The One Tree of Luna

by Todd McCaffrey

  “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.

  Tribute

  I wrote Tribute in 2005 for Liftport: The Space Elevator: Opening Space to Everyone.

  It has since been published in Baen’s Universe and now here.

  Annogi floated in Observation Room Four staring blindly out of the viewport to the blue Earth below.

  Clutched tightly in her hand was a small strip of paper. She had read it twice and still could not believe the words written on it. Words that, at age ten, she should not have been able to read — words stored on the station’s computers that should have been kept fro
m her for eight more years.

  But Annogi was station-trained, station-bound, clever; and Tanuro was the head of station security. Tanuro had adopted her when she was three, just after her mother had died.

  Annogi wondered why Tanuro had adopted her. He never seemed to smile, was never satisfied with her work, was always angry with her failures. Yet his adoption of her had solved a very difficult problem for the space elevator; because Tanuro was the head of security and his job demanded that he be at the top-end station much of his time, he could provide Annogi with the zero-gee quarters that her body had grown accustomed to in the months after her mother’s death.

  Annogi looked down, past the bottom of the viewport, past her hand with the clenched slip of paper, to one of the many pictures which lined the walls of the Observation Room.

  The face which smiled back at her had blue eyes and blond hair, not the dark eyes and jet-black hair that was mirrored back at Annogi in the viewport. The only feature Annogi had in common with her mother was a thin smattering of freckles across her nose.

  ‘Amanda Brown. She died so that others may live, May 5th 2025.’ Annogi didn’t need to read the caption to know what it said. She thought idly of linking in to the station’s computer network to call up a video of her mother, then shook her head and pulled the earpiece which doubled as a holographic display out of her left eye and slid it into the top pocket of her ship-suit.

  Images of her mother disturbed her. They were different from her memories. And all her happy memories were hidden behind the last frightening minutes of her time with her mother.

  Annogi knew that her mother had volunteered to work on the space elevator. In fact, Amanda Brown, former astronaut, had been in retirement when the elevator was first funded. She had become an artist and writer, chronicling the adventures in space of herself and so many others.

  When the chance came to take residence in the space elevator, to draw, photograph, and scribe about the new project and its impact on Earth, Amanda had grabbed at the chance. Annogi knew this because Tanuro had told her.

  Amanda had spent almost all her time in the Observation Rooms. She had helped select the pictures that adorned the walls of Observation Rooms One through Three. No one had ever thought that there would be pictures in Observation Room Four.

  Observation Room Four was a special room, even now. This was the room chosen above all the others for inaugurations of presidents, premieres, prime ministers, and even kings. From this vantage point the world had no boundaries, save that brilliant blue band between the cold of space and the life-giving atmosphere.

  The space elevator was more than just a place from which to understand man’s place as caretaker of the Earth. It was a place of new beginnings.

  Here was the doorway to the solar system. Where before the cost of moving into space was impossible, now it was achievable. Where before Mars and Venus were mere points of light, now they were home to growing numbers of scientists, explorers, technologists, and colonists.

  Here also was the doorway to Earth’s healing. Where before solar satellites were the thing of fiction, now they were commonplace. Factories in space were being constructed that made marvels never seen before, and produced goods that would cost hundreds of times more to make on Earth — all without polluting the fragile home-world.

  Bases on the Moon, Mars, and Venus also provided invaluable insights in to how to husband the Earth itself; for what kept life alive on the airless Moon could be applied to making life less polluting on the bountiful Earth.

  So Amanda had sat in the various Observation Rooms, floating cross-legged, her sketch pad and colored pens strapped to her with Velcro or floating in hands’ reach nearby while Annogi played with toys and goggled at the glowing Earth below.

  Often Tanuro would stop by to talk. Amanda’s behavior with him was strange, it seemed to little Annogi almost like a game of hide-and-seek — Amanda would smile and talk animatedly, then Tanuro would say something and Amanda’s smile would fade and she would become silent. Annogi taught Tanuro hide-and-seek one day after asking about it, and Tanuro would often play the game with her, so much so that Annogi became adept at finding all the nooks and crannies of the station.

  At that time Annogi had wished that Tanuro was her father. Amanda had always refused to talk with Annogi about her father, insisting that he was a good man and that she would tell her when she was older, that it was not the right time. Annogi could never understand that and often cried when her mother would tell her that she could not see her father for dinner.

  “Your father does not know about you,” Amanda had explained once. “I chose to have you by myself, you are my star child. It was my choice, he never knew.”

