The next days on Yggdrasil were far more pleasant. The company of this family proved to be very much appreciated. Benàn, for example, was an energetic teenager who couldn’t stop talking about his dreams of escape and space conquest. He was fed up with living in that aquarium, but his father had always resisted a premature departure.

“Me dad promised to buy me a roun’ trip to Ceres-stad when I was twelve years old then a secon’ one when I was sixteen. And finally, let me leave for the Marine Academy once I reach my majority,” he told us once we were chilling under the shade of a giant amber-colored dandelion. “But he keeps renegin’ on his word! He believes I’m not ready!” Furious, he closed his record player and threw away the last Pepper Coke from our picnic. The can slowly swirled near a rotten log.

I was surprised when he mentioned the Academy. “I thought you wanted to be a pirate. Why would you join the Marine Corps?”

“To learn how to handle weapons! My pa refuses to let me use his and the armor he hides under his workbench. I don’t even know how to wield a revolver!”

Without a word, Ali nonchalantly passed him her gun, barrel in hand. I didn’t even realize she was listening. To doze off mid-conversation was a habit of hers.

The boy feigned hesitation, but the sparks in his eyes betrayed his excitement. My human didn’t need to insist any further, because seconds later he already had the gun well in hand. “It’s so frackin’ heavy,” he said. “It’s different with my virtual reality console.”

“Try it out,” Ali proposed as she put the needle back on the first track after reopening the portable turntable. From her chin, she then pointed to the soda can Benàn had thrown a few minutes earlier.

Together, they practiced in music all afternoon. The yardman’s son had almost exhausted Ali’s ammunition when Diligua picked us up for dinner on her flying Solex equipped with black sails.

This was our daily routine for the next two weeks: working in the morn, hanging out in the afternoon. We were so productive that Alàn no longer needed us to maintain the station. To be fair, I suspected he had dismissed us because of the meager gardening skills of my sapiens. Apparently, that girl had two left hands with no green thumb.

And it wasn’t even the funniest part.

“What’s happening to me?” Ali sobbed one night as the thermometer was going up.

“Unbelievable!” Alàn answered. “You’re without doubt allergic to real vegetables! Nobody’s allergic to real vegetables! What kind of human being are you?”

“Just gimme pizzas, you poisoner…” muttered my feverish nutrigel-raised partner, white as the giant tree’s leaves.

The next morning, Benàn finally introduced us to his secret spaceship hidden in the old external shipyard. He had begun to assemble her by repairing the worn parts of the deserted hangar with his mother’s tools. Her name was a testament to his ambitions: the Arcadia. I had to reckon this dynamic rascal was a skillful mechanic. However, he needed my skills to set up the control computer and program the post-nuclear engine’s out-of-gravity draining. Meanwhile, with a slice of pizza between her teeth, my sapiens was improving a jet-pack. The young boy had stolen a prototype from a pirate who stopped by a couple of months before.

In the evening, Ali and Benàn often exchanged stories about buccaneers and space adventurers. The young boy was fascinated by the freebooters from the Golden Age of Jupiter’s colonies: King Xiao and the Lost Triads, Grace Bonny the Traveler, Osborn the Freak or Marcellàn Iron Fists and his famous hand-to-hand fights. The latter was Benàn’s favorite and he would talk about him for hours. Our amateur raconteur wasn’t holding back his ardor. He knew hundreds of stories about pirates.

“It is said that the Sun King, Goldsun’s vessel, shines like a star. Forstår du? And that is how she camouflages herself in the celestial firmament!” Benàn exclaimed, showing Lady Goldsun, the privateer, the respect she deserved; and this, although she sided with the Marine on the recent conquest of Pluto. “Her fleet is so frackin’ fast that even the Marine’s Interceptors can’t compete in pure speed!”

Like everybody in Solaris, we already knew some of these tales. In fact, there were so many we couldn’t distinguish the truth from the myth. The majority of these criminals and adventurers had never existed.

 

The vacation was shortly coming to an end as the Kitty was only missing a few coats of paint. Alàn boasted every night that he would soon have one last job for us. Yet, I suspected him of monopolizing the floor so that his son would no longer broach the subject of his emancipation. And this was confirmed in the following twilight.

“Wait! Both of you. I gotta talk to ye.” He took a look at Benàn, who had grabbed his virtual reality console before going outside. “Erik—the station’s storekeeper—told me that ye’ve emptied his entire soda supply,” he continued, clearing the remains of his nattmal. “Along with .50 AE ammunition. The kind of bullets we used to hunt hvaler—whales or Soviet cosmodons!’

