It was the day the world ended.  I was watching television in my room.  A re-run of Gilligan’s Island, I believe.  Don’t bother commenting on the irony; believe me, I’m well aware.  This far from home, bandwidth was at a premium, so all we got was old canned TV.  I could have specially-requested newer programming, but the newer dramas were a bit political for my taste.  When the episode ended and they were marooned, again, on the island, I shut the TV off and noted my reflected in the glass.

I assessed.  Not handsome, never was.  Still, it could be worse.  I was looking better these days; tanned, healthier, more muscular.  When I’d first arrived, I had been gaunt and pale, 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 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.


All the same, I was glad that was over.  Long distance space travel was for the birds.  A million things could go wrong and kill you, and a million more couldn’t, but might anyway.  Even if everything went perfectly, there were still consequences to being mostly dead for a year and a half.  Bone loss, hair loss, malnutrition, organ damage, oxygen hysteria, radiation poisoning, the works.  Forget what the movies told you, space travel is hell.  Try spending a year locked in a chest freezer if you think otherwise.  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 on the island for good.     



My room was still dark.  Theoretically, I was still sleeping.  I had forty five minutes until morning reveille.  The lights were on a timed circuit to come on by themselves, and the TV would play a video of a 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 net 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 Earth side international tensions had suspicious holes. 



I groaned, rolled out of bed, and went to check my schedule on the calendar.  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 more spare parts.  The jeep was already a twisted mess of ugly fixes, duct tape, and improvised repairs.  We’d already cannibalized one of the old rovers for components.  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.  That was well behind schedule as well. 

I laid back down, staring at the mylar ceiling, imagining 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 got stuck in the pressure weave and stained the uniforms the color of dirty urine.  Still, they would keep your internal organs where they belonged if something happened.

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 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 inside 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 were 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 I 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.  Pure oxygen was toxic.  You could get sick, euphoric, even start hallucinating.    You needed an inert gas to make up the other seventy percent of your atmosphere.  If we really wanted to we could have used helium, but that had the side effect of making us talk like cartoon rabbits.  That way lay madness, so we used nitrogen, which we could filter out of the atmosphere. It took a while, though, so you always had to be careful about how much you were losing.


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 like wet paint 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 like shit. 

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 brink 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 ice 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 their 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 and mylar cubes of the private rooms; the foundry, half finished; the hallways leading out to the greenhouse and solar arrays.  Off 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 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 temperatures, 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.   Put a lot of water into the soul.  Maybe we’d thawed something out.  Holy hell, this could be 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 into the long hallway to the mess hall. 

 

I pulled the bag off, and turned a dial on the rebreathers to start recharging from the ship’s atmosphere.  Then I checked my watch, again, and headed back 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 watched.  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 a test pattern, and then just 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 certainly didn’t care, and nobody was left to receive our results if we sent them. 

We gave up on the foundry project a week 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 started waking up screaming.  He had to be restrained for a while until he calmed down.  We treated him for a nervous breakdown as best we could, but May was the shrink.  He kept saying 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.   No, more like spores.  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 blew in.  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, 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 when, exactly.  I don’t know why, either.  Maybe 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’ve 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.  They are so lovely, and I feel that I might walk among those fields of bluebells, breathing the sweet summer fumes, walking over flowers under foreign skies.