Ursula Doorne had become a number of things she’d never expected when she accepted this posting on Farside. She’d known when she’d come up here that she would be participating in the maintenance work of the settlement as well as being an astronomer — she’d been chosen at least partly because her secondary degree in electrical engineering had so many additional applications relevant to living and working up here.
But she’d never anticipated teaching grade schoolers basic science. Sure, she’d done her fair share of work as a TA during her grad school days, but even undergrads were adults, and it was generally expected that they would take a certain measure of responsibility for their own education. Not so kids of eight or nine, or even tweens. You had to spend as much effort on keeping order in the classroom as actually getting the concepts across — concepts you had to break down into much simpler terms than even a 101 level intro class in college, where most of the students were actually just there to get one of their general-ed classes done.
And she’d never expected to be a mother. It wasn’t like she was asexual — she’d had various boyfriends over the years — but she’d never really seen much way to pursue her career goals and have children. And then, not long after the Expulsions began, there was an accident in the cryo-freezers. Thirty-seven embryonic clones were thawing, and there could be no question of re-freezing them.
She’d stepped up, and her whole life had changed. And now she had a little boy who was overhearing the bigger kids’ whispered speculations and worrying. A lot.
“We’ll pull through somehow.” She tried not to think about the small number of things that the lunar settlements were still dependent upon Earth for — right now there were sufficient spares that there was time for someone to come up with substitutes. “We pulled through the Expulsions, and that was a really close-run thing.”
“I know, Mom. We studied oxygen-carbon dioxide cyclesin science class last week.”
Rusty had the basic understanding of artificial habitats that every child on the Moon picked up. They might not know the fine details of a settlement’s oxygen budget, but they had the basic concept that oxygen production and consumption had to be balanced, and if it got out of balance, there would be trouble.
“Which was why there were times when we literally had carbon-dioxide scrubber modules set up in people’s rooms, like something out of the old Apollo missions, because that was the only way we could keep things going. We even sent some of the older teens out to the various outlying settlements who had room for another person, just to stretch things out here. But we pulled through.”
No, she couldn’t say and nobody died. True, nobody literally had to stop breathing because there wasn’t enough oxygen to go around. But there had been a number of accidents in those desperate days of jury-rigged solutions to the latest crisis, and a number of new names on the Wall of Honor down in the formal entrance.
But she wasn’t going to dwell on that. “And the first Thanksgiving Day after the Expulsions, we had a big celebration, because we finally were ahead of the game enough that we actually had a little surplus. But first, we all had the traditional three kernels of parched corn, so we wouldn’t forget those desperate days, or the privations of other pioneers before us.”
Yes, Rusty was familiar with the old/new Thanksgiving tradition. Ursula had read about it — was it in the Little House books? a history book? — but it was something old-fashioned, something you’d read about in a book. And then Captain Waite had reintroduced it that first Thanksgiving after the privations of accommodating all the Expulsees and integrating them into the community, and the old was new again.
And yes, she could see some of the fear in Rusty’s eyes subsided. Whatever he’d heard the older kids saying, her words had convinced him that yes, there was hope. That this was a community of can-do people, used to resolving “impossible” problems.