One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries Read online

  I hated cabbage anyway; it made the whole house stink like garbage for days.

  Clearing the edges of the yard took longer. I was half way around when something caught my eye out in the grass. It was red; a red that I’d never seen before. Pure and vibrant, it glowed in the afternoon sun like a beacon a little more than a metre out in the sea of blades. I stared at it for long minutes trying to work out what it was. It had to be man-made to be a colour like that, though I couldn’t remember seeing anything in the town that had ever been that red. How would it get out here, on our claim?

  I reached out a gloved hand, shuffling up to the wall of the Grass. Blades pushed against my treated leather coveralls but none came as high as my face. I stretched as far as I dared, leaning out, careful not to overbalance, acutely aware that the further I stretched the closer my face came to the knife edges below me.

  My fingers brushed the red thing and it swayed. It seemed to be attached to the Grass around it. A second attempt and I’d grabbed whatever it was attached to and pulled, but the Grass refused to break.

  Carefully, I stretched out with my other hand, which held the secateurs. I’d need to cut the thing free of the Grass. It was much harder reaching out with both hands. I found myself standing on tip-toes in an effort to get more reach, my balance hanging by a thread. Then the secateurs bit into the Grass and the red thing came free. It did so with a sudden jerk and suddenly I was unbalanced and falling.

  It happened in slow motion. I windmilled my arms, desperately trying to stay away from the wall of Grass before me. A picture came into my mind of Amy Rice, who had tripped and fallen face first into the Grass. It had cut off her nose and sliced open her lips and one of her eyes. I wanted to scream, to let out the fear and horror that had blossomed in my chest, but in this sluggish, treacle world I had no control over my body.

  Then I fell, hard and backward, landing bottom first with a thump on the cleared soil of the yard.

  For a few moments the world swayed and shifted around me as I sucked air down into my lungs. Then it all settled and I was able to look at the thing I held in my hand.

  It was a flower; five luminescent, gently curving petals with a round yellow bulb at the centre. It was half way up a long stalk that must have come up from the Grass. There were more flower buds at intervals along its length, but none of them had opened.

  Taking off my left glove, I carefully stroked a fingertip along one of the delicate petals. It was soft and warm and left a faint tingling sensation on my skin. Leaning close, I put my nose to it. There was no smell. I gazed at the wall of green before me. Now I was looking, I could see other stalks with buds. They looked almost exactly like normal blades; only slight symmetrical swellings gave them away.

  I had never really thought that the grass might flower. It certainly hadn’t in the sixteen years since colonists had been here. I’d seen flowers before. There were beds of them, carefully tended, around the Council chambers, seeds brought the vast distance from Earth. There were seeds in the Archives too, waiting for a time when ornamental vegetation was no longer a luxury only civic authorities could afford. Some people didn’t think that time would come. Some thought that we would never win, that the Grass would consume us. Swallow us whole, the way it had swallowed almost every other thing on this world.

  Unnatural, my father had called it. On land, he said, we had discovered only fifteen species of vegetation, four species of animal, thirty-two species of insect and twelve invertebrates. The seas, as though in compensation, teemed with life. Certainly most of the meat we ate was fish, brought overland along narrow, laboriously paved roads. It cost a lot; we hadn’t eaten any since Dad died.

  “Should have chosen the coast,” my father had muttered whenever we’d painstakingly extended our yard, slashing the Grass at ground level, digging out the metre deep root systems, shredding and composting it all. It wouldn’t even burn.

  But the coast had problems of its own. Near Landfall something had come out of the sea one night. At least that’s what they thought; the next day the whole town was empty with not a clue to where everyone had gone. There wasn’t any blood, or signs of panic. There weren’t any people either, but a few days later some bits washed up on the beach.

  That town was deserted now, everything usable taken away to safer ground, leaving a pillaged skeleton, as though the things in the ocean had done more than just make a meal of the populace.

  I looked down at the flower in my hand, feeling oddly as though this hostile world that was my home had given me a gift, a peace offering of some sort. Behind me the light in the house had come on.

  I hurried to finish the rest of the yard, then tucked the flower inside my coveralls before going inside.

  My mother was in the kitchen, doing something with vegetables. The food tasted different since Dad had died, as though the oppressive air of the house seeped into everything that was created there.

  “Wash your hands, Jennifer.” My mother’s voice followed me as I ducked into my room. “Nina Sung just lost three fingers to that fungal infection that’s going around.”

  I pulled the flower from inside my coveralls and put it into the glass of water that stood beside my bed. Even in the dimness of my room it seemed to glow. I stroked the petals and again felt the oddly pleasant tingling in my fingertips.

  My mother’s voice came again from the kitchen. “Dinner’s on the table.”

  I left the flower in the darkness of my room.

  I hated dinner; of all the times of day it was the worst. My mother and I sat across from one another at the table, under the single globe that we could only run at half intensity since two thirds of our solar array had gone offline. Neither of us spoke. The vegetable soup tasted bland and almost metallic, as though my mother had forgotten to put salt in it. Perhaps we’d run out of salt. I didn’t dare ask.

