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“Grace! Why you no say plants are on Hail Mary, question?!”
The question puts me on my back foot. Literally. I jog up to the door after my morning run to find Rocky waiting for me on my side of the house, suited up and ticked off. I rock back on my heel.
“Huh?”
“What you mean ‘huh’, is simple question! Why no mention plants on Hail Mary when almost die of two berry disease and pirate sickness?!”
“No bud, I heard you the first time,” I scoff, shaking my head ruefully. He gets under my feet, tapping at my thighs with his claws to annoy me while I toe off my running shoes. “Hey, quit— quit it! You’ve gotta be confused, the only plant matter on the Hail Mary was the food in my meals, and that’s years gone.”
He makes a frustrated chittering noise as he follows me into the house. I glance at the clear xenonite wall in the sitting room and see no one. Adrian is probably out and about already, doing girlboss stuff.
“No, not true!” Rocky scolds, climbing up to the loft behind me. An accusatory claw pokes the back of my calf while I’m stripping off my shirt to change. I have class in an hour and I won’t let Rocky’s presence delay my morning routine; not when “”modesty”” around him is both arbitrary and pointless. We’ve lived together for years and he can see through walls, he doesn’t give a crap whether I’m clothed or not.
He continues scolding me even as I’m changing. “Found plants in gold plates on walls in Hail Mary! Plants the whole time!”
That draws me up short. I stop dead in the middle of the room with my dirty shirt still tangled around my elbows. I stare at him.
“What?”
“Grace just say ‘what’ to be annoying or say ‘what’ because no understand, question?! You stupid today, statement.”
“Wha— I— no, I don’t understand. D’you mean the carvings of plants in the golden record? Those aren’t schematics of how to make a plant, they’re just pictures. It’s for posterity. I know I explained the golden record thing to you, are you sure you’re feeling okay?”
Any kind of memory loss is an indication of serious illness or stress in Eridians. But Rocky just shakes a fist at me and chitters with pure wordless frustration. Then, to my surprise, he flicks on the full translator in his suit.
“Do you think we’re stupid? I’m not messing with you! Most serious! I saw them myself! There were plant seeds in a compartment behind the golden record this whole time, and human blood samples and many other preserved artifacts. We found them while we were servicing the electrical back there.”
The breath goes out of my chest like I’ve just been punched in the solar plexus. I fumble and catch myself on the side table before my knees give out. I sink onto the bedspread and rest my elbows on my thighs, hands folding in front of my mouth.
“Oh my god… the whole time?!”
“Did you seriously not know they were there?”
“N-no, I had no idea!!” I shrill. “Clearly I would’ve said something if I’d known!!”
“How could you not know? You built the Hail Mary! And even after you lost your memory, you had the schematics in the ship computer the whole time!”
Rocky and I spend another twenty minutes chasing each other through the house and yelling semi-incoherently while I rip through the annals of my computer in search of the Hail Mary schematics. I could’ve sworn I went over every inch of them at some point or another during our long journey to Erid. How could I have missed this?! I have to remind Rocky several times that I don’t have any kind of echolocation to tell me about hidden compartments in my ship, and that I have latent brain damage from two comas and a dose of a powerful amnesia drug. Even if I had been part of the decision-making process for the Hail Mary’s golden record contents, it’s not surprising that I don’t remember. I still don’t remember my own mother’s maiden name, or where the heck I lost my sunglasses last week. (Rocky made those for me, I’m still very upset that I can’t find them.)
It takes Adrian’s return home and several minutes of them talking us down with their soothing deep voice, but we eventually calm ourselves so we can review the new discovery together.
The upshot is this:
There are narrow compartments behind each of the three golden record plates in the wall of the Hail Mary’s lab. They went overlooked this whole time because the contents aren’t itemized in the ship manifest. The things are just labeled “golden record No. 1, 2 & 3”. I never looked hard enough at the ship plans to see how much cavity space in the wall those three objects took up. They’re actually sealed boxes which are only revealed when you unscrew the plates and pull the whole thing away. The plates act as lids containing a myriad samples of earth life and DNA. Rocky and the other Eridians who research and maintain the Hail Mary never paid it much mind because, without light-sensing organs, the labels on the samples never stood out to them. And the samples themselves are hermetically sealed glass containers filled with preservative, so they’re not exactly scrutable objects to someone who ‘sees’ with sonar. Rocky knew they were there the entire frigging time on our journey to Erid. He just didn’t know what they were, and since I never brought them up he assumed they weren’t important. He only identified them now because, with the panels pulled away and opened and his curiosity piqued, it occurred to him to “look” at the contents with his camera. The moment he read the labels and realized what they were, he came straight back here.
