(eng) Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Retrieval Artist 14 by Starbase Human

Author:Starbase Human [Human, Starbase]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-TWO

PIPPA LANDAU OPENED the door of her centuries’ old house and stepped onto the lawn. The air smelled faintly of cut grass and Mississippi River mud. Davenport had just experienced the annual spring flood. Back in the day, the people who lived here had sandbagged the riverbanks to prevent the brown Mississippi water from overrunning the city.

And it didn’t always work. Much of Davenport had been built based on the knowledge that the Mississippi would flood periodically. So most of the city was up high, on the bluffs.

Now, the houses had stilts that lifted the buildings above any known waterline. Her house, built above the traditional flood stage, had only used its stilts once in the decades she had lived here. That flood, which happened when her children were small, had been epic, a disaster that would have wiped out the city if modern technology hadn’t made city protection possible.

She thought of that flood every time the smell of the Mississippi became overpowering.

And she was thinking of it now.

The grass was wet. She probably shouldn’t have had the bots cut it so soon after the heavy rains, but she had. The ground was still squishy, and water soaked into her favorite slippers, making her feet cold.

She wrapped her robe around her waist, hoping the neighbors wouldn’t see, and then realized that worrying about her neighbors meant she had become an Iowan.

Tears pooled in her eyes. She wanted to remain an Iowan. A Midwestern teacher of uncertain origin, who raised her family here and put down roots, like she had never thought possible.

When she first arrived on Earth, she had felt like a plant in a hydroponic garden: roots visible in her little glass container, taking in nutrients, but movable—constantly on the alert for the best conditions, the best life, the safest place.

She had found it. Right here. Davenport, Iowa, Midwest, Earth, the center of the Earth Alliance, the place most people ran from.

And she loved it.

Now she was like the garden she planted every spring. Her roots had sunk deep into the rich loam that had kept generations of humans alive in this very spot for hundreds and hundreds of years.

She wiped the back of her hand over her eyes, felt the wet, and made herself take a deep breath.

Then she walked deeper into her yard and looked up.

As she had thought after Anniversary Day, her backyard was not the ideal place to gaze at the moon. The lights of the city were up tonight, which they hadn’t been when she went to Prospect Park six months before, unsettled because she had seen the clones that haunted her nightmares.

Only on Anniversary Day, those clones had been alive and entering the Moon’s main port in Armstrong, on their way to committing mass murder.

Just like they had done on Starbase Human, over thirty-five years ago.

She wrapped her robe even tighter and looked up again.

When she had stood in Prospect Park, the Moon had been full and the night sky clear. The damage to some of the domes had been visible to the naked eye.

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