  It took me until the bottom of my soup bowl to muscle up the nerve to say what I’d been wanting to say for days.

  “Mark says we should apply for a Council subsidy.” The words came out in a rush, as though my normally unresponsive mother might jump in and cut me off. “He says we’re entitled to one on account of Dad being killed in the fighting. He says we should be getting it already, but maybe there’s been a mistake in the records or something.”

  My mother just sat there, her grey eyes focused a little to the left of my face, as though I wasn’t really there at all.

  “It’d help.” I said. “Maybe we wouldn’t have to sell any land.”

  The silence stretched further for a few moments. Then my mother said, “Have you been discussing our finances with your friends?” There was an edge to her voice that told me I should have kept my mouth shut.

  “No, not really, it’s just that…” How could I tell her that everyone knew we were in trouble, that I hadn’t even needed to mention it.

  “I don’t want you seeing Mark Trenton anymore,” said my mother, her gaze still on the space beside my head. “He’s not a good influence on you. Besides, there’s more than enough work to be done around here.”

  And with that, she got up and began to do the dishes, leaving her dinner half eaten on the table. In a fit of anger I grabbed it and ran with it to my room, where I drank it down straight from the bowl, before she could come and look for it.

  I was sick of being hungry all the time. Sick of the pitying looks people gave me in town. Sick of my mother’s misery. And I certainly wasn’t going to do what she said. Pure rage washed through me, the emotion so strong it left me shaking. How dare she just give in? How dare she opt out and leave me with all of it? She had even stopped going out and looking for work. Was that my job now? What were we going to do when our coveralls and gloves wore out and there was no money to buy more? Or if one of us got sick?

  I buried my face in the pillow on my bed and waited for my breathing to slow. My thoughts hung there, suddenly clear in my mind. This was my world and it wasn’t going to defeat me, and neither my mother, nor anyone else
was going to get in the way of that.

  ∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞

  When I looked out my window the next morning the world had turned red. It was the red of the flower at my bedside, which now had every bud open. As far as I could see, the velvet green of the grass appeared as flashes in a sea of flowers. Every bud on every flower must have opened overnight, as though set on some internal timer.

  “You were early,” I said to the flower at my bedside and ran out into our yard.

  My mother was already out there, standing completely still with her back to me, looking out over the blanket of colour. I went to join her, my bare feet silent in the dirt. When I was standing beside her I saw the shiny tracks of tears on her cheeks.

  Without thinking I reached out and took her hand.

  For a long time she didn’t even look at me. Then she said. “Roses are red like that.”

  I didn’t reply. I’d never seen a rose. No one had been able to make one grow here.

  “He used to give me roses,” my mother said. “Even though they were so expensive. He said I was worth it. We worked so hard to come here. We planned it together. It was what we wanted. We were going to do it together. How can things change so much?”

  Her hand suddenly squeezed my own so tightly it hurt. I felt her start to shake.

  “It’s going to be okay.” My voice sounded weak and uncertain in my ears. “We’ll be okay.”

  “No.” The word was a moan. “It’s not okay. I can’t. I just can’t do this.” My mother sank slowly to her knees, still holding my hand. Her breathing was coming in jerking sobs now, with horrible inhalations between, as though she couldn’t draw the air down into her lungs. I stood fixed, my hand in hers, my toes digging down into the dirt beneath me, immobile but desperate to run, to cram myself under my bed and put my hands over my ears.

  “I hate this place.” She gasped the words out between breaths. “I’ve always hated it. From the moment my feet touched it I knew it was wrong. What are we going to do?”

  I stood there, trapped, holding her hand as she cried, the red of our world around us.

  ∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞

  “They really liked that wire,” said Mark. “I wonder if there’s a cook pot at home that Mum wouldn’t miss.”

  “The chair was just as good.”

  Mark had managed to turn up with a coil of rusting wire and the other bits of the chair which had donated its leg earlier. I’d got the impression that he’d been the one who’d broken it and this was a handy way of destroying the evidence. The aliens had certainly made short work of it. They’d watched us expectantly as we’d approached this time, shuffling their massive frames forward but not coming too close until we’d deposited our offerings, as though they didn’t want to scare us away. Their eager advance once we’d begun to retreat was evidence enough of their enthusiasm.

  “What do you think they’re building?”

  We’d been speculating for the last half an hour as to the nature of the structure which was appearing on the hill. It consisted of a fragile looking four-legged framework standing more than two metres high. It didn’t look very functional, particularly as shelter, and it had something hanging down from the centre of it by four poles. This part swayed every now and again in the gusts of the breeze.

  “Maybe they’re just bored,” said Mark, “waiting for their people to come and get them. My dad says they’re going to have to do it soon. The Aramaci have set a date for them to be out of the system.”

