by Greg Chase
Life in the agro pod was like being a fish that suddenly learned it could fly, but with fins instead of wings. Everyone around Sam moved with graceful ease among the plants, while he landed headfirst into a tree trunk. His clumsiness slowed down all who tried to show him around, the way a toddler’s stumbling would slow the pace of nearby adults. In exasperation, Jess finally told him to go explore on his own.
A dim memory from his youth haunted him. It’d been his first time throwing a baseball. All the other boys tossed it far out into the field. His attempt landed at his feet. Pathetic. The coach took him aside. Along the far end of the playground ran a fence. Together with two other boys, the fattest of his class and the sickly one, he was told to practice throwing rocks over the fence while the rest of the class learned to play softball.
That was what the day felt like. Go explore meant, Let us get some work done without you. He grabbed for a vine, an easy snatch for anyone else, as he slowly drifted down the length of the pod. His pride at grasping the dangling creeper quickly turned to terror as the plant let go of its tendril. Still grasping the useless length of wisteria, he floated out away from the security of plants and people. Someone was laughing at him from the dense foliage. Looking at the green stalk, he discovered why. It’d been cut.
Jess had explained that if he ever lost his handhold, he should just let himself float free. Eventually, he’d either end up along the pod’s transparent wall, which he could kick against to head back down to the plants, or the momentum of the ship would bring him to the back of the pod. Few ever bothered wandering back that far. Being so close to the ship’s engines, the noise and vibration hardly added to the tranquil nature of the village. But the reinforced disk of metal gave him an oddly comforting place to think. Lying against it, his back massaged by the freighter’s propulsion, he looked out along the entire length of the transparent cylinder.
What am I doing here? But it’d be just as easy to ask what his other options were. To return to Leviathan’s main decks would mean an eventual return to Earth. He didn’t have a job and wouldn’t when he saw his parents again. Life in space hadn’t been what he’d expected, but it still beat what he remembered. No one judged him here—no parental disappointment, no boss who questioned his abilities, no society looking down on the one who had no direction. Maybe there was one guy who thought it was funny to cut the vine that he still held onto. But one among many sure was better than what he was used to.
He turned the wisteria stalk in his hand. This was his life: cut off from his past, with no source of nourishment, he’d die without the help of others. But there were also buds about to bloom. He still had potential in the right environment. Out here in this strange new village, people made all the welcoming gestures that showed they could be the help he’d long sought. A place to be transplanted. He fell into a peaceful sleep, gently rocked by Leviathan’s engines.
Being laughed at was nothing new, but having it happen twice in one day did tend to affect Sam’s sense of self-worth. He opened his eyes to the long, slender legs of Jess as she stood on the back wall of the pod, towering over him like a jungle goddess. Laughing.
He struggled to stand up—though the concept of up in the agro pod still eluded him. At least the thrust of the engines gave him something to prevent his body from flying off again. “What’s so funny? Hasn’t anyone ever taught you it’s not polite to laugh at the uncoordinated?”
“I’m sorry. It’s not that you ended up back here. We’ve all lost our way at some point and based. You’re holding that wisteria bloom tight to your chest like a little girl.”
He looked at the stalk in his hand. Maybe it’d been the warmth radiating from the engines, but a couple of the buds had managed to burst into flowers. He held it up, cut end first. “Someone’s idea of a joke? Or is this an initiation ritual? Because I know I heard a man’s voice laughing at me as I floated free.”
Jess ran her finger along the severed vine. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Just give each handhold a little tug before you trust it with your life.”
As she ran her thumb along the sharp edge, he knew she wasn’t telling him everything. “This is a small village. You know who cut it, don’t you?”
He shouldn’t care. If he wanted to live with these people, it’d be best not to create enemies so soon. But then, not standing up for himself could be just as bad. Last thing he wanted was to become the village’s laughingstock.
Jess nodded. “Had to be Jonathan. We have a history. He was the oldest of the original children who moved into the agro pod. I was five, and he was eleven, just entering puberty, when the village got started.”
She pulled Sam back down to sit against the metal base. “The goal for my generation is polyamory. Not that we’re expected to love everyone the same—just be open to that love. But there were only twelve kids when we started out, five boys and seven girls. Kind of hard to form multiple attachments when there aren’t a lot of choices.”
“There were adults. I thought age wasn’t supposed to be an issue. Maybe I just assumed that didn’t matter to you.” So much had been explained the previous day that Sam had trouble keeping it all straight.
“Age doesn’t matter to me,” Jess said, “but most of the original villagers were already married. Not that that mattered either, but it is nice to not feel like someone added into a relationship. The point is, polyamory is the goal, but it doesn’t work for everyone. Jonathan was just entering puberty, and most of us girls wouldn’t be sexually ready for quite a while. I won’t bore you with the details, but he came to think of us as being committed to each other. It was partially my fault.”
“You were a kid. I don’t see how anything that happened would be your doing.” Alarm swept through Sam. He’d had a girlfriend who’d been assaulted sexually. The incident managed to infect every aspect of their relationship. It’d taken professional counseling to convince her it hadn’t been her fault.
