She heard the whoop-whoop of the ready siren and ran all the way back to the pilots’ locker room. Her father was out on the pad, already dressed in his flight suit, inspecting the waiting line of flitters. She waved to him and dashed inside. The place was crowded because Glen Tuath Farm was prospering and this season Ian Macdonald had hired four extra free-lance harvesters in addition to the three regulars. Her brother Ken, looking sad and dreamy as usual, was suiting up. So was the oldest nonborn, Gavin Boyd, who called out in a jeering voice:
“It’s about time you showed up, Dodo! We were all set to take off without you. Since you were so late, Dad says I’m going to fly The Big Cheese after all.”
“Ian said nothing of the sort,” said Sorcha MacAlpin, one of the resident workers. She was a massive, kindly woman who strained the seams of her forest-green environmental outfit to the maximum. “You stop teasing your little sister.”
“Aww. Would it make Daddy’s Little Princess cry?”
“No,” Dee said quietly, and that made Gavin’s face turn red with anger. Ever since she had finished her flying lessons and Ian Macdonald announced that she would pilot the yellow flitter this year instead of Gavin, the big fosterling had been unbearably rude, putting Dee down every chance he got. He opened his mouth to make another cruel remark, but Dee’s big brother Ken briefly touched Gavin’s shoulder.
“Let her alone. You know the reason why Dad gave The Cheese to her. She’s a better pilot than either of us, and she’ll bring in more weed.”
Gavin looked suddenly startled, as though Ken’s light tap had hurt him. But he recovered in an instant and offered Dee a mocking salute. “Just try not to screw up too much on your first day out, Baby Dodo.” He swaggered out, helmet tucked under his arm.
“Your brother doesn’t mean anything,” Sorcha said. “He’s a wee bit jealous, is all.”
Dee tried not to show her anger. In spite of the Caledonian foster-age custom, she could never think of sullen Gavin Boyd as a real brother. He was fifteen, two years older than Ken, and he had been hostile to her from the beginning. The two younger nonborns, Hugh Murdoch and Ellen Gunn, were more friendly, but they were Thrawn Janet’s favorites rather than rivals for lan’s affection as Gavin and Dee were.
All five of the children worked hard at domestic and landside agricultural duties when they weren’t attending the farm’s tiny school, where lessons were piped in via satellite from the Education Center at New Glasgow. There wasn’t much time left to play, and the fosterlings usually made it plain that they preferred their own company to that of Dee and Ken.
She’d tried to be understanding. It was hard being a nonborn—gestated in a laboratory from the ovum and sperm of anonymous donors, knowing that the only reason you’d been made was to help build the planet’s population quickly. Ken had explained it all to Dee when she was eight and he felt she was old enough to understand: The two of them had been made during an act of sexual love between Dad and Mum, but the poor nonborns had only been cooked. Grownups tried to pretend that it didn’t make any difference, but kids knew better.
“Let me help you with your lovely new flight suit,” Sorcha MacAlpin offered. “It’ll be harder to get into than that old baggy thing you used during practice. You know how the plumbing works, don’t you? You’ll be staying up all day long now, not just an hour or so at a time.”
Dee blushed. “I understand.” She had thrown off her jacket and Wellingtons and sat on a bench in long underwear just like the other pilots wore, putting on extra socks to pad out the boots of her flying kit, which were not as stretchy as the rest of the outfit. Mercifully, Ken and the men finished and left the room before Dee had to wriggle into the unfamiliar skintight silvery garment and adjust it with Sorcha’s help. Ian Macdonald had bought his daughter a flight suit of the highest quality, the same type as his own. Gavin and Ken, being so much taller, had been economically furnished with adult castoffs. The nonborn boy had made no bones about his envy.
Dee looked herself over in the cracked and dusty old mirror above the washbasin and felt a thrill of satisfaction. Except for her size, she looked just like an adult, ready to do an adult’s job. Children were ordinarily permitted to work only three hours a day outside the schoolroom, but during the harvest season an exception was made for those who lived on farms and enjoyed good health. Ken, who was still far from strong and prey to every mutant strain of cold and flu germ that came along, would have to return to home base around noon, when his aerial storage-craft was full. But Dee, who was as sturdy as a Sheltie, would labor a full nine hours just like Gavin and the grownups.
