The Blue Moon - Part 1 - Into the Forest (8 page)

Excitement and fear filled Emmy’s thoughts. She would finally have a chance to leave St. John’s and search for her mother, but it was not freedom so much as fear of a Martian invasion that was getting her out the door. The only good news was her certainty that her mother deliberately left the guidebook behind. It wasn’t just a birthday present. From the moment she found it, Emmy constantly thought of traveling. With her guidebook and the blue light in her bag, she was ready to get on with her journey.

She followed Shankar out of the cottage and they were met with a gust of cold wind in their faces. Shankar looked at Emmy and smiled. They put their heads down and set off.

The Rock Sun extinguished as they passed the shadowy crop fields. Mirrors wrapped around the white stalks of wheat reflected the last red glows of light.

The Shamrock Forest began at the end of the crop field. Emmy and Shankar paused before passing the threshold to the forest. Shankar looked at Emmy, his lips still stretched into a smile. Emmy looked back across the fields, dark since they’d lost their red reflected light. She looked back at her home in the distance, and noticed she’d left her reading light on. The frustration she’d experienced since her mother had disappeared wiped out any longing for the comfort of her cottage and reading chair.

She was no longer sitting still, and she was glad of it. “Let’s keep moving,” Emmy said.

They entered the Shamrock Forest, which consisted of a single variety of tree that grew with a thick trunk high into the air. The branches were short and bunched at the top of the tall trees. The trees were also spread out, so that the scale of the forest made it feel like the cathedral ceilings of an old growth pine forest on Earth.

They travelled for a few hours, making good progress as the leaves managed to amplify the starlight in the dark night’s sky, providing a shimmering, sparkling light to guide their footsteps. They finally took a rest when they came to a small creek that flowed from the mountain. Emmy and Shankar finished one canteen each of water, then filled them up again in the river. The small flow of water was almost frozen in the cold chill of night, and it was crystal clear.

Emmy sat by the river and scanned the forest from its canopy to its floor. All around her, it sparkled. Emmy had been into the Shamrock Forest a number of times in her life, though it was mostly prohibited to enter. It was a preserved wilderness on St. John’s, and the St. John’s Council preferred to ban visitors except on a few holidays. You could sneak into them, though, as many people did. Emmy had done so a few times in her life, most recently on a camping trip. She had an idea of the forest as an exciting place; a place where life on cold, autumnal St. John’s seemed as beautiful as any other place in the Solar System.

At least her
Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System
got that right. The book didn’t say many good things about St. John’s, but it did indicate that despite all of the bad food, cold weather, dark days and sullen people, it was worth traveling to if only to see the Shamrock Forest.

She took her book out and opened it to that section. There was an animated video which must have been taken when the Rock Sun was burning bright. The forest sparkled red and orange in the video, far different than its current gloomy dark green. Emmy read the highlighted text.

The Shamrock Forest earned its name from the only tree that grows on the space-island. The St. John’s Tree was engineered to be the other half of the larger cycle of the breathing system on St. John’s; the outer and other part to human being’s lung and respiratory function — always the most complex, but necessary, step in terraformation.

On St. John’s, fulfilling this function proved difficult for genetic engineers. Scientists struggled to create a tree that would grow at all in the low-light of St. John’s, let alone the many thousands of different kinds of trees found in the forests on Mars, Earth or the other colonies in the Asteroid Belt basked by larger and brighter Rock Suns.

When engineers finally managed to create a tree that could fulfill its functions and grow unaided on St. John’s, it became the only tree ever successfully engineered. So, St. John’s forests are all made up of this one species of tree.

The tree itself is unremarkable. It grows high with a thick, white trunk. Its leaves are bunched at the top of the tree on short branches. The leaves differ on either side and the man-made breezes of St. John’s help sway them about.

In this action the trees of St. John’s are remarkable; indeed, the leaves make the Shamrock Forest one of the Solar System’s most beautiful places. The leaves are on one side a light, pale green. The other side is a silvery reflective color, which helps amplify light for the photosynthetic pale green sides. The canopy overhead sparkles and reflects the pale green of the leaves and whatever colors the St. John’s sky happens to be onto the forest floor and all around the lucky visitor. A must see place in the Solar System!

