The Far Green

Waking

The dream let go of her last, the way it always did—a green door swinging shut on a light she could never quite reach—and then Naima Sereda was awake, sixty-two years from everyone she loved.

For a long time that was all there was: the fact of being. Not thought, not name, not the catalogue of a body. Only a pressure, a dim red behind the eyes, a cold that had gone so deep it had stopped being cold and become a kind of weight, the weight of stone laid on a chest. Then the cradle began its work. Warm fluid moved through the lines threaded into the crook of her arm and the hollow of her throat, and something in her hindbrain remembered, reluctantly, what it was for. Her heart shuddered, missed, caught. The first breath tore in like swallowed glass.

She did not gasp so much as the ship gasped for her, the recovery harness compressing her ribs and letting go, compressing and letting go, until her own diaphragm took up the rhythm and held it. Pins of fire raced down nerves that had lain unused for the length of three Earth lifetimes. Her tongue lay thick and foreign in her mouth. When she tried to lift a hand it answered her only after a delay, the way a far station answers a question already gone stale—the limb floating up, surprising her, a pale unfamiliar thing strung with monitor leads. Sixty-two years. The number arrived before her name did. Her name came second, and it came small.

The smell reached her next, and that was when she knew, truly, that she was alive and not still dreaming. Cold-sleep had no smell. Waking had a great deal of it. The cabin reeked of the inside of machines—of warmed plastic and electrolyte gel, of the iron tang of revived blood, of the sweetish rot the cradles produced when they purged sixty years of cellular waste from six sleeping bodies all at once. Underneath it lay the ship's own scent, the one she had stopped noticing in the weeks before they went under: scrubbed air gone slightly stale, the ghost of a thousand reheated meals, the particular dryness of a closed world. Calyx. She was aboard Calyx, and Calyx had carried her across eleven and a half light-years while everything she had ever touched turned to dust.

"Vitals on Sereda," said a voice in the dim, flat and careful, a clinician's voice trained to give nothing away. Théroux. "She's tracking. Pupils equal. Welcome back, Doctor."

Naima's mouth worked. What came out was not a word, only air shaped like the wish for one.

"Don't," Théroux said. "Don't talk yet. Swallow first. There's a reflex you have to find again. Take your time finding it."

She found it. It hurt. She did it twice more, and the third time her throat felt like a throat and not a wound, and she said, in a cracked whisper that did not sound like hers, "Are we—"

"We're here," said another voice, and this one she would have known at the bottom of any sea—the gravel and warmth of it, the long vowels worn smooth by years of command. Reza Aban. He was somewhere above and to her left, and she heard the wet effort of him hauling himself upright in his cradle, heard him bite down on a groan and lose. "We're here, all of us. Six for six. Calyx did her job."

"Speak for your own pupils, Commander," said Théroux. "Lie back down. You'll tear the lines."

"I've torn worse."

A light came up—not the red emergency glow but a true amber, soft, rising the way dawn rises when you have not seen one in a very long time. The cabin resolved around Naima in increments. The curved white ribs of the deck. The six cradles in their ring, lids retracted, each holding a person in the slow agony of return. Frost still ghosted the rim of the cradle across from hers, melting now, beading, running. She could see the others as shapes and then as faces. Aban, big and grey-stubbled, his head fallen back, the cords of his neck standing out. Beyond him a slighter form curled almost into itself, a tangle of dark hair, fingers flexing and unflexing with the deliberate wonder of someone testing whether hands were still real—Teo, that would be Teo, who flexed her fingers like that even awake.

"My hands work," Teo said, to no one, to all of them, her voice high and amazed and very young. "Oh. Oh, they work."

"Congratulations," came a dry murmur from the far cradle, the words bitten off between hard breaths. Bram. "Mine itch. Everything itches. Is that—Théroux, is the itching normal, or is that the part where we find out the gel ate us."

"The itching is normal."

"You'd say that anyway."

