The song sung by those who remain
Author: drcalvin
Characters: Switzerland, OC
Summary: Angst in space! No, not really... This vignette a look at the countries that didn't make it so far – or at all – in the space race and how they deal with things.
Second part of the "Nations in Space" AU verse, though it can be read completely independently from "New skies, new harbours for us all".
The Red Cross barge grew slowly in size as it approached from the rarely used wormhole hub of the Sol system. They were watched by two pair of wary eyes.
"That Red Cross is coming at all, still, we should be grateful," Luna said. "He has many new ideas this time, also."
"I don't care," The Revivalist Movement said, his hand clenching hard around the archaic rife that but rarely left him. "He abandoned us once already."
With an angry mutter, he turned off the holo-screen and left the communications room. Freight barges were so large and clumsy that it would take the better part of a Earth day before the ship reached them. It wouldn't actually land, of course, since it was built purely for hard vacuum and even the weak gravity of Luna would crush the ship.
Once it was parked in safe orbit, the mini-transports would stop working as propulsion engines and detach with the supplies that he, however much he hated to admit it, knew they needed desperately.
"Your rudeness acts as a weak shield, Swissman."
"Don't call me that!" The Revivalist spun around and lifted his rifle threateningly. "I've abandoned all those names. You of all people should know!"
Luna just stared down at him with unnerving diode-blue eyes.
It was the Revivalist who looked away first. He had, indeed, for many years lived on a beautiful green world, cradled among mountains beneath the protective roof of a blue sky. As time passed, however, humans broke through that roof and with that, they broke everything... his house, his history and his family.
"To forgive is difficult," Luna said musingly, her hand going out to touch the pipe of the rifle. "Only, without forgiveness, what remains for those on the edge of nothing? Swissman-who-is-no-more...?"
"Nothing." He sighed and closed his eyes as memories of sweeter times assaulted him. "That's why they call it nothing, I think."
She was so pale and frail-looking that it was almost ridiculous - while he was shorter than her, bent with age and bitterness, he weighed at least thrice as much as the willowy woman. Yet, she was the stronger. They both knew he lived in this cramped, artificial city, so far removed from his dear mountains, only at her mercy.
Luna had been the first nation to spring up on her own in space, even before the FTL-drive was out of its wildly experimental stage. Nobody had really expected the barren moon to awaken as a true nation, least of all the other personified countries.
One day, though, while the scientists living in the early settlements became increasingly engrossed in remaking themselves to truly live on the moon, instead of merely surviving with the help of gravity chambers and mineral supplements, a little girl of unknown origin was found playing hopscotch right in the middle of Mare Foecunditatis.
Sixty years later, she was all grown up. Her presence was announced to the United Nations on the same day that the scientists, miners and self-aware cyborgs of the Moon declared themselves independent. It caused a truly amazing ruckus.
The Free State of Luna gained her maturity one small war and three years of trade-embargo later. The embargo had only proved to the world that the Lunarites were in fact fully prepared to put themselves in suspended animation and download their consciousness into modified mining robots, if that was what it took to become free.
At this point, the bosses basically threw their hands in the air and said "alright already, have your damned independence!" only with more 'hereby we do acknowledge', since they were bosses.
The curious nations had invited Luna to visit them on Earth. However, seeing as how she was born in such low gravity, nobody really knew what would happen if she tried to land on Earth. The results from human Lunarites were not encouraging and in the end, the nations of the world had decided to hold a meeting above a space station.
Incidentally, America was fond of blaming the birth of the nation of ISS the Third on the party that took place aboard that very space station. Here the members of the United Nations officially welcomed Luna as one of their own. America fingered Russia as the father, to which the large nation only looked adorably clueless and revealed exactly nothing.
England, meanwhile, had loudly accused France. It was beyond a doubt him that had spiked the punch when he realized a certain fact. Namely that while she may have artificial eyes, could make Prussia look tanned by comparison and was rather limited in the chest area, Luna really was a female nation.
Since they had only seen her in military style space suit before, and low-grav adaptation influenced facial features very much in the direction of 'elvish' and 'androgynous', nobody had been really certain. And, France confided drunkenly to Finland, a gentleman never asks. Prods and pokes a little, perhaps, but that is so difficult to do through a television screen, don't you agree? About then Sweden pried the drunken Frenchman off his not-quite-husband's arm and a suspicious short while after that, some 191 proof ethanol telescope-cleaning-mixture found its way into the punch.
Whatever the cause, eight months after the party little ISS appeared and was soon adopted by Luna, as her little brother.
A gentleman, France reminded the curious nations, never asks. Especially not if he himself suffers from slight blackouts concerning the evening in question.
For a few years, the two flourished and there was even talk about heading off to the asteroid belt and see if they could increase the family.
Then, finally, some smart bugger on Earth figured out how to use the FTL-drive in a way that wasn't actually suicidaly dangerous. Where once, a jump between the stars was apt to leave you lost outside of real time and space nine times out of ten, it became about as dangerous as a transatlantic flight. In one last show of strength, the ailing empires of the old Earth rose for a final mad scramble into space.
They left behind a wasted planet at the edge of the galaxy orbited by a still difficult to inhabit moon and a dozen independent space-stations scattered in orbit. Once the human exodus was truly underway, the stop-over trade and the tax-free zones that had nourished the space stations faded and the micro-nations became increasingly silent and empty.
Though Luna tried to take in heir younger siblings, she was forced to bury them one by one, as their people either immigrated or became hers. The second generation children of the space age never grew up.
