This is the sequel to Tree.
It is told by Jimmy’s daughter.
Every day, just after I get up, I climb on up to the observation dome and watch the Earth rise. Sometimes it’s already up, full in its beautiful blue glory, whisked with white clouds and smudged with the darker shades of earth.
“Jenny, you’ll be late!” my mother cries most mornings. Sometimes she has to call me twice before I climb back down, close the dome’s hatch and get ready for school.
Yes, we do school on Luna. Sorry, if you need to ask the question, you’re clearly a grubber — I mean — an earthsider. ‘An ancestor’ as my dad sometimes calls you. ‘A tourist’ as most of the polite adults will say. But, hey, I’m just twelve and no one my age says anything but ‘grubber’ and sometimes ‘grub.’ I’m sure you’re all very nice but I can’t imagine wanting to stay stuck in that overheating, overweighing, deep gravity well you think we should all call home.
I was born on the Moon. I’m a Moony, a Loony, or a Selene if you want to be nice. My parents tell me that if I really wanted to, I could go to the weight rooms and the centrifuges and learn to live on Earth — but I grew up here. My bones are thinner than yours and it’d take lots of work to make them strong enough to live at six times my normal weight.
And I’ve have to give up flying and I am not going to do that, thank you very much!
You probably think flying is the sort of thing you all do down on that dirt ball, don’t you? Get a big, powerful engine and have it pull you fast enough so that you can climb through that thick, muddy atmosphere of yours, right? Or maybe you’re a bit sophisticated and you’ve learned to hang glide. Well, if you have, you’re closer to proper flying at least.
But up here on the Moon, we really fly!
And that’s why I rushed to get dressed, didn’t complain at all when I had to race down the corridors to catch the walkways and arrived breathless at my first class of the day at the unbelievably early time of 9 a.m.
Because if I don’t get to school on time, have all my homework done and turned in, then I won’t get to fly after school. And I am not missing that, not even for a chance at simulator time, no, not me!
And, yeah, when my PE teacher asks me to do another forty sit-ups and another twenty push-ups, I don’t complain and I hardly even grumble because he knows what I do after school and he knows my parents, too! (I think that last bit’s not fair, really, and I’m not sure that Mr. LePisto would ever tell on me but … you can never tell with adults.)
We do go to school on the Moon, as I told you, but I suppose I should also mention that our schools are a lot different from grub schools. We can’t afford to spend all our time with our butts in chairs listening to someone drone on. And who’d want to? Our teachers are working as well, you know.
So we’re out in the gardens helping our biology teacher, Dr. Philedra with her latest cross-pollinations while we’re also talking about mitochrondria; we’re spinning glass while we’re listening to Dr. Lecter tell us about how to stop light in its tracks; we’re running photo discriminators on our comps while Dr. Kilstan is telling us about star formation. And we’re working on our own, figuring up new ideas in FreeForm (which is probably the hardest class we have), managing younger kids as they work in the bakery or serve on the cafeteria line, knitting, darning, throwing pots, double-checking QA test results, you name it.
How do you think I managed to pay for my wings? Credits don’t grow on trees, you know!
Well, okay, they do but there are very few people who are qualified to work on trees here on Luna.
My Dad’s one of them. In fact, not to brag, but he’s the one to work on trees on Luna.
I love my dad like mad and crazy and I think he’s the sweetest guy there is but … well, please don’t ever tell him, but I think trees are kinda boring.
I mean, who wants to wait twenty years to see if something’s gonna work? (I said that once to my mother and she practically burst her sides laughing, “Why not? We’re going to wait longer with you!”)
Anyway, dad knows more about trees and plants than anyone which is kinda cool and kinda lame. Take Dr. Philedra, she’s always giving me that sad look when we’re talking botany because she doesn’t understand that someone like me is far better suited to quantum space field theory. How are we going to get faster-than-light travel if someone doesn’t research it, for stars’ sake?
But Dr. Philedra keeps giving me those odd looks out of the corner of her eye like she’s expecting me to sprout leaves or something or suddenly bounce up and spore all over the place. I’m not; I’m a girl and very well-adjusted, thank you very much. (Even my mother agrees and she should know. Although, on second thought, she did marry my dad so she may not be the best judge of things botanical.)
At my house, we have a couple of models that my parents brought up from Earth, models of the clunky old spaceships that were first used to get to the Moon. Of course, as soon as I found them, they became mine because, as I said, I’m into all things space and flying and stars and stuff. Mom’s a nutritionist which only says about a quarter of what she does as she’s not only Luna One’s leading nutritionist, she’s the leading lunar expert on micro-fauna, intestinal fauna and flora, digestion, and nutritional mutations. She’s a great cook, too, which makes sense when you think about it for a while but doesn’t seem to mean anything at all when you are eating her cooking. Then, the only thing you can do is either go ‘yum!’ or ‘yuk!’ (when she tried to find if I’d inherited the family’s distaste for liver).
Ever since I could remember she’d do most of the cooking. Dad was not bad when he took his turn — he cooked on special days or when Mom was late helping someone on something or other.
Anyway, I never did figure out which of them brought up the old models or why — maybe they belonged to one of my grandparents or something. But I had an old Lunar Module model which separated into the Ascent and Descent modules. The Descent Modules legs would open up. As models go, it’s nothing like our latest nano-models but it was fun in its own way. And … there was a magic about it, you know? I suppose that something loved acquires its own magic. Yeah, I know, very scientific, Jenny! But, still … I kept those models on the shelves beside my bed.
Luna’s at the forefront in most things. We kinda of have to be because outside the domes — there’s nothing. No air, no safety, nothing but vacuum and even a grubber knows you can’t breathe unless you’ve got air. Some of them are so dumb that they don’t understand that you don’t need air so much as you need oxygen but … hey, I suppose living with all that weight makes brains work funny.
