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As soon as she’d climbed up—or at least, along—the ladder, Cora was greeted by the familiar lumps of misshapen rock that comprised Cypsela’s surface. Relatively speaking, she’d exited onto the moonlet’s south side, but the concept of south was kind of a doofy one here. Cypsela wasn’t big enough for magnetic poles. It wasn’t even big enough to be round. It was an ugly, wonky sweet potato caught in orbit around an ice giant, with two hairless primates, a couple thousand bumblebees, and a fuckton of plants living in the artificial caves inside.
Cora took a deep breath of her bottled air, exhaled with satisfaction, and gave the nearest rock an appreciative pat. She was enormously fond of their ugly sweet potato.
She clipped her belt tether to the safety hook outside the hatch, then took some time to enjoy the view. Straight ahead, she saw star field, crisp and sharp. Even the sun was cold out here, and with no atmosphere to diffuse its rays, it was just one big light bulb among countless littles. She turned her body one-eighty to say hello to Solace, the pale behemoth, its clouds and hurricanes so deceptively pretty at a distance. She turned her gaze down to the curved horizon—looking “north,” or whatever—and took in Solace’s rings, spread out like a veil of lace. The rings stretched for hundreds of thousands of miles to either side, but only a few dozen meters vertically. Cypsela traveled in the middle of this road of suspended rubble, coasting along in an empty lane carved by its own gravity.
So beautiful, Cora thought. Every time. Just stupidly fucking beautiful.
A shuttle flew past overhead. Cora recognized the paint job, as she did with all of Solace’s smallcraft. She waved to her neighbors from another moonlet, flagging her arm back and forth in exaggerated motions. From her position, she was inverted over the cockpit window, but she was too far away to tell if it was Cal or Amber in the pilot’s seat. She supposed it could even be Amy. This was possible, because Amber had been teaching Amy how to fly, but the thought was terrifying. In Cora’s mind, Amy was still a loose-toothed goober permanently smudged with vanilla pudding and craft glue, not an adult-sized impostor only four years younger than Cora had been when she’d started flight school. It wasn’t that Cora minded getting older. Being in your forties was awesome, as it turned out, and she was looking forward to discovering if the same held true for the decades ahead. But little Amy being fifteen? Fifteen and allowed to fly a spaceship? No. No, no, no. Ludicrous. Nothing about that was okay.
In broad concept, at least, it was a good thing, for a kid that age to start flying. That was a necessary skill to have, living way out here.
The landing lights on the shuttle flashed a short series of steady blinks. Cora waved more enthusiastically, confirming the reply had been received. The shuttle flew on, and Cora turned her attention back to the rock she really didn’t want to drift away from. A pathway of sorts stretched out from the hatch—a row of metal rings on posts. Cora grabbed the first ring, unclipped her belt tether from the hatch, clipped it again to the ring in her hand, then skipped along the surface in a breathy parody of a walk, her boots barely touching the ground at all. Once she reached the second ring, she repeated the process—grab, release, clip, skip—bit by bit, post by post, as she headed on into the surface garden.
Interstitial
It was easy, when your body was nearly weightless, to let your mind drift, too.
This one time, back in the Berth, Otto had come into the shop while Cora was over. Signy had invited him into the back room so he could take a gander at the plants she was most proud of. He’d asked, in his interested-in-everything way, what each one was called and what it was for.
This is dwarf foxglove, Signy said. I use it to make heart medication. That’s periwinkle. I’ve tweaked it to produce antidepressants.
And this? he’d said, pointing to a crop of waist-high leafy guys. (Tobacco, Cora later learned, disguised as bell pepper.)
Those are for Cora, Signy had said, adding no detail beyond that.
Otto had looked at Cora with a twinkle in his eye. Ah, he’d said. Your lady’s favor.
Cora hadn’t known what he’d meant by that. She thought he meant like the plants were a favor Signy was doing for her—a way of helping her out. And that was certainly true, so Cora had just smiled and nodded. Old people said funny things, Otto especially.
