West of Honor

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The sun was orange red and too bright, and the gravity was too low, but Kathryn Malcolm didn't know that. She had lived all of her 16 years on Arrarat, and although her grandfather talked a lot about Earth, humanity's home was not a real place to her. Earth was a place of machines and concrete roads and automobiles and great cities, where people lived crowded together far from the land. When she thought about it, Earth seemed an ugly place, not fit for people to live on.

Kathryn wondered how it smelled. Certainly it would be different from Arrarat. She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with the smell of newly turned, black, rich soil. Arrarat's soil was good. It felt right beneath her feet. Dark and crumbly, moist enough to take hold of the seeds and nurture them, but not wet and full of clods: perfect for the late-season crop she was planting.

Kathryn walked steadily behind the plow. She used a long whip to guide the oxen, flicking it to the side of the leaders, but never hitting them. There was no reason to hit them. Horace and Star knew what she wanted. The whip guided them in the precise path that would plow the field in a spiral out from the center. The plow turned the soil inward so that the center of the field would be slightly higher than the edges. That helped drain the fields and made it easier to harvest two crops every year.

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