Over the moon, p.2
Over the Moon, page 2
“I could wear my veil?” I lift my gray shawl over my head, demonstrating how easy it is to conceal my features. “No one here has ever caught me out. I doubt any of the off-worlders will.”
“No, Dora. I said, I need you here. With everyone at the Landing, the farm will be vulnerable.”
“It’s not like I can defend this place on my own, if it does come to that.” It’s true. The house is huge, and I’m just one girl. Old Tidbit, our hound, broke down last month, and no one’s been able to repair him yet, not even me. If we’re lucky, some replacement parts will come in with the shuttle shipment today.
And also—defend against what? There are two-hundred-and-forty-four colonists on this moon right now, and not a single one of them would put us in danger. And, unless the Farming Coalition has gone rogue in the last six months, there’s no way their representatives are going to attack the farm while they’re here harvesting, either.
“You won’t have to.” Uncle stands and shouts upstairs, “Emery? Can you wrangle the kids?” He turns back to me and lowers his voice again. “I’ve asked Tobis to come help keep an eye on the farm.”
“You mean keep an eye on me.”
Tobis is the neighbor boy who grew up too close to home to not be in on the great family secret, the only person my age for kilometers, and thus, the pre-approved friend who’s been assigned to me practically from birth. The only other sixteen-year-old on the entire moon, and he happens to live right next door. Our friendship was written in the stars.
Until Uncle and Auntie told us to replace it with something a whole lot more, and with his instant yes and my disgusted no, it all came crashing down. Now, the two of us barely speak.
“Perfect,” I reply. “Tobis can protect the farm, and I can go with you to the fair.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“But I really want to see the shuttle. I’ve never seen one up close, and I just want a close look at their anti-grav nacelles. Please? You know I’ll be careful. You know I’ll be safe. Please. I’ve never gotten to go to a landing.”
“And you will,” he says. He’s avoiding my eyes, the interstellar language for lies. “Just not today. Maybe next year.”
“You say that every year.”
He runs a hand through his thinning hair. “Well, one year, things will be different.”
“Different how? She’s already dead, Uncle. What else would it take?”
Before he can answer, the cousins come rolling down the stairs like boulders in a mudslide. Auntie does her best to keep up with them, grabbing one to fix his hair before rushing to another to adjust her dress, at which point, of course, the hair of the first one has to be redone.
The cousins are quaking with excitement. For them, Shuttle Day means eating candy and talking to someone other than our few hundred neighbors. If they’re lucky, they’ll meet a star child, like they did three years ago and haven’t shut up about since. Though I’m not sure how much I believe their story about people born in space actually glowing white.
“Steady there!” Uncle throws out his arms, half to stop his children from running any farther into the house and half in an invitation to hug. “Behave or you’ll be staying at home today.”
“Is that why Dora’s not coming?” Luce asks, in one of those kid whispers that isn’t low enough to be subtle. “Cuz she’s been bad?”
“Dora never comes,” says Duncan. “She doesn’t like people.”
“Dora’s staying because we need someone to keep an eye on the house.” Uncle shoots me a look. “And she’s the best person for the job.”
“I can protect the house!” says Wallace, puffing out his chest and giving it a resounding slap.
“Fine. If you want to stay”—Uncle runs a hand through the boy’s soft blond hair—“then you can stay. But there might not be enough stardust left by the time we get back…we might get hungry and eat your share…”
“Dora can handle it,” Wallace says, letting out a breath as he deflates. I brush his ruffled hair, setting it back in place, smoothing it behind his ears. As obnoxious as my cousins can be, I love them ferociously.
“Dora can handle what?” asks Tobis, letting himself through the front door.
He’s updated his hair with new designs since I’ve last seen him, laser etchings on the short, black fuzz. Its detailed patterning clashes with the sloppy sweatshirt he’s thrown on over dusty jeans, though why he’s wearing a sweatshirt in this heat is anybody’s guess. As always, he’s grinning, his smile an overburdened clothesline.
