Here Be Dragons (11 page)

Maginus was nestled deep inside a crater near the South Pole, and the Selentine had been built into the lunar wall which stretched high above the colony. Beyond the balustrade was the magnificent forest at the center of the city—the giant redwoods, hundreds of meters tall, which supplied so much of the colony’s oxygen. Bred for size and without the force of gravity to hold them down, the trees were so tall that they stretched out of sight into the cloud layer, and tapered to points just beneath the armored dome which protected the city.

“Just a salad, dear? Are you sure?”

Her mother had grown up in the rationing days, when seaweed products had still tasted like seaweed, complete with saltwater tang. Alejandra had first tasted red meat as a teenager. Food was serious business to her.

“I’m not really hungry.”

“Mmm.”

Alejandra took another bite, and Elena laughed.

“You get me for two days after two years, and this is what you want to talk about?”

“I’m sorry, dear. Occupational hazard, I’m always thinking of food.”

“Well, you don’t look it.”

Alejandra smiled.

“Keep it up and you really will get twenty kilos next time.”

“How is work, by the way?”

“You’re eating it.” Alejandra smiled. She never tired of that joke. “It’s well. Our Thai cuisine line just got two stars.”

“I hate spicy food.”

“I know, dear.”

Alejandra signaled the waiter for more wine, and they watched him pour. The wine flowed sluggishly from the bottle and seemed to almost hang in midair before hitting bottom with an enormous splash. Lunar glassware tended to be abnormally tall and thin, much like the Moon’s long term residents. While her mother was distracted, Elena took the opportunity to check her bracelet underneath the table. But there were no new messages from
Gabriel.

“And what about your job? Have they made a decision?”

Elena shrugged.

“They have candidates, I’m sure. I don’t really know. They won’t start vetting until we’re underway. Just in case there’s a problem with the ship.”

“There won’t be, I’m sure,” Alejandra said.

“Glad to hear an expert’s opinion, but I think we’ll test her just to make sure. Halfway to Jupiter isn’t the best place to learn that the air filters don’t work.”

“You are being considered, of course?”

“For executive officer?”

“For captain,” Alejandra said.

“Of
Gabriel
? A chief officer with only two years in grade? There’d be a mutiny.” Elena took another, deeper sip of her wine. “No, I might get exec perhaps. Or maybe boatswain. I’ve done it before, but this would still be a step up.”

“But not captain.”

With Alejandra, it was difficult to distinguish between those times when she was leading Elena, and when she really didn’t know.

“No, not captain.”

“Don’t they trust you?”

“They trust me just fine, mama,” Elena said. “But this is how it works.”

“So you’ll take the ship out on this…”

“Trial cruise.”

“Thank you. So. You take
Gabriel
out on this trial cruise. You go to the Belt and back. And if something goes wrong, you take the ship back to the station and try to figure it out. And if all goes well, another captain takes the ship instead, and you go…somewhere.”

“Yes, I’ll definitely be going somewhere,” Elena said.

Alejandra drained the last of her glass, and placed it down a touch too hard.

“And you’re okay with that?”

“That’s how it works, mama.”

Elena raised her own glass and took a sip.

“Mmm. Did you know that I breastfed you?”

Elena nearly spit out her wine, and set her glass down carefully.

“No. Jesus. Did I need to?”

“I suppose not,” Alejandra said. “But you do need to grow up. It’s a beautiful thing, one of the most generous things you can do for another human being. You shouldn’t be so squeamish.”

Elena could hold her own amongst soldiers and politicians, but her mother could still make her cheeks burn.

“I’m sorry, mama. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Your great-grandmother felt the same way, it’s no mystery where you get it from. She didn’t want to nurse any of her children, so she employed a local woman to do it for her.”

“A wet nurse,” Elena said.

“Yes. She was a lovely woman, I’m told, so close to all the children, always there at baptisms and birthdays and Christmases. But I used to feel so sorry when Mother would tell me about her. She’d had only one child of her own, a stillbirth. Carmen nursed my mother and her brothers and sister over the next few years, but she could never take them home with her. It did not seem fair that someone so full of love would not be able to share it with a child of her own.”

