The One Tree of Luna

by Todd McCaffrey

  Flying is when you’ve passed your Free-form Test Five and you’ve received the full Airborne Authorization. And that is so much more than what grubbers could ever hope to do.

  So, after school, after saying goodbye to little Carey and big Mary, I moved into a clear space, checked my rear, took a run, leapt — and flapped my wings.

  Wings? Yeah, between that first step and the leap, I closed my eyes, interfaced with my nannies and had them close up around me, fan out — and spread into wings.

  You gotta be strong to fly. You need biceps, triceps, you need to be trim, you use your abs more than you’d imagine and you’ve got to be light. If it was a choice between starving to lose twenty kilos or flying — I’d starve. Because there is just nothing like it! Chocolate’s great but it’s nothing compared to climbing up fifty meters, banking, and seeing the dome floor from a thirty degree angle.

  Now tourists come up and spend their time in Heinlein Cave. But those of us born here, who train for it, can go for a full Endurance rating. That’s even beyond FFT5. I have a 60 minute full endurance rating. To get that, I had to prove that I could stay aloft for twice that amount and that I could fly for 70 minutes at twice my weight.

  And that’s how I can pay for my extra nannies. Okay, not just because I’ve got the endurance but because of the jobs that that endurance opens for me. You might be wondering what sort of jobs there are for people who can fly on the Moon — as a grubber you might joke that there’s no air up here. Of course, you’d be wrong. There’s plenty of air in the colonies. And not just air but high places, too.

  My first flying job I got when I was only rated for 30 minutes. That job you could probably guess — safety hawk for grubbers in Heinlein Cave. It was boring work aside from one or two truly spectacular disasters — one where I helped and one where I was too far away to do more than give first aid.

  But now, with my E60 rating, I have a real job. Arborean. Every week, I run the airborne scan of the forest.

  It’s not as easy as it seems because there are very few stoops on the forest and landing on the trees themselves is frowned upon — particularly by my Dad.

  No, I didn’t get the job because of my Dad. I’m sure it helped because he had an extra advantage with me — he could talk to me any time of the day. I got the job because I’m one of only six who are rated E60 or better. And there’s only one better, Stan Morgan, who’s got a full E70. So Stan gets the really tough jobs and everyone’s scrabbling to hire the rest of us. Heck, they’re offering jobs to people as low as E20 nowadays. Because it turns out that once people began to realize how useful it was to have a real live person in the air above, they discovered all sorts of things that needed looking at.

  That might surprise you seeing as we on the Moon pride ourselves on our advanced technology. We’ve got nannies just about everywhere and double- and triple- fail-safe systems where there’s the slightest risk of depressurization. But a nanny isn’t the same thing as a pair of eyes, ears, nose, and hands all at the same time. The Council recently priced the replacement cost of a human being — just regular schooler mind, not one of our top scientists — at well over a billion credits.

  Grubbers don’t get credits. Let’s just say that on bad days a credit’s worth about $200 U.S. and it goes up from there. More specifically, a lunar credit can usually buy a full barrel of oil anywhere on Earth. Somedays an Elsie (Lunar Credit) can even pay the cost of transporting it up to the lunar surface.

  Anyway, the cost of replacing a human, even here on Luna is high. So my eyes, ears, nose, hands don’t come cheap. Particularly when I can deliver them up to three hundred meters above ground level.

  None of the trees in the forest are anywhere near that height — no one expects them to top more than two hundred meters — but no one knows for certain what things will be like a century from now. You see, among other things, we’ve not only got the best soil but we’ve got the third interstellar seed repository up here on the Moon.

  And we’ve got the first major non-terrestrial conservatory. All our trees are no more than thirteen years old, of course, because none of them were planted until Dad got up here and convinced the Council of their value. It’s not just the oxygen generation — we’ve got great algae for that — but also the long-term wood, the environmentalism and … the promise.

