Chapter Text
When she first arrived at Georgia Tech, Laoise Sparrow tried Anglicising her name to Leigh. Unfortunately, people called her “Lay-guh”, which was even worse than “Lao-ise”. Nowadays she still introduced herself as “Laoise”, but signed her name “Lee”. It would have upset her mother, and especially her grandmother, but hey, they weren’t around right now.
Lunar childhood left Laoise short, feeble, and sickly by Earth standards. In low gravity, her bones and muscles hadn’t grow the same way an Earthling’s would, and it was exacerbated by the low-protein diet most Lunese subsided upon. Laoise wore a supportive brace around her legs for her first six months on Earth, and ate a special tofu-rich diet to help her gain bone and muscle mass. She saw a physiotherapist every two weeks and worked out in the gym with a specialist personal trainer three times a week who kept her on a low-intensity regime that still left her shattered. Every aspect Earth life was exhausting for her.
Laoise loved the little snatches of nature she could enjoy. She loved the blue sky and the red bricks, and even brown dirt was a novelty compared to the monochrome world she had grown up in. She loved the flutey twitterings of the wild songbirds, the wind in the leaves, and the bubbling of flowing water. She loved the cool summer breeze and the feeling of sunlight on her face. But constant fatigue meant walks through the city or the surrounding countryside were a struggle. Her training did help her fitness built up over time, and after about a year she was fully adapted to Earth gravity.
Nevertheless, Laoise remained cautious when it came to physical exertion. Her bones were still much more brittle than those of her Earthling counterparts. Small scrapes that most young adults would brush off could seriously hurt her. She didn’t play sports or go dancing on nights out, preferring instead to read for leisure, and to work on recreational engineering projects. Her dorm room was an accessible ground-floor room, a quiet and sterile environment that suited most of the disabled students, but did make it harder to organically develop a thriving social life. At the end of first year, when most undergrads chose to move into private accommodation in the city, Laoise instead stayed in her college dorm. She didn’t have any friends who she felt comfortable renting with, and she didn’t know if she’d be able to find something suitable for her needs.
The second year, she promised herself, would be different. Her brace had come off, and she was feeling healthier. No longer would she spend all day working alone to make deadlines at the last minute. No longer would she spend her precious leisure time on solitary pursuits. Instead, she’d get her work done in good time, and then try to have some fun. She would make friends.
Certainly, her improving health made it easier to get work done. Making friends was much harder. Social circles had been established, and Laoise found it easier to keep to her solitude, rather than imposing upon others. She was often lonely, but her grades were excellent, even by her own standards. In December, Laoise implanted a subdermal microchip in her wrist, which she used to control a simple robotic arm. This was motivated by nothing but the sheer curiosity of whether she could do it.
In the spring term, Laoise applied to study in the UK for a year. The dean encouraged her to apply for Oxford or Cambridge. Her grades justified it, but she was sure she wouldn’t be accepted. This turned out to be a rare example of Laoise being wrong. She was invited to an interview at Magdalen College, Oxford, and the admissions tutor was impressed by her performance, academic record, and her budding robotics research. She had offers on the table from Surrey, Strathclyde, Bristol, and Imperial College London, but she was giddily excited to accept a place at Magdalen.
Laoise thought a new country would be the ideal new start. Oxford’s climate was much closer to the Moon’s than the sweaty summers of Atlanta, so she quickly felt at home. The workload at Oxford was more intense, but all the same, at 6:30pm on Friday Laoise finished for the week. Laoise didn’t want to go to the Junior Common Room to hang out with exuberant freshers, but she was saved when a girl from one of her tutorials, Elena, knocked on her door to ask if she’d like to accompany her to a nearby houseparty.
Having spent the best part of two years in her room, Laoise didn’t know what to do when they arrived. Everyone was a stranger, except for Elena, and she know her well enough to feel comfortable clinging to her The music made it difficult to follow conversations, and she was tempted to just go home and go to bed until she remembered her resolution to herself. This was the year she got a proper college experience. She stuck around, but struggled to involve herself in the party, and ended up in a corner with a cute boy who she thought was probably half Japanese. His name was John, and he was studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Edmund Hall, another nearby Oxford college.
“I wish I’d just studied Philosophy, to be honest,” he admitted. “Economics is too mathematical for me, and Politics is OK but a Political Philosophy module would have been enough.”
“Don’t you need mathematics to do good philosophy?” Laoise asked.
“No, not really. It’s mostly trying to find a dead white guy who you agree with and claiming his views as your own.”
“Is it always a white guy?”
“Well, sometimes it is a white woman. But they’re nearly always white. I’m still a bit stuck in Western Philosophy. Occasionally someone like Du Bois comes up, but… it’s mostly dead European men, yeah.”
“I guess I don’t understand how you can engage with something like Swinburne’s teleological argument without a good grasp of statistics. Maybe I’m completely wrong here, but it seems to me that most great philosophers were also naturalists and amateur mathematicians – Al-Farabi and Kant and Descartes and Russell…”
Laoise worried that she had put her foot in it. She had never enjoyed conversation much and she was badly out of practice. But John was smiling, a crooked, toothy grin. “Well, I guess I’m not going to be Bertrand Russell,” he said. “What about you?”
