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MOTHERLAND
by ASHLEY HENNEFER

"Last chance for water until Jupiter."

The sign had been made in jest, but it had been true, and now it was a joke
again, because all the water was gone.
Under the particle board desk, Fallon shook her canteen, and a few
precious ounces sloshed around, coating the metal sides. The flask on her hip,
however, was full. Of whiskey. There was always plenty of whiskey.
And where the water went, the humans followed, and nearly all had left
save for a few hardy stragglers catching the last ship headed into the abyss.
People were seeking the light, like tiny heads of seedlings germinating under
soil. Meanwhile, Nevada was fulfilling its destiny of becoming a desert
wastelandand maybe millions of years into the future, Fallon thought, it would
return to its primordial state and become enveloped by water again, with giant
monsters swimming in its depths. It was unthinkable to her. But, then again, so
was living on Jupiter.
Sunlight filtered through the glass walls of the toll booth, which was
perched atop a small hill once dubbed Rattlesnake Mountain. Where there was
just once a blinking red light to guide airplanes at night, it was now a portal to
the universe. Within the booth sat Fallon, where dust and skin and hair met to
form a very tan human being, and it didnt matter that her hair was actually
black, or that her skin was pale and freckled. The dust permeated everything, a
thick coat over her life. She gave up trying to escape it, keeping her hair tightly
bound at the nape of her neck. It had been many years since she felt the soft
curls bounce around her face, free and unbridled.

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She peered through the dirty glass, checking for anyone trekking toward
the toll booth. The sunlight filtered through the haze, trapping her like an insect
under a magnifying glass. It was like a giant eye was watching her directly,
trying to make her squirm in the heat.
Someone had uploaded more than a terabyte of history textbooks and
documents to the library portala last digital purge before leaving, as the
travelers would want as much device storage as possible to document the trip
"out East." Jupiter wasn't really "east," of course. Cartesian coordinates didn't
apply to planets other than Earth. Fallon thought of it as out. Far. Beyond. But
the phrase stuck, and Fallon found it ironic, since pioneers usually ventured out
west. Space was far from the final frontier. For humanity, it was now just the
beginning.
She'd downloaded all of the historical texts onto her tablet, on which
storage was quickly waning. But she wasn't going anywhere, and she was trying
to ignore the stickiness inside her parched mouth. She took a sip of whiskey and
swallowed with her lips pressed tight against her teeth. Grit found its way in
anyway, and she coughed from the burn.
In Daily Life of the Vikings, she learned that beer was the primary
sustenance for Viking sailors. It met the need for food and water while out on
the sea, adrift and surrounded by salt and ice. Whiskey was far more
dehydrating than beer, but she liked the thought anyway, that she was surviving
the way ancient people did in times of hardship.
There were so few travelers this week that she finished Daily Life of the
Vikings within a matter of hours, and was well into Vikings: Life, Death and the
Afterlife.
She had a lot more time to read these days.
***

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At first it was just a part-time, post-college summer job, validating the one-way
tickets for the travelers heading out. Had she studied engineering, she could
have been an assistant pilot on the ships, or perhaps an architect on the new
settlement.
But she studied history, and the job gave her ample time to read, so it was
basically her dream job. Her father would have rolled his eyes, commenting (not
for the first time) that she didn't aspire for much, did she? Content to just let the
world fly by, revolve around her, without her. It was true she had always been
like that, living in her head. But she was a simple woman with simple needs, and
being a booth operator suited her just fine. And for a while it was job security, as
everyone and their mother was abandoning ship, so to speak, and hightailing it
out into the galaxy. Terraformed Jupiter was lush and wet and so much larger
than Earth. Clean, shiny, new.
The dust storm enveloped the glass booth, whistling and slapping against
the sides of it, and she felt submerged inside a very noisy fish tank. And like a
fish without gills, leaving it without her eco-mask would mean gasping for air,
and getting a mouthful of dust instead.
Inside the booth, the sounds were muffled. The sound of the wind used to
make her anxious, but it was no longer superimposed onto the chatter of travel.
The planet was nearly empty now, and it was so quiet. Fallon was resolute in her
loneliness; her roots had extended far into the aridisol. She envisioned herself as
a cactus: prickly on the outside, slimy with hoarded water on the inside, with
tiny spiky limbs reaching into the heat.
The sun was beginning its descent for the day, and she was so engrossed
in her book that she didnt notice that a break in the dust storm had hushed the
wind, and outside the booth stood a man.
***
A man with a robust gray mustache and a cowboy hat tapped on the glass.

