---

Sister Cities

by Marie Vibbert

The Pour House Tavern is built on a stairway, with low ceilings that step down along with the bar, so it’s hard to see who’s at the other end, and the smoke gathers on the high side, making it even harder, and that’s why I didn’t notice Rusty until Crash yanked me down to her mouth-level to shout, “My drone came back from West Leg.” She raises her brows, widens her eyes, like the only reason I’m not squealing in excitement is that I don’t get what she means.

It means that for once, the Halo didn’t shoot something down, nothing more, nothing less, but now I’ve seen Rusty there, and he’s looking over at us like he’s wondering what we’re up to. Rusty’s a rival climber with a rich daddy who underbids contracts because he doesn’t need the money. I haul Crash off her bar stool—she weighs less than a kitten—and shoulder my way out to the steeply-slanting alley. In one direction, the center of town gleams like a golden bowl. In the other, I smell piss. I turn to Crash with my most bored expression. “You think you can get to The Halo?”

“I know it! Look, I have footage, and a flight plan—”

“Ignore it,” I say. “Nothing but misery and death for the folks who try to go up.”

Her eyes are open wounds. “Geej, you’re the only real climber I know. Do you want me to do this solo?”

I’m probably the only person in Cratertown that doesn’t dream about getting to The Halo. It’s this donut-shaped floating city, shored to the edges of our crater. All the kids here learn about the forces that keep it up: the anomaly in the magnetosphere, the special meteor fragments buried around town. And I mean all the kids. I get lectures on physics from seven-year-olds.

It’s that I’m not from here. Growing up in Portlanding, Cratertown was the dream destination: a place that was genuine to this planet, not the same old galactic mass-production. And you know what? I love it: the sun glowing on the cliffs that peek through buildings no matter which direction you’re facing, the tidy streets that sometimes turn sharply into ramps, the cafes built on balconies and landings. Hell, even The Halo, that unnatural thing, glinting silver or hiding in low fog, casting down its shadows, making the lights come on. Cratertown glitters with points of light all the time, even forgotten nooks are strung with lamps in rainbow colors. Couldn’t Crash see the beauty right here?

Then Rusty pokes his head out of the bar, and like Crash can read my mind she joins me in tromping up the alley, past the piss-smell into the darker, more twisting streets. Rusty once had a drone snatch a stranded cat. A drone! Nearly broke its paw. We don’t talk to Rusty.

Our twisty alley opens into a broader street, all cobbles and shops. It’s late, though, so everything’s closed. This is the neighborhood with horses carved on the walls and the little iron rings to tie off your hover-bike. Crash says, “I need this.”

Crash’s mom died trying to get to the Halo. It’s sad. It’s epic-level mommy issues. Normally, I pretend I don’t know; anything to keep the subject silent. But this time, I unload the nuclear option, “It’s not going to bring her back.”

“I know that.” Barely a whisper. “This is for me. Why doesn’t anyone get that?”

Crash has this fold under her lip that means she’s not going to give up until she has her way, and I know I’m not going to let my bestie go solo, if I can’t talk her out of it. “Can we pick this up in the morning? I’m way too buzzed for this.” A lie. I’ve been nursing a water with a lime slice, hoping someone will buy me a drink, but Crash falls for a blatant lie the way she never would a well-crafted one.

“Tomorrow, sunset, the goat fountain,” she says, and leaves me at the next slip-rail stop.

---

My apartment is near the top of a tapering concrete pylon, one of many standing like a ring of cool white teeth around the center of the warm sandstone city. They were used to lift the first part of The Halo into place, but the perspective bothers me; they look too close together for the outer edge of the ring and too far apart for the inner. There’s video footage of it going up, so I can’t deny the inner section of the ring once hung from these towers before catching hold of whatever it is that all the school kids can lecture about.

Maybe that’s why I love this city—every day, you can see the limits of human perception. Over half of the towers have been torn down to make way for other things. Most of the remaining ones are apartments like mine, one per floor, getting smaller as they go up, with excellent elevators and terrible plumbing.

When I get to my block, my alerts are already stacking. I’m in demand. I put on my climbing gear and skip the elevator.

I love being a climber. I see parts of the city few see. Well, few see all of. I’m sure each wall-top and decoration has its admirers, peering from small balconies or garret windows. Every rooftop hallow is some kid’s secret get-away. Children climb their own buildings and their neighbor’s. That’s how I got started, though Portlanding had fewer ledges you could get a finger into and a lot more cops pulling you back to your parents.

