by Andre Infante





The day a world ended, I watched the rain from my window.  The water came down in gouts, in roars, in torrents.  The puddles swelled in the yard beyond, and I pressed my fingers against the cool glass, feeling the cold air coming down from the vent overhead.  God, I missed the rain.  I watched the water rise until I couldn’t bear it, and I turned the window off.  The screen went dark and dead, and all I saw was my own reflected face.


I assessed.  Not handsome, never was.  Still, it could be worse   I looked better than I had the first time I had stared into that window.  I had been gaunt and pale back then, barely alive.  Humans were never meant to hibernate.  I winced, remembering the smell of rotten eggs and the half-conscious frozen sleep, stars wheeling past my capsule.   I was stronger, healthier, now.  Even a bit tanned.  I had done well in the last five years.  I had put on weight, sped my metabolism back up, and had finally kicked the barbiturate addiction six months previous.  I was the poster child for cryonics.


Still, I was glad I would never have to do that again.  Long distance space travel was dangerous.   Radiation poisoning, claustrophobia, muscle atrophy, bone loss, hibernation side effect,  oxygen hysteria.  Forget what the movies told you, space travel is hell.  Try spending a year delirious and hypothermic in a chest freezer if you think it isn’t.  I rubbed the scars on my stomach and lay back down, arms trailing on the dusty floor.  Even if I wanted to do that again, there was no fuel for a return.  We were there for good.     


My room was still dark.  Theoretically, I was still sleeping.  I had forty five minutes until the lights switched themselves on and the window started to display an obligatory sunrise (which, we’d figured out two weeks in was, in fact, the sunset video played in reverse).  I could hear the coffee machine in the next room quietly turn itself on and begin to assemble a beverage that had absolutely no relation to coffee beans.  I considered bringing up my laptop, but decided against it.  The walled garden web they provided us with got tremendously boring, since they didn’t update it often.  You could read through all the new content in about half an hour, and then you were dead in the water for the rest of the day.  I had a few email threads I needed to update, but didn’t feel like dealing with them now. I had also grown concerned that the internet we got up here was being censored.  The coverage of the Earthside international tensions had suspicious holes. 


I crossed the floor to the calendar on the wall in two strides and checked my schedule.  I was on gardening duty.  Thank god.  The jeep was broken, again¸ and I was truly glad that it wasn’t my problem. You’d think that with a fifty plus year mission, they’d bother to ship along some spare parts.  The jeep was already a twisted mess of ugly fixes, duct tape, and improvised repairs.  It’d probably be completely inoperable within a year, and then we’d have to build a new one.  Assuming we ever got the foundry up and running.  Boy, was that behind schedule…  


I returned to bed, staring at the fabric ceiling.  I imagined the sky beyond the thin walls.




I must’ve fallen back asleep at some point, because the alarm jerked me awake a second later.  I climbed out of bed, climbed into the bathroom, got cleaned up, took a crap, pulled my uniform on, and headed for breakfast.


Theoretically, the uniforms were white with blue stripes, white gloves, and brass buttons- classy, practical, and not overtly nationalistic.  In practice, the tiny shards of glass and iron filings that passed for sand around here rapidly stained the uniforms the color of dirty urine.  Still, they would keep your internal organs on the internal.


Breakfast was a bit tense that day.  May and Jung had had some kind of a falling out that I was way too tired to deal with just then, and they were going about matters with a kind of brittle politeness that made conversation a minefield for the rest of us.  I kept my head down, ate my bacon, egg whites, tofu and orange juice as fast as humanly possible.   I drank the coffee, too, not because of any flavor, but simply because that was where they snuck vitamin D into our diet.  Minimal sun meant we needed a lot.  The coffee tasted like boiled dirt.


Right before I was about to get the hell out of there, Tom decided to make a speech.  He rapped the table, and caught my eye.  I sunk back into my chair. 


Tom paused for a moment to wait for attention, and then spoke. 


“Welcome to your one thousand, eight hundred and forty fourth day on the Ash Tree Colony.  In about twenty minutes, the bell will ring for morning shift.   Now, I know things have been tense lately.  The jeep is a piece of crap, and missing control is sorry about that.  Not nearly sorry enough, but that’s beside the point.  Unfortunately, I’ve got to give you guys some more bad news.  Things are tense with the IndoRussian block right now, as I’m sure you know.  I was informed by Mission Control this morning that  both sides have agreed to suspend all ballistic launches for any reason.  That includes our relief.  The Oakland party may be delayed indefinitely-”


There were a chorus of groans.  Tom rapped the table. 


“Look, people! We’re here, aren’t we?  We’re in pretty damn good shape, under the circumstances.  We’ve got fresh air to breathe, clean water to drink, and plenty of food.  We made all this ourselves.  We’re quite capable of taking care of ourselves for as long as it takes. “


The bell rang.


