Can a 14-year-old delinquent start a stagnant world into motion?
 

“Higher!”

Burkoo taunted me from the branches above my head.

“You moonlings, are you Halar fraidies?”

I climbed. Higher up, the redberry blossoms smelled stronger. Sniffing them made your ears ring. And you had to brace yourself for that rush of dizziness.

“We’re not really from the moons,” I told Burkoo, reaching for a big blossom.

I had to lean far out for it. I tried to look relaxed. I didn’t look down.

“Yeah, yeah,” Burkoo said. “From far away. Sniff it!”

I sniffed.

It was still lavender light, before the nighttime violet. Catbats swooped and called. A western breeze carried a scent of smolder, from Halars burning last autumn’s stubble, readying their fields to plow. On the eastern horizon, the two blue moons had risen, silhouetting the town’s domes and spires.

“Spaaa.”

Rubber legs. Rubber arms. I almost let go of the branch. Who cared? I could soar like a catbat. I could circle over the Dint town, over the Halar farms. Then spiral above our Enclave, higher and higher, into blackness. To the orbiting Seeder…

“Spaaa.”

Now the ringing in my ears faded. My legs came back to me, and my arms. Those catbat calls—“Spaaa.” I’d made them.

Burkoo snickered.

“Batty Boy,” he said.

He climbed higher, still snickering. A branch snapped in his four-fingered hand and—abruptly—he plummeted. Falling, he flipped, dove headfirst, grabbed a limb, swung, curled his legs over a branch, and sat. Insouciant.

“Good trick, huh?” he said. “Want to try, Batty Boy?”

He knew we Enclave kids lacked the Dints’ athleticism. Their bodies looked almost like ours, only shorter and blockier, and they had no external ears, just openings.  A lot of us tried combing our hair to hide our ears. But we never looked like Dints. Parallel evolution, my father said. This planet had an Earthlike atmosphere, Earthlike topography, gravity, chemistry. And, long ago, the Dints’ and Halars’ mutual ancestors occupied an ecological niche similar to our own ancestors’. So they turned out like us, only different. Musculature, for one thing. Burkoo could do all sorts of stunts that I couldn’t.

Deep-violet night came on as we sniffed blossoms, Burkoo and I in our tree, his gang and a few Enclave kids, delinquents like me, in the next tree. The Dints joked about their school in town. We made lame jokes about our Enclave schooling, trying to sound like them. We weren’t supposed to tell them much, and we didn’t. But that was mainly because we knew they would not understand things like holographic teachers or consciousness physics or quantum-entanglement technology or Earth history. And what they did not understand made them irritable.

“Shhh!”

Burkoo had heard something. Off in the darkness, a rustling. Again, closer.

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