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“Thus says the Lord GOD:
On the day that I cleanse you from all your iniquities,
I will cause the cities to be inhabited,
and the waste places shall be rebuilt.
And the land that was desolate shall be tilled,
instead of being the desolation that it was
in the sight of all who passed by.
And they will say,
‘This land that was desolate
has become like the garden of Eden,
and the waste and desolate and ruined cities
are now fortified and inhabited.’
Then the nations that are left all around you
shall know that I am the LORD;
I have rebuilt the ruined places
and replanted that which was desolate.
I am the LORD; I have spoken, and I will do it.
—Ezekiel 36:33-36
They almost seemed to have a sort of religion, in Eden, around the tree.
“The last tree,” Etho told him, as if he didn’t already know. “It’s gone, now.” He turned the little glass circle over in his hands, tracing the outline of the seed encased within. All the Edenites seemed to carry them. Even though he didn’t live there anymore, Etho guarded his zealously. He wore it on a band around his wrist at all times, from chores around the ship to free time, like this, curled in their pitiful bunks with a meager light between them. Gotta save resources, after all. Not many left.
“Why bother with that thing, then?” Bdubs asked him. “It’s not gonna come back to life if you stare at it long enough.” Maybe that was what went wrong in Eden, why they were all psycho now. Their object of worship, their last desperate hope had abandoned them, and they couldn’t face reality. Everything was gone. Stars. Planets. People. Trees. The quiet rapture took them. Now there were just a few battered space stations left, slowly running out of resources and no way to get more. Not a single habitable rock in the whole universe. Bdubs wondered why anyone bothered to keep trying to survive when it was never going to get them anywhere. And yet, he still got up in the morning and did his tasks. Talked to Etho. Sometimes, Etho even talked back.
Etho looked down at the seed in his hands. “This isn’t dead,” he said. “It can still—we can find a place for it to grow. It’s just waiting to be planted. That’s all.”
“You think?” Bdubs asked. He didn’t know anything about plants, really, other than the pictures on his wall, cut out from old world magazines and pasted wherever he could find space—any speck of green he could find to make his little world feel more alive. Still, he doubted that thing could really be extracted from its artificial shell and brought back to life. Etho’s face when he pointed this out, however, was enough to make him regret the comment. “I made it,” the man said, his good eye glimmering with something Bdubs would rather not put a name to. “I came out all right, so there has—there’s got to be—“
What? Hope?
Maybe. Bdubs didn’t know what happened in the Iron Lung, the little burner submarine where Etho was trapped for days, lost beyond their radars in the depths of a cursed ocean that shouldn’t exist. Etho didn’t talk about it to him or any other members of the crew, so all he had to go on is rumors. They said he found something down there, something to do with the quiet rapture. Certainly, the higher-ups had been been busy at work ever since he had returned, and Captain Xisuma had really only been down here to check Etho out of the infirmary and introduce him to the crew. This is Etho. He’s one of us, now. Not a proclamation to be made lightly.
Bdubs would never forget the ghost-like man, one eye bandaged, the other vacant and haunted, a far cry from the self-possessed, defiant prisoner who’d been dragged out of his cell days before to be welded into a shoddy submarine.
He wouldn’t speak for weeks after. Still didn’t much, except when he was in the grasp of his nightmares. It was the main reason he was Bdubs’ roommate. No one else wanted to share with the ex-convict from Eden who screamed in his sleep. It was better than it used to be, largely because Bdubs knew to wake him up now. Still, it was hard to describe him as all right. Bdubs wasn’t cruel enough to tell him that, though.
“You really think we’ll find a place?” he asked instead. Personally, Bdubs didn’t have a lot of hope, but Etho had seen things, even if he didn’t talk about them. The way people ran around when the sub had been found, the excitement when he was brought up implied some sort of discovery. They were still busy, Doc and Impulse and the other scientists, with whatever Etho had found, even months later. Not that it had done anything to improve Bdubs’ lot in life, but whatever.
And no one had said it out loud, but Bdubs knew enough to know that Etho had gone down with enough oxygen for a few hours at best. How’d he survive days down there? How’d they lose track of him in the first place? How’d he cut his face open like that?
Etho was silent, turning the seed over in his hands.
“I don’t know what to believe,” he said finally. “She—she talked about light. Said it caused the quiet rapture. I only saw it on the x-ray camera, so I don’t—she was messing with me. She could have made it all up. I don’t know . . .”
“Who?” asked Bdubs, running through scientists he knows in his head. Doc, Tango, Impulse, Mumbo. Most of them were guys, though. Gem, maybe? He didn’t know her well, but he thought she was the sort who would mess with people, especially an Edenite. Did Etho know Gem? “What are you talking about?”
Etho paused mid-ramble and looked at him. “Are you real?” he asked point-blank. “Am I still in the sub, and you’re still messing with me?”