“I’m on an exchange from Georgia Tech. I’m planning on a dual major in neuroscience and cybernetics.”
“You’re American?” John asked.
“No… I mean, sort of? I was born on the Moon. One of my mums is British and the other is… Irish-Canadian-American, I guess.”
“Have you spent your whole life on the Moon? Before uni, I mean.”
“Pretty much. We had a holiday to see my grandparents in Canada when I was small, but coming on holiday to Earth is rough, by the time you’ve adapted to the gravity you have to go back again.”
“I went on holiday to the Moon, once,” said John. “I was pretty young, but it changed how I thought about Earth forever. I mean, the Moon seemed like a magical place where I could jump higher. Do you resent gravity?”
“Well, I don’t think the Moon is magical. Earth just feels more substantial, more real. It was hard at first, but living here has made me stronger, more resilient. Getting even the simplest thing done requires so much effort, it makes it all feel more worthwhile.”
“That’s fascinating. I suppose it’s all relative.”
Laoise stared out the window, watching large raindrops plop onto the glass. The music was uncomfortably loud and the people were so… unpredictable. Their conversations bounced so unpredictably between loud and quiet, they moved in ways she didn’t understand.
“You alright?” said John.
“Yeah… yeah, I’m fine,” said Laoise.
John paused for a second and regarded Laoise. “This place is a bit much for me. Would you like to come back to my room and play some board games?”
Laoise was not naïve. She knew she was being propositioned. You wouldn’t know it if you’d only known her on Earth, but she had been quite popular back on the Moon. There hadn’t been many children Laoise’s age on the Moon, but Moon Children were the subject of regular documentaries, and then, eventually, a reality series. Earth had an obsession with those strange rich kids, with low muscle mass, low body fat, and small, thin bones. A few of her school friends had found modelling work back on Earth, their unnaturally slender frames apparently serving as ideal billboards for women’s fashion. Those that hadn’t were leveraging their low-level fame and rich parents into a variety of careers in entertainment, or else, like Laoise, were geared up for long spells in higher education. But Laoise felt kinship with even the most vapid of them. It helped that they all seemed to want to kiss her.
On Earth, Laoise didn’t feel like a sex symbol. She felt underweight, weak, and pallid. The leg braces she had worn for those first few months had served as an effective barrier to intimacy. At the same time, she wasn’t touch-starved. Her mothers had raised her to feel self-love, and while it wasn’t always easy, she didn’t derive her self-worth from her perception of other people’s perceptions of her.
But still… it was nice to be noticed.
John led Laoise over to St Edmund Hall, through the gates and up to his room. The stairs were a struggle, but a year ago would have been impossible for her. She gripped the bannister and hauled herself up.
John’s room was nice enough, with a corner desk under the window and a sturdy-looking bookcase. The bottom shelf was reserved for nerdy boardgames – Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Kodama –but it was a middle shelf at waist height that immediate caught the eye. A peculiar skull sat in a glass case. It didn’t resemble any animal Laoise was familiar with. It might have been a bear’s, perhaps, if not for the elongated beak-like snout that was almost cetacean. There was no lower jaw, and the temples had been replaced with hinges. It was odd and unsettling.
“What’s up with Yoderick here?” Laoise said, trying to sound like she was asking for help identifying an unusual musical instrument or some other innocent curio, not... a fucking skull.
“Oh, that?” said John, affecting a similar coolness. “It’s a carving. Don’t worry, I’m not… you know. It’s just a pretension, a daily reminder of mortality, you know…”
“Huh,” said Laoise. “Well, if you like it, I guess…”
“I wouldn’t say I like it,” said John. “But… I’m going to sound like such a wanker… it fulfils a need in me. Drink?”
“Please.”
John reached into his wardrobe and pulled out two bottles. “I have cheap vodka or cheap wine.”
“What sort of wine?” Laoise asked.
“Red,” he said, checking the label. “Spanish. Last year’s vintage.”
Laoise’s formative experiences with alcohol had been with dandelion wines brewed on the Moon. It was impossible to grow grapes there, and difficult to grow any fruit. Some people apparently grew hops and barley to brew into beer, and Sally had once turned some excess strawberries into strawberry wine, but dandelion wine was the stock drink of Lunese teenagers, socialites, and elderly alike.
Grape wine was different, particularly red wine. Laoise had drunk a rich aged Burgundy at a bar in Georgia and had found it difficult to stomach, with its unfamiliar oaky taste. But in any case, she couldn’t imagine herself preferring cheap spirits. “I’ll have some of that, please.”
“OK. Erm… did you bring a water bottle?”
No, of course she hadn’t. There was nothing for her to drink from, and she certainly wasn’t prepared to just swig from the bottle. There was a glass in the bathroom that John used to store his toothbrush, but it was still stained red from a previous use. Laoise cursed herself. She was ruining it again. John began to mumble some apology, and she worried that he was about to ask her to leave, so she kissed him.
He broke the kiss after a few seconds. “Oh. OK. Wow. Wasn’t expecting that.”
“Do you want to?” asked Laoise.
In reply, he kissed her back.