"I would," Théroux agreed, without warmth, and Naima heard the small terrible humor in it and almost laughed, and the almost-laugh became a cough that doubled her over the harness.

It was the sixth voice that steadied her. It came low and unhurried from the cradle beside hers, a voice with grey in it and gravel of a gentler kind than Aban's, the voice of a man who had spent a life talking glaciers and stone into giving up their age. "Easy now, Naima," said Kwame Estévez. "Easy. You're doing the hardest thing you'll do all decade, and you're doing it well. Breathe like you mean to keep it. There. There you are."

She breathed like she meant to keep it. Across the ring, one by one, they were all of them coming back into the world—Aban cursing softly, Teo marveling, Bram itemizing his complaints as a way to keep from weeping, Théroux moving among them with her tablet and her cold competent hands, Kwame anchoring the whole drift of it with that low steady voice. Six minds. Six separate weathers. The only six human beings within eleven and a half light-years of where they were, and where they were—

"You'll want to see it," Kwame said. He had freed one arm and was pointing, slow, at the long oval port set into the hull above the cradle ring. "We all will. But you first, I think. It was your reason. Go on."

She did not remember deciding to move. She remembered the appalling labor of it—the lines coming free with small tugs and colder kisses, the deck reaching up through nine-tenths of a gravity she had forgotten how to wear, her knees discovering they were knees and objecting. She remembered Kwame's hand under her elbow, and then the cold curved metal of the port frame under her palms, holding her up. She remembered putting her face to the glass.

Below them turned Tasso.

Afterward she would try a hundred times to say it and fail a hundred times, because the languages humanity had brought across the dark were languages made by and for a single living world, and they had only ever needed one word for alive because they had only ever had one example. Now there were two. The moon filled the lower half of the port and ran off its edges, and it was green. Not the brown-green of the Earth she had left, the Earth gone sallow and low and salt-poisoned at its drowned hems—but green the way a held breath is green, green the way the inside of a leaf is green when the sun is behind it, a deep and lit and living green that climbed up out of cloud and ran unbroken from limb to limb of the visible world. Forests, she understood, though no forest she had ever flown over had looked like that, so even, so deliberate, the canopy laid down across the curve of the moon like something combed. Rivers caught the light in bright crooked threads. A weather system turned slow and white over an ocean the color of old jade. And over all of it, filling the rest of the sky beyond the moon's bright rim, hung Maru.

The gas giant was banded amber and bruise and cream, vast past the scale of anything, a wall of slow storms that made the moon beneath it look like a green seed dropped against a burning floor. Its rings cut a hard bright line across the dark and threw their shadow down across Tasso's face, a long band of deeper green-gold where the sunlight came filtered, stained. Ophir—their orange sun, eleven and a half light-years from the sun that had made her—burned small and steady off to one side, and everything it touched it turned the color of honey and brass and that impossible green.

The only living world humanity had ever found. And it was beautiful past bearing. And it was too good.

"Eleven point six light-years," Aban said behind her, and there was something raw scraped under the command in it now. "Sixty-two years asleep. We are the farthest anything from Earth has ever been by a factor I don't have the stomach to say out loud. And we made it, and it's—Sereda. Look at it. Tell me what we're looking at."

"Green," she said. It was all she had. Tears were running down her face and she had not noticed beginning to cry; her body, so slow at everything else, had remembered that one thing instantly. "It's—Reza, it's green. It's all the way green."

"Then we did the right thing," he said, and she heard him want it to be true the way a man wants the verdict before the trial. "Then it was worth it."

Worth it. The two words went into her like the first breath had, like glass. Because the green out there was a sum, and she knew the arithmetic of it the way she knew her own pulse, and the arithmetic did not care how beautiful the answer was. Sixty-two years out. The same again, near enough, since the mission had been crewed and the lots cast and the goodbyes—God, the goodbyes—said in a launch hangar that smelled of coolant and other people's fear. A hundred and twenty-odd years, then, end to end, swallowed by the dark while she slept and did not age and dreamed her green-door dream. Everyone she had loved was decades gone. Her mother, who had pressed her hand at the gate and said go on, go on, don't look back, you were never one to look back. Her colleagues. The boy she had almost married, twice. All of them old, all of them dust, all of them long since become the soil of a world she would never stand on again.

