Shooting Star

by Sandra L. Vasher

Temperature, normal. Blood pressure, normal. Heart rate, normal. Height and weight, normal. Blood work, normal. Above-average intelligence. High empathy.

Abnormal karyotype. A minor Y chromosome microdeletion.

Doctor Sammy J. Ecoe’s fingers froze above her keyboard. The child before this one had been under-weight with a slow pulse, a vitamin D deficiency, and a chromosomal translocation pointing to a likely cognitive defect. Sammy understood the need to deny that child the right to citizenship on Aether Orbital Station. But this one … he exhibited no symptoms of the abnormality inherited—presumably—from his father, whose record was also clear of any symptoms. It was so minor it would probably never mean anything for the child’s physical health. Perhaps something like intolerance for hazelnuts or limited hair growth on his feet. Something science had yet to advance far enough to predict.

It could cause infertility, but on an ill-repaired space station approaching its two-hundred-and-forty-second birthday with a population too large to sustain, that shouldn’t have been too much of a problem. Still, there was the future of Aether to consider.

Sammy herself had argued that. The Deportation Selection Program—a screening program designed to use physical and mental health determinants to select which of the station’s 26,219 children should be deported—brought fairness to an inherently heinous exercise.

And yet … a minor Y chromosome microdeletion.

The child waited patiently on the examination table with his hands under his chubby thighs, swinging his legs. His bright brown eyes scanned the poster on the wall with the cartoon depiction the Committee for Humane Relocation had created to help children understand why some of their friends were going to be deported. “Earth is your true home,” an overgrown teddy bear in an official cap with a badge said to a group of children boarding a transport shuttle far shinier than the one the children would actually be sent back in. In the cartoon, the kids each held a favorite toy, and some held hands with each other. They were all smiles while an absurd teddy bear shipped them away to a world they did not know.

“Doctor Ecoe? There’s still a line outside.”

Sammy saved her current report without finishing it, reached for a piece of spacesalt taffy from the bowl on the counter, and handed it to the child.

“We’re passed close,” she said to the nurse. “They can come back tomorrow for the tests.”

She lifted the child from the table by the waist and tussled his soft brown curls. There was still a bit of gum stuck in the back that she hadn’t been able to cut out after he’d slept on it three nights before.

“Come on, Aiden,” she said. “Your appointment’s done. Let’s go home and have dinner.”

He licked his taffy-sticky-fingers. “Okay, mommy.”

Aether Station was organized around a tram system that fanned out from the central structure, where Sammy worked in the medical complex, to the outer quadrants where the residents lived in cramped apartments. Sammy held Aiden’s hand on the tram. He was probably the most exceptional thing she had ever done. Her future as a physician had been mapped out from childhood, and she’d never meant to stray off her planned route until she met Luther Ecoe, a maverick pilot with more zest in his trigger finger than most people had in their whole body.

Luther hadn’t run in the same circles as Sammy. He was a soldier. She was an academic. He was raised by a family of gritty mechanics. She was raised in an institute in Aether’s upper echelons. But he’d bumped into her at a citizen’s meeting—with his broad, all-muscle shoulder—and it nearly sent her to the ground. He reached swiftly to catch her by the arm and caught her eye, too.

She had no idea what he’d seen in her. She was diligent, conservative, timely. Easy to predict. She never over-prescribed antibiotics or engaged a parent in a fight about the T1I27 vaccine. Luther liked to say she’d fallen for him at that first encounter, but really, he was an asteroid collision in her life. He’d pushed her over, then pulled her into his orbit. Those few short years she’d spent in his arms were beyond her control.

“Mommy, can we have the banana flavored protein box today?” Aiden asked at home while Sammy dug through the pantry for something to feed them both. He should have more than a protein box, she thought. Something homey, like instant roast chicken or that easy-heat broccoli casserole with all the cheese Aiden liked. Those meals weren’t as balanced as the protein boxes, though. Sammy knew. She’d been on the Food and Nutrition Committee before she’d been nominated for the Aether Leadership and Ethics Committee.