“Sorry. We shouldn’t have hidden this from you,” Ali apologized. “We just wanted to teach the kid how to shoot.”

I saw Alàn smiling shyly through his beard. “There’s no harm, rest assured,” he said after a short silence. “I just yearn this pirate story would get outta his head…”

“He’s a descendant of the first settlers… of course he has a taste for adventure,” I reported.

Our host’s eyes were full of nostalgia. “Ja! I know. ‘was like him…”

“You wish…” corrected his wife, who was fixing a modulator in a corner of the room. “This child has more potential than the whole clan put together. He has passed the age to play with his Spirograph.”

“Again. I know. ‘saw the boy handling the absurd handgonne Ali uses,” admitted Alàn. “And for sure, he’s also undoubtedly smarter than me.”

“Why not let him go?” my human asked.

Alàn sighed. “There was an age when I craved to see what was happenin’ in the solar mines of Mercury and the colonies of the Outer Worlds.” The gardener then showed us his right leg by putting it on the table. His calf was studded with scars and burns. The same wounds slept under the dry earth that permanently covered his hands. “T’was a beautiful time of freedom that was already comin’ to an end,” he said as he readjusted his gray pants to hide this pink topographic map of Mars. “What will he find now? Cyber-psychos on the run? Irradiated moons? This durn Technocracy and its ruthless Marine, both corrupted by Lunapolis? Nej. There’s nothin’ for him in the deep space. This is the sad reality: the dream has faded.”

“The armor was from when you served?” I asked, alluding to Benàn’s words about the assisted exoskeleton.

“Served? I’ve never served anyone but the giant plants of Yggdrasil,” he said. Alàn scratched his beard; his gaze was lost in time. When he addressed us again, he made us promise to stop encouraging his son’s sweet utopias. After that, he floated off to the greenhouse on the second floor.

“How can we tell him that he’s living in his own illusion?” Diligua asked rhetorically. She had finished repairing the modulator but she threw it anyway; the day after, Benàn would secretly retrieve it to improve his radar system. She ultimately left the room after wishing us a good evening. Sadness could be seen on her face.

 

The final days were quieter. Diligua and the station’s technicians activated the wind turbines. This ingenious system dispensed a fine mist inside Yggdrasil and the fog invaded the large windows separating the pastoral town from the vacuum.

With the humidity, Ali’s haircut had doubled in volume, giving her a Bob Ross vibe. Benàn and I both enjoyed seeing her like this before she threw her iron cup at us. Despite the lack of gravity, it almost tore off my right ear.

“The mist will only last a few days. It’s good for the skin,” Alàn preached while finishing cooking tofu on the gas stove. “Just like the mud and—”

“Alàn—” Diligua cut him off before her commentary got interrupted by a knock on the giant mushroom’s door.

It was strange because since the beginning of our stay, nobody had come to visit Benàn and his family. From the yardman’s expression, this didn’t bode well.

“Enter!” Diligua shouted as she slid off the wood table to face this unexpected intruder.

The wooden door opened slowly before a man in a beige raincoat rushed inside. Water was dripping from the edges of his round hat and long pointed nose. He wiped his blond mustache from the back of his sleeve before plunging his gold circled gray eyes into each of ours. When he met Alàn’s gaze, he gasped, flabbergasted. “What a shock! What they say is true!” he shouted with a thick English accent, hands on his hips. “Marcellàn Iron Fists lives on this moldy stone!”

Marcellàn? Was he referring to the pirate? Marcellàn Iron Fists who pulverized his opponents with the strength of his fist? That Marcellàn would be Alàn?

Ali didn’t seem to make the connection. She was for the moment too busy finishing her meaty dagmal, the bottom of the bowl almost stuck to her forehead.

“I don’t know what ye’re talkin’ ‘bout,” coldly replied our host.

“Cut the crap, old fibber!” the visitor laughed. “I’m responsible for some scars on your back.” He opened his coat, revealing an AAJ’s badge and the stock of a rifle with a scope hanging from his shoulder.

I recognized him. We were looking at Nigel Hemingwest, a second-generation bounty hunter. Obnoxiously famous for his gross blunders from which he had always come out as white as snow.

“Marcellàn, who fought bare hands in his shiny red titanium armor, relegated to the simple rank of a petty gardener! This is beyond prodigious!” Hemingwest continued, taking a step towards the table.