And Maren.

The name arrived the way her own name had arrived, small, and then it was the only thing in the cabin. Maren at seven, gap-toothed, furious that Naima was leaving, refusing the hug and then giving it so hard it bruised. Maren, who would be—Naima did the arithmetic she had sworn she would not do, the arithmetic she had done ten thousand times in the months before they went under—Maren would be sixty-nine years old now, if Earth had been kind, which Earth was not in the habit of being. Sixty-nine, or eighty, or thirty years dead. Her daughter was an old woman or an absence, and there was no third thing, and Naima had chosen this. Had stood in a room and signed her name and chosen the green out there over the small hot hand that had held hers at the gate, because the green out there was a future and Earth was a closing door, and she had told herself, I am doing this for her. I am buying her a sky.

Her hand had gone, without instruction, to the breast of her undersuit, to the flat shape sealed in the pocket there that had ridden across the dark against her sleeping heart. She did not need to open it to see what was inside. The pressed leaf, a maple from the last living maple on their street, gone brown and translucent as parchment, that Maren had given her at the gate—so you don't forget green, Mama. The folded square of paper, soft as cloth now from handling, with the crayon drawing on it: a stick woman and a stick child under a wild scribbled tree, the whole thing colored over and over in the one color the child had loved best, pressing so hard the green had waxed and shone. This is us where you're going. This is the garden you're going to plant. And beside the leaf and the drawing, the small flat tin, cold through the suit, that held the heirloom seeds—tomato and bean and bitter green and a twist of wildflower, the genetic memory of a kinder Earth, carried eleven and a half light-years so that she could kneel on a new world and put the old one into its ground and call it a beginning.

A first garden. She had carried it the whole way to plant a first garden.

Out the port, the green came up to meet the ring-shadow and turned, in the band of filtered light, the color of old glass. Beautiful. Made. Set, something in her whispered, the way you'd say a table was set, and she did not yet know why the word frightened her, only that it did.

"Twenty-six days," Aban said. He had come to stand at her shoulder, and he said it to the moon as much as to her, an oath and a warning both. "That's what the window gives us. Twenty-six surface days from first footfall, and then Ophir and Maru and our own orbit line up the one way that lets us climb back to Calyx on the fuel we've got, and if we're not on the Heron and burning when it opens, we don't come home. Théroux's done the consumables. Twenty-six days down, or we starve on the way up. The Combine sent us to find them a world they can have. We've got under a month to learn whether this is it." He let out a slow breath through his teeth. "No pressure."

"None at all," said Bram faintly, from somewhere behind, still in his cradle, still itching, still alive.

Below the ring of waking minds, far down a curved umbilical corridor she had walked a hundred times in training and not once in flight, the lander Heron waited in its cradle—fueled, checked sixty-two years ago and checked again now by the ship's patient automatic hands, a blunt grey wedge of a thing that would carry the six of them down through that green-gold air to set the first human feet on the first living ground anyone had ever found that was not Earth. She could feel it down there the way you feel a held note. The whole weight of the species leaned on it. The whole weight of everyone she had left behind.

They moved fast, after that, the way the trained do when the alternative is feeling. Théroux cleared them one by one, grudging, thorough. Kwame talked them through the gravity, joint by reawakened joint. Teo wept once, openly, at the port, and then wiped her face and grinned at the moon like it had promised her something private. Aban ran the lander checks in a voice gone hard and certain, the commander's voice, the one that did not allow doubt to find a seam. And Naima Sereda, xenobotanist, mother, the one whose reason this whole green impossible distance had been, sealed her suit over the leaf and the drawing and the cold small tin of seeds, and let them strap her into the Heron, and put her hand flat against the cool inner hull as if it were a flank she could gentle.

