Logline -
On a dying Earth, four couples confront whether to bring children into the world—and whether to surrender them to the Solar Marines on war-torn Europa—in an anthology where love, survival, and parenthood demand choices the audience must ultimately reckon with.
Earth has, officially, two hundred years of resources left. The Allocation Authority rations water, air, and power. The dust gets into lungs. On Europa, Jupiter's ice moon, there is an ocean and a future, and a war: the Solar Marines hold the colony against breakaway human Free Settlers and against the Vey, an intelligence that lives beneath the ice. The Corps raises children born into its care in the crèches, and it pays their families on Earth for them. That arrangement is called the Covenant.
A child needs a birth license, and the local quotas have been closed for years. A registered household may keep a declared, unlicensed child without an allocation of its own, sharing its parents' rations until the quota reopens. A person with no household registered before the conception cannot. An undeclared pregnancy is taken into the Covenant, and the mother is sent to a labor unit.
Covenant infants travel to Europa sedated, in the cold holds of the supply ships: an eleven-month crossing. Troop ships make it in about four. Officially, crèche children begin compulsory service at sixteen. In practice, they rotate through the perimeter from age twelve, and the Corps records it as instruction.
Running time: 1 hr. 15 min.
4M, 4W or 2M, 2W doubling roles
CHARACTERS
Our Share of the Air
MARA — late thirties. A municipal water engineer. Eleven weeks pregnant. She measures things when she is frightened.
ELI — early forties. Her husband. Born on Earth, sent up to a Europa crèche as an infant, and returned after his service; his knees have never forgiven the gravity. Now a maintenance worker. He can repair almost anything in their apartment.
Blue Hour
IRIS — late thirties. A resource modeler for the Allocation Authority. Precise. Her grief has been filed, indexed and cross-referenced, and she knows exactly where to find it.
JONAH — early forties. Former Sergeant, Solar Marines, Third Europa Expeditionary. His left arm ends below the elbow in a matte prosthetic. Gentle, in the way that unsettles people who know what he has done.
False Sky
JUNO — thirty. Lieutenant, Solar Marines. Grown in a tank on Europa and raised in a crèche: Cohort Twelve, Bunk Seven. She chose her own name at eighteen. Her body was built for a moon with a seventh of Earth's gravity, so on Earth she wears a gravity brace on both legs and moves like someone who expects the floor to tilt.
AMOS — forty. Keeper of the Hollis Planetarium, the last one still operating on the continent. Talks too much when he's frightened. Coughs when he talks too much.
Graft
ROZ — thirty-four. Keeper of the Seed Terrace, the Authority's last rooftop orchard. For twelve years she has packed seeds and cuttings for the supply ships to Europa. Funny, sharp, and allergic to being pitied.
ELLIS — forty-one. A licensing assessor at the Authority Birth Registry. He decides which couples may have a child. Married to Hana. One son, Theo, seven. Neat, careful, and exhausted from being both.
SETTING AND PERFORMANCE
Staging the collection
The plays can be performed separately or together, in any order, with one pair of actors or four pairs. Each play begins with its own character and setting notes. Only the two characters named in each play are seen or heard.
Each play is built around a different action: a repair that keeps being interrupted, a signature needed against a clock, a planetarium show its keeper keeps trying to give, and a morning's grafting before an office opens. The arguments interrupt those actions. Play the attempts to persuade, conceal, bargain and retreat, rather than the dialogue as a sequence of speeches.
The endings close on different things: a sound in the dark, a light carried away, a sky that outlasts the people beneath it, and a dawn. Transitions should preserve the uncertainty of each ending.
