Starglass Page 5

  This means something, I told myself. This means you’re a citizen, almost an adult. But I didn’t feel it. In fact, I didn’t feel much of anything. With a grimace I thrust the coat down at the table and went to the icebox to fetch Pepper his dinner.

  I scraped the leftover meat and bonemeal into his bowl, then watched for a moment as he pawed at it before diving in. As he licked the bowl clean, I went to the sink, where the tower of crusty dishes had been waiting since the night before. I switched the sink on. The pipes clattered and rang before a murky stream of brown water trickled out. I pulled up my sleeves and went to work, scrubbing the old dented pots and nicked china, letting the rhythm of the water wash over me.

  I didn’t hear my father come in. His footsteps were lost beneath the steady drone of tap water and my own tuneless whistling. But I heard the windows rattle when he slammed the door shut, and I jumped, splashing water over the floor. I waited for him to say something about his visit to the hatchery, to comment on how big his granddaughter was growing and what a wonderful father Ronen would be. But he didn’t. He only went to one of our cupboards, uncorked a cloudy bottle of wine, and took a long draw from it. As he passed, I got a nice whiff of him—that sour smell of alcohol and sweat. Drunk already.

  “You’re wasting the water,” he said, reaching past me to turn it off. I held my hands tight at the edge of the sink, not wanting to let his skin brush mine. On nights like these I never knew if I could trust him. His broad, age-spotted fingers had backhanded me one too many times.

  “Sorry,” I murmured. He gave a grunted response, then crossed the galley and collapsed at the table. For a moment he just sat there, shoulders slumped, turning the bottle in his hands. But then he spotted the pile of flaxen cloth.

  “What’s this?”

  I put the last dish on the rack, fumbled through the greasy water for the drain stopper, then turned, bracing myself.

  “My uniforms,” I said.

  He put the bottle down on the table. His fingers skidded across its splintered surface, finally grasping one of the coats by the sleeve and pulling it toward him.

  “Specialist,” he said, flatly at first. But then his hand alighted on the cord, and I saw something unfamiliar dance across his mouth. A smile.

  “Terra,” he said. He rose to his feet, still clutching the coat in his hands. Then he crossed the galley and crushed me in a hug. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I held them high between our bodies, shielding myself even as my face was pressed against the brass buttons of his coat.

  “Mazel tov, Daughter,” he said, rocking me. “Your momma would be so proud.” I started to let my eyes close, to lean into his embrace. He was still my father. I could smell the remnants of the clock tower under the rank stench of wine and body odor. He still smelled like the dust in the rafters and the cedar of the wide floorboards.

  Finally he pulled away, holding me at arm’s length. His face wrinkled in a grin.

  “You’ve done well,” he said. I shrugged at that—it’s not like I’d done anything. “A specialist, like your old man.”

  It was true. Abba did more than just ring the clock bells. He was an advisor to the meteorologists and doctors too. It was his job to help the people of our ship get used to the changes we’d inevitably face when we arrived on Zehava. Longer winters. Longer days. I knew he was proud of his job, of the ratty old blue cord threaded into his double-breasted coat.

  “Thanks,” I said. But I couldn’t stand the intensity of his gaze. I turned to the empty sink, starting to wipe it clean with an old dishrag, glad to have something—anything—to distract me from his stare. Meanwhile Abba folded my uniform for me, holding the arms against him like they were another body. Then he gently set it down.

  “Botany,” he said. Then he repeated it, more darkly this time. He reached for the bottle again. I saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. “Botany. You’ll be working with Mara Stone, you know.”

  “Will I?” I asked carefully. I’d never heard of her before, didn’t understand the shadow that had fallen over Abba’s words.

  “Be careful,” he said finally, smearing his lips against the back of his hand. “I’ve worked hard to see that you grow up right. I won’t see it ruined by that woman.”

  I didn’t know what to say. So I gave a timid nod. My father sank down into his seat, glowering at the wine bottle like it had insulted him. But he didn’t say anything.

