I dreamed I was with James in his bunk, the air warm and close, his skin damp against my own. His face loomed, his hair a dark tangle. He made a sound near my ear, low, insistent. His arms wrapped around me—
I woke covered in sweat. I blinked; I threw my covers off, got out of bed. My cot was a damp rumple of gray sheets and blue blanket. I pulled the covers to the top of the bed, smoothed them down, tucked them tightly around the edge of the mattress. Then I shook out the pillow and laid it flat.
I went to the equipment room, my socked feet sore on the rubber floor, my fingertips smarting, and ran a systems check. All the status bars lit up green. Then I checked the water reclaimers, made a tour of all the modules and airlocks. I found toilets, a shower room, and a laundry. Inside the food lockers were enough supplies to last for months.
I picked up a bag of dried fruit and then a packet of instant potatoes and asked myself if I was afraid to be here alone. If something went wrong there would only be me. But I wasn’t. I asked myself if I wanted James to come looking for me, and I didn’t. The supply capsule Theresa had taken was already gone, and another wasn’t due for several weeks. For that span of time there was nothing to do but wait. When I thought of waiting in this place alone—without anyone to answer to, without having to explain—I felt intense relief.
At the end of the corridor was a narrow plastic module with sinks and shower stalls. I went inside and the soft sound of silt, tppp tpppp tpppp tppped, came from the ceiling. It was cold; condensation on the sinks had a sheen of ice. But when I turned the knob in one of the shower stalls lukewarm water came out.
I found a stack of thin towels and undressed quickly, stepped into the water, and yelped when it hit my chest. There was a container of soap in the shower and I washed, the sensation of my frostbitten fingers against my skin tender and strange. I dried myself, cautiously patting the skin on my hands, chest, and face.
I didn’t want to put my clothes back on—they were stiff with dried sweat—so I just pulled on my underwear and wandered. In the kitchen I filled a mug of water and drank it. In the laundry room I found a pair of sweats—they were a men’s large but soft inside—and I put them on. In another room, a T-shirt with a European football insignia on it. It smelled clean and I put it on too.
In one of the greenhouse modules I opened the motorized shades—the room was made almost entirely of transparent glass. I’d seen the Pink Planet only through tiny portholes, the silt-dirtied windshield of a rover, and the tinted visor of my helmet. The color of its surface wasn’t uniform like I’d thought—the silt was full of different hues. Rose and peach and coral and fuchsia.
I went to the kitchen. I found plenty of food but no ready-made meals like at the Gateway. I found oats, heated some water, and reconstituted some milk. When the oatmeal was done I added a spoonful of sugar, and then since the container was huge, I added two more. I poured some of the milk into the oatmeal and some into a glass. My mind was a blank as I spooned the sweet liquid into my mouth. I didn’t think or make a plan. I just moved my spoon and tipped my glass to my lips until the food and milk were gone.
46
The next day I spent an hour organizing the food stores. I did some systems checks, sent a transcript to the satellite station to let them know where I was, and then because I had nothing else to do I went into one of the greenhouse modules and poked at the wilted plants. I’d never grown anything in my life. My aunt used to keep herbs in containers on our back porch in the summer, to use in cooking. Rosemary, thyme, oregano. Lavender and mint. Watering them every couple of days was the extent of my knowledge of plants. I didn’t know if I’d ever even looked at a plant up close.
The day stretched out before me with no list of assigned tasks, no piece of equipment that needed attention, no system to service or replace or check. I experimentally tugged one plant from its tray and liked the satisfying sound of its roots pulling away from the soil.
I pulled out the next plant and the next, until I’d cleared about a quarter of the trays. I found some gloves and broke up the earth. Then I located some seeds, read the directions on the back of the packet, and began planting them. The soil was soft and cool on my fingers as I pushed each seed down, and a sharp and musty smell filled my nose. I got the irrigation system working and then turned on the temperature controls. The room grew warmer, the air more humid. I smoothed my hand over the top of each square of wet soil.
Through the walls the sun warmed my face and filled the room with a rosy glow. I moved without thinking, my body loose. The pain in my fingers receded. I had a feeling of freedom that made me think, for some reason, of my uncle’s paper airplanes. How we would stand at the top of the stairs, the three of us, my uncle, John, and me, and give them the slightest push into the air and watch them drift slowly to the ground.
I returned to the grow rooms every morning. I watered. I fertilized. A schedule for all these things was posted in neat script on the wall and I followed it. I’m not sure I had any thought the seeds I planted would grow, but every day I tended to them and planted more, until all the limp stalks and leaves were cleared away and both grow rooms were filled with neat grids of dark brown earth.
When I was done in the grow rooms I worked out in the gym. At first it was hard to do anything but run on the treadmill or ride the exercise bike because of my hands. But when they started to heal—the fingernails on two of my fingers pulled away from the skin and eventually fell off, revealing new pink nails underneath—I was able to lift weights, following the same routine Lion and I used at Peter Reed.
Only now I took my time with the exercises; I didn’t speed through them like I had at school, or squeeze them in between other tasks like I had on the Sundew. I did extra reps and stretched in between intervals. I noticed which movements came easy and which were more challenging. Some things depended on the day, or the hour. Squats were harder in the morning, running on the treadmill easier. I tracked my progress from one day to the next and noticed slight changes in my body in the mirror in the shower module. At first my torso had a lopsided look to it—my shoulders were round and strong from hauling water tanks and cleaning solar panels, but my posture was stooped from bending over the fuel cell for hours. My legs were pale and thin, my stomach soft. Now I watched as my arms shrank and the shapes of the muscles under my skin turned sharper. As my legs gained bulk and my stomach flattened.
I’d never paid much attention to my body. Now I slept when I was tired. I drank when I was thirsty and ate when I was hungry. I had time to make real meals. They were simple but were better than anything I’d eaten in months. My skin was healthier looking in the mirror; my nails grew and my hair seemed stronger and shinier. My teeth were the only part of me that wasn’t improved. When I pressed my tongue into the holes where my fillings used to be my molars throbbed.
At the end of the day, after I’d tended to my plants, worked out, and eaten three meals, I watched the light change through the transparent walls of the grow rooms. I’d thought the weather was almost unchanging on the Pink Planet, but it wasn’t. In the mornings the light was soft, almost woolly, and the gusts of wind gentle; in the afternoon the horizon grew sharper and the wind stronger and more continuous. At the end of the day there was a peculiar sort of twilight I hadn’t noticed until now, when the landscape grew long shadows and the color of the silt intensified and became almost jewellike. Then I’d shut the blinds before the smudgy gloom of night, when the ridges of silt yawned and the dust-covered junk started to look like things that weren’t real.