Free Points of Origin by Marissa Lingen Page B

inconvenience. My grandchildren at least knew how to present themselves in a tidy and orderly fashion, filters checked and suits in their proper bags in case of emergency.
    At the museum, they were quiet at first and then more openly inquisitive. When they realized that I knew a fair amount about genetic engineering because of my fish, they picked me dry. “They’re like piranhas,” I told Judith when we got home. “They will gnaw any hint of flesh off you and crack the smaller bones.”
    â€œThat’s a good sign,” she said. “Perhaps they’ll relax a bit.”
    I thought about how proper they had been, how careful. “Harry might. He’s still little. But Enid and Richard—I don’t know what they’ve been through. I feel like trying to ask is the wrong way to get them comfortable. But—do you think they’re all that buttoned up, out there in the Oort Cloud?”
    Judith frowned and turned from wiping down the kitchen counters to put her hand on her hip. “I have never known an Oorter to be like that. But—things are different out there now for a lot of people, Torulf. Even just being taken away from their families might be enough, poor mites.”
    I knew my expression mirrored hers. “I wish I knew what to do. I never—I don’t know what kids do. They were talking about ice-skating. They heard it was one of the rare compensations for the hardship of living on a planet.”
    Judith snorted. “Poor us, planet-bound! Well, I have some time off coming to me. I don’t mind using it to show the children how things aren’t so bad on planets. Or at least on this planet.”
    After that we went to the first landing site, and after that we took an entire weekend-long trip to go to Olympus Mons, to go up it and look out at the entire planet as our domain. The thing about Olympus Mons—and maybe you think you have mountains like this where you’re from, but trust me, you don’t—is that it feels like you’ve gone halfway to space. Like you could just hop a little and make it out to orbit. I thought the little ones might like that, and Harry did. Richard and Enid looked white eyed and skittish.
    â€œIs anything wrong?” I whispered to Richard.
    â€œPlanets are very exposed,” he said. “I’ve just realized.”
    His sister overheard him and nodded vigorously, keeping careful hold of the handrail there at the summit. “You can’t steer them. If you end up on a collision course with a comet or something, you have to fix the other thing because you can’t fix you .”
    I looked at them helplessly. I hadn’t even come to Mars on one of the ships. Judith and I were both from Martian families from generations back. I think I had one great-great-grandmother from Earth, but I had to think about which one it might be.
    Harry tugged at my sleeve. “Is ice-skating like this?”
    I hesitated. I’d never been ice-skating. “A bit like this,” I said. “There’s a dome roof overheard, and you won’t do it in your suits. But I hear tell there’s a feeling of flying, if you do it right.”
    They had not let up on the idea of ice-skating. When I asked Harry who Erin was, he looked at me like I was daft and said, “Erin is Erin .” I began to think that the Oort Cloud was filled with people’s relations. As I herded the children into the train down from the Olympus summit, I was struck with the realization that these days it might be full of my relations.
    If it was full of anything. The economic collapse of the Oort economy after the plague at Chornohora Station was the subject of thousands of speculating pundits, with the Jovian system and the Earthers differing extremely about cause and justification, but one thing I could not dispute was that it had caused refugees. Maybe it was completely empty now. Maybe Judith and I would be all the home