Sitting in my apartment window, I flick to order my incoming requests geographically, then flick again to prioritize cats.

I change my clothes and have a snack, and within twenty minutes, I’m at a garret where a worried man gestures helplessly. “Smokey never jumps, but there was a bird.”

We see the said Smokey, a sooty cloud of fur, crouching fearfully on an olive branch sticking over a neighboring roof. Whatever it is that makes cats so good at going up but unwilling to come down, it keeps me in bob.

The big cat hisses like a demon and swipes at me, but becomes boneless in my arms. He starts purring the minute the old man touches him. “Oh, thank you Mx. Geej!” Nose-to-nose they commune in cat-language, and I consider that half my tip.

Then I’m off to replace some lights, move an antenna, retrieve a toy, and then more lights. All those tiny ground-stars that fight The Halo shadow, and it’s always the inaccessible ones that break down. Typical evening for me.

I’m grimy and sweaty and cat-scratched when The Halo shadow abruptly shifts away and long beams of sunlight drag across the jumble of the roof level. Dawn is a drawing of drain pipes and air vents, built need by need, individual and messy, like the chambers of an ant hill. This is a city. Pure human habitat. That up there… maybe it’s as pretty as the dramas make it, but it was all built at once. That lacks something.

By the rising light, I don’t have time to get home, so I head to meet Crash. I’ll sleep after I tell her not to do this.

---

Our crater was settled long before it swelled with workers constructing The Halo, early colonists found the soil good and the rock walls not a challenge when the local ore powers hovercars. So Cratertown is dotted with sudden plazas and fountains marking the center of some community now subsumed by the whole. Why this one has a pair of goats dancing on their hind legs is beyond me. The water didn’t run when I first moved here, but it’s been repaired, and a lusty column continually collapses on itself between the goats, spattering on their faces and hooves. You can see one is a male goat and one a female. The whole thing is erotic in the weirdest way.

A stout man with a permanent scowl is roasting nuts on a wide stove. Translucent letters in neon colors spin and flash over his head, “Plaza Snacks – 4 bob credit transfer, 3 bob cash”

It’s a good price, and I have the cash, so I buy a paper bag dotted with hot grease and smelling like holidays.

Crash is always late. I have time to plan my strategy.

She’ll say: the mystery is the point. The rich founders of the Halo have never allowed any photos or video inside their city to be published. None of the very few who have met the strict requirements to go up there have ever come back, either. Take a photo, and be famous. A big boon for the independent entrepreneur.

I’ll say: no one wants a mystery revealed.

I should think up other arguments, but I like that one too much.

The nearest tether-point for The Halo, West Leg, is close enough to loom over the brick buildings around Goat Plaza, a chrome invader from some other genre. In the old days, people would climb the tethers. They died, of course. Those who didn’t fall from sheer exhaustion were taken out by security drones. To this day, housing under the tethers is cheap, because the memory of a corpse crashing into your kitchen dies slowly.

When the Halo went up, it left behind a swollen population of unemployed artisans, a city with its economic center torn out. Of course people were desperate to get up there, that glittering city in the sky, new and polished with stolen wealth. It cost a million bob to apply to move there, and there is a cap of one approved per year. Exclusive as exclusive gets. These days, it’s a news item when some rich person applies. Some don’t even take the trip once they’re approved; it’s bragging rights just to be approved.

Why are people still obsessed? Cratertown recovered. We make the best lighting and gadgets on the southern continent. People come from other worlds to attend our arts festivals. The glider rail to Portlanding never stops disgorging eager young suckers looking to learn to make elegant drones or light-sculptures and unaware that their cats are going to be up a tree within a week.

And good god damn are these roasted nuts glorious.

By the time Crash is huffing across the plaza at a jog, dwarfed by her backpack, I’ve built a solid argument to give up the whole enterprise, with prepared counters for her objections.

I’m not prepared for her to drop the pack on my feet and grab my shoulder, pressing her slight weight onto me as she catches her breath. “Huh… huh… he—”

“Easy,” I say. “Back it up.”

“We can’t…” she swallows. “We have to go now. Rusty and his gang are getting ready to go. We have to be the first.”

Oh no. There’s that itch in my gut: competitiveness. It’s a bait I know I should ignore, but can’t. “I thought you said no one knew.”

She blows the hair out of her face and glares at me like I’m stupid. “The defense drones are down. You think I’m the only one who probes them?”