“There now, nic-cridhe! You look just fine. Very professional.”
Sorcha clipped Dee’s gloves to her belt and handed her the silver hard hat and mask. Following the female pilot outside, Dee felt a twinge of anxiety. Briefly, she turned inward to her mental guardian.
Please, angel! she begged. Let me do everything right today. Don’t let me be nervous or do anything silly or stupid. I want Daddy to be proud of me.
The angel, as usual, did not reply. He had been silent for over a year now, and it probably had something to do with that awful Jack.
Jack was some kind of horribly powerful operant who had tried many times to farspeak Dee all the way from Earth. He claimed he was just a boy, but she doubted it. No child could farspeak such a long way. Dee had decided that Jack must be a person in league with Gran Masha and the latency therapists, trying to trick her into demonstrating her operancy. When she did, they would force her to go back to Earth. But Dee had been too clever for Jack. She never answered him, never gave a single sign that she even heard him—not even when the angel appeared in her mind and said it would be all right.
Jack finally stopped calling her, and the angel went into a sulk and wouldn’t talk to her, either. Dee didn’t want to believe that the angel was part of the plot; but he had told her, back in the beginning, that she would have to become operant someday …
She wouldn’t! She was going to be as normal as she could, and keep on hiding the overt powers that had already escaped from their boxes. She used her healing only when it was absolutely necessary (to help Daddy and Ken, and when nice old Domhnall Menzies burned himself so badly in the processing factory during the last earthquake), and she farspoke her brother only when she had some really important secret to tell him.
Once, Dee had believed that farspoken thoughts were private. She knew now, from studying about telepathy after Jack began bothering her, that it took special skill to shield thought-messages from clever operant eavesdroppers.
Dee didn’t know whether she had that skill or not, so she was careful not to take chances. No one was going to trick her into betraying herself, as she once had done with the man who called himself Ewen Cameron.
Never again.
The others were already climbing into their flitters, and Dee hurried down the tarmac to her own ship, the last in line. There were eleven brightly colored aerostats: eight harvesters manned by the adults, two larger bin-flitters piloted by Ken and Gavin, and the beat-up yellow machine combining both functions that Dee was going to fly. It was the oldest aerostat on the farm, the first one Ian Macdonald had ever owned and the one he always used for flight training. Because of its color and the wedge shape of its semirigid superstructure, it was nicknamed The Big Cheese.
All summer long Ian Macdonald and Sorcha MacAlpin had patiently taught Dee how to fly the venerable aircraft. Her lessons had taken place at low altitudes for the most part, and she had practiced catching buoyant drifts of degradable confetti rather than actual airplants, which were protected by law during the off-season. It was going to be much more tricky pursuing weeds that actively tried to get away! She would also have to learn how to cope with the pesky fairy-critters and watch out for sky-wolves and the dangerous torachan. Her father had promised to stay close by until she felt confident doing the work, and he alone would be dumping his accumulating harvest into her storage cells.
Sorcha
gave a farewell wave as Dee ascended the boarding ladder of The Big Cheese. The compressor that operated the propulsion system and slurper of the aircraft was already humming, having been switched on earlier by the ground crew during the servicing period. Dee settled into the cockpit, closed the canopy, and looked up at the bulgy, much-patched yellow envelope, held within a rigid superstructure frame that was attached to the fuselage by a stout pylon. She fastened her safety harness. A seat cushion helped her see outside and pedal extensions enabled her to operate the floor controls. She put on the visored hard hat with its self-contained oxygen concentrator and fastened the mask. The breathing equipment was necessary because the luibheannach an adhair—the “weeds of the air”—lived mostly at altitudes between six and nine kilometers where the atmosphere was thin. The plants were also poisonous if one inhaled their concentrated essence.
But when the wee things were processed and their essence greatly diluted, they were the safest and most effective human aphrodisiac known.
Dee had learned all about human sexuality in satellite school; but it still mystified her that mature adults—apparently even including operants—were willing to pay extraordinarily high prices for weird chemicals like that.
