overburdened their stems, forcing them to bow toward the muddy green soil. The foliage danced and rippled like ocean waves as chill breezes snapped in from the plains.

At first, the woodlands seemed exotic and fascinating, a welcome break from the sparse, grassy environs of Cinder Pointe. Within weeks, however, the forest became monotonous. Cheap terraforming bundles notoriously met only minimum requirements for sustainable biodiversity. As a result, the flora colonizing this climatic zone had the appearance of a lazily copy/pasted simulation — the same trees, the same bushes, the same clumps of burnished flowers, over and over and over again.

For the sake of corporate efficiency, reaching and validating the alleged ore deposit marked just one goal of the expedition. In the event of a legitimate claim, enough data had to be collected to site an adequate landing field and mining camp, plot additional farmland, and route a terrestrial highway to Cinder Pointe. Getting boots on the ground was expensive, which made multiple missions cost-prohibitive. “One and done” was the mantra of market necessity. That meant every reconnaissance detail for a future mining operation had to be accounted for now.

As a result, the expedition practically crawled through the wilderness, slowly leapfrogging from one camp to the next. Every other week, an advance team went forward to establish another campsite. Over the course of several days, trucks and camels would then haul everything to the new site. Once there, crews stripped limbs from nearby trees to make windows in the canopy for Arcturan sunlight to reach the solar power banks.

Mineralogists then examined nearby soil samples, and surveyors scouted local terrain. Kate and Quince practically lived at the administrative tent, collecting reports and then collating them with data outputs for upload to the offworld monitoring posts.

As months passed, the expedition gradually climbed into rough, uneven terrain, breaching the foothills of a titanic mountain range. Having only recently acquired a climate, Oberon retained many youthful geologic features, including the results of a tectonic collision in a prior eon that had launched a spine of dislocated strata almost seven miles into the sky. Wind and rain had barely begun eroding the jagged slopes of this behemoth, which towered over nearly an eighth of its native continent.

The expedition camped on a broad plateau high up in these mountains, which allegedly contained the ore deposit Terra Novus had come seeking. However, validating that claim would require extensive investigation. For the next several months, this campsite, overlooking a vast, rock-strewn valley, would become home.

Having reached its prime destination, the expedition’s work now began in earnest. Reams of data poured in from sensors, coring samples, and spectrographs. Triangulated pulse probes driven deep into rock provided ultrasonic resonance imaging — blobby, amorphous digital glimpses of the mountain’s subsurface. Kate and Quince could barely keep up with the blizzard of tasks assigned to them, often working late into the night. Staggered shifts meant they rarely worked together. On those brief occasions when their time off aligned, one was usually asleep, exhausted from yet another long day.

After several weeks, Patricia granted them a few days’ leave to rest. That first night, they both collapsed into their cots. Kate expected to go right to sleep, but a few minutes after they shut off their lamp, Quince asked, “Hey, you still up?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” Kate yawned.

She heard him inhale before asking, “This might seem like a weird question, but what do you think you might do after this?”

“What do you mean? After our time off?”

“No. After the expedition.”

“Oh.” Kate sighed. “I’m... not really sure.”

“I don’t mean right after the expedition,” Quince clarified. “I mean more like big picture. What kind of life are you planning? Career? Marriage? Settling down?”

Kate stiffened and didn’t reply.

After a few moments of silence, Quince wondered, “Are... you okay? Did I say something wrong?”

“No, you’re fine; it’s fine,” she managed to reply, trying not to sound as jagged as she felt. “I just—” Kate let out a long breath — “Those aren’t easy questions to answer.”

“I know. I wasn’t trying to put you on the spot, or anything. I was just... curious.”

Kate sighed. “To be honest, I think if I had answers to those questions... I’m not sure I’d be here right now.”

She heard Quince shift on his cot. “You mean you don’t think you’d be here on this expedition? Or you wouldn’t be... with me?”

“On the expedition,” she assured.

“Oh.” He resettled. “Does that mean you signed up for this expedition to do a little soul-searching?”

“Something like that, I guess.” She sighed again. “What about you? What kind of life are you planning after this?”

“Me?” He suddenly sounded weary. “I... really don’t know either.”

“I mean, how can you know? It just feels like it’s not fair.”

“Like what’s not fair?”

“Having to decide what to do with my life,” Kate said. “How the hell should I know? It’s such a big question, and the consequences are so... heavy. I’m supposed to decide my fate for the rest of my life? Based on what? All I’ve done is go to school. I know how to deal with school, but... how do I deal with everything else? You know, all the other crap that comes with” — she sighed — “growing up”

In the darkness, she heard Quince exhale. “I know what you mean,” he finally said. With a strange weight in his tone, he added, “How are we supposed to know... the consequences?”

Suddenly feeling self-conscious, Kate rolled onto her side. “You know what, I... I think I’m going to call it a night.”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. I mean, it’s late. We’re both exhausted. We should turn in so we can enjoy the day tomorrow.”

“Yeah. Our first day off in weeks. Something to look forward to, right?”

“Right.”

A long quiet moment stretched between them before Kate added, “Well, goodnight.”

“Yeah. Goodnight.”

* * *

They slept in late the next morning, ate a leisurely breakfast, and then went hiking to explore the nearby terrain. Atop a vertiginous bluff overlooking the valley, they settled at the foot of a boulder and enjoyed a picnic lunch. Kate then reclined in the crook of Quince’s arm and they relaxed together, enjoying the lofty view.

