The One Tree of Luna

by Todd McCaffrey

  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.”

&nb
sp; “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 fif
ty 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?”