by Sarah Zettel
Chena, on the other hand, was thirteen going on fourteen and looked like their father—tan skin, thick and wiry hair that was more brown than black, a sharp face, a wide full mouth, and deep-set eyes of midnight blue. Everything about her seemed too long right now—arms, legs, hands, feet. She was still getting used to the fact that she could look Mom in the eye without tilting her head up, and that she needed to wear a bra.
Teal wrapped her arms around her legs and hugged them to her chest, turning her head so her cheek rested on her knees and she could look back up at Chena.
“What do you think Dad’s doing?” she asked. Her voice was small and furtive and a little impatient. She wanted to start a story.
Chena sighed. Ever since Dad had left them last year, they’d been making up stories about what had happened to him. All they knew for sure was that he’d failed to rejoin his ship in the port of a world called Rupert’s Choice and they’d left without him. There’d been no news since then, even though Mom had talked to every bureaucrat on the station.
He’d probably just left them. Parents did that sometimes. There were kids in the halls on Athena who’d had both parents just dump them. But maybe not. Maybe he was really out there doing something important and soon he’d come back for them.
Oh, well, it’s better than her whining. Chena sat cross-legged next to Teal. “Okay.” She pulled her leg in as a big dark woman shuffled past, looking for someone or something. “Let me see.” She pressed her fingertips to her forehead, like she was receiving messages from the Great Beyond. “I think he’s working undercover for the Authority,” she said, flipping her eyes open. “I think there’s a conspiracy to poison one of the colony worlds and he’s going to find out who’s behind it.”
One of the old men next to them wheezed with laughter. “I think you’ve got too much imagination for a hallway baby.”
Anger, hot and sudden, flashed through Chena. “What would you know, you limp old—”
The door swished open and Teal seized her arm before Chena could finish the insult. Mom strode into the waiting room. Chena scrambled to her feet, stuffing her thumb between her first two fingers and stabbing upward to give the old man the piss-off sign. He waved her off and turned back to his friend.
“Well, Supernova, well, Starlet, that was something else, wasn’t it?” Mom’s voice was light, but her face was tired, even grim. “Gods below, I’m tired.” She had wrapped her arms around Teal and Chena and leaned back against the wall.
There was no time to ask questions then, because a different woman walked in right behind Mom. She wore a brown tunic and a long skirt. Her skin was sandy gold and her black hair was swept back and bundled into some kind of little mesh bag. She said her name was Madra and that she was the coordinator for the village of Offshoot. Then she’d read off a list of names of people who were supposed to come with her—including Chena, Teal, and Helice Trust.
So they lined up and walked down the corridor and out a door, where there’d been a brief glimpse of sky, and shifting sand and pebbles underfoot, and a huge glass and silver wire thing that Chena knew was a dirigible only because of a rig game she’d played once, and they were lead into the compartment under the areogel balloon. At least in this one there were enough chairs, and they were soft and comfortable, even if the immigrants did have to be strapped in, and they flew.
At first the feeling was fun, like the acceleration of the car on the space cable, but then it got boring. There wasn’t anything to see except the walls and the back of the chair in front of her. There were no jacks for her comptroller, or game rigs, or anything, and she found herself missing the space elevator. They’d been cooped up in there for two days in one big room with capsule bunks on the walls, but that had been fun. There’d been rigs and screens and five other kids, including Dea Jemma Tosh, whom Chena had grown up with, and Mom had been relaxed and happy, telling them over and over that this was a new beginning.
But the new beginning was turning out to be as boring as used grease. That was Pandora out there. Pandora. The world where people walked around counting flowers, with chips in their heads to tell them what to do. Where they were so busy with plants and animals, they didn’t even know know how to fix their own machinery and they had to get Athenians to take care of everything for them, from replacement parts to satellite maintenance. Where they had beaten the Diversity Crisis and all the babies were born healthy and alive. A thousand conflicting stories ran through Chena’s head. Nobody—well, nobody Chena knew—knew that much about Pandora. There was no public access network between the station and the planet, and the planet was forty-eight hours away at the bottom of the space cable. Forty-eight hours, after you got all the permits you needed, if you could get them. All Chena herself knew came from a combination of half-forgotten history lessons, legends she and her friends told each other, and snippets of rig games designed around the Conscience Rebellion that won Athena Station its semi-independence four hundred years ago. The Pandorans were helpless and they were automatons. They were distrusted geniuses and miracle workers. The whole world was a wilderness, and a garden.
And she couldn’t see any of it.
Eventually somebody came around and handed out some of the cakes that Chena and Teal had always called nutra-bricks. But even they were more interesting than the talk Madra got up to give—about how welcome they all were to Offshoot, and how they would be expected to give their share to village life, and on and on and on. Chena wasn’t sure if she actually fell asleep, but she was counting the white hairs on the balding head of the man in front of her for a while.
My first time on a planet, and I can barely tell it from the station, she remembered thinking.
Then, finally, finally, the dirigible settled down to the ground, they were herded out the door, and the world around them was dark, except for a little path of lanterns leading up to a wooden dock, with an enclosed boat waiting on it. Inside, they all had to take seats again, and a bunch of people had lined up on benches on either side of them and grabbed hold of these wooden levers sticking out of the walls. They began pushing and pulling on the levers in time with the ticking of a big metronome at the back of the boat.