Elena didn’t know what to say to this, but knew she had to say something.

“What happened to Carmen? Abuela never mentioned her to me.”

“Well…you know. Que dios me la tenga en su gloria.” Alejandra’s Spanish sounded strange to her daughter’s ear. Elena couldn’t remember the last time she had heard her mother speak it. “Madre didn’t know her very long.”

Elena nodded. Her maternal grandmother would have turned one hundred years old in a few months—she had been born the year of the Storm.

There came a silence. Alejandra would not ask if her daughter had understood, it was not her way. She cleared her throat instead.

“And if you don’t get this ship. Will there be another? One day?”

“I’m sure there will be. The Space Agency isn’t going anywhere, and neither are the outsiders.”

“Then I’m sure that will be a good ship too.” Alejandra checked her electronic bracelet and sighed. “Ask for the bill.”

Despite the protest that Elena spent roughly twenty nine days out of every thirty in a spacesuit, jumpsuit, or dress blues, Alejandra insisted on taking her daughter shopping for clothes.

“You know what happens to a skirt in zero gravity, don’t you?”

Alejandra shook the dress, cut in the latest Havana style, and watched it ripple slowly. It was royal blue, several shades above an Agency uniform, and shimmered softly under the lights.

“We’ll get you matching stockings.”

Elena laughed and ran her fingers over the dress. The material color shifted under the heat of her skin, and left vibrant orange trails that slowly faded as they cooled.

“Maybe I can use it as a parachute.”

“Fine.” Alejandra turned to hand it back to the shopgirl. “We’ll get you shoes. You still wear shoes in space, correct?”

She spoke with the haughty umbrage reserved exclusively for the parents of ungrateful children. Elena stopped her hand.

“It’s fine, mama. I just feel like you’re spoiling me.”

“I only have the one daughter.” Alejandra and the shop girl pressed their electronic bracelets together, and the transaction was completed in an instant. The woman left to find a garment bag for the dress that Elena doubted she would ever have the opportunity to wear. “And for maybe not much longer.”

“Stop.”

Elena knew that her mother was entirely correct. It wasn’t exactly unheard for vessels to be lost in the Belt. The reach of the Global Union, from the Sun to the Belt, was nearly half a billion kilometers. Between Mercury and Mars, one could feel perfectly safe, as there had never been a single recorded attack inside that fortified ring. But the Belt was the frontier, and outside was the wilderness.

“I suppose those big guns are for decoration, then.”

The shopgirl returned with the dress, a bag, and a smile. Elena took the first two and gave a smile back. The girl was almost gorgeous enough to make Elena wish that Alejandra wasn’t there.

Elena and her mother stepped out onto the High Street, which circled the forest. A nearby elevator station from below opened and disgorged a flood of passengers. Most people lived and worked beneath the crater, inside the lunar surface, but the trendy shops and posh townhouses were up here, lining the crater wall. A few—the most expensive, including her mother’s apartment—had been nestled among the trees. But Maginus was an expensive town, no matter where one chose to live. It was an original, like Tranquility and Fra Mauro, one of the settlements created over a century before by the Avram Corporation. The old colonists were long gone, just like the company, and its founder, presumed dead during the Storm. But their cities remained, carved into the surface.

The lunar workday had nearly ended, and Maginus bustled with the first of the artificial night’s crowds. The true lunar night was actually several weeks old, and the near side of the Moon wouldn’t face the sun for another hour or so. But the city lights, shining down on the crater from the top of the dome, followed a twenty four hour cycle, and they died down now to create the illusion of twilight.

Elena and Alejandra found a seat in the dimming light on a bench not far from the shop. The High Street billboards gleamed brightly in the dusk, and their holograms flickered with luminous campaign ads—Socialist red, Conservative blue, Liberal gold, and the white of the Alliance for Sovereignty.

Alejandra spoke first.

“The Defense Minister is from the old country, you know.”

Elena looked at her mother and tried to follow her through yet another sharp conversational turn.

“Yes, I knew that. I didn’t know that you knew that.”

“Well?”

Alejandra’s dark eyes had faded in the gloom, but Elena could feel them searching her.

