by Maggie Allen
“I’ll trade you mi galleta for your trail mix,” Rosy said holding out her sugar cookie.
“Okay,” Imani shrugged, handing over her bag of nuts and pretzels and taking a bite of her new cookie. As she ate, she watched as Rosy deconstructed her own tuna sandwich and started to add her trail mix to it, along with various other odd ingredients.
“What are you doing?” Imani asked, making a face.
“Making a better sandwich.” Rosy responded confidently, holding up her mess of a sandwich for Imani’s inspection. “See? I just layer on all the stuff I like.”
“I don’t think that’s how sandwiches…” Imani began, but stopped short as an idea formed in her mind. She looked between Rosy’s sandwich and Auto’s sensors. “That’s it! I need to have layers of all the things ships like!”
“¿Qué?” Rosy asked through a bite of messy sandwich.
“If we can adjust Auto’s sensor to take in satellite information for the whole planet,” she began, already opening up the robot’s casing, “and layer it all on your map…”
“We can find the perfect landing site!” Rosy finished for her, taking one last bite of her sandwich before packing her lunch away, brushing her hands off on her jeans.
Soon the girls had Auto pinging off the satellites surrounding Venus, but as they began to get the information back, there was one big problem.
“It’s all in zeroes and ones!” Imani wailed, pouting. It had seemed like such a good idea, too!
“It’s binary!” Rosy exclaimed gleefully. She smiled and quickly connected Auto’s output cable to her bike’s navigation system. “No hay problema. I’m bilingual.”
“Well, yeah, I know, but…” Imani started to tell her that wasn’t what bilingual meant, but soon the data Rosy was working on began to make sense.
“Hey, I am serious about becoming a famous movie-star-programmer!” Rosy grinned playfully. “Tell me what you need, and I’ll make your sandwich.”
Soon the program was up and running, and it worked perfectly. With all of the specifications layered over each other on the map, there was only one place the landing site could be.
“Right there! That’s it! The Lakshmi Planum!” Imani pointed at the map.
Rosy gripped her handlebars. “¡Vámonos!”
And off they flew again.
Soon enough they found the place they’d pointed to on their map. It was a plateau on the continent Ishtar Terra, and it was surrounded by mountains. It was also the perfect place to land a spaceship. The girls danced around so happily when they saw it, they almost fell off their bike.
“If it lands right there, I can get the perfect shot.” Rosy said, framing the scene with her hands like she sometimes saw done in the movies. “This is gonna be great!”
Imani was excited, too, and proud that she had been able to help find this place. She was just about to agree, when suddenly Auto beeped in a way Imani knew meant trouble.
“Weather alert: volcanic eruption.” That was definitely trouble.
“What? An eruption?” Rosy looked around at the mountains surrounding them. “Where?”
“Northwest Aphrodite Terra, be advised,” Auto replied.
“Oh no…” Imani said, looking up at the clear, pale orange sky above them.
“Don’t worry, that’s way far from here,” said Rosy reassuringly as she checked the map.
“But, Rosy, the clouds!” Imani cried, still looking up at the sky, which was quickly filling up with dark yellow and gray clouds. On Rosy’s navigation system the ‘visibility’ layer went dark in their area, just before the entire program unexpectedly shut down.
“Satellite connection: disrupted,” Auto explained.
Both girls groaned and slumped down, defeated. This had been the perfect spot, but now it was ruined. If the alien ship came now it would just choose a different place to land, and there was no way they were going to find it in time.
“I give up.” Rosy said, taking Imani by surprise. She had never heard her friend give up on anything. “Let’s get back home before it gets too cloudy.”
Imani frowned. Somehow it didn’t feel right to give up after all the work they’d done, but she couldn’t think of anything else to do. She nodded sadly. “Okay.”
Devastated, the two girls turned the bike around and started to head for home. Rosy looked especially disheartened. Imani remembered how Rosy had helped cheer her up when she was upset this morning, and she wished she could think of a way to return the favor. They were just searching for a big enough opening in the clouds to fly through when Auto chirped again,
“Incoming: digital communication.”
“What? I thought his satellite connection was down?” Rosy asked over her shoulder.
“It is!” Imani answered, double checking the source. “It’s coming from in there.”
She pointed up at the gargantuan mass of dark clouds, where the signal was apparently originating from. When Imani tried to listen to it at first, she could only hear static. She opened Auto’s casing again and started to adjust the frequency. The report on space communication she did last year in school was sure useful now. Soon she could hear a voice:
“Adiuvate!”
Imani blinked and held onto her headphones. “What language is that?”
“Earth language: Latin,” Auto answered, but that one word was followed by many others, and soon Auto was identifying them all, “Earth language: Greek. Mandarin. Arabic…”
“Okay, but what does it mean?” Imani asked in frustration.
“Online dictionary: error.”
“He can’t connect to the internet; it’s too cloudy.” Imani told Rosy before pressing the button on her headphones and calling out to the mysterious voice, “Hello? Can you hear me?”
The string of various Earth languages paused for a moment, but there was no response. Imani tried again, “Do you speak English?”
“¿O Español?” Rosy added, straining to hear what the voice said next.
