Red Bloom

Mother Nature is nurturing deep space.

“The Future of Nature” is an Earth Day community writing project for fiction writers to explore the human-nature relationship in a short story or poem. It was organized by

Claudia Befu

and

Julie Gabrielli

, and supported with brilliant advice from scientists

Jonathan Tonkin

and

rebecca hooper

. The story you're about to read is from this project. You can find all the stories as a special

Top In Fiction

Disruption edition, with thanks to publisher

Erica Drayton

.

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This science fiction short story is dedicated to my daughter, Lisa. Sixteen years ago on Earth Day, in a small hotel room in Guatemala City, we held our seven-month-old baby for the first time. She’s not a fan of science fiction, but she’s Daddy’s girl, and that’s all that matters.

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The lights dimmed above Dr. Ben McCallister, making it difficult to observe the alien plant cells under his microscope. Another brownout. His ten-year-old daughter Lisa wouldn’t be alarmed by the inconvenience, a regular occurrence on a planet in the infant stages of terraforming. She accompanied him to the lab on most days, and today she sat at a workstation pruning the dead leaves from a Sanglith plant. Diminished luminosity didn’t interrupt her routine. Lisa’s delicate fingers pinched at the stem’s base and she twisted, just like Ben taught her. She cupped the leaf and deposited it into a small graveyard of withered leaves gathered nearby.

Ben returned to his observations, flipping the nosepiece on the microscope to a higher magnification, then adjusted the focus on one of the oculars. The box cells of the Sanglith were no longer tightly grouped, but were still held together by channels of thick, viscous fluid. In recent weeks the channels started enlarging and as a result the plant’s stomata shrunk, producing less oxygen. The most shocking result of the change was the slight vibrations in the cell membrane, a noticeable precursor to wilting.

“Cassidy’s dad says the O2 levels dropped a full percent last month,” Lisa said. She ran her fingers gently over the bright red Sanglith, treating the foliage like a pet.

“We’ve increased the CO2 output on the fermentation reactors and have begun glucose fertilization, but nothing appears to be working,” Ben said. He recognized Lisa was bright from an early age and was unsatisfied with answers meant to balance her emotions. She wanted straight answers, even if she didn’t completely understand the science.

“What happens if we run out of oxygen?” Lisa asked.

“I think you know the answer to that,” Ben said.

“I don’t mean what happens to us. If you can’t figure out how to stop the Sanglith from dying, will we have to leave?”

“I don’t know if that’s an option. This is an expensive operation. They’ll want to keep it running as long as possible. Another team arrives in a few days. A very talented physiologist, Dr. Han, will be among them. I’m sure he’ll help me find a solution.”

“What if we’re not supposed to find a solution or even be here at all.”

Lisa had spent her entire life on a substation and subsequently planet LV-6. While she enjoyed the company of the other inhabitant’s children, Ben suspected she yearned for familial surroundings, the kind with quaint subdivisions packed door-to-door with nuclear families.

“I know this isn’t the best environment for you, especially without a mother. But as you grow older, as we begin a full-scale germination of Sanglith, more people will arrive. It will start to feel like a home, and less like an experiment,” Ben said.

“What right do we have to be here,” Lisa said.

“I’m certainly no lawyer, but we’re not violating the interstellar terraforming treaty. Everyone’s contributions are welcome here.”

“What if there was something… else, that didn’t want us here?”

“A higher power?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure what to call it.”

Ben didn’t know how to continue, growing uncomfortable with the conversation and line of questioning. Lisa’s mother, while spiritual, wasn’t religious, and he claimed to be an agnostic in his own faith. He never thought Lisa would explore the existence of God by her own curiosity.

“The substation orbiting LV-6 employs a clergyman, or more of an adviser I suppose, schooled in various religious traditions. When they’re within radio trajectory, I’m sure you could speak with him,” Ben said, ashamed by his cowardly evasion. He never before shied away from difficult topics with his daughter.

“I guess,” Lisa said.

