- T W O -
School is a courtesy more than anything these days, and she's easily top of the class. There's only one teacher that she likes. He's soft and kind, with an older face not always seen around Elysium, and he refuses to adhere to the common courtesies usually afforded to the teachers – they call him Keat. He sits with Theresa at lunch, sometimes, and answers the questions that just can't wait until she sees Chia again at the end of the day.
One day, he finds her lying in the grass, staring up at the sky with wide eyes. However hard he tries, he can't quite fathom what it is that has her so fascinated, though he spends a few minutes himself staring at the sky while trying to figure it out. All he sees is the sun and the stars, and the planet whose face they loom over, day in and day out. The moon is nowhere in sight today, hiding below them, he supposes. He was never one for astrology, however much he likes to learn.
"What are you looking at?" he asks the little girl eventually, giving up on his own search.
"There are people that live in the sky," she replies, sounding awestruck as she points to the planet above (below?) them. "Did you know that, Keat?"
A laugh bubbles from his lips. "I did, in fact." He sits down next to her, and turns his face upwards again. "But you know, to them, we are the ones in the sky."
She frowns at him, trying to figure through what he was saying. "But they are in the sky," she insisted. "I am here, on the ground, and they are floating around up there."
"They're not floating," he corrects gently. "They walk and run and jump and fall just like we do." He considers trying to explain the concept of gravity to her, but it's too big a concept for a six year old. "Where did you find this out?" he asks instead.
"The droids told me," she explains easily.
"Ah."
Silence falls. She stares upwards, never blinking, her mind racing at a million miles an hour. The sky was beautiful, she thought – packed full of far-away stars and galaxies, sometimes with the cracked, cratered surface of the moon. And always, always with the visage of planet earth below, changing each and every day. So many people missed it, never looked up even once in their day…sometimes, she stands and looks just so that there's at least one person appreciating it.
"What's it like?" she wonders out loud.
"What?" Keat replies.
"Up there," she explains. "What's it like living there?"
All at once, Keat feels like he's being backed into a corner. If he can't tell her about gravity, there's no way to explain poverty, or overpopulation, or epidemics…just three of the many, many things they were blessed to never have to live with, up here in their paradise in the sky.
"Probably just like Elysium," he lies instead.
"But there aren't any walls," she continues, and just from her voice he can tell this is more of a dream than an argument to his points. "And it turns and turns, and sometimes it would be dark, and sometimes light. And there could be lawns that go on forever and you could run and run and never find the end of them, and there would be so many more stars to see…"
A bell sounds, signalling the end of her break. She leaps up and skips off, all her lovely dreams still swirling around inside her head.