The Journey Prize Stories 28
Page 13
No contest this time.
I’m writing in the garden, the only place I can stand to be now. The fibre-optic strands funnel in the scant sunlight, and the plants give off a slight humidity that makes breathing just a bit easier. They grow surprisingly well here, as I expect James documented in much more technical detail. Aside from the cold, the red planet is naturally kind to them, with plenty of subsurface water and minerals in the dust that, mixed with our compost, provide all the nourishment they need. About the garden: I should tell you a few things, in case James forgot to mention them, in case you come and no one’s left. For example, it is important to blow on the carrot tops. In the still air they droop, weakened, until they touch the ground and turn yellow. But a little breath, like the breezes from home, seems to give them the strength to grow sturdy and green.
I will do my best to remember anything else that you might not think of on your own and leave notes for you. Just in case.
I’m dreading moving James’s body. For one thing, it means putting on my space suit. Also awkward and silver, like the sheets. It has always annoyed me that everything in space is silver. As though all the imagination got used up on the mechanics of things, with nothing left over for colours and textures. He’s light enough after being sick all these months that I could probably carry him, but I’ll use a cart anyway. It wouldn’t do to throw my back out, being alone.
I’ll need to be much more careful from now on.
—
I’m back in the garden, and it’s done. James is outside with the others. The botanist has joined the two medical doctors and gaggle of engineers frozen naked and staring empty-eyed up into eternity.
And then there was only the psychologist.
The most useless and unskilled of the entire group, but someone at Headquarters must have thought it would be a good idea to include one. Five hundred years ago they would have sent a Jesuit along on an expedition like this, but in 2042 they wanted a PsyD. And now here I am. Who would have bet on this old girl to be the last?
About the arrangement of the bodies: Headquarters told us to preserve them for future research, but they didn’t give specifics. I wonder what those hypothetical future researchers will make of our artistry. Maybe they’ll think we invented some new religion, when the truth is it was only a mix of aesthetic pleasure-seeking and boredom. We started out lining them up, but later someone—I think Sonny, the water engineer—had the idea we should arrange them in a circle, with toes touching. Back then the circle was only a little more than half formed. Now there’s just one wedge left, for me, although I don’t know how I’ll get to it when the time comes.
I took my time getting ready to move James. The death-smells of emptied bowels and decomposing tissue, I’ll be honest, made me retch, but I lingered anyway, knowing these would likely be the last human odours I would ever breathe, apart from my own. Outside, I jumped on his knees to break them so his legs would go straight like the others’, and when they cracked under my feet I nearly threw up in my helmet. I should have positioned him when I first woke, when he was still a little warm and the rigour had not yet set in, instead of wasting time writing and crying in the garden. I would say I’ll know better for next time, but there won’t be a next time, will there?
—
It’s occurred to me I may seem a little flippant about James’s death, and I apologize if anyone’s left who cared for him and is offended, as unlikely as that is. After all, those of us who came on this one-way trip were chosen partly for our lack of human ties to the blue-green planet. Enticed here by advertisements hinting at adventure and new beginnings, perhaps not unlike those that lured my third great-grandparents from England to their Saskatchewan homestead two centuries ago.
Though James and I were alone for over a year, I still feel I hardly knew him, and for that I’m sorry. He was a soft-spoken man. He had a wife and child once, I think, killed in a car accident on a Florida holiday in the 20s. He liked spinach and backgammon. I will miss him.
—
About the bamboo: I don’t expect you to bring all the machinery and materials to make sheets or even to know where to begin with that whole process. We’ll find other uses, food to start, though I admit I like the idea that one day, even after I’m gone, bamboo sheets will exist on the red planet. I can’t say what insights and lucky coincidences and inventions will be required between now and then. I just have faith the mere imagining that something’s possible can be enough to set it on the trajectory to being. Like Da Vinci’s helicopter sketches. They waited four and a half centuries on paper, but the day came when they flew.