They waited a few seconds but didn’t hear anything. Imani looked down at Auto’s sensors and saw that the signal was quickly fading, not to mention the clouds were getting darker by the second. “I think we lost it. We should probably –”
“¡Ayúdame!” The voice suddenly came back, and both girls jumped.
Rosy was the first to recover, answering with a determined “¡Si!” and stopping the bike. She turned around in her seat. “That means she’s in trouble! I got this, you fly the bike!”
“Wait, me?” Imani gaped, but she helped Rosy maneuver around her anyway. Auto was once again strapped to her back, but now Imani was nervously gripping the handlebars of Rosy’s hoverbike while Rosy put on Imani’s pink-and-purple headset.
“¡Hola amiga! ¿Cúal es el problema?”
Imani could hear her friend talking to the voice in Spanish while she tried to get the hang of flying the hoverbike. There were a few jerky stops and starts, but soon they were hovering at a decent speed, still heading for the station. They had to find a way to get back up. There were a few small patches of open sky, but Imani was nervous about trying them.
She was just about to turn around and try looking in a different area when Rosy shook her shoulder urgently, “It’s the T’Raji ship!” she announced, but, Rosy sounded more worried than excited. “There’s something wrong with it!”
Imani listened as her friend tried to get details, but soon loud static interfered with the message. “I’m losing the signal!” Rosy cried. “You have to fly higher!”
Imani frowned and tried to protest. She was nervous; she knew she wasn’t very good at flying. What if she messed up and they crashed? She turned to look at her friend over her shoulder, but Rosy looked back at her unwaveringly. “C’mon, Imani, I need you!”
She couldn’t let down her friend, or that ship. Imani took a deep breath, gritted her teeth, then pointed her handlebars up and shot off toward one of those little gaps in the clouds. Every time they got close to one, it would clo
se up, and Imani would have to turn and chase another, but as they flew she could hear the signal clearing up. Rosy continued to talk with the T’Raji.
“There’s smoke coming out of the ship… and it’s losing control!” Rosy translated. Imani had never heard her friend so distressed. “It’ll crash if we don’t do something!”
“Auto, you’ve got to call the station!” Imani shouted over her shoulder.
“Outgoing call: error. Chemical interference,” Auto chirped helplessly.
“Ugh! It’s these clouds!” Imani groaned, trying her best to pilot her way through the big yellowish blobs of gas. Then, she suddenly had an idea. “Wait a minute. It’s just like what happened to your bike!” She called out to Rosy, “You’ve got to tell them to get rid of the acid.”
“I can’t! I’ve lost the signal again.”
Imani looked back up at the sky. “We’ll just have to get higher.”
“What about the clouds?” Rosy asked, concerned. These were way bigger clouds than the ones she flew through, and they were much scarier.
“We have to let them know. We can’t let the whole ship crash!” Imani reasoned, though she was nervous, as well. Even so, she knew she had to do something. “We have to go.”
Behind her, Imani could feel Rosy hold on tightly.
“Warning: corrosive substance.” Auto’s warning beeped unheeded as the two girls flew up and into the dangerous chemical clouds. The ship’s light force-field kept the chemicals off of the girls, but the anti-gravity pads the bike ran on were quickly filling the engine with acid again.
“Do you have it?” Imani called out to her friend even as her eyes looked ahead for any sign of the clear afternoon sky. She didn’t think she would even mind the color anymore; she so desperately wanted to see that murky orange.
“Not yet!” Rosy called back.
“Warning: corrosive substance,” Auto buzzed again, warningly.
“Now?”
“No!”
“Now?”
“Danger –”
“I got it!” Rosy shouted, just as they broke through the clouds. Imani sighed in relief as Rosy finished relaying instructions to the T’Raji ship. In the distance they could see the station.
“¡Hurra! It worked,” cheered Rosy. “She said they were able to filter out the acid, and the ships’ sensors are going back to normal! We did it!”
Rosy jumped up and wrapped her arms around Imani’s shoulders, laughing with joy. Imani couldn’t help but laugh, too. She felt like she’d really accomplished something great.
With Rosy hugging her back, it was difficult to hear Auto’s repeated chirping. Soon enough, however, the little robot was wiggling and chirping too much to be ignored. Rosy let go of her friend and sat back, muffling the robot, who immediately screeched, “Danger: acid damage.”
The hoverbike’s engine stuttered, then stopped, and suddenly both girls were falling.
“Aaaah!!!” They both shrieked, panicking, even as a soft blue light enveloped them and whisked them away before they could even touch the clouds.
“Aaaah!!!” They continued to scream, even as they landed safely in the hull of the T’Raji spaceship, their eyes tightly closed.
“Um, please calm down.” A strange, somewhat stammering voice broke through their yells, and both girls slowly opened their eyes.
“Woah…” They gaped as they looked up at an extremely tall, bright blue alien.
“Are you… both all right?” he asked, clearing his throat a little.
Both girls nodded.
The T’Raji looked slightly uncomfortable.
“Are your… guardians… on the science station nearby?” he asked, hesitating a little.
Both girls nodded again.
