The Window Repairer

The complaint said: WINDOW SHOWING INCORRECT VIEW.

Mara took a replacement screen to Cabin 214. Outside the orbital station, Saturn’s rings shone like a road nobody could reach.

Inside the cabin, the window showed a brick wall.

A small, ordinary wall. Damp at the bottom. A weed growing from a crack.

“That certainly isn’t Saturn,” Mara said.

The passenger stood between her and the control panel.

“Does it have to be?”

He was an elderly man wearing the pale slippers issued for long journeys. His suitcase remained closed.

“You filed a complaint.”

“I asked whether you could make the picture wider. Your form didn’t have a box for that.”

Mara checked the screen. Its serial number belonged to the station’s first generation of cabin windows, installed forty years earlier. Beneath the live-view software, someone had left an old video file.

“Do you know this place?”

“My kitchen looked onto it.”

She glanced at the wall again.

“You came all this way to look at your kitchen view?”

“My daughter bought the ticket.”

Something moved at the edge of the picture. A sliver of red, gone before Mara could identify it.

“There,” he said. “Can you show more on that side?”

The file was damaged. Most technicians would have replaced it. Mara had six more jobs waiting, including a shower that rained upward.

Instead, she sat on the floor.

While her scanner worked, the man explained that the station’s builders had collected thousands of ordinary Earth scenes for passengers who found space unsettling. His wife had submitted theirs. Apparently, she had thought it funny.

“She always said we had the least interesting view in the country.”

The scanner found another strip of image.

A red sleeve appeared.

Mara looked up. The man had stopped rubbing his hands together.

She restored the next strip carefully.

A woman stepped into view, carrying a chipped bowl. She scattered something along the wall. Three sparrows descended. One landed on her head.

The woman laughed soundlessly.

“Can you recover the audio?” he asked.

Mara tried twice.

“No. I’m sorry.”

He watched the woman shoo the sparrow away. The recording looped. Again, the bowl. Again, the bird.

“I’d forgotten that happened,” he said.

Mara saved the recovered file to his travel card. Then she showed him how to switch between the recording and the outside camera.

At the door, she heard him call her back.

“Which side are the rings on?”

She returned and pressed the control.

Saturn filled the cabin with gold.

For a while, they stood together looking at it.

Then he checked that the little button for home was still there.