The one thing that we’re famous for is our nanotech. We kinda have to be because without nanotech we couldn’t live. You see, there are moonquakes and other natural disasters on the Moon. Yeah, it doesn’t rain — ’cept in our domes — so we don’t have to worry about hurricanes or floods, except when some moron messes with the atmospheric controls and then all that happens is we all get drenched with an unplanned downpour. But we use nanotech to seal our domes. Every airlock and hatch, every corridor, everywhere you go, there’s a thin layer of nannies just waiting for a problem. If there’s a breach, they’ll seal it until we can get a bigger patch in. And they’ll sound the alert so we know there’s a problem.
But even better, and safer, are our suits. Grubbers don’t believe us when we say that we’ve always got a spacesuit with us. I remember one old lady looking at me and clucking at my outfit until I activated the suit and then she near-on fainted dead away! Even when we’re sleeping, we have our nano-suits like a second skin. Some of the earthers complain that we must smell because we wear the same thing all the time but that’s just silly. The suits are self-cleaning.
Of course, we wash and take showers. When we take showers, the suits become the curtains which is another thing the grubs grumble about — so most of our hostels have additional shower curtains to keep them from moaning on and on.
And even our nanotech wears out after a while and has to be replenished. There’s a law that says that every Loony has to have at least a five per cent surplus of nannies on them at all times. Not only does that make sense but, if ever someone is caught out without a suit or if someone’s suit gets destroyed (I can’t think how), then we can pool resources to help out.
Most of us prefer a twenty per cent margin.
Then there’s people like me. I can never get enough nano. I have a special container back in my room for any nano I can’t carry around me. It’s never very full but whenever I can, I bring it with me.
For wings.
On the Moon, just as on Earth, I mass about forty kilos. Grubbers talk about weight — which is silly! — but for them, I’d weigh about 88 pounds in the stupid ol’ English system that the North Americans all insist upon using. Really, we’re talking somewhere in the field of a measily four hundred Newtons on Earth — and only sixty-five Newtons on the Moon. Why talk in Newtons? Well — duh! — because Newtons are the force that the Moon exerts on my body. So that’s the force I need to counteract to achieve weightlessness. Or lift.
After school, most of my friends gather together in the common area to pod up. If you’re a grubber you don’t know about pods. Why would anyone want to be a grubber?
Pods. Well, at school we all sort of get together. We’re all ages, from toddlers right up to graduates. The oldest of us, Mary Lemieux, has just turned nineteen and, honestly, I think she’s getting ready to pod out but — well, I guess we’re too much fun to be around. There’s really no age limit on podding. A pod is a group of schoolers who decide to be together. Often it’s the same pod as the school pod. Like I said, our schools don’t do that silly age thing, we group into pods with the littlest being cared for the by the bigger and the bigger being watched over by the biggest. Pods are cool, they’re constantly changing, growing, learning and — well, I’m not even sure my parents understand us. No, heck! I’m sure my parents don’t understand ’cuz they keep saying things like, “Oh, it’s like a gang!”
I’ve read about gangs and our pods are almost exactly the opposite of those gangs. The gangs on Earth, dirtside, they break things. Our pods are to make things.
Sometimes pods hive off from each other, sometimes they grow. There’s a core of my pod, a central theme. Pretty much from youngest to oldest we’re all space-mad. And not your typical Loony space-mad, either. We’re serious. Which is why Mary is working toward a doctorate in astrophysics, Jordan has specialized in n-space math, little Carey is mad about hydroponics and environments, Matt is all into radiation shielding and I’m — well, I’m into everything. Starship captain, if you must know.
We figure ten years, twenty tops, we’ll be ready to head out. So we’re figuring more than just a pod’s worth — maybe even two hundred people in all.
I’ve tried to tell my parents but they don’t seem to get it. They say things like, “Wait until you’re older” and “Yes, dear, I understand.”
You see, Mom and Dad weren’t born on Luna. I don’t think they understand us. Me and my friends — my pod — we’re star-children. We know it. It’s not just in our minds. It’s in our blood.
Okay, okay, so if you’re a grubber you won’t understand. Heck, half of you can’t even see the stars; your cities are so polluting. And the rest of you seem to think that Luna couldn’t live without Earth. And if Luna can’t, then there’s no way Loonies can build their own starship without your say-so. Ha!
But here, on Luna, we know better. And my pod, the Third of Luna One, we know what we’re gonna do. Where we’re gonna go.
Still, that’s a ways off but there’s no point in not getting ready. So, you might ask, why the flying? Or, if you’re a real grubber, you might say: what do you mean, flying?
If you’re a tourist or you’ve been a tourist, they might have brought you to Heinlein Cavern — as the tour guides call it — and given you a pair of what they call ‘wings’ and let you try your hand at lunar soaring. Well, the Cavern is really Air Holding Station One for Lunar One and yeah, it is also known as Heinlein’s Soar in honor of a grub who wrote a silly story about flying on the Moon but that’s not flying.
Flying is when you’ve passed your Free-form Test Five and you’ve received the full Airborne Authorization. And that is so much more than what grubbers could ever hope to do.
So, after school, after saying goodbye to little Carey and big Mary, I moved into a clear space, checked my rear, took a run, leapt — and flapped my wings.
Wings? Yeah, between that first step and the leap, I closed my eyes, interfaced with my nannies and had them close up around me, fan out — and spread into wings.
You gotta be strong to fly. You need biceps, triceps, you need to be trim, you use your abs more than you’d imagine and you’ve got to be light. If it was a choice between starving to lose twenty kilos or flying — I’d starve. Because there is just nothing like it! Chocolate’s great but it’s nothing compared to climbing up fifty meters, banking, and seeing the dome floor from a thirty degree angle.
Now tourists come up and spend their time in Heinlein Cave. But those of us born here, who train for it, can go for a full Endurance rating. That’s even beyond FFT5. I have a 60 minute full endurance rating. To get that, I had to prove that I could stay aloft for twice that amount and that I could fly for 70 minutes at twice my weight.
