Jason

We moved to Et C 2 from Jupiter Prime shortly after my fifteenth birthday. It was not a decision I’d had any say in. My parents had just come home from work one day and announced it, as if they were announcing dinner plans, or something. As usual, I didn’t rate an opinion.

I had lived my whole life on Prime—or as near as I could remember, anyway—and moving to some rock 20 light years away wasn’t high on my list of things to do. I’d been on other rocks before—Europa, Ganymede, Earth even, once—and I didn’t like it. Earth especially. So damned bright, and everything so heavy . . . . And the air . . . I just could not get used to the smell of it. No, I was a station kid, and I never wanted to leave.

We argued that night. I mean, we’d had some fights before, but that night . . . . I’d have run away, but on a space station, where’re you going to run to? Best I could do was smash a lamp, tell them both to fuck off, and storm out.

Not that it did any good. I mean, it never did any good. They did whatever the hell they wanted to, and I was left to make what I could of it.

Well, I didn’t help them pack. I spent most of those two weeks in the twilight of the observation deck, leaning over a railing, staring out at that beautiful orange disc. Jupiter . . . I don’t think there is anything more beautiful in the universe. Subtle shades of orange and beige, glowing softly in the dim light of the Sun, eddying and spinning and twisting into and over each other, dancing slowly back and forth over months; and a glittering fabric of stars behind. And when the light and the station’s orbit are just right, there’s the faintest shimmer of a ring around the equator. It seems I’d spent most of my life on that deck, sometimes with a telescope, sometimes with a book; always with a lot of time on my hands.

Those two weeks went by way too fast, and it was all I could do to burn the image of that sky into my mind, so that I’d have something to cling to when even Sol itself was just a tiny speck in the night. Before I knew it, I was standing on the jump shuttle platform beside the shipping crate that held all our stuff. The whole of the station staff had turned out to see Mom and Dad off. Probably couldn’t wait to call dibs on their offices. But Mom and Dad were happily chatting everyone up. And I couldn’t think of anything better to do than just stand there and wait.

The shuttle ride to the jump gate took only a few hours. Mom and Dad spent the time absorbed with each other, as usual. I ignored them, and went to the back to watch Jupiter—my home—slip further and further into the black expanse, until it was just a bright light in the night.