Mish laughed, not offended in the slightest. “Thankfully, Uvian newborns are very small. Each one could fit inside the palm of your hand. Birthing them is the easiest part, honestly.” She pushed back another lock of frizzy orange hair. “Uvian women can only reproduce once in our lifetimes. I’mnotcomplaining about that.”
“Once?” Holly mistakenly pulled a carrot rather than a weed. The thin orange root was no longer than her finger. “Oh, no. I’m sorry. Can I just…” She moved to stick the carrot back in its hole, but Mish stopped her.
“It’s okay. They need to be thinned, anyway. Put it aside to eat later.” Mish gestured to a handful of other small carrots that had suffered the same fate. “The question I bet you’re really wondering about is how I nursed them all.”
“Oh, mystars, I never thought about that.” Almost against Holly’s own will, her gaze dropped to Mish’s chest, which did not appear curvy.
This time, Mish’s laugh was full and rich. “First of all, our men also produce milk, and while your species and mine mayappearsimilar, we are different.” She nodded toward Bean, who was not digging, but had found a bright sunny spot of dirt and was lying in it, tongue out and eyes shut. “Dogs, and other species from your planet, have multiple teats, do they not?”
“Yes.” Holly blinked at her. “Wow, you have… Sothat’show you feed them. Youandyour husband.”
“Nursing is a full-time commitment for two years, so Uvian couples with newborns must find a safe place to confine themselves, because no one’s going anywhere for a while.” She glanced at the group of children who had ceased playing with the ball and were sitting in a row, passing a rock from one to another. “And then it gets hard. Very hard.”
“I can imagine,” Holly said softly.
“It doesn’t last forever, though.” Mish leaned up and stretched. “Theydogrow into their own minds. They become people like you and me, and hopefully, lead happy, fulfilled lives. So, tell me about you, Holly.”
“What about me?”
“What made you decide to leave the lunar city and comehere?” Mish asked, peeking over at her. “You owe Charles Moone nothing.”
Holly shrugged one shoulder. “I’m forty-two, which is young by current Earth standards, but for so long, my focus has been on my work. And that just wasn’t going anywhere. Then, and this is what really changed things, Sol-Arc—my employer—wanted me to go through this program to change my appearance. To make me look more like their image of the ideal Sol-Arc professional for the goal of impressing clients.” She said the words, but couldn’t miss how absurd they sounded. Like the high-level management at Sol-Arc had gotten lost in the superficial culture of Nova and decided to force that shallownesson everyone who worked for them. “Everything inside of me rejected it. It may sound foolish to give up a prestigious engineering job and a coveted residential unit on Nova simply because I didn’t want to change how Ilooked, but it earned me a three-month suspension and here I am.”
“Not foolish at all,” Mish said. “They wanted to change more than how you look.” She turned to Holly and touched the center of her chest. “Something inhereknew that and rejected it. They wanted to turn you into a bee.”
Holly paused. “What?”
Mish waved her trowel. “It’s like my children. I’m working to raise them to be individuals, but your company wants to take that away and make their employees parts of a superorganism. No personality. No identity. So, I’d call your refusal to go along with thatwise.”
A wave of emotion rose up and closed Holly’s throat. “Hmm. I… Thank you,” she got out, but it sounded hoarse. She hadn’t thought of it that way. That her spirit had known that “aesthetics” wasn’t all Sol-Arc wanted to change.
She thought of Beenan and tried to imagine him having any life whatsoever outside of the firm. An identity of his own. She couldn’t. He was just…blank. For the first time, she felt a pang of pity for him. He’d made a choice to become what he was. Maybe it hadn’t been hard for him. Maybe there hadn’t been a whole lot to him before he went all in on Sol-Arc’s programs.
There was more toher. Holly frowned as she shifted down the row.
“What happens at the end of your leave of absence?” Mish asked.
“What?” Holly broke from the inward thoughts and accidentally pulled up another skinny carrot. “Oh. I’ll have to formally resign, I suppose. If I don’t accept their terms, I’m terminated.” She offered a shaky laugh. “It’s funny, when I thinkabout it. I was put on leave only to take a position with a thousand times more responsibility than I had, with impossible challenges and no guarantee of success.” She nodded toward Bean. “Someone who has never even taken care of a dog is now running a space station. And the dog can’t stand me.”
“No, it makes perfect sense.” Mish leaned back and balanced on the balls of her feet as she studied Holly. “Sol-Arc wants your skills, but notyou. Moone’s Landing needs you, and your skills are helpful.”
Holly had no words for that. None. This had been the most insightful conversation since her mother had decided to psychoanalyze her during the brief spell in her teen years when Holly wanted to change her name to Oylspil and join a likely doomed experimental expedition to the Terv-Poc black hole. It had been a dark time.
“And Bean likes you,” Mish added. “He’s adjusting to you, is all. And you…well, you’re adjusting toeverything.”
Holly stood up and stretched her sore back. Actually, everything was sore and only part of that was due to weeding on her knees for a long time. “Stars, Mish. What did you do with yourself before you were a mother of fourteen children?”
Mish brushed dirt from her knees and gave Holly a little grin. “I was a bartender.”
“Figures.” Holly nodded, thinking how much that made sense. “You’re an amazing listener.”
“Well, when my husband and I escaped our home planet, we worked jobs on cruise spaceships and bartending positions were always open.” Mish held out a hand to take back Holly’s gloves and trowel. “You do what you have to do.”
“I hope I don’t let everyone down,” Holly said quietly. It was almost painful to say those words, but she needed them said tosomeone. They couldn’t keep living in the stew of worries that bubbled away in her head.
“Even if Moone’s Landing can’t be saved,youwill not have let anyone down.”
Bean, having sensed that it was time to return home, rose from his warm, sunny spot, stretched, and waddled over to the two women. He waited expectantly at Holly’s feet.
