Not in My Lifetime

The shed roof kept the day’s heat long after the light went, and Etta Vann lay on the warm corrugations with her boots hooked over the gutter rail and the essay open and unwritten on the handheld resting on her chest. Third night running. The assignment had been set for two weeks and was due Monday and stood at fifteen words, fourteen of which were the question copied out.

Describe the causes of the Dimming and what it will mean for your generation.

Above her the deep field was out in its thousands. Ashfield sat high and dry and a long way from anywhere, and had one of the best night skies humanity had ever settled under — Ms Ilori said so in survey history, in the manner of a woman handing out something breakable — and on a clear night, and most nights were clear, visitors from the port towns went quiet on their backs in the grass.

And there was the Gap.

You didn’t need the Gap pointed out. Every child on Ashfield could find it before they could read: west of the Plough — the settlers had brought the old names and hung them on new stars — a thumb’s width up from the ridge line at this time of year, a piece of ordinary darkness where the Sower used to be. The Sower had been the brightest thing in the winter sky once. Her grandfather saw it as a boy — not saw it go out, nothing so tidy; he said it took four years to fade, like a coal, and that for the last year you could only find it by knowing where to look, and that the worst part was how quickly everyone stopped looking.

Etta had heard the story maybe forty times. He told it the same way every time, ending on the same line — and then it was just sky — and then he would change the subject to soil moisture, and that was the Dimming as far as her grandfather was concerned.

The causes of the Dimming. She knew the causes of the Dimming the way she knew the catechism of anything taught since primary: humanity found the seams and opened them; the roads ran farther than anyone had a right to expect; the Span joined the roads into a thing no one could draw the whole of; and somewhere in all that opening and joining and running, the deep sky started going out. Not everywhere. Not evenly. Reach by reach, in the far fields first, on no schedule anyone could predict, and the arguing over whose fault it was had already outlived everyone who could have been at fault. The survey people published maps with shaded bands, and the shaded bands disagreed with each other by a century either side, and grown adults argued about the bands the way they argued about rain.

Three hundred years, give or take, to the general dark. That was the number the feeds used, because it sat in the middle of the band.

Etta thumbed the handheld awake and opened the calculator, which was not writing the essay but was adjacent to writing the essay. Three hundred years. She was fifteen. Say she made ninety-five, like her great-gran, who was still going and still rude. That put her dead two centuries before the middle of the band. Her children would miss it, if she had children. Their children would miss it, and theirs. Even on the pessimists’ band it belonged to people four lifetimes down, on some world she couldn’t name.

Everyone she would ever meet, in her whole life, every one of them, would be dead long before the sky was.

Etta looked at that number for a while.

Then she closed the calculator and typed, The Dimming will not affect my generation directly, and deleted it because Ms Ilori would write develop this in the margin, and there was nothing to develop. That was the whole thought. It was true, and it was worth a C at best.

The kitchen door banged below her, and light went long across the yard.

“Etta.” Her mother, not loud. On a farm you learn the pitch that carries without shouting. “Down, please. Now-ish.”

Now-ish meant now. Etta lay one more second under the whole enormous failing sky, then swung her boots off the rail and went down the ladder into the smell of dinner.

---

The table was wrong when she came in. Not the food — the food was ordinary, flatbread and the last of the white beans — but the arrangement of the people. Her father was sitting down already, which never happened before everything was carried over. Davey was kneeling up on his chair with the special occasion in him somehow, eight years old and vibrating. Her mother stood at the counter with a printed sheet in her hand. Paper. The route office at the port still did things on paper, on the theory that paper in the hand was harder to argue with than a line in a feed.

“Sit down, love,” her mother said.

“Who died?”

“Nobody died. Sit down.”

Etta sat. Her mother put the sheet on the table and turned it so it faced her, which was a thing her mother did with documents, an engineer’s habit, read it yourself, don’t take my word. Amended berth allocation. The line’s stamp at the top. A string of route codes. And a date.

The date was Tuesday.

“That’s wrong,” Etta said. “It’s end of term. It was always end of term. That’s six more weeks.”

“It was,” her mother said. “The end-of-term sailing’s been consolidated.” She said consolidated the way she said the names of tools that had broken in her hand. “Half the outer calls came off the schedule this year. It’s Tuesday or it’s four months, and the contract says I present in six weeks, so it isn’t four months. I’m sorry. I know what I said.”

“You signed for end of term.”

“I signed for a berth. The line moved it.”