Anyone reading this should be aware there won’t be many more messages, maybe none. The solar cells that power the transmitter are failing. James noticed and warned me about this a few months back. At least the water and air systems are holding, even though all the parts were supposed to have been replaced years ago by later missions. The ones that never came, let me remind you.
“Delayed” was the official word. “Budget cuts” the truth, revealed in one final unsigned message, right before Headquarters shut everything down. After some discussion, we agreed to keep that last transmission a secret to avoid getting anyone else in trouble. However, after revisiting the issue with the surviving red planet settlers, i.e., myself, I’ve decided after all this time to spill it.
Whichever board or committee made the decision to cut us off knew it was our death sentence. Of course, they also knew they could get away with it. Who would have bothered to organize protests and petitions? Who would have cared, given our lack of human ties to the blue-green planet?
All I want is some shred of accountability. I don’t expect you to do anything about it now, but it makes me feel better to know you know I know. If you’re even reading this.
—
That’s all for now. The carrots need my breath. / cmb
Send
Red Jacket, Assiniboia East. September 8, 1885
Dear Sister,
I regret I have not been able to write to you since my last letter from Montreal. We have had much to do to secure provisions and make a cabin livable for winter, which our neighbours who arrived two years ago tell me is fierce and long in this part of the country. The journey was as the agent forewarned: the prairies seem endless, days and days to cross by train, and, I’m told, they continue days more to the west of us all the way to the Rocky Mountains. For now, we live under a warm sun and cloudless blue sky, with green and golden fields all around save a stand of trees they call cottonwood along the small creek that runs nearby. Your nephews are growing strong with hard work, fresh air, and sunshine, and your nieces lovelier by the day as every breath fills their lungs with Nature’s raw beauty.
Lucille is finding the conditions harsh, I fear, and suffering for the lack of female company. I assure you the cabin is no poorer than some of the lodgings you and I knew in our childhood, but it must be remembered my wife was raised with more comforts than you and me, and it is to be expected she would find this change in her circumstances difficult. I thought she was bearing it admirably until the last of our trunks arrived and we discovered the one containing all the quilts, so carefully stitched over countless evenings, had gone missing. I do believe her heart broke at that moment. In a poor effort to raise her spirits, I joked I would ride off every dawn to hunt buffalo and wolves until I gathered enough pelts for us all to have as fine sleeping robes as any Sioux chief, but I fear this only caused her more distress. I am sorry necessity required me to trade Mother’s little pewter pin box, among other small treasures, for a few of the Hudson’s Bay Company blankets. I do hope you will forgive me this loss. Our new blankets are plain, but made from heavy wool that will keep us warm in our beds through the winter.
I must end here, Dear Sister. The trader who has kindly agreed to deliver this letter to Moosomin Station will soon depart. I trust you and Jimmy and my little nieces are well and wish you good health until I may write again.
Your devot
ed brother,
J.M.B.
08.04.2070 station 1 / I saw what you did.
I’m not even sure where to start this report now. From the beginning, I guess.
The latest dust storm ended overnight, and today I was able to get out to complete all the routine checks and maintenance. The winds were especially fierce, and the cleanup took much more time than usual. First, I climbed the outside of the dome over the garden to sweep off the solar panels. The station’s layout from that perspective reminds me of a medieval cathedral, one that endured extensive additions and renovations every hundred and fifty years. A few saints and gargoyles would fit nicely. My dusting job worked: the lights have stopped flickering now.
Next I went down to the main roof to inspect for the beginnings of fractures or other damage. Nothing to report. The robots who assembled the station before our arrival clearly took pride in their craftsmanship. They’ve all long since been pillaged for their parts, donating their vital organs to keep water pumps and climate control systems operating. To keep us humans alive. I know they weren’t sentient (I haven’t gone crazy, if that’s what you were thinking), but it seems unfair to me how they ended up despite all their diligence and industriousness.