“Glen Tuath Leader requests harvest team systems check and verbal affirm,” said Ian Macdonald over the RF com.
Dee went through The Cheese’s flight checklist swiftly, then verified her life support. One by one the pilots called out their affirmation and number. Last of all, Dee said in a loud little voice: “GT-11 checked and ready.”
“GT Leader says lift-off in sequence via NAVCON. Today all work areas are preassigned and any deviation or hot pursuit of the weeds must repeat must be cleared with Leader. Torachan have been reported in the vicinity of Ben Fizgig, so keep alert.” After everybody affirmed, Ian said, “Team enter NAVCON.”
Dee put on her gloves and then hit the console pad that would transfer control of her machine to the farm’s navigation system. Now she could sit back and relax while The Big Cheese mounted into the sky and flew automatically to the airspace it had been assigned to harvest.
As their ground-locks deactivated one by one, the flitters rose, buoyed by the hydrogen in their envelopes. A series of caged air jets with internal rudders, mounted on both the superstructure and the fuselage of each aerostat, controlled ascent, descent, and maneuvering. All working parts of the fusion-powered fans and compressors, as well as the pump that sucked the crop into expandable storage-cells in the skin of the envelope, were carefully shielded so that the highly flammable gases generated by the fragile, drifting organisms would not be accidentally set on fire—a disaster that might also ignite the hydrogen in the flitter trying to harvest them. This kind of accident was fortunately very rare. Aerostat envelopes were fireproof and had an internal quenching system. If the skin ruptured by accident or as a result of torachan attacks, the pilot could explode bolts in the pylon, separating the fuselage from the gas-bag. A huge parafoil would then pop out and lower the fuselage safely to the ground. Dee had practiced this maneuver on virtual video, feeling reassured by the knowledge that Glen Tuath Farm had a perfect aerial safety record. Its own machines were meticulously maintained, even those that were old, and Ian Macdonald only hired free-lance flitter operators whose standards were as high as his own.
Shortly after arriving at the farm, Dee had asked her father why airplants could not be harvested by ordinary flying eggs. At the time Ian was in no mood to be bothered, so instead of explaining, he told Dee to find out for herself. To Ian’s surprise, the little girl found the answer by evening on the same day.
“Eggs have rho-fields all over their outsides,” Dee told her father at the supper table. “That’s how they counter gravity. A rho-field looks like a net of purple fire you can barely see. It can burn organic matter like airplants to a crisp if they touch it.”
“And you, too, Dodo!” Gavin Boyd had said, with a wicked smirk.
But Ian Macdonald had silenced the nonborn boy with a stern gesture and asked Dee if she knew why sigma-shielded rhocraft could not be used for harvesting.
“Because the rho-field has to cover the whole egg, or it won’t fly,” she said triumphantly, “and the sigma-field has to cover all the rho-field to make the egg safe to touch. But then the person inside the egg can’t harvest airplants because you can’t usually make holes in a full sigma.”
“Very good, Dorrie,” Ian had said, without smiling. But Dee knew he was pleased with her.
“Everybody knows that,” Gavin muttered. Ken, sitting next to him, gave him a sharp elbow in the ribs.
“Not every five-year-old,” Ian said. He asked his daughter: “Did you call a satellite teacher for the answer?”
Dee shook her head. “I looked up the way inertialess aircraft work in the schoolhouse database. Then I figured it out.”
“Well, don’t that beat all!” said Thrawn Janet archly. “Looks like our little Doro’s real cackleberryhead. I s’pose you know all about how flitters work, too.”
Dee flinched at the animosity radiating from the minds of the woman and the oldest nonborn. But instead of holding her tongue, she took a deep breath and said to her father, “I’m going to study about flitters. I’d like to learn to fly more than anything else in the whole world. Will you teach me, Daddy?”
“Yes,” Ian Macdonald said curtly. “And the rest of you children, too. Just as soon as you’re old enough.”
“But I’m going to be your harvest foreman when I grow up,” Gavin protested. “You promised, Dad!”
