Equinox by Christian Cantrell

Author:Christian Cantrell [Cantrell, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 47North
Published: 2015-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

HAMMERFEST

LUKA’S EARLIEST MEMORIES WERE of Hammerfest Arkade. The combination port, dry dock, and trading post was only a few clicks northwest of the Hammerfest Pod System, which was rumored to be one of the wealthiest and most secure in the world. Although by most pod system standards, the Arkade was a slum—a kind of parasitic by-product of the much more affluent and technologically advanced enclave that supported it—Luka had never known anything else, and consequently believed that he and his family enjoyed a near-perfect existence.

He remembered the volume of the hermetically sealed pavilion as being significantly greater than that of the San Francisco, though he wasn’t sure now if it actually was bigger, or if perhaps his recollection was simply the result of typical childhood-scale distortion. The atmosphere inside Hammerfest was good most days—much hotter than the San Francisco’s above-deck mean temperature, but generally clean—and there was always plenty of purified if tepid water available to anyone with caps.

The stall Luka’s parents ran doubled as their home with two cots in the back, a kind of nest Luka built himself out of scraps of composite construction material and silicone gel packs, an old low-res polymeth surface they used as a table, and a capacitive cooking surface. The shop was a microcosm of the greater exchange that contained it—a miniature bazaar in its own right. Most of what they sold were items that Luka’s father had repaired, refurbished, or pieced together himself out of components or material obtained from other merchants, usually through aggressive but almost always good-natured bartering.

Luka’s little family also did reasonably well selling an eclectic selection of novelties. Not dirty, tattered, or incomplete trinkets excavated from the age of inexpensive global manufacturing, but truly unique novelties custom-built by Luka and his mother. Some of them were functional like ornate calligraphic capacitive styluses, and intricately carved polymer storage cases. Others were purely aesthetic such as models or sculptures built out of buckets of old injection-molded thermoplastic bricks, and music boxes that produced melodies when wound up and placed against acoustically resonate conductive polymeth.

Luka and his mother originally began their artistic explorations purely as a way to satisfy and indulge their own visual and tactile curiosities, and perhaps to brighten up their sparse living quarters. They never expected anyone to pay good caps for anything that wasn’t necessary or practical—anything that couldn’t be used to make a repair, to defend oneself, or to preserve or purify consumables. But when they started getting offers on objects they’d inadvertently left lying around, or that they tinkered with in their laps or on a workbench as they ran the storefront, they began to realize that there were others out there who believed as they did: that just surviving wasn’t enough; that any life worth living and fighting for had to find ways of incorporating elements of beauty, wonder, and inspiration.

By far the most popular pieces the Mance family sold—and what rapidly became their signature product—was their line of mechanical butterflies. They

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