by Karen Bao
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America by Viking,
an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015
Copyright © 2015 by Karen Bao
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Bao, Karen.
Dove arising / Karen Bao.
pages cm -- (Dove chronicles ; 1)
Summary: “On a lunar colony, fifteen-year-old Phaet Theta does the unthinkable and joins the Militia when her mother is imprisoned by the Moon’s oppressive government”— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-698-15277-9
[1. Science fiction. 2. Space colonies—Fiction. 3. Militia movements—Fiction. 4. Government, Resistance to—Fiction. 5. Moon—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B229478Dov 2014
[Fic]--dc23
2013041198
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Acknowledgments
About the Author
TO MY PARENTS
1
UMBRIEL SAYS I’M SO GOOD WITH PLANTS because I’m as quiet as they are.
He might be wrong. According to the oldest people here, green growths weren’t always silent: leaves once cartwheeled in the wind, and storms snatched branches from trunks with deafening cracks. But these plants surrounding me are mute apple trees, strawberry bushes, and cotton shrubs with fibers and filaments of cellulose that would, if they could, complain about never anchoring in the earthen soil and never seeing the light of day, except through the carbon-reinforced glass of the Greenhouse 22 roof.
I used to imagine their limbs lengthening toward the tantalizing sliver of a sphere along the horizon, trying to stretch away from this barren, cratered satellite and reach the Earth we all came from. I stopped sympathizing with them at thirteen, when I converted the energy of my childish fancies into relentless concentration in Primary Education. Now we come to the greenhouses after class to make extra money. I don’t try to understand the plants anymore. I just take care of them.
“Phaet!” Umbriel says. Because my name’s pronounced “fate,” it sounds like destiny’s calling every time someone addresses me. “This one’s growing quickly. Can you bring me the stake?”
He stands a few meters down the row of flowering apple trees, scrutinizing a branch that has gotten too long and upset the balance of the sapling. It looks like one of those old Earth buildings called “skyscrapers,” shrunken down and ready to tip over. Ironic, that name. We are closer to the sky than they ever were.
To reach him, I leap across the plants between us. There are no grav-magnets above our heads, so acrobatics unimaginable in the rest of Base IV are possible here. I relish the sight of my billowing, white clothes until gravity pulls me back down.
We strap a pole to the sapling’s trunk so that the lengthening branch doesn’t cause it to tilt farther. Umbriel’s awkwardly tall body resembles the skinny tree we’re disciplining, a likeness intensified by the matching green of his clothes. Smiling, I scoop smelly compost from a box with a small shovel and spread it in a ring around the base of the trunk.
Moisture hits my scalp while I work: the spray nozzles in the ceiling have released water onto the left side of my head. Umbriel bunches his sleeve around his hand and uses it to soak up the droplets in my tightly coiled hair. “Let’s hope this dries before Dorado sees. Heh—aren’t you a waste of water.”
H2O is dear to us; it costs three Sputniks for a one-liter canteen of the stuff to drink. If we’re lucky, Dorado, the head Agriculture specialist, who never enters the greenhouses himself, isn’t watching the cameras closely. He’s old, at least seventy, and dozes off on the job unless he’s shaking his cane at us clumsy young folk. In spite of the inconvenience we’ve caused him, I think he likes us.
When we were eleven, Umbriel tripped over a pumpkin vine and landed face-first in a clump of Vaccinium-8, a bioengineered variety of fist-sized blueberries with savagely poisonous leaves. Dorado heard shouts of agony through the security screens, saw splotches of scarlet erupt on Umbriel’s skin, and summoned a team of Medics on the spot. It was a special case, he’d told us, because we were young; normally he wouldn’t call Medics for workers’ nonlethal accidents. That’s when I began hoping to become a Bioengineer—so I’d get to work on projects like reducing the plants’ toxin levels while increasing their nutritional content.
I don’t usually slip up—and neither does Umbriel, not anymore. We trained under heavy supervision for three years before they gave us duties, and for good reason. Greenhouse plants supply the bulk of the base’s nutrition, as well as the cotton in our robes and the oxygen we breathe. Above my head, solar-powered filters dump carbon dioxide into the greenhouse and pump oxygen to the rest of the base.
I’ll admit that I’m distracted today. This morning, my mother left for her job in the Journalism Department with circular blue imprints under her eyes. She hasn’t looked alert for a few days but has refused to say why. Apprehension has been thrashing around in my heart, unspoken and squashed down by my will. Regardless, I can’t hide my worry from Umbriel.
“What’s bugging you? Not the flat-ended bees, I hope. The hive people had to harvest honey today. Neither species was very happy about it.”
Umbriel knows that being surrounded by organisms—sprouting and growing and living—usually puts a serene, if not content, expression on my face. When the slightest crease appears on my forehead, he feels he must erase it with a joke or two.
“I know—it’s that chemistry test. You probably bombed it. Your name’s going to flop off the top of the science-area listing.”