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Fallon started at the tap. She set her tablet down, disgruntled to be
interrupted while in mid-sentenceMuch like the ancient Greeks, the Vikings had
neither a positive or negative view of the afterlifebut she was more startled by two
things: that there was someone still lingering around outside the spacecraft
bridge, and that he wasn't wearing an eco-suit.
She cracked open the door, grateful for new air, and poked her head out.
He was smoking a cigarette (who still smokes in this place? she thought), and she
resisted the urge to wave away the tendrils that emanated from the glowing tip.
The scent of it evoked a memory of her mother, smoking on the balcony under
eucalyptus trees while it rained outside. The memory, awash in wet and moody
colors of blue and green, left as soon as it arrived. The man tipped his hat at her,
and tossed his finished cigarette to the ground. He stamped it, and within
seconds, he pulled out another one.
"Dust storm comin' in," he said, peering into the sky, squinting.
"Pretty sure its been here for a while," Fallon said. She followed his gaze,
confused that she could see real clouds, for once, and turned back to the man.
"I'm sorry, can I help you?"
"I'm here to take over your shift," he said, still looking upward.
"My shift isn't over. And I dont know you."
"No matter." Finally, he met her eyes. "This is the last ship."
"Im aware." Fallon pursed her lips. " I'mI'm staying. So you can head
on."
Youre stubborn, like my daughter." He looked at the cigarette, pinched
between his thumb and index. Well then. Dont think theyve cultivated tobacco
out east. Better enjoy this while I got it."

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A full minute passed in silence. Fallon grew more impatient by the second.
She felt the ground vibrate; the engines of the ship were warming up. The bridge
would be closing soon.
"Not to be rude, but you might want to get a move on," she told the man,
who gave no indication that he was in any hurry. "Do you have a ticket?"
"Ah, yes." With his cigarette dangling from his mouth, he pulled the
boarding pass from his shirt pocket and handed it her. Fallon stamped the
corner, the teal Bound for Jupiter seal bright and stark against the muted
environment.
She pointed to the west, where the bridge to the Ceres spacecraft was
visible in the distance. "Bridge is that way. Scan your ticket to get in."
He considered her. In the heat and under his gaze, Fallon felt like she was
being X-rayed.
"Would you mind accompanying me?" he asked. "These knees arent what
they used to be."
She glanced at her tablet, open to mid-sentence in mid-chapter in midbook, and hesitated before acquiescing. Fallon pulled her eco-mask over her
face, and snapped it to the collar of her vest. The respirator hummed in her ears.
She grabbed her satchel and tablet, too, out of habit.
"It's this way."
The roughly-hewn dirt path to the bridge was a half-mile long and littered
with last minute discards: tote bags, broken toys, empty water canteens, even
eco-masks. Thered be no need for those on Jupiter. The air was clean and not
yet polluted. Sand lined the beaches of the many, many lakes and oceans; it
wouldnt embed itself into nostrils and lungs.

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The man walked slowly, as if evaluating the environment around himthe

open and empty sky, the Sierras looming in the distance. She wanted to ask him,
Wont you miss this?
She wanted to ask that to everyone who passed through the booth, but she
never did. It was only she who wallowed in what was being left behind. Who
would look after the mountains and libraries, Machu Picchu, the pyramids of
Egypt? These testaments to humanity and what it stood for? What was a future
without those links to the past?
The bridge appeared before them. He tossed his cigarette into the dirt and
stamped it, another remnant left behind. She scanned his boarding pass on the
outside of the ship. Green light, and a beep, and the door slid open.
"Bon voyage," she said, saluting. "This is where I leave you."
But the man said nothing. Whatever, dude, she thought, but as she moved to
press the button and close him in the bridge, he pushed her roughly into the
tunnel, and she stumbled and fell.
With a movement that looked too fluid for a man his age, he turned on his
heel, slammed the button with the side of his fist, and the glass door slid shut
behind her.
***
The airlock sealed instantly, and Fallon scrambled to her feet.
"Let me out!" The glass didn't budge as she beat at it with her fists. It was
made many layers thick to withstand an interplanetary journey, as it served as a
viewing bridge when the ship was traveling. "No! Please! I don't want to leave!"
She needed out. She needed to touch the ground, to cling to the sagebrush.
She needed her books, her mother's clothes in the box in her closet that still
smelled like her. She needed her bed and her toolbox and her tiny apartment.
Because Earth was Fallon's childhood, her origin, her beginning and end. Earth

