The One Tree of Luna by Todd McCaffrey Page B

spaceship designs to include a proper forest; we’re expecting seedlings any day now. Hama kept the name I made up for her.
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    My name is Jennifer Lynne Ki, I’m a second generation Loonie whose best friend is a Hamadryad.
    And we’re going to the stars.

 
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Tribute
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    I wrote Tribute in 2005  for Liftport: The Space Elevator: Opening Space to Everyone.
    It has since been published in Baen’s Universe  and now here.
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    Annogi floated in Observation Room Four staring blindly out of the viewport to the blue Earth below.
    Clutched tightly in her hand was a small strip of paper. She had read it twice and still could not believe the words written on it. Words that, at age ten, she should not have been able to read — words stored on the station’s computers that should have been kept from her for eight more years.
    But Annogi was station-trained, station-bound, clever; and Tanuro was the head of station security. Tanuro had adopted her when she was three, just after her mother had died.
    Annogi wondered why Tanuro had adopted her. He never seemed to smile, was never satisfied with her work, was always angry with her failures. Yet his adoption of her had solved a very difficult problem for the space elevator; because Tanuro was the head of security and his job demanded that he be at the top-end station much of his time, he could provide Annogi with the zero-gee quarters that her body had grown accustomed to in the months after her mother’s death.
    Annogi looked down, past the bottom of the viewport, past her hand with the clenched slip of paper, to one of the many pictures which lined the walls of the Observation Room.
    The face which smiled back at her had blue eyes and blond hair, not the dark eyes and jet-black hair that was mirrored back at Annogi in the viewport. The only feature Annogi had in common with her mother was a thin smattering of freckles across her nose.
    â€˜ Amanda Brown. She died so that others may live, May 5th 2025 .’ Annogi didn’t need to
     read the caption to know what it said. She thought idly of linking in to the station’s
     computer network to call up a video of her mother, then shook her head and pulled the
     earpiece which doubled as a holographic display out of her left eye and slid it into the top
     pocket of her ship-suit.
    Images of her mother disturbed her. They were different from her memories. And all her happy memories were hidden behind the last frightening minutes of her time with her mother.
    Annogi knew that her mother had volunteered to work on the space elevator. In fact, Amanda Brown, former astronaut, had been in retirement when the elevator was first funded. She had become an artist and writer, chronicling the adventures in space of herself and so many others.
    When the chance came to take residence in the space elevator, to draw, photograph, and scribe about the new project and its impact on Earth, Amanda had grabbed at the chance. Annogi knew this because Tanuro had told her.
    Amanda had spent almost all her time in the Observation Rooms. She had helped select the pictures that adorned the walls of Observation Rooms One through Three. No one had ever thought that there would be pictures in Observation Room Four.
    Observation Room Four was a special room, even now. This was the room chosen above all the others for inaugurations of presidents, premieres, prime ministers, and even kings. From this vantage point the world had no boundaries, save that brilliant blue band between the cold of space and the life-giving atmosphere.
    The space elevator was more than just a place from which to understand man’s place as caretaker of the Earth. It was a place of new beginnings.
    Here was the doorway to the solar system. Where before the cost of moving into space was impossible, now it was achievable. Where before Mars and Venus were mere points of light, now they were home to growing numbers of scientists, explorers,