And that’s how I can pay for my extra nannies. Okay, not just because I’ve got the endurance but because of the jobs that that endurance opens for me. You might be wondering what sort of jobs there are for people who can fly on the Moon — as a grubber you might joke that there’s no air up here. Of course, you’d be wrong. There’s plenty of air in the colonies. And not just air but high places, too.
My first flying job I got when I was only rated for 30 minutes. That job you could probably guess — safety hawk for grubbers in Heinlein Cave. It was boring work aside from one or two truly spectacular disasters — one where I helped and one where I was too far away to do more than give first aid.
But now, with my E60 rating, I have a real job. Arborean. Every week, I run the airborne scan of the forest.
It’s not as easy as it seems because there are very few stoops on the forest and landing on the trees themselves is frowned upon — particularly by my Dad.
No, I didn’t get the job because of my Dad. I’m sure it helped because he had an extra advantage with me — he could talk to me any time of the day. I got the job because I’m one of only six who are rated E60 or better. And there’s only one better, Stan Morgan, who’s got a full E70. So Stan gets the really tough jobs and everyone’s scrabbling to hire the rest of us. Heck, they’re offering jobs to people as low as E20 nowadays. Because it turns out that once people began to realize how useful it was to have a real live person in the air above, they discovered all sorts of things that needed looking at.
That might surprise you seeing as we on the Moon pride ourselves on our advanced technology. We’ve got nannies just about everywhere and double- and triple- fail-safe systems where there’s the slightest risk of depressurization. But a nanny isn’t the same thing as a pair of eyes, ears, nose, and hands all at the same time. The Council recently priced the replacement cost of a human being — just regular schooler mind, not one of our top scientists — at well over a billion credits.
Grubbers don’t get credits. Let’s just say that on bad days a credit’s worth about $200 U.S. and it goes up from there. More specifically, a lunar credit can usually buy a full barrel of oil anywhere on Earth. Somedays an Elsie (Lunar Credit) can even pay the cost of transporting it up to the lunar surface.
Anyway, the cost of replacing a human, even here on Luna is high. So my eyes, ears, nose, hands don’t come cheap. Particularly when I can deliver them up to three hundred meters above ground level.
None of the trees in the forest are anywhere near that height — no one expects them to top more than two hundred meters — but no one knows for certain what things will be like a century from now. You see, among other things, we’ve not only got the best soil but we’ve got the third interstellar seed repository up here on the Moon.
And we’ve got the first major non-terrestrial conservatory. All our trees are no more than thirteen years old, of course, because none of them were planted until Dad got up here and convinced the Council of their value. It’s not just the oxygen generation — we’ve got great algae for that — but also the long-term wood, the environmentalism and … the promise.
The promise that one day the green plains of Luna will be the green forests of Luna. That the tattered redwoods that are losing the battle for survival in California will find a new home up here with those of us who really treasure them.
We’re not just growing redwoods, naturally. We’re growing pine, we’re growing oak, mahogany, ash, cherry, you name it. One of our main thoroughfares is lined with cherry trees and when spring comes the Cherry Blossom festival is so amazing that it’s famous throughout the solar system.
We’re growing pine and other hardy woods — including bamboo not just for ecological reasons but also for their value as crops. Not that anything from Luna will come to market anytime soon. And I’d be really surprised if any of our wood ever made it back down to Earth.
Dad says that already some of the trees are outgrowing their terrestrial counterparts. It’s not just the lunar soil or the lower gravity but a number of factors, some of which he’s still trying to analyze.
None of the trees are taller than twenty meters now, so I set my cruise altitude for a safe thirty meters and began to scull my way from one side of the forest to the other, planning my rest stops on the way. The forest is big enough that it takes a good three hours to cover but it’s only half an hour wide so I go from side to side, taking a ten-minute recovery break at every side. Not that it’s really necessary: climbing takes the most work, once I’ve got the altitude it’s just a question of keeping it.
Anyway, I was waiting (impatiently) for my timer to count down to zero when I saw her. I almost jumped off my perch then and there but I checked myself at the last moment.
“Security, we have an intruder,” I said over my comm. The intruder had dark hair, seemed no more than my age and she looked like she wasn’t wearing any clothes.
Naked doesn’t mean that much on the Moon. Not that anyone ever really goes naked — they have to have their suits somewhere — but it’s possible to roll it up into headgear or even to make it transparent or simply reflect the skin underneath. There’s a whole Nudy-Loony contingent up here — I think they total about sixty and many of them are Naturalists up from Germany or other such countries — and they do the whole headgear/necklace approach.
It wasn’t the lack of apparent clothing that bothered me, naturally. It was that she was climbing my tree!
“Say nature and location,” a bored security guy replied a moment later.
“Coordinates and video on the chip,” I said, glancing at the playback to make sure that I’d got a good shot. There was nothing there but my tree. No sign of the girl that I could plainly see with my eyes. “Uh … wait one.”
“Sure.” He sounded more skeptical than bored now. The thing is, reporting a security violation is a big thing. Reporting a false security violation was bound to go on my job evaluation — and not in a good way.
I fiddled with my recorder, changing the speed and depth of field but I couldn’t get anything to record.
My timer final chimed and, with a sigh that was part relief and part irritation, I dropped from my perch and stooped down right above the naked girl.
“What are you doing?” I called as I pulled up from my dive. My muscles warned me that I’d need more than a good hot bath later to recover from what I’d done to them. I didn’t care, I was mad. No one was supposed to climb my tree. Heck, no one was supposed to climb any of the trees yet.
“What are you doing?” the girl replied. She frowned at me. “Are you a God?”
“Huh?” I said stupidly. And then I realized — my suit.
You see, every gram is that much more to lift against the lunar gravity. So early on I made sure that there wasn’t a wasted gram on me. I shaved my hair — and wanted to shave my eyebrows until my mom convinced me that they were necessary to prevent sweat from getting into my eyes — and wore only my nano-suit. But all that doesn’t mean I don’t have style. I mean, after all, I own a pretty nice nano-rig and there’s no way I wouldn’t use it. Particularly with the Animé Parade coming up so soon.