“Nothing the two of you can’t work out,” says Uncle. I cringe. There never had been anything the two of us couldn’t work out until Auntie and Uncle interfered and played matchmaker.
“Come on,” Posy whines, tugging at her dress while staring pleadingly at her dad. “Can we go yet? They’re going to be out of all the best treats!”
“Right, yes,” says Uncle. “Dora, Tobis, look after things, all right?”
“That’s the plan.” My hands are still stuffed into the pockets of my overalls, as deep as they can go without ripping the seams. So, their plan is to force me to talk things out with Tobis while the rest of them have a fantastic time at Shuttle Day? First, that ridiculous ‘subtle’ attempt at an arranged marriage, and now this. I’m already trapped on their stupid moon—I don’t need to be trapped in the house with him on top of it all.
“I’m going to eat a whole stick of stardust, and that’ll be my lunch, okay?” says Wallace, apparently oblivious to the tension in the air. “If you don’t say no, then you think it’s a good idea.”
“No, definitely no,” says Auntie, giving me an apologetic look as she shuts the screen door behind her.
I know they mean well. Auntie’s cared for me my entire life, the closest thing to a mother I have ever had. She’s made it her life’s work to hide me: she taught me how to use makeup to alter the shape of my face and how to style my hair when it grew far too long for my frame. She’s also the only reason I have books at all: despite the expense, she’s always sourcing copies of engineering textbooks and manuals for me to devour, pushing me to follow my passion for circuitry. But even that push has limits. I know all my family wants to do is keep me safe, but I don’t need them to help me anymore. I just want to be me.
My heart clenches as I watch them leave through the screen of the closed door. I’ve forgotten what real quiet sounded like. The cousins are always making some kind of ruckus, and a house without their rumble in the background hardly seems a home at all. The silence hangs in the air like dust in a sunbeam.
Somewhere over the moon, over the solar system, light years away, there has to be a better place than this. A place where I can show my face without fear of retribution. My family will probably be better off without me—certainly, they’d be in less danger—so why can’t I just…go?
“So, what’s the plan, then?” asks Tobis. He’s grown again since last month when I repaired his father’s generator. He stands over a head taller than me now, and his skin seems stretched over his lanky limbs, like his bones spurted but the rest of him hasn’t yet gotten the memo. I have to look up to him now, and I’m sure he’s just loving that. He’s carrying himself like he owns the slagging moon.
“I’ve…got work to do.” I push the door to the back porch open. I have almost a half day to myself, and I’m not going to waste it.
Well. So long as I can ditch Tobis.
I pick up my abandoned mug of synthetic coffee and sip the cold, bitter liquid, watching the harvest drones come and go as they scramble about their work with the silos. Once emptied, they mark them with heavy white paint, which washes off with the first rains of the season.
“Come on, don’t be like that.” Tobis is suddenly at my side. I flinch; I didn’t hear him sidle up beside me until he’s way too close. “I’m missing the fair, too.”
“Only difference is that you get to go this afterclipse,” I mutter, placing my now-empty mug on the side table. “Or sooner, depending on when my family gets back.”
“Look, it’s not like I asked for babysitting duty.”
“So, that’s what this is? So much for keeping up a pretense. I don’t need to be sat.”
I fix my gaze on the silos in the distance and try to push Tobis out of my mind. Good timing, too: one of the drones is acting strange. Even from this distance, I can make out the white mark on top of the already-drained silo—but there’s a drone there anyway, trying as hard as it can to hoist the container into the sky with only two of its six spindly legs.
Something is terribly wrong. And I can’t be more excited.
My shed is only a few steps away. Well, it’s not exactly my shed; it’s not as if Uncle gifted me the little square box in the back of the yard, a few feet from the out-of-use outhouse. It had once been a toolshed, but when I was twelve, I found myself making so many trips between my room and the shack that it just seemed like less of a hassle to set up my own workbench in there. What with the horde of noisy children in the main house, and the all-nighters when a project was too exciting to put down, I slept in that shed more often than not, until it became my bespoke bedroom. It’s also where I hoard my collection of books. After all, you don’t need a spaceship to see other worlds when you have a well-stocked library.