As far as Bdubs knew, Etho had gone down there all alone. He was the only one they could spare, a captive from a rival ship, because they’d already lost so many when Eden wrecked the filament station . . .
Etho was technically partially responsible for that, and maybe Bdubs should hate him for it. Some of the other crewmates did, no matter what Xisuma said. It was hard to hate a ghost of a man, though. All Bdubs could think was that if it were him, alone in a mysterious sea of blood on some remote moon, he’d lose it a little, too. Etho didn’t have any fighting spirit left, now. And engineers were valuable. Etho knew how to fix engines and cooling systems and the ice cream machine, one of the only things on this ship that made life worth living. Bdubs could tolerate it if he was a little bit mad.
“I’m real,” he assured.
Etho didn’t look entirely convinced, but he nodded anyway.
“A god looking in through a window,” he murmured, as if to himself, “trying to understand.”
“Huh?” said Bdubs because usually Etho’s odd statements at least made a modicum of sense, a thread he could pull to keep the conversation going in a direction he could follow. That was just total nonsense, and Bdubs didn’t know how to respond. Was it some Edenite cult thing? They believed in some sort of god, he presumed.
“Light,” Etho said, tapping their little old-fashioned lantern, “but no stars.”
Oh, he was talking about the quiet rapture. Technically, they couldn’t see that the stars were gone, but everything else was, so it made sense. The ghost light they were seeing now was emitted before everything disappeared. Eventually, it would run out, and nothing would take its place, and they would all be floating through space in the dark. Assuming anyone was still alive at that point.
“So they say,” Bdubs agreed. He wasn’t sure what rehashing it all would do, but Etho’s face was twisted in thought. He looked—intense, almost, the way he usually only looked when maintenancing wires or solving whatever weird problems engineers dealt with.
“Oceans of blood,” Etho continued. “Human blood, but no bodies. How does that work? And how does it stay in liquid form?”
“Don’t we all want to know?” Bdubs griped. It was the strangest and creepiest part of it all, the blood moons. Four of them, now, and no answers yet. Even if there were, what good would they do? Not like it would fix anything.
Etho wasn’t deterred. “Moons, but no planets.” He fixed Bdubs with that intense, thoughtful look. “Ships, but no spaceports. People, but no home. Don’t you see? Effects, but not causes. Emissions, but no source material. She doesn’t understand the difference. No concept of how things relate to each other.”
“What are you talking about?” Bdubs asked again with growing concern. “Who is she?” She was obviously not a scientist, but he wasn’t seeing another reasonable explanation. And it was—he didn’t mind that Etho was crazy, but it was—uncomfortable. Bdubs didn’t know what to do, sometimes, when Etho started wandering off into nonsense-land. He already said so very little.
“The thing in the ocean. She talked to me.” Etho squinted at him. “You don’t get it? We’re in a terrarium. I’ve said it before.”—He hadn’t, actually; Bdubs had no idea what he was on about—“A few space ships or the rest of the universe? It makes more sense to believe that we’ve disappeared, not everyone else.
“She said she could bend reality to suit her understanding, so what we’re seeing here is her attempts to understand us. She doesn’t get how things relate to each other, so it’s all disconnected. I guess she got tired of trying to make it work and brought some of us here to study. We’re like this”—he held up the seed—“in a box for viewing. It’s not the environment we’re meant to flourish in because she doesn’t know what we need or how to make it. Or maybe she doesn’t care.” He shrugged. “She probably doesn’t know she’s being malicious. I don’t think? Not the way we would understand malice. I mean, she definitely wanted to kill me. I’m really not sure how I—Oh, you think I’m crazy.”
“Yeah,” Bdubs told him, not one to mince words. He’d never seen Etho ramble like this, and it would almost be endearing if it weren’t blatantly obvious that he was off his rocker. Maybe some part of his theory made some sense, but Bdubs doubted he somehow heard something talking to him from outside a submarine—even if anything was alive down there, how would it speak submerged in a liquid? And how would Etho be able to hear it through a wall of metal? Bdubs might not be a scientist, but he did understand basic physics. “Did you tell Skizz you’re hearing voices?” he asked. “Was it just in the sub, or is it still happening?”
Etho sighed. “Skizz is a medic,” he said, “not a therapist. Just—forget it. Not like we can do anything about it. And I’m not sure you’re real, anyway.”
He went back to fiddling with the seed, the spinning circle of glass throwing lamplight in various directions. Shame the seed was dead, Bdubs thought. He’d like to see a tree one day.
Maybe that was why Etho was crazy. He couldn’t find hope in the real world, so he had to make something up. Bdubs couldn’t really blame him for that one. As long as he kept fixing the ice cream machine, Etho could think whatever he liked until they all dwindled away into nothing.