Now he’s appealing to my pride by bringing up my Primary ranking, the reward for long nights of studying, of pinching my forearms to stay awake and mumbling formulae to drown out the complaints of my empty stomach. It’ll someday get me a job in the Bioengineering Department—and
along with that position, state-of-the-art equipment to tinker with and design team members who’ll give me both respect and space to think. The entire base gave respect and distance to the Bioengineer who modified honeybee homeotic genes to strip the species of stingers. I, too, want to create something new with the tools nature has provided. I’d also earn an engineer’s high salary, though that’s secondary.
As Umbriel straps another tree to a post, he studies me with eyes so dark I can’t tell where the pupils and irises meet. Stumped, he slaps his gloved hands together three times, as if dusting them off. It’s an old signal of ours. We’ll talk later, when there’s greater likelihood of privacy.
“Guess you’re just tired, then,” he says.
He taps the back of his left hand and turns it toward me. His handscreen—the circular layer of flexible polymer fused with his skin—reads 16:58. Two minutes remain until we can go home to the Residential Department, him to the Phi complex and me to Theta.
When we’ve finished off the compost, we walk past other temperate fruit-bearing species to the perimeter of the dome. Our two-person transport, made of fiberglass embedded with carbon nanotubes, has a nose shaped like an old-fashioned bullet. It’s a retired Militia ship that has been stripped of its tinted shell and fitted with a storage bin on the rear, into which we pile our shovels, hoes, empty compost sacks, extra stakes, and soiled gloves. The thing miraculously didn’t explode in space combat or get piloted into an asteroid by some novice soldier during its fighting years. Today, it sports only a few scars where the self-sensing material grew back after being punctured by small particles.
I take the driver’s seat and enter the password—6, 8, 8, 6—into a keypad, another relic from the past. Nowadays, secure access doors and vehicles all have fingertip scanners.
Umbriel parks himself next to me, patting my shoulder the way he does when he’s not sure what to say. Last year, we took our first pilot’s tests, excited at the prospect of flying the endless distances between the Agriculture terminal and our assigned greenhouses instead of hitching rides with older workers. Because I had scrutinized the steering mechanisms—and studied the transport manual—I passed the written and practical portions in half the time allotted. Umbriel didn’t; he forgot the scientific names of the delicate plants over which we’re not allowed to fly and failed the written. I’m secretly glad that he can’t travel far by himself. For convenience’s sake, Dorado still assigns us to work the same plants at the same times.
I crank the bottom-thruster lever all the way up. With a sputter, the old transport lifts us two, four, six meters in the air. I set the transport to lateral mode, push the joystick—I try three times before it stops jamming—and we’re flying over the garden below.
Umbriel sucks in a breath, uncomfortable with me doing something as “dangerous” as piloting a transport. “I’ll never get used to this. . . . Next year I’ll pass that, er, exam.”
I glance at him and laugh as he polishes his incisors with his tongue—our code for “blast, how dumb.” Not far from sticking our tongues out like annoyed little kids, which is precisely the point.
There’s the familiar whoosh of cool air and the change of scent from plant fragrances to plastic and glass as we exit Greenhouse 22 into the main terminal of Agriculture. My eyes painfully adjust to the shift from soothing green to blinding white. The entire interior of Base IV is white, which best insulates us from the volatile temperature fluctuations of the Moon’s crust. My body slumps as the grav-magnets in the ceiling repel the diamagnetic water molecules in my system to make me as heavy as I’d be on Earth. If not for the magnetic force supplementing lunar gravity, everyone would shrivel from muscle atrophy or osteopenia.
We zip past the greenhouses, each half a kilometer in diameter and climate controlled to suit its plant species. Greenhouse 17, tropical fruits; 14, cotton and indigo; 13, coniferous forest. Last year, when Dorado assigned us to 12, paddy crops, we wore bizarre rubber overalls and sowed rice, poking each other with muddy fingers whenever we finished a row.
Finally, I park the transport in the lobby. Leaving the transport in its designated spot, we step out and enter the expansive Atrium, where Base IV’s complex network of hallways meets. Each of the six bases has its own departments needed for subsistence, from Agriculture, where food is grown, to Culinary, where it’s prepared, to Market, where it’s finally sold. Law, Defense, Sanitation, Recreation—they all serve concrete purposes in our lives. We always know where to go when we need something, but many departments are off-limits to nonemployees—like Journalism, where my mother works.
Umbriel slings an arm around my shoulder. People push and shove, all wearing the robe colors of their respective apartment complexes. Scattered throughout are black-suited clusters of Militia soldiers, or as we call them, “Beetles.” Their shiny-visored black helmets obscure their faces, mimicking the reflectivity of insect shells.
Wrongdoers must hide their activities from both the Beetles and the two-meter-high convex security mirrors that stretch toward the ceiling. Civilians are supposed to check the security mirrors and report suspicious activity to the nearest Beetle, but I’ve never seen any criminals in action. Maybe that’s because I don’t pay enough attention—I don’t want to approach the intimidating Militia.
