Of Botany and Biology
A xenobotanist struggles to find connection light years from Earth after never quite having it at home.
Science fiction is my home turf. So far this year I’ve been following prompts for different contests, bending lightly into fantasy where I could. I’ve experimented with horror, struggled with satire, and dabbled in straightforward fiction, but my favorite genre is sci fi. How I love a good space opera or some hard sci fi.
I found a writing contest by Writer’s Playground that had a pretty open-ended prompt and a higher-than-normal word count of 3,000. I had to include some specific elements, but I was excited to weave them into a sci fi story. Look for more from me in this vein.
I’m proud of this story, and I hope you enjoy it. While this didn’t place in the contest, I received some very positive feedback, and I plan to hone my voice in this style and nurture and act on some ideas that have sparked for future projects.
It felt like an eternity before I could open my eyes. In reality, it was probably only a minute. But for someone who hadn’t moved a muscle in four years, it was a unique form of agony. I think people tend to romanticize the idea of hypersleep. It sounds so simple, even peaceful. You “sleep” for a very long time and then wake up impossibly far away, as if by magic. I’ve heard that people used to take pills to help them sleep on long flights back on Earth. It’s funny to think that 14 hours felt insufferable back then.
“Hello again, Zeyu.” Good, my ears still work fine. “It’s me, Dr. Forrest. It may seem like we were just talking, but it’s been a few weeks from my perspective. I’m going to review some things with you to help you reacclimate as comfortably as possible.”
I lifted the heaviest eyelids I’ve ever known to see the doctor facing me. We were the only two people in the rehabilitation room. The lighting was soft and there was an abundance of greenery, like you might find in a spa.
I remembered all this from the training. The doctor’s team methodically went over timelines and time dilation with us. We all knew exactly how the trip would go. That said, nothing could truly prepare me for the moment that came next.
“You’ve been in stasis for about four years. During that time, we’ve traveled 23 light years. 25 years have passed on Earth.”
Damn. Mom and Dad would be in their 80s. My sister Liyue would be 60 and little Chenxi would be older than me! I traveled into the future and my mind was breaking.
Dr. Forrest must have seen terror creeping into my awakening facial muscles, because she said, “Let’s help you calm down” before slipping relaxation meds into my IV and proceeding to tell me about the new state of the universe.
*****
A familiar unease arose after the meds wore off. As my body continued to awaken, so did my memories of why I left. Earth was now a planet in decline, headed the way of Mars, and climate technology showed no promise of reversing that. Humanity wouldn’t go extinct; at this point we lived throughout the solar system, mostly in space habs and research colonies on places like Venus, Mars, and Europa. But to thrive again, humans desperately needed to find a new home, meaning a planet in the Goldilocks zone that was neither too close nor too far from its sun, able to support Earth-based life.
I am a botanist. There was still a need to study and preserve plant life on Earth, and to continue cultivating plants in habs and colonies. The exciting work, however, was in xenobotany, the study of exotic, alien plant life. I had been part of a team trying to simulate alien plants in a lab based on data collected from probes.
Countless probes sent to candidate planets decades ago had been reporting about the atmosphere, soil, and life forms using a special form of instantaneous data transfer powered by quantum entanglement. Only available in specially equipped labs, entangled atoms transmitted data at a low bandwidth, meaning simple text sailed between the stars with zero delay.
*****
It was this technology that allowed me to read a book of updates from my family. I used my Hint (an embedded Human Interface to the local net) to read these dispatches. I cried learning about Liyue’s miscarriages then again when she gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Interspersed with family updates were recaps of events in the Sol system. Things progressed mostly like people predicted they would. Wars were fought over dwindling resources, minor discoveries were made, but mostly everyone muddled through like they always did.
My parents were doing well, all things considered. Aging was easier than it used to be, and my secret hope was that they’d be able to follow me. Over 60 missions like mine had been launched in the intervening years, and at least one was bound to find a viable world for migration from Earth.
*****
“Zeyu, don’t rush into this.” Dr. Forrest’s words echoed those of my mother. She was talking about getting up and trying to move around. My muscles had been electrically stimulated to keep from atrophying, but actually trying to walk after so long in a hypersleep chamber would take some practice. “You’ll need to spend a lot of time in therapy here as we approach the station.”
The rehab room was large, designed for many of us to use together as we reintegrated into the conscious world. A few hundred people came out of hypersleep as we approached the planet Le Guin, named in honor of an old author/philosopher back on Earth. There were no significant problems, but people were often clumsy in their freshly awakened bodies, as if they were teenagers who had undergone a growth spurt and didn’t quite know where their limbs ended. Despite a daily exercise regimen that wore us out, we usually needed help from the doctors to sleep.
Of vital importance was the chance to reconnect with humans. Only a few individuals seemed particularly extroverted, and their voices tended to dominate. Like me, most people kept to themselves, but that didn’t stop me from feeling like I was an outsider watching some team that had been playing together for years. This feeling was magnified by the impossibly vast distance from home. Sending short texts through the entanglement machine did help make Earth feel closer than 23 light years away, but here we cautiously extended feelers outward, like vines trying to find purchase in a new patch of soil.
