The Rainbow Maker's Tale by Mel Cusick-Jones Page B

much. The sparse soil pockets that the grass seeds
planted themselves into were not placed on the crevices by design,
but had sprung up over time as the air circulation system of the
station forced minute amounts of dust into the atmosphere of the
Family Quarter. In most places this dust would be invisible where
it settled or was periodically cleaned away, but not up here. There
was no one to clean the dust away here because no one really came
to this park except me. (I’d already made sure of this by checking
the scanner records, once I’d found a way to hack in to the system.
Very few people even ventured into the park, let alone stayed long
enough to indicate they had travelled sufficiently far to reach my
current location). Over time, seeds from the parks and residential
zone lawns must have mingled into the dust and found their way
here. Then they settled themselves into place, to wait for the
opportunity of light and moisture to make them grow. Nature always
finds a way, I mused dreamily. It was a reassuring notion.
    My gaze drifted lazily over the
landscape of the Family Quarter spread out before me. Park 42 sat
at the outer edge of the quarter, reportedly close to the external
walls of the space station itself. Not that my calculations on
gravitational pull would support the theory that we would have such
a strong gravitational field on board if the Family Quarter truly
was the largest section of the space station. But, I had no proven
alternative to offer at this point in time, as to what the
alternatives might exist, and so I dismissed the problem, just as I
had many times before.
    Up here I could see pretty much
everything, whilst remaining near invisible myself: the rock face
was so similar in colour to the grey external walls at the edges of
the Family Quarter that it blended in almost completely. If I
hadn’t been climbing out here in the park one day – something that
was not permitted due to the dangers it posed – then I probably
would have been ignorant to its existence myself.
    There was no denying that the
view was impressive: it was the highest reachable point within the
station. In the distance to the left, my eyes picked out three tall
buildings stretching from the middle of a group of smaller ones,
that made up the main hub at the centre of the Black, Green and
Blue residential zones. The Clinic – where Mother worked – was the
tallest of the three. From here they appeared small and almost
unreal, like a model I might have made and placed on a table to
walk around and peer into, as though I were a giant.
    I was no giant. If I had been I
probably would have smashed the towers into pieces, enjoying each
snap and crack as I destroyed another of the symbols of the lies we
were told about ourselves.
    How could the others not see
it? This question troubled me now, just as it always did. Was I
more observant than them, or were they just more a part of the
system than I was?
    Not for the first time I
considered again whether it was me who was the problem – some
genetic throwback with inherited mental imbalances – I dismissed
that, as usual. I’d already tested myself extensively to see if my
observations were hallucination or paranoia. They were neither.
    My thoughts drifted back to the
day I’d found the secondary receiver inside my viewing screen. I
remembered immediately my anger at being proved right once more: we
were being lied to and watched. What was the purpose of it? Surely,
it would only make sense to lie, if there was something to
hide…?
    It always surprised me how much
I wanted my research and investigations to prove me wrong
and not the system I in lived within. I wanted to be the
failure and anomaly, not everyone else. After all, that would be
the easier thing to believe. So far, that had not happened. I had
always been proved right and it had been that way since the first
day I began to suspect. Before I could stop myself, I found I was
tumbling headlong into a memory I usually