Page 31 of Joven's Bride
Chapter Seventeen
When they finished with the orders, Joven suggested taking Carly to tour around the property. They took the little ground car because it was a big property. He told her the size in a measurement that she couldn’t translate into acres, or hectares. Visually it looked like it went on for miles, definitely too far to walk in a few hours.
They passed endless fields of grain native to Glasica. From the way Joven described it, she considered it comparable to oats or wheat. It was used to make traditional sourdough bread that originated on Narova. The potential profit was modest in smaller quantities, but worthwhile in the quantities grown on his farm.
There were other crops in other areas, but Joven wanted to show her the forest trails he loved. Ever since Carly arrived on Glasica, she marveled at how Earthlike it was. Joven’s grain fields closely resembled the wheat fields of Earth. As they passed by them, she half expected to find corn fields interspersed in them.
When she said as much to Joven, he noted that some farms on Narova grew corn from seeds imported from Earth. In their four-hundred-year history of covert operations on Earth, Narovians had introduced many plants and animals, dogs, cats, and horses. Besides corn, they also grew coffee and tea, hemp, and cotton.
It took almost a half hour to get to the forest that extended from Joven’s land into the Selkeres Mountains. In many places, the trees were so thick that little light reached the forest floor. Carly thought they were going to walk the path in the forest, but Joven said there were miles of trails all the way into the mountains. The trails through the Reserve land were only high enough for a big cat to pass through the underbrush.
Where Joven had removed trees from the paths on his land, he had only cut through the underbrush in the Selkeres Reserve. That was the agreement he’d made with the government. It was all primordial forest with some trees as big as the ancient redwoods of Earth. The tree leaves resembled deciduous trees on Earth, but the climate never got cold enough for the trees to shed all their leaves at once.
Winter on Glasica was more like Fall where Carly grew up temperature wise. That meant crops would grow year around there. Joven explained that a different crop would be planted after the grain harvest, which would rejuvenate the soil.
Joven parked the “wheeler” at the edge of the forest in a small meadow. From there, they would walk for a while.
“This is just beautiful,” Carly murmured as they strolled onto the path. A green leaf drifted down on the light breeze, and she caught it in her hand. “I can’t believe it. This leaf looks almost exactly like the ginkgoes. back on Earth.” She drew in a deep breath. “It even smells like the woods back there, too.”
Joven smiled down at her indulgently. “It’s very much like Narova as well. Although, I only spent a few rotations sets there, after I was awakened. They sent us off-world for training, then to war.”
“What about…? No, you never had a childhood.”
“I had a virtual childhood while I was growing in the nurturing tank.”
“Right, I remember that you talked about that in one of your vid-mails. What was it like?”
“It was real to me. I had parents and brothers and friends; Rader Knight was one of them.”
“Skye’s husband.”
“Yes. It was a highly sophisticated program that could adjust to our behavior. When I became an adolescent, I went to military school.”
“What about girlfriends, dating?”
“I had you.”
“What?”
“A virtualmeomee,” he said. He stopped and faced her, putting his arms around her.”
“How could they know?”
“It was a composite extrapolated from my DNA to complement mine. They constructed the female counterpart for me from that extrapolation. But she wasn’t as beautiful as you are,” he smiled hopefully.
“But why would they do that?” Carly frowned. “How come you never told me about her?”
“She could have been a younger you.” Joven frowned, too, uncertain why this revelation seemed to upset her. “The scientists did that so we would have emotional ties and a vision of the future when we were released from service.”
“To give you something to fight for, and live for if it came to that,” she realized.
“Early cyborg creations, didn’t have that, they were too dangerous to integrate into society. They had to be decommissioned.”
“What do you mean?”
“It is against our laws to kill them. They are in stasis off-world, living in virtual reality for the rest of their lives.” Joven pulled her against him and hugged her, resting his cheek on top of her head. “My sense of you dimmed while I was at war because of the emotional suppressors.”
“But that wasn’t really me.”