She couldn’t find anything but flavored protein boxes. They weren’t up for new rations until next week. She gave Aiden the banana flavored box and watched him eat it. Supposedly on Earth, they still had real food in some places. Whole fruits and bread, unless the rumors were fairy tales.

Aiden swallowed a mouthful of banana protein. “Is your meeting tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Will you be home late?”

He hated when she came home late from ALEC meetings. It meant she wouldn’t be able to read to him. At six years old, Aiden could read to himself, but he liked it better when she did the voices.

Tonight’s meeting, however, was important. The Chairman was speaking. He wanted the Committee to repeal the Deportation Selection Program.

Sammy kissed Aiden’s forehead. “I’ll try not to be too late.”

She chose a gray one-piece suit to wear to the meeting. She paired it with the heirloom pearl earrings she’d inherited from her mother—an Earth woman who’d donated the earrings along with Sammy as an embryo before Aether Station’s launch in the late Second Millenium. For years the Aether Center for Genetic Diversity had birthed annual batches of human babies from frozen embryos in artificial wombs. A solid half of the Aetherian population had been Earth embryos or were the children of such people. Only about a quarter of the population could trace its roots back to the station’s original colonists.

The earrings were a reminder to Sammy; no one truly ‘belonged’ on Aether. It had never been meant to be an independent state, separate from the Earth countries and companies that had launched it. No, the Aether Station was only supposed to be the first in a series of pit stops for Earth colonists on their way to the Lunar Station, the Mars Station, and the planned-but-never-built Titan Station.

But Aether was launched at a time in human history of unprecedented technological advances, blind optimism, and human hubris; the Resource and Religion Wars of the 30th century had later left Earth a scorched and Godforsaken place. Earth had entered a second Dark Age, an era of scavengers ruling scavengers in a hostile environment.

So Aether had an migrant population to consider: the “Illegal Astronauts”—15,692 Earth refugees who had boarded rusty, ramshackle ships that made it into space on something not so far off from a wing and a prayer—plus the 7,240 children of the Illegal Astronauts, the so-called “Shooting Stars,” many of whom had been born on Aether. That was what tonight’s Committee meeting was about. The Shooting Stars and their right to life on Aether.

Aether’s forced independence from Earth had been mostly for the worst. It hadn’t been as bad when there was trade with the Lunar Station, but these days the Mars Station was Aether’s only trading partner, and the Martians had their own challenges. Sammy thought those people probably didn’t know how good they had it. The Mars Station had an empty planet to expand on. Aether was little more than a decaying space city ready to burst at the gills from its efforts to support a larger population than it was capable of and left with a terrible question:

Who should be allowed to stay?

Sammy carried Luther’s heirloom briefcase into the Committee meeting. It was an old leather thing, in good condition today only because of the oil Sammy rubbed into it every few weeks. She sat down at her place in the forty-nine-chair circle, avoiding eye contact with General Yang to her left and Doctor Tribett to her right.

The Aether Leadership and Ethics Committee was supposed to represent the creative, compassionate, and intellectual elite of Aether. The committee members were the station’s philosopher kings, responsible for governing, though every member was also required to maintain a civilian position. Sammy was the youngest and newest member of the Committee. She had not wanted the role, and she’d told the nominating team so.

“I do not see how I am any more capable than anyone else of governing Aether,” she’d said, rudely, and she’d been chagrined to see that quote splashed out on the news the next day as the reason the search for the next ALEC member was over.

Her peers at the medical center had also betrayed her. In interviews, they’d called her stable, resourceful, and fair. She thought out everything, documented everything, missed nothing. And the death of her war hero husband in the Lunar Crisis of 3044 made Sammy the type of person people thought they could trust.

Not that any of those traits had made Sammy any friends on the Committee thus far. She had lost the General’s favor when she spoke against efforts to recover the stranded Aetherian pilots left in the Lunar Station wreckage. But she could not justify the mission. Luther wouldn’t have either. The fuel for a single ship to make it to the moon could heat an entire quadrant for a month, and the pilots had been prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.