“Okay, everyone, let’s see if we can make it to number eighteen forty five, huh?”


I got the hell out of there.  More delays.  Christ things must be bad Earthside. I left the mess hall, stepped into the surrounding hallway, blew the hatch with a soft bang of equalizing pressure, and set off down the hallway.  The hallway was unfinished, just bare ice bricks, and it wasn’t heated, either, so the air was freezing.  I closed the door behind me, hurried the ten meters to the end of the hallway, and crossed into the green house. 


The ceiling and northern wall here were slanted towards the low end of the crater, and had been cut in solid slabs from deep within the glacier to maximize clarity.  I could see the dull blue morning sun breaking over the lip of the crater.  The Mylar floor and walls caught every scrap of light and trapped it.  It was terribly bright, even this early.  I wished I’d remembered my sunglasses.


Squinting, I checked the algae first.  The racks took up a good third of the entire greenhouse.  The long ropes slimy of algae hung down the racks, dripping with condensation.  A large compression pump hummed in the corner.  The purity readings were well within tolerance, and there we\re no noticeable brown streaks in the algae colony.  Our air supply was safe for the time being.


I moved into the next part of the greenhouse.  There was an airlock here, so pulled the oxygen hood over my head, sealed it, and switched the rebreather on.  I stepped into the airlock.  There was a hiss, and I felt the pressure drop.  The crumpled bag around my head inflated suddenly and my ears popped. I briefly felt gas cramps before my clothing reacted, gripping my torso and limbs, holding the blood in.  Inside the airlock, the pressure dropped to nearly zero before the next door opened.  There was a loud hiss as the room flooded with carbon dioxide.  I felt a crushing pressure for a moment before my clothing suddenly relaxed.  I took a deep breath of recycled oxygen.  Thank god for rebreathers.  The atmosphere in here was not intended for people.


I stepped out of the airlock.  We had to be careful not to go back and forth too often.  You lost too much gas that way.  Contrary to popular mythology, oxygen was not the most precious thing around here.  You could get oxygen easy.  Algae, electrolysis in a pinch- oxygen was simple.  The problem was that you needed more than oxygen.  A pure oxygen atmosphere was toxic.  You needed an inert gas to make up 70% of your atmosphere.  The nitrogen extractors did their job, but they were slow.   You had to be very careful. 


I made the rounds.  First few rows were oranges, soybeans, a few other hydroponic crops and a small window box of daisies in the corner.  Nothing remarkable.  I changed the water, tested the soil PH, and moved on. 


Last row was the mutant freaks.  I wandered over to a sickly looking plant sprouting vines that ended in yellow-white bulbs.  One of them was split open and was dripping a viscous yellow fluid onto the floor.  Crap.  I hated cleaning up egg whites.  Another had big pitchers at the end of its leaves, filled with a thick oily white fluid that would pass for milk when diluted. It vied for shelf space with another that had dark brown leaves that they made the coffee out of.  It was over ten times more efficient then growing coffee beans and came replete with over a dozen vitamins that coffee never ordinarily had.  It also tasted lousy. 


The last two were possibly the most disturbing.  They were identical to the first, except that more than half of the bulbs were filled with dark shapes, occasionally squirming.  Four of the bulbs had turned from green to yellow.  I picked up the ovipositor tool, and pushed an egg into each one.  I then gingerly turned the plant in its metal brace.  Two of them were ripe, overstretched, on the point of bursting.


I winced.  I hated this part.  I took a pair of scissors and cut the bulbs from the leaf tips, thrusting them into a bucket of cold water.  The bulbs struggled for a few moments and then succumbed to thermal shock. I threw them into the basket without looking at them.  The cost of bacon.  On the bright side, if suckling pig was tender, it had not a thing on fetal pork.  


I moved back through the rows quickly, grabbing anything that looked fairly fresh and piling them into the basket.  I checked my watch.  Damn.  I still had nearly an hour before the first shift ended. 


I walked over to the big ice window, staring out at the dull red sand stretching to the edges of the crater, glowing with reflected light from the glacier a few thousand meters behind me.  I watched the sun rise, fading from blue to white.  The sky was dark with thin shreds of blue and gray, a half-hearted pretense of an atmosphere.  It had a bleak, dead beauty, and I loved it for that.  I didn’t have a lot of choice.  As I stared out at the desert, something caught my eye- a distant glint of sapphire blue, nearly hidden in a shadow a long distance off. 


Well that was more than enough. There was nothing that color out in the desert unless it was ours, and nothing was supposed to be out that far.  There was nothing out that way.  The foundry building project was out of sight to the right.  The science station was behind me.  We didn’t even have a solar array out that way. 