In a sentence, we go from “this might be possible” to “we have to be the first.”

I push her gently back onto her own feet. “We’re not going up West Leg.”

“It’s right there!”

As much as I object to the idea of climbing up to The Halo, I’d formed my plan ages ago, how I’d do it. A mental exercise mostly fueled by the obvious mistakes others make. “If the drones are down, we fly up.”

Her eyes widen with avarice, and I can feel myself being pushed out of our plan. (OUR plan? What’s happened to my brain? But… the highest climb, the free advertising… beating Rusty…) I quickly add, “You’ll still need a climber to get in.” We’ve seen the footage, the zoom-cameras from shot-down drones. The Halo platform is ringed by a wall as high as any hilltop fortress in ancient Europe, and a glass dome over the top. Only a climber could find the hidden entrances.

She squeezes my shoulder, like, good thinking, mate.

I already regret this.

---

Crash rents an air-scooter, one of the tourist type, not much more than two seats and handlebars, in the shape of a swan. The sun is over The Halo, throwing shadow on the ring of pylon-buildings by the time we push off from my apartment window, but still Crash is anxious that we might be seen rising against the shadowed ring. I’m able to talk her out of her plan of leaving Cratertown completely and coming in from above only because it would give Rusty more time to catch up.

Anyway, I’m driving. Crash comes by her nickname for a reason.

We skim the rooftops to a point where West Leg casts its shadow on us and then we go straight up. The “legs” are big metal pylons perched on the edges of the crater, leaning inward, swoosh-shaped. At their tops are the cables, invisible from the ground, that attach to the Halo platform, keeping it in place over the city. The cable is massive up close. There are safety-lights on it, but most burned out a long time ago. The Halo picked keeping the rabble out over ease of maintenance. The higher we follow the leg, the more lights are intact.

The air-scooter handles like a shopping cart with a stuck wheel, and the winds are yanking us, still Crash insists on staying very close under the cable, in the hard noon shadow. She’s hugging my waist and uses her grip to “steer” me when I get too far. I try to explain that it doesn’t matter where we fly, we are always going to risk being seen—there are people who live on the edge of the crater, for luck’s sake—but okay. She’s deploying the chin-wrinkle, and I know better than to beat my head against a brick wall.

We’re going at the scooter’s top speed, and its engine is whirring like it’ll burn up, but with everything huge or far away, it feels like we’re crawling. It also feels like walking out of a store after shoplifting. The Halo drones will shoot us down any second. The safety patrol will come and yank us away for our own protection.

The Halo grows. We can see where the wall meets the dusty dome.

Crash grabs my arm, nails digging in. “Shit!”

This causes me to jerk the yoke, and we nearly fall over, and my blood is in my ears and I’m over-correcting and my elbow nearly brushes the crushing hard cable and Crash is still jerking at me, trying to get me to look behind us.

Finally, the stupid swan is stable enough for me to look in the rear-view mirror. A fuzzy something, swinging left and right, is gaining on us. A drone? I tap the glass to magnify. Rusty himself hangs practically over the hood ornament of a sporty red hovercar, wearing goggles, his stupid orange curls whipping behind him, lips parted, all teeth, like he’s slurping up the air. How I hate that guy.

“No!” Crash says right as I turn us out into the sun, as I knew she would. Well, if Halo’s security forces are watching, they’ve got two targets now.

I try something from the serials: swinging closer to the tether, back and forth like I can wipe the tail off of us. Crash screams something that’s lost in the wind, but I’m pretty sure it’s how I’m an idiot. She scrambles over me and takes the wheel.

Crash destroyed three flyers in the demolition derby they hold every Summer Solstice. Not on purpose. I suppose that gave her more experience than my religious watching of “Beyond the Stars” because she’s dropping us low and up like a fish on the line and all I can do is hang on to a flimsy sculpted wing as the city yawns below and then beside me. “Up” and “down” are becoming complex terms.

We’ve reached where the tether cable connects to the city platform with a junction box the size of a castle. The Halo’s shadow is falling and lifting over us like a waving flag and my stomach wants to crawl up my throat and jump out. Carefully, one limb at a time, I crawl around Crash and into the rear seat. I’m looking right at Rusty because, well, as he matches our moves, it’s the most stable point to focus on. He’s close enough to spit.