The forest continued to twinkle pale green all around Emmy and Shankar. Emmy closed her guidebook and returned it to her bag.

Shankar ended his daydream, walked over to Emmy and said, “We should get moving again.”

Emmy agreed and they were off in no particular direction, guided only by a sense that they needed to be away from the edge of the forest. It was easy to stay quiet when walking through those woods. The leaves from the St. John’s Tree rarely fell, and when they did, the silver and pale-green sides disintegrated rapidly. All that was left was a scattering of stems and central veins.

These thin white needles were soft and muffled footsteps instead of being brittle and snapping under the weight of a walking person. They moved along these quiet needles for hours into the evening, until they tired.

“I don’t think we’ll be too easy to find at this point,” Emmy said, exhausted.

“We shouldn’t be too quick to assume that. We have no idea what’s looking for us. We can’t afford to assume it’s incapable of finding us quickly and easily. But, we do need rest. It’s late. You sleep, I’ll take first watch.”

At that late hour, Emmy climbed under her blanket and fell into a restless sleep. The sound of leaves blowing in the gentle wind filled her dreams with sound.

It was still dark when Emmy awoke. The leaves were no longer swaying. There was no breeze at all and the dead silence was the first thing Emmy noticed. She looked over to Shankar, his eyes opened wide and fixed into the depths of the cavernous forest.

When he noticed Emmy awake, he put one finger over his closed lips and whispered, “Shhhhhhhh.”

Emmy nodded, her blood pumping in her ears and the drowsiness draining from her body.

Shankar whispered again, “It’s 9am.”

“9am? It’s so late. Why hasn’t the Rock Sun been lit?”

“I believe the Martians took control of St. John’s last night. This has delayed the work necessary to load the Rock Sun with nuclear explosives.”

“How could you know that?”

“Has the Rock Sun ever failed to ignite and start the day? I know there have been surprisingly short days, but never a day that has started so late, I’m certain.”

“You’re right. It definitely is strange. Also, the wind has been turned off.”

“Ah, yes, of course. St. John’s wind is generated by turbines. I believe it was at about 7am when the wind died out.”

“Then, if you’re right, it’s more than the supply lines filling the Rock Sun with nuclear explosives. The Martians might already be in control of the surface. The wind controls are in the Weather Department in Eastern Edge City. But why turn off the wind?”

“Because the wind in the leaves was providing us with audio cover here in the forest,” Shankar whispered. “The Martians know we’re in here, and they’re looking for us with long ears.”

Emmy and Shankar sat and ate breakfast without uttering a word. The chilling notion that the Martians might know they were in the Shamrock Forest was enough to keep them silent. Emmy opened two cans of St. John’s
White and Grey Soup,
which they ate cold. She also served some cold silver leaf tea that she’d brought. They huddled under blankets and ate their cold breakfast feeling the particular sense of gloom that comes when the cold and the dark combine.

They sat silently until Emmy’s bag, which had been lying sideways, shifted when Emmy moved in her seat. The top of the bag popped open and the glow from the blue light spilled out, brightening the guidebook’s cover as it slid from the bag and over to Shankar. The blue light lit the guidebook’s cover — a picture of the waterslide down Niagara Falls.

“I haven’t seen this book in ages,” Shankar said, still whispering while looking at Emmy’s copy of the
Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System
.

“I love it, I read it every night.”

Shankar could tell the book was old. It was worn and its plastic pages no longer felt crisp. He opened the book and looked for its publication date; it was printed 60 years earlier. Shankar remembered that Emmy had no idea how much the Solar System had changed since the book was published. He was sorry the updates he could provide were so disappointing.

“You know that this book is out of date now, don’t you?” Shankar said.

“So what if it’s old? It’s fun.”

“Yes, but Emmy, the Solar System has changed a lot since this book was printed. People don’t travel too much anymore, nor do they have a use for books like this.”
 