Oh, the Animé Parade! I forgot. So … about the first thing the very first kids on Luna discovered was that they could shape and color their nano-suits any way they wanted to. And in no time they were wearing whatever costume they wanted. And then, to show off, they started a parade. At first the grown-ups just chuckled but somehow news of it made its way to Earth and suddenly it was a big thing. Reporters started coming, then fans and then animé and comic people and in a few years it became THE thing for rich fans to attend.
And we made it a big deal, too. We’d spent a large part of the year trying out costumes and working on them, each pod trying to out-compete each other. Fans from Earth would come and attend special workshops, pay zillions of credits to get special-made nano-suits and the training required to operate them so that they, too, could participate in the Animé Parade.
And that’s where my shaved head comes in so handy. Not only does it drop a full kilo or more from my weight, not only does it decrease my aerodynamic drag but I can make the coolest “hair” with my nannies!
And so today, as I stooped on this strange girl, I was wearing a ‘helmet’ that was totally cyan-blue with an elongated chin-guard and goggles over my face. My wings, by regulation had the six endurance pennants on them with only two red, two orange and two yellow (we were allowed to pick our own color schemes providing that red was always the ‘used’ state), the rest of my wings being a coordinated mix of dark blue, white, gray, and steel-black.
Everyone who saw me in the air said I was a shoo-in for Lead Bird in the Animé Parade. Did I mention that one of the perks of being a paid flyer is a chance to practice up for Lead Bird? You know, the Animé character that flies at the front of the whole Animé Parade?
The one who, according to rumor, might be presented to the Emperor himself?
The Emperor of Japan, silly! Luna has no Emperor. Although, there’s talk that maybe the Emperor of Japan might settle up here in Munbesu Nihongo. Everyone’s been talking about it, wondering if that isn’t why he and his wife had planned the trip up here in the first place.
“No one’s allowed to climb in the trees,” I said, forcing my attention back to the girl. She seemed pretty enough although it was hard to say. I tried to imagine her in a costume and was surprised to think that the best outfit for her would be something leafy and green. Like Pan in Shakespeare.
“I am,” the girl said.
“I’ve called security,” I told her. It was true, I had, I just didn’t bother to add the bit about the cameras not seeing her. I eyed her carefully. “Where’s your suit?”
“Suit?”
“Your nano-suit,” I said. “Are you running it transparent?” Even as I asked that, I realized that if she was wearing a nano-suit the cameras would have had to pick it up. I’d been chewing on that problem — what can eyes see that cameras can’t? — even as we’d been talking. Cameras recorded a set number of frames per second. I silently sent a command to my suit to up the frames per second and watched the display in the lower corner of my cheekguard until I saw the girl’s image come into focus. The frame rate was two hundred and forty frames per second — ten times normal.
“Who are you?” I blurted, now wondering what I’d wandered into. Was she a ghost or something? Her image was flickering in the playback, even at that high rate. Silently, I ordered it doubled again and the image steadied down. This girl wasn’t here most of the time.
“I don’t have a suit,” the girl said. She looked up at me. “Do I need one?” She pointed at my wings. “Is that what you are wearing?”
“Yeah,” I said, stalling for time to think. A girl who can’t be seen by regular cameras — why would she need a nano-suit? She doesn’t exist.
We Loonies get laughed at by earthers a lot. They think we’re a strange mix between ‘eggheads’ and ‘tree-huggers’ that we don’t understand ‘the real world.’ But really, one thing we are is open-minded. We’re willing to admit we don’t know everything that there might be things outside our understanding. So ghosts — collections of psychic energy or dark energy or whatever — that wasn’t impossible to us (me, at least).
“Could I get one?” she asked.
“Sure, if you’ve got the credits or ask your parents,” I told her.
The girl frowned and looked down at the branches under her feet. “Credits?”
“You know — money?”
“Money,” the girl rolled the word in her mouth as if it were new to her. She looked back up at me, her brows drawing together. “Can you go now? He’s coming and he promised to teach me to kiss.”
“He?”
“The nice old man who was here the other day,” the girl said. She smiled. “He said I was pretty.” Her smile faded as she added, “If he sees you, he might change his mind.” She made a shooing motion. “You should go.”
Before I could find any words to respond to that, my emergency warning bleeped. For a moment, horror-stricken, I thought I’d overflown my endurance but then I realized it was the home alert.
“I have to go,” I told her.
“Fine,” she said, turning away from me and staring intently at the path that lead through the young trees, “just as long as he doesn’t see you. He said no one could know.”
I wanted to stay, to ask more but the home alert was insistent.
“Coming!” I called over my comm even as I cupped air with my wings and slowly climbed back up to a safe gliding altitude. Once there, I quickly converted height to velocity and skimmed along at max, getting home in less than ten minutes.
“You just missed him!” Mom said as soon as I entered our house.
“Who?” I asked, still thinking about the girl and her mystery kisser.
“Your father,” Mom said. “He’s gone down earthside —”
“Earthside!”
“It’s an emergency,” Mom told me.
“What?” I mean, honestly, what sort of emergency is there that calls a gardener back down to Earth? I love my Dad but, really, gardening? Yeah, he’s the best and he’s cool and I love him so much but I can never, ever understand what makes trees and leaves so important to him.
“His trees,” Mom said as if that explained everything.
“His trees are here, Mom,” I reminded her. I don’t know what it is with adults but it seems like outside of their specialties, they’re really pretty dumb.
“Not all of them, miss smarty-pants,” my mother — mother! — snapped back. Apparently she realized how silly she was because she blushed and turned away from me. “Five there, only one here,” she muttered to herself. She turned back to me. “Were you on patrol?”
“Yeah,” I said wondering at the sudden change of topic. “Why?”
“Did you see anything unusual?”
I should have told her. I really should have, I realize that now. But then, just after “miss smarty-pants” I wasn’t quite thinking at my best. And … ghosts? Can you imagine how my mom would have reacted to that?