Jess quickly shook her head. “No, no, nothing like that. See, this is why you don’t leave details out of a story. Growing up, Jonathan’s sexual education was handled by the village women. He wasn’t stifled or anything. Far from it. When I say it was my fault, I mean that it stemmed from my own education. Jonathan and I were actually quite close by the time I entered puberty. He was a strapping teenager. All of us girls fancied him. And up to that time, he’d been like a big brother to me. So when Mira started teaching me different techniques for dealing with sex, he kind of volunteered to be my test subject.”
Sam leaned away from her, trying to envision a younger version of Jess eager to test out what she’d learned. “So you were the assailant?”
She looked at him and laughed. “Oh, no. You really are full of those Earth sexual repressions, aren’t you? Everyone has sex. Get over it. Everything we did was mutual, and no one got hurt.”
“I’m confused.” Sam held up the vine. “Why did he cut this wisteria?”
“Polyamory doesn’t work for Jonathan. He sees us as something we’re not. Even though we’ve had ten years to talk about it, he still can’t accept that I might find other people attractive to the point of wanting more than friendship. There were only four other boys of my generation, so he hasn’t had too much trouble fending off their advances toward me over the years. But he’s not as successful as he’d like to believe. Even with his education, he tends to forget that women have as much a say as men—sometimes more—about who initiates a relationship. And the time I spend with married couples doesn’t bother him much due to them having each other.”
“But I’m someone new. Worse, someone you’re responsible for taking care of and someone you’re spending a lot of time getting to know,” Sam said.
“Exactly. And he’s not stupid. We have known each other most of our lives. When I find someone interesting, he knows about it, sometimes before I do.”
Sam tried not to smile, but the warmth around his face gave him away. “Am I to understand you find me attractive?”
/> “Did you truly learn nothing from your conversation with Mira?”
Equal sexual authority was not an idea that came naturally after a lifetime on Earth. “Some lessons might take a while for me to learn.”
“Fair enough.” Jess’s sly smile warmed Sam’s face again. “The village wants you and accepts you. I know you haven’t been raised the way I have, but you’ll bring a new perspective to our society.”
“Are you flirting with me, or just setting me up?” Sam asked.
“Maybe both. Just because most of us want you here, that doesn’t mean everyone’s going to be as welcoming as me and Mira.”
“Then I’ll have to rely on those vast skills as a shaman—which I don’t have, by the way—to win them over.”
As he followed her back along the vines toward the village, he knew he’d made up his mind. He wanted to stay. And not because he didn’t have any other options. There were always options, even if he didn’t like where they led. But following Jess toward a future with these people who spoke so openly about human connections, who cared so deeply about each other, and who wanted him sparked a desire for life he’d never known before. The aimless drifter had found a home. And setting down roots might even give him a direction in which to grow.
8
Memories were a problem. There were the core memories that Sam knew, truly knew, without consciously thinking about them. Then there were the subjects like agriculture that Sam had no inkling of. His school-fieldtrip memories were filled more with Mallory Kincaid and her tight-fitting sweaters than the melons the dirt-covered agriculturalist lifted from the ground.
“Come here anytime you want.” Doc had meant the invitation to the library to sound kind, offering knowledge or entertainment. Most of the books had been reduced to computer files, but enough antique hard-backed volumes remained to fill every surface of the zero-gravity room. As he ran his fingers over the old bindings, he had an urge to pull each one out of its protective enclosure. A volume on French horticulture projected out from its neighbors far enough to catch at Sam’s fingertips. Without thinking, he found the book open in his hands. Languages had never been of any interest to him, but the hand-drawn pictures of extinct Earth vegetables had him touching the images to see if they’d been printed or actually painted. His fingers strayed onto a paragraph about the propagation of lima beans. Though all in French, he immediately knew the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, the entire book. Had there been gravity, he’d have dropped the heavy volume. He’d not only read the book before, he’d memorized it. Apparently, he’d studied it harder than any text he could remember, because he could recite sections of pages he hadn’t even opened. This was impossible. Hurriedly, he pushed the book back into its position on the shelf only to find its neighbor in his hands—a Japanese text on bonsai trees. As he feared, this book he also knew by heart. But the author had made some mistakes when it came to fruit-bearing bonsai trees. Sam let go of the book as if it were on fire. No way should he know these things. As the book floated harmlessly in front of him, he tried to follow the memory paths back to where he’d, unknowingly, studied plants so thoroughly. Each recollection stopped at his time working on Leviathan’s computer. If only school had been this easy.
He returned to village life, vowing to steer as clear of the library of horrors as possible. His brain wasn’t a place for some computer’s information dump. But the hidden knowledge, once noticed, couldn’t be ignored. When Jess struggled over why an orange tree wasn’t producing, or Doc speculated on ancient societies, Sam knew if their directions were right or wrong, but he couldn’t tell them why. Knowledge without references only made him sound arrogant. Being the village know-it-all wasn’t going to improve his standing. Best to stick with information he could defend.