As for Doctor Tribett, Sammy had been instrumental in the recent shutdown of the Aether Center for Genetic Diversity, where Tribett had been a researcher. “The embryo birthing program is what keeps us from marrying our cousins,” Tribett had argued furiously, but Sammy had said, “Then introduce your daughter to a Shooting Star, and you won’t have that problem.”

Neither of her peers spoke as Sammy held Luther’s briefcase in her lap like a security blanket. The Committee Chairman—the only popularly elected member of the ALEC—had a single agenda for tonight, and he began the meeting with gusto, pumping his fist in the air and shouting: “They. Do not. Belong!” Those were four of the Chairman’s favorite words—always used to refer to the Illegal Astronauts and the Shooting Stars—and he also liked “Send them back!” and “Aetherians. Save. Aetherians!”

It was disgusting. True, Aether’s poorest citizens were starving quietly. The CO2 rates were dangerously high, while oxygen levels were dropping. Aether needed a massive cut in population immediately, and even a euthanasia program for elderly citizens would leave the station with about 20,000 too many bodies to support. And yes, the Illegal Astronauts and the Shooting Stars were easy targets. But what had they done to deserve life on Aether any less than any other person?

The Chairman was still talking: “The point, fellow Committee members, is that we have 20,000 too many people and 22,932 Illegals. We have a simple solution that does not penalize Aetherians to the benefit of Illegals.” The Chairman pointed to the floor as if that symbolized the whole Aether Station. “The Deportation Selection Program must be repealed! We must. Send. The Illegals. Back!”

Sammy glared at the man, who hadn’t missed too many protein boxes over the years and liked to form his duck-billed mouth into an I’m-sorry-I’m-so-popular smile. She pressed the call button on her seat as the Chairman sat down, and she stood.

“We are hardly ‘sending’ the Illegal Astronauts back,” she began, putting emphasis on ‘send.’ Aether didn’t have the means to ‘send’ twenty-thousand people anywhere. That word was glossy rhetoric. Everyone on the Committee knew what it meant that they had voted to ‘send’ the Illegal Astronauts away, and it was a sick decision. Aether had a single transport shuttle that could support a one-way trip to Earth for about two-thousand adults, or five-thousand children, obviously the more rational choice. For the Illegal Astronauts that were being deported, Aether had only a few exits to outer space.

General Yang snorted. “I will not vote to draw lots with the Illegals, Doctor.”

Sammy fought down nausea and locked her knees. She had advocated for a lottery to determine which adults should lose their lives, but that was not her fight tonight. “I do not speak now to change our decision on the Illegal Astronauts, General,” she replied. “I speak instead—as I have before—only for the children. The Chairman has asked us to repeal the Deportation Selection Program. He wants to send the Shooting Stars back to Earth, where they may perish.

“But I remind you again: there is no difference in culpability between the children born to Illegal Astronauts and those born to legal Aetherian citizens. None asked to be born or brought here and none have done anything to deserve to be returned. What we are doing is despicable enough, but if we must do it, justice and sensibility demand that we choose to keep the children most capable of serving as strong, productive, diverse Aetherians. The Deportation Selection Program is the only fair determination of that. It is based purely on objective criteria.”

Doctor Tribett spoke spitefully from her chair. “And have you tested Aiden yet?”

Sammy answered with a tight chest. “We are called to do what is right for Aether.”

The Committee voted not to repeal the Deportation Selection Program.

Aiden Ecoe was asleep when his mom got home and logged on to her work account.

Abnormal karyotype. A minor Y chromosome microdeletion.

Enough to make Aiden one of the children that would be deported …

If Sammy ticked the right box on Aiden’s medical record.

Luther wouldn’t have hesitated. He’d have said the only thing worth fighting for was what you loved. But what was the difference between the love Sammy had for her child and the love the mom three doors down had for the Shooting Star she huddled over tonight? And that woman was scheduled to be sent out Aether’s back door. Maybe as early as next week.

Doctor Sammy J. Ecoe woke up her son at two in the morning to read him his favorite story.

She did all the voices.

Then she ticked a box.