  The promise that one day the green plains of Luna will be the green forests of Luna. That the tattered redwoods that are losing the battle for survival in California will find a new home up here with those of us who really treasure them.

  We’re not just growing redwoods, naturally. We’re growing pine, we’re growing oak, mahogany, ash, cherry, you name it. One of our main thoroughfares is lined with cherry trees and when spring comes the Cherry Blossom festival is so amazing that it’s famous throughout the solar system.

  We’re growing pine and other hardy woods — including bamboo not just for ecological reasons but also for their value as crops. Not that anything from Luna will come to market anytime soon. And I’d be really surprised if any of our wood ever made it back down to Earth.

  Dad says that already some of the trees are outgrowing their terrestrial counterparts. It’s not just the lunar soil or the lower gravity but a number of factors, some of which he’s still trying to analyze.

  None of the trees are taller than twenty meters now, so I set my cruise altitude for a safe thirty meters and began to scull my way from one side of the forest to the other, planning my rest stops on the way. The forest is big enough that it takes a good three hours to cover but it’s only half an hour wide so I go from side to side, taking a ten-minute recovery break at every side. Not that it’s really necessary: climbing takes the most work, once I’ve got the altitude it’s just a question of keeping it.

  Anyway, I was waiting (impatiently) for my timer to count down to zero when I saw her. I almost jumped off my perch then and there but I checked myself at the last moment.

  “Security, we have an intruder,” I said over my comm. The intruder had dark hair, seemed no more than my age and she looked like she wasn’t wearing any clothes.

  Naked doesn’t mean that much on the Moon. Not that anyone ever really goes naked — they have to have their suits somewhere — but it’s possible to roll it up into headgear or even to make it transparent or simply reflect the skin underneath. There’s a whole Nudy-Loony contingent up here — I think they total about sixty and many of them are Naturalists up from Germany or other such countries — and they do the whole headgear/necklace approach.

  It wasn’t the lack of apparent clothing that bothered me, naturally. It was that she was climbing my tree!

  “Say nature and location,” a bored security guy replied a moment later.

  “Coordinates and video on the chip,” I said, glancing at the playback to make sure that I’d got a good shot. There was nothing there but my tree. No sign of the girl that I could plainly see with my eyes. “Uh … wait one.”

  “Sure.” He sounded more skeptical than bored now. The thing is, reporting a security violation is a big thing. Reporting a false security violation was bound to go on my job evaluation — and not in a good way.

  I fiddled with my recorder, changing the speed and depth of field but I couldn’t get anything to record.

  My timer final chimed and, with a sigh that was part relief and part irritation, I dropped from my perch and stooped down right above the naked girl.

  “What are you doing?” I called as I pulled up from my dive. My muscles warned me that I’d need more than a good hot bath later to recover from what I’d done to them. I didn’t care, I was mad. No one was supposed to climb my tree. Heck, no one was supposed to climb any of the trees yet.

  “What are you doing?” the girl replied. She frowned at me. “Are you a God?”

  “Huh?” I said stupidly. And then I realized — my suit.

  You see, every gram is that much more to lift against the lunar gravity. So early on I made sure that there wasn’t a waste
d gram on me. I shaved my hair — and wanted to shave my eyebrows until my mom convinced me that they were necessary to prevent sweat from getting into my eyes — and wore only my nano-suit. But all that doesn’t mean I don’t have style. I mean, after all, I own a pretty nice nano-rig and there’s no way I wouldn’t use it. Particularly with the Animé Parade coming up so soon.

  Oh, the Animé Parade! I forgot. So … about the first thing the very first kids on Luna discovered was that they could shape and color their nano-suits any way they wanted to. And in no time they were wearing whatever costume they wanted. And then, to show off, they started a parade. At first the grown-ups just chuckled but somehow news of it made its way to Earth and suddenly it was a big thing. Reporters started coming, then fans and then animé and comic people and in a few years it became THE thing for rich fans to attend.