  “Um,” I said at last, groping for some words to fill the silence. One side of his lip lifted in a sneer of acknowledgment. I went on: “I was wondering why you requested a talmid. I mean, it’s great, but I’m just . . . It surprised me. And I was wondering why. You requested him, that is.”

  My father lifted the bottle again, but it was empty. He let it thud down on the table as he let out a long sigh.

  “Because I’m tired,” he said.

  Then he rose and trudged up the stairs. His footfalls were heavy. I stayed still for a moment. Both Pepper and I kept our ears cocked toward the stairwell.

  Finally it came—the sound of his bedroom door thundering shut.

  • • •

  When I had finished putting the dishes away, I carried the lab coats up to my room. I threw the lot of them into the corner and didn’t even bother to scold Pepper as he settled into the pile of soft cloth.

  Even with the light off, within the confines of my narrow bed, I couldn’t ignore them. They seemed to glow up from the darkness, taunting me. I turned over to face the wall. My mind raced. Maybe I should have reached for my sketchbook, my pencils, poured out all my worries across the rough pages. But instead I just stared at the wall, my eyes wide and my body stiff.

  I couldn’t help but feel that, somehow, this was all Momma’s fault. If she hadn’t died, maybe I wouldn’t have taken to spending so much time in the atrium alone, looking at trees and sketching the splayed fingers of oak leaves in red and green. When I was little, it had been our place—she would take me walking every night after supper. Girl time, she said. Of course, those walks stopped when she first got sick, a few weeks after I turned twelve.

  At first her illness seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary. Nearly every winter a rash of flu ran through the ship, and it was almost impossible to stay healthy when we all shared the same air. But Momma stayed sick long after the rest of us went back to school and work. I just feel a little queasy, she said, a bit under the weather. It wasn’t until the end of the season that we finally convinced her to go to the hospital.

  In the waiting room I tried to ignore the fact that it was Doctor Rafferty and not one of the normal medics who tended to my mother. The blue cord on his shoulder was threaded with gold. Council member. Ronen noticed it too.

  “Why would she need the head doctor for the flu?” he demanded, jostling my father’s arm. “If it’s viral, she should be better already!”

  But our father didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Doctor Rafferty had appeared at the door, his olive features drawn.

  “There’s a mass on her liver,” he said. “It’s . . . very unusual. I’ve read about this but never seen it. ‘Cancer’ is what it was once called. Uncontrolled cell growth. It seems to have already reached her lymphatic system.”

  Doctor Rafferty’s expression was wrong. His lower lip twitched. There was something in his eyes, something I couldn’t quite pinpoint. But my father and Ronen accepted the diagnosis without question, so I told myself I must have been crazy—told myself there was no time to worry about Doctor Rafferty. There was only Momma, dying.

  A few weeks later she was gone, and high spring came stumbling back. And there was no one left to walk with me.

  • • •

  That night I dreamed of her.

  We were walking through the atrium together, down the twisted paths. It was summer, a season I hadn’t seen since I was a little kid. Dragonflies, their long bodies gleaming like ancient amethysts, swarmed the dome. As I followed my mother over the overgrown brick, I swatted inse
cts from my face. But it didn’t do any good. Between the tangle of vines and the fury of wings, I lost my mother down a fork in the path.

  “Momma?” I called. I crossed a wooden footbridge where flashes of green caught my eye from over the rail. Turtles milled through the water below. Everything was too bright, too hot. It made me dizzy.

  Then I heard movement in the jungle. I stalked forward, squinting through the heat.

  “Momma?” I pushed the branches aside.

  There, standing in the jungle, was my mother. She smiled at me, reaching out a hand. I pressed forward.

  But then she turned, and I saw that she wasn’t alone. A boy stood just behind her. But his face was obscured by a veil of Spanish moss that spilled off one of the tree branches above.