“Take me there,” I demand breathlessly.
“Grace, darling, you have class,” Adrian reminds me.
“I don’t care. I need to see.”
So Adrian — angel that they are — volunteers to take over teaching that day on my behalf. (Her motivations are partially selfish, I’m sure: being able to claim ‘family emergency’ to get out of yet another political obligation is probably a relief.) Rocky escorts me to the space elevator.
I don’t leave the biodome like this very often. Until recently, I didn’t leave the biodome at all except for rare consultations on the Hail Mary, where I would be taken up the space elevator and spend several days or weeks there helping with repairs or research that the Eridians can't easily do. As for the surface of Erid, I never ventured out in it unless I was in a pressurized 'car'. It took several years to product an exo-suit that was flexible enough for me to move in while still being strong enough to resist 29 atmospheres. It was a low priority compared to the overall issues of food and medicine, then later setting up my teaching schedule. But Rocky finally figured it out a year ago. The suit has been fully tested and everything. The only caveat is that I move painfully slow in it, partially because of the extra gravity, partially because of the extra atmospheric pressure, partially because I have to carry an oxygen tank and air recycler with me whenever I’m out here, and partially because it’s pitch-dark without my BOL (big ole’ lantern). Because of all these things, it’s safer and more efficient for me to use a wheelchair for mobility outside the biodome than to try and walk with the cane. So rather than running along besides Rocky, I roll down the pathways in style!
I appreciate all the work he’s put in to make life here accessible for me. Most of the time it’s easier for the Eridians to come to the biodome than vice versa. Rocky and Adrian live right by me in their own connected home on the Erid side of the facility for that exact reason. But they wanted me to have the option to leave the biodome at will, both for my safety and on principle. Rocky never wanted me to feel trapped again. I can’t say I disagree with the sentiment.
He guides me and my lamp down to the trackways that run like arteries through the supercluster. I gave this place the English name of “New Houston” as a nod to my homeland’s space program. It’s thematically fitting. Our supercluster is focused almost entirely on astronomy, astrophysics, rocket science, xenobiology, and the industries that surround it, so Rocky and I fit right in. He and Adrian both apparently grew up here and I’ve come to love it too.
Still, despite calling this place home for the past three years, I’m not exactly a common sight on its pathways. Rocky and I draw a lot of attention when we skid into the trackway station, clearly in a rush and on a mission. The workers practically fall over themselves in their eagerness to help us aboard. But I wave them off.
“Thank you, that’s very kind, but there’s no need! We’ve got it!” I smile, leaning against a nearby pillar while Rocky gets my chair locked into one of the trackway ‘cars’. I call it a car, but it’s just a stabilized platform that clamps securely to the trackway to provide a safer, more elevated (albeit slower) place to ride. Rocky designed my wheelchair with an anchor point and tether that hooks into most standard trackway platforms, plus a seatbelt to keep me in the chair, so I can navigate their public transit system on my own. Though he usually likes to accompany me anyway. Such platforms are reserved for handicapped or elderly Eridians who have mobility limitations. Technically I fall into that demographic, so I try not to feel bad about needing the accommodation. (Who knew you could leave an entire star system and still carry its internalized ableism with you!)
Eridians have very few mass-produced ‘vehicles’ in their society. Their six-wheeled vehicles with their hyper-efficient steam engines are reserved for overland travel between hives, which is almost never necessary except for the most remote of settlements. (Or the rare occasion where you’re transporting an alien who needs a sealed atmosphere environment over distances.) Piloting a vehicle at all is a specialized skill, unneeded in the general populace. All clusters in the modern day are absolutely webbed with underground tunnels, connecting amongst themselves and to each other. And most of those major tunnels have trackways, which (to me) are very large, very fast versions of a moving walkway in an airport. Except they have lanes and traffic laws with right of way and everything. Eridians are so sturdy they don’t really need vehicles to navigate the trackways. They just hop onto the belt and skitter along at a much faster clip than they naturally would. And that’s their whole public transit system. Advanced fast-walking.
