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Milo burst through the door, startling his father and older brother. “I saw her!” he said, gasping for air. “I saw Talie Tappler!”
“Who?” his father said, reaching for the next soil sample. The lab overflowed with samples, lined up in trays, stacked in tottering columns.
“Talie Tappler, from the Tomorrow News Network. She’s here. She’s doing a story about us.” Milo staggered to the worktable and leaned on the top railing.
A scanner beeped, adding one more data point to the survey charts. The information was forwarded to the mines out in the Redlands. Milo’s older brother, Max, prepared the next sample. The process began again.
“Why would anyone do a story about us?” Max asked, scratching under his left armpit while the scanner did its job.
“This is a very important colony,” their father said. “We supply 28% of the Earth Empire’s lithium.”
“Dad, that’s not the point.” Milo pulled at his dark, messy hair. “She’s from the Tomorrow News Network,” he said with overabundant emphasis. “That means she’s a time traveler.”
The scanner beeped, forwarding new information to the Redlands. The process began again.
Milo looked outside at the orange and purple landscape. The balloon trees and bubble moss were swelling in the afternoon heat, their helium sacs stretched so thin they were almost transparent. Beyond them lay the Redlands, rich in lithium, poisonous to all forms of life. From space, the Redlands looked like a pattern of circles within circles. The technical term was poly-circular desert, a strangely common feature on many worlds.
Despite his teenage angst, despite his overwhelming need to break free of family ties, despite his primal urge to assert his independence, this colony was home. Milo couldn’t bear for anything happen to it.
“Well, what’s this Tappler woman saying?” his father asked while preparing the next sample.
“She was interviewing people in alpha district,” Milo said, trying not to sound sulky. “Asking them how they liked it here. She said something about the mines and all the equipment, how everything is brand new, how we have such a promising future.”
Max chuckled. “Sounds serious.”
The scanner beeped. The information was forwarded.
“And she said our economy has a lot of potential.”
“You don’t have to be a time traveler to know that,” Milo’s dad said. “The price of lithium keeps going up. The mining company is making a fortune, which means higher percentages for us.”
“And she said,” Milo began, leaning over the table, ready to give the most damning evidence yet, “and she used these exact words: ‘This is a happy, safe colony.’”
The scanner beeped.
“Sounds like a positive story,” Max said, taking the next sample. “You don’t get that in the news very often.”
“But it doesn’t make sense!” Milo flopped into a chair, his arms and legs sticking out at awkward angles. “She could pick any day in history. Why today?”
“Milo,” his dad said, “shouldn’t you be in the bio-dome?”
“I thought this was more important.”
Milo’s dad set the next sample aside. The scanner could wait.
“Milo, this colony is in an isolated sector. We’re far from the Border Wars; we’re far from the Planet Eaters; there’s no native life here except helium sacs. The only thing that can go wrong is when adolescent boys don’t do their shifts in the bio-dome.”
“But Dad…”
“Do you want to lose more rations?”
Milo had never beaten his father at anything. Not darts, not checkers, and certainly not arguments. He knew he’d never win this one, although he made sure to kick something really hard before he left.
The problem was Milo’s dad never watched the news. He’d never seen Talie Tappler and didn’t know the kinds of stories she covered: black hole collisions, telepathic terrorism, intergalactic genocide–always with a big smile on her face. Now she was wandering around Litho Colony with a cyborg cameraman in tow.
* * *
All the colonists wore diamond shaped patches on their uniforms. They were called skill-marks. There were skill-marks for chemistry, mineralogy, medicine… nearly everything. The designs became more elaborate with rank. Master gardeners, the ones who ran the bio-dome, wore a bright, red flower. Mid-level gardeners had a tree, and beginners got a little, green sprout.
Milo had a sprout. Most kids his age had at least earned grade-one chemistry and proudly wore their hydrogen atom patches in addition to a sprout or water drop or single-celled organism. Milo only had a sprout. His friends called him Sproutling.
