The ice beneath my boots sang with ancient frequencies as I descended into the marketplace carved from Europa’s frozen shell. Crystalline vendors hawked their wares in the tunnels where Jupiter’s radiation couldn’t reach, their breath forming small galaxies in the bitter air.
“Fresh memories from Earth!” called Zara, her stall draped with bioluminescent kelp that pulsed like a heartbeat. “Grandmother’s apple pie, first love’s kiss, the smell of rain on summer pavement!”
I pulled my thermal wrap tighter and approached her counter, where glass vials contained swirling, opalescent mist. Each one held someone’s lived experience, extracted and preserved for trade.
“I need something specific,” I whispered, glancing over my shoulder. The Station Authority had been cracking down on black market memory dealers, claiming the trade was destabilizing the colony’s psychological infrastructure.
Zara’s eyes narrowed. “How specific?”
“A mother’s lullaby. But not just any mother—one who knew the old songs from before the Great Migration.”
She disappeared behind her stall’s curtain of ice-woven fabric. When she returned, she held a vial that seemed to contain liquid starlight.
“This one’s dangerous,” she warned. “The woman who gave this up… she was dying of home-sickness. Literally. Her neural pathways were deteriorating from nostalgia.”
I placed a pouch of Europa’s rare blue salt on her counter. “I’ll take that risk.”
The memory hit me before I’d even finished uncorking the vial. Suddenly I was five years old again, lying in a bed that smelled of lavender and recycled air. A woman with kind eyes and calloused hands stroked my hair while singing words in a language I’d never heard but somehow understood.
“Hush now, little starling, the void is full of light,
Sleep until the morning comes to make the darkness bright…”
The lullaby wrapped around me like gravity, pulling me toward something I’d lost without knowing it. In this borrowed memory, I felt the weight of tradition, the comfort of ritual, the unbreakable chain connecting one generation to the next.
When the memory faded, I found myself crying frozen tears.
“She gave this up?” I asked.
Zara nodded solemnly. “Said the beauty was killing her. Some people aren’t strong enough to carry their past.”
I clutched the empty vial. For just a moment, I had felt what it meant to belong somewhere, to be part of something larger than survival and trade routes and the endless expansion into the dark.
As I walked back through the tunnels toward my quarters, Jupiter’s glow filtering through the ice above, I understood why the Station Authority feared the memory merchants. When you could taste what you’d lost, the hunger for home became unbearable.
But some hungers were worth feeding.
In my pocket, I carried three more vials I hadn’t shown Zara—memories I’d extracted from myself over the past year. My first glimpse of Earth through a porthole. My father teaching me to navigate by the stars. The day I’d volunteered for the Europa colony, believing I was choosing adventure over roots.
Tomorrow, I would trade them away, and some other homesick soul would taste my past while I learned to live without it.
The memory merchants understood what the authorities didn’t: sometimes forgetting was the only way to keep moving forward.
Leave a Reply