With the chair tied in, Rocky and I settle down for the thirty-or-so-minute ride. Again we draw a lot of attention from passers-by on the trackway: I’m a bit of a celebrity around here, and Rocky and I are speaking excited pidgin to each other, so we probably look and sound a bit crazy to the average Eridian. As far as I can tell based on the bits of New Houston radio news that I listen to, seeing me in public is a bit like living in Los Angeles and randomly seeing Beyoncé at a crosswalk. I get my own little section in the Eridian equivalent of the celebrity gossip rags, too! They report all kind of inane crap about my day-to-day life as if it’s shocking news. Good to know some cultural fixations are universal between intelligent species.
Finally we get to the space elevator facility, where my face is a bit more familiar. We greet the workers in passing and they wave us through with a few encouraging chirps. Again, Rocky rolls me and my chair up into the elevator for the long ride to the station where the Hail Mary is semi-permanently docked.
The ride takes several hours, during which time I get desperately hungry, thirsty, and have to pee really really bad. This is the other issue with me leaving the biodome: no good way to perform natural functions in my suit. It kinda limits the amount of time I can comfortably spend outside. The trips either need to be very short and slightly uncomfortable for me, or they need to be between one human-habitable area and another. Luckily, all the facilities on the Hail Mary are functional, and the airlocks are quick and easy after years of Eridian scientists coming and going.
In the fractional gravity up here, with my strength returned to me and a frantically homesick sort of hope flaring in my chest, I move like a bolt of lightning. I kick out of the seat of my wheelchair and bound smoothly through the control room to the hatch, with Rocky in his atmosphere suit following shortly behind. I got very used to moving around this ship in the moon-like gravity during my eight months of recovery, so I’m quick and graceful. I leave him behind in the lab and clamber down to the dormitory to relieve myself, ignoring everyone who greets me. Now that I’m free of my atmosphere suit I really have to pee, and drink water.
But I do it fast as heck. Once I’m decent again, I rejoin them all in the lab to see what all the fuss is about. The ship’s lab is much the same as I left it: mostly bare of my old equipment, which has been moved to my planetside lab in the 1G biodome where I can manage my own experiments. I turned half of the ship’s lab space into a sort of makeshift parlor/movie room, with the other half devoted to storage. There’s a small computer lab set up against the wall where the three golden record plates used to be fixed. But all the extra laptops, texture-screen readers, and dexterity tools for visiting Eridians have been moved aside to make room for the electrical servicing. A pair of electrical engineers hang from one of the nearby grips on the ceiling to keep out of the way, chittering excitedly while they watch the xenobiology team pore over the samples spread out across the clean floor. But the scientists all part like water for my arrival, making room and gesturing excitedly with their camera readers.
I stagger to a stop and fall to my knees on the floor. Three large square holes gape open from the aluminum wall, electrical wires spilling out of them like innards. I barely notice. I don’t care. With shaking hands I begin to inspect the samples in their gold casings.
They’re all mounted to the back of the golden record panels, with padded clips so they can be removed and inspected at will. Printed labels on the vials indicate the species of each group of seeds, suspended in preservative in hermetically sealed glass. Tears film over my eyes. I suck in a shuddering breath and dash them away.
They’re all here. Well, not all. There’s a limited amount of space behind each panel and millions of species of life on Earth. One of the three panels seems to be devoted entirely to DNA samples of various earth fauna, some domesticated and some wild. Another is dedicated to insects, fungi, and microbial life. But the third, just like Rocky said, is all plants.
Mint, oregano, basil, sage, rosemary, thyme, dill, parsley, chives, tarragon, cilantro, chamomile, lavender, onions, garlic, lemongrass, spinach, kale, arugala, cabbage, bok choy, tomatoes, peppers, asparagus, eggplants, celery, cucumbers, squashes, melons, pumpkins, radishes, carrots, beets, ginger, turmeric, broccoli, beans, peas, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, grapes, wheat, corn, barley, rice—
There’s flowers too, and grasses, but my eyes keep coming back to the crop plants. I’m so gobsmacked that it takes awhile for my curiosity to come back online, and from there, it takes even longer for my intelligent brain to start puzzling over the myriad questions this discovery raises.
“What Grace thinking, question?” wonders Rocky, who has a casual arm looped around mine. I wipe my leaking face again and sniffle, then clear my throat. All the other Eridians besides Rocky flinch at my grossness, bare to the open air in my own atmosphere, but I pay them no mind.
“I, uh…” my voice warbles wetly. I clear it again. “I’m trying to figure out why they chose some plants and not others. Trees are – are kind of a big deal on Earth, but I’m not seeing many of those.”
