Nina had been born on a ship, but now she lived on a planet with Mama, Papa, Dad, and all her friends.
She was outside playing when it happened—little white things coming down from the sky. The first time anything had ever come down from the sky, she'd thought it was the sprinklers, and had run inside crying, certain the planet was burning up. She'd been such a baby then, but Dad had explained that it was just rain, like in the vids. They'd gone back out and gotten soaked. As it turned out, clothes were weird when they were wet, and got really heavy and clung to your skin.
Nina wasn't going to cry about white stuff, but she did want to know what it was. She told her friends she had to go, and ran inside.
First, she looked for Mama, who was working in the big room with all the fetuses floating in big see-through cylinders. As usual, she slowed down to look at them on the way, wondering if cows, goats, and horses really would be other friends for her, like her parents thought they might be, and how soon they would be ready. She'd asked Mama about that yesterday, and she'd said the goats would be done soon, but that there was still a long, long time to wait on the others.
That was okay. Nina already had friends anyway.
She found Mama in her lab at the back, doing something with a needle and a little cylinder. Probably it was a chicken again: Mama had been trying with chickens for a while now, but chickens came from something called eggs, and so that made it harder, for some reason.
Nina knew better than to bother Mama when she was concentrating, and so she went to look for Papa.
He was inside the Communications room. The door was closed, with the big red light glowing at the top of it. That meant she couldn't go in; she was never, ever supposed to go in when the red light was on. At first, Papa had told her she'd burn up if she did. She'd spent days upset and crying about it, because didn't that mean Papa would burn up when he was in there? Then Dad and Mama had yelled at Papa a lot, and then finally they'd told her that she couldn't go in because she'd been a surprise, and they'd had to keep her a secret from Earth Control. She wouldn't be a very good secret if they saw her while Papa was making a report, would she?
(One time, when they thought she was asleep, Papa and Mama had been arguing about her. "You can't raise a child this way. She's going to be even more fucked up than we are by the time the mission's over. It's not right," and Mama had said, "She's here now, and she has us," and Papa has said, "We're not enough," and they'd repeated the same things for a long, long time, until Dad had said, "I don't suppose my opinion matters. I'm just the sperm donor," and Mama and Papa had said, "Shut up, Charles."
Nina knew, sort of, what Papa was worried about. There weren't any other kids on the ship for her to be friends with. There was just her, and Papa, and Mama, and Dad. And then other times, Papa and Dad started smelling funny, and went to hide in Dad's room for a few days, and for a while it would seem like there was only her and Mama and some weird noises Mama told her not to listen to.
Ever since they'd been on the planet, Dad and Papa would take the shuttle away for a few days when they wanted to hide. And Papa hadn't said anything about her not having any kids to play with, not since she'd stepped off the ship and found out that she could talk to all the aliens that lived there, and that they'd talk back.)
Last, Nina went to find Dad. As usual, all he was doing was reading. Dad didn't have a job to do, like Mama and Papa did. He'd been a surprise, too. ("If by 'surprise' you mean 'stowaway,'" Papa had scoffed, when he'd overheard this.) And he was definitely a secret. That made him a lot more fun than if he were official like Mama and Papa were.
"White stuff?" he said. "Well, it's been cold enough, hasn't it? Let's go see it."
Then Nina climbed up into his lap, and his chair zoomed out of the ship.
"I am never going to get used to this. Lovely as it is," he said, which was what he always said when they went outside. Mama, Papa, and Dad all seemed to agree on this much, at least: green skies and purple grass were weird, and Nina's friends were weirder. "And yes, I daresay it's snowing. Maybe it'll even stick. If it does, we could make a snowman."
Nina had seen snowmen in vids before. "Or maybe a snow deer?" she said.
"Hmmm, yes," Dad said, unlike Papa, who would have just said that they needed to think of something else to call those, because they didn't look a damned thing like Bambi to him. "And we'll make sure to include the tentacles."
They stayed outside and watched the snow for a while, until Papa and Mama came out to join them.