  And we made it a big deal, too. We’d spent a large part of the year trying out costumes and working on them, each pod trying to out-compete each other. Fans from Earth would come and attend special workshops, pay zillions of credits to get special-made nano-suits and the training required to operate them so that they, too, could participate in the Animé Parade.

  And that’s where my shaved head comes in so handy. Not only does it drop a full kilo or more from my weight, not only does it decrease my aerodynamic drag but I can make the coolest “hair” with my nannies!

  And so today, as I stooped on this strange girl, I was wearing a ‘helmet’ that was totally cyan-blue with an elongated chin-guard and goggles over my face. My wings, by regulation had the six endurance pennants on them with only two red, two orange and two yellow (we were allowed to pick our own color schemes providing that red was always the ‘used’ state), the rest of my wings being a coordinated mix of dark blue, white, gray, and steel-black.

  Everyone who saw me in the air said I was a shoo-in for Lead Bird in the Animé Parade. Did I mention that one of the perks of being a paid flyer is a chance to practice up for Lead Bird? You know, the Animé character that flies at the front of the whole Animé Parade?

  The one who, according to rumor, might be presented to the Emperor himself?

  The Emperor of Japan, silly! Luna has no Emperor. Although, there’s talk that maybe the Emperor of Japan might settle up here in Munbesu Nihongo. Everyone’s been talking about it, wondering if that isn’t why he and his wife had planned the trip up here in the first place.

  “No one’s allowed to climb in the trees,” I said, forcing my attention back to the girl. She seemed pretty enough although it was hard to say. I tried to imagine her in a costume and was surprised to think that the best outfit for her would be something leafy and green. Like Pan in Shakespeare.

  “I am,” the girl said.

  “I’ve called security,” I told her. It was true, I had, I just didn’t bother to add the bit about the cameras not seeing her. I eyed her carefully. “Where’s your suit?”

  “Suit?”

  “Your nano-suit,” I said. “Are you running it transparent?” Even as I asked that, I realized that if she was wearing a nano-suit the cameras would have had to pick it up. I’d been chewing on that problem — what can eyes see that cameras can’t? — even as we’d been talking. Cameras recorded a set number of frames per second. I silently sent a command to my suit to up the frames per second and watched the display in the lower corner of my cheekguard until I saw the girl’s image come into focus. The frame rate was two hundred and forty frames per second — ten times normal.

  “Who are you?” I blurted, now wondering what I’d wandered into. Was she a ghost or something? Her image was flickering in the playback, even at that high rate. Silently, I ordered it doubled again and the image steadied down. This girl wasn’t here most of the time.

  “I don’t have a suit,” the girl said. She looked up at me. “Do I need one?” She pointed at my wings. “Is that what you are wearing?”

  “Yeah,” I said, stalling for time to think. A girl who can’t be seen by regular cameras — why would she need a nano-suit? She doesn’t exist.

  We Loonies get laughed at by earthers a lot. They think we’re a strange mix between ‘eggheads’ and ‘tree-huggers’ that we don’t understand ‘the real world.’ But really, one thing we are is open-minded. We’re willing to admit we don’t know everything that there might be things outside our understanding. So ghosts — collections of psychic energy or dark energy or whatever — that wasn’t impossible to us (me, at least).

  “Could I get one?” she asked.

  “Sure, if you’ve got the credits or ask your parents,” I told her.

  The girl frowned and looked down at the branches under her feet. “Credits?”

  “You know — money?”

  “Money,” the girl rolled the word in her mouth as if it were new to her. She looked back up at me, her brows drawing together. “Can you go now? He’s coming and he promised to teach me to kiss.”

  “He?”

  “The nice old man who was here the other day,” the girl said. She smiled. “He said I was pretty.” Her smile faded as she added, “If he sees you, he might change his mind.” She made a shooing motion. “You should go.”

  Before I could find any words to respond to that, my emergency warning bleeped. For a moment, horror-stricken, I thought I’d overflown my endurance but then I realized it was the home alert.

