Asimov's Science Fiction: March 2014

by Penny Publications

  It's not easy to live with guilt for sixty years. Not even when you made the right decision.

  Ask me. I know.

  "Is that a Droran snapclaw?" asks Cheryl. "I saw a documentary about them."

  I notice her putting her hands on the table to steady herself as she leans down to examine the small fishbowl, half filled with water. We don't like to admit it, or even think about it, but we're both over a hundred, and neither of us has yet gotten used to the way gravity changes as we move around the spinning space station.

  I say the first words that come to mind: "I thought they were illegal." Write it off to my usual good humor.

  "Maybe back on some planet like Earth or Pele, but we don't have as many rules out here around Tyche IV," the nursery owner explains, just a bit smugly. "This is one government that knows how to stay out of people's lives."

  On the surface of the water float three oval, copper-red leaves. Out of the middle of the three leaves a finger-thick stalk rises, ending in a fist-sized spherical flower head made up of narrow petals terminating in sharp thorns. As Cheryl leans closer, the head lunges at her and snaps shut an inch from her nose, the thorns lining its flowery jaw interlocking and emitting a hiss.

  "It's cute!" says Cheryl with a chuckle. She's a nature lover, but this is going a little too far.

  "I don't think I'd feel safe napping with that damned thing around," I say (well, I grump)— but you really have to be pretty desperate to love a plant that might bite your face off. Then the anger drains out of me, because I realize that of course Cheryl is just that desperate.

  "All right, Robert." Her voice is resigned, dampened by the invisible gulf that's always between us. She looks around. "Then how about some of these Ropsto jumping beans?"

  She points at a small planter, covered by a clear glass bell jar on the table next to the snapping jaws. Inside, a bunch of beans are jumping up and down like a flea circus. A few high-energy beans strike the glass of the bell jar from time to time, making a tinkling sound.

  "That's lovely!" she enthuses. "It sounds like a glass harmonica—or maybe a wind chime."

  "Sounds like hailstones to me," I answer. "What happens when they get bigger? Are they going to break the glass?"

  "I can sell you a bigger terrarium," says the owner. "Did you know that there are five varieties of Ropsto jumping beans? Each one is shaped like a different Platonic solid."

  Yes, I think, that's exactly what we need—alien plants to teach me a geometry lesson.

  I turn to Cheryl, unable to hide my frown. "I thought we agreed we don't want any animals, just plants." I try to sound pleasant and reasonable. I don't quite pull it off.

  "I don't carry any animals here," interjects the nursery owner, who actually has the chutzpah to sound offended. "You think I don't know the difference? Everything here at Dave's Plantimals is a certified plant, backed up by the opinions—and the signed certificates—of reputable botanists."

  Cheryl jumps in before I can tell him what I think of his reputable botanists. "All right," she says, "How about something a little less... active? We've got a really small cabin here on Shepard Station."

  Cheryl wants a pet, something that she can fuss over and that will respond to her love. I haven't wanted anything like that for more than half a century. So plants are our compromise.

  Dave ponders her question for a moment and slowly looks around the nursery. Finally he points to a corner. "You can take a look at that one. I got it from the crew of an explorer ship to HD40207g."

  Cheryl and I walk over. The low gravity does have the benefit of being much easier on my joints. It's one of the main reasons we moved here. Maybe the doctors and medical facilities aren't as good, being so far from the core systems, but at least we'll be comfortable.

  And there's another consideration: it's cheap. We don't have much put away for retirement.

  There's a little ceramic pot in the corner filled with white sand. A pale blue blob sits on top, formed from two oval lobes. Thin, shallow creases cover the entire surface.

  "Jesus!" I blurt out. "It looks like a baby brain!" I instantly realize what I've said as Cheryl kind of freezes next to me. I'm not just a bitter old man; I'm a slow learner. For maybe the thousandth time (or is it the millionth?), I wonder why she's let me stick around all these years.

  She relaxes after a moment and bends down to look at the plant, but almost immediately jerks back up.

