Echea

The Moon Child, I responded. Echea.

Pretty name.

Pretty girl.

There was a silence, as if he didn’t know how to respond to that. He had always been silent about my children. They were links he could not form, links to my husband that could not be broken, links that Ronald and I could never have.

She has no interface, I sent into that silence.

Not at all?

No.

Did they tell you anything about her?

Only that she’d been orphaned. You know, the standard stuff. I felt odd, sending that. I had asked for information, of course, at every step. And my husband had. And when we compared notes, I learned that each time we had been told the same thing-that we had asked for a child, and we would get one, and that child’s life would start fresh with us. The past did not matter.

The present did.

How old is she?

Seven.

Hmmm. The procedure won’t be involved, but there might be some dislocation. She’s been alone in her head all this time. Is she stable enough for the change?

I was genuinely perplexed. I had never encountered an unlinked child, let alone lived with one. I didn’t know what "stable" meant in that context.

My silence had apparently been answer enough.

I’ll do an exam, he sent. Don’t worry.

Good. I got ready to terminate the conversation.

You sure everything’s all right there? he sent.

It’s as right as it always is, I sent, and then severed the co

That night, I dreamed. It was an odd dream because it felt like a virtual reality vid, complete with emotions and all the five senses. But it had the distance of VR too-that strange sense that the experience was not mine.

I dreamed I was on a dirty, dusty street. The air was thin and dry. I had never felt air like this. It tasted recycled, and it seemed to suck the moisture from my skin. It wasn’t hot, but it wasn’t cold either. I wore a ripped shirt and ragged pants, and my shoes were boots made of a light material I had never felt before. Walking was easy and precarious at the same time. I felt lighter than ever, as if with one wrong gesture I would float.

My body moved easily in this strange atmosphere, as if it were used to it. I had felt something like it before: when my husband and I had gone to the Museum of Science and Technology in Chicago on our honeymoon. We explored the Moon exhibit, and felt firsthand what it was like to be in a colony environment.

Only that had been clean.

This wasn’t.

The buildings were white plastic, covered with a filmy grit and pockmarked with time and use. The dirt on the ground seemed to get on everything, but I knew, as well as I knew how to walk in this imperfect gravity, that there wasn’t enough money to pave the roads.

The light above was artificial, built into the dome itself. If I looked up, I could see the dome and the light, and if I squinted, I could see beyond to the darkness that was the unprotected atmosphere. It made me feel as if I were in a lighted glass porch on a starless night. Open, and vulnerable, and terrified, more because I couldn’t see what was beyond than because I could.

People crowded the roadway and huddled near the plastic buildings. The buildings were domed too. Pre-fab, shipped up decades ago when Earth had hopes for the colonies. Now there were no more shipments, at least not here. We had heard that there were shipments coming to Colony Russia and Colony Europe, but no one confirmed the rumors. I was in Colony London, a bastard colony made by refugees and dissidents from Colony Europe. For a while, we had stolen their supply ships. Now, it seemed, they had stolen them back.

A man took my arm. I smiled up at him. His face was my father’s face, a face I hadn’t seen since I was twenty-five. Only something had altered it terribly. He was younger than I had ever remembered him. He was too thin and his skin filthy with dust. He smiled back at me, three teeth missing, lost to malnutrition, the rest blackened and about to go. In the past few days the whites of his eyes had turned yellow, and a strange mucus came from his nose. I wanted him to see the colony’s medical facility or at least pay for an autodoc, but we had no credit, no means to pay at all.

It would have to wait until we found something.

"I think I found us free passage to Colony Latina," he said. His breath whistled through the gaps in his teeth. I had learned long ago to be far away from his mouth. The stench could be overpowering. "But you’ll have to do them a job."

A job. I sighed. He had promised no more. But that had been months ago. The credits had run out, and he had gotten sicker.

"A big job?" I asked.

He didn’t meet my gaze. "Might be."

"Dad-"

"Honey, we gotta use what we got."

It might have been his motto. We gotta use what we got. I’d heard it all my life. He’d come from Earth, he’d said, in one of the last free ships. Some of the others we knew said there were no free ships except for parolees, and I often wondered if he had come on one of those. His morals were certainly slippery enough.

I don’t remember my mother. I’m not even sure I had one. I’d seen more than one adult buy an infant, and then proceed to exploit it for gain. It wouldn’t have been beyond him.

But he loved me. That much was clear.

And I adored him.

I’d have done the job just because he’d asked it.

I’d done it before.

The last job was how we’d gotten here. I’d been younger then and I hadn’t completely understood.

But I’d understood when we were done.

And I’d hated myself.

"Isn’t there another way?" I found myself asking.

He put his hand on the back of my head, propelling me forward. "You know better," he said. "There’s nothing here for us."

"There might not be anything in Colony Latina, either."

"They’re getting shipments from the U.N. Seems they vowed to negotiate a peace."

"Then everyone will want to go."

"But not everyone can," he said. "We can." He touched his pocket. I saw the bulge of his credit slip. "If you do the job."

It had been easier when I didn’t know. When doing a job meant just that. When I didn’t have other things to consider. After the first job, my father asked where I had gotten the morals. He said I hadn’t inherited them from him, and I hadn’t. I knew that. I suggested maybe Mother, and he had laughed, saying no mother who gave birth to me had morals either.

"Don’t think about it, honey," he’d said. "Just do."

Just do. I opened my mouth-to say what, I don’t know-and felt hot liquid splatter me. An exit wound had opened in his chest, spraying his blood all around. People screamed and backed away. I screamed. I didn’t see where the shot had come from, only that it had come.

The blood moved slowly, more slowly than I would have expected.

He fell forward and I knew I wouldn’t be able to move him, I wouldn’t be able to grab the credit slip, wouldn’t be able to get to Colony Latina, wouldn’t have to do the job.

Faces, unbloodied faces, appeared around me.

They hadn’t killed him for the slip.

I turned and ran, as he once told me to do, ran as fast as I could, blasting as I went, watching people duck or cover their ears or wrap their arms around their heads.

I ran until I saw the sign.

The tiny prefab with the Red Crescent painted on its door, the Red Cross on its windows. I stopped blasting and tumbled inside, bloody, terrified, and completely alone.

I woke up to find my husband’s arms around me, my head buried in his shoulder. He was rocking me as if I were one of the girls, murmuring in my ear, cradling me and making me feel safe. I was crying and shaking, my throat raw with tears or with the aftereffects of screams.