Headlines from the Luna Daily roll across the domed ceiling in block-shaped print:
MISSION TO OBERON SUCCESSFUL—SAMPLES TO BE TRANSPORTED TO GEOLOGY LAB
BASE III MILITIA HALTS EARTHBOUND ATTACK
The capital letters on the high-resolution screens worsen the visual clutter, and the pulsing crowd makes my discomfort around large numbers of people impossible to ignore. Umbriel clutches me tighter, using his height and sure footwork to drive us through.
STANDING COMMITTEE COMMENDS BASE I AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION
Sometimes, the Committee—the six people, one from each base, who govern the Moon—directly addresses the public. I’m glad they’re not appearing on the news tonight, because they’d make my head spin even faster from fear. Whenever they give a public address, they use lighting that reveals only their silhouettes, turning them into towering black shadows. Hiding their features allows them to lead quiet lives outside of the government buildings; they also use pseudonyms. If I met the Base IV representative in Market, I wouldn’t recognize her.
Fortunately, the chances of an unknowing encounter with a Committee member are tiny, because the Committee resides on Base I to facilitate meetings. The oldest Base is located all the way near the North Pole, on the rim of the Peary Crater. In contrast, Base IV is a few kilometers from the equator, on Oceanus Procellarum—one of the dark basalt seas formed by ancient magma deposits—and slouches against the wall of the Copernicus crater, which protects its western portion from meteorite bombardment.
After exiting the huge dome and bumping along arched white hallways barely wide enough for me and Umbriel, we reach Theta, one of twenty identical apartment complexes. A four-meter-high letter “” greets us out front. The can-shaped elevator takes us up to the eighth floor. At my apartment, 808, I press my fingertip to the scanner, and the doors slide open.
We stop in the white cylinder of a bedroom I share with my sister to stow Agriculture’s shovel, trimming knife, and gloves under the shelf that holds my little moss garden. The stuff grows under the angiosperms in the greenhouses; Dorado considers it parasitic, so we pluck it away. But I once snuck some home, filled a tray with pilfered soil, and laid stripes of light green sphagnum and brownish cap moss across its surface. I’d get locked up if anyone found out I’m cultivating unregulated life-forms, but it’s worth the risk. The moss brings me peace in a life of constant studying, working, and looking over my shoulder. It’s the most low-maintenance companionship one could ask for, and it reminds me that things are more than what they seem. Its uneven clumps look like shrunken versions of Earth’s rolling hills, and the sporophyte stalks resemble trees. Not that I’ve ever seen the hills, except in old pictures. But I’v
e tried looking, even though I know the Moon is too far away, by squinting at Earth through the greenhouse windows while the sun shone.
My room is so small that when Umbriel and I sit on my cot, we see both the moss garden and our reflections in the desk mirror. I uncoil my hair and pick apart the braid, shaking loose the feeling that someone’s been yanking on it all day. Agriculture, like many of the scientific departments, expects females to bind our hair so we don’t shed or tangle it in expensive equipment. The style is a headache to create every morning and literally a headache to wear during the day.
I lower my cheek onto Umbriel’s solid shoulder, but because our faces are pointy from daily bouts of hunger, the pressure soon hurts my bones and I have to sit back up. We both have tan skin from working in the greenhouses and eyes the same shade of onyx: mine long and sloped, his wide and penetrating. Our hair was the same color too, in our childhood, but now mine is shot through with silver veins, the tails of miniature comets hurtling across my head. The rest is dark as the spaces between the stars.
Looking at my hair, Umbriel clicks his tongue. “Take it easy, will you? There’s a whole new section here that’s gray. I’m starting to worry about your worrying.” The fingers of his right hand untangle the knots at the ends of my hair—fingers that have vexed me time and again by snatching fruit off shrubs and depositing them in his pockets. For free produce, he’s willing to risk spending a few days locked up—though he’s gotten so good at evading security that I think he no longer worries about the danger.
Before he continues the conversation, we sit on our left hands to cover the microscopic audio receptors on our handscreens. It’s a common practice, but I still grin for a moment. It’s always funny to me that people having the most serious talks look the silliest, hands firmly tucked under gluteals.
Powered by our blood circulation, handscreens perform the functions of old Earthbound computers and link us to the Base IV network. Every five-year-old must report to the Medical Department, fall unconscious under morphine, and remain so while specialists fuse flesh with technology. We use handscreens to compute figures, read uploaded books, watch news broadcasts, and view other peoples’ statistics on demand; Medical also uses them to monitor our vital signs, like heart rate and body temperature. However, we can’t send messages or receive communications unless they’re transmitted directly from a department. And everyone knows—though the Committee doesn’t tell us—that in some undisclosed location, their agents listen to the multitude of handscreen feeds to root out threats to national security. Maybe the Committee’s okay with our knowing because it discourages bad behavior. I’ve never felt unsafe—but I wish they’d leave us alone.