This is where I first saw Saanvi.
She would have been hard to not notice. Keeping to herself, I often saw her on a treadmill and reading from her Hint, which projected an overlay directly in front of her amber eyes. She kept her dark, wavy hair pulled into a braid, and despite my best efforts to not look, what caught my eye was her left arm, which ended below the elbow. When regrowing flesh and bone only took a few days, I was surprised to see someone resist fixing a problem like that.
“It’s not a problem and it doesn’t need fixing,” she would later tell me. “It’s part of me; part of my story. It’s a reminder, and it’s a gift.”
I struggled to understand. “Wouldn’t you like to do things with two hands again?”
“Of course! But that’s not who I am. For me, it’s good to know what I’ve lost, and what I’ve overcome. For you? If you lose a precious body part,” she laughed, “I’ll be sure to get you to the nearest med lab as fast as my one arm can tow you.”
I didn’t know any of this at the time. I just found myself wanting to know her, be near her. Over the next few days, I slowly closed the distance to where she stationed herself until I was walking next to her.
“Are you courageous enough to talk to me, or are you going to keep inching closer until we share this treadmill?”
Dammit! I thought I had played it cool! At least she had broken the ice. “Um, hi. Sorry, I didn’t want to intrude.” I may have visibly cringed. Inwardly, I was hitting my forehead with my fist. “How are you doing?”
I realized I hadn’t worked out any sort of plan to introduce myself. Fortunately for me, she was incredibly kind and had mastered the social graces required to smooth over the bumpy efforts of idiots clumsily pursuing her.
“Not too bad,” she replied. “Just dealing with post-hypersleep nausea, sleeplessness, constant headaches, and the passing of my grandmother while I was snoozing in space.”
I pulled a face of shock and horror, like I had stepped in something foul, but she laughed at my discomfort and diffused the tension.
“I’m Saanvi. This is all a lot, isn’t it?” She gestured around. “How are you doing with everything?”
“Saanvi,” I repeated her name, luxurious in my ears. “I’m Zeyu. I’m good, I guess?” I laughed at how not good I was performing in this moment, but over the remaining days of approach we found comfort in our shared discomfort, kindling a friendship that I hoped would develop into something more.
*****
Liyue couldn’t understand my decision. She never really understood me at all. Maybe I was to blame because I had difficulty connecting with others, or maybe it was our five year age difference. In any event, she couldn’t fathom leaving home.
“I don’t have a family of my own,” I tried explaining to her. “What I do have is an opportunity to maybe give us all a better life.”
“That’s a very selfish way to look at it. I’ll be left to take care of Mom and Dad all by myself–”
“I’m hoping you can all join me!” I caught myself, trying to prevent further escalation. This was already hard enough, and she pushed my buttons in the way only siblings can do.
We never ended up on the same page. Such was the case with my parents, too. Friendships had mostly faded by then; I worked all the time and never let anyone get too close.
Where I did feel connected was in nature. Marveling at the vast, interconnected systems, I felt my place in the universe most strongly when in the presence of some towering, ancient tree, or kneeling in the mud with tubers or mushrooms poking up around me. That overwhelming feeling of being where I was supposed to be when enmeshed in nature was the key factor in my decision to join the research colony on Le Guin.
*****
I woke up in rehab again, this time on the base station in orbit above Le Guin. We had docked to unload people, machinery, and supplies. The station wasn’t exactly a space port, but a town in its own right had formed to manage the flow of people and materials.
I was lying in a room similar to the one on the ship: warm lighting, comfortable bedding, and lots of greenery, but new was a wall-sized window to the ever-rotating landscape of the planet. I stared as Le Guin leisurely spun 500 kilometers below the station. Like any natural wonder, seeing it in person was so much more impactful than in pictures and videos. It was dominated by blue oceans, though there was a deeper green tint thanks to different microalgae and microorganisms. The landmasses were the prime feature, covered in blues, pinks, lavenders, and purples. Photosynthesis evolved a little differently with this sunlight and atmosphere, and the desire to explore it consumed my thoughts.
The culprit of my incapacitation was slightly embarrassing. My appendix had ruptured, which is a rare side effect of long bouts of hypersleep. As the only person lucky enough on the ship to experience it, I had gone to the doctor complaining of unusual pain and nausea. “Ah,” she responded, with a nod and grim smile. She ordered me into surgery for an emergency appendectomy, and ten hours later I came to in the presence of Saanvi. She was seated off to the side and I hadn’t noticed her as I was staring out the window.
“Zeyu! How does it feel to be a part of the Body Part Removal Club?” She waved her left arm.
I laughed, which hurt, and she apologized, but I had genuinely never felt better.
“I head down tomorrow,” she told me, as if I hadn’t been thinking about it nonstop. We would have been on the shuttle together, but my little nuisance of a vestigial organ was delaying my trip. Saanvi was a xenobiologist who, like me, was obsessive about studying alien life. Prior research had only found microorganisms in the water and soil, but we would be cataloging biology on Le Guin for centuries. Saanvi hoped to discover more complex animal life. Meanwhile my own obsession was understanding exactly how all these species of alien plants reproduced. Despite the absence of active pollinators, fierce competition occurred as the various plant species figured out novel and creative ways to carry their genetic heritage forward.
