The coffee tasted poor. It was good coffee. It wasn’t the coffee. But everything tasted bitter on his tongue. The coffee, the milk, the dime-store bread they’d toasted.

            “It’s not good?”

            Celia had this habit. She’d ask him things she knew: You don’t want more? You didn’t sleep? You aren’t going to brush your teeth?

            “Something’s wrong,” he said.

            She tasted the cup herself and left the rim clean of gloss and lipstick. She wore neither.

            “You’d prefer a tea? You’d prefer a juice?”

            He cracked the window against the heat. They had no tea. They had no juice.

            Celia cleared the plates and stacked them in the sink. She did not order the mess. Did not gaze out at the cul-de-sac. Simply emptied the cups into the drain and piled one plate atop the other.

            He stared beyond her, out the window to where the sand had choked the margins. Windy last night. Celia’s breath, rhythmic, alkaline. Her open mouth.

            Shrugging her shoulders to reject the hand he hadn’t offered, sat on the vinyl of the entry and struggled with her sandal straps. “I’m leaving, Wally,” she muttered, then said something about lunch. Wall asking about duration when the front door swung and closed.

#

            The Aggrigrow was doing well. Not the company, but the seeds. Each plant seemed frozen in ecstasy, branches splayed, pods moist and blushing.

            The company, meanwhile, was going to shit. Prepping for another move, another merger, another rebrand. Employees given severance speeches via uplink by smiling executives.

            “Mr. Korbitz, I’m sure this comes as quite a shock. Hell, I know how you feel. Had an uncle that farmed myself, back on the Major Plane. Don’t let the suit and tie fool you; I have been in your shoes.”

            Wall looked down at the clods of mud on his bare feet. He’d considered correcting the man about the shoe comment, but wasn’t sure if the comm booth was equipped for talkback. It was an impromptu setup, thrown together at the edge of the vast soilbed for this specific purpose--to convey the company’s sympathies to employees who may or may not be wearing shoes.

            “I assure you,” the suited man continued, “once the merger settles down, you’ll be considered for work on the satellite colony. Remember, skilled labor is Aggrigrow’s greatest asset. We need you just as much as you need us.”

            Wall rubbed the dirt between his toes and waited for the man to finish and the screen to go blank.

#

            Down the road from Wall and Celia’s, Leffy looked depressed. His shoulders slumped against the bar, as was their nightly practice. But Leffy always looked depressed, it was his body’s fleshy tonnage. He simply carried too much to appear any other way.

            He bought Wall their first round. Didn’t bother with a toast. Wall sniffed his drink for traces of Aggri; that acrid, not-quite-normal smell. Typically, he tried to ignore it, but today it deserved special attention.

            “S’bullshit,” Leffy said, gesturing at the map of the Minor Plane. It was tacked to the drywall behind the bar with their colony labeled brightly, as though some source of celebration, its rings each different shades of pink. “The new satellite’s off on the back end. Couldn’t afford t’get there if we tried.”

            But Leffy was going nowhere. Had never intended to. None of them had. Theirs wasn’t the work you took if you planned on going places.

#

            At home, Leffy watched the shows. He forewent his two-drink limit somewhere between the soap about the Empress and the thriller about the banks.

            He enjoyed them. Sure, they didn’t offer much, but a man deserved certain enjoyments. Couldn’t sip on a glass and watch only the ceiling. Especially his, pitted and stained. Couldn’t look at the carpet either. Sand was dried to little clumps from when he’d forgot to latch the door.

            Soon, he’d move down-ring. Rent a nice place in cooler climes. Save up so they could walk the streets unmasked and leave the windows wide all night. He’d call his old girl, Rimmy. She’s wear a nicely patterned dress and they would drink and talk through out the way they ought to have for years.

            Leffy poured himself another, watched the thriller about the banker. Then he went and got the bottle so as to really settle in.

#

            There was no easy way to say it: Salcah was over the hill. She sensed it, Mae could tell. The strain weighed on her worse than ever. Even back when she’d worked that brutal schedule of promos in every major colony, with the night shoots and the interviews, even that hadn’t been this bad. She’d seemed indomitable, then. In full command of her talent, starring in two or three shows a season.

            And it wasn’t just the crow’s-feet or the soft folds of her smile--that got touched up long before the show was beamed out to the rings. It was the color of her demeanor which began to worry Mae.

            Sexy Salcah, who had charmed the Colonies in Slave of the Minor Planes and To Dream Only of Light, had fro the first time been miscast. Salcah seemed to be aware of it--look at her listless mumbling scenes! How she tripped over her cues! And Sexy Salcah as a banker?

            Yet they were here, agent and actress, perhaps equally at fault, both facing the first real true disaster of their adult lives.

#

            Wall sent Celia for more tape. He washed the dishes while she was out. The ketchup stains and Aggrimash chipping dry onto the counter.

            Dust and grit flooded the room to form a film across their luggage. He’d left the window cracked, the open boxes were old clothes anyway. Suits he’d purchased from Aggri, Inc.--two for chemical work, one for the rain rooms. An operator’s jacket for the T-rig, though he had not qualified as pilot. He needed tenure to pilot the rig but bought the setup anyway. Celia said the road to glory was paved with self-belief. You had to make room for the outcome. They had believed that stuff back then.

            Wall pushed a box into the entryway heaped with donations. Shorts and sandals. Colored visors and useless tank tops. Aggri set up a credit system to offer their clothes to the next crop of workers. That made Celia happy, imagining some recent migrant in her tops. Every ten pounds of material was a week’s worth of free screens.

            “Imagine!” she’d insisted. “Us all cozy there up-ring, beaming shows or a movie, dancing to music all night long. Remember?” Celia stayed at him. “Remember how we liked to dance?”

            Wall went to the stack the dishes set along the crowded counter. He washed his eyes under the faucet and wet the space behind his ears. Celia was trudging up the drive, bent in half against the windstorm. She spotted the open window and started yelling through her mask.

            Wall went and closed it. He turned around and surveyed their little kitchen. As cramped as when they had arrived and just as piled with junk.

            He scolded himself silently, Try to focus on the bright side. Celia didn’t like his pouting, but he was working against the flow.

            They weren’t even taking the dishes was cleaning.