A pine forest girdled the mountains. From their perspective, Kate and Quince could see specks of new growth infiltrating higher elevations like rust devouring a chassis. Kate had never witnessed this early stage of a new world’s birth before. Ejaculated into virgin alien soil during the terraforming process, Earth’s biomatter had surged, grappled, and spread — a hungry, explosive force with an endless appetite. Organisms forged in the crucible of competitive selection carried potent adaptations, set loose here in an environment free from competition. The resultant wilderness — teeming, raw and ravenous — was still busy overrunning the planet, stalled only at the thresholds of Oberon’s deserts, permafrost, and thin-aired altitudes.

“So, do you still want to know?” Kate asked between sips from her canteen.

“Know what?” Quince replied, stroking her shoulder.

“Why I really volunteered to come out to the Fringe.”

Quince glanced at her with mock surprise. “You mean it’s not because it would look good on a resume?”

She elbowed him gently in the ribs. “Not just because of that.”

“It’s almost as if I knew you were holding out on me,” he said with a grin.

“Maybe because I’d just met you, and you were being awfully nosey right out of the gate.”

“I still prefer ‘curious’.” Quince shrugged. “After all, I’m not nor—.”

“I know,” Kate said, cutting him off with a tolerant smile.

“Okay, so what’s the big secret then?”

Kate sighed and resettled herself against him. “It’s my family.”

Quince raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me there’s a standing order for your execution, too.”

“Nothing quite so dramatic.”

“Then what?”

Gazing out over the valley, she said, “I’m the youngest of six. Most of my siblings are married. Most of them have kids. Most of them have also never left our hometown, let alone our home world. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but to me... I don’t know... it feels like they’re all living with their heads in the sand, or something. I honestly can’t believe they just want to stay in the same place where they grew up, send their kids to the same schools they went to, and work at the same boring jobs every day until they retire. That kind of life sounds excruciating to me!”

Quince’s brow hunched slightly. “Okay.”

“But my whole life I’ve been living in the shadow of this looming expectation that someday that’s exactly how I’m supposed to turn out: having this tidy little life, stuck in Mom’s and Dad’s orbit, living just a few minutes away so that I’m close enough to bring the grandkids over for family dinners. And they keep badgering me about it! Why haven’t I found the right person yet? Why haven’t I found the right career? Why haven’t I settled down?

“It’s, like, until I turn into who they want me to be, then I’m just some ongoing problem that needs to be solved. And I can’t stand the thought of any of it. I’ve always wanted to get away from home, to get out from under Mom’s wing. I mean, we live in an amazing age, when it’s possible to soar among the stars, to go almost anywhere, and I want to see what’s out there. I don’t just mean I want to travel; I want to explore, to go to the wild places, the raw edges of human colonization, to... I don’t know... to drink deeply from the cup of life! You know?”

Quince pulled his arm from around Kate’s shoulder and folded his hands in his lap.

She blinked and turned to him. “What’s the matter? Is... something wrong?”

He drew a long, slow breath before responding. “Do you seriously mean to tell me that you came all the way out to the Fringe just because you’re afraid of turning out like your family?”

Kate narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean?”

“You have a loving family waiting for you at home, a family that’s eager to share your life with you, that wants you to be a part of their lives. But instead, you’d rather jet-set around the Colonies and ‘drink deeply from the cup of life.’” He shook his head. “I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anything so asinine.”

Kate’s jaw fell open. “Excuse me?”

“My family wants to kill me, Kate!” Quince looked up at her with a savage, hunted expression. “I can never go home again.” He gestured toward the sky. “Wandering around the stars in perpetual exile is a sentence for me, not a privilege. But here you are: acting like a family who actually wants you around is some sort of prison. What the hell is wrong with you?!”

Kate pushed away from Quince. “That’s not fair. You don’t get to judge me by your standards.”

“Then what standards should I judge you by?”

“Why do you have to judge me at all? We’re not competing to see who has the saddest backstory.”

Quince shook his head again. “No wonder you were so evasive about why you really came out to the Fringe.”

“Oh, what the hell do you even know about the Fringe?” Kate snapped back. “You keep banging the drum about the frontier being so dangerous, like we’re tap-dancing on the very knife-edge of life and death just by setting foot out here. But look around! We’ve been here for almost half a year and the most dangerous thing we’ve dealt with is making sure we don’t crap on our own ankles when we squat at the latrine.”

“Well at least I have a good reason for playing Russian roulette with my life, Kate. No one back home cares if I lose it! But you’re out here breaking your family’s hearts because you think a standing invite to Sunday dinners at Mom’s house is some kind of oppression. Give me a break!”

“You’re unbelievable!” She shook her head. “I never should have confided in you.”

“You’re right. Because what you confided makes you sound like a selfish brat. Grow up!”

Kate pushed herself to her feet. “Hey, screw you, man!”

“No thanks,” he retorted with a ruthless scowl. “I’ve got better things to do.”

Kate’s eyes flashed with fire. “You know, you were right when you said people always reach a point where they’ve just had enough of you. Because I certainly have!”

Quince’s shoulders slumped and he muttered, “Same as everybody else.”

She scowled, exasperated. “See you back at camp.” Then she stalked away.

* * *

Proceed to part 6...

Copyright © 2021 by Nemo West

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