  "It's breathing!" she says in an astonished whisper.

  The lobes move up and down rhythmically, as if the plant is actually taking breaths or a heart is beating inside.

  "Nah," Dave says, shaking his head for emphasis. "It's just pumping air and water through in its version of photosynthesis."

  Words and concepts like that may put the average browser off. Not my Cheryl.

  "What else can you tell me about it?" she asks, staring at it in rapt fascination.

  He scratches his head. "Just what the survey crew told me. They found tons of this stuff down on the exoplanet, likened it to a pulsating carpet. This is a baby—well, as these things go."

  I of course wish he hadn't said that, but Cheryl doesn't react, at least not the way I feared she would.

  "The adults look the same, just bigger?" she asks.

  "Well, not exactly," he hedges.

  "What do you mean?"

  "They're like... like the plant version of chameleons," he says at last.

  "Chameleons?" she repeats.

  "You know—imitators. What you see here, this is their basic form. But if they grow up near other plants, they take on their form over time. It's kind of a camouflage technique, I guess."

  My guilt kicks in again. This is Cheryl, after all; I've got to get her some thing, and she seems really entranced by the chameleon plant. "I think I'll get a few orchids from the real nursery across the hall and put them next to it," I say. "It would be something special to have a breathing orchid." I turn to Dave. "And it's not poisonous—doesn't snap or bite or spit acid like some of your other specimens?"

  "Not as far as I know," he replies. Real cagey, this guy.

  "We'll take it," Cheryl says. Her eyes take on a kind of misty look, and I wonder if it's about the plant or the thoughtless comment I made. It ought to be the plant; I've been making thoughtless comments for longer than two-thirds of the species in the Universe have been alive, but they still seem to hurt her as much as they ever did.

  As we leave the shop, carrying the pot with the baby plantimal, Cheryl says, "I think I'll call it Shep, in honor of our new home."

  From the viewport in the hall, we can see Shepard's Planet spinning below, a tan and blue and white mosaic. I don't like the idea of naming the plant, and especially names that fit better on an old farm dog, but I nod. We're always polite to each other. (Well, she's always polite. I always try to be, which isn't the same thing.)

  I stare at the planet. Reminds me of the time Cheryl and I took our adventure vacation to Ranginui, back when it was barely colonized.

  But of course I don't say that. I've said enough wrong things today.

  For my fortieth birthday, Cheryl surprised me with a month-long trip to Ranginui. The furthest I had gone from home before that was Mars. An excursion to Ranginui didn't seem like my kind of vacation. I liked eating foods I was familiar with, and climate control, and furniture and sports times and doctors I'd known for years. Adventure was for other people.

  "Oh, live a little!" Cheryl scolded me lovingly. "We're already in our forties, and we won't be able to get away as easily after we have kids."

  It was a good point. We'd been talking about starting a family. We were still young by the standards of the day, but we didn't want to wait till we were in our fifties or even a bit older, when our careers were really going strong.

  To my surprise, I actually enjoyed the cruise to Ranginui. Sure, the weird local fish tasted like slimy yogurt, and the weather took a lot of getting used to (it was the only place where I ever experienced hail).r />
  But the scenery was amazing. Back then, only a couple of million colonists lived on Ranginui, and most of the continents were unsettled. Flying in a tiny two-person hovercraft over kilometers and kilometers of virgin forest, with their hexagonal trunks and dark blue leaves, with not a single piece of plasteel or glass in sight, was invigorating in a way that I couldn't quite capture with words. Hell, I'd read the travel guides, and nobody ever quite captured it. And all that empty space! There wasn't another human being except Cheryl and me as far as the eye could see, with snowcapped mountains peeking out over the horizon and packs of six-limbed, scaled prairie bears leaping all around as we set the ship down under dual blazing suns.

  I'll never forget it. I just wish those were my only memories of that time.

  The trip even rekindled our romance. I hadn't realized how going through the same routine day after day, comfortable and secure though it was, had slowly staled—not our feelings, but the spontaneity of them. Suddenly it was very nice not having neighbors on the other side of thin walls.

