Another Garden

We found the first garden in the third deck maintenance shed. Thompson stood in the doorway pulling this disgusted face as I pushed the plants aside with gloved hands, digging toward the middle. It was my first week on active duty. Blooms batted at my face in a thick profusion. “Rip it all out,” Thompson said. “It’s in the manual.”

I checked with the weak AI in charge of shipwide rule sets and he was right. The response pinged in my head like an air exchange hissing in my ear. Any unauthorized plant life had to be removed, something about invasive species. But where anyone would’ve gotten an invasive species three hundred years after we last left Earth, I couldn’t begin to guess. I moved deeper into the garden, fingertips grazing across wide leaves, but feeling none of it, only pressure and latex. The room smelled like mulch and something rank. Thompson didn’t follow, and soon he was gone, lost at the edge of the green blossoms, their stalks and buds surrounding me like the thick blanket my mother used to wrap around my little body when I was small.

“Shan,” Thompson called out. “What the shit are you going in there?”

I knelt down in front of a small pot filled with whirls of thick, spongy fronds. I leaned forward and smelled them, breathing in a sharp tingle in the back of my throat, before stroking down their length. Nothing moved. The garden was quiet and alive. I plucked a clipping and shoved it into my pocket.

Thompson looked pissed when I walked back over. “You going to make me do this alone?” I asked and kicked over a pot. It rolled on its side, spilling earth.

That woke him up. He snapped on gloves.

***

We found the second garden in the private quarters of Luanne DeVay, the assistant to the Chief Science Officer. She was pissed when we knocked and even more pissed when Thompson started confiscating her planters. I’d seen this a dozen times by now. It was always the same. “Those were approved,” she said even though we all knew that wasn’t true.

“I’m sorry, Ms. DeVay, but it’s protocol.” I was trying to keep her from flipping out. Sometimes, folks lost their minds when the little rules they bent came back to smother them. “You can ping the AI if you want.”

If she bothered, she didn’t show it. Thompson took great pleasure in carting out the garden, in placing the pots, the dirt, their little blooming flowers on the cart we brought for this reason, having learned our lesson after the first one. Although we barely needed it.

“They’re seedlings from the botany wing,” she said, not looking at me, staring straight at her plants as they rattled against each other. I remember my mother looking like that after Dad’s funeral as the maintenance crew pushed her shroud toward the recycling center. Hollow acceptance.

“Protocol,” Thompson grunted at her.

I tried a sympathetic smile. She wasn’t buying it.

***

The third garden was in a damp maintenance hatch buried deep beneath the gray water pipes. My back hurt and my knees ached as we crawled along the tunnel. Thompson had thought it was natural when we first found it, but I knew the signs. Fungi didn’t spread in neat rows like that. Moss wasn’t normally shaped into geometric patterns, squares within circles, connected by fuzzy green lines. I could see the wrinkles around my mother’s eyes in the way the green fuzz curled into itself. Someone spent hours down here meticulously crafting this place. They were like quilts obsessively stitched from leftover string by tired hands. It was almost beautiful, except Thompson insisted on wearing a mask and dousing the whole place in bleach. I scraped at the edge of a pattern like our ship’s thrusters leaving cosmic dust scattered across an asteroid band.

“Spray,” Thompson said, tossing me a bottle. Then fake gagged. “And put your gloves on, you lunatic.”

***

The fourth garden wouldn’t stop growing. It started from a mistake, and moved to cutting, to seedling, to spore, to profusion. I refused to answer the door when they knocked and ignored their voices when they tried to override the lock. I had disabled it a few hours ago. Quilts were stacked on the bed and they still smelled like her, even a week after. She’d liked the flower motifs, lots of birds and bees, little creatures she’d never seen, life she’d only guessed at from photos fed to her by the AI stream. But her hands had worked hard in the lean years. She’d taken my gifts and made them into something bigger.

The garden was overwhelming. I stood with my back to the door, not sure where to begin. Round little bush-like plants and green-and-purple flowers and creeping vines dripping down the wall from hanging baskets and fern fronds three feet wide and eight feet long, all of it crowding her cramped quarters. The garden must’ve taken years, ten of them since Dad and the first night I gave her that stolen clipping, ten long years since I was last in this room.

The banging started again, but I let it wash over me. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell, the musty stink, the pollen and the blooms. I could see her sitting on her bed, gathering stitch, big stitch, drag, featherstitch, backstitch, start over again. Limping around her small quarters, using her allotment of shower water to make sure the plants kept going.

I never should’ve mentioned the gardens. I never should’ve given her the start of all this. But here it was, the fourth garden, more beautiful than the others because it still looked like her, and I didn’t want to let her go. It was protocol, it was the rules. Her shroud had disappeared down the long hallway everyone went through one day. Except she’d left something behind.

“Shan, open the door.” Thompson’s voice. Much too familiar at this point. “I know you’re hurting. But you got to open the door.”

I leaned my head back. I looked at the ceiling. Ivy leaves reached down toward my face like fingers. Mom was there and I could feel her. My head buzzed, the rattle of old pipes.

The clipping came off easy. It was the same plant, the one that had started it all. I don’t know why I did it, but it felt right as I slipped it into my pocket, like saving a piece of Mom.

There was always more life. We couldn’t smother it, even when we tried. There’d be a fifth, and a sixth, and on well past the time they wheeled me down the hall.

Thompson was first through when I opened the door. He paused, looking around, but didn’t seem surprised. He nodded at me, and I expected him to yank on gloves. He hugged me instead. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you know the rules.”

I knew them. I just didn’t care. There was always another garden.

---

Hello folks and welcome to another Sprawl. If you’re new: thanks for joining. If you’re old: also thanks. I’m glad you’re all here.

Sometimes I’ll use this bottom space to write my thoughts on the publishing industry, especially self-publishing, but I’m under the weather at the moment and my head’s not really working all that good, so there’s nothing from me today.

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