Free The Blue Moon - Part 1 - Into the Forest by Nolan Bauerle

their faces. Shankar looked at Emmy and smiled. They put their heads down and set off.
    The Rock Sun extinguished as they passed the shadowy crop fields. Mirrors wrapped around the white stalks of wheat reflected the last red glows of light.
    The Shamrock Forest began at the end of the crop field. Emmy and Shankar paused before passing the threshold to the forest. Shankar looked at Emmy, his lips still stretched into a smile. Emmy looked back across the fields, dark since they’d lost their red reflected light. She looked back at her home in the distance, and noticed she’d left her reading light on. The frustration she’d experienced since her mother had disappeared wiped out any longing for the comfort of her cottage and reading chair.
    She was no longer sitting still, and she was glad of it. “Let’s keep moving,” Emmy said.
    They entered the Shamrock Forest, which consisted of a single variety of tree that grew with a thick trunk high into the air. The branches were short and bunched at the top of the tall trees. The trees were also spread out, so that the scale of the forest made it feel like the cathedral ceilings of an old growth pine forest on Earth.
    They travelled for a few hours, making good progress as the leaves managed to amplify the starlight in the dark night’s sky, providing a shimmering, sparkling light to guide their footsteps. They finally took a rest when they came to a small creek that flowed from the mountain. Emmy and Shankar finished one canteen each of water, then filled them up again in the river. The small flow of water was almost frozen in the cold chill of night, and it was crystal clear.
    Emmy sat by the river and scanned the forest from its canopy to its floor. All around her, it sparkled. Emmy had been into the Shamrock Forest a number of times in her life, though it was mostly prohibited to enter. It was a preserved wilderness on St. John’s, and the St. John’s Council preferred to ban visitors except on a few holidays. You could sneak into them, though, as many people did. Emmy had done so a few times in her life, most recently on a camping trip. She had an idea of the forest as an exciting place; a place where life on cold, autumnal St. John’s seemed as beautiful as any other place in the Solar System.
    At least her Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System got that right. The book didn’t say many good things about St. John’s, but it did indicate that despite all of the bad food, cold weather, dark days and sullen people, it was worth traveling to if only to see the Shamrock Forest.
    She took her book out and opened it to that section. There was an animated video which must have been taken when the Rock Sun was burning bright. The forest sparkled red and orange in the video, far different than its current gloomy dark green. Emmy read the highlighted text.

    The Shamrock Forest earned its name from the only tree that grows on the space-island. The St. John’s Tree was engineered to be the other half of the larger cycle of the breathing system on St. John’s; the outer and other part to human being’s lung and respiratory function — always the most complex, but necessary, step in terraformation.
    On St. John’s, fulfilling this function proved difficult for genetic engineers. Scientists struggled to create a tree that would grow at all in the low-light of St. John’s, let alone the many thousands of different kinds of trees found in the forests on Mars, Earth or the other colonies in the Asteroid Belt basked by larger and brighter Rock Suns.
    When engineers finally managed to create a tree that could fulfill its functions and grow unaided on St. John’s, it became the only tree ever successfully engineered. So, St. John’s forests are all made up of this one species of tree.
    The tree itself is unremarkable. It grows high with a thick, white trunk. Its leaves are bunched at the top of the tree on short branches. The leaves differ on either side and the man-made breezes