Ghost Talk
Just before my sixteenth birthday, Mama and I had a terrible quarrel. She and I didn’t used to argue. We used to always laugh and have fun like a mother and daughter should, but in the last year everything I did seemed to try her patience and everything she did seemed to antagonize me.
Our base camp was on the habitable moon of a gas giant. The giant covered a quarter of the sky and vied for dominance with the solar system’s sun and the gas giant’s other twelve moons. Even though our base camp was in the relatively cool plains above the horse latitudes, the overall climate of the moon was hot and dry. That day the air felt good, like a sauna, so I strapped a lightweight medi-pak on my left upper arm and a communication bracelet on my right wrist. But instead of wearing a refrigerated vest, I wore a thin summer dress, sandals, and nothing else. I felt pretty, wonderful, and free. That’s when Mama barked, “Anna, put on some clothes before your father sees you.”
“What have I done now?” I said, rolling my eyes toward the gas giant overhead. “We’re the only three people on this entire moon. What does it matter if I dress comfortably? Who’s going to see?”
“Anna, it’s not that simple and you know it. I’ve told you before, you’re growing up. You shouldn’t dress that way around me or your father. You’re becoming a young woman⎯”
“⎯But you treat me like a child,” I snapped as I crossed my arms, which felt strange because my breasts had just developed in the last year and I wasn’t quite used to how they seemed to always be in the way.
“We treat you like a child because you’re still young,” Mama said. “You’re very smart and very pretty,” mother said as she pushed aside a long lock of my blonde hair that had fallen over my left eye. Of course that irritated me more, but she finished adjusting my hair before I had a chance to shrug her off. “Papa and I are very proud of you, Anna; you know that. But you should dress more modestly now that you’re growing…older.”
I knew Mama was just making excuses and that made me madder and madder. I had a lifetime of experience learning how to run all of Mama’s and Papa’s archaeological equipment and every one of their experiments. I was industrious and helpful. Hadn’t I done everything they ever asked of me? Hadn’t I earned the right to make at least a few decisions on my own?
Maybe Mama was after me because she was afraid I was smarter than her. Or worse yet, she was afraid that I was prettier than her. Then what would Papa say if he compared us…. All at once, my argument with Mama felt, well, …creepy. I didn’t want to continue that line of thought⎯it had skidded off track and become unsettling⎯but I was still mad at Mama.
“If you don’t want me around the camp dressed like this,” I told her, “may I go for a walk?” My blue eyes were so narrowed that my pale eyelashes half blinded me. “I’ve done all my chores except recalibrate the neutrino tomography unit, and I can do that⎯”
“No, that’s fine, go for your walk,” Mama said. “I think maybe we both need time to ourselves.” Mama started fingering the gold necklace chain that Papa gave her years ago, which was something she did to soothe her feelings when she was too mad for words. “I’ll recalibrate the tomography unit myself before your Papa and I prepare dinner tonight,” she said. “Just be back before dark. The nocturnal fauna on this moon can be nasty.”
“’Kay,” I grumbled in defeat. I slinked back to my cabin aboard our starship, rifled through my clothes, and angrily put on underwear, trousers, a sleeveless t-shirt, and hiking boots; but then in a blow for independence, I pulled my sundress over the entire outfit. With that, I picked up my hiking pack, headed out the front hatch, and stormed down a trail that the robots had cleared through the tall, yellow, prairie grass on the thirteenth moon of an extraordinary gas giant.
I tromped down the trail with such noise and fury no ferocious diurnal fauna would dare get near me. I don’t know how far I walked, but I probably would have tramped around the moon a dozen times over if the awful heat of day hadn’t forced me to find shade. The thought crossed my mind that a refrigerated vest would be a nice thing to have about now⎯if I hadn’t been too angry to think to pack one⎯but that insight just made me more irritated.
The yellow plain was sparsely dotted with dark arbors and after a while I found a copse of trees that cast inviting shadows. The tree branches were a dense tangle of huge, dark limbs that were as thick as elephant legs. And the branches swooped so close to the ground that I could hop up onto one the way that I could hop onto the saddle of a thoroughbred on a merry-go-round. I made myself comfortable, pulled out a protein bar and a bolus of water from my hiking pack and brooded.
I don’t know why I was arguing so much with my parents, and especially Mama. Since about my last birthday, life had become so confusing all of a sudden. Sometimes I felt like a giddy child and sometimes I felt like a wise old woman. I could work with my parents on their experiments and do the science as well as any adult. I knew I was still a kid, and yet it infuriated me that I was treated like one.