  On the last day of our vacation, as we boarded the jump ship for the return trip, Cheryl told me she was pregnant. We were both ecstatic. Of course it came a bit earlier than we had planned, but sometimes not planning everything has its advantages. We still had plenty of time to set up the baby's room and get everything ready after we got back to Earth.

  What happened on our return trip was something you probably remember from the news archives. They still talk about it from time to time in history documentaries.

  Our ship, the Princess of the Southern Skies, had to drop out of hyperspace due to an engine failure. Since the cruise line to Ranginui was new, there weren't many beacons along the way and the little ship had no way to send out a precise location signal—so we had to wait until a rescue ship could locate us and tow us back.

  It was one of the greatest disasters in space cruise history. We drifted for seven months. The crew and passengers made a valiant effort to conserve resources and made supplies that were meant to last two weeks stretch for the duration. The recycling measures we resorted to now sound like legends from the earliest days of space travel—and would probably disgust you. But amazingly, morale was high, for the most part.

  I fretted about the fact that Cheryl couldn't get access to a real hospital. But she was much more relaxed about it than I was. "You know, women used to have babies without doctors," she repeated almost every day. It was true. It was also true that those were barbaric times. "I'll be fine," she kept assuring me. "I'm sure we'll be rescued long before then— and if not, well, at least we have a medical bot onboard."

  When the rescue ship finally showed up, Cheryl was just a couple of weeks from her due date. I've never been a religious man, but on that day I thanked every world's and religion's gods for the miracle.

  "Won't this be a great story to tell the kids someday?" Cheryl said as we gingerly stepped off the shuttle onto the rescue ship. The other passengers cheered, and she smiled and waved back. "Yes. Yes it will," I agreed. I kept the cruise ship tickets, thinking they'd make a great addition to the first page of the baby book.

  Suddenly there's a major jolt. I think it's an earthquake until I remember that we're not on Earth or any other planet. I pick the tickets off the floor, along with other scattered bits of paper.

  The Station Commander apologizes over the PA system, explaining that a worn-out bearing caused the jerk in the station's spin, so I sit down in the chair with the papers. Now I have to sort through them and put them back into their rightful places in our document binder.

  While I'm doing this, Cheryl is hovering around the plantimal, making sure that the quake didn't damage it. She straightens up and begins mixing a nutrient pack with water and sprays it over the planter with a misting nozzle.

  "My, you're growing fast!" she half-says and half-purrs. "Look at you! I wonder what you'll look like when you're grown?"

  She coos at it as if the plantimal were a kitten.

  "I'm heading off to the gym on the Outer Ring for some high-gee exercise," she says to me. "Can you remember to give Shep a second nutrient pack in an hour?"

  I mumble a yes, and she leaves.

  What Dave, the owner of the nursery, failed to tell us is that the plantimal is as much trouble as a puppy, maybe more. Away from its native habitat—and an orbiting station is about as un-native as things get—it has to be given a careful regimen of food and water while it's in this immature state. If I had known it was going to be this much trouble, I'd never have agreed to buy it. Well, not until Cheryl looked at me with those deep brown eyes that reflected six decades of hurt. Then I'd have given in, like I always do.

  It takes me half an hour to get all the papers sorted out. I slide the document binder back on the shelf, where it nestles with all the other binders. That's the last one that had fallen. (Yes, I know: they're on my computer too. But what if the computer dies? There was a time I didn't think so much about things dying, but that was a long time ago.)

  I stand up and look around. A stranger might think I'm a hoarder, with all the stacks of papers and knick-knacks and mementos filling every visible horizontal surface. There's barely room for me and Cheryl to move around. Makes no difference. I have my own system: over there, in the binder on the left, is the receipt from the first time I took Cheryl to dinner and a show; on the shelf below is the pebble she picked up from the highest peak on Ranginui; and over here, on the table by the sofa, is the card I had all her colleagues sign when she finally returned to teaching.