Rocky and I sort through the samples together, discussing it amongst ourselves and the xenobiology team. The scientists want to talk about all the other DNA samples too, but I keep coming back to the plants like a needle to a lodestone. I find myself explaining all kinds of things about each plant, their yield, what they look like when grown, what biome they come from, how different cultures on Earth generally prepare and eat them, how they taste — god, it’s enough to choke me up with homesickness. At least the others are polite enough to pretend not to notice when I struggle not to openly weep over a rosebush seed.
Besides the crops there’s a dozen different flowers, some ivies, grasses, small shrubs, plants with woody stems. But no oak, maple, spruce, beech, cedar, aspen, or ginko. No orchard trees — looks like there won’t be any real apples in my classroom after all. Not even a spruce or a pine. You’d think they’d throw a pinecone in there, since evergreen trees constitute a massive percentage of forest acreage around the world. Probably even more since I left: the incoming ice age would’ve killed off huge swathes of the tropics, replacing it with ideal taiga conditions. God, the tropics. Why no mangrove, mahogany, palm, jacaranda? (Or coffee or chocolate? I’m especially pouty about that.) You’d think humanity would want to send preserved samples of the biomes they were about to lose. The other scientists are equally stumped by this, once I explain the discrepancy.
“At least they sent bamboo,” I shrug “That’ll grow like a weed just about anywhere. There are — were? — whole countries on Earth that use bamboo for most practical applications in place of wood. Y’know… Maybe I can get it to root in my biodome if I can nail down a watering syst-“
My eyes widen. I leap up off the floor and smack myself in the forehead, flailing in low G with a squealing Rocky still clinging to my arm. I grapple two of his shoulders into my hands and shake him with excitement.
“Oh my god, ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod Rocky I’m a moron!”
“Yes, I know Grace stupid, but why, question? You excited? What exciting!” He squeals. I’m practically vibrating with joy and it’s infectious. The xenobiology team starts rocking back and forth, also chirping encouragements and questions. I fall back to my knees by the samples and snatch up the bamboo vial, shaking it towards Rocky as if he could ‘see’ what the hell I’m on about.
“BAMBOO!” I shout, grinning like an idiot. “It’s one of the easiest things to grow in just water, any idiot on Earth could stick a fresh shoot in a fishbowl with some rocks and have a healthy plant on their desk in a matter of days!”
“Oh yes yes yes, good good good for Grace to have green growing thing in biodome! You want some place to grow plant, question?”
“No, Rock, you don’t get it: all of these can be grown hydroponically! That’s growth without soil! Some are harder and more costly to grow than others, sure, but this is why Stratt chose these specific plants, and not others. They all grow well in just water!”
I remember now. Well, not exactly remember — it’s more a feeling, a piece of knowledge that was always there in my subconscious, the curtain pulling back now to reveal it. Eva, always a woman of caution and careful planning and redundancy, sent the Hail Mary to space with a near-perfect water recycler that contained three times the water a crew of three would ever need. And she sent a small, secretive reserve of seeds that Yao and Illya knew about, plus everything we’d need to grow them in a lab without soil. She and everyone else on the project had assumed there would be no contact with intelligent alien life, nor would there be any atmospheric re-entry, so the golden records and their samples were mostly posterity things. In case intelligent life ever stumbled across our aimlessly floating ship with our dead bodies in it, and wondered what we are, what were doing so far from home.
But there was a practical application too. There’s always a practical application with Stratt, an edge case to plan for. If for some reason our mission had taken much longer than anticipated, or a portion of our food was lost, destroyed, or spoiled , she wanted us to have some renewable means of supplementing our food stores. Backups. Redundancy. she had a specialized hydroponics team put together these samples of things that were proven to grow in purely water.
It would’ve been great to have frigging remembered this before I almost died of scurvy, but in my defense, I was and still am kind of brain damaged. (Seriously, coma + amnesia drug was NOT your smartest move, Eva.)
“You know what this means?” I yell, throwing my hands up, “We can build a garden!”
Cheering erupts so loudly that the bouncing Eridian voices off the cylindrical walls nearly deafens me, but I don’t care, I don’t care. I’m going to taste a strawberry again. I want to run freaking laps around this ship, I’m so excited.
Don’t get me wrong, the vaguely sweet-tasting nutrient shakes saved my life, and the cloned me-burgers afterwards saved my sanity. But eating the same two things over and over does wear on you eventually. It’s been years since I enjoyed the simple act of eating. Eating, to me, is a chore that I muscle through. My mental health is pretty good all considered — I find other ways to keep myself mentally and emotionally enriched — but that doesn’t stop me from missing the simple pleasures.
