The Park

A short, near future, Science Fiction story.

Everyone in our section of the habitat would gather in the park on Saturday afternoons. The grownups in little groups, eating, drinking and talking, always talking. The sounds of their voices a low background for the higher pitched chatter and shrieks of we children, as we swarmed around the play sets, laughing and screaming, glorying in the one afternoon of the week when we could be as rambunctious and noisy as we wished.

When we'd tired ourselves out, we'd run off to our families, and eat until we were ready to pop. Then, in the late afternoon, we would lay in the soft green grass, with our closest friends, the tops of our heads to the north, so the sunlight gathered by the great reflectors, and redirected into the habitat through the giant space windows, wouldn't blind us as we gazed across the habitat cylinder at the little green squares that stood out amid the gray blocks of apartments and factories of the other sections, and wounder if there were kids is those parks looking back at us.

"It's like flying, don't you think?" I would ask my best friend Jose, staring up at other side, so far away that we couldn't even make out the trees in the parks.

"Like flying up in the shuttle, and looking back down on earth," Jose would say, his bright, freckled face turned up, as he sprawled on the grass, arms spread wide as if he were floating in the air. He would then tell about his ride up from Earth in the shuttle, and I would listen rapt, and a little jealous that he'd had the adventure when I'd never even been out of our section of the habitat. All the while wishing that I had the chance to see such wonders as he had seen.

***

The troubles with Earth started when I was nine. Talks between the conglomerate of corporations that had built the L spot Space Habitats, and the council of Union leaders that represented the workers who lived and worked in them, broke down. Earth's Council of governments stepped in to mediate, and things went down from there.

For a while the troubles had little effect on my life. I heard all the talk among my mother's set, about how presumptuous and arbitrary the Earth delegates were being. How they were siding with the conglomerate--

"Of course they would!" This said with knowing nods. "The Conglomerate is based on Earth after all, and Earth thanks we're like the mechanicals we build! What would we need benefits for!"

I also saw the wary look in the eyes of the grownup's who weren't Habitat born, as groups in the park on Saturdays got tighter, and there was less and less mangling between Habitat and Earther adults. We children still played together, but even with us groups began to form and separate.

I payed little attention to it all at first. It wasn't until the Saturday that my Mother called me back when I started to run and join Josy at the swing-set, that I begin to understand that my life was changing.

"Shawn," she said, when I came drag-footing back, "I don't want you playing with that Earth boy anymore".

"Who?" I ask inanely, and then, understanding came. "Jose? But he's my best friend!"

"I know," my mother said looking away, "but it's causing trouble for me at work, and so I have to ask you to stop seeing him."

I looked from mother to Josy, who was on one of the swings, waving at me and shouting, "Look at me, Shawnyyy! Look how high I can go!!!"

"Mom..." I said.

"It could cost me my job, Shawn. It might even cost us our place in the Colony." she said, interrupting my whine. "Is that what you want?"

"No, Mom," I said, my shoulders slumping.

Mother nodded. "Stay here by me today. That would be best," she said with a sad smile.

***

I saw Josy a few more times after that, but he wouldn't look at me, nor I at him. I felt too ashamed of the way I'd abandoned our friendship without a word of explanation, though I thought he knew why. By that time the breach between Earth and the Colonies was openly spoke of by everyone, and it wasn't long before the Earth born were ask to leave the Habitat and Josy was gone.

***
When I was fourteen, talks broke down altogether, and the the strikes started. The factories shut down, and the shuttle service from Earth stopped. A year latter the Colonies, including those on the Moon declared themselves free of Earth rule. Talk of a possible invasion from Earth started, and a Habitat Guard was founded.

I joined the Youth Guard on my fifteenth birthday, not so much because I wanted to, but because it was what was expected. For two years, as relations with Earth became more and more strained, we did nothing but talk and drill, drill and talk.

"Those snooty Earthers," someone would say, "they want us to be their slaves!"

"Yeah," someone else would chime in, "cheep labor, that's all we ever were to them."

"That's right, cheep labor, and then they would come up here acting like Lords of the Universe, sticking their noses in the air like they're better than us!"

I would be silent during these bull sessions, until the invariable question would come.. ."don't you think so, Shawn?"

"Yeah," I'd say, "stuck up bunch."

Truthfully I'd never found Josy, or any of the other Earther kids I'd played with snooty, or stuck up, and although I'd never spent much time around the Grownups they'd always been kind to me. I didn't say any of that however, not just for fear of what would be thought of me, but because I didn't want to cause trouble for my mother. Besides Josy was back on Earth, and nothing I said could hurt him. That's what I told myself, and that's what I made myself believe.

***

When I was on the verge of my seventeenth birthday talk of an Earther invasion of the Habitat grew serious. As did plans for how to repel such an attack. We of the Youth Guard were assigned to post in our own neighborhoods, in squads of twenty, with a junior officer, from the ROTC, in charge of each squad.

We never though we'd have to fight. If an attack did come we were sure it would come through the shuttle docks, where the regular Guard were stationed. What we forgot was that Earth had built the Habitats, and might know more about them than we did.

***

We were hunkered down in a service access twenty hours after the first shuttle had been seen lifting from Earth, and two hours since the attacks, through builders hatches we'd known nothing about, had begun. My squad had yet to see action, thought the squad to the north of us was in a running fight, and we'd just gotten word that there was a breach in our section.

"They're coming in here," my CO pointed to a spot on the plans he'd spread out on the floor.  "at this section of corridor, on the other side of the park. If we don't cut them off before they get to the square around the park they'll spread out and we'll never contain them." He stood and folded the set of Habitat plans, and we moved out at double time.

The fighting was a blur I killed, who hand never killed anything before, and I saw those around me, kids I'd known all my life, die. We fell back, and then fell back again, until we were fighting in the Park itself, dodging around the play-sets, like some macabre version of one of our childhood games.

I dodged around the slide, to get out of the line of fire of an Earther, only to come face to face with another. His gun was leveled at my chest, and I knew I would never get a shot off before he did, but I was pulling the trigger even as I braced for death.

He had me, there was no getting out of that, but he didn't shoot. "Shawn?" he said even as my shot took him full in the chest spinning him back and down.

I watched him fall, his name a silent scream in my head, as I ran to his side and looked down into the bright, freckled face of my best friend, his blue eyes staring up unseeing at the Habitat above us, as his blood pooled in the dust beneath the swing-set where I had turned my back on him that terrible afternoon.

And looking into his unseeing eyes I knew that the innocence of my childhood was gone forever. And in my head I heard the echo of his laughter and his voice as he called to me on that long ago day...

"Look at me, Shawnyyy! Look how high I can go!!!"

Author's Note

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