by Audrey Faye
Dandelion Kisses
Audrey Faye
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Dandelion Kisses
Thank You
Copyright © 2015 Audrey Faye
www.audreyfayewrites.com
For all the neighbors
who never minded
the dandelions blown
onto their lawns.
Year 2283, First Orbit, Eighth Rotation (2yrs old)
Candelaria Siobhan Masuko Bagani knew her whole name, but no one ever used it. It would have been a waste of oxygen, and nobody on Poseidon Station ever wasted anything that valuable, even if the last time oxygen had been in short supply had been back in Aya’s day.
But today was different, and Ari knew it.
Every child born on Poseidon was watched very carefully from the moment of their birth, tested and measured and tracked while the adult population of the station held their breath for 784 days. Two complete cycles.
A child who made it to the first day of her third cycle had passed the terrible test set by life in a bubble on the side of an asteroid. Aya said it had once been the same back on Earth when animals were held in captivity and their young struggled mightily to survive.
When Moon was around, he generally told Aya to hush, that Poseidon Station wasn’t a cage.
Ari mostly ignored them. She’d been born in the bubble that separated Poseidon’s oxygen from the unfriendly void beyond. It didn’t seem like a cage to her, and besides, she would rather giggle and try to touch the dolphins on Aya’s comp screen. They looked like they were having fun, jumping and splashing in more water than any child born in space had ever seen.
Ari straightened her shoulders and tried to remember Moon’s quiet words of the morning. Space children had responsibilities, and hers were about to get bigger. It was her fledging day, and she would take her place as the youngest fully acknowledged member of Poseidon Station’s crew complement.
Because of the history present in the rest of her names, she would be stepping into far bigger shoes than most of Poseidon’s fledglings. Her father had been a Bagani, one of the hereditary master gardeners who shepherded Poseidon’s fragile, complicated food supply. Her mother had been a Masuko, and everyone said that what she couldn’t fix with a sapwrench and chewing gum couldn’t be fixed.
Ari wasn’t sure what a sapwrench was, but she liked chewing gum. She thought it might be nice to have a mama, too, but she didn’t remember her parents, and Aya had always been there. The loss of her parents had been a deep blow to the station, however—and small though she was, Ari felt some of the weight of this day and the expectations coming in for a landing on her tiny shoulders.
Aya leaned down and touched her hand to the back of Ari’s curls. “See if you can manage to stop squirming, sweetling.”
It was asking the impossible. Some part of Ari was always in motion, and if her feet had to be still, then something else had to move. Her Uncle Murphy called it Ari’s law of perpetual motion, but his eyes always twinkled when he said it.
There were too many eyes today. Lots of people staring at her. She knew most of them, but they were all dressed in funny clothes, just like she was, and they stood around like they had nothing better to do than gawk at one small girl who really just wanted to go back to Aya’s pod and have a cookie, or maybe do her chores. People on Poseidon worked as soon as they could walk. All this stillness just felt wrong.
“It will start soon, child.” Aya’s voice again, with a hint of gentle chiding this time. “Look at all the flowers that have bloomed just for your special day.”
Ari knew that her uncles had worked very hard to make the fledging garden especially beautiful for today. Uncle Murphy said it wasn’t very often that they had a Bagani to honor.
The flowers were really pretty. Blue ones and shiny pink ones, and in the middle, the rainbow-striped ones that were her favorite. Her most secret wish was to have one for her very own—to sit it on the table beside her bed and touch its soft petals and tell it stories about dragons and oceans and lands far away where things called snowflakes fell from the sky.
Uncle Murphy said she had a heart for flowers. And he also reminded her, every time she hinted at the most secret wish nestled in her heart, of the station’s rules. Poseidon’s most precious riches were its green, growing things. They belonged to everyone on the station, and they had very important jobs to do. They weren’t to hold and they weren’t to touch, and they most certainly weren’t for small girls to take home. The station needed every single living green thing it could muster—for food, for air, for life.
She always told him solemnly that she understood. She was Poseidon born, after all.
But today, as she stood at the edge of the pretty fledging garden and its elegant stone pathway so she could walk to the center without accidentally jostling any of the flowers and disturbing their important work, something inside Ari protested. She wanted to disturb the flowers. She wanted to dance amongst them, just like she twirled amid the paper cranes that hung from the ceiling of Aya’s pod, and tell them that Ari Bagani was going to be their friend.
Instead, she slowly bowed her head and listened as the words of the fledging ceremony began. She would make Aya and Moon proud. And maybe, if she worked very hard, one day Uncle Murphy would let her take a flower home.
Year 2289, Third Orbit, Eleventh Rotation (8yrs old)
“Try again, child—you almost have it.” Aya leaned over the table where they worked with stylus and tablet, painstakingly learning the ancient art of handwriting.
“It’s too long.” Ari tried not to grump too much. She had very little interest in handwriting or anything else that involved sitting still, but if she did her grandmother’s bidding there was usually a cookie at the end of it, and if she was very lucky, even one of the old stories. Aya remembered everything—and she knew how to shine and polish the words up better than anyone.
