Time and Dirt
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Day 15
Heliopause Colony on Planet Vertumna, Medbay
“Solane! Wake up! Please, wake up. I was coming to visit