A World Fair and Bright
A Science Fiction Story
Stan pushed a clipping from one of those old-timey daily papers – the ones with the ancient type and the black-and-white photographs – across the synthetic tabletop.
“Look at this,” he said to Juon, who was a year younger than Stan and still in secondary school. “Wanted: Men with mining experience. Low pay. No benefits. Dangerous conditions. Long hours.”
Juon took the clipping from the paper, which was still printed on old-fashioned material cut out of dead trees. He looked at it.
“I’m not going to drop out of school,” he said. He pushed the paper back across the tabletop. Juon was tall for sixteen and dark-skinned. His eyes were purple, which was said to have been a post-Space-Age trait. Juon wasn’t sure he believed that. Stan was also dark-skinned, and had blond hair and blue eyes. He was often going on about hunter-gatherer societies who had lived before the invention of fire who had looked like him, and how they had gone away sometime before the Bronze Age, and how the genetic stock of the human race had shifted after the Space Age and now blond hair was very common again among people with dark skin. Juon wasn’t sure he believed Stan, because Stan had dropped out of school one year before graduation to work in the asteroid mines. Juon wanted to apply to university, which would mean leaving Carelia for the first time. He wasn’t sure he could make it into one of the good schools in Tetrajano or the cities on Cent. But there was a regional university one system over that wasn’t too selective.
“That’s just what they say to deter people,” said Stan.
“Yeah,” said Juon, glancing around the bar they were sitting in. This late in the afternoon, the place was deserted. The lunch rush was over and happy hour hadn’t begun. Most of the tables had chairs stacked on top of them, but the owner knew Juon’s family and let Juon and Stan hang out there sometimes when Juon skipped school and Stan was on one of his off months.
“That’s how you know they’re digging up good stuff,” said Stan. “Stuff that will make you rich.”
“Like what?”
“Uranium.”
“Of course,” said Juon. Uranium was Stan’s go-to when he wanted to say that some asteroid mine or far-flung planet was rich in resources. Sure, Juon knew that finding uranium in 2542 was like finding oil in 1931. Almost all starships ran on fusion and most cities did, too. Uranium was the one commodity which had traded higher every single day for twenty centuries. But Stan lacked imagination and so uranium was the only mineral he ever talks about.
“You’ve always got some new place,” said Juon.
Stan smiled. “But I haven’t even told you the best yet,” he said.
Juon raised his eyebrows. “The best?”
Stan took the paper and folded it back up carefully and stuck it in the pocket on his tunic. He let Juon wait a full minute before responding.
“There’s a planet near the outer edge of one of the spiral arms,” he said. “It’s only just been discovered recently. It doesn’t have a name yet.”
“What are people calling it if it doesn’t have a name?”
Gion, the owner of the bar, came out of the kitchen at that moment. He nodded to the two of them and took a mop down from the wall and begun to clean the floor behind the bar. Strictly speaking, he could have had any one of his robotic bartenders do this, but Gion was a man who liked to do things for himself. He was probably the only man in Frittia who mopped a floor by hand.
“They call it the world fair and bright,” said Stan. “They say the sun shines every day, but it’s wet enough that the land isn’t all dried out like a desert. It’s always warm and never cold, but it’s not hot like Grabba or Kan. You can sleep outside every night because of how nice the air is and people do. They say it’s like the air on Earth was, except that it’s better, because Earth was always too hot or too cold and people died of exposure in the winter and summer.
“You can breathe it without a respirator?” asked Juon.