Now, almost three hundred years later, only The Revivalist Movement for a New Earth and Luna herself remained as nations in the Sol system. One of them was a bitter man, prematurely aged even for a weakened nation, and the other was considered so odd and non-human that most nations found it easier to speak with the wholly alien nations. At least no one expected them to act like people.
In the beginning, it had been an easy decision for the one who still considered himself Switzerland to switch his name and stay close to the earth. He was, back then, not even the last nation off earth. With the speed scientific discoveries were made who was to say that they couldn't turn this around in a century or two? Then he'd go back home where he belonged!
"Hope remains last of all," Luna reminded him and interrupted his thoughts. The blue light in her eyes flickered softly in a way the Revivalist had learned was the closest she came to smiling.. "Hope and, mayhap, forgiveness? To return is not something many others do."
"Hmpf. The big ones all send us their scraps far more often than he ever does!"
"True," Luna said and looked down at the fading red star engraved on the nano-ceram casing on her left arm. Her people had always been dependant on greater nations for survival. Like their home, the moon, they required someone else, a strong source of true light, to be able to shine themselves.
"What we do not receive from Ivan's people or Scandia, we can usually beg from the Bharat Group. The Hero's Harbour too, share, though theirs is not the richest house." A shadow of a smile flitted over her face. "And what we did not know we desired until it is received, comes most often from the Celestial Knight."
"Thank god that lunatic hasn't been back yet," the Revivalist said with a shudder. "Half the 'aid' he sends is junk anyway."
"Though nobody sent anything at all," her voice was even softer now, almost drowned out by the air-filtering pumps circulating the same particles over and over again, "until your brother convinced them to."
"Well of course he did," the Revivalist snapped. "He's the bloody Red Cross, that's what he was made for!"
"What was Switzerland born to do?"
The alps so proud around him, cold and dangerous in the winter but lovely green beneath the summer sun. Soft music from his neighbour's house, the feel of so much coin moving through his hands after harsh year of strife. To grow and see his new wealth flow among his children, the familiar motions of reloading his gun and the hope that he would never have to wield it again.
Laughing among them, making him smile more sincerely than ever, his sister. His darling little sister, who was going to join him in the new world, who had sewn them matching nurse and doctor outfits for the role they planned to take.
His little sister. Lichtenstein. One moment she was talking, pointing at the earth they were leaving behind so rapidly. And then, as he turned around to find her a napkin, from one breath to another, her laughter fell silent and when he turned around there lay only a hair-tie he had given her. Abandoned on the floor, abandoned by the one who had promised to remain with him always.
How he had searched! He had raised the alarm, called everyone, hailed France back on Earth and pleaded him to go look for her. But there was nothing to find. No trace of the tiny nation on Earth or anywhere beyond.
When finally they dragged the screaming personification off the ship, calm and collected Luna met him. Her with words that cut away his panic like daggers and stabbed at his heart in the same breath.
Space, Luna told him, is infinite. Our strength is not.
When he saw her little memorial garden for the space stations that had once been nations - the ISS 4 and 5, новый Мир and a handful more - he finally recognized what had happened. The breaking of his heart was the birth of his new brother, for the nation who had loved his Earth and his sister, could now no more leave the solar system than he could turn around the flow of time.
"Whatever I was meant for, I'm not, anymore."
"Then you should become what you are now, Revivalist!"
While Luna was usually content to let him mope around and occasionally tinker with bacterial gene-splicing and anti-radiation research, it seemed as if this latest bout of depression brought on by his brother's return was too much even for her.
"Do you not see, why you are aging and fading?" she said, shaking him accusingly. "You are the hope of your people, for even your name means hope! Take this chance, this moment of forgiveness. Give peace to your self."
"Let me go!" He wrenched free. "I don't care. What's the point anyway? You have seen the numbers as well as I have - unless we terraform the entire bloody planet, it's impossible! And even then, the radiation, the heavy metals..."
"The point is that when Lichtenstein is dead, you are still alive! Was I born to become nothing but a graveyard for empty nations?"
The Revivalist felt his breath catch in his throat as he heard the raw pain in Luna's voice, saw the way her nails scraped uselessly at the ceram arm. Dressed in cast-offs from greater nations, left here on the edge of a fading memory, the barren youngster among nations... She who had been born to no mother country or fatherland, was now the nation living closest to Earth. And if things continued like this, it would not take long until she was the last nation in all of Sol's system.
"No... Luna, I. No." He took her hand in his, felt it shake slightly. He who knew so well the horror of losing a trusted friend; it shocked him to realize that his own passing would inflict the same pain on another.
The man who had once called himself Vash and endured frilly nightclothes for the sake of a beloved little sister closed his eyes. In his mind, he saw a beautiful past, one he would never be able to leave behind. But, perhaps, he could try one last time to make himself a future almost as bright?
"Let's go and greet my brother. Perhaps his new ideas for terraforming will lead somewhere useful after all..."
"If they do not? Will you fall back into your despair, Swissman?"
"Even if they do not," the Revivalist said, eyes gleaming stronger than in many years, "we will show him the great white mountains and the beauty of a blue earth rising over the horizon. If we can not remake the earth as it should be... then it is our duty to remember her beauty."
Luna squeezed his hand tighter and together they went to meet Switzerland's younger brother.
Dictionary:
новый Мир = Novy Mir, New Mir
Bharat = Hindi for India
The End?