Ian surveyed the table with a thunderous scowl. “That was before Dorrie and Ken came to Glen Tuath. Whoever of you becomes the best pilot will be foreman—eventually. But that’s years away. Now eat your supper. I don’t want to hear another bloody word!”
Ian Macdonald kept his promise. First Gavin learned to fly and then Ken—though he didn’t enjoy it. The other two children, Hugh and Ellen, disliked flying even more than Ken and quickly washed out. But Dee was a natural and had proved much more adept than either of the older boys. That was why she flew the dual-purpose Cheese this year while Gavin, in spite of bitter protests, was demoted to driving an unexciting aerial cargo-bin.
Dee fingered the controls gently while the autopilot did the actual flying en route to the harvest site. Her aerostat, the last in the procession, lofted higher and higher as the team headed northward, finally leveling off at an altitude 500 meters below the level of the lowest drift of airplants. The view through her polarized helmet visor was magnificent. On her left, she could even see the clearing in the tartan-forested mountains where the diamond mine was. She had only visited it once, and had been very disappointed to discover that the freshly mined stones looked dull and glassy, not even as bright as the rhinestones on her pin.
Flying as fast as the lumbering bins could go, the harvest team left the fjord, passed above the sharp-nosed cape called Rudha Glas, and moved out over the wave-pounded islets and reefs of the Goblin Archipelago. (Their official name was Eileanan Bòcan, which no one ever bothered to use. Dee had quickly found out that even though Gaelic was a required subject in school, Caledonians spoke Standard English most of the time, and their pronunciation of the ancient tongue was often strange and their usage ungrammatical. No one minded except a few ultraethnic fanatics.)
The farm’s computerized tracking system had calculated that today the volume of airplants would be most dense in the area just north of the Goblins, where a thin stratum of smoglike volcanic ash from Ben Fizgig had spread out, providing a perfect concentration of nutrients that the weeds craved. One by one, the individual flitters were guided to their hunting grounds. Dee watched their images on her console monitor as they scattered over an area of 800 square kilometers. Finally, her own machine reached its assigned block of airspace and a mechanical voice said: “Glen Tuath NAVCON to GT-11. You have entered Block 4 of preassigned harvest area. Resume manual control of aircraft within two minutes or your aircraft will be inserted into a
holding pattern.”
“GT-11 on manual,” she said, and felt a little shiver of joy as the control stick came alive. Block 4, which she would share with her father, was at the northeasternmost corner of the rectangular search area.
“You keep to the bottom of the box, Dorrie,” Ian said inside her helmet. “Go easy at first. There’s a nice cloud seven-pip-niner kloms high that should be showing bright and clear on your target display. See it?”
“Affirm, Leader.”
“Go for it, lass. Sonas is àdh ort!”
“Good luck to you, too, Daddy,” she said, and soared off in pursuit of the precious weeds.
By lunchtime, Ian Macdonald pronounced his daughter to be “more or less competent,” but she knew he was really saying that she was very good indeed.
“I’m going to Block 3 now to help Aonghas,” he said. “You eat your lunch and then carry on here. Remember to ascend to an altitude safely above the weeds before hovering, and be alert for wandering torachan. And don’t forget to put your oxygen mask back on between bites of food. We don’t want you blacking out.”
“Affirm, Leader.”
Her father’s new black aerostat moved off to the west and was soon lost to sight among the small cumulus clouds that had begun to form. Dee neutralized the thrusters of her flitter and let it seek its altitude of equilibrium, rising among the swirls and drifts of aerial organisms, gently sucking them in as it ascended.
Individual plant species of Caledonian balloon-flora ranged in size from minute specks like red pepper to rarer things as big as apples that resembled masses of greenish soap bubbles. The commonest kinds of airplants had balloons the size of cherries or large peas, mottled bubblegum-pink and iridescent green. Photo-synthetic organs provided most of the energy for their life-processes, and they also took up water vapor and gained essential minerals from airborne dust and debris. All airplants stayed aloft by means of thin-walled pneumatophores, float-chambers containing lighter-than-air gases. The “body” of the plant might hang from its balloon, or be embedded within the float, or spread over the pneumatophore’s exterior like a weird growth on the surface of an odd-shaped little plass bag.