It didn’t help my mood that I’d started having headaches and seeing nightmarish visions of long-dead people at every odd and awkward moment. For the first time in years my visions were getting scary.
The Exploration Guild sent my medical records to the Parapsychology Institute, and the psychics said they could teach me how to manage my visions if I enrolled in their Academy. My parents were convinced that I should go. I didn’t want to leave home to get help, and yet some days it was almost painful trying to tell the difference between the past and the here and now. I was so confused.
“Anna, come here!” shouted a distant voice. I looked up from contemplating my lap and saw Mama blazing a path toward me through the tall grass.
I didn’t realize how long I had been away from the base camp. The wilderness around the copse had already started to turn crimson and the shadows outlining the gently rolling terrain had turned lavender.
It’s pointless to try to dead-reckon daybreak and nightfall when the celestial mechanics of a sun, thirteen moons, and a gas giant are at play. When I stormed away from the base camp I should have set an alarm on my chronometer and I shouldn’t have turned off my communication link. But I was angry and didn’t want Mama to be able to contact me for a while. When I finally calmed down, I forgot to follow the basic safety rules and turn the right devices back on.
Every explorer has a subcutaneous tracking chip beneath their skin, a beacon that they can’t lose. Mama must have gotten worried and followed my beacon. Now she’s marching across the prairie heading straight toward me, and she doesn’t look happy.
“Anna, come here this instant!” shouted Mama from across the grassland. She will get here soon enough⎯there’re only tens of meters between us now⎯but she just can’t wait until she gets here before she starts scolding me.
If I had just paid more attention to the time I could have avoided this confrontation. Now Mama can use my being late as another piece of evidence that I’m irresponsible, or worse yet, an irresponsible child. Well, I won’t give her the satisfaction. I don’t have to go back to camp now just because she says so.
I hopped off the branch, turned my back, and strode into the deep darkness beneath the tree canopy. I could hear the crunch of Mama’s boots right behind me on the stunted grass beneath the tree. The first words out of her mouth will probably be, ‘Anna, how could you be such a thoughtless, petulant, little girl?’ Really, Mama? I’ll say right back. Well I’m old enough to⎯
“Anna,” Mama shrieked at a pitch reserved for only the worst terror, “get down!” In response to the tone in Mama’s voice, I spun around just as she slammed into me and smashed me to the ground. I landed on my back with a thump, staring up at the tree canopy, with Mama sprawled out on top of me. As I looked up, I saw a reedy, camouflage green-and-black, “tree viper” dangling by its tail from the branches above me like a party streamer.
A tree viper isn’t technically a snake like a terrestrial serpent, but it’s close enough. When I looked up into the tree, I could see scores of shadows beginning to wriggle and writhe. The tree was full of vipers, and being nocturnal, they were all starting to stir. Mama must have seen the first one slithering down toward me and tried to warn me to move. But I had recoiled from her and retreated farther into the dark under the tree canopy. Having no recourse, she dove to push me out of the way.
“Mama, thank you. You saved me.” I hugged Mama tight, but she hugged me back weakly. “Mama?”
Mama didn’t say anything; she just rolled off me and lay there with a stricken look in her eyes. Then I saw the tree viper slither out from under her back and the bright drops of blood from the wound in her shoulder. I kicked the viper away as hard as I could with the toe of my boot, not even thinking that that was probably the best thing I could do to avoid getting bitten myself.
A part of me was shocked and unable to think, while another part of me, the part that has had a lifetime of training, turned on my communication link to call Papa and help him locate us. I pinched the wound on Mama’s shoulder to try to squeeze out the venom, then I spoke through my communication link to her medi-pak and told it to administer an antidote to the venom.
I dragged Mama from under the tree and out into the open tall grass. All the while, her medi-pak kept emitting a two-toned error signal: It knew there was a poison in Mama’s bloodstream, but it was alien poison, and the medi-pak didn’t know how to cure her.
I held Mama in my arms as my tears fell clumsily on her chest. Her eyelids fluttered and she smiled as she said, “Anna, are you all right?” I could barely breathe as I struggled to answer her question. Didn’t she know she was supposed to worry only about herself? But I didn’t get a chance to answer because Papa had just flown overhead in his jeep and landed by Mama’s side.
Papa held Mama in his arms and they said something to each other that I couldn’t quite make out. Then Mama let out a long sigh that ended abruptly, and Papa let out a long wail that seemed to last forever.