Dove Arising (2 page)

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’ve 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.

“What was bothering you earlier?” Umbriel says. “My guesses have all been wrong so far . . . Oh?”

A third person appears in the mirror, fragmenting our short-lived privacy. We turn away from our reflections. Umbriel huffs in annoyance, but I don’t, not after I see who it is.

My ten-year-old sister, Anka, stands at the door, staring at us with eyes identical to mine, except that hers glisten with innocence—and at this moment, fear. She could have been me five years ago, with her full cheeks and black hair, but she allots herself more words per hour than I ever did. I tug Umbriel to his feet.

“Um, can you guys come out?” Anka’s voice is a nervous whisper, turned down to about five percent of its usual intensity. Her hands are clasped together, right palm concealing her handscreen. “There’s this weird boy. . . . The door light blinked, and I forgot to check the camera, and I opened up, and now he won’t leave.”

No
. We haven’t had an unexpected visitor since last year, when my brother, Cygnus, was quarantined for a vicious stomach virus. Three weeks later, Medical dumped him on our doormat, having hoisted away 20 percent of our savings for his treatment.

I remember learning that Earthbound creatures like mice and birds have such high heart rates that their pulses sound like humming. I’d never thought that my own heart could take off at a pace that might rival theirs.

But as the three of us tumble into the main room, it misses beat after beat. Saving them up for what will come.

2

THE ONLY NOISE IS THE FAINT WHIRRING OF our half-meter-tall maintenance robot, Tinbie, as he zips around on rickety wheels and sucks up debris. His eyes light up yellow in victory whenever he rids the floor of a particularly large chunk. But machines, even rotund benevolent ones, are insensitive in difficult situations.

Cygnus crosses his arms over his chest, trying to make his lanky thirteen-year-old body appear imposing. Like Umbriel, he looks as if someone grabbed both ends of his prepubescent self and pulled. He holds his right shoulder higher than his left, a result of spending so many hours fooling around on his handscreen.