“Dr. Han thinks the phytoplankton discovered in The Cerulean Basin may help generate more oxygen. It’s possible we won’t need the Sanglith, at least not entirely,” Ben said. His daughter nodded, turning her attention back to the plant. He watched as she caressed the leaves with the love and care of a mother, as opposed to a promising botanist. For a brief moment, he thought one leaf reached back to meet her finger in a light embrace, the tiny red veins brightening with her every touch. Lisa appeared to mouth a few words in silence — a prayer perhaps, or words of encouragement.

Ben resumed studying the specimen under his microscope. Channels of fluid appeared to shrink, breathing life back into the cells, but only for a moment before stretching the membrane walls to their limits. The structures finally imploded, a recurring sign of imminent death.

2.

The substation’s personal quarters for Ben and Monica were quiet, except for the steady breathing of their infant daughter, Lisa, and the 432hz hum of a sound machine. Ben stretched in bed, awoken by a subconscious twinge of alarm. Where his legs would have normally met resistance, they only found emptiness. He expected a gentle nudge indicating he should return his meandering limbs back to his side. Instead, his stomach tightened, and the needling sweat of anxiety pricked his arms and neck.

Ben removed the covers and wrapped himself in a robe, careful not to wake Lisa. A growing urgency tugged at his insides, pulling him out of the bedroom to search the bathroom and kitchen, and then a sitting room. Monica could not be found. She would never leave Lisa alone without waking Ben. Nothing could separate the three unless it were an emergency and this sent him spiraling with thoughts of catastrophe.

The halls of the Xerces II were empty as well, but it was to be expected at this time of night. Circadian sleep rhythms were maintained for consistency, even though the darkness surrounding the vessel was persistent and suffocating. Ben’s breathing intensified as he jogged through unfamiliar corridors, but the air was shallow and the oxygen diminishing. The situation reminded him of climbing to the tops of Mount Elbert in the Rockies as a teenager.

The slaps of his naked feet on the floor grew lighter as did his weight. Dizziness washed over his entire body and his momentum stalled as he floated upward. It’s possible the systems governing spatial dark matter for gravitational manipulation were broken. Had they been hit by cosmic debris? He guided himself along the ceiling, a spider with only four appendages, groping about for traction. An alarm broke the silence, screaming of danger, while emergency lights flicked on, their rotating orbs indicating an approaching threat.

Ben shouted for his wife, pleaded for her to call out, but no sounds escaped his lips no matter how hard he tried. Tears were welling, clouding his vision, and yet through the salty moisture he made out a figure walking through an airlock. Monica. In an impossible flash he stood outside the compression chamber looking through a window. She peered back. The joy in her eyes, once bright and blue, became soulless and remote.

Monica reached out to pull down the airlock’s disengage lever on the wall, then turned it clockwise. Ben banged on the window, urging her to stop. She smiled and held up her hands, presenting an offering, a Sanglith, blooming with a white flower turning red as the veins from its leaves seeped through the petals. The plant multiplied, filling up the entire chamber, sprouting cloned flowers from nothingness. Monica reached through the sea of blood and pressed the airlock’s release button. The Sanglith withered, millions of cells exploding in a cataclysmic event. All of life was sucked out into the void.

All Ben could do was watch in desperation, his cries never heard. Frustration bubbled up and he screamed one last time. The voice he heard was not his own. It was Lisa’s, but not the infant, not the tiny helpless soul he left behind. His present, corporeal daughter was calling through his nightmare as she woke from her own.

Their bedrooms on LV-6 were in close proximity. Lisa held her father in a tight embrace, their conjoined heat and hurried breathing a physical reminder of their sleepless evening. She eventually settled, laying her head back down on the pillow, staring up at the shadow comforting her, desperate for him to understand.

“I saw you and Mom, on Xerces II, but I was young, an infant. You both left me all alone. I got up to find you, but I got lost and wandered around, babbling nonsense. I could understand in my mind, like I can understand now, but I was stuck in a child’s body. Does that make sense?” Lisa asked, the fever of the nightmare returning.