And this will be a fantastic opportunity to teach the kids. I could even make a hands-on project out of it!
Then my mind starts to race with the other possibilities, so fast I’m dizzy.
The Eridians mastered cloning based on Earth research, solely for the sake of varying up my diet. Though they have since applied the technology to their own medical and biological research as well, to fantastic results. Adrian is a leading expert in the nascent field of Eridian cloning technology. She’s already in line for recognition by the Entities, a sort of combined equivalent of a Nobel Prize and Medal of Freedom. (Which Rocky and I have already earned, of course; she loves to melodramatically tease us about being left out of the ‘famous heroes’ club, and how she better catch up to us before our heads get too big).
I already know without asking that Eridian scientists are going to clone every single one of these seeds as many times as it takes to get viable embryos. Labs all over the globe will be growing these crops in controlled environments for study. Even if I didn’t want a varied diet, they would be eager to set up a full hydroponic farm simply for the science of it all. And since my biodome is already built and easy to add onto, with me as a convenient built-in technician to maintain it, the greenhouse is a given.
I’m going to have a greenhouse, but more than that, I might actually get a garden! Heck, I might even be able to populate an entire active biosphere around myself! The soil in my dome right now is mostly just loose rock and scree, gravel and sand and silt and clay: enriched with minerals and elements, but nearly-sterile. With almost none of the vast array of nitrogen-fixing bacteria, fungi, root systems, and decomposition processes that make dirt into soil, it’s barren in there.
But Stratt didn’t just send seeds. She sent bacterial cultures and fungal spores. She sent samples of insect eggs which, with any luck, could be cloned into a population of pollinators. Maybe I’ll taste honey again before I die! And best of all, she sent me: a living breathing biome of my own, containing multitudes.
There’s already a store of several years’ worth of my waste composting in septic chambers under the biodome. Adrian insisted on keeping everything on the off chance that it could be turned into fertilizer, the bacterial cultures sampled and studied, or any other use that might crop up. While I thought it was kind of gross at the time, I didn’t see the harm in agreeing so long as I didn’t have to participate in the sewage management. But now I’m so glad she did. With some experimentation, we might actually be able to create soil. Real, bioactive, fertile soil, and not just a few scientific little samples. We might manage to create it en masse.
It might take years. It might even take decades. It might not happen at all. There’s every possibility of failure. Any one of these seeds may have spoiled in the years since they were first preserved. Cloning fails all the time, often for no discernible reason. On earth, the biological pioneering process to turn bare volcanic islands into living biospheres can take thousands of years and thousands of different hardy extremophile organisms working together. We only have hundreds of organisms, and a measly couple of decades before Erid’s built-in gardener and resident Earth Life expert kicks the bucket.
But that’s when evolution is left to her own devices. Here, she has help. We can take the top few layers of stone that make up my home’s rolling hills, and grind it to the kind of semi-fine dirt that most plants need to support their roots. The same can be done with my pebbly sand. The lichen that populates the space has already created a thin but soft carpet of new growth over rot over new growth, the beginnings of a topsoil layer composting over time. The water in my ‘ocean’ has a light teal tint to it from the flourishing algal population; it’ll be even brighter once we get the phytoplankton samples bred and released into it, enriching the air with oxygen that I can then turn back into carbon dioxide. (We may even need to add carbon dioxide in order to feed the sheer volume of photosynthesis, but that’s no trouble in Erid’s thick atmosphere). I can already picture a carpet of grasses shaping my beach into dunes… a forest of bamboo shading the hills… tilled rows of vegetables, trellises of fruit on vines, constantly flowering and bursting with life. All we’d need to do is turn the temperature up a little bit for a few months at a time, to imitate a shift between a ‘colder’ spring-ish growing season and a ‘warmer’ summer-ish growing season.
It’ll be like my own little Stardew Valley farm, I think hysterically. Then I pause and think again.
No… it’ll be Erid’s own little terrarium.
The idea strikes me to my core.
Teaching here on Erid has already given my life new meaning. Even if my original mission was unsuccessful and the Beatles didn’t make it — I’ll have no way of knowing, not for another decade at least — even if Earth is long dead and I’m the last human alive in the universe, I will have taught someone about the world that was lost. My Eridian students will carry pieces of it through the rest of their lives, and perhaps teach it to their children.