Davey couldn’t hold it any longer. “Tam says there’s Nhál on the Cairn,” he announced, to the table at large, radiant. “Whole decks of them. Tam says they don’t have faces, they just have—”

“Tam’s a moron,” said Etta.

“Etta,” her father said.

“He is, though. They have faces.” She didn’t actually know if they had faces. Nobody on Ashfield had seen a Nhál outside the feeds. That was not the point and the point was rising in her throat with a heat she could hear in her own ears. “Tuesday. I’ve got maths Thursday week. Ms Ilori’s thing is due Monday, I’m meant to be — we’re doing the escarpment run with Jamie’s lot on the solstice, I told them I’d—”

“The school’s transferring your marks as they stand,” her father said. “We sorted it this afternoon. The exam you can sit on the Cairn, they have a—”

“I don’t want to sit it on the Cairn!” It came out much bigger than the exam, which even in the moment she knew, and couldn’t stop. “I don’t want their school, I don’t want a deck number, I don’t — it’s your job. It’s your job and it’s Dad’s — whatever Dad’s doing—”

“Teaching,” her father said mildly. “It’s called teaching.”

“It’s your posting and we’re the luggage. Forty kilos each and whatever fits in the crates.”

Her mother didn’t answer straight away. She studied the berth notice on the table between them like a pressure fault, giving it nothing. When she did speak it was flat and quiet.

“Eleven families left Ashfield last year,” she said. “Six the year before. The maintenance contract on the water plant went to a firm that services us from orbit twice a year, which is why I have spent this winter recertifying valves for free so that the east district doesn’t lose pressure in the cold. Nobody is building here, Etta. Nobody has built here since before Davey. The Cairn is putting up four rings and they are short of exactly what I do, and the contract is nine years with family berths and schooling written in. I’m not taking us there because I want a view of a wall. I’m taking us there because it’s the one place on the schedule where the work is getting bigger instead of smaller.”

“Because everywhere out here’s on the wrong side of somebody’s map.”

It landed harder than she expected. Her father looked at his plate. Her mother’s jaw moved, once.

“The maps are guesses,” her mother said. “The freight schedule isn’t.”

“Right,” Etta said. “So it’s not even the sky. The sky’s got three hundred years. It’s the timetable.” She was up out of the chair without deciding to be. “That’s so much worse, you know that? That’s so much—”

There was no end to the sentence. She took the stairs two at a time and shut her door on the sound of Davey asking, in the ringing silence, whether he could have her room on the ship.

Nobody came up. That was the house’s way; you cooled on your own clock. Later — the light long out, the moths ticking against her window — the murmur of her parents came up through the floor, not arguing, which was somehow worse, and then her father’s tread on the stair, and a plate set down outside her door with a soft chime of cutlery, and the tread going away again. He hadn’t knocked. Flatbread gone cold, and the beans, and beside the plate, when she finally opened the door, the stupid little jar of the honey she liked from the port market, with a spoon in it.

Etta ate sitting on the floor with her back against the bed, furious, starving, fifteen.

---

Thursday’s survey history was the Dimming, because it was always the Dimming; the unit ran all term, fifth period, after lunch, and Ms Ilori taught the end of the universe to a room that treated it the way rooms that age treat anything after lunch.

The wall screen carried the Survey Commission’s composite, the one from the textbook cover: the near reaches picked out in white and gold, the far fields shaded in bands of grey running out to black at the edges, and the bands labelled in ranges so wide they were less a forecast than a shrug. Ms Ilori stood beside it with her pointer collapsed in her hand, which meant discussion rather than notes, and asked the room what the two surveys actually disagreed about.

The room offered her nothing. A boy from the port row was asleep with his eyes open, a skill Etta had never stopped envying. Rain — the first in five weeks — had started against the windows around midday, and half the class were farm kids and kept glancing at it with their parents’ faces on.

“The middles,” Ms Ilori said, answering herself, as she mostly had to. “Not the direction. Nobody serious disputes the direction anymore. The middles of the bands sit a century apart, which sounds like a lot, and is a lot, if you’re a government. The far edge of the far band is about four hundred years out. The near edge of the near band is inside two hundred.” The pointer clicked out to its full length and touched, without ceremony, a small gold point in the near reaches with a name and a date printed under it. Etta didn’t need to read the name. Everyone in the room had grown up under the hole it had left.

A girl near the front asked the question somebody asked every year, which was whether it would get theirs.

“Not on any band on this map,” Ms Ilori said.

“Then why’s it an exam unit,” said the boy from the port row, awake after all.