  Annogi learned about sperm donors and artificial insemination years after Amanda’s death. It took her two more years to learn about DNA typing and another year to gather the nerve to break the station’s security systems, worrying all the while that security manager, not-father Tanuro would discover her.

  Tanuro had visited them several times when they were not in the Observation Rooms. In fact, Tanuro had dined with Annogi and Amanda just the night before the accident. When Amanda had put Annogi to sleep that night, she invited Tanuro to participate.

  “She looks so Japanese,” Tanuro said. “No one would ever think she wasn’t my daughter.”

  Why would they ever worry about that? Annogi had wondered muzzily to herself at the time.

  Amanda had laughed and shaken her head. She shushed him, pushed him out of the cramped room with her hand, gave Annogi one last kiss goodnight, turned out the lights and had left.

  But Annogi had not fallen asleep straight away. Tanuro’s comments had got her wondering about her father again. So she was still awake when their voices rose loudly and the front door was opened and Tanuro left, his voice full of sorrow. Annogi couldn’t remember the words they’d said but she wondered if their argument had contributed to the disaster of the next day.

  The day certainly hadn’t started like a day for disaster. Amanda seemed a bit withdrawn but her smile for Annogi was as bright as ever, perhaps even brighter.

  “We’re going to draw today, would you like that?” Amanda had asked Annogi over breakfast. Annogi liked that.

  They set up in Observation Room Four. Just before lunchtime, a group of strangers came in and crowded around the viewports.

  Annogi frowned at them because Amanda frowned at them. Amanda saw Annogi’s frown and smiled at her.

  “Maybe this is a good time for lunch,” Amanda said, starting to gather in her floating pencils.

  In that instant, Annogi’s world changed.

  It would take nearly a year to finally discover what had caused it, but the large bolt which slammed into the Observation Room did not hit one of the walls. If it had, maybe the worst that would have happened would have been a loud bang which would have startled everyone. Instead, the bolt hit one of the viewports with such force that it shattered both the outer and inner panes. Its size and speed were so great that it continued through into the room and started bouncing like a deadly missile off the walls — and through the suddenly terrified people.

  Amanda, with years of astronaut training, was not terrified. It was her actions which saved everyone else in the room. She forced them through the hatch, forced Annogi into the arms of one of the wailing women, and closed the emergency hatch. She would have gone through it herself, except that as it slowly closed, the flying bolt ricocheted into her head.

  Annogi screamed and yelled for her mother and struggled to get back to the hatch, to open it, for she was a smart girl and even at three knew how, only to find herself restrained, held tightly — in the arms of Tanuro.

  In that moment Annogi hated Tanuro. She hated him more when he seized her struggling body and squeezed it tightly against his, keeping her head on his chest. Annogi remembered wondering for a moment if Tanuro had been hit by the flying bolt too, for as she screamed and yelled into his face she could see all color an
d life draining out of it, as if Tanuro were turning to stone before her eyes.

  Annogi broke out of Tanuro’s tight grip when another group of station personnel arrived, and fled. She knew the station so well that it took even Tanuro six months to track her down. By then her body had grown too accustomed to microgravity, she could not return to Earth. So Tanuro had adopted her.

  It was years before she realized that Tanuro had been watching her mother die, still tormented by the flying bolt, and that Tanuro had held her, Annogi, instead of donning a spacesuit to rescue Amanda from the now airless Observation Room.

  It was still more years before Annogi realized that even as Tanuro had cradled her against him, Amanda had been too long without oxygen and had become just as dead as the bolt that had killed her.

  But by then Annogi was too accustomed to hating Tanuro to say anything to him.

  So Annogi decided to track down her real father. She would ask him to raise her, forgetting that years in microgravity had banished her from Earth forever. It didn’t matter to Annogi, she would be rid of Tanuro.

  And now she had her slip of paper, now she knew.

  A noise from behind her startled her and Annogi turned to see someone enter the Observation Room. It was a teenager and something about the way he moved caused Annogi to turn her body, reach into her pocket and put her earpiece into her far ear. She brushed her hair over the earpiece, hiding it.

  The boy was blond-haired and blue-eyed. Something about him seemed familiar but he moved like an earthling, not a spacer.

  He was older than her, Annogi realized. Not really a boy at all, in fact, in his mid- to late- teens. He was not yet shaving or had very soft facial hair, he still had the look of a youngster about him; that was why Annogi had first thought of him as a boy.

  They spoke at the same time.

  “What are you doing here?” the boy demanded.

  “Are you lost?”

  Annogi waited for the boy to respond. She’d seen enough television to expect that they would both burst out in laughter but she had no real friends her own age.