I’m looking him right in the eyes when his ship is hit. I see the grin drop, the white go all the way around his irises, and then Rusty, ship, and stupid hair are all spiraling toward the ground, trailing smoke.

I clench my eyes and use one hand to check the straps on my parachute.

“It’s coming from the Halo!” Crash shouts, and something zings close enough to burn my hair. She’s crying and screaming orders I don’t catch. That’s all that’s clear of the four seconds or so between Rusty going down and our right wing snapping off like an invisible giant yanked it, and we’re spinning, and I puke, and it hits my cheek and flies sideways or maybe that was down, and I have my climbing harness on so I fire a grapple and grab Crash around the waist before I know if it caught anything.

The grapple jerks taut, the scooter falls away under us, a broken toy, and Crash is clinging to me like a pissed off cat, all nails dug in. I hit the button to retract the grapple and we glide slowly up until we’re on a thin little ledge of lattice around what looks like the canon that shot us down.

Once we’re sure our butts are secure on the ledge and it isn’t going to break under us, we take a long time to get our breathing under control. Crash rubs her face with her palms and stares above us. The city wall looks as high as endless from here, curving away from us. “What do we do?”

I have to grin, I can’t help it, everyone loves being right. “We climb.”

---

A straight wall climb is an ordeal. The city defenses shot some birds and I dropped us four feet from the heart attack the sound gave me. Trigger happy bastards.

The wall is a wall, smooth as glass. Maybe they thought that would keep climbers from getting up, but it was perfect for my suction-grips.

It does not feel easier as the wall curves under us. It doesn’t get near horizontal for another ten stories above, but soon, I see our ticket: an honest-to-gods busted window. Guess they happen even in paradise. I imagine a thrown vase during a heated argument about whose turn it is to fuck the robot butler. The ledge is big enough for Crash and me to hang off side-by-side. We take another long breath. We’re looking at a corridor? The floor is only a story below so I drop down. The thought hits before I straighten. I look again at the greasy planking under my boots, and try raising my gaze slower, like it’ll come out different this time.

Crash lands behind me with a harsh exhale, and we are silent together for a beat. “What a dump,” she says.

“I mean, I guess they have their bad neighborhoods up here,” I say. Wind whistles sharply from the broken window, ruffling the trash strewn about the corridor, which is actually an alley. The walls, graffiti’ed, grimy, and full of ad-hoc repairs, end well below the dome, which paints the sky a dull, dusty blue.

First, I take out the paint-pen I brought for this moment, and we write our names on a clear patch of wall: Crash and Geej, We Are First! We take a photo, and Crash frowns at it because it could’ve been taken in a not-very-interesting part of Portlanding. We re-take it with the window behind us, angled up to show the curving dome.

“We’re doing this again when we’re not in the town dump,” Crash growls.

The alley opens out onto a street, and it’s not better. There’s a weed-choked strip along the path, with a half-disassembled skimmer car peeking out of the tall grass. There’s another skimmer car down the street, and it’s at least fifty years out of date. Crash brushes it with her fingertips, and an alarm wails.

We jump back. A window opens on one of the grim buildings and a shot fires, pinging on the pavement inches away from us. We run.

There’s a neglected sort of park, and we take refuge in the overgrown bushes. Crash is laughing silently under her huffs for breath. “That was a ShadowKat 18. My grandpa had one!”

I scan between the trees and bushes; what I’m seeing is a landscape from a hundred years ago, the elongated shapes of a dream of an airy city, metal and glass clouded by time. There’s one new building, cheap and square with safety-barred circular windows.

A wet cough alerts me that we aren’t alone. A shape huddles on a park-bench, shoulders shifting for comfort.

The longer we sit without pursuit from whoever that was with the gun, the more we calm down. We stand and stretch. Every direction reveals more trash, more ugliness. Big cracks in windows repaired with tape. A dangling wire from a broken light fixture. The man on the park bench stirs, and stares at us with alarm.

Crash approaches him before I can stop her. “Hey, we’re looking for the good side of town. Which way do we go? Clockwise or counter?”

The man gathers the coat he was using as a blanket against his chest. Slowly, like he’s trying to remember a poem learned in grade school, he says, “This spot is taken.” He smells like piss.

“Come on,” I tug Crash away. “It’s a ring. Either direction works.”

The design of the city becomes clear after a few blocks. There are buildings on either side of us, with occasional alleys ending in windows between them, and a string of defiled parks and empty ponds in the center. It’s like a hollow tree, still alive only on the edges. Or like something that is eating itself.

