Dove Arising
Authors: 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
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.”
H
2
O 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.