“Don’t discover anything new until I get down there, okay?” I told her as we parted.
“Deal,” she replied, then leaned over to give me a hug for the first time. It hurt to wrap my arms around her, but it was worth it to take in her smell and feel her body next to mine. My chin and lips pressed into her hair and for a moment I knew what Heaven was like.
*****
A few days before we were scheduled to leave Earth, I had woken up unsettled. Our team was to be ferried up to an orbital station, where we’d catch a transport to the asteroid belt. Humanity had constructed a gigantic industrial zone near the asteroids, and our mission ship had been built where the materials were harvested, stored, and processed.
I had been having a recurring dream (or more specifically, a recurring theme in different incarnations) which had been plaguing my sleep.
The dream followed a familiar path in a new setting. I was in my childhood home, but it was different. I heard my sister and parents talking in the next room, but when I walked through the door, they were somewhere else and I was in a strange room I had never seen. I was excited by the discovery; how had I never noticed this picture window? After a moment I pressed on, attempting to reach my family through the next doorway. But crossing the threshold brought me to yet another undiscovered area, no closer to them.
My reflections on the dream swirled with my anxiety about the trip. Part of me was preoccupied with inconsequential details, but a bigger part was wrestling with an unspoken question: “What if I’m alone out there?”
*****
The colony at Le Guin was a sprawling network of domes and rectangles, having long ago established that the atmosphere was survivable by humans. By some miracle of evolution, photosynthesis worked basically the same as it did on Earth. The plants sucked up carbon dioxide from things like volcanic activity and offgassing from the oceans, and while the oxygen levels were a touch high, humans could safely go outside without special protection.
Remote sites had popped up in areas of interest further and further away from the hub. Many of us from the ship, including me and Saanvi, were stationed in a remote camp studying an old-growth forest nestled in a valley around a large, crystal clear lake. Day after day I’d trek out with a small group to catalog the forest. It was everything I had hoped for; it was Heaven on Le Guin. The smells were different; there was a similar muskiness from the forest loam, but there was a sweet tang from some of the nurse trees whose fallen bodies were hotbeds for alien fungi and new saplings.
Saanvi’s team continued to collect soil and water samples to study microorganisms. Everything we did was incredibly careful and sterile since we did not want to expose ourselves to something dangerous to humans. I could see that Saanvi was interested in this work, but I could tell that she longed for greater discoveries.
By comparison, I felt a little ashamed of my joy. My team was compiling a list of old trees, and we estimated some to be over two thousand years old. The biodiversity was overwhelmingly rich and there was so much planetary history to unlock in this patch of land. Construction had begun on a larger settlement in a grassy area not too far away, and though I tried not to get my hopes up, I dreamt of a day where I could bring my family members to this forest.
One of my favorite discoveries was fossilized tree sap, or amber, that another team had found in rock strata at the lakeshore a kilometer from camp. Theorized to come from some ancient forest in the area, the paleobiologists were ecstatic.
Saanvi and I volunteered to collect samples, so for a week we switched gears to hike the lakeshore each day and chip away at rocks for hours. Our friendship had blossomed and we spent most of our time together, but I was afraid to upset the balance by telling her that I longed for more than friendship.
We talked a lot, but we’d also find ourselves quietly working side by side for long stretches of time. The only noise came from the wind occasionally stirring small waves, and the little tack-tack-tack sounds from our tools on the stone.
Crouched and lost in active meditation, I worked on a small amber deposit lodged at waist level. I hadn’t noticed Saanvi had stopped until I heard her whisper, “Holy shit.”
I jerked my head to look. A moment of panic dissipated as I saw she was fine, and I experienced a new kind of time dilation. She was suspended there, dressed in light, loose protective clothing, staring at the rock face. The red dwarf sun, low and behind us, illuminated the scene with a rich, ruby-tinged light. Her braid hung at her back with strong auburn highlights. Her right arm was loose at her side, holding her pick, and her left arm was up, as if a phantom hand were covering her mouth. Her mouth was open in awe, and her eyes shone with a dazzling intensity.
“Zeyu, come here.” She didn’t dare move her eyes. My trance broken, I hurried to her side.
“Zeyu,” she whispered. “Look.” She had found a larger sample. I focused in and a wave of goosebumps washed over my body. I stared for a moment, making sure I understood what I was seeing: a tiny, fragile, four-legged insect with four delicate, lacy wings, frozen for eternity. I looked up to lock eyes with Saanvi, whose eyes were brimming with tears.
Her pick clinked on the rocky ground as she threw her arms around me. We held each other close for a moment, then kissed, our lips smashing together yet cushioning the force in exquisite harmony. Emotions that I had bottled up, afraid to fully acknowledge, now flooded every inch of my body and psyche. I shared in her unbridled joy, and for the first time, I felt like this place could be home, and that I belonged.