  “I have to go,” I told her.

  “Fine,” she said, turning away from me and staring intently at the path that lead through the young trees, “just as long as he doesn’t see you. He said no one could know.”

  I wanted to stay, to ask more but the home alert was insistent.

  “Coming!” I called over my comm even as I cupped air with my wings and slowly climbed back up to a safe gliding altitude. Once there, I quickly converted height to velocity and skimmed along at max, getting home in less than ten minutes.

  “You just missed him!” Mom said as soon as I entered our house.

  “Who?” I asked, still thinking about the girl and her mystery kisser.

  “Your father,” Mom said. “He’s gone down earthside —”

  “Earthside!”

  “It’s an emergency,” Mom told me.

  “What?” I mean, honestly, what sort of emergency is there that calls a gardener back down to Earth? I love my Dad but, really, gardening? Yeah, he’s the best and he’s cool and I love him so much but I can never, ever understand what makes trees and leaves so important to him.

  “His trees,” Mom said as if that explained everything.

  “His trees are here, Mom,” I reminded her. I don’t know what it is with adults but it seems like outside of their specialties, they’re really pretty dumb.

  “Not all of them, miss smarty-pants,” my mother — mother! — snapped back. Apparently she realized how silly she was because she blushed and turned away from me. “Five there, only one here,” she muttered to herself. She turned back to me. “Were you on patrol?”

  “Yeah,” I said wondering at the sudden change of topic. “Why?”

  “Did you see anything unusual?”

  I should have told her. I really should have, I realize that now. But then, just after “miss smarty-pants” I wasn’t quite thinking at my best. And … ghosts? Can you imagine how my mom would have reacted to that?

  “I didn’t get to finish the sweep,” I told her honestly. “I got this emergency call.”

  “Your father said to keep an eye on the forest,” Mom said. She made a worried face. “I think he’s scared …”

  Scared? My Dad? Of what?

  I should have told her then. I should have but I felt bad that I hadn’t told her the first time.

  “I can’t go into the air again today,” I said, consulting my flight log. “But I’ll be extra careful tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Mom said, nodding to herself. “That’ll do.” She still looked worried as she added, “It’s probably nothing.”

  “Hey guys, I’m sorry but I gotta jet
,” I said to the pod as they collected at the end of the last class that day. I pointed to my back. “Angels tread and all.”

  “Yeah, right,” Carey said, rolling her eyes. “You’re just going off to try out your latest costume for the parade!”

  “Am not, squirt,” I told her as I found a clear spot in the crowd. “Stand clear!”

  I took two quick steps, leaped up and unfurled my wings. Just to annoy Carey, as I flapped up higher, I strobed the lower edges of my wings in rainbow colors. I could hear Carey’s squeal of delight and indignation and the cheers of the others as I made it past fifty meters and then I steered toward the school thermal and slowly glided up to the very top of the safety limit — can’t get too high. It’s not that my wings might melt, rather that my wings might tangle with some wiring or other important piece of infrastructure trailing down from above.

  A quick check on all my displays and I veered sharply port, towards the agricultural section.

  The first thing I noticed was the tree. Actually, the first thing I noticed was all the leaves under the tree. I stooped and dropped down to the top of the tree, swinging in a fast, tight circle, examining and filming every bit of it.

  This was bad. It looked like someone had purposely set out to destroy the tree. The special tree. The one my dad always talked about it hushed tones. The one he planted the day I was born. I was just about to call him when I realized — he was on Earth.

  Something flickered at the base of the tree. I dropped down to the ground and furled my wings even as I ground to a halt. I squinted at the shape but I couldn’t make it out.

  “You need to go,” a ghostly, faint voice said.

  “Are you okay?”

  “He’s coming back and he won’t come if you’re here,” the voice said. “He’ll want to kiss you, not me.” And then, the voice went on dreamily, “He kissed me yesterday. I want him to kiss me again.”