Missing the Seasons

Miriam shivered, the cold biting into her skin as a draft of wind managed to find its way down into the mining tunnels. Instinctively, she reached to rub her arms, ignoring the fact that the touch caused a smear of mud to appear near her elbow. She was used to the dirt and the grime, but she somehow still wasn't used to the cold. Five years she had been in this forsaken place. Five years she had endured continuous cold and rain. Behind her, a warden shouted threateningly for her to get back to work and she knew better than to disobey. Five years she had been a slave here.

The mine was located on an odd little moon that had only partially accepted the Terraforming process. It had breathable air and a climate that was technically capable of sustaining life, but, at least at the poles where the mines were located, it was never comfortable. The Owner had paid a huge sum of money, Miriam had heard, in order to get a special Terraforming treatment to the valley at the moon's equator, so that he could build his own home on-planet, and that area was now nothing but comfort. The rest of the planet, though, where the Owner forced the vast majority of his slaves to work day in and out, was cold year-round – a constant 7 to 8 degrees Celcius.

Even if the Owner had been willing to pay the extra money for his slaves' comfort, which he wasn't, the unusual clay that filled the mines was most workable at these temperatures, and under the nearly continuous rain that fell on the moon's southern pole where Miriam worked. Any change in temperature or water content of the soil, and it would become nearly impossible to retrieve the precious stones buried within, one of the Owner's two sources of his great wealth. The rest of his money came from "acquiring" and selling slaves.

As Miriam plunged her hands once more into the clay soil in search of gems, she shivered again, although this time it was more in memory of the day her freedom had been taken from her. Mother had never explained why they were leaving Angel, the planet where Miriam had been born and raised. All the little girl had known was that they were leaving immediately to see Mother's family, and Pa wasn't coming with them. But then they were intercepted as they switched transports on Bernadette, and they had never made it to their relatives, instead ending up trapped as slaves.

They had both been sold to the Owner and sent to the mining Moon, Rousseau, and Miriam had been trapped here ever since, enduring the unending cold. Mother had been sold off right away to another slaver, and Miriam hadn't had heard anything from or about her since. The girl herself had been sent straight to the mines, forced to dig for gems with her bare hands with the other slaves, because any tools would run the risk of damaging the relatively soft gem stones. So far as she knew, no one back home even knew that they had gone missing and no one had ever come looking for them.

She had been sick a few times in the months after she first arrived. It had been six years since she had experienced such low temperatures back on Angel, and then she had always had a nice thick jacket to wear. Here, her ragged dress was barely hanging together, and the material was so thin that it provided absolutely no protection from the environment. Add that to the fact that she was continuously wet through the day from the unending rain and working with the saturated clay, and it wasn't much of a surprise that she'd caught a terrible cold within the first two weeks. The illness had lasted well over a month, but she was still expected to keep up the same quota as when she was healthy. The slave wardens didn't care a bit that she was sick. They cared only about keeping the slaves down in the mines, working away.

She had always expected that she would eventually get used to the cold, but nearly three years had passed and she'd still been shivering from the miserable conditions all hours of the day. And then she had been chosen. The Owner dealt in slave trade as well as precious gems, and potential buyers would often tour the mines, choosing the workers that they wanted to purchase. The entire process made Miriam absolutely sick. She had always known that slavery was evil – freedom was a basic concept that everyone she'd ever known had had instilled in them from the time they were young. But here, it was totally absent.

She'd been taken to the valley, once, chosen when she was sixteen by the Owner to act as one of his personal slaves. He had about a dozen young women at his home in the valley, but Miriam had refused to have anything to do with the man. She had fought and kicked and screamed – anything she could do to get away from the man. Even the warmth of the equator palace wasn’t worth submitting to the Owner's every whim and command – working in the mines was bad enough. The palace warden had tried to beat her into submission, but when she continued to fight, she was sent back to the mines, and she'd been there for all of the two years since, cold and always wet once again.

Nearby, the young woman heard the crack of a whip and a warden shouting obscenities as he ordered the slaves to work faster. A glance down at her basket told Miriam that she was still well below her quota for the day, and she tried to quicken her pace, clawing desperately through the mud walls in search of gems. But her hands were stiff and almost numb from the cold, and it was getting harder and harder to do her work as the day dragged on.

How she longed for the warmth of Angel. There, the seasons changed slowly, but at least they changed. Every two and a half years, the planet's climate would shift, providing new temperatures and weather patterns. The changes of the seasons were gradual enough that Angel's people had time to adjust to the new temperatures and to get to like it, but not so long that they would get terribly bored of it. And it was almost always warmer than this. Miriam could remember her first and only winter on Angel, during her first few years of primary school as a little girl, but for the most part, her whole life before Rousseau had been warm, and she had always been comfortable and cared for.

She had never imagined she would lose all that so easily. Yet, here she was, cold, alone, and enslaved. Back home on Angel, it would be the start of spring now, if she had calculated correctly, the season of new beginnings and of change. Oh how she missed her old home. And that was even without mentioning the loss of her family or her best friend, for those thoughts were too painful to even begin to think about right now. Still, she would give anything if only she could escape this wretched place and get back home, where she belonged. If only.