Ms Ilori paused, visibly, like a lorry going up through its gears. “Because the bands on that map set the freight schedules,” she said, “and the freight schedules will make more of the decisions in your lives than any person you’ll ever meet. Learn how they’re drawn.”

The rain kept on. The composite cycled to its next overlay. Etta, with the amended berth notice folded in the front pocket of her bag because her mother had insisted the school office would want the original, looked at the shaded bands and did not put her hand up.

At the bell Ms Ilori said her name, not loudly, and tidied papers until the room emptied.

“The office sent your transfer through this morning,” she said. “Tuesday. That was sudden.”

“The sailing got consolidated.”

“Mm.” Ms Ilori squared the papers on the desk, and there was a silence Etta recognised too late as a teacher leaving space for a student to say something, and the space closed unfilled. “Send me the essay anyway. By Monday, as set. I’ll have it marked before you sail.”

“It won’t count for anything.”

“It will count for the mark I give it.” She said it the way she gave out the breakable things. Then, tidying the last of the papers, not looking up: “I taught your mother in that chair by the window. You may tell her the office still has the dent where she kicked the radiator the day her scores came in low. She’ll deny it.”

Etta stood holding her bag strap with both hands.

“She kicked the radiator?”

“Denied that too,” said Ms Ilori. “Go on. You’ll miss your bus.”

---

Saturday she took the flatbed track out to the Crofts’ east quarter, because Saturday was drone day and had been since they were eleven, and if anyone was going to hear it from her first it was Jamie.

The Crofts ran spray drones over their lentils, old airframes twice patched and out of certification, and Saturday mornings Jamie serviced them with Etta passing tools and doing the software side, which he was slow at and wouldn’t admit. She found him in the machine shed with the second drone already up on the bench, its cowling off, a smell of hot dust and degreaser, and her own green jacket on him, which he had borrowed at the creek in autumn and then just — kept, in the way of a thing neither of them was going to make the mistake of mentioning.

“Feed line again,” Jamie said, not looking up. “Pass the small crimper.”

Etta passed the small crimper. For twenty minutes they did the work and it was like every Saturday there had ever been, and she let it be, because there was a version of this where she got one more ordinary hour before the news arrived, and she wanted it.

Then Jamie said, “You going to tell me what’s wrong with you, or do I have to run diagnostics.”

“We’re leaving Tuesday.”

His hands stopped on the cowling.

“The berth moved up,” she said. “The end-of-term sailing’s cancelled. Consolidated. So. Tuesday.”

Jamie put the driver down. He was very careful about where he put it, lining it up on the bench mat with the other drivers.

“Tuesday,” he said.

“Tuesday.”

“Well.” He picked the driver back up. “Good. You were rubbish at crimping anyway.”

“Jamie.”

“What? It’s a compliment to me. I’ll get quicker.” His voice had gone light and fast, the one he used on teachers. “You’ll love it. You know they don’t have weather? They’ve got a schedule for the fans. Tam’s cousin did a haul out there, he says the clocks go wrong past the last junction, whole crews come back — what’s the word — long. Gone long. You’ll fit right in, you’re always late.”

“Don’t do the voice at me.”

“There’s no voice—”

“You’re doing the voice.”

“Then don’t stand in my shed telling me Tuesday like it’s a delivery date!” Not light anymore. Loud enough that the yard dog stood up outside. “You were going to be here for the solstice run. You were going to help me get the third frame certified. You said — forget it. Everyone goes. It’s what this place is. It’s a departures board with lentils.” He turned the drone a quarter-turn on the bench, hard, and the feed line he’d just seated popped loose again, and he looked at it. “Now look,” he said, quietly, to the drone.

They fixed the feed line again. It took both of them, his hands steadier than hers now. Neither of them said sorry. She held the line seated while he crimped, and their heads were close enough over the airframe that she could hear him breathing through the last of it.

“Forty kilos,” she said, when the cowling was back on. “That’s the allowance. Each.”

“That’s insulting.”

“It’s transit mass, it’s not personal. Everything else goes in the family crates and the crates go freight and freight lands whenever freight lands.” She wiped her hands on the rag and didn’t look at him for the next part. “The telescope’s nine of it, with the case. And apparently there’s” — she did the flat voice properly, so he’d know what she thought of it — “no sky.”

Jamie was silent for a second. Then: “You’re not giving me your telescope.”

“I’m not taking a telescope to a corridor, Jamie.”

“Then leave it with your grandad.”

“He’s got one. He never uses it. He says he knows what’s up there.” She put the rag down. “You’d use it.”