The clamps released with a sound like the world clearing its throat. The Heron uncoupled from Calyx and fell toward the moon. Below them, the green came up to meet them, and it was the color of a promise she had made a child who was probably already dead.

First Footfall

The ring-shadow swallowed the Heron, and the light turned the green of old glass, and Bram brought them down so gently that Naima did not feel the world take their weight.

She had braced for it—hand around the strap, jaw set, the way you brace at the top of a long fall. The descent through Maru's ring-shadow had been a slow eclipse, the gas giant filling the whole port like a struck bronze gong and then the thin dark band of its rings cutting across the sun. For ninety seconds the cabin had gone the color of a bottle held up to candlelight, everything dim and submarine, the readouts smearing green across their faces. Teo, across the aisle, had made a small sound, not quite a word. Then the Heron slid out the far edge of the shadow into amber morning, and the moon was no longer a thing on a screen. It was under them. It was a country.

Bram flew it down with both hands and his whole spine. She could hear him through the open channel—not panic, never quite panic, but a running murmur of numbers and corrections, easing her, easing her, two meters, hold, a man talking a frightened animal down off a ledge, except the animal was the lander and the ledge was eleven and a half light-years deep. The thrust note dropped. The skids felt for the ground. And the ground, when it came, did not clang or jolt. It received them. The Heron settled into the meadow with a long sigh of compressing turf, a sound like sitting down in deep grass, and the engines wound to nothing, and there was no more falling, and they were the first human beings to rest on a living world that was not the Earth.

Nobody spoke for a moment. The cabin ticked as it cooled.

"Down," Bram said finally, unnecessarily, and laughed once, a cracked exhale. "We're down. We're—" He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. "Sereda, your soil's right outside. Try not to fall in love before the rest of us get there."

"No promises," Naima said, and was surprised her voice worked.

Aban was already out of his couch, moving down the cabin with the deliberate economy of a man who had decided long ago that the commander's job was to be calm where calm was not warranted. He checked the seals. He checked the external panel. He looked, for a moment too long, at the meadow waiting beyond the forward port—an ocean of pale-green fronds running up to a tree-line of things that were almost trees—and something crossed his face that he put away before any of them could name it.

"Théroux," he said. "Tell me about the air."

Théroux was already telling them about the air. She had been telling them about the air for two days, from orbit, in the flat lecturing voice she used when she wanted no one to argue. Now she read the local samples off the Heron's sniffer as they came in, and Naima watched the numbers populate her own slate and felt the back of her neck go cold for reasons that had nothing to do with cold.

Partial pressure of oxygen: a touch high. Nitrogen bulk. Trace argon, trace carbon dioxide within a hair of Earth norm. No methane to speak of, no sulfur compounds, none of the reducing-atmosphere poisons her training had taught her to expect on any world young enough or strange enough to be interesting. Humidity comfortable. Particulates low and organic. She ran her first assay against the reference library, the one built from Earth, and the match came back so clean that she ran it again, certain she had fed it the wrong baseline.

She had not fed it the wrong baseline.

"This is breathable," Théroux said, and there was something in the way she said it—too careful, a woman setting a full cup on a crowded table—that made Naima look up. "Not survivable. Breathable. I would clear a patient to take this in through an unmasked face and I would not write a note."

"Convergent chemistry," Naima said, because someone had to say the sensible thing, and because she wanted it to be true. "Water world, right star band, photosynthesis is photosynthesis. You get the same notes if you've got the same instrument."

"Maybe." Théroux did not look at her. "It's a very clean note, Doctor."