Rowing. The were rowing. This boat had no engines!
But eventually even that novelty wore away into boredom. As hard as she tried, Chena couldn’t see a damn thing out the windows. Teal and Mom fell asleep on each other’s shoulders, and Chena wished she could do the same. The boat’s rocking motion made her queasy and she felt like she was alone in the whole dark world and nobody cared.
Then they were unloaded onto yet another lit path, in another dark world, and led into this big round room, assigned lockers, and given bundles of pallets and blankets and told to go to sleep, that there’d be a general breakfast bell, and welcome to Offshoot.
Welcome to Offshoot. When do we get to go home? Chena thought now to the darkness that was the ceiling.
She’d thought they’d be in one of the domed cities. That was what Mom had said at first. She’d applied for a liaison and consulting mechanic’s position. But that hadn’t been a go plan. Mom didn’t say why. She just told them they’d be heading for one of the outside villages instead.
As she thought that over, Chena noticed the darkness was less dark. The world seemed to be turning gray at the edges.
Sun must be coming up, she thought, sitting up and blinking. Weird. She’d been in rig games that showed dawn, and she thought she’d be ready for it, but somehow she’d never guessed it would be so… gradual. She didn’t think it could start up without you noticing it. It seemed like there should be a noise, a click, or a hum or a bell—something.
Which is completely stupid, she told herself. You’re a jungle girl now. No more caution buzzers, ever.
Then she realized something else. For the first time since they’d stepped aboard the space cable car, she wasn’t being watched or led around or put someplace. She could actually get up and go somewhere if she wanted to.
; She looked at her comptroller. It had defaulted to the time function: 4:20 glowed at her.
Chena made her decision. Carefully, she folded back her blankets. Teal didn’t stir. Neither did Mom. One of the anonymous lumps that was a fellow immigrant snorted and shrugged, but that was it.
Now that her eyes had adjusted to the dimness, Chena found she could make her way easily between the clusters of pallets to the room’s one doorway. The floor was cool under her feet but not cold, so she decided not to bother with finding her shoes. A corridor led off to the right and a set of shallow stairs climbed to the left. Ahead of her opened another round room, also full of sleeping bodies.
Chena opted for the stairs. They felt strangely uneven under her feet, as if they hadn’t been quite smoothed off. They were cold enough that she wished for her socks, but she kept going.
The staircase rose in a spiral through a second story that was shrouded in darkness, and up past that to another low doorway. Chena found the knob and tried to slide it sideways. It didn’t budge. Feeling foolish, she remembered to push.
A gust of damp wind, heavy with unfamiliar scents, caught Chena in the face and she shivered. She was outside. The rushing water sound that was the wind in the tree branches filled the world. She could see the black trunks like gigantic support girders against the gray background.
She almost turned back then, but her gaze dropped to the, what?— floor? roof?—that she stood on. It had been terraced and covered in dirt, and then in grass. Shafts of pale silver light slanted through the trees and touched the plants. Chena sucked in a breath before it could become a gasp. The roof was a garden. Flowers, closed tight for morning, grew out of beds of moss. Ivy crept along the rooftop and twined up the saplings, and that was just the beginning. The glimmers of silver light the forest permitted in highlighted more kinds of plants than she had known existed, just in this little space of a living rooftop.
It was alien to Chena, utterly and completely, but, even as she shivered in the unregulated wind, she found it beautiful.
Wrapping her arms around herself, Chena stepped out onto the roof. Damp, chilly grass cushioned her bare feet. She wandered here and there, just to see what she could—the shades of green on the different plants, the cup of a flower, all the kinds and shapes of leaves, the big rocks with their flecks of green and gray. Something touched her arm and Chena saw a bug with iridescent wings and a bright green body hanging on to her. It rubbed its impossibly delicate forelegs together and took off in the next heartbeat.
Beyond the edge of the roof waited a world of trees and rivers. The trees were so huge that any one of them could have been hollowed out to make a station module. Sunlight became tangled in the girder-like branches high overhead, up where the leaves made a shady mosaic that swayed in the wind. Here and there, a solid column of light made it down to the floor and lit up a patch of plants with tightly closed buds or furled leaves. Reed-choked streams dissected the village and then joined together to spill into the long brown river that snaked along the forest floor. More water fell in chortling cascades from the trees. Chena’s gaze followed the waterfalls up and saw that there were houses in the trees too, lashed to the crooks of the mighty branches. Entirely wooden, with living roofs, they looked like they had grown out of the gigantic trunks. Water cascaded down from the heights, collecting briefly in a series of cisterns, only to spill over their edges and down into the streams.
Chena had always thought that forests would be silent places. In the rig games, they were hushed except for the occasional call of a bird or growl of an animal. The games had left out the endless chatter of the water, and the great rushing of wind through the branches, and the way those branches creaked, as if they hadn’t been tightened on properly and might fall off at any moment.