“I didn’t get to finish the sweep,” I told her honestly. “I got this emergency call.”
“Your father said to keep an eye on the forest,” Mom said. She made a worried face. “I think he’s scared …”
Scared? My Dad? Of what?
I should have told her then. I should have but I felt bad that I hadn’t told her the first time.
“I can’t go into the air again today,” I said, consulting my flight log. “But I’ll be extra careful tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Mom said, nodding to herself. “That’ll do.” She still looked worried as she added, “It’s probably nothing.”
“Hey guys, I’m sorry but I gotta jet,” I said to the pod as they collected at the end of the last class that day. I pointed to my back. “Angels tread and all.”
“Yeah, right,” Carey said, rolling her eyes. “You’re just going off to try out your latest costume for the parade!”
“Am not, squirt,” I told her as I found a clear spot in the crowd. “Stand clear!”
I took two quick steps, leaped up and unfurled my wings. Just to annoy Carey, as I flapped up higher, I strobed the lower edges of my wings in rainbow colors. I could hear Carey’s squeal of delight and indignation and the cheers of the others as I made it past fifty meters and then I steered toward the school thermal and slowly glided up to the very top of the safety limit — can’t get too high. It’s not that my wings might melt, rather that my wings might tangle with some wiring or other important piece of infrastructure trailing down from above.
A quick check on all my displays and I veered sharply port, towards the agricultural section.
The first thing I noticed was the tree. Actually, the first thing I noticed was all the leaves under the tree. I stooped and dropped down to the top of the tree, swinging in a fast, tight circle, examining and filming every bit of it.
This was bad. It looked like someone had purposely set out to destroy the tree. The special tree. The one my dad always talked about it hushed tones. The one he planted the day I was born. I was just about to call him when I realized — he was on Earth.
Something flickered at the base of the tree. I dropped down to the ground and furled my wings even as I ground to a halt. I squinted at the shape but I couldn’t make it out.
“You need to go,” a ghostly, faint voice said.
“Are you okay?”
“He’s coming back and he won’t come if you’re here,” the voice said. “He’ll want to kiss you, not me.” And then, the voice went on dreamily, “He kissed me yesterday. I want him to kiss me again.”
I cranked my video recorder up to four hundred and eighty frames per second and suddenly the shimmering shape resolved itself into a human form.
“Are you okay?” I said. The ghost of the girl I’d seen yesterday was older, near my mom’s age now and she looked listless and weak. Sort of like the tree whose limbs were drooping even as I watched.
“Three kisses,” the ghost girl continued, not seeming to hear me. “Three kisses and I’ll be his forever!”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Name?”
“What do people call you?”
“He calls me his life’s blood, the heart of his heart, the only thing that matters,” the ghost woman replied. Her eyes seemed to smolder as she glared at me. “What does it matter my name?”
“I’m Jennifer,” I said, wondering why I was trying to sound so reasonable while dealing with someone who was exhibiting symptoms similar to oxygen starvation. “Can I get you anything?”
“You can leave,” she said. “He’ll be coming and I don’t want him looking at you.” She stretched her hands out and held them up to her eyes. “He won’t think I’m too old, will he?”
“I thought you said he was an old man,” I said.
“He was,” she said, a smile fleeting across her lips. She was beautiful in her own way. “But now he’s my handsome suitor. Three kisses and he’ll be mine forever.”
“I should really get my father to look at that tree,” I said, pointing to the tree she was leaning against. “And you should treat that tree with more respect. You shouldn’t be here.”
“My mother doesn’t mind,” she told me, raising a ghost hand. It seemed to disappear as she wrapped it around the trunk. “She’s tired but that’s to be expected.”
“Your mother?” I said, frowning. I looked around. “Where’s your mother?”
“Right here, silly,” the girl said with a dry laugh that sounded like wind through leaves.
“We should really get more water for that tree,” I said. “And I’m going to have to report you,” I added, chiming my comm. Unit. “I think you need help.”
“I need nothing from you!” She roared and suddenly she loomed up large and charged right through me. A cold, freezing chill took my heart even though none of my sensors recorded it. “Begone!”
A wind rose up and pulled me off the ground before I could react. I was airborne, in gusts I’d never before experienced — and I was very scared.
I can’t say how or how long I battled with the storm that shouldn’t have been. For several moments it looked like I was either going to be speared on the trees or dashed against the roof and it was all I could do to survive.
My alarms went off and then my comms went dead and my heart was in my throat as, for a moment, my nano-wings flickered, dissolving into lifeless streams.
Help! I cried to myself, not knowing what to do. The ground was rising and then — my wings were back. I flexed them, warped to veer away from the storm that had tossed me and finally found myself in still air.
My comms burst back into life loudly with several security guards all calling at once. With a shaky voice I told them that I was all right, that I was about to land and I’d give them a full report when I’d discovered the source of the fault.
“Do you need someone to get you, Jenny?” a voice asked and I nearly died. It was Stan Morgan.
“Did anyone get a read on the freak weather over the forest?” I asked, trying to sound mature and relaxed.
“There are no alerts anywhere in the domes, Jenny,” Stan replied after a moment. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I don’t know,” I told him, knowing that honesty was the best policy in a conversation that was monitored and recorded — and pretty much heard by everybody. “Maybe I hit some micro-climate or maybe … I’ll run a systems check when I get home.”
“You do that,” Stan said. “You never know how those upgrades can interfere with each other sometimes.” There was a pause and then he added, “I’d hate for you to run afoul of them.”
Did Stan Morgan care about me? My heart skipped a beat.
“Sure thing, clear skies, Stan!”
“You, too, Jenny,” he said feelingly — which might only be because of my recent thunderstorm.
I was running through diagnostics for the third time when my mom came in. One look at her face made it clear that she had bad news.
“Your father has to stay on Earth,” she said without preamble. “He wants to know if you checked up on the forest.”
“I did,” I told her.
