Kea's Flight by John C. Ricker & Erika Hammerschmidt

Author:John C. Ricker & Erika Hammerschmidt [Ricker, John C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Erika Hammerschmidt and John C. Ricker
Published: 2011-03-02T23:00:00+00:00

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For a long time, Beep kept his dark silence, while Draz was absorbed in the computers. I couldn’t sit still. I got up and paced, forcing the sight of plants into my eyes. Anything to take my mind off problems I couldn’t do anything to solve. Teachers hunting us down, building files on us, suspecting us. And even worse: the ship filling with smoke at this very minute, and Draz fighting to fix it.

I tried to focus on the greenery. Spider plants. Blade-like leaves, sometimes solid green, sometimes green and white. They sent out vines with small clusters of leaves and roots on them, which would grow into new plants if they reached soil. Spider plants were especially good in starships because they cleaned the air, absorbing impurities and using them as nourishment. They could even clean water; gardeners on Earth had discovered long ago that vases with spider plant stems in them stayed clean long after vases with other flowers had grown algae.

If only they were strong enough to clean this...

I forced my mind back on track. Strawberries. A small plant, with jagged-edged, roundish green leaves growing in threes. They spread much like the spider plant, sending out tendrils that put down roots anywhere they could. Their flowers were simple: yellow centers surrounded by a few round white petals. The fruits were red (or, in rare varieties, white)... speckled with tiny, edible seeds... flavored sweet and tart and...

Damn. Thoughts of eating strawberries with Draz led to more thoughts of Draz, which led back to his desperate hacking job that I didn’t understand and couldn’t help with. I had to think of something else or I would go insane. But somehow all roads brought me to the same thought.

“They haven’t answered me,” Draz said. “Probably the malfunction’s happening in their side too, and they’re too busy trying to survive. I’m going to use the virus now.”

I went back to trying to distract myself. Language. The one thing that could occupy my mind completely. I had been trying to learn Spanish and German from the resources I had access to, and there had been times when I’d thought about various points of their grammar for uninterrupted hours.

Spanish, for instance, was interesting because of its fixation on gender. There was no equivalent for the word “it”... all nouns were either “he” or “she.” Even adjectives had sexes. You couldn’t say, for example, “I am angry” without stating your gender, because you’d have to put a different ending on the word for “angry” depending on whether you were male or female.

And yet there were also gender-specific things in English that weren’t gender-specific in Spanish. For instance, suppose... I began mouthing the words to myself, reciting the language lecture under my breath the way I had recited so many unwritten essays and stories before I met Draz. Suppose that you were sitting near Lefty’s bed, and you saw Lefty walk up to it and lie down. To inform another person of Lefty’s location, in

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