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was her mother, her mother who died long before the water started to run out,
and she was buried in the depths of the desert, and she was part of the planet.
When the dust embedded itself into her skin and her hair, Fallon felt her
mothers presence. How could she ever leave, when that is what she was leaving
behind?
But the man said nothing, emoted nothing as she sobbed against the glass.
He continued to squint at her as he had squinted at the skypassive, analytical,
thoughtful. And the vibrations of the ship began to signal its departure, the
bridge was pulled into the ship, and her voice was hoarse, and it was all futile.
The man held up his hand, a farewell gesture. The ship started to leave the
ground, and the panic swelled in her, and she was overcome with grief, and she
couldn't breathe
And within moments, the ship was flung out of the atmosphere and into
the black.
***
The man waited until the woman on the ship was long out of sight before
lowering his arm. He wasn't concerned by the final look on her facethe
betrayal, fear, devastation, panic. It was better this way. Every day he had
watched her sit in the booth at the top of the hill, and every day she returned to
her apartment near his house. He wasnt surprised that she was the last to leave.
He suspected she had her reasons for wanting to stay, same as him.
But one day of living under rain, a life she had never known, and she
would begin to heal.
And he was selfish; he wanted to be alone with his daughter, to be the last
of the Earthlings.
The sun began to slide behind the mountains, and the shadow of
Rattlesnake Mountain darkened the empty path before him. So he stepped into
the booth, and lit another cigarette with the glass door cracked open.

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He pulled a picture frame from his satchel, and set it on the desk. A
picture of a young girl smiled back at him, her long, dirty blonde hair draped
over one shoulder in a fishtail braid. He remembered when she tried to teach
him how to braid, his rough hands fumbling to twist the silky strands together.
He knew she would have killed him for smoking so many cigarettes in a row.
The thought was immediately followed by an angry gust of dust against
the booth. It stung his eyes. That girl always had a temper. But he just smiled
back at his daughter, and kicked up his feet, settling in for what he was sure
would be a very long rest.
"It's just you and me now, kiddo."
***
Space was dark, and quiet.
The eager travelers spoke in hush tones, like they were collectively
holding their breaths. In her pod, Fallon pulled her knees to her chest and
looked out into the nothingnessshe knew it wasn't really nothingness, but
everything that mattered to her was millions of miles away, and everything that
wasn't there meant nothing.
But the day had come when the sight of a new blue orb punctured the
endless black. At first it was so small, and every moment they hurdled toward it
made it larger in her vision. The sheer scale of Jupiter was unfathomable.
Soon the planet was in full view as the ship began its descent, and the
captain's voice said, "Welcome home."
But home is where my mother is, Fallon thought. Home was Earth, and she
was made from the substances of Earthwater and dust and love, and she
carried them with her, through time and space.
I must become my own home now.

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The ship hovered for a moment, then settled onto the ground, where it
would remain indefinitely. Through the spacecraft window, Fallon saw so much
rain, and green. The planet was alive with new life, ferns unfolding into the light.
And she was met with dense humidity, gripping her like a hug, as the pod bay
doors opened into the new world. She was birthed into the delta, pushed along
from the river of space, and was suddenly awash in understanding.
Her home planets, new and old, were connected via orbit, all made from
the same star stuff and chemistry to form the galaxy in which she resided. And
the journey had made her just one more explorer sailing in the night, like a
Viking, unsure of her new destination. But the tributary of all humanity was
sourced from the same pool.
So she pulled on her satchel, still covered with the dust of Earth, and
stepped out into the cool rain of Jupiter.