I walked over to the surface access airlock.  I sent a voice message over the PA to inform everyone that I’d be out on the surface to investigate something.  I got no response, but that was fine with me.  I stepped into the airlock, checked my O2 levels, and then headed out.  This airlock didn’t bother to recover the CO2; as a result, when the hatch blew open, I felt a tremendous shove from behind as the air sent me stumbling out into the vacuum.  I steadied myself, feeling cramps for a split second until my uniform reacted and supplied pressure. 


I set out across the desert, taking my time.  The uniforms were Kevlar, but a stray shard of ice could go right through.  Shattered permafrost was like steel knives.  Besides, there was no reason to rush. I had plenty of air and was in no hurry to get back.  Besides, it was pretty out here.  These vast alien deserts, the strange sky and distant sun.  These things made every other hardship worthwhile, because I was one of only about twenty people ever to see these skies with his own eyes. 


You could feel the cold out here.  The uniforms were very thin.  After a few hours, you could go hypothermic without assistance.  I began to wish I’d brought a hot bottle with me.  It was further than I’d guessed.  I thought about turning back, but at this point I’d just feel silly.  Besides, I was nearly there.  I crossed the last stretch in a minute or two, and turned back to look at my progress. 


The entire colony was small from here.  The central lander, now the mess hall and ops centers; the ice brick rooms that were the private rooms; the foundry, half finished; the hallways leading out to the greenhouse and solar arrays.  Of in the distance, the dull glint of the science station.  The glacier in the background, hundreds of miles across, dwarfed the entire assembly.  I’d never been out this far without the jeep.  I took a minute to survey the compound in satisfaction. I didn’t take more than a minute, though, because it was freezing out here and I still had a long walk back.  I then turned to peer at what I’d just hiked all the way out here to find. I expected a lost piece of foil or heat shielding, or maybe a chunk of deorbited satellite.  Maybe I was expecting nothing at all; a trick of the light and a sheepish walk home.  As for what I found instead… 


I crouched down to stare at it.  The little green threads stabbed at the sky, four or five of them, each ending in little blue flowers like bells.  The plant sat, irresolutely real. It should’ve been twisted, dead, frozen.  It wasn’t.  In fact, it seemed to be in excellent health.  I sat back on the sand, feeling the cold sinking into my legs from the red sand.  I stared at the plant. 


It wasn’t even a particularly nice plant.  The thick, waxy blossoms had their charm, sure, but the stems were thin and rather scrubby, and the whole effect was rather mismatched and unattractive.   The obvious question, of course, was how the hell it came to be here.  We didn’t grow any flowers like this in our window box.  Even if we had, there’s no way it could have ended up this far out.  And even if it did, the widely varying temperatures, the lack of liquid water and the lack of air would kill it in minutes.  Nothing could survive out here.  The desert was sterile.  


Come to think of it, I had never seen a flower like this at all.  I wondered if it was genetically engineered.  The last remainder of some old terraforming experiment?  After a moment, another thought struck me entirely.  What if it wasn’t one of ours at all?  We’d vaporized a lot of water during our time.  Raised the water soil content a lot.  Maybe we’d thawed something out.  Holy hell, was this an alien?


I inspected it with new caution.  I wondered if I should break off a leaf and take it back for analysis.  No.  There was no telling how it’d react.  I wasn’t even remotely qualified to make a decision.  I needed to go back and get the others.  I wished I had a camera.  I heard a dull alarm deep in my suit as my body temperature dropped another degree into dangerous territory.  The noise snapped me out of my reverie, and the cold hit me like a bucket of ice water.  I was going to freeze to death out here if I didn’t start moving, now.


I stood up and began to lope away, travelling as quickly as possible.  I hoped I could find the flower again if necessary.  I moved fast, returning in half the time it took me to arrive.  Still, I was shivering uncontrollably by the time I reached the airlock.  I stumbled into the greenhouse, which was nice and hot, and flopped down on the floor, breathing hard, and waiting for my body temperature to rise.  After five minutes or so, when my shivering was starting to subside, my oxygen alarm starting dinging, and I climbed to my feet, grabbed my basket, and started through the airlock and down the long hallway to the mess hall.  When I got there, I found that everyone was there.  They were all gathered around the screen in the middle of the table, staring, ashen-faced.   Tom glanced at me, but nobody made any move to explain what was going on. 


I stepped over to the table, peering over their shoulders.  The screen was  filled with a news broadcast.  I watched the lights climb through the air, dropping and blooming.  The television screen was filled with a thousand early sunrises across the world, captioned with only three letters.