Uncle has strict rules, but when it comes to my fascination with all things mechanical and electrical, he gives me free rein and lets Auntie spoil me. It’s probably because he actually finds my hobby useful. The more I know about engineering, the more I can help around the farm. And the less, in his opinion, I’ll want to leave.
“Are you at least going to talk to me?” Tobis says as he trots to catch up.
“There’s nothing to say.” I run my thumbprint over the padlock and open my small domain. Instantly, Tau rises up from behind a pile of Tennyson manuals, making excited little beeps as he recognizes his creator.
“What the void?” Tobis stares at the tiny egg as it hovers around my face, looking for affection. It would be annoying if it wasn’t for the fact I codded the behavior into Tau myself.
“Hey, buddy.” I pat his top. “Tobis, I thought you’d met Tau before?”
“This thing has a name?”
Tau lets out a low beep, whizzing backward into the shed like a dejected puppy.
“He has feelings, you know. Sort of, since I programmed them. Tau is part of my portfolio. A pet project, quite literally, as he’s the only pet I’ll ever own on this rock.”
“You…you made it?”
Tau chirps, rapid clicks of frustration.
“Him, sorry. You made him? What…what exactly is he?”
“An AI. If I want to be taken seriously as an engineer, I need to have an AI under my belt. Tennyson himself called it the pinnacle of robotics, combining the three points of artificial existence: maneuverability, usefulness, and personality.”
“An actual AI? He’s actually conscious?”
“No, that would be impossible,” I reply. “Even Tennyson couldn’t get a synthetic brain to understand the concept of ‘self’, and no one has gotten closer than he has since he died. But Tau does think.”
Tau is my most successful creation, with an antigravity propulsion system to keep him hovering at all times and a chirpy interface that allows him to make his own decisions and share them with me. He might not be alive in the literal sense, but he’s my buddy. And considering that I built him out of scrap material from the farm, he’s a friend I can actually be proud of.
Beyond that, Tau isn’t much use. He’s primarily for interfacing with computers and other tech, but when there aren’t any around to interface with, or without a task to do, he’s just a floating egg. I did give him a few diodes, so he does make a fantastic flashlight, though I rarely need him for that—nights on Nesworth are lit by Thebos’s reassuring blue glow, bright enough to walk the farm by. True darkness only comes during the daily ‘clipse and it’s never long enough to bother anyone—except me. Thankfully, Tau has my back. I love his company, even if his personality is my own programming and a whole lot of projecting on my part. I don’t care. He is mine.
I only wish Tennyson was alive so I could ask him what he thinks. The father of modern-day robotics has been dead for over three centuries, and yet, every single facet of engineering still revolves around his principles. Physicists have their Isaac Newton; roboticists have Sylas Tennyson. ‘Genius’ doesn’t even begin to cover the man’s mind.
“So, you’re like…applying to university?” Tobis scratches his head, seemingly not daring to take a step farther into the shed. There’s only so much space to move around the old, padded barstool I sit on when doing small, focused work, and I’m currently taking up most of it while I try to find my tools. I reach a hand out to the desk to grab for a book by Tennyson—the poet, not the roboticist, as the latter was a fan of the former, and frequently used snippets of his favorite poems as controls for his droids. I shove it out of the way so I can reach into a drawer, pulling out my toolbelt and buckling it around my waist.
“Of course I am. Aren’t you?”
“Yeah but… never thought you would actually leave.”
I freeze, one hand on the pommel of my screwdriver, the other squeezed tightly into a fist. Tau rises up and beeps a little tune by my ear. It’s a series of questions: what are we doing? Where are we going? What next, and how can I help?
Thank the Sisters for helpful robot buddies.