“Stanley Morgan commed me,” mother added.
“I had some difficulty with my suit,” I told her, waving toward the diagnostics unit. “I’ve run diagnostics three times but —” I shook my head.
“Maybe you should stay on the ground until your father gets back,” Mom told me.
“Mo-ommmm!” I cried. “You know I’ve got a job to do and —”
“And there’s the parade,” Mom finished for me, nodding. She reached a hand toward me. “Honey, I know how important it is to you but your father’s worried —”
“Worried?” About me? Why? “I think he’d be more worried about his tree.”
“His tree?” my mother said quickly, giving me a sharp look. “What about it?”
I told her. I told her everything and as I did I felt a lump in my heart ease but at the same time, I found another growing in my throat — because while it was a relief to tell someone, my mom’s reaction was terrifying.
“You’ve got video?” Mom asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, gesturing toward the suit and the diagnostics. “I didn’t download what I got yesterday and if something happened to the suit all of it might be gone.”
“You say that yesterday she was a girl and today she’s a woman?”
“Yeah,” I said. I knew it sounded silly, so I added, “At least she looked like the same person and she seemed like she remembered me.”
“But — older?”
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “Maybe …”
“Maybe nothing,” my mother said. She glanced over to the shelves where I kept the old spaceship models and shook her head. “Oh, I wish your father had stuck with spaceships —”
“Dad?” I cried, completely amazed, turning toward the models. “He made those?”
“Well you don’t think I did, did you?” Mom snapped with a laugh and then, seeing the look on my face, added sympathetically, “Oh, baby, you mean you didn’t know?”
“No,” I said, finding my entire world turning upside down. Dad, into spaceships? That was nuts! He was a tree guy, into plants and growing stuff.
“Did you ever ask about your grandfather Ki?” Mom said and then shook her head, “No, of course not.” She seemed to be talking to herself as she added, “We thought that there was still time.” She shrugged and pulled herself together, letting out a little sigh — the sort of sigh she gave when she was forced to admit that I was growing up faster than she wanted. She gestured to my bed. “Sit, we’re going to be here for a bit.”
“But my homework!” I cried. “My projects!”
“They’ll wait,” mom said, grabbing a chair and pulling it to sit opposite me. She let out a long sigh. “Your father should be the one to tell you but I think it’s time you knew.”
“Know what?” I asked. Was my dad some sort of Japanese elf or a wood spirit? And then I knew. “She’s a wood spirit, isn’t she? That tree, dad’s tree, she lives in it.”
Mom looked amazed and then smiled, reaching forward to ruffle my hair. “Very good! Very, very good! You’re as smart as your dad, little one!” She shook her head ruefully. “I suppose I’ll have to stop calling you little one, won’t I?”
I shook my head. Mothers say silly things — it’s okay.
“But you’re only part right,” she said when she brought herself back from her reverie. “Your father’s tree died long before he came to the Moon.”
“It died? How?”
And my mother told me. Now my mom has always been the smartest, most logical, scientific person that I’ve known — and I’ve got lots of other people who agree with me on that. So the story she told me was so far from what I’d expected that my eyebrows rose to the top of my forehead and stayed there pretty much the whole time.
“Mom,” I said slowly when she’d finished, “are you sure that dad wasn’t just pulling your leg?”
“It’s how he won my heart, honey,” Cheri Ki told me with a shake of her head and bright spots in her eyes. “I’m a botanist first and I know my craft.” She shook her head. “I not only examined the wood but I went to the other plantings —”
“Plantings?”
“There were six seeds,” mom told me. “Your father planted five on them on Earth and the sixth one here.” She nodded toward the forest. She smiled at me. “You know, we’re always learning and we’re always discovering that we don’t know everything. It was your father showing me those saplings that showed me how much more there was to know and learn.” She paused for a moment. “So when he asked if I’d like to live with him on the Moon and make a new garden, I could only say yes.”
“But you’re a nutritionist!”
“I grow things,” mom reminded me. “I grow things that help us breathe, that let us eat, that let us grow and survive.” She gestured with one arm in a wide arc, taking in all of the Moon. “We’ve made life where there was none, built a promise for the future.” She smiled as she met my eyes. “Built a home for your children.”
“You said that dad’s tree died,” I said, remembering her story.
My mother is a very smart, very empathic person: she caught my unasked question with a twist of her lips. “The tree he planted here in the forest, that’s your tree sweetie.”
“What happened to the other trees?” I asked in a very small voice.
My mother heaved a deep sigh. “Your father is trying to find out.”
“But what happened?”
“We don’t know,” mom said. “All we know is that they’re all dead.”
“So mine is the last tree.”
Wordlessly, Mom nodded.
“Well then, that makes things simple,” I said, rising from the bed and moving toward my diagnostic unit.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to save my tree.” My eyes went to the model rocket ships on my shelves and suddenly I realized that I’d begun to understand my father.
This is the point at which, according to all the Earth books I’ve read, my mom would have taken charge. But you as you’ve gotta know by know, we’re Loonies and we don’t do thing the way you do on Earth.
“What are you thinking?” my mom asked instead.
And that’s when I knew I wasn’t a kid any more.
To be honest, she took me by surprise. It was a moment before I had a reply.
“Is there a way we can identify this man?” I asked. “I mean, surely if he were a Loony we would have —” I broke off when I caught the way mom was looking at me.
“Hmm,” I said as I conceded her unspoken point. It could just as easily be that something in my tree had changed to attract this person. “No, I still think we should check for any recent arrivals.”
She gave me a half-nod. Hmm, so I still hadn’t figured it all out. “Oh! We should correlate for anyone who’s been on Earth near Dad’s trees!”
“What else?” Mom asked, making it clear that I was still not done.
“Well,” I said, “naturally we need to set up a guard on the tree.”
“And?”
I looked at her, stumped. She smiled and patted my knee while moving her hand up by her ear, activating her comms.