      WAR




I watched the Eiffel Tower burn.  Johannesburg, LA, Moscow.  The voice on the television said there had been some kind of accident, and the old Russian doomsday machinery had come to life.  The voice was choked, afraid, stumbling.  We watched.  I stood.  I could do no other.  At some point, it occurred to me that all of this news was at least twenty minutes old, at which point I had to go and be sick.  By the time I got back, the reporters were silent, and the camera views had stopped switching.  All that was left was a constant shot of a city, I don’t know which one.  The cloud still hung heavy overhead, and the fires raged.  We watched for nearly an hour as the cloud dissipated and the fires ran out of things to burn.  Flashes of light out in the distance attested that even now the suns had not stopped rising.


At some point, the camera feed cut out, and all that was left was static.  Somebody turned off the television.  We sat around the table, not talking. 


Eventually, Tom seemed to pull himself together.  He stood up, clapped his hands for attention, and then spoke.


“Okay,” he said, “listen up everyone.  This changes nothing.  We’re still here, and we’re still not going home.  Only difference is, now we know our relief isn’t coming.  We’ve kept ourselves alive this long, and we can keep doing it for as long as we have to.  Evening shift starts in ten minutes.  Move. ”


We moved.  We hated him for it, of course, but I think most of us knew that he was doing what he had to do.  This was the only way we’d survive.   We had to pretend like this didn’t change anything.




Life did go on, though.  It’s almost horrible that how undisturbed it was.  I probably would’ve told them about the plant after a week or two, but just as I was about to, May walked through an airlock without a suit.  Tom told us she’d gotten confused, but we all knew that was bullshit.  She’d gotten out.  After the funeral, I just gave up.   The plant was mine.  If I told them, what would it change? 



Six months later, the jeep broke down for good.  We spent nearly a week working on it non-stop, and finally gave up.  We really only needed the jeep to get to the science station, and we weren’t going to be doing that any more. 




We gave up on the foundry project the day before the two year anniversary of the war.  Jung had started sleeping with a radio in his bed, listening to the static.  A little while after that, he had to be forcibly restrained and treated for a nervous breakdown.  He kept thinking he heard voices in the noise.  After that I snuck a radio into my quarters.  I didn’t hear anything.  My visits to the plant had faded to one a month, then once every two.  It kept growing, ever so slowly.  The flowers in the flowerbox died.  I’d forgotten about them.  One of the solar panels crapped out, and nobody fixed it. 


On the day after Tom died, I walked out to the plant for the first time in six months.  It was right in the middle of morning shift.  Nobody cared.  They hadn’t cared before Tom breathed a lungful of dust, as lethal as ground glass, and they didn’t care after.  I hadn’t spoken to any of them in weeks, and I left without a word.  Somebody had switched the decompression protocol off, so I watched as a roomful of nitrogen vanished into the void.  When I got to the plant, I found something unexpected.  The plant had launched seeds during my absence.  Perhaps it was not a plant at all, but more a fungus.  In any case, a dozen new young plants had appeared around it, each long stalk tipped with a dark blue bud. 



They spread quickly, after that, each new generation seeding within days.  We were living in our rooms by then, without even a pretense of cooperation.  You could easily see them from the compound by then.  I don’t know what the others thought they were.  The meat crops had died, and a puddle of dried coffee had built up under the machine.  The algae racks had streaks of brown, and the plants grew wild.  Sid was pregnant.  By who, she wouldn’t say. 


 Sid wasn’t pregnant anymore.   The airlock on the mess hall had cracked a seal and didn’t close right anymore.  Dust began to blow in even as air leaked out.  Another solar panel failed and power became intermittent at best.  Nearly nobody left their rooms anymore unless they ran out of food.  I walked out every day to see the blue flowers.  It wasn’t much of a walk.  They were nearly to the airlock.


 Nitrogen loss was coming back to bite us.  Jung wandered out of his room, laughing hysterically, and tried to eat some of the dust coating the floor.  He got sick after that, and died a few weeks later.  Now we avoided the mess hall out of necessity.  The dust on the floor was toxic, and all of us developed an ugly cough not long after. 

People started dying a lot after that.  Eventually, we stopped burying the bodies.  Just left them in their rooms and sealed the doors.  At some point, it was just me.  I don’t know why.  Perhaps it was all the time I spent out with the flowers – taking samples and studying them in the clean air of the suit.  Whatever the reason, I was the only one left.  I had made some interesting discoveries, though.  The oldest of the flowers, now as tall as sapling trees, have begun to develop yellow-white bulbs at the ends of their leaves.  The oldest tree is nearly ripe, and the fruit moves.


Perhaps this is all just oxygen poisoning.  Perhaps I am delirious, and there never was such a plant.  If it is poisoning, then I hope it continues for just a little longer.  Because as I stand here alone in the dead greenhouse, hands freezing to the icy walls, I think of home and I am content.  I stare out at the field of blue flowers extending to every horizon, punctuated by strange trees with white, swollen fruit, and I feel that I might walk among those fields of bluebells, breathing the sweet summer fumes, walking over flowers under foreign skies.