Tides of Terminus

The shuttle ramp hissed down and the gravity hit me wrong before my boots even touched the deck. Terminus runs about point-eight standard, and the tide pulls in waves, so you step off a shuttle and your stomach thinks you're on a boat. I grabbed the rail and stood there like a tourist, because I was one.

"You know you're thirty in two days, right?"

My comm chirped with my sister Shelby's voice before I'd even finished walking down. Twenty-nine and holding, that's me, Karyn, and Shelby has never once let me forget the math.

"I'm twenty-nine, Shelby. Two days from thirty. There's a whole year left in me yet."

"Which is why you booked a solo birthday trip to a rock at the ass end of the shipping lanes instead of letting Mom throw you a party."

"Exactly why," I said. "A party means thirty people asking what my five-year plan is. Here nobody knows me."

"Nobody knows you because you won't let them. Okay, I get it. Have fun. Call me. Don't die in the ocean."

"Love you too."

I cut the comm and looked up. The sun here sits nailed to one spot in the sky, big and pink and low, never rising, never setting. The colony is stacked into the cliffs like barnacles, and down at the waterline there's a boardwalk of shops and bars glowing blue and green under two moons. The ocean under it never stops moving. Tidal forces from the moons and the sun all wrestling, Trina would tell me later. At that point I just thought it looked like a pot of soup that refused to boil.

I'd been a nurse on the Meridian corporate station for four years. Shifts, charts, the same six faces in the break room, and a birthday looming like an audit. Three days of vacation, all of it here, and I meant to spend every hour of it not being responsible for anybody.

* * *

The boardwalk smells like fried fish and some kind of local spice they burn in lamps. Everything glows. Even the driftwood in the bar fronts has bioluminescent fungus in it, so the whole street looks lit from inside. The gravity does a slow push and pull every few minutes, nothing you'd fall over from, just enough that you sway a little and your drinks slosh.

I was swaying past a place called the Driftwood Sink when the tide pulled hard and somebody came out the door fast.

We hit shoulders. Her drink went down the front of my shirt.

"Oh, hell, I am so sorry," she said, grabbing my arm to steady both of us. "The tide does that. Everyone gets nailed their first day. You okay?"

"I'm fine, I'm just wearing most of my drink now."

"Then I owe you a replacement. That's the law here. Spill rule."

And that's when I actually looked at her. Green eyes, cropped dark hair, a geologist's field jacket with about nine pockets, and a face I knew.

"Trina? Trina Osei?"

Her mouth fell open. "Karyn. Karyn Mercer. No way. No way."

"We had anatomy lab together. You were my partner. You made me do all the dissecting because the formaldehyde made you cry."

"It did not make me cry, it made my eyes water, which is a completely different physiological process," she said, and then she laughed, and it was the same laugh. Six years and half a galaxy and it was the same laugh. "What are you doing here? Nobody comes to Terminus on purpose."

"It's my birthday trip. Twenty-nine. I turn thirty in two days and I wanted to spend the last of my twenties somewhere that isn't a corporate station."

"Thirty is not the death sentence your sister thinks it is."

"I never said she..."

"You were talking to someone on the ramp. I saw you from the window. You had the face of a woman being reminded of a deadline." She pointed at my shirt. "Come on. Inside. You're buying me a real drink and you're telling me everything since nursing school. That's also the law here."

The Driftwood Sink is small and low-ceilinged, all glowing wood and a bar made out of the hull of some old survey ship. We got stools by the window where you can watch the ocean roll around under the boardwalk. Fish in it, big pale things, chasing the light.

"Two tidesprouts," Trina told the bartender, and then to me, "Trust me. It's the local thing. It glows."

"Why does it glow?"

"Because nobody's figured out how to make it not glow and stopped trying." She raised the little green glass when it came. "To Karyn, twenty-nine, escaped from the corporate stations for three whole days."

We clinked. The drink tasted like cucumber and something electric. I could feel it faintly buzzing going down, which I decided not to think about.

"So," I said. "Geologist. How?"

"Long story. Short version, I did my field placement here in my last year and never left. The tides on this planet don't follow any model that works anywhere else. Two moons and a tide-locked sun and a liquid mantle under the crust, all interacting. It's a mess and it's beautiful and I get paid to stare at it."

"That sounds exactly like you."

"What does that mean?"

"In school you were the one who stayed after lab to look at the models. Everyone else wanted to leave and you'd still be there turning the rock samples over."

