Jasmine

Jasmine’s mother rose before dawn to tend the coal fire that warmed their krill soup and illuminated the crystal-lined walls of their cave. “Rise, daughter,” she whispered, and Jasmine stirred on her pallet, drew a blanket around her, and crawled to the ledge that overlooked the colony. The researcher’s dome glowing near the edge of the Oblivion Sea was far brighter than the sun would ever hope to be here on Ceres.

Her mother offered her a steaming mug, and Jasmine accepted it without glancing behind her or speaking. Her mother crouched and began brushing Jasmine’s long, white blond hair. With gentle fingers she loosened the tangles, pulled each strand back and away from Jasmine’s thin face, and then swiftly braided a tight whip that hung down her spine.

From the softly glowing mouths of the other cave cells, Jasmine could hear the rustlings of women preparing for labor in the mines.

Suddenly an asteroid entered the atmosphere and seared toward the colony in a flaming, sizzling rush, like a hunter’s flaming projectile. Mother and daughter watched its descent. Glowing like lava, its trajectory ended in a smashing finale that scattered rocks and gravel on the deserted shoreline beyond the researcher’s dome.

“All of this,” Jasmine’s mother sighed, “and heaven throws stones.”

The asteroid’s arrival was no surprise. Almost daily, great burning projectiles strayed from their orbit and hurled toward Ceres, smashing into the surface with dramatic visual effects, sometimes splitting rocks with great explosions and creating wide craters that paid homage to the intruders. Since Ceres processes through the solar system with the other members of the asteroid belt, orbital rejects of various sizes regularly bombard the colony. Often they splash into the slushy sea, but occasionally they damage the colony’s domed greenhouses. Usually the inmates were unaware of their arrival. Supplied with pickaxes and shovels, the women mined the interior of the carbonaceous planet for coal and diamonds, spending little time under the black sky. An unsuspecting inmate, Daria, whose cell was above Jasmine’s, had been crushed on the ledge of her cave, and from then on, Jasmine’s mother warned her daily to keep an eye on the sky. But Jasmine looked forward to the challenge of climbing the gigantic new asteroid.

After Jasmine’s mother donned her thick-soled work boots, coarsely woven coveralls, and her helmet with its single headlamp, she reached up to pencil the number 5,475 on the calendar. Five more years until her sentence ended. She kissed Jasmine on the top of her head and whispered, “Be safe, my daughter,” and strode down the mountain path to join the line of inmates assembling at the mine entrance under the prison guards’ watchful glares.

Ceres was one of the many penal colonies established by the central government in conjunction with the space administration. Like Columbus, the space administration recruited its voyagers from prison rosters. Most were thieves, embezzlers, or failed financial wizards. Unable to resist the siren call of greed, they had been sentenced and banished by the legal system to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Offered an adventurous alternative to prison, healthy inmates willingly entered the lottery. Jasmine’s pregnant mother was one of these, having succeeded in hiding her first trimester by switching urine samples with another inmate. Jasmine was born, squalling in protest, on a pallet laid on a cold floor inside her mother’s cave cell. Her mother named her after the fragrant flower that blooms on Earth only at night.

*

Jasmine pressed the callused fingers of both hands into a long, narrow fissure. After the toes of her climbing boots found solid purchase, she trusted them with all her weight, straightened her legs, and pushed her slim body five inches higher. Feeling faint, pulsating stars danced in her vision, so she concentrated on inhaling deeply and exhaling slowly, patiently, and she rested her cheek against the asteroid’s pitted surface. As she waited for oxygen to reach her brain and revive her, she glanced sideways and glimpsed a flat space at the summit where she intended to plant her feet. When her head cleared, she lifted her right foot and sought another protrusion, poking and prodding. Discovering a sturdy nub, she lent it all her weight, stretched up, grasped another fissure, and hauled her chest over the rough upper edge. Flat on her belly, she welcomed the meteorite’s diminishing warmth. Legs dangling freely, she rested again. Next she snaked forward, causing threads on the front of her synthetic jumpsuit to snag on the meteorite’s rough surface. Her mother would be unhappy; the weekly space transport delivered jumpsuits only twice each year. Concentrating on her balance, Jasmine stood, permitting herself a brief, self-congratulatory grin. She had triumphed over the intruder; surmounted the unknown.

Like a leaf that naturally turns toward the sun for sustenance, Ennui turned toward the pinpricks of firelight she had left behind in the penal colony’s caves scattered across the mountain’s face like so many soulless eyes. The unceasing darkness of Ceres, so far from the solar life source, oppressed her.
She turned her back on the colony to reap the panoramic reward she earned each time she scaled one of these grounded asteroids. First she gazed at the dark and distant Oblivion Sea where several geysers spouted. She liked to imagine that ponderous whales lay beneath the geysers, but she knew that the endless gushing originated in hydrothermal vents hundreds of feet below the surface.