“Yes, I know what you mean,” Ben said, in disbelief about the similarities between their dreams.

“I finally found you, screaming Mom’s name, banging on a window, but I wasn’t tall enough to look inside. I grabbed hold of your robe and pulled. You wouldn’t answer me and I kept pulling, punching at your leg, desperate to get your attention. When you finally noticed, you picked me up and whispered in my ear…” Lisa began to cry.

“What, honey, what did I whisper?” Ben asked.

“‘It’s all your fault’. That’s what you said. ‘It’s all your fault’. Mom’s dead because of me.”

“No, your mother’s death was not your fault. She suffered from a blood clot in her brain, a rare, random, unavoidable condition. It was nobody’s fault, certainly not yours.”

After a few moments of silence, Lisa said, “They don’t want us here.” The blanket of exhaustion covered her body. She closed her eyes and breathed in stuttered fits, inviting sleep despite the confusion.

“Who doesn’t want us here?” Ben asked.

“They don’t… but I’ll talk to them,” Lisa whispered.

Ben watched for several minutes as she slipped back into unconsciousness. He held her hand tightly as her fingers twitched involuntarily beneath his. Once they stilled, indicating she was sound asleep, he exited the room, hopeful the ordeal would pass and be forgotten.

3.

Focusing on work became increasingly difficult for Ben. The absence of Lisa in the lab reminded him of the previous evening. She chose to sleep in and then visit the Sanglith fields alone. He tried to convince her otherwise, but he refused to admit it was more for his sake than hers. Memories of Monica hovered nearby, pecking away at his concentration, to the point where he stopped working altogether. Ben leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, attempting to envision his wife and daughter on their happiest days. A call on the lab’s Visicom interrupted his serenity.

A bioengineer from sector maintenance in the Sanglith fields fidgeted nervously on the other end, rubbing down his disheveled hair with soiled hands.

“Uh, Dr. McCallister, sir, this is Troy,” the man said.

“Yes, Troy, I can see you,” Ben said.

“Yeah, sorry to interrupt your work, but I really think you need to come down to the fields,” Troy said.

“Is it urgent?”

“I would say it’s a crisis. I’m out of options, but your daughter might have something to say about it, too.”

“What? Lisa, what would she have to say about it?”

“It’s a bit hard to explain, doc. You better hurry.”

Ben rushed from the lab and hopped into an all terrain buggy. The atmospheric gravity on LV-6 was a little heavier than Earth’s. Moving around with a vehicle outside was the recommended form of transport and he throttled it to the maximum speed, although it could never exceed the average human’s running pace.

Fermentation reactors came into view over the horizon, discharging CO2 as the steam vents hissed out condensation. Troy waved down Ben, who noticed a large portion of the Sanglith, even those growing wild around the habitat, were wilting. In the distance, Lisa stood in the middle of a brilliant red patch, stunning in color and achingly beautiful. Troy removed his tattered baseball cap and held his head down until Ben stopped.

“Doctor McCallister, I don’t know what happened. She walked out in a trance, without saying a word. I didn’t think much of it, until the plants started to wilt. It’s like they’re concentrating all of their energy on your daughter… as crazy as that sounds,” Troy said.

And it did sound crazy, but Ben sensed a purpose to their behavior and hoped Lisa could confirm. He advised Troy to stay behind and walked through plotted rows of the plants. Hundreds of miles of the species produced enough oxygen for a local community to survive. Without their help, nobody could live on the planet, a reminder of his own fragility, living day-to-day at the mercy of their provision. When he reached Lisa, he was stunned to witness a large outcropping in full bloom, all of them encircling his daughter. A gentle vibration could be felt below his feet.

“We have to leave,” Lisa said.

“What’s happening?” Ben asked. Lisa mouthed a few words in silence and crouched down, stretching her hands out to touch the budding white flowers. There was no mistaking their attraction to his daughter. The plants leaned in, stretching in waves as far as their roots would allow, acting in concert and communion.

