Launch Pad by Jody Lynn Nye & Mike Brotherton

Author:Jody Lynn Nye & Mike Brotherton [Nye, Jody Lynn & Brotherton, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WordFire Press
Published: 2014-11-24T05:00:00+00:00

The Caretaker

By Tiffany Trent

On the day the great tree spoke, Renza had been tending it for all her life. She was the thirtieth in a line of caretakers, descended from the first who had budded out of the tree at the appointed time.

She knew that she would die before she saw the ship reach its destination. She would never see the tree bear its fruit. She would never see the tree-born step onto the new world they had set out for before Renza was born.

Renza knew all this, but she still found herself yearning for what she was never meant to see—the fruit, the tree-born, the soil of the new planet, even perhaps the first saplings planted by the shores of a great lake or sea.

She would never see any of these things, but they were rich in her mind as she dug around the tree’s roots. Renza felt her fingers thickening, her skin becoming as gnarled as the tree’s. It was nearly her time.

It was quiet as it always was in the great oxygen chamber. The gravitational ring revolved every few minutes above her, keeping her steady with its slow spin.

You will soon return to me.

Having never heard any voice but her own, and that only seldom, Renza dropped her trowel. Its thud against the moss and roots seemed overly loud.

She looked around. No one was there. The catwalks that crisscrossed the great chamber were empty. The hammock where she slept was a drab rind slung across an alcove nearby.

You will soon return to me.

High in the branches, where billions of leaves shivered in the process of delivering precious air, the barest hints of buds were visible. And as always when she peered hard enough, Renza saw faces surface in the bark, the sleeping visages of those who would be born of the fruits when their time came. They were held there in suspension until the time of ripening came on the new planet’s surface. Then, they would burst forth and at last begin their new lives, adapting in whatever way was required to match the planet’s environment.

But those of Old Earth had calculated that KOI 1422 would be a relatively easy adaptation. In their last desperate attempt to free themselves of Old Earth’s failing Sun, they had filled the gene catalogs with whatever they thought their descendants would require.

Shame they’d never been able to test it out, Renza thought. A vague sense of dread settled in the pit of her stomach.

The tree must have sensed her discomfort. Soothing music from Old Earth came over the loudspeakers. “I Can’t Believe That You’re In Love With Me,” by Billie Holiday.

Renza couldn’t remember having heard this before herself, but she knew that her predecessors had. She also knew that when they had been told it was time to return to the tree and deepen, they had all done so without hesitation. They had believed in the tree’s words. They’d had to. It was part of their genetic programming.

She settled on the

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