“Very well, we will be sure to return you to your homes immediately.”
The tall alien nodded sternly, then quickly excused himself. His departure revealed another blue alien, this one much smaller and with a big smile on her face.
“¡Hola!” She greeted jovially. “Sorry about my dad. He gets nervous.”
“Hey, it’s you!” Rosy was the first to speak up, remembering the voice she’d heard. “You were the voice on the transmission!”
“Yep. I finally found the right language on my translator. Hello!” She wiggled slightly. “Thanks for your help, by the way. We didn’t know what was going on.”
Imani was a little slower to catch her bearings, but after a moment she smiled back at the other girl, who looked to be about their age, and replied, “We had the same problem.”
The blue girl smiled and happily introduced herself. “My name’s Terra. I was named after Earth, since I was born on the ship, and that’s where we’re supposed to be going, eventually.” She sighed, clearly growing tired of the long journey.
“I’m Imani.”
“And I’m Rosa, but you can call me Rosy!”
“So,” Terra began after a short span of silence, “do you want to go see my dad try to give his introductory speech to a bunch of human people?”
“Sure!” both human girls replied, and all three of them quickly ran to the ship’s front window. Outside, Terra’s dad was giving a speech, surrounded by a bunch of eager reporters.
“Well, so much for getting the best picture,” Rosy groused.
“Picture?” Terra questioned.
“Yeah, we were trying to get a good picture of your ship landing to send to Young Explorers for their contest. But, your ship had already landed, so I guess we missed out.” Imani explained with a shrug. She wasn’t as disappointed as Rosy was. This was the best day ever.
Terra thought for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision.
“Well, who wants a picture of our silly old ship anyway? It’s not very interesting,” she started, before opening her arms to the other two. “Let’s take a picture together! You can send that to your contest. It’ll be way better.”
“You think so?” Rosy asked hopefully, taking out her cell phone.
“Trust me!” Terra grinned; both humans shrugged and bunched together around their new friend. Rosy held up her camera and adjusted it until they all fit in the screen.
“Okay. Three… two... one…!”
Click!
“Good morning, Young Explorers!”
The cheerful voices of the children’s TV show hosts chimed out for two worlds and two species to hear.
“My name’s Imani.”
“Me llamo Rosa!”
“And I’m Terra!”
“And we’re here to tell you about all the cool things happening on planet Venus!”
The Worms Won’t Feed Themselves, You Know
Deborah Walker
Deborah Walker grew up in the most English town in the country, but she soon high-tailed it down to London, where she now lives with her partner, Chris, and her two young children. Find Deborah in the British Museum trawling the past for future inspiration. Her stories have appeared in the 2015 Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide, Nature’s Futures, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and The Year’s Best SF 18 and have been translated into over a dozen languages.
It was about time. Finally, I was a woman. I am woman, hear me roar. Only kidding. Not much had changed. Now that I was thirteen, the so-called Age of Freedom, the Mamas had given me just the tiniest bit of independence. I was allowed to manage my own time. No more timetables. So, I’d slept in until noon and had to waste the whole afternoon on my console doing maths (which I love) and social studies (which I despise).
At five, I finally finished, but I still had my chores to do. The worms wouldn’t feed themselves. I grabbed my bee hat and made my way to the hives.
He was there, standing at the edge of the village right at the boundary marked by the underground bleepers. He was making notes. The bleepers also send out dampening privacy waves. He couldn’t video-record us. But there was nothing to stop him from looking at us and writing it all down.
He waved. I kept my head fixed on the hives, pre
tending to be concentrating on the task I’d done a thousand times: extracting the waxy propolis from the hives. The propolis would be sold at the Collective’s market after the worms had done their business.
I wondered what Comb7 looked like through his eyes. An English summer made anywhere look good. The meadows were pretty with a ton of wild flowers. Every step I took kicked up dandelion clocks and milkweed fluff. Close by, Mamas were working in the corn fields, helped or hindered by a gaggle of little ‘uns. It was a good village. A bit small. We had twelve Mamas and twice that number of freedom juniors and kiddiewinks.
In the centre of the village was our home. It was basket shaped like a bee skep and had a nice brown colour to blend into the environment. With a spectacular lack of invention, we called it The Hive. We’re a bit bee mad in Comb7. The Hive riffed off the structure of a bee hive, with hexagonal rooms stacked in parallel layers, and one large arched entrance facing the equator. It made sense to use millions of years of evolution and copy Mother Nature, at least that’s what my social architecture lessons told me.
When I’d been a kid, Comb7 had seemed huge. But as I’d grown older, the village had somehow grown smaller. There was a whole world out there, with billions of people in it, and here everyone was the same. Well, not the same. But not as different as the people outside. Not as different as the man who was watching us. I’d never spoken to a man.
There was no doubt about it; Comb 7 was just a small, isolationist village, part of the all-female South East Collective. And it was too small for me. In a few years, I’d be going to London T. I know everybody says that. But I mean it. But that was in a few more years. With the man, the social librarian, Alex Shvartsman his name was, standing at the village boundaries, it was as if LondonT had come to Comb7. I wasn’t ready for it.