After the roof, I walked the building perimeter. No damage to the walls either. They are smooth and the same silver as my suit, designed to be easily visible from approaching vessels—the ones you never sent. They glow reddish orange in the faint sunlight.
Last, I visited each of the solar panels arrayed around the station. Again, no damage, just in need of cleaning. All the storage cells are in good shape, except for those connected to the transmitter. Very little charge left—this may well be the last time you hear from me. If anyone’s left to hear. After what you did.
By the time I finished my spit and polishing, sunset was near and both moons had risen. I checked on my fellow settlers, also dusty, but otherwise as I last left them. The summer breezes will blow them clean again.
Eight women and eleven men, a mandala for the stars to gaze down upon. The oldest ones, from twenty years ago, are desiccated but otherwise intact. They will start to thaw in a few weeks, but in these anaerobic conditions they don’t decompose, and most nights they will refreeze anyway. No wild animals to feast on them and scatter their bones. No worms to eat them from the inside out. They will be here like this until our swollen red sun swallows the solar system, then explodes everything into stardust to start it all over.
I have a childhood memory of a brief stop on a long road trip at a graveyard somewhere between the Qu’Appelle and Assiniboine rivers, near the Manitoba border. Weathered tombstones, some sinking into the soggy ground, others toppled over on their faces and lying under two inches of water. Wind snaking through the flooded grasses and shaking the tops of the cottonwoods. Somewhere beneath the watery surface, the blind, muddy bones of ancestors born on the other side of the Atlantic, who once must have found solace standing or kneeling in that quiet patch of earth on the outskirts of their village. As we who came here found solace in our mandala.
I still had nearly an hour of oxygen left. I lay down in my wedge as I sometimes do and nudged my frozen neighbours in greeting. The twenty of us all together again. The mandala complete. Jupiter rising between the two moons, and the shimmer of the terrifyingly near asteroid belt between us and our giant neighbour.
Spring is here and the days are lengthening. About –10 degrees now, quite bearable compared to the typical –103 winter’s day. If only I could take my suit off.
Spring. Olfactory memory is the strongest and the most easily recovered. I conjured up the smells of late April on the blue-green planet. Fresh grass in wet peat. Melting dog shit. Half-decomposed leaves. Thirty years, with no idea what spring smells like here. If I ever do find out it will be with my last breath. Death by hypercapnia, which I imagine to be quick and painless although I don’t know for sure, since none of us went that way.
They screened us for suicidal tendencies, of course. Even now, despite what you did, I have no intention of hastening the end of my life. I am far too curious about the possible endings to this strange story of mine, and all the moments in between.
But if there were a way to arrange it, if I could be sure I was about to die from say, a massive heart attack within the next 120 seconds, and if I could only have the time to strip naked, then hold my breath long enough to run out the door, lie down, and get into position with the others, I would. From my place in the circle I would open my eyes wide and inhale through my nostrils, sacrificing the few seconds I might have had remaining just to grasp that one last bit of knowledge.
The blue-green planet twinkled a few degrees above the horizon, becoming brighter and more distinct as the sun sank and disappeared. I lifted my hand and waved with my clumsy silver arm. On the way here, if you can believe my naiveté, I imagined a crop of fashion designers inspired by our expedition—for a brief time before our departure we were minor celebrities—creating new and improved space suits in a variety of colours and cuts to flatter various body types to be sent along with the next vessel and with each vessel to follow. New trends for every season. Well, it was a pleasant thought for a while.
As I lay in the mandala, imagining the scent of the red planet spring and sleek fuchsia space suits, Earth suddenly shone bigger and brighter than I had ever seen it before. An illusion created by the dust still floating in the meagre atmosphere, I thought, but alluring nonetheless, like a candle in a distant window on a black, pre-electricity night. Then there was a moment when awe and wonder at the loveliness of it switched to horror as I realized what you must have done for that to happen, right before the starburst flash, brief fireball, and complete darkness.