“One of the drones is down, and I’m going to fix it,” I proclaim, ignoring Tobis and grabbing my protective gear from where it’s scattered around the shed in various forms of disarray. I slip on my worn, yellow spark coat, letting it bulk up my shoulders. My tall, lanky frame does the rest of the work: I have no chest to bind, no curves to hide. I wrap my shawl over my hair and chin, concealing my face in a half-veil. A quick glance in the greasy mirror tells me that I’m getting the exact look I’m going for: as in, not myself.
“What the void, Dora?” says Tobis, but I’m already shoving past him to get outside.
The heat is beginning to rise now, a dusty haze settling on the fields. I can practically smell my own sweat already.
Tau beeps again, another question. I focus on the little chirps, the dips between the tones. His language is simple, even if it was the hardest thing I’ve ever coded.
“Of course, they probably have their own people,” I agree, “but I’ve never worked on a harvester drone before. I want to see what’s going on inside that head.”
Tau chirps once: Impulsive. I pat the bot on the top of his little egg-shaped body, making him dip and bob in the air.
“That’s me, bud,” I say. “Impulsive through and through. But at least no one is going to recognize me.”
There’s no one out there anyway: just kilometers of empty fields. No one except Tobis, whose heavy hand clamps down on my shoulder before I can take another step.
“You can’t give me the silent treatment forever, Dora,” he hisses. “You don’t have to talk to me, but you do have to stay on your farm. Your uncle put me in charge of defending you, and I’ll…”
“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not leaving the farm—”
“Not without me, you’re not.”
“I’m just heading to the end of the field. That’s fine, right? Still on family land.”
Tobis’s fingers tighten around my shoulder, releasing only as he moves to place himself between me and the barn. “Dora. I haven’t seen you in weeks, and we need to talk. I know you’re not one hundred percent on board with—”
“What? Getting hitched?” My heart clenches as I say the words, as if uttering them aloud will make them true. “I need time, Tobis. I have a lot of things I need to work out, and just…”
It’s one thing to be best friends with a guy, quite the next for him to jump with excitement when your uncle suggests you tie the knot before even finishing high school. I hadn’t put any thought into how I’d said the word, only reacted on instinct, shock, and my tone would have hurt anyone. He accepted my ‘no’ well enough, but I saw the look in his eyes. You can’t go back to being only friends when you know how someone really sees you.
“It’s not like you have many options. There isn’t anyone else on Nesworth anywhere close to our age, and we get along—we used to get along so well.”
“Before my aunt and uncle played matchmaker.”
“Before you were forced to consider the fact that we could be more than friends, yes.”
“But we’re not. And we can’t be.”
“I still can’t let you go, Dora.”
“You can’t stop me, either.”
“I wasn’t talking about your field trip.”
Tau beeps a little ditty once more, moving to hover over my right shoulder—let’s get moving, already.
“I don’t have time for this, Tobis. Let’s both agree not to tell my family about this and leave it at that.”
I grab my bag of useless space parts, push past the boy whose heart I broke, and go on the hunt for an injured drone.
Chapter
Two
The most valuable piece of equipment I’ve built so far is the family quadcopter. The four propellers were so expensive we had to live off rations for a while, but the quad is the only way to cover the kilometers of farmland Uncle manages. It’s my crowning achievement: well, except for Tau, who’ll be offended if I don’t put him first. And I know that because I programmed him to—not quite sure why I gave him an ego.
Flying the quad out to the middle of nowhere to fix a downed drone will effectively be taking away the most valuable piece of machinery on the farm; all I will leave behind is a sullen boy and maybe my common sense. Not that anyone local will ever steal from the farm: everyone is busy at the Landing and the Shuttle Day fair, and besides, there’re less than three hundred colonists on Nesworth, so any theft and you’ll never hear the end of it. When Duncan snuck a half-eaten jar of pesto from a neighbor’s fridge, the entire moon branded him a thief: perpetual shame is a good incentive never to mess with your fellow colonists. It’s a small moon.