“We’re not just here to study them, to live among them. We’re here to govern and expand, to populate their planet with houses and businesses and loads of people. Is that true?” Lisa asked.

“Over time, more people will arrive, but we’ll source the plants and any wildlife responsibly. You knew it would happen eventually. I never hid that fact,” Ben said.

“Dr. Han isn’t the only one coming. The directors of Thermodyne are with him, including their investors. This isn’t really about science or symbiosis. It’s about commerce.”

“How… how could you know all of that? I’m the only one who knows the flight manifest.”

“They’re listening to us, and their response is going to be self-destruction, Daddy, to kill themselves off instead of allowing it to happen.”

“Honey, we can’t just pick up and leave.”

“Then we’ll all suffocate.”

Ben waved over Troy, who jogged as fast as his portly legs would carry him, huffing as he approached the two.

“If we lost everything, the entire crop, how long before the oxygen density would destabilize?” Ben asked Troy. The color from the man’s face drained.

“I, I don’t know, I suspect a week possibly. Maybe… probably… if meteorological conditions are right,” Troy said.

“And if they’re not?” Ben asked.

“A day.”

Troy understood the assignment and rushed back to issue evacuation orders. Nearly a hundred residents would need to launch to safety on the orbiting substation, which would be cramped quarters until help could arrive. Ben suspected the investors would want answers and he would need to convince them without lunatic ramblings, talks of a psychic connection between Lisa and the Sanglith. But he had to admit, if they could communicate, could issue a warning to someone, then she would be the person.

The next twelve hours were difficult, trying to convince the council of the need to evacuate. A few insisted on staying, refusing to abandon their research, but when the votes were tallied, nobody could argue with the results.

Ben and Lisa strapped into the last transport ship. Before they could take off, he would need to communicate to Dr. Han and the visitors, to stay in orbit. He reached for the com too late. As their landing gear pulled up, the incoming transport hovered close and landed smack down in the middle of the Sanglith fields.

“Dr. Han, this is transport LV-6-6. Do you read?” Ben asked. After an agonizing pause, a voice came over the communication channel.

“Ah, Dr. McCallister, you’ve caused quite a panic,” a voice said.

“Who is this? Is Dr. Han on board?” Ben asked.

“My name is Kyle Bennet, President of Thermodyne’s Planetary Research division. Dr. Han found your assessment troubling and stayed aboard the substation. Do all scientists overreact like you two?”

The arriving ship’s cargo bay door opened and several well dressed men and women stepped out onto the platform, walking down into the fields. Ben could see through the front window as his pilot circled around for a better view.

“Mr. Bennet, I don’t think you understand. The ecosystem we’ve augmented is collapsing. The Sanglith are refusing to produce enough sustainable oxygen. Once the air thins, you may not make it back to the transport. Emergency supply tanks are available at the nearest outposts. Don’t be stupid. Grab them while you can,” Ben said. No response.

Another man walked down the platform — Kyle Bennet. He waved up at the transport and pointed to his ear, indicating he could not hear the com, then waved them off with the back of his hand in a dismissive gesture.

“Fools,” Ben said.

“I don’t want to watch,” Lisa said. Her father leaned in close to the window to get a better look as the transport rose into the air. All around, to the horizon and beyond, the Sanglith bloomed with white flowers, slowly bleeding red. Plumes of dried burgundy spores, dense, like a swarm of hungry locusts, ejected from the flower’s pistils. A cloud encased everyone and everything on the ground, drifting downward after a few minutes to reveal motionless scattered bodies, sinking down into the soil.

“They waited, even resisted their nature to reproduce naturally, for us,” Lisa said.

“You knew. Their wilting wasn’t a sign of self-destruction. We were being warned. It was a sign of their own self-preservation and our extinction,” Ben said.

“Would you have believed me if I told you the whole truth?”

“No, and I’ll never make that mistake again.”