Set for guests, Naima thought, and did not say, because the phrase had arrived in her head unbidden and fully formed and she did not like it. She wrote it in the margin of her slate instead, the way you write down a dream before it goes: air reads as if tuned. as if set for guests. Then she closed the slate, because the first thing they had agreed, all of them, in the long sober meetings during the weeks of waking, was that they would not let wonder do their thinking for them. They had crossed a desert of dark to get here. They would not lose their heads in the first oasis.

Aban gave the order, and they suited—not against the air, which by every reading wanted them, but against contamination, theirs of it and its of them, the soft permeable field suits that let the world touch you through a membrane and kept the worst of you off the world. Naima sealed her hood and felt her own breath come back at her, and through the visor the meadow waited, lit that impossible green-gold, and she found she was afraid, and the fear was not of dying. It was the fear of being unworthy of the next two minutes.

The ramp came down. The outer lock breathed open. And the first thing that came in was not the sight, which she had been bracing for, but the smell, which she had not.

It came through the suit's intake faint and then not faint: a sweetness low to the ground, the ground-fog that lay in the hollows of the meadow and broke around the skids in slow pale rivers. It was the smell of cut hay and crushed stem and something else under that, something floral and clean and very slightly mineral, like rain coming over warm stone. It was the smell of a greenhouse at dawn. It was the smell, precisely, of the inside of the propagation domes where she had spent the best hours of her ruined life on a ruined Earth, and her throat closed so hard she had to stop on the ramp with one gloved hand on the rail.

"Sereda." Aban, behind her, low. "You all right."

"Yes." She was not. "Yes. Go—I want to be last."

He understood, or decided to, and went past her, and Reza Aban set the first human boot on Tasso the way he did everything, like a man planting a flag he was not yet allowed to plant. Then Kwame, the old geologist, going down on one knee almost at once to put his fingers into the turf, his face working. Then Teo, who did not walk down so much as drift, both hands a little raised, her lips moving. Then Théroux, upright, watchful, last but for Naima, the doctor's eyes going everywhere at once and trusting none of it.

Naima went down the ramp alone, and stepped off the metal, and onto the world.

The turf took her weight and gave it back. That was the thing no instrument had told her, the thing she had not known to want: it had give. Not the dead packed give of soil but something springier, layered, alive all the way down, a deep pile of living matter that pressed up under her boot and breathed and held. She rocked her weight onto it and it rose to meet her. Nine-tenths of Earth's gravity, so she felt at once lighter and more upheld, as though the moon were carrying a tithe of her for her. The fronds came to her knee, pale green going gold at the tips where Ophir's amber light caught them, and they bent away from her boots and sprang back, and overhead Maru wheeled enormous and serene, half the sky, its rings a thin bright wire drawn across the morning and its shadow a soft band that crawled, that she could watch crawl, slow as a clock's hour hand, across the meadow toward the trees.

The light came down through all of it—through the rings, through the high thin cloud, through the fronds—and arrived green-gold and everywhere at once, shadowless and warm, the light of a world remembered rather than seen. It lay on the backs of her gloves. It lay on the meadow running out to the candlewood and the fern-trees beyond, on the low turfed mounds humped here and there in the grass like sleeping things, on the far blue-green wall of forest. It was, she thought, and hated the thought for its sentiment and could not unthink it, the color of a promise. The exact color. She had told a seven-year-old that she was going to find her a green place, the greenest place, and here it was, sixty-two years and eleven light-years later, and the child was a number now, a probability, an age she could compute and could not bear to.

She knelt.

She had not meant to. Her knees simply went, the way they go in a church you didn't know you believed in, and she knelt in the pale fronds with the fog breaking cool around her thighs, and she put both gloved hands flat against the living turf, and at her hip, through the suit, she felt the small hard rectangle of the tin.