  I couldn’t make out his features, but this much I knew: He was tall, taller than Momma. Taller than me. The flowers all turned their faces to him, like they couldn’t wait to soak up his warmth. In turn his thin body bent unnaturally toward me as I stepped close. It was like he had no spine, no bones, like he was just a reed bending in the breeze.

  I woke in the pitch dark of my bedroom, my heart doing a wild dance in my chest.

  5

  The next morning I hustled across the ship, pushing my sleeves up over my hands and listening to the clock bells strike out the quarter hour. It wasn’t entirely my fault that I was late, of course. The labs were practically a world away from the grimy port district where we lived. To reach them I had to make my way through the commerce district, then the fields, then the pastures, then cross the narrow footbridge between the library and school. The concrete buildings that housed the labs rose up out of the ground near the far wall of the ship.

  I made my way through the winding hallways, smiling nervously to the other specialists as I passed. They hardly noticed me as they rushed by, white coats streaming. When I finally reached the door to the botanical lab, I hesitated.

  Truth be told, when I pressed my hand to the panel by the door, I hoped, for just a moment, that the door would stay shut.

  No such luck. It slid away, revealing metal floors and walls. Everything would have been gleaming if it weren’t for the junk everywhere. Metal shelves reached up to the ceilings, but the books had begun to topple off them. Waterlogged papers spilled like leaves off a row of steel tables. And there were plants everywhere. Vines curled out of pots of soil and from planters overhead. Little trays of seedlings were stacked along the floor. Open bags of fertilizer steamed heat into the cool air.

  The lab smelled like disinfectant, soil, and heady pollen. I wrinkled my nose.

  “Hello?” I called as the door slid closed behind me. I walked carefully, doing my best not to trample any of the books that were set open on the floor. For a moment there was no answer. But then I heard movement near the rear of the lab. A woman hovered over one of the desks, behind a massive monitor. The computer terminal looked like it wasn’t often used. The keyboard was strewn with papers.

  The woman was sharp eyed, with gray-threaded hair cropped close to her head, and a hook-shaped nose. And she was tiny—much shorter than I was, and slender, too, though her coat fit much better than mine. It had been taken in at the waist and sleeves, tailored to her. I watched as she squinted down into the long tube of a microscope, her expression a sort of grimaced wink. She didn’t acknowledge me standing there, waiting.

  “Um, Rebbe Stone?” I said, clearing my throat. “I can come back later if you want.”

  She waved a hand at me, but her gaze didn’t move from the microscope. “Don’t call me ‘Rebbe’! The Council might think they can make me teach you, but they can’t force me to be as formal as all that.”

  I chewed my lip. “You didn’t request me?”

  “Bah,” Mara said. “ ‘Request.’ They’ve been trying to strong-arm me into retiring for years. They think you’ll be my deathblow. Sit down!”

  The only chair was behind her, and it was piled high with books. So I crouched in place between a stack of field guides and a prickly needled bush.

  “On Earth there was a country called Iceland,” she began. She had a craggy, sort of froggish voice. It matched her nose. “Of course you haven’t heard of it. Their chief cultivars were potatoes, kale, cabbage. Hardy grasses. That sort of rubbish thing, and limited to the warmer lowlands. But with geothermally heated hothouses, they could add almost anything to their diet. Tomatoes for vitamin C. Grapes for wine. Small scale, mostly, but still. They’ve been an excellent model for us.” She finally looked up at me, one eye still squinted.

  “Only problem is, for the last year, blight has been hitting our hothouse fruit trees. And Zehavan fruit salad’s going to be exceedingly bland if all we have is crab apples and figs. You know, when they told me they were sending me a girl, I was worried you’d be an addlebrained fool. But I’m glad to see they didn’t send me one of the pretty ones.”

  I blanched. I’d long known that I was no Rachel—my frame was gawky, and my fair hair hung in a frizzy curtain down my shoulders—but I wasn’t used to people saying it so plainly. The woman scowled.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it. You’re fine. It’s better off, anyway. You’ll be doing all sorts of digging around for me. Wouldn’t want you to be afraid to get your hands dirty.”