Milo ran to the bio-dome. Only Lianna would understand what was going on. She watched the news. She knew who Talie Tappler was. She’d think of some way to save the colony.
Sylvia, the head gardener, scolded Milo for being late. She was all sweaty with her braid of white hair coming undone, but she looked invigorated by a long day’s work.
Milo mumbled an apology, adding, “I was worried about the reporter from the Tomorrow News Network.”
“Ms. Tappler?” Sylvia said. “Oh, she seems so nice. Nothing like what she’s like on the viewlink.”
Milo mumbled something else, picked up a digging hoe, and slunk off to find Lianna.
“By the way, where’s your girlfriend?” Sylvia asked, wiping her hands on her dirty uniform. “I thought you were being late together.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” he said, ignoring Sylvia’s friendly smile.
The master gardener laughed. “I just don’t want her losing any more rations. You two can’t be earning enough to eat.”
Milo ignored her. He had to think. If only he could watch the news. The Tomorrow News Network was already broadcasting the story, reporting it before it happened, but they blocked reports from reaching anyone directly involved. If he checked a viewlink, the screen would show static, but there had to be some other way to get the information he needed.
Milo was deep in thought, injecting water into the soil, when he heard her voice: “Litho is the third moon orbiting planet 55 Cancri f, better known as Cancriph. The environment can’t support the kinds of fruits and vegetables humans eat, so the colonists constructed this bio-dome for their crops.”
“This is the second moon,” Milo said, “not the third.”
Talie Tappler turned away from her cameraman, a tall, pale cyborg, and carefully examined every detail of Milo’s appearance before speaking. He felt like she was inspecting each individual cell in his body.
“Of course,” she said, flipping back her bright, blond hair. “The first moon hasn’t split apart yet. Mr. Cognis, we’ll have to do that over.”
“Yes, Ms. Tappler,” the cyborg said. He took a step back and adjusted the lens of his massive, artificial eye.
“Is that why you’re here?” Milo said, trying to decide if he should fold his arms across his chest or let them hang in a comfortable, non-combative posture. He was the kind of teenager who never knew what to do with his arms and legs when he wasn’t using them. They were such long, gangly appendages.
Talie shook her head. “That’s a century and a half away,” she said, finally looking Milo in the eye.
As much as Milo hated this woman and as much as he dreaded whatever had brought her to his home, he liked the way she stared at him. Her eyes were violet, a very sexy color. Her midnight blue suit, her light pink skin, even her hair, a color more golden than gold–none of that compared to the flawless violet of her eyes.
She wore a ribbon tied around her neck, just like all the fashionable women did five centuries ago, and the collar of her jacket was turned up in a style even older than that. Ruffley flare trimmed the hem of her skirt, even though women had stopped wearing skirts thousands of years ago. Her jewelry, however, glowed in a way Milo had never seen; it came from somewhere beyond the 50th Century.
“Would you like to do an interview?” she said. Her soft voice, her slim body, the flirty anachronisms of her wardrobe made her irresistible.
“No,” Milo said.
“Oh, please,” she said, coming closer. “You’d be perfect. A strapping, young man living on the frontier of space who obviously isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.”
Milo looked at his hands. “Is the bio-dome important to your story?” he asked, determined to get some answers even if he was blushing.
Talie smiled. Her pearly teeth were a lot prettier in real life. “I can’t tell you that, but I can say it’s a big story. The biggest in this century.”
“If something bad is going to happen, shouldn’t you warn everyone?”
The reporter stepped a little closer. Milo could smell her perfume: the luscious scent of flowers that had long been extinct.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a sultry voice. “I can’t get personally involved in a story like that.”
Talie’s eyes seemed to grow more and more violet. She was a little shorter than most 50th Century women, but who knew what century she’d been born in? Her golden hair framed a heart-shaped face with a small, perky nose. Hers was the beauty of a long forgotten era or a glorious era yet to come.
“So,” she said, almost pleading, “can I get my interview?”