“Madre de dios. You looked him up while I was in the restroom, didn’t you?”

“I’m not wrong, am I?”

Elena sighed. It was impossible to explain military protocol to someone who was placidly determined not to understand it. After more than fifteen years, concepts such as “active duty,” “scheduled leave,” and “chain of command” still failed to make an impression upon Alejandra.

“It doesn’t work that way, mama.”

“You think you’d be the first candidate to get a good word from a countryman?”

“It shouldn’t work that way, then,” Elena said. “Besides, I’m too young.”

Her mother was quiet for a moment.

“She was younger than you are now, Elena.”

Elena hadn’t expected Alejandra to remember that detail. She felt her cheeks grow hot again.

“Captain Muller had a combat record. I spent a six month tour on an asteroid and didn’t see action once.”

Alejandra turned away and began to brush nonexistent lint from her sleeves.

“Well, if you have an answer for everything.”

“Jesucristo, an hour ago you were talking like you didn’t want me to go. You need to make up your mind, mama.”

“If I’m going to lose my daughter for however long again, I want it to be for a good reason.” She hesitated once more. “And I think it would have made Anne proud.”

“Why wouldn’t she be proud of me already?”

“Elena, I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Anne knew how hard I had to work to get where I am. It takes fifteen years to make your name in the Agency, and I didn’t have a very good fucking name to begin with.”

“Elena.” Her mother spoke quietly. Her knee pulled away from Elena’s own. “There’s no need for—”

“You don’t have any idea why they wouldn’t trust me? Then let’s ask papa and see if he knows.”

Alejandra said nothing, and Elena turned away.

The artificial light cycle had reached its darkest point, and now resembled an early summer evening. This was the Maginus equivalent of sunset. The night had begun, and the tide of humanity on the High Street swarmed back and forth, bounding in the peculiar lunar gait.

When Elena finally risked a look, Alejandra was busily checking her mascara in a tiny mirror. She snapped it shut and glanced at her bracelet.

“We’re going to be late.”

Earthrise was a busy time at the observation decks. Elena and Alejandra had to wait half an hour for one of the massive elevators to the top of the dome to become available, and it was nearly the same amount of time to their destination. They passed in silence above the canopy of the trees, spread out like a green carpet beneath them, and then they were enveloped in the white downy softness of the cloud layer. Maginus City was nearly two kilometers tall at its highest point, and its upper levels were perpetually clothed in a fine mist. Elena had been told that lightning sometimes struck the towers, but thankfully did not have the opportunity to observe it.

The elevator terminated at an airlock set into the curve of the dome itself. Elena’s professional judgment was highly impressed—it was a triple lock system over twenty meters thick, each manned by a helpful attendant. It was far more secure than anything she had ever seen aboard a ship or station. Then again, no ship or station had ever held a fraction of Maginus’ one hundred thousand residents. Even if it had been breached, only the elevator shaft would have been exposed, and it possessed its own safety locks—but one could never be too careful.

There were no spacesuits here, and no helmets. Elena could feel her heart quicken inside the last lock, just one away from the vacuum. It was as though she had walked outside her home in the nude. Beside her Alejandra craned her neck curiously, wanting to be among the first to see the stars. The crowd—tourists from Earth, mostly, to judge from their awkward motion—seemed just as nonchalant, as if they were completely unaware that a million tonnes of air pressure were straining to blow them out into space.

A gasp ran through the cloud when final lock opened and allowed them into the observation bubble. It looked like the inside of an impossibly authentic planetarium. The starscape above them shone on the dome like diamonds on black velvet, and the pearly arm of the Milky Way reached over their heads and stretched away into the distance, and disappeared over the horizon. Once at the center Elena could look up without seeing the walls behind her, or the surface before her, and feel like she was floating in space. This was a view that was impossible down below—the sun and moon were too bright during the lunar day to see much of anything else.

Elena glanced at Alejandra. An expression of wonder had taken two decades off a face that already seemed much younger than its sixty years. She thought of the camping trips to the Andes that she had taken with her father, paddling a canoe at the top of the world. Her mother had never come with them.