  I didn’t say anything. The woman looked amused. She offered me her hand.

  “I’m Mara Stone.”

  Her knobby fingers were cold. “I know,” I said. “My father told me . . .” Then I trailed off. I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to share what my father had said.

  “Terrible things, I’m sure.” Mara turned to her microscope. “Terra, isn’t it? It’s an interesting name, considering. Do you know what it means?”

  “No,” I said, and then added: “Considering what?”

  “Considering your new vocation. ‘Terra’ was another name for Earth. But also for the stuff on it. The land, the soil.”

  “Oh,” I replied, not really sure what to say to that. “It’s a family name. My mother named me after some ancestor.”

  “Your mother, yes.” With those words something about Mara’s expression changed. Her hard mouth didn’t exactly soften, but her frown sort of crumbled away. “You know, I’m sorry about that. Well, not sorry. I didn’t do it, you know. But sorry enough. The founders tried to safeguard us against that. But they couldn’t anticipate every eventuality.”

  I was used to people apologizing for my mother’s death, but I wasn’t used to this. “It’s okay,” I said at last. And then we just stood there, staring at each other for a minute, the terrible silence stretching out.

  “What do you know about plants?” she finally demanded. I opened my mouth, letting it form a helpless O.

  “I know the names of some flowers,” I offered. “My mother taught me. Daffodils and cyclamens and—”

  “Ha!” Mara said. “Lot of good daffodils’ll do us. Here.”

  She strode over to the desk in the corner, where a heavy volume waited in a nest of papers. It was open, the pages yellow from water that had drained from the planters above. She fanned through it. There were illustrations of plants on every page, each one lavishly illustrated in shades of brown and green. I wanted to reach out and run my fingers over the images. But there was no time.

  “I’ll take you into one of the greenhouses. You’ll find each of the marked plants and bring me a cutting.” She fished a pair of rusted shears out of her deep pocket. I took them from her and then glanced down at the book. Even looking at it sideways, I could see that almost a third of the pages were marked, the corners folded over.

  “All of them?” I asked, doubt seeping into my voice. Mara showed me her teeth. It didn’t look so much like she was smiling as it did that she was hungry.

  “Yes,” she said. “All of them.”

  • • •

  She led me to one of the adjacent greenhouses, where, beneath the condensation-dusted canopy, a jungle of green seemed to have exploded. A few workers milled about
, tending the plants. But they didn’t even look up at us. It was like they were somewhere else entirely. Mara and I stood on the central path, where we listened to the steady alternating sound of the sprinklers coming on in different parts of the room. The air here was muggy. I began to regret the heavy sweater I’d put on that morning between my undershirt and lab coat.

  Mara gestured to a few of the plants. “Cycads. Gnetophytes. Bryophytes. Pteridophytes,” she said, like that was supposed to help me. Maybe it was. Other than a few pea plants, none of them were marked. I stumbled over her last word, sounding out the syllables: “Pter-i-do-phytes?”

  “Ferns.”

  Mara wrested the shears from my hand, knelt down in front of some sort of scrubby bush, and showed me how to clip a branch off. She dropped the gnarled thing into my palm. “Start with that,” she said. Without another word she clomped down the path, leaving me there alone.

  I turned to the first dog-eared page.

  “Gnetum gnemon,” I mumbled to myself. “ ‘A midsized tree. Evergreen. Emerald leaves, with fruitlike st-strobilus.’ ” I tried to commit the image of the red, clustered nuts and green-fingered branches to memory and hustled off through the tangled mass of plants at the greenhouse’s center.

  It took hours. By nineteen o’clock—a few hours after the other workers had departed, smiling apologetically at me—my sweater was soaked with sweat, my trousers caked with mud. I wandered in circles through the overgrown paths. When I finally dragged myself into the lab, I felt dizzy, waterlogged, and exhausted. But Mara didn’t say a word when I set the book on the desk in front of her. I watched as she typed something into her computer, carefully ignoring me.