Member-only story
Science Fiction-Short Story
Salt Sky
I did not come for the salt. No one comes for the salt.
The instruments wake me before the cold does.
Somewhere past the window the barometer is falling, and the falling has a sound, a thin descending note the housing makes when pressure drops faster than the seal can answer. I have trained myself to hear it through sleep. I lie in the dark of the station and I listen, and I know before I rise that the season has started, because nothing else in this place moves that fast.
The colony calls it the white time. The colony calls it a lot of things, none of them kind. I have a different word for it, one I keep to myself, because the word is beautiful and on Thule Minor that word is close to treason.
I get up. The floor takes the warmth out of my feet through two pairs of socks. I cross to the panel and read the morning into me the way some people read scripture, the way my mother read the tide charts back on a world I have stopped being able to picture clearly. Temperature, minus forty-one and dropping. Humidity, climbing. The two lines on the old plotter leaning toward each other like people who have decided, at last, to speak.
When they cross, the sky comes down.