“Why don’t people travel anymore?” Emmy asked.

“Mars. Not just Mars I suppose, Earth has its own problems. But Mars has controlled the travel routes for some time now. They tax them, control the flow of people and goods and the movement of ships. There’s also the communications networks, which used to connect every inhabited place in the Solar System. Now, it is broken in pieces, with Earth, Mars and the Asteroid Belt all using separate networks. No one really wants to travel or communicate much anymore. People aren’t interested in the whole Solar System. Not in the way this book suggests, not in the way people once used this book.”

“Why would Mars do all of this?”

“Mars has flourished since the miracle of life stopped. They’ve taken control of everything that matters. Law making, manufacturing, trade-routes… They set the agenda as they please, and that means everything is skewed in their favor. In theory, Martians can trade wherever they like, but they are not a people that like traveling.”

“What makes them like that?”

“Their leader, their creator, their God.”

“Their God? How did he get so powerful?”

“He goes by the name of his own planet, Mars. He’s a few hundred years old. He’s one of the last naturally created people alive. He became rich after he created some weather controlling technology on Earth. This weather controlling technology was used to fight tornadoes and hurricanes and other costly weather events. He made a lot of money. He used that money to invent all of the terraformation technologies first used on Mars. He already created much of the life on the planet when the miracle of life stopped. The people of his planet find a great deal of meaning through a reverence of him and his brilliance. For years, this reverence was sustained through a huge cult of personality that was built around him.

“But recently, this has changed. The way Martians worship their creator is no longer pushed by a communications strategy or from school lessons. The worship is fanatical. They pray to him and worship him as God. The one and only God. The reverence has spread, and there are people on Earth and in the Asteroid Belt who worship him as God.”
 

“Why can’t Earth stop him?”

“For years, people on Earth have worked to balance everyone’s interests. All manner of special interest group has sprung up as a result. Twisted politics arose from this; politics of corruption, filled with discordant groups, all of them caught up in the spinning vortex of fundraising, and campaigning that left little time for ideas and thoughts. Earth is in no position to deal with the threat of a Mars united behind their own God.”

Emmy considered what Shankar told her. She looked down into the dark valley below. The valley was full of shadows, but dotted with starlight reflecting off the pale green leaves of the Shamrock Forest canopy. The forest floor looked as if covered in a sparkling light green ash.

As Emmy continued to process all Shankar had said, they both heard a howl off in the distance.

“What was that?” Shankar said.

“There is no creature on St. John’s that makes a sound like that,” Emmy said.
 

Another howl, creeping nearer.

“It’s coming this way,” Shankar said. “We need to move.”

Emmy stuffed her guidebook into her bag while Shankar packed up their blankets. They started running. Up a hill and through the dense, dark forest, they heard whatever it was approaching. The reflections the leaves formed sparkled on the forest floor, and this was the light Emmy had to guide her feet to safe landings with each stretching, running step.

Emmy could hear whatever it was that was approaching and risked looking back. She saw it; a large hairy beast, pounding the forest floor as its powerful legs propelled it forward, kicking up debris. It was coming for her, Emmy was sure.

Emmy ran faster on the poorly lit, uneven ground.

Then disaster; she tripped, hit the ground hard and rolled a few feet. The beast skidded to a stop above her. Emmy turned to look at it — she was sure it was smiling and that horrified her all the more. The beast stood on its hind legs, sharp eyes never leaving Emmy’s stare. It began to twitch and froth at the mouth.

Shankar saw what had happened to Emmy. He moved back towards her to help and his path was cut-off by another beast. A third came out of the woods and moved towards Shankar. The beasts resembled a pack of werewolves. They were baring their teeth, growling and barking.

Emmy lay on the ground, terrified, and paralyzed by the sight of all the sharp-toothed gnarling.

Shankar pulled a weapon from inside his coat and fired, aiming at the wolf moving towards Emmy. The third wolf jumped and took Shankar’s blast. It stung the beast, but he was right back on two feet moving to attack Shankar head on.