Jamie would. They both knew he would; half the reason the telescope had ever mattered was the pair of them on the shed roof with the eyepiece and a bag of stolen apricots, arguing about which smudge was a reach humanity had actually been to. He looked at her and started twice on something else, and what came out was:

“Fine. But I’m keeping the jacket as well.”

“You’ve had the jacket since autumn.”

“And I’m keeping it.”

“Okay,” she said, and it came out smaller than she meant it to.

Jamie turned back to the bench and started re-boxing the drivers, one by one, each into its foam slot, and she stayed and passed them to him in order even though he could reach perfectly well, and neither of them said anything else.

---

Sunday was her grandfather’s, as it had been every Sunday of her life: the long table in his kitchen, the pump clicking in the yard on its slow cycle, her great-gran installed at the head in the chair nobody else had ever sat in, ninety-six and upright as a fence post.

Nobody said last all through dinner. The word sat in the room anyway, in the second helpings her grandfather kept dealing out unasked, in her mother talking valve certifications with him for twenty entire minutes as if valve certifications were the thing on everyone’s mind, in her father being funnier than usual. Her great-gran ate steadily through all of it and at one point looked at Etta down the length of the table and said, “I went up the well once. ‘Fifty-nine. Didn’t rate it,” and returned to her plate.

It was Davey, over pudding, who asked for the star one.

The telling never varied. Etta could have mouthed it along with him — the winter he was Davey’s age, his father getting him up in the dark with a coat over his nightclothes, the Sower so bright off the snow that you could read the thermometer by it if the thermometer had wanted reading; and then the four years of it fading, like a coal, so slow that people argued about whether it was happening at all; and the last year, when you could only find it by knowing where to look; and how quickly everyone stopped looking. Etta had heard it forty times. Davey took it in chin on his stacked fists, maybe his tenth. It landed somewhere new in her all the same, which she put down to the week.

“And then it was just sky,” her grandfather said.

“Did it have planets?” said Davey.

The kitchen went quiet in a way it had not gone quiet in forty tellings. Her grandfather sat with his tea in front of him and his big hands around it.

“I don’t know,” he said, at last. “I never once thought to ask.”

Then he said the pump was running long on its cycle and he wanted a look at the foot valve before the light went entirely, and Etta went out with him, because going out with him when he looked at things was a job that had belonged to her since she was six.

The foot valve was fine. They both knew the foot valve was fine. He shone the torch down the bore anyway, and she held the cover plate, and the two of them crouched there in the blue evening with the first proper stars coming on over the windbreak.

“Your mother sat me down in that kitchen a year ago,” he said, to the bore. “Asked me would I mind. Before she’d even filed for the posting. Sat there turning her mug around until I told her to out with it.”

Etta held the cover plate.

“A year,” she said.

“Bit more.” He clicked the torch off. “She had the ring specifications printed out. For a station she hadn’t been offered a job on yet.” He straightened up the slow way and looked at the sky over the windbreak, the deep field thickening, the Gap not up yet at this hour. “You’re angry about the six weeks. Fair enough; I’d be angry about the six weeks. But don’t spend it thinking this was quick. Nothing your mother has ever done was quick.”

“You could come,” Etta said. It came out before she’d decided anything about it. “There’s family berths. Dad said the rings have—”

“Who’d pump your great-gran’s water?” he said, mild as milk, and put the torch in his pocket. There was no arguing with it, because it was not an argument; it was just true.

Inside, the others were at the dishes. Her grandfather went to the dresser drawer that had held the same things her entire life — twine, fuses, a broken hinge he was going to get to — and took out a paper bag, folded over at the top and soft with handling, and put it in her hands. Seed, by the weight and the shift of it. Labelled in pencil, his writing, four twists.

“For your father,” he said. “He’ll know what they are.”

“He’s not allowed to plant anything on the—”

“He’ll know what they are,” her grandfather said, and took his towel back off Davey and stood in at the sink, and that was Sunday.

---

The crates came Monday morning, printed flat and folded up in the yard, and the house started disappearing into them.

It went faster than a house should go. That was the obscene part. Fifteen years, and the kitchen was done by lunch — her mother’s packing was labelled, manifested, nothing wrapped twice — and by mid-afternoon it was Etta’s room, which she had sworn to do herself and had not started.

Her father appeared in the doorway with tape and the air of a man volunteering for something. He was the slower packer, which she had always thought was inattention and understood that afternoon was not: he stopped at things. He picked up the clay bird she’d made in second year, the one whose beak had come off and been glued on wrong so it looked permanently astonished, and he stood there with it.