“Security, this is Cherie Ki, I am declaring a stage one biological emergency,” my mom said. My eyes went wide with surprise. “Do NOT use the alarms — we have an intruder who may be carrying a biological hazard.”
“Dr. Ki, do you have any ID on the intruder?” the security chief came back calmly. I smiled at my mom — she’d turned on her external audio so I could listen in.
“Not yet,” mom said. “We’re still working on that. But this is in connection with the earthside emergency that my husband was called away on.”
“Yes, Doctor,” the security chief said with a tone of increased alertness.
“And Don, I want a twenty-four/seven watch on the tree,” my mom added. I knew Don Ostermann, he was the best we had.
“I see,” Don said. “Jenny reported an incident the other day but didn’t —”
“This is related,” my mother said. “It’s her tree, you know.”
“Oh, yeah, I know!” Don Ostermann said. My eyes went wide and I flushed with embarrassment. The Head of Luna Security knew about my tree?
“I’ll let you know more as soon as we’ve got it,” mom said, breaking the connection and telling the computers, “Central library, data search.”
“Subject?”
“Keyboard entry,” my mom said, rising from her chair. Over her shoulder she said to me, “You get some sleep!”
“Mom!” I wailed. How could she possibly expect me to sleep with all this going on?
“I’m going to need you to take over in the morning,” she told me. “Your father’s not here and you’re probably the next expert we have on the dryads —”
“Dryads?”
“Well, who did you expect your tree friend was, honey?” Mom said, tossing me a smile before exiting through the automatic door.
Dryads? Do you know how long it took to look up dryads? 0.32 seconds, that’s how long. The network must have been working overtime.
I pulled up a complete download and was checked by a security screen. It prompted me for a passcode. I was astonished, I’d never found anything requiring a passcode on the network before — we Loonies pride ourselves on our freedom of information. With my tongue poking through my lips — I do that when I’m nervous — I entered my passcode and received a priority data assignment.
The Japanese word was Kodama, the Scottish had a similar spirit called the Ghillie Dhu. Dryads and Hamadryads — uh, oh, my friend was a hamadryad — if her tree died, she’d die. And, from the looks of what I’d seen, if she aged, her tree aged. But what had caused her to age so much?
‘Three kisses’ she’d said. ‘Three kisses and I’ll be his forever!’
If she looked so bad after two kisses, what would she be like after the third?
I jumped out of bed and rushed out into our living room.
“Mom! Mom, I’ve got it!” I cried. “I know what happened to the trees!”
But she wasn’t there.
“Stan, Stan, pick up, pick up!” I cried as I rushed outside, wrapping my nano-suit and willing it on me. My chrono told me it was past midnight.
“Huh?” Stan Morgan’s voice came into my ear. “What? Jenny, what’s up?”
“I need you to meet me at the forest,” I told him.
“The forest? Now?” He sounded more awake. There was a silence. “There’s a stage one emergency, you should stay home!”
“I’m going out because of the stage one emergency,” I told him. I spread my wings but I already knew what they’d show — I’d four red bands and only two yellow. I was thirty minutes from the forest — I’d be ten minutes into the red by the time I got there. “You’ve got to meet me; I’m going into the red on this.”
“Into the red? Jenny, you’ll get your license pulled —”
“Just meet me there,” I told him, talking a quick set of steps and leaping into the air. I must have been more tired than I realized for I fumbled the first beat and nearly crashed. I had to work twice as hard to regain the lost height and I was breathing hard by the time I was fifty meters up.
It took work to get to the nearest thermal — I usually launch from school which has a thermal close by — and I was grateful to be able to just glide for a bit in a slow turn as I climbed up to one hundred and fifty meters — just below the safe altitude limit.
“Jenny,” Stan called me. He sounded like he was trying to talk sense to me. I didn’t have time for sense so I ordered my comms unit to reject the connection.
I glanced at my altitude gage and with a few beats of my wings climbed another twenty meters. Now I was right at the safe altitude but I didn’t plan on staying there for long, diving to exchange height for speed.
I didn’t know what was happening or when but I knew if I couldn’t stop my Hamadryad friend from getting her third kiss she was going to die.
“Warning, warning, you are entering a secured area,” a voice spoke insistently in my ear. “You are in violation of Lunar regulations and penalties will be assessed.”
“I know,” I said, even as I spotted my tree in the distance. It was surrounded by lights and people. I landed just in front of my mother.
“Jenny!” she cried. She was angry. Don Ostermann was next to her, his expression grim.
“Mom, I know what’s happening and I know how to stop it,” I told her quickly. Her eyebrows rose. “You’ve got to leave or he won’t come.”
“What?” Mr. Ostermann said. “How do you know?”
“Because no one ever saw him,” I said. “He went after all the trees on Earth and no one caught him.” I looked back at the tree and said, “I’m not sure we’ll be able to see him.”
“So how are you going to stop him?” my mom asked.
I told her. Mr. Ostermann looked at me wide-eyed but my mom merely took a deep breath and nodded. “She’s right, it’s probably the best way,” she said. “And you’ve got Stan on patrol?”
“Actually, I’ve got the whole air corps on patrol,” I told her.
“But you only said Stan —”
“Trust me,” I told her, nodding up to the skies above as two, then three, four, and finally a dozen sets of wings came into view. “Mr. Ostermann, if you could coordinate with them?”
“What makes you think he won’t see them?”
“I don’t think he’s ever heard of flying men,” I told him.
“Do you know who he is?” My mom asked in surprise.
“No,” I told her, “but I’ve got an idea what he is.” She gave me a skeptical look and I moved close to her. “Mom, trust me, please?”
“This is the last tree, Jenny,” my mother said slowly. “We can’t lose it, there are no seeds.”
“This is my tree mom,” I told her. “Dad didn’t know what to look for when he was little but I do.”
My mom gave me a long look and then she surprised me by stepping back toward Mr. Ostermann. “Jenny’s got it, let’s go.”
Mr. Ostermann had known me a long time, pretty much my whole life. I guess he saw the same thing in me that my mom did because he nodded toward me and smiled. “Good luck!”