  I need these tokens to remind me, and to remind Cheryl, that we have a life, that it didn't end sixty years ago. Hell, sometimes I even believe it.

  What we have here is just a tiny portion of our earthly possessions. When we moved off Earth, I had to get rid of most of the things we owned. It was like cutting off pieces of myself. Everything held a memory, a tangible connection to the life Cheryl and I made together.

  There's a gurgling sound from the planter. It sounds—I almost hesitate to even think it—startlingly human.

  I walk over and see that the plantimal is pulsating faster than usual. Dave told us that this is a sign that it needs another nutrient pack. I wonder how the hell a plant knows to make a noise when it needs to be fed?

  "Hold on," I say. "Yeah, yeah, I know you're hungry. Let me get this ready." I prep the nutrient pack and the water. At least the plantimal doesn't seem to need as much feeding at night. I guess it's adjusted to our circadian rhythms, like Dave said it would.?

  It reminds me of prepping formula for a baby.

  A baby.

  I push the thought away.

  As I spray the mist over the plantimal, its gurgling quiets down and it emits a satisfied sound, almost exactly like a burp. My heart clenches, and I'm suddenly grabbing onto the edge of the table to stay upright, my breath catching in my throat.

  After a while I stand up and go back to my comfortable chair and turn on the video. I flip through the channels, keeping an ear out for any more sounds of need from the plantimal.

  I have to admit it. Shep may take a lot of work, but he's cute. Then I mentally correct myself: it's cute.

  Somehow I settle on a children's program with dancing kids and puppets. The tiny cabin apartment is filled with the sound of children's laughter, and just me and Shep listening. It brings back memories of other kids in another time and place.

  From time to time, I heard the noises made by other families visiting the new mothers in the other rooms. Loud squeals from young kids followed by admonitions from adults. "Shhhh... Mommy needs to rest." "Be gentle with your new sister."

  "Cradle the head, remember to cradle the head!"

  Hearing those happy voices was torture. I'd been shuttling between the NICU and Cheryl's room in the maternity ward for two days with no sleep. Cheryl's parents and my parents all tried to get me to take a nap. But I just couldn't. Every time I tried to close my eyes, the sight of my first view of Joey would return to me. I had stood by
Cheryl's side and held her hand during the actual delivery, so I didn't see him until the nurses had moved him onto the examination cart to cut the umbilical cord and take measurements. There was a strange tenseness in the postures of the nurses and the whispers of the doctors.

  My first view was of lovely little legs, perfect little toes, twitching arms, ten fingers curled tight—and then the head. I'll never forget it, and Lord knows I've tried.

  The eyes, like an old cartoon of an alien. The bulging bloody mess on top.

  My first reaction to the face of my son was one of horror. My second was disgust. My third—and no one will ever know how close I came to yielding to it—was to run from the room and never stop running.

  I hated myself.

  I replayed the doctor's words in my head over and over. "Your son has anencephaly, Mr. Carr. I'm sorry."

  The rest of her speech was a blur. All I remember were some snippets. "... the neural tube failed to close... there's no neocortex... we don't know why it happens... exceedingly rare these days... usually caught early during prenatal screening so a decision could be made... cannot ever gain consciousness... maybe a few days, or even hours..."

  Cheryl had grown increasingly agitated. "Why can't I see him? What is wrong with my baby?"

  They brought in a specialist to talk to her. Afterward, the staff left the room to give us some privacy, and we clung to each other like we were drowning. And we cried. And cried. Then she let go and called the nurse back in. "I want to see him." Her voice was steady, each word as heavy as steel.

  The nurse and Cheryl gazed at each other. Eventually the nurse nodded and went out.

  They rolled Joey in and lifted him into her arms. She held him gingerly. They had put a prosthetic skullcap on him to shield the naked tissues in his skull. His eyes were closed, and he was very, very tiny.

  I looked at Cheryl's face. There was no horror, no disgust in her eyes.

  "He's breathing," she said. Her tone was even. I could tell how hard she was working at appearing calm, to not give the doctors an excuse to take him away.