The One Tree of Luna

by Todd McCaffrey

  “Lawn?”

  “I’ll come and get you two anyway.” She answered and hung up.

  “She’s coming for us.” I explained to the nurse. I went over to Josh and whispered: “It’s all right: your mom found the problem.” He unscrewed his eyes long enough to look at me. He was crying and he didn’t like crying, especially with me. I guess it was because the first time he cried at school everyone teased him. I had tried to tell him that it was okay to cry but Josh could be stubborn that way.

  Josh was better but still shaken when Mom got us. We were all silent on the way home until we turned into the driveway.

  “Gosh!” I cried. Josh perked up and looked out: “Wow!”

  The whole front of the lawn was torn up, like an earthquake had split it or a spider had crawled up from the ground or —

  “She pulled her roots!” I cried. The car came to a stop and I bundled out. Josh followed a bit later.

  Together we surveyed the mess. My tree was all right but the ground in the front lawn was all torn up where her roots had lashed to the surface. Josh trotted over to her and put a hand into her. It used to be that he could always talk to her but as time went on, he had to be inside to hear what she was saying.

  “She says that something burned her.” He explained to us. With a look at Mom, I turned to the garage. I returned with a shovel. Mom looked at me and went for a shovel herself.

  We took turns digging: Mom, Josh and me. We got down ten feet before we found it: a discarded bag with a hole in one side where my tree had burrowed in. The bag was heavy and hard to haul up. I could barely read the label. It was a bag of pure lime.

  “Must have been left over by the builders.” Mom decided.

  Josh was still upset by bedtime: we slept in my bed. Next morning he had recovered his spirits — he woke me up by tickling me!

  September faded into October and we forgot about the bag of lime we had long ago thrown out. The leaves on my tree were falling off as it got ready for its rest through Fall. Josh was nervous about it: he had never spent a Winter away from his mother while she slept. But my mother and his both did not think there would be any problem.

  It was recess, a group of us were playing soccer. I had just passed the ball on to Josh who was tearing up the field, barefoot as usual, grinning ear to ear as he zipped around frustrated defenders. Suddenly he stumbled, pitched to the ground.

  “Josh!” We cried, angry that the other team got the ball. I started running back to the defense, then I noticed that Josh was still down.

  “Josh?” I ran up to him. His face was blue and he was gasping for air. “Josh!” He turned to him, grabbing his throat. “Teacher!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. I knelt beside him.

  He was gasping: “It’s white, it’s sticky! Mother can’t breathe! She can’t breathe!”

  I grabbed him in my arms. “It’s okay. Mom’ll fix it, Josh. You’ll be okay.”

  A faint smile crossed his face but he shook his head. There, in my arms, he faded out. Disappeared. Like smoke in a breeze.

  “Josh!” I screamed. A teacher rushed up but it was too late. All the kids were clustered around me. I beat my way out of the crowd and ran back to the school, hoping to find Josh standing in a corner laughing at his joke.

  When Mom brought me home I had already cried all my tears. I sat beside her in stony silence. We entered the driveway, she stopped the car and I jumped out. I rushed to my tree. It was dead. Its branches drooped, were bare, leaves strewn all around on the ground.

  “No.” I pleaded. A wind swept by, picked the leaves up, swirled them away. “No!” A hand brushed my neck and I twirled around: it was my mother. “Mom!” I buried my head against her.

  She had brought the shovels. We dug. When the sun set, Mom brought the car around and turned on the high beams. She tried to drag me to bed around four in the morning but I kicked and screamed at her. She left me, sobbing.

  When the sun rose I was still digging feebly. My shovel bit deep and the white sticky stuff welled up from the ground. Paint. I got Mom.

  “Oh, Jimmy!” She grabbed me when I showed it to her, hugged me tightly. “Get a sample, we have to find out why it killed Josh’s mother.”

  It was lead paint. When Mom found out she got really upset. Then she got active. She met with all the parents in Sunny Hill, called the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA took samples from all over the hill.

  And we found out: Sunny Hill had been built over an old chemical company. There were wastes all over the hill. The lead would poison the water and, eventually, poison us. They made us move, bought every house in Sunny Hill. There was a huge legal battle and Mom got a big check from the government.

  That’s how I became a gardener. When we moved to our new house, I got a borer and dug up samples from fifty feet below the surface. I learned how to test soil acidity and discovered what were good fertilizers. I built the most beautiful garden in our county. Won awards.

  It was when I was going through Dad’s collection of seeds that I found it. It was a small seed envelope, folded over. Cryptically it was marked ‘Jimmy’s seeds’. But I knew the minute my hand touched it. There were six of them.

  I had grown up by then: I did not need someone to look after me. But I took those seeds, only five of them, and carefully germinated them. I planted one by an orphanage, another in a forest, another by a hospital, one at an old folk’s home, and the fifth in a cemetery. I checked the ground for all of them down to a hundred feet and I made the soil myself, carefully planting them. I kept the last one.

  After that I went to college, majoring in ecology. But I never forgot the Moon. And so I did not hesitate when they offered me the job as the first gardener for Luna City. I am married; Cherie’s expecting. You can guess what I planted first.

  The soil is great up here. I just wish I could tell Josh.

  The One Tree of Luna

  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 sch
ool. 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 tho
se 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.