  The Aramaci were the race we’d negotiated with to protect our new planet, all those years ago when my parents had boarded their ship headed for the stars. Safe passage and military backup, in exchange for a one tenth share in our export tradings, no matter what they may be, for a thousand years. So when an alien race, bristling with attack craft, had arrived and advised us that the Grass belonged to them, we had triggered our distress beacon and, to everyone’s surprise, the warships had arrived. I guess the Aramaci thought the planet had to contain something worthwhile for someone to attack it in the first place. Certainly this world was rightfully ours, allotted to Earth, but out in the fringes people didn’t always pay a lot of attention to things like that.

  We didn’t even know the true name of the race that had attacked us, or why they had done so.

  “You going to the War’s End celebrations tomorrow?” said Mark. “I bet we could get hold of a whole lot of rubbish before the Recyclers come and pick it up. No one’d know.”

  I’d completely forgotten about the planned festivities that would be occurring the next day. There was going to be a fair. With so many people eating, drinking and enjoying themselves, we should be able to get our hands on all manner of disposables before the Recyclers snapped them up.

  I thought about that as I made my way slowly home, hundreds of thousands of perfect red flowers swaying gently around me. The light had the heavy golden quality of late afternoon and the air smelled ever so faintly sweet. My feet seemed extraordinarily light on the road, and I was suddenly filled with optimism and hope. I was doing something important back on that stony hill, something that would go on to resonate through my life. Good would come of it, I was sure.

  My feeling of optimism lasted until I reached home and remembered that my mother was waiting for me.

  ∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞

  The day of the Wars End celebrations dawned bright but not clear and I woke to a faint dusting of gold on my pillow. I gazed at it in consternation for a moment before looking up at the flower on my bedside table. The table itself was also dusted with powder and all the small yellow bulbs at the center of my red flowers were gone.

  It had to be pollen. It made sense; we hadn’t discovered any pollinating insects on this planet, so the plants must have found a way to spread the pollen themselves. I giggled, suddenly finding the idea of exploding flower centers disproportionately funny. I imagined millions of them, all going off together. What was the sound of a million flowers exploding? Sitting up, I looked out the window. The air was hazed in gold, so thick it might have been fog. I laughed out loud.

  When I came into the kitchen, my mother was cooking eggs. I stared at the two sizzling blobs of white and orange in amazement. “Where did those come from?”

  “Suri Burton.” My mother’s voice was quietly surprised, as though she couldn’t quite believe what she was saying. “She came to the door and gave them to us. Said she had extra and she thought we’d like them. Do you want to toast some bread?”

  I had two slices of bread under the griller in a matter of seconds and started setting the table. The smell of the eggs was making me dizzy in anticipation. Everything seemed amazing this morning; bright and glowing and clear. Even the hazed gold of the sunlight streaming through the kitchen window was spectacular, pollen motes swirling lazily in the kitchen draughts. I gazed at them, entranced and suddenly I knew that today was going to be a perfect day.

  ∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞

  The War’s End celebrations were in Plenty, our hub town, more than twenty kilometres away. A special Council road train came and picked everyone up from the satellite settlements, its eight open-sided carriages wending slowly over dirt roads, enormous armoured tyres standing almost as tall as me. It would do the circuit continuously until the sun set on the day.

  The mood in the carriages was effusive. People talked and laughed over the top of one another. Not even the babies cried. I sat in the midst of the press of people and drank it in, my gaze on the gold-tinged red fields around us. It was as though I’d been living in a dark damp hole and had suddenly been thrown out into warmth and light. In my hands I held my rucksack tightly, my collecting sack inside.

  ∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞

  Plenty was packed with people. The town square had been turned into a market, stalls decorated with anything brightly coloured that people could find. Many had made wreaths and chains out of the Grass flowers, and loose red petals whirled in the breeze.

  Mark appeared at my side as we got off the train.
“Got any cash?” he asked, keeping his voice low so that my mother wouldn’t hear.

  I shook my head; we’d even brought a packed lunch, though in the euphoria of the morning I hadn’t cared.

  “Here,” he pressed something into my palm. “My mum gave me heaps. Must’ve gone mad this morning. See you over by the games in half an hour.”

  Then he was gone, following his parents into the throng and I was left looking down at the five credit piece in my hand.

  It was easy to convince my mother to let me explore on my own. There was free coffee, put on by the Council, and she didn’t particularly want me hanging around while she sat and gossiped, so off I went. It was just as easy to grab the odd bit of rubbish when no one was looking and jam it in my sack, which soon bulged satisfyingly against my thigh. Half an hour later Mark was waiting by a stall where you had to throw rubber balls into barrels. Nobody was managing it very well. The balls kept bouncing out, but no one seemed to care as they laughed and shelled out credit for more attempts.

  We both had a go at the rifle shooting; the solid butt of the gun was heavy against my shoulder as I lined up garishly painted paper fuzzers in the notched sight on the end of the muzzle. I laughed at the light kick of the recoil, even as I missed every time. Mark was giggling too, though he hit all his and we walked away with a big stick of fairy floss, pulling off chunks and shoving them into our mouths.

  “Mum says this stuff used to be bright pink back on Earth,” said Mark, holding up a pale golden tuft. “And just a little bit bitter, like it wasn’t really food at all. She says they didn’t care though, that they probably wouldn’t have liked it any other way.”