I’m filming everything, of course. “We came, we saw, we leave.” I point behind us. Out the window, and parachute jump, and we’re safe and sound, received as heroes, the first visitors to the Halo.

Crash shakes her head. “This isn’t it.” She hurries ahead, and I have to catch up.

We are in some market district. There are store signs, but everything has smaller signs saying “By appointment only” and “no public restrooms” or “no public water.”

It’s a dying city of locked doors. The only sign of life is the snapping down of shutters when we look in windows. Crash points up. A man stares at us, leaning over a balcony railing.

I wave. “Hey! Hi! We’re—”

He’s gone like a mouse that sees a cat’s shadow.

We start trying doors, and eventually one is open. Well, “open” is inaccurate. It’s bent and damaged, so that I’m able to slide a climbing pick through the gap and unhook the chain holding it shut.

Crash is bouncing. “This is it. I bet the riches, the beautiful places, are inside.”

It’s a musty corridor with stained yellow carpet, but Crash is optimistic, trying other doors. “This has to be, like, a utility passage, for deliveries or taking out trash. We’ve been on the worker side of things.”

The deeper we get, the less I’m sure. I smell cooking smells, and some of the doors have welcome mats. They’re all locked, and no one answers our knocks, though I see peep-holes and mounted cameras.

We reach a stair at the end of the corridor, a wider space, with two busted-open vending cabinets, and a kid stares at us, one hand on the crayon she is using to draw on the much-abused crepe-patterned wall.

“Hi,” Crash says. “Can you show us someplace fancy?”

“I don’t have any money,” the girl says.

Crash and I look at each other. I shrug. “Neither do we. We’re… looking for something cool to see.”

The kid turns her back to the wall and tucks her crayon into a pocket on the chest of her tattered jumper. “I like your clothes.”

We’re both in utili-suits, mine slick black under my climbing harness, Crash’s pink, but nothing special.

But our clothes are the only clean and bright things in sight. Crash crouches to the kid’s height. “Were you born here on the Halo?”

The kid’s eyes get wide. “You’re from down in Dirt Town?”

That’s it. From now on I’m calling this The Toilet Seat. “We just came to see. Show my friend something impressive, and we’ll leave.”


She points. “That way. You first.”

There’s a door from the stairwell into a courtyard with a dry swimming pool and some rusty play equipment.

“We have the best in the city,” the girl brags. She’s pointing at a chipped and battered fountain, also dry, against the wall of the courtyard. A stone lion with visible rough spots where his teeth were knocked out, yawns eternally over an upturned clamshell full of refuse.

We inspect the fountain and try to act impressed, when we hear a rushing behind us, fabric and feet and door slamming. A dozen people rush through three different doors, all in armored vests and helmets with visors, holding big riot shields and batons.

Crash and I have nothing behind us but a broken fountain. The little girl gasps, “Someone called the cops,” and scampers away.

“Show us your papers,” one of the visored, anonymous figures shouts.

Crash and I slowly raise our hands. “Just… visiting,” I say. “We’ll go, if you want.”

“You people,” she sneers—she’s closer now and I can see the feminine shape of her jaw under the visor. “You want what we have, but you don’t want to earn it.” She flicks her baton to the side and it expands, crackling with electricity. “Over the side, for you.”

I grab Crash’s hand and run, hard, to the side. I’m thinking about Rusty. About not-so-automated fire. There’s no way out of this courtyard but how we got in, but my plan, instinctual as it is, is to get them chasing us so the door is unguarded. The cops are smarter than that, they split in two, one group waiting to catch us. We’re trapped.

A glass apartment-door shatters behind us. I hope that little kid got away clear.

My mom was right; I am going to get myself killed. She meant moving out on my own so young, but she was only off by two years.

I shoot my grapple at a balcony overhead and we tumble over the railing, gunshots peppering the walls around us. The safety-glass balcony door blooms with multiple impacts.

Below I hear them shouting things like “Dirt-grubbers” and “Worms.”

Crash throws a potted plant into the courtyard, I kick the door apart and we crawl into the apartment.

It’s dim. Some people are huddled behind a corner, staring out at us. The furnishings are old-fashioned but well cared for. It smells… well, it smells like someone shit in here a long time ago and no one did anything about it.

“Excuse us,” I say, and we leave the apartment by its front door.