Aya’s cultural roots were widely discussed on the station and never fully pinned down. Manji’s mama thought it was because Aya read the old histories on the Net and made up whatever she wanted about her past. Ari didn’t care. Aya’s stories were the best, even if they might not all be true. When you lived in a bubble on the side of a rock in space, people were so serious about every little thing.
Ari already spent plenty of her day being serious. She trained four hours each day with her uncles in the gardens. Boring, painstaking work, carefully helping each tiny seed to sprout and fertilize and grow. It wasn’t too bad—the plants seemed to like her all right, even if her fingers were always cramping from the careful work.
Whenever she felt like rebelling, she remembered the sad look on Uncle Murphy’s face every time a green thing failed to grow.
He hadn’t been sad today, though. The gardeners were all aflutter about a new package from Earth. Precious seeds, eight years in transit, sent by relatives Ari knew only as faces in the frames on Aya’s walls.
She picked up the stylus. Time to earn a cookie. “Tell me again what each of my names means.”
Aya’s eyes wrinkled in the corners. “You’ve got a mind like a muskrat, child—you forget nothing. Why don’t you tell me?”
Ari had no idea what a muskrat was, and she would have asked if there hadn’t been cookies on the line. Aya made them the old-school way, full of synth-butter and sugar and a whole bunch of other things that weren’t good for growing children. This week she’d even traded with her friend Emilio for some of his little drop-shaped chocolates.
Aya carefully smoothed out a small, square piece of paper. “Moon blessed this for you.”
Ari wasn’t sure she believed in blessings—and that was only part of why this whole thing was kind of wei
rd—but it was important to Aya. She picked up her favorite pencil and reviewed the cursive letters of her name in her head one more time. Each one joined to the next so they wouldn’t get lost from each other when the ashes went out into the universe.
Ari’s fingers held the pencil a little tighter. It would be the very first time any part of her left the bubble of Poseidon Station. And even if it would just be a few ashes left from the burning of an origami flower with her name on it, blown out one of the exhaust tubes by a friendly engineer, it still felt momentous.
It was momentous. Fires, even tiny baby ones, used precious oxygen at a fearsome rate. But Aya had insisted, and when Ari’s grandmother did that, even the sternest faces of Poseidon eventually relented.
Aya said it was because they all liked her cookies.
Ari thought it probably had more to do with the fact that Aya had invented half of the things that made Poseidon Station money. They might be one of the smaller asteroid stations, but traders came from half a star system away to get their hands on cell heal and flexiplasm and skin gloves.
To the children of Poseidon, Aya was the keeper of stories and a soft touch for treats—but she was also one of the best bio-engineers the galaxy had ever seen. She knew how to make things that felt like part of a person’s body instead of an awkward appendage, and it kept the station rolling in credits.
Or at least piling up tidy sums of them.
One day, Ari thought, she was going to grow up to be just like her grandmother. Tough and smart and with a cold-unit full of cookies.
“That looks very nice.” Aya leaned over, inspecting Ari’s tiny writing.
Ari tried not to wince—her letters had wandered all over the paper square. “Will one more time be enough?” Aya said they wanted to fill the paper with the letters of Ari’s true name, so the universe would know it was her even if all it found was the tiniest molecule.
At Aya’s nod, she carefully began to write her name again.
And wondered why so many of the important things made her fingers cramp.
Year 2294, Fourth Orbit, Seventh Rotation (13 years old)
Ari yawned and wondered if it was possible to die of terminal boredom.
She knew what Aya’s cage was now—and it chafed.
This was the third time in two months that the new science teacher had brought them to the agropod. And for the third time, they were supposed to sit quietly on the grav benches and listen to the droning voice of the agro-manager explain things every Poseidon Station kid had known since two minutes after they were born.
Ari leaned over to Manji, her current best friend. He’d probably be transferred to a different class next orbit—her luck tended to run like that. “I bet that robot said the same stuff when our parents were still stuck in kiddie internment camp.”
Manji grinned—they’d picked that particular nickname for school after their ancestor studies unit on the wars of Earth.
She watched the shadows moving across the agropod’s skydome as random phrases from the science lecture bounced off her ears. The terrible evils of Monsanto, the company that had changed all the Earth seeds until they couldn’t reproduce anymore.
Which worked out fine for Monsanto, but not all that well for anyone else.
Ari didn’t need a lecture to know all about that. She could vouch for how hard it had made things—she spent four hours every day doing the work that the plants used to be able to do for themselves, making sure the station had enough food to eat. Ari tried to imagine a world where green stuff grew just because the winds blew or a helpful bee happened to wander along.
They had a small bee colony on Poseidon—it was one of Aunt Rumia’s pet projects. The bees made awesome honey, but never, in eighty orbits of trying, had they ever managed to make anything grow. Only master gardeners could do that—and their lowly, overworked, underappreciated apprentices.
Manji poked her none-too-gently in the ribs. “Wake up. Your uncle is up next.”
She scowled. “I wasn’t sleeping.” Not totally, anyhow.
