#160 Mothership 3

read the first part

“Come,” Mother said, her voice soft and mysterious. “Look here.” She pointed to a place in the wall where a panel was slowly rolling aside.

Dawn opened her eyes wide in the dim light, trying to make out what was back there in the dark. A soft red glow bathed something small and floating. It twitched, and Dawn jumped back with a little squeak. When she drew closer again, she could make out a round head, large eyes dark through translucent eyelids, arms, hands with tiny fingers, and even legs with feet and toes.

“It has legs and feet, just like mine!” Dawn said.

“She does,” Mother said. “I hope you will help me teach her how to use them.”

Dawn looked up into Mother’s smiling face. Mother didn’t have legs, she had always said she didn’t need them. Her place was in the home, Aiko did everything that had to be done outside. From the middle up, Dawn was like Mother, with arms and hands, a body, a head, a face, but where Mother was planted into the floor, like a tree, Dawn had legs to move around. She sometimes thought her legs weren’t as fast or as steady as Aiko’s wheels, or the drones’ whirring propellers that let them fly, but they were what she had. Her alone, out of everything else in the world.

But not anymore. Now there was someone else.

“This is your sister. What do you think we should call her?” Mother asked.

Dawn blinked, surprised. Mother never asked her to help name things that came out of the home. Things that came from the world outside, Dawn always got to name them. But the koi in the pond, which had come from the home, all the fruits and vegetables and flowers in the garden, they had come from the home, and Mother had taught Dawn their names. Now here was something that most definitely had come from the home, but Dawn was being asked to name it.

Dawn watched her sister’s tiny hand, the whole hand the size of one of Dawn’s finger tips, move up to the face as if to shield her eyes from the light. “Day,” Dawn said. “Because looking at her makes me feel like sunshine all over.”

“That sounds beautiful,” Mother said. “We will call her Day.”