The seed tin. Her grandmother's, before it was hers—a flat dented thing that had held boiled sweets when there were still boiled sweets, and now held the future of an Earth that was mostly past: tomato, bean, a twist of waxed paper full of marigold, three kinds of squash, a pinch of wheat from a field that no longer existed, all of it dry and patient and asleep, like the six of them had been asleep, waiting out the dark for a soil worth waking into. She had carried it across the gulf to plant a first garden. She had imagined it a thousand times in the months before the long sleep and a thousand times in the strange green dreams of the sleep itself: a square of turned earth, dark and broken, the seeds going down in their straight hopeful rows, the small green coming up to say yes, here, this works, this is home. She put her hand over the tin and let herself, for one moment, all the way into the dream. The garden. The rows. A child's hand—she would not let herself see whose—pressing a seed into the dark.

Then she opened her eyes, and the dream stayed a moment longer in the world before her, and she understood with a small cold drop in her chest that she was looking at it. Not her garden. Theirs. The meadow ran out from her knees in patterns. She had not let herself see it from the ramp—she had told herself it was the human eye doing what it always did, making faces out of stars, rows out of randomness. But down here at the height of the fronds the candlewood stood at the tree-line in a spacing too even to be wild, trunk and gap, trunk and gap, with low ferny things filling the gaps in a way she had seen exactly once before, in a textbook, under the heading companion planting, and the mounds in the meadow sat at intervals, and the whole green country had the quality, faint and undeniable, of a thing arranged.

Convergent chemistry, she told herself again. Tropism. Glaciers leave regular ground. Don't.

She stood, slowly, and that was when she noticed it—the thing that had been there since the ramp, the thing the smell and the light and the give of the turf had crowded out of her attention, the way a held breath goes unnoticed until the lungs begin to ache for it.

There was no sound.

There was wind. The wind moved across the meadow in long slow combers and the fronds turned under it with a dry sweet hush, and the candlewood at the tree-line made a deep soft roar of moved leaves, and under everything, almost below hearing, there was a hum she could feel in her back teeth more than hear, a vast green hum of growth and water and slow alien metabolism, the sound a forest makes when it forgets you are there. All of that. And under it, where the bones of her expected the rest—the chitter, the drone, the small idiot music of a living world doing its million small living businesses, the insects rising off the warm grass, the thing in the trees that calls and the thing that answers—there was nothing. No birdsong. No whine at her ear. No click, no buzz, no rustle that was not the wind's. She turned her head and there was only the wind and the great hum and her own breath in the hood, and the silence under it all stood up around her like water rising in a room.

The others had felt it too. She could see it in the way they had gone still—Kwame on his feet now, head cocked, an old man listening for a clock that had stopped; Teo with her arms slowly lowering; Aban's hand drifting toward a weapon he had not brought; even Théroux, who trusted nothing, holding very still and trusting this least of all. Nobody named it. To name it would be to make it true, and they were not ready, on the first hour of the first day, to be afraid of a paradise.

Naima walked toward the tree-line. She did not decide to. Her body went, the way it had knelt. The fronds parted at her shins and the fog broke around her and the silence came with her, vast and attentive, and at the edge of the meadow the candlewood gave way to the fern-trees, and the fern-trees let down great green fronds in a curtain, frond crossed over frond, a hanging green wall with one gap in it the exact width of a person, an arch of crossed fronds, a door.

She had dreamed this door. She had dreamed it asleep in the dark between the stars, sixty-two years of it, the same dream every crewmate would later admit to in low voices when they finally dared compare: a green door, standing open, and on the far side of it a green you wanted so badly it woke you. She had dreamed it and woken with her face wet and told no one. And here it stood, made of fronds and shadow and green-gold light, the dream made flesh, waiting at the edge of the world's first quiet.

She stepped through.

The fronds brushed cool along her shoulders and closed behind her, and she was inside the tree-line, in the gold-green underlight, and the meadow was a bright country behind the green and the forest a deep one before it, and she stood in the doorway of the moon and felt it know that she had come.

She knelt again. The fog was thicker here, sweet, lying in the roots. She pressed her palm flat to the soil and waited for the world to make a sound.

Somewhere there should have been birds.

There were none.