She perked up when she saw the container in Uncle Murphy’s hands—the one with all the stamps on it warning of death and dismemberment to anyone who disturbed the contents. Not that anyone was dumb enough to mess with a master gardener’s experiments. She leaned over to Manji. “That’s the dandelion I was telling you about.”
It was one of the last plants to be grown from the precious seeds sent in the packet from Earth. Five years of painstaking work, getting each seed to grow and figuring out how to reproduce them. Uncle Murphy’s team had solved the most—they had six new species of edible greens and four new root crops.
On a space rock, that was a very big deal. Even if you weren’t very fond of edible greens.
The dandelion was one of the very last seeds they’d tried to grow. They had three of them in the Earth packet. This first one would let them study its life cycle. The second one would be for the all-critical experiments—figuring out how to help the dandelion reproduce. Uncle Murphy and the science team had been planning for weeks. The third seed would be held in reserve in case they failed.
Ari hoped they didn’t fail—it made too many people sad.
Uncle Murphy set his container down carefully on the table and tapped on the series of buttons that would undo the climate-control chamber shielding it from the rest of the agropod. Dangerous stuff, but Uncle Murphy insisted that plants did better if they got to see the real world once in a while.
He also insisted that kids did better if they got to see real plants.
Ari strained to see around the students on the front rows of benches—it had been three days since she’d last seen the dandelion. The first two rotations after the seed was planted had been really boring, but after the little green shoot had come up through the soil, she’d been mesmerized.
And when the funny little bump on the top had turned into a round, fuzzy flower, everyone had gotten excited. The science team and the gardeners had been all aflutter about how many seeds it had. Uncle Murphy’s voice had even shaken a little as he tried to count them all.
Ari had loved its bright yellow color, and she’d wanted so very badly to touch the softness. She hadn’t, of course. They only had three chances to figure out how the dandelion worked.
“Ari,” hissed Manji under his breath.
“What?” She was a little mad—his elbows were sharp.
“You’re supposed to go up there.” He pointed at the front where Uncle Murphy stood, holding the container and looking annoyed.
Uh, oh. Ari made her way to the front as quickly as she could and stopped a safe distance away from Uncle Murphy. And then looked at the dandelion in shock. “What happened to it?” The yellow was gone, and in its place was a ball of gray fluff.
Her uncle smiled. “We think it has moved into the seed dissemination phase of its life cycle.”
She knew what that was. The part where the poor plants, who didn’t understand what the evil Monsanto had done, tried to make more of themselves. She looked at the gray fluff, feeling a little sad.
Uncle Murphy’s eyes were a little sad too. “Why don’t you take this and show it to the other students?” He held out the container very slowly, very carefully.
Her eyes widened. He never let anyone else hold the dandelion. She felt her hands getting moist and shaky, and wiped them on her pants.
He smiled. “Maybe you can stand here and hold it, and your classmates can come up a few at a time to take a look.”
She nodded, hands still shaky. And held as still as she could as Uncle Murphy placed the container ever so gently in her hands.
Ari barely noticed as her classmates walked up, two at a time, to look at the rare and beautiful thing she was holding. She only had eyes for the ball of gray. It wasn’t really fluff—it was a collection of tiny hairs and what must be seeds. Light as space dust and shimmying in the tiny winds caused by the slow shuffle of students.
The hairs moved as she breathed.
The oddest memory popped into her head, from one of the silly books Aya used to read. Blow and make a wish.
The tiny gray filaments moved again. Stuck. Struggling against each other. Not enough space.
They wanted to fly.
Ari sensed her lungs inhale. Felt the movement of her breath as it flowed out the tunnel of her lips and blew into the side of the gray ball of fluff. Flattening it, like the poke of an invisible, cosmic finger. And then, in slow, silent motion, the sphere of gray exploded and tiny bits of hair and seed caught a ride on the magic carpet of Ari Bagani’s breath.
Joy rose up in her as she watched them disperse. Followed by the sure and certain knowledge that she had never been in so much trouble in her entire life.
Three seeds. Three chances. She had just destroyed one.
She could see the white faces around her, mad and tight and agitated and afraid. She had just broken every possible rule Poseidon Station had, and probably a few they hadn’t dreamed up yet. This would get her time in the reformation center for sure.
Only Manji’s eyes still watched the bits of dancing gray.
“Ari.” Uncle Murphy’s voice was a horrified whisper. “Why did you do that?”
Because it had wanted her to.
Ari knew that answer wouldn’t be good enough. She didn’t care. She watched one last tiny bit of gray, still hovering. Weightless. Immune to the forces of gravity and good behavior expected of all bio-mass on Poseidon.
Free.
Year 2303, Second Orbit, Third Rotation (22 years old)
“Seriously, you couldn’t keep your hands out of the dirt for ten minutes?”
Ari Bagani, Poseidon Station’s newest PhD, set down her trowel and looked up at her aunt with an amused grin. “Plant sex waits for no one—you know that.” In actual fact, the strawberry propagation could have easily been added to some intern’s chore list, but Ari knew what the evening held in store. If wanting to stick her hands in the dirt for a moment made her a coward, then so be it.