Plasma Frequency Magazine: Issue 14 by Jes Read Free Book Online Page B

occupied by pale-faced earthlings just like myself and my sister. We take our places. I always sit in the back.
    Class has always seemed useless to me. I might dedicate myself more if my path wasn't already marked out thanks to my father. It never matters if I pass math or history or astrophysics—all that matters is whose last name I have. With the future being so set, not in stone but confined in steel and chrome and cold bulkheads, I don't pay much attention to the instructors. But today my ears perk up as the topic turns to the first emigrants: those who became the Venusians, the Martians, and the Lunarians when Earth became uninhabitable. When Luna II comes up in the lecture, I pay attention to the images that the instructor projects on the holo-dais.
    It's Tinder's home, and what will become mine, too. She has told me about the rice fields that stretch for miles, the springs that lick down the craggy mountain-sides, the cool jungle mud that seeps between your toes. She has told me of colors that don't exist here—umbria and martruse and darinette—and how all the flowers that take those unknown hues cling to the facade of her house.
    But the planet surface that’s projected in front of me doesn't look like what Tinder has described. The holographic city looks clinical: the habi-modules are round and white, one identical to the next. The buildings are huddled together in a grainy desert. There are no places to grow flowers or plants, skin knees and elbows, get grass stains on your clothes.
    I raise my hand, frowning. “Is this right?” I ask. “I hear Luna is a beautiful place.”
    “Beauty's in the eye of the beholder, I guess, Mr Marbella,” the instructor says. “I'm sure it's beautiful to those who enjoy deserts.”
    I hold up Tinder's flower. “So how could this flower grow on Luna if it's mostly desert?”
    The instructor steps closer, his mouth a thin, impatient line. He looks at my flower and his mouth softens. He even licks his lips. “That's Lillium Lunarum, the Luna lily.”
    “So if it can grow on Luna, it can't be a desert planet.”
    “That flower doesn't exist on Luna II. It existed on Luna I, before the first colony planet was destroyed eighty years ago. Beautiful replica, Marbella. Did you design it?”
    I look at the flower, numb. “I didn't design it. The girl in the moon did.”
    The instructor stares at me. "Any artist from Luna would be long since dead, Marbella. But it's a beautiful echo of a lost colony. You keep that flower safe."
    He walks back to the front of the classroom. The ghost faces of the other students turn away, too, leaving me un-observed to clutch the flower in my hand.
    How arrogant of us to not be suspicious of the miracle of communication through space, but through time. Her ancient printer. Her weird dresses.
    For the remainder of class, I don't pay attention. I just sit at my desk, the plastic flower cutting into my palm, me clutching it harder, and it cutting me more in turn. Tears threaten, hot and angry, and I want to cry for myself and for my lost future—my girl, my new planet, my life in jungles, beneath rain. But this isn't just about me. So I blink my grief into submission and swallow the thick dread in my throat, and begin to wonder what I should tell a ghost at twenty-two hundred hours.
     
    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Sylvia Anna Hivén lives and writes in Atlanta, Georgia. Her fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, EscapePod and others.

The Petrologic Engine
    By Nyki Blatchley
    I pressed myself against the wattle-and-daub wall, hoping the shadow of the many-storeyed roundhouse would hide me from prying eyes. I didn't like being out in daylight, considering how many people might be searching for me, but it was reassuring to feel the pressure of my shardcaster against my chest inside the skin jacket.
    I never felt comfortable in a megavillage; give me the forest anytime, herding reindeer and hunting mammoth. A clean life, for all