Free Shifter Planet by D.B. Reynolds

otherwise.” She stepped closer. “Sit down, sweetling. It hurts my neck to look up at you.” Her proud smile took away any sting the words might have had as she sat next to Amanda on the bed.
    “This,” she said, shaking her head, “is proof of nature over nurture. How I managed to raise a daughter who despises ship living—”
    “I don’t despise it,” Amanda protested instantly. “I loved growing up out here. I’ve witnessed amazing things and seen more of the universe than most people would see in a hundred lifetimes.” She drew a frustrated breath. “It just gets to me sometimes. Recycled air, artificial light, the long corridors and silent doors. It’s like it’s all been sucked clean until there’s nothing real to it anymore.”
    “I know.”
    She looked at her mother in surprise.
    “Oh, I never feel that way,” Elise conceded. “But I know you do. So did your father.” Her glance fell on the open duffle, then she stood and began wandering the room much as Amanda had earlier. “I need to tell you something. About your father.”
    Her earlier surprise was doubled. They never talked about her father. Not since she was about eight years old when she’d finally grown tired of asking questions that were never answered.
    Elise glanced at her, and then away, as if nervous. “He was an earth witch, you know,” she said with studied casualness.
    She stared. “A what?”
    “That’s what they called it on his home planet. Earth witch. On old Earth, they sometimes called it a ‘green thumb.’”
    She had heard of that in her studies as a child, and didn’t understand why Elise was making such an issue out of it. “So, he was good with growing things,” she said. “A lot of people are. Every member of the fleet’s botany department, for example.”
    “It’s a little more complicated than that,” Elise said slowly, finally sitting down to face her once more. “He could make anything grow. Anything. He could coax a dead plant to life, could double the harvest in a single season just by wandering the fields. I doubted, naturally. I’m a scientist. Until I saw with my own eyes what he could do. There was no other explanation.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
    “I meant to tell you, when you were older. Then I saw how much you loved going dirtside, how you never missed an opportunity to visit a planet. It didn’t even matter which one. If it had dirt, you were there.” She reached out and took Amanda’s hand, squeezing her fingers. “And I was selfish. I was afraid I’d lose you, that you’d choose him.”
    “Mom, I’d never—”
    “I know that. Mostly,” she admitted, with a fleeting smile. “And yet here you are, leaving me for that planet.”
    Amanda stifled a dismayed sigh. She wanted to tell her mother the truth, to explain why she had to stay on this particular planet. But her mother was also Dr. Elise Sumner, Chief Medical Officer. And Dr. Sumner would never be able to resist siccing a whole team of scientists on such a rare phenomenon—even if it meant poking and prodding her own daughter.
    On the other hand, this little history lesson might explain why she seemed to be the only one it was happening to. Well, the only fleet person anyway. She still believed Rhodry and Fionn, and probably some of the others, could hear and understand the trees a hell of a lot better than she did—the members of their so-called “guild” maybe?
    “I have to stay, Mom,” she said almost apologetically. “I want to. At least for now.”
    “For now,” Elise repeated. “Well, that’s something, I guess. If you’re going to be living down there, though, I want to be damn sure their medical facilities are up to snuff. And from what I’ve seen, they’re a few centuries out of date.”
    “The first few years here were brutal,” she explained, feeling the need to defend them. “They ran out of almost everything, and they’d lost so much of their equipment and materials in