Astrid the Astronaut's Arc

Chapter 11 of 12

The next morning, Astrid found Echo near a small domed outpost tucked against the rocks at the edge of the grounds. He sat on the step holding his communicator. A green-winged butterfly drifted past his shoulder and landed on the door. Echo did not look up. A metallic sphere hovered above the outpost, blinking slow red lights. Astrid had never seen it before. It had arrived in the night. "From her," Echo said quietly. "She watches through it." The sphere turned once, then went still. Echo opened a worn book on his lap. New words had appeared on a blank page, written in his teacher's hand. He read them aloud for Astrid. The message said Space Haven was teaching the wrong lesson. It said Astrid's view made humans small, and Echo was forbidden to learn smallness. He was to leave at once. Astrid sat down on the step beside him. She thought of the tower, the disc, the tiny Earth. She thought of the dome she had redesigned, the forests and oceans inside the stars. "Tell her she is half right," Astrid said. "I used to teach that. I don't anymore." She placed a helmet visor from her old suit on the step between them, its painted sun facing up. "Show her this. Tell her what you actually saw here." Echo lifted the visor and held it toward the hovering sphere. He spoke into the communicator for a long time. He described the orb. The butterfly. The blanket in the sun building. The dome that did not shrink anyone. The sphere's lights dimmed, then brightened once, then dimmed again. The book's page filled with a single new line. Echo read it twice before he spoke. "She withdraws the order," he said. "For now." The sphere drifted off above the rocks, but it did not leave. It hung in the sky like a small second moon. Astrid watched it settle there. Echo could stay. But his teacher was still watching, and Space Haven was being measured now, every path and every room. Astrid stood up gentler than she sat down, and walked back toward the dome to look at it with new eyes.