“That’s not going,” Etta said. “It’s rubbish.”

“It’s coming.” He wrapped it in a sock and set it in the crate. “You don’t get to decide what’s rubbish for thirty more years. That’s how it works. Your gran decided a chair I loved was rubbish in ‘09 and I’ve thought about that chair every year since.”

“You have not.”

“Every year. Beautiful chair.” He taped a box shut and wrote KIT — E — SHELF on it in his careful teacher’s hand, the same hand that had marked a generation of Ashfield’s homework. Monday was his last day too; she kept forgetting that, and it kept catching her when she looked at him. Twenty-two years in the same classroom, and he’d resigned it with one printed page and said nothing about it at all, and on Sunday evening he was at the school with nobody watching, planing the splinters off the porch rail because, he said, someone was going to catch their hand on it eventually and it wasn’t going to be on his conscience.

They packed for a while without talking. Wind moved in the windbreak trees. Down in the yard Davey was narrating something to himself among the crates, a long complicated adventure in which, as far as she could make out, he was captaining the transport personally.

“Dad. Do you actually want to go?”

Her father finished the seam he was taping, smoothing it down twice.

“I want your mother to work on something that isn’t dying,” he said. “I’ve wanted that for about six years. The rest of it I’ll find out when we get there. That’s the honest answer. Anyone who tells you they know how they’ll feel about a place they’ve never seen is guessing with confidence, and I’ve a whole classroom’s worth of report cards about where that leads.”

“Mum acts like she knows.”

“Your mother read the ring specifications on the contract. Environmental loads, pressure sections, the lot. Two hundred pages.” He set the tape down. “She read them out loud to me in bed, Etta. Some of it twice.”

Etta looked at him, and he looked back at her, one eyebrow up, and did not add anything to it, and she understood that she had just been handed something and that the price of it was not telling her mother she’d been given it.

That night, with her room in boxes and the mattress bare and the essay still at fifteen words, she sat on the floor and wrote it in eleven minutes. She wrote that the causes of the Dimming were the seams and the Span and three centuries of traffic, which everyone knew, and that the maps disagreed, which everyone also knew. Then she wrote: The question asks what the Dimming will mean for my generation. Directly, nothing. The middle of the band is more than a century after the last person I will ever meet has died. But my family is leaving on Tuesday because the freight schedule believes the maps even where people don’t, and my mother is an engineer and goes where the building is. So I think the answer is that the sky will outlast everyone reading this essay, and it is taking our address anyway.

Etta read it over once, deleted which is apparently allowed, and submitted it at 23:40 to a school she would no longer belong to by the time it was marked.

---

Tuesday came the way exams come: an ordinary morning with a wrongness under it, everyone up too early, the kitchen echoing now the crates were gone ahead.

There was an hour, before the port shuttle, that nobody had assigned a task to. Her mother was at the water plant, handing over the valve logs to a man from the orbital firm and, by her face when she came back, not enjoying the standard of his questions. Her father walked the empty rooms once with his hands behind his back like an inspector and then went and stood in his stripped-out seed rows for a while, and nobody went after him.

Etta climbed the shed roof.

Last time, so she made herself actually look, the way you never look at a thing you can see whenever you want. Morning, so no stars; just the high pale enormous ordinary sky of Ashfield with one hawk riding it, and she lay on the warm metal and looked anyway, and put the night version up from memory — the deep field in its thousands, the Plough, the ridge line, the Gap.

Three hundred years, give or take. Rooms full of people not born yet, who would never meet her, standing under that sky when the middle of the band arrived, on this farm maybe, on this roof if the roof held out. She lay there and tried to feel the size of it, honestly tried, the whole slow going-out of everything — and for about four seconds she almost had it, a cold clear enormous thing tipping toward her —

The handheld buzzed against the corrugations.

Jamie: shuttle’s 11. you still coming past ours or what

The enormous thing tipped away and was gone. Etta looked at the message for much less than four seconds.

yes, she typed. don’t wear my jacket to the port I’ll cry and blame you in front of everyone

no promises, came back, instantly, and then, while she was already climbing down the ladder: bring the eyepiece box. you packed it with the telescope. it’s mine now, that was the deal

It was in her forty kilos, was where it was. Wrapped in the green jumper, between her boots. She’d taken it out of the case on Sunday night without letting herself think a full sentence about why.

“ETTA.” Her mother’s carrying pitch, from the yard. “Shuttle in forty. Boots on.”

“Coming,” Etta called, and went down the ladder for the last time, and did not look up on the way, because the sky had three hundred years, and she had forty minutes.