“They’ll be coming up here,” Crash says. “We’re trapped.” There’s a bank of elevators, but they’re dark, and I suspect they don’t work. There’s a stairwell door propped open with a brick. A bang echoes below, and the sound of boots pounding up stairs.

“Parachute,” I say, and point at the end of the corridor, where there is a big window. Sure enough, it’s looking out on the plain around Cratertown.

I’ve never had a harder time opening a window, and it had a simple lever-handle.

There’s a scramble, trying to get over the edge, the wind screaming, and we hear a door bang behind us and then we’re falling and Crash is screaming and damn if my chute doesn’t open on the first tug…

But it opens, and despite a few bullet-holes, we’re floating down to the city I love, alive. The wind has pushed us under, out of window-range. Safe and sound. Crash’s face is all wet against my collarbone, but I’m looking at the many traceries of sundial murals that track the flow of the Halo through the day. I mean the Toilet Seat. I think: we get more out of the Halo now than they get from us.

It’s not a graceful landing. The chute catches on something, I don’t even know what, and we fall on a roof and have to release and crawl down the side of a house to the street. I’m trembling like a new nerve. We’re in one of the edge-plazas, hard up on the crater wall. We must have crossed most of the city on the way down.

A road worker rushes to us from the traffic-direction stand. “Are you all right? Were you—” He looks at my chute flapping like a holiday banner and I can tell he can’t even begin to form the right question. I’m delighted. I can’t talk fast enough. “We were first! We made it to The Halo! And it’s TRASH. It’s absolute garbage. Worse than Portlanding! Freedom isn’t free! I mean… they were mad, like we were stealing something! Wait, wait… What happened to Rusty? Did anyone see him?”

Someone’s running to get someone official. Rusty made it, someone says, after I describe him, give his full name and explain what happened. Landed in Central Square, of all places. Someone’s brought us fluffy robes for some reason, and cups of hot soup. I turn to hand the second one to Crash, and she’s looking up at The Halo. Tears glow blue on her cheeks. The set of her lip now means she’s feeling a dream die.

“I’m sure it used to—” I begin.

“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t defend them. There are no windows on the bottom.”

I see where she’s looking, and it’d be hard to be sure from this distance, but I know she’s right. I put my arm around her shoulder. “So, Pour House?”

She jabs me hard, which is fair. The Pour House is miles away, and there are places waiting for us to discover them in this neighborhood.

---

Host Commentary

Once again, that was “Sister Cities” by Marie Vibbert.

The author had this to say about her story:
I started this story at a writing retreat in Italy, where I spent a week in a thousand year old monastery north of Sienna. I’d read Calvino’s Invisible Cities for the retreat, and it bounced around in my head along with the gorgeous architecture of Sienna and hit an old idea of mine, that I wanted the city floating above to be total trash, and the city in the dirt to be idyllic, a sort of reversal of a trope I’d seen a lot.

Humans love to invent and speculate about idealized cities and societies. From the mythical Atlantis, to the Kallipolis of Socrates, up to Thomas More’s Utopia and beyond, we imagine how much greener our grass could be if only things were different, if we were on the other side of the fence—or as in this story, in the city up above us in the sky. We’ve also, in fiction and in real life, seen what can happen when those who decide they know best gather together and form their own cities, with their own rules and restrictions—or lack thereof. For every Atlantis, there is an Omelas, or a Panem, or a Rapture, or a Grafton, New Hampshire. You may end up fighting genetically modified survivors of an underwater class war, or just trying to keep bears out of your backyard because your neighbors voted to defund garbage pickup and wildlife management. You may, as in this story, discover the city you thought was paradise is anything but. Even if there is an idyllic sector floating high above the masses, their pristine plenty is typically bought with the blood and sweat of those literally and figuratively beneath them. But as we enter the age of dreaming about moon bases and Martian habitats, many of us are starting to think that we’re actually doing fine right where we are. The dreams people are trying to sell us, of freedom and escape and leaving behind the messes we’ve made, feel more pie in the sky than ever when we could instead improve our own homes and neighborhoods and cities. Maybe it would serve us better if we made our own grass greener instead of wishing we had a different yard. Maybe we can replace it with a vegetable garden, or xeriscape it to save water. Maybe we can even let it go to seed and learn to appreciate the dandelions. Looking up at the stars is good, but sometimes looking down at the dirt is a different kind of ideal.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please do share it.

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And our closing quotation this week is from Italo Calvino, who said: “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”

Thanks for joining us, and may your escape pod be fully stocked with stories.