Chena bit her lip nervously. She couldn’t help it. Creaks were bad noises. Creaks meant something was straining. Straining things broke and spilled the air out into the vacuum. Her head knew things like that couldn’t happen on a planet, but her gut didn’t yet.
Another gust of wind blew through her hair and tickled her nose. Chena sneezed, and one of the rocks straightened up.
Chena almost screamed. She stumbled backward, caught her foot on the edge of one of the terraces, and fell into what felt like a mass of feathers and thorns. Someone cackled with laughter while she struggled to get to her feet again, wincing at every snap and rustle underneath her.
When she was finally standing, Chena found she faced a stooped old woman who stepped out from behind a cluster of cablelike plants that ran up a bunch of skinny poles. She was even smaller and shorter than Chena. Some kind of apron covered her clothes, and its many pockets bulged with… something. In her hand, she carried a short curved knife.
Chena cleared her throat. “Good morning, Grandmother,” she said, saluting as politely as her mother had ever taught her, touching forehead, heart, and lips.
“I don’t know you.” The woman frowned and shifted her grip on the knife.
“I just got here.” Chena stared at the knife as if she’d been hypnotized. “I was just looking around, is all.”
“Were you?” The woman stepped closer. Chena could smell her now, and she smelled green and moldy. “Where’d you get here from?”
“Athena Station.” Chena thought about taking a step back to get away from the smell, which now included sweat and some really bad breath, but she was afraid she’d fall and wreck something worse. Still, there was that knife in the wrinkled fist.…
“You’re a station girl, and you came out here?” The old woman spoke the words like an accusation. “Alone?”
“Yes,” said Chena, her anger rising at the sneer the old woman put into the words “station girl.” “As if it’s anything to you.”
“Huh,” grunted the woman. “Well, that’s different. All right, girl, I’ll tell you, it’s not a good idea to be wandering around the roofs too late or too early. That’s the first thing.”
And because I so desperately begged for your advice…? thought Chena sourly. She folded her arms. “What’s the second thing?”
She thought she saw a look of approval flicker across the old woman’s face. “The second is, I’m Nan Elle. If there’s something you need to know, pass the word for me and maybe I’ll tell you.” Her mouth gaped in a smile, and Chena saw with a shock that she didn’t have all her teeth. “Now get you downstairs, station girl. This isn’t your world until the sun’s all the way up.”
Chena stayed where she was for a long second, just to show she wasn’t afraid and that she wasn’t going to be ordered around easily. But she saw that knife, and she saw how this woman came out of nowhere, and how the air was still more shadows than light. With all these things in her head, Chena turned away. But as she headed for the door, she saw another staircase. This one traveled down the side of the building. There was also a kind of catwalk leading straight off the roof and into the trees. Chena looked back over her shoulder and saw that the old woman was still watching her.
Let her watch. She walked right onto the catwalk. She thought she heard a raspy chuckle behind her, but that could have been the wind in the leaves.
The walkway was made of wooden boards, polished to a high shine and tied together with fiber ropes. She felt a little dizzy standing there. She could look over the edge and see the forest floor. This wasn’t even anything near as high as she could go. There were buildings whose roofs brushed the leaves on the trees. She wanted to climb up there, to see who lived in them and how they lived, and if they thought they were something.
Better not push it too far right now, Chena.
At least she could touch. Chena reached out her hand toward the wrinkled bark of the tree trunk beside her.
Pain ran up and down her arm.
“Ow!” she shouted, snatching her hand back. She stared from her fingertips to the tree. Then she saw the slim silver pillars that lined the catwalk on both sides.
Gods below, she thought, rubbing her hand. It’s a
shock fence.
Now that she saw them, she noticed the shock fence posts lining the paths in the village below too. Every path, every building, was effectively cut off from the surrounding forest. No one could walk out there without suffering a serious shock or, depending on how high the current was set, without dying.
All that alien beauty out there was completely out of reach.
Feeling cheated, Chena stuck to the lowest level, just walking and wondering about the slowly brightening world around her. Did the waterfalls chattering around her shoulders serve any real purpose or were they just decoration? What were those four silver rails stretching across the forest floor and into the woods? She could see the broad brown river winding between the trees, down a slope from the village, but she couldn’t see any boats at the docks.
Suddenly Chena felt closed in. Except for the theoretical boats and mysterious rails, there really was no way out of here. Maybe they really would have to wait for Dad to come get them. Maybe that would never happen.
Mom won’t make us stay here, she told herself, her hand tightening on the catwalk railing.
The noise of running feet and hoarse calls made Chena look down. A pair of boys about her own age trotted out from between the buildings, following one of the gravel paths. Mindful of the fence, Chena leaned over the railing and waved.
“Hey!” she called.
The boys paused and looked up. When they spotted Chena, they stared for a minute and then one of them slapped the other on the shoulder and they took off running again.
“Hey!” exclaimed Chena again. She ran along the catwalk until she came to the stairs leading to the ground. The boys had almost vanished. She pelted down the gravel path after them, angry at being ignored, and anger gave her speed. It was pretty obvious they were trying to lose her, and they knew the ground a lot better than she did. If she didn’t catch them fast, she wouldn’t catch them at all.