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We Don’t Know Why
    By Nancy Springer
    So me’n Kris were basically out atmosphere-cruising in our solar wings, flying fast and low to the planet surface, kinda looking for trouble to get into because there was really nothing to do. It was a stupid planet, boringly Earth-like, just a little more gravity, squatty trees, lumpy stumpy animals that made us laugh the way they scuttled away from us. The wings didn’t flap or fold or anything, they were just standard helio-energized antigravity foils, but anything was better than staying on board and listening to my father lecture me about how I was lucky to be alive and I ought to shape up.
    “Stop it, Mishell!” Kris yelled at me.
    I stalled a little because he had startled me. “Stop what?”
    “Thinking!” He swooped so low his chrome boots rattled a treetop. “So your brother’s dead, so what,” he complained. “Everybody dies sometime.” Kris was totally heartless and rude, which was why I had started going out with him. His coolness was a lot easier to take than sympathy, and Kris was totally cool. He never wore a helmet in atmosphere. Said he liked the feel of all those little air molecules in his mane of platinum hair. He had more hair than I did, and I was the captain’s daughter, but that was part of how Kris was cool. Nobody could tell him how to act or what to do. I didn’t wear my helmet anymore either when I didn’t need it for oxygen.
    “Bet you can’t goose a goose,” Kris said as a riverside meadow full of some kind of waterfowl came into view. All facing away from us and making simpleminded noises through their lowered bills, they seemed to be eating the new spring grass. Maybe they really were geese, though on this planet they looked as short-necked as ducks, with wings that were oversized, big and clumsy compared to the rest of them, like mine.
    “Go ahead,” Kris challenged. “Try it.”
    Sneak up behind one of those downy waddling bird butts, he meant, and startle it silly. Scare them all silly. The solar wings were lightweight and shining and dead silent, like riding on light. If Kris would stop flapping his mouth, it actually might be possible for me to glide down and goose a goose.
    Unless I caught a wingtip on the ground, in which case I would probably be killed. But I didn’t care. Since Mykel had died I really didn’t care about anything.
    “Shut up,” I whispered at Kris as I kicked my booted feet up to slant my body downward.
    He didn’t shut up. “Uh oh,” I heard him say in bored tones as the flange of one of my six-meter wings scraped on tree fingers and threw me out of control.
    I nose-dived into geese flying up with a frightened clamor like they were a chorus for my panic. “Help me!” I cried to Kris.
    “No way,” I heard him say, distant—he had turned his back on me, was flying away. “Are you crazy?”
    I managed to throw myself sideways, turning my dive into a spin, a spiral that lessened the impact somewhat. Still, I don’t remember much. Just a major quaking resonance through my whole body. Then blackness.
    *
    My head hurt like a drum somebody was beating on when I woke up in a shadowy place full of soft lights. I blinked at the lights. Very different than the quick, hard lights on board. These lights seemed to breathe, like live things, yet they were so timid and dim that I could scarcely see the—people?
    Behind each light, a timid brown face, a stumpy brown body. I had not known there were people on this planet. Neither had anyone on board, I guess. That was what we were here for, orbiting out of sight behind the clouds, to find out. The scanners had just been setting up to look and listen before Kris and I sneaked out.
    These short brown people were not much like me. Generations in artificial gravity and artificial light had made spacefarers like me willowy and pale. But the bilateral symmetry was unmistakable, the two-eyed faces, the two hands holding the—candles? Yes, candles, I recognized the