But information has a way of twisting over time, without evidence to preserve it. Fact becomes apocryphal legend becomes outright fiction. When I die in a mere few decades, all that will remain of me here on Erid is the stories and the knowledge. Nothing physical, aside from the technology Erid adopted from us, and the empty cavern of a biodome where I once lived. Sure, human science has re-shaped their society and even the face of their planet, but only after passing through the lens of Eridian needs, environment, and capabilities. Their memories are long, their history deep and well-recorded, but time degrades all.
This, on the other hand, would be an immortally living, breathing environment: self-sustaining so long as a few key systems are maintained, flourishing with its own life cycle, things being born and living and dying and decaying and being born, Mother Earth’s own children carefully established and nurtured by one of her native stewards, then left behind as a gift to her neighbor… a place where future generations of Eridians can visit and study and wonder… a garden of Eden preserved for them in a bubble, a gift from me to the people who adopted me as their own, who took care of me, who gave me everything…
I imagine Rocky and Adrian’s future children wandering through a lush field of grass and wildflowers, playing in the simulated sunlight and the wind, their claws leaving three-fingered prints in the dirt with their atmosphere suits, their tiny legs scrambling all over my gravestone while their parents reminisce. Maybe it’s a morbid and selfish thing to want. But the knowledge that I will be loved and missed after I’m gone, that I will have left behind something beautiful and worthwhile…
I know my constant face-leaking makes most Eridians uncomfortable. But this is important, okay?! I’m having a moment. So I sniffle and smile and let it happen anyway. All that from a few seed samples! I’m getting ahead of myself, I know, but I can’t help it. I already feel like home here on Erid. This is my chance to make more than a home. This could be my magnum opus.
Rocky crawls into my arms with a croon while the xenobiologists flit back and forth between the plant samples and the computers, already researching hydroponics systems and photosynthesis. I hug him back and he lets me cry on his atmosphere suit like always.
“Happy tears?” He wonders. I nod, my cheek squeaking a bit against the warm glassy surface of the suit.
“Happy tears.”
…
We carefully label the samples with textures the xenobiologists can read before we remove them from the golden records. Some of these plants have highly specific needs even in hydroponics; best not to mix them up. Then we load them into a pressurized container for the descent to the surface. It’s been decided that for now, I’ll be the primary technician handling the seeds. I’m not a botanist, but the xenobiologists can guide me remotely while I handle these delicate things in their native atmosphere, rather than risk exposure or damage to them. I’ll probably spend a lot of time in my lab for the next few months, helping with the cloning process until we have a large and healthy body of seeds to work with, and backups in case of crop failure.
With the golden records re-installed in their rightful places in the wall of the lab, I clutch my case of samples close to my chest like the priceless thing it is. I can’t help but pause in the Hail Mary’s airlock as we leave. I turn to look back into the darkening ship.
After I first arrived on the surface of Erid, I was reluctant to ever come back up here. The thought of going back to space after everything it put me through was daunting, and I feared that returning to the ship — the locus of so much of my trauma — would be triggering.
But then one day, six months after I had settled into my planetside home, I got the itch. The astronaut’s itch. I thought bittersweetly of the day I told my old friends that I couldn’t do this. ‘I’m not an astronaut,’ I said. Cried. Begged.
Look at me now, I later thought from within my trusty old Orlan, sitting on the bow of my ship where I could watch the whole of the Eridani system go by. Doing an EVA just because I missed the stars. In the shining blue light of Erid’s rings — a glorious sight I could never even begin to describe to the planet’s own inhabitants — I felt at peace.
I feel that same sense of peace in this moment when I reach into my pocket where the little bamboo vial is. For some reason I just couldn’t part with it when we loaded the sample case. I had slipped it into my jumpsuit for safekeeping. When my hand wraps around the body-warm glass, I feel a swell of nearly paternal love for this ship that brought me home. Sure, I can’t really hang out in the dormitory for long without feeling like trapped animal in a cage, and the control room still bears the scars from the planet Adrian. But the Hail Mary was my shepherd and protector as much as she was my prison. And now here she is, imparting yet another gift from our Mother Earth to me.
“Thank you, Mary,” I whisper. I lean over and press my lips to the aluminum doorframe in a sentimental kiss.
“You’re welcome, Doctor Grace,” she says back as always, and I imagine that her computerized voice sounds fond.
“Grace coming, question?” calls the other half of my home from down the tunnel. I smile affectionately. I turn and leave, the airlock sealing shut behind me.
“Yeah yeah, I’m coming. Pushy.”
…
Two months later I taste the sharp, spicy bite of a fresh basil leaf on my tongue for the first time since I left Earth, and I weep with joy.