The majority of his time he spent tending the plants. Yoshi would stop by, often with stories that would last the afternoon, but sometimes he left Sam on his own, with no distraction from his own thoughts. The enjoyment of getting to know someone new was better savored than taken all at once. Others stopped by, some wanting to hear about Earth or tell him their life stories or find out what the hell he was doing in their community. A great many people, including Jonathan, avoided him altogether, reminding Sam what Yoshi had said about most of them being borderline hermits.
Meals were usually with Doc and maybe a few guests, often people Doc wanted Sam to know for one reason or another. The meals had a way of nourishing Sam in more than a physical way. But Doc refrained from offering too much information about anything.
Sam’s favorite part of the day was falling asleep in Jess’s arms. Second favorite: waking up in those same arms. Like the cannabis-infused evening gatherings, days became indistinguishable from each other.
One morning after breakfast, Doc pointed to the large metal tube opposite the agro pod docked to Leviathan. “I’m headed over to the living quarters to unload some produce. Wanna come with?”
Three weeks learning his way around the plants left Sam jumping with anticipation at seeing civilization again, an excitement that masked an unidentifiable lurking fear. “Sure. How long will we be there? Should I pack a bag?”
“Dude, it’s like a five-minute flight. We’ll be back by lunch. Dinner if you want to stay longer.” At least Doc no longer laughed at him. Still, the humor in his eyes told Sam he’d never fully outgrow the role of village comedian.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to let my enthusiasm run away with me.”
In spite of the large pod and small number of inhabitants, it seemed no one was ever out of earshot. Doc guided Sam to a relatively quiet area of densely blooming indigo wisteria. “You don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to. We’re only offering you a place. If you want to go back to modern technological society, we’ll totally understand. I’m certain Lev can work something out for you.”
Sam was less certain that Lev could simply bring him back from the dead and plug him back into modern society, and Doc’s continued reference to the ship computer as some sort of benevolent protector continued to mystify him. “Really, Doc, I’m sorry. I never meant that to sound ungrateful in any way. I know it’s only been three weeks, and I’m still trying to feel my way around, but I do like it here.”
Doc put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. “Don’t sweat it, man. We’re a tight-knit group, and you’re still an outsider. Add to that the idea of living free of the conveniences you’ve known, and six months pretty much as a vegetable, it’s understandable you’d be excited about going back. Think of this as an exploration. We’ll stay one night. Lev can find us accommodations. If you want to come back, great. You know we’re growing rather fond of you. If not, well, best to find that out now before we get too attached.”
Drifting from job to job, Sam had never thought much about packing up and moving. Somehow, the look in Jess’s eyes as Doc maneuvered the small craft away from the airlock made the short hop seem like traveling to the other side of the solar system.
Doc spoke over the hum of the small engine. The sight of him at the controls made Sam cringe. “You have an option we should discuss before we dock with the other pod. Lev can either give you a fresh identity, basically pretend you’ve always been one of us in the agro pod, or let you be the long-lost technician come back from the dead.”
Sam didn’t think it sounded like much of an option. “I can’t imagine wanting that kind of recognition.”
“Fair enough. Lev mentioned you’ve got some money coming to you.”
Sam had no idea what Doc was talking about. He looked at Doc, confused.
“Don’t worry about it,” Doc said. “Bottom line: anything you want, just get it. Lev will deal with the monetary issue.”
Stepping out of the small craft into the living pod proved to Sam’s senses just how foreign the last three weeks, hell, the last seven months, had been. It was all so welcoming: filtered artificial light meant to calm the senses of new arrivals, a faint, clean lemon scent he knew masked the decontamination filters
, and rooms of a size appropriate for normal human beings.
Xavier had performed a minor miracle on the ship since Sam had first encountered it.
A man in a white smock greeted them. “Good to see you, Doc. We’re down to synth-food for our main meals. Okay for most, but I gotta tell you, your homegrown stuff is catching on. Still a niche market, but I think you’ll be pretty pleased.” The man’s light overtones of cooking grease brought Sam back to his first day aboard the Leviathan, though the hint of freshness had a soothing quality that the earlier overpowering stench of the ship never had.
Doc and the other man yammered on as the crew unloaded the shuttle and the three of them walked—such a strange experience—toward the main eating area.
Doc turned to Sam. “Why don’t you hang out here? Jillian’ll serve you anything you’d like. My guess would be a good ale or a margarita might be a welcome change from Yoshi’s concoctions.”
Though still human in scale, the bar boasted a wall-long bank of windows that looked out across the length of the ship and on into approaching space. The image made for an oddly relaxing mood. Of course, the soft lighting, dense magnetic gravity carpeting, and deep plush floating chairs with their unobtrusive restraints all added to the experience.
Doc surveyed the welcoming bar. “Actually, I think I’ll join you for one. We do have some time to kill on this trip.”
No sooner had they settled into the comfortable combination of restraint and weightlessness than a table monitor lit up. Sam’s first expectation was to see a menu.
“Knock-knock.”
“Oh God, Lev, please.” Doc’s face registered actual pain.
“Knock. Knock.”
“Okay, who’s there?”
Sam looked around in confusion. “There’s no one here, just you, me, someone I assume to be Jillian behind that counter, and a handful of other customers. Who are you referring to?”