It wasn’t until years and years later, during a movie night on Lodestone, when Cora found out what he’d actually meant. They’d been watching some corny old adventure flick from the Primer, something based in Earth folklore, full of swords and horses and shit. A ribbon got tied around someone’s upper sleeve, and Cora’s ears pricked at what they called it. She looked it up in the Primer’s dictionary when she and Signy got home that night, and once she scrolled down enough to hit the line labeled noun (archaic), she’d cried, a little. Not because it was mushy, though, okay, sure, she was a marshmallow and it was also that. But no, the real reason she’d cried was because she wanted to call Otto and tell him what a sweetheart he was, and . . . that wasn’t something she could do anymore.
Cora had been really soft on that phrase, after that. She still was.
Interstitial
The surface garden was home to three primary things.
The first was the seed vault, where Cora dropped off the packets she’d been carrying in the pouches on her thighs. Each was labeled with Signy’s careful handwriting, noting the scientific name, the common name, the batch number, the date on which they had been packed, and the date by which they needed to be replanted. Space was pretty much the best deep-freeze environment imaginable, and since most seeds didn’t mind hanging out in a vacuum for years on end, all you needed were some storage racks and some walls with rad-block lining, and bam, an incredibly cheap security system for the most precious stuff there was. Common wheat, the packets read. Soybean. Cotton. The same seeds human beings had been filling their pockets with since before they had any idea that other worlds and other moons existed.
The second part of the surface garden was the ammonia patch. Outside the vault lay a circular array of transparent domes, each roughly as tall as Cora’s hips, built with complicated mini-airlocks for when you had to access the plants inside. This garden was nothing like the ones tucked away within Cypsela. There wasn’t any dirt here, for a start, and nothing was allowed to grow wild. The ammonia patch was a hydro setup—heated tubes and bioplastic, a system that would’ve fit in perfectly in the canvas plant farms back at the Berth, if it weren’t for the super illegal weirdos they housed. There was no disguising these plants as anything other than alien. They were Argosan in origin, but engineered into something that planet wouldn’t have recognized, either. Real funky little guys. Whitish purple spirals without leaves or a hint of green. They had no need for grow lamps, no need for fertilizer. They were chemophiles, bred to consume nothing but water and fine-ground rock.
Every few days, the ammonia the plants exhaled needed to be tapped, so to speak. The domes handled this automatically, shutting off the line of plant-friendly air and pumping the pungent stuff out. Cora and Signy didn’t collect the ammonia, or bottle it, or anything like that. It was simply kicked right out into space.
This, like everything here, was on purpose.
One of the domes had signaled a malfunction that morning, which was why Cora now found herself at site 16A with a set of micrograv tools, taking apart a misbehaving air valve. It was just a worn-out O-ring, she was happy to discover. Easy peasy. She could fix that in no time.
Signy had labored for three years on the template for this crop, and Cora had yet to stop feeling humbled by that. Argosan botany was not Signy’s field of expertise, but she’d been determined, and it had paid off. The plants in the little domes did not produce medicine. You couldn’t eat them, or press oil, or weave their fibers into cloth. They made one thing and one thing only, and it wasn’t intended for human use.
What should we call them? Signy had asked her, as they stood gazing at that first row of pale seedlings peeking their heads up in the test chamber.
Cora’s cheeks had been wet, and despite having her arms around Signy’s waist and her chin on her shoulder, she felt as though she wasn’t holding her close enough. She’d sniffled, kissed the side of Signy’s neck, and made a suggestion. Maybe it was a dumb name for a coiled mutant that smelled like window cleaner, but then again, why did love have to look like flowers?
Scientific name: Rorqualopsis cypsela, the template file read. Common name: Lady’s Favor.
Interstitial
The third thing in the garden was a twin pair of lattice towers, each about three times Cora’s height. Boring to look at. Nothing fancy. She and Signy and some of their neighbors had put them up together, after the bunker was carved out and furnished. The towers predated the seed vault, and the ammonia patch, too. Their drain on Cypsela’s energy budget was slight but constant, and a while back, Cora had voiced to Signy that if she felt the cost wasn’t worth it, they could talk about it.