He was stopped by Diligua, a sharp knife ready: “If you’re not here for any Yggdrasil-related business, I’d appreciate it if you’d get the hell out!”

Hemingwest stumbled backward, hands up, but visibly amused by the situation. “Lovely wife!” But the chauvinist’s smile faded as he looked at Ali who had now put her bowl back on the table. His eyes lingered for a moment on her own badge. “Anyway, I see that the bounty is already coveted…”

My partner wiped the tip of her nose with the back of her hand, also revealing her .50 caliber, before granting her unexpected opinion on the matter: “We ain’t give a shit about the dollar-credits. Alàn has offered us shelter and food. No harm will come to him from us.”

Hemingwest opened his eyes wide. It must have been a long time since he had been so dissed but unfortunately that was Ali’s trademark. Also, my associate indicated that she wouldn’t fulfill a contract, which was uncommon for an auxiliary; unusual and punished by a severe reprimand if the high authority got wind of it.

“Is that so?” Hemingwest squeaked before turning to Benàn’s father. “I’m no fool, Alàn the florist. I’ll be waiting for Marcellàn and his armor at the foot of the Big Tree for a duel tonight. A legend like him can’t refuse, even if he has pissed calcium for twenty years by living in low gravity. Otherwise, the whole system will learn where his pitiful family is hiding—rightly or wrongly!”

And Hemingwest left by slamming the door.

“Well, that explains all the praise for Marcellàn coming from Benàn!” I said to Ali, breaking the awkward silence.

“There’s no way I’m goin’ to accept this cursed challenge,” Alàn grumbled while sitting.

In front of him, Benàn had risen, red with anger: “Ye’re goin’ to let him humiliate you like that?”

“Can’t you see that your father has moved on?” his mother spoke in the same tone.

We didn’t say a word. Ali grabbed me by the paw before leaving the table. She had judged that the rest of the conversation had nothing to do with us. But when we arrived at the front door, Benàn passed us and withdrew first, visibly furious at Diligua’s answer.

“This Hemingwest klaphat hasn’t turned over a new leaf and I know him, he won’t let go,” Alàn grunted with his palms compressed against his eyes.

“We ignore if he doesn’t have any evidence. But if he does, I’d bet he has nothing solid and he’s attempting to bluff us…” Diligua said, trying to reassure her husband before we closed the door.

Outside, against his mother’s flying Solex, Benàn was tearing off pieces of brown moss covering the ramp to their fungal home. His anger had subsided and his eyes filled with tears when he saw us: “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you who my pa was… but you were bounty hunters…”

“All fathers have secrets,” I replied. “Yours is worth a lot of dollar-credits. And Hemingwest is no joke…”

“My pa hasn’t wrestled for decades,” Benàn explained. “And yet, even with porous bones, he could crush this rat’s skull if he wasn’t such a coward!” I noticed he had lost most of his Nordic accent.

“Your father is anything but a coward, you know…” Ali intervened, sitting next to him. “He’s just doing what parents do… trying to protect you.”

“Is he? Then why does he refuse to fight? Why did he stop his life as a pirate and adventurer? Why does he prevent me from leaving?” Benàn shouted as he stood up. “Because he’s a fraud!” Crying, he subsequently swam in the void before disappearing into the fog.

“What a bad-tempered brat!” my human grumbled.

“Don’t blame the boy,” said his father, who had joined us. “He also inherited the worst of his parents’ nature… especially his mother.”

A cast-iron cup coming from inside the house brushed against his head before getting lost in the mist.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“This afternoon? Spud the contours of the water recycler. And if ye’re not ashamed to help an old pirate, I can employ you for that last job,” he said. “As for tonight? Absolutely nothin’. Hemingwest could wait for the Ragnarök that I wouldn’t give him satisfaction.”

 

We worked alongside Alàn for the rest of the day. But not without concern because we had no news from Benàn. By dinner time, the teenager was still missing, which worried his mother, and rightly so.

“Alàn! Alàn!” The voice came from outside. The station storekeeper, Erik, stood below. “Alàn! You’re not gonna believe your ears!” he continued after we had joined him. “The pirate Marcellàn is on Yggdrasil… and he’s fighting Nigel Hemingwest!”

“He what?” the real Marcellàn roared.

The old pirate immediately jumped and grabbed the flying Solex before his wife took control of it. The machine unfolded its broad black wings and made its turbine roar then took off, forming a tunnel in the fog. Ali and I chased them to the foot of the Big Tree as it was there, in the center of the station, that Hemingwest had set its cruel rendezvous.