—
Twenty-three years since I last had news of you, I have no idea what unsolvable political crisis or technological fuck-up could have made blowing up the entire planet inevitable, but I have to tell you, from here it all seems pretty unnecessary. I guess I’m in shock.
I wonder if the moon is still there, and what will happen to it now. Catapulted into the sun, flung into outer space, or left to inherit the blue-green planet’s orbit and continue its silent path in peace?
—
I am going to send this. I waited. I considered. Here it is: even if there is only the most infinitesimal chance someone is still left to read this, sending these words is the right thing to do. Whether or not anyone receives them is not my concern.
—
I wish someone would breathe on me the way I breathe on the carrots. / cmb
Send
Red Jacket, Assiniboia East. 12 April 1889
Dear Sister,
My news is sorrowful, and I pray you do not find yourself alone as you read it. Yesterday we buried Lucille. Her heart failed her, the doctor said, though he had no need to tell me. To think she would have had her fiftieth birthday this September. Though I often feared for her when she was bearing our children, always mindful of how you and I lost our own dear Mother, once our last was born I imagined she was safe and we would grow old together. How foolish I was.
Poor little Leo is inconsolable. Being the youngest, he was still accustomed to clinging to his mother’s skirts and climbing into her lap, an indulgence for which, I now regret, I often reproached her. Amelia and James have taken him and Sarah into their home, where they will stay until after the harvest or perhaps longer. It gives me some comfort that, though deprived of their Ma, the littlest ones will know at least the care of their gentle sister. The others will remain with me to help ready the fields and sow the crops, which must be accomplished soon, the land and elements caring nought for our grief.
She is laid to rest in the yard of our new little brick church, I assure you, as good a Christian burial as she might have had in England. My neighbour the Swede built her a coffin from lumber that I believe he had intended to use to repair his barn, and would accept no payment in return. His wife brought us breads and stews made in the style of their country,
and was most kind to the children. It grieves me Lucy never sought to befriend her, nor the German ladies who live nearby and who, when they learned of her passing, also came to clean the house and attend to us. Though their English is halting and they do not share our faith, they are of good heart and would have made her fine companions. All of our fellow countrymen regrettably dwell at some distance from our little homestead.
The coffin was plain but well made. It only pained me to think of sweet Lucy lying on its bare wood, and, as there was no finer fabric to be had for a lining, God forgive me, I placed inside one of the Company blankets she so detested. Aside from you, Dear Sister, only Amelia knows, and like me she thought it was the best to be done for her mother under the circumstances.
I am told the Reverend spoke well at the service, though I confess my head was so filled with other thoughts I hardly heard him or recall what he said. The little church was full of our friends, and even our Catholic and Lutheran neighbours came to pay their respects. Two young North-West Mounted Police officers who boarded with us for a few days when they were caught in a terrible blizzard last winter, on hearing of our loss, rode up from White Bear Post. In their fine scarlet coats they made a handsome addition to the funeral procession. I am certain Lucy would have been pleased.
I fear in some of my letters to you I have written things that may have cast my dear wife in an unfavourable light. I beg you to put those out of your mind as the unkind thoughts of an impatient and obstinate husband. I have had no true cause to judge her so harshly for her unhappiness here. She was raised a merchant’s daughter, with many comforts, and had just hope and expectation of living her days as a merchant’s wife. She was so until the decision, which was my own, and taken with greatest insistence, to uproot us from our homeland. She bore me fourteen children and was a most devoted mother. Though, as you surely remember, we both grieved deeply the loss of brave Henry at the brink of his manhood, I daresay it was she who comforted me more than I her in that darkest of times, when I could not find rest for the dreams of my beloved son sinking to his death in the Pacific. It is I who am at fault, having brought the sorrows of these recent years that broke her dear heart upon her, and for this I must and shall beg forgiveness to the last of my days.