She grinned at her drink. "You remember that."

"I remember lots of things," I said, and then heard how that sounded, and took a sip to cover it.

"Six years," Trina said. "Where did you go after graduation?"

"Meridian station. Surgical and general med. Four years now. It's good work, it's just... the same. Same corridors. Same faces. I know what everyone's going to say before they say it."

"And that's why the solo birthday."

"That's why the solo birthday."

"Anybody waiting for you back there? Boyfriend, girlfriend, angry spouse?"

"Nope. Nobody. You?"

"Nobody. There was a botanist for a while but she transferred and long distance on this side of the sector is a fantasy." She spun her glass. "So it's just me and the tides."

The tide pulled just then, a long slow lean, and everybody in the bar swayed the same direction like a field of weeds. Somebody whooped. It's a whole thing here, I learned. People time their sways to it.

"So what's the plan for three days?" she asked. "Tell me you didn't book the glass-bottom tour and call it done."

"I literally booked the glass-bottom tour."

"Of course you did. Okay, no. I'm off shift today. I'm taking you out. There's a ridge north of the colony where the water stacks up thirty meters against the cliff and just holds there, trembling, all day. It doesn't even break. Tourists never see it."

"That sounds like a date, Trina."

The words came out before I'd checked them. She didn't even blink.

"Maybe it is," she said. "We're both adults, we're both single, and you've got two days left on your warranty. Deal?"

I looked at her over the glowing green drink. Six years ago, our last semester, she used to linger at the lab bench and I used to pretend I didn't notice. I'd had a whole life plan since then, tight as a chart, and every line of it was supposed to keep me safe and on schedule. And here was the tide pulling again, and me leaning with it.

"Deal," I said. "But I'm buying the second round. Spill rule."

"You spilled nothing. I spilled on you."

"Then you owe me dinner too. That's the law."

She laughed that same laugh and flagged the bartender for another round, and outside the two moons dragged the ocean up the cliff face one more slow inch, and for the first time in about a year I wasn't counting days.

We drank a second round, and then a third, and somewhere in there Trina looked at the clock on the wall and stood up so fast her stool scraped.

"What? What is it?" I asked.

"Tide's turning. It'll be low in about forty minutes. You have to see the flats."

"The flats?"

"The tidal flats, east end of the boardwalk. At low tide the whole seabed drains out for half a kilometer and everything left behind glows. Algae, bacteria, little worms, who knows. It pulses with the mantle pressure. It's the single best thing on this planet and the tours charge forty credits to show you a video of it."

"It's not dangerous? All that water has to come back."

"Of course it comes back. It comes back slow. Nobody's been swept off the flats since I got here, and that guy was drunk and trying to ride a sand eel."

"I'm sorry, ride a what?"

"Sand eel. Big as a canoe. Mean as a drunk uncle. Come on, the window's closing."

She paid, I tried to pay, she covered my hand on the tab with hers and shook her head. "You bought the first round. Spill rule stands until tomorrow. Then you're on the hook for dinner."

"That math doesn't work."

"Local math. Terminus math. Come on."

* * *

Outside the boardwalk had filled up. The shops along the rail were all lit in blues and oranges, glowing shells and woven lamps and a woman selling fried something on sticks that smelled like garlic and, I swear, faintly of the sea itself. The pink sun sat in the same spot it always sits, a thumbprint of color low over the water, and the two moons hung above it, one big and one small, so the whole sky had this layered look to it. Gravity was lighter too. I'd noticed it on the ramp and I noticed it more now, walking, that floaty little lift in every step.

"Nobody gets used to this sky," Trina said, watching me look up. "I've been here six years and I still stop."

"It never sets."

"Never. The sun just sits there being embarrassed about itself. The moons do all the work. Two of them, opposite phases most of the month, that's why the tides are insane. We get four highs a day and two of them are forty meters."

"Forty?"

"On the north coast. Where we're going tomorrow, thirty. The cliff eats most of it."

We came off the boardwalk down a set of metal stairs with railings wrapped in glowing rope, and then we were on the flats.

I stopped walking. I couldn't help it. The whole seabed, wet sand stretching out flat and dark to a distant silver line of water, was lit from underneath. Not glowing steadily. Pulsing. Slow waves of blue-green light rolled across it like wind over a field, maybe every six seconds, and where the pools stood between the ripples the light came up through the water and made the whole pool look like liquid glass.