“Thanks.” I was going to need it. If I was wrong or if I fell asleep, my tree was going to die.
“Jenny,” a voice came quietly in my ear and I startled, surprised that I had nodded off. It was Stan. My face chrono showed me that it was 4:13 a.m. so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. “From the northeast.”
“Roger,” I replied. “Show time.” I sounded calm, I knew it. But really, truth to tell, I was shaking like a leaf. Which was probably a good thing.
“Nano-suit overload in ten minutes,” a computer voice warned. Yeah, I knew. The nano-suit was overworked, overloaded, generating a shutter that flickered over six hundred times a second — the fastest I could get it to go.
I was pretty sure that whatever was coming for my Hama — well, I had to call her something! — was flickering in the same ghostly manner as my tree’s Hamadryad. I guessed that was why no one had noticed it — it was flickering too much for our regular cameras to catch it.
There! “Target acquired, confirm lock.”
“Locked,” Stan’s voice was the first among a dozen to reply.
“Engaging —”
“Jenny, are you sure?” Stan cried out. He sounded worried about me. Stan Morgan, the best flyer on Luna?
“— now,” I finished, standing up and moving from the tree toward the approaching figure. There was no time for worries and there was no second plan.
He was dark-haired, dark-eyed and incredibly handsome. He was Japanese, just as I’d guessed. He looked middle-aged, maybe younger. He smiled at me.
“Did you miss me?” he said, moving toward me.
“Are you going to kiss me again?”
“Is that what you want?” he asked, smiling. I could see the hollowness in his eyes and my skin crawled. Whatever he was, he was not human. Some sort of spirit, a creature of darkness or of void — I didn’t know which.
“Don’t listen to her!” Hama cried as she burst into view. “She’s an impostor?”
“Am I?” I said and, on cue, all twelve flyers swirled into view, each adding their own voice, keyed to match Hama’s. “Am I?”
The dark-haired spirit looked desperately from one to the other of us. Hama tried to move toward him but I stepped in front of her as did Stan and Crissie while Moira and Kevin pulled Hama back behind them, executing a quick shell-game even as the rest of flyers interposed themselves.
I shifted out of my flickering just before my nano-suit’s power failed.
“This tree is mine, you may not have her,” I told him.
“What are you?” he cried, backing away from me in awe.
“The Greeks called me Artemis,” I said advancing toward him. “I guard the Dryads, the Kodama, the Ghillie Dhu and no jiang shi will defeat me.”
I must have guessed right for the dark-eyed thing winced at the name I gave it.
“You have killed too many, you must depart,” I told him.
“What would you do if I don’t?” he demanded. “What can you know of my power?”
I smiled. “I know this, you’re no match for me,” I said, moving forward once more to trap him exactly where I’d planned. I threw a handful of nano-suit at him, using the last of my power to cause it to flash in brilliant light. On that signal, all the other flyers threw flashes of nano-dust light at him and surrounded him in it.
With a horrible scream, he brought his arm in front of his eyes but it didn’t matter, it was far too late — our power-packs were completely consumed delivering that one burst of intense laser light. Stone would have shattered, steel melted. As for the jiang shi — he simply dissolved.
There was a moment’s stunned silence and then my Hamadryad moved forward through the group, shouting, “You killed him!”
“No,” I told her, turning toward her even as the afterglow faded in my eyes, “he was never alive.”
“But — he kissed me!”
“He took your life force,” I told her. “He took it, he took your mother’s, and he would have drained you to the death with his last kiss. He’s already killed at least five other of your kind — you’re the last that we know.”
“The last?” Hama said in dismay. She turned back to her tree. “Mother, is this true?”
The tree my father planted for me shivered as though shaken by an invisible wind and a terrible sorrow and then Hama turned back to me, “She says this is so.”
“Jenny?” Stan came over to me. “Who are you talking to?”
“Can’t you see her?”
“He has to get my mother’s permission to see me,” Hama said. She made a face very much like ones I’ve had when dealing with my mother. “She says I should have asked about that man, too.”
“Stan,” I said, “go touch the tree and ask for permission to speak with her daughter.”
“Jenny, are you all right?” Moira Adamson asked, coming up beside me. She gave Stan a worried look.
I sighed. “Look, it’s a long story that you won’t believe until you do what I ask. Go touch the tree and ask for permission to speak to her daughter.”
“They can’t see me?” Hama asked, looking at me in surprise. “Or hear me?”
“No,” I said as the others started, with obvious skepticism, to walk toward the tree.
“Then how can you see me?” Hama asked. She turned back to the tree, even as the others reached it, touched it and murmured the question.
“Oh my goodness!” Moira Adamson shrieked as her eyes lit on Hama. “Guys, look, look! There’s a girl and she’s wearing no clothes!”
Hama looked at me. “What is all this about ‘clothes’?”
I laughed. “I’ll explain later.”
Okay, so I’m a Loony. I make no apologies. I guess you grubbers have your place, your home and you love it, too. If you want to stay in that gravity well, I’ll be okay with that.
You’re probably wondering what happened. Well, only the flyers ever saw Hama. With my father’s approval, they became the air guard. Mostly that didn’t change anything, we still flew our regular patrols, fought and bickered, egged each other on for endurance records and plotted to win the lead flyer position in the Animé Parade.
It was Hama who came up with the best idea, though.
And so when the Emperor of Japan came to view the Luna Animé Parade, the parade was covered by thirteen different flyers all changing off so that the whole parade had at least three flyers at any point.
At the end of the parade, on a signal, we all stooped from on high and split in an aerial rainbow over the Emperor of Japan.
Of course, only we knew that the thirteenth flyer wasn’t even human.
And my pod expanded our spaceship designs to include a proper forest; we’re expecting seedlings any day now. Hama kept the name I made up for her.
My name is Jennifer Lynne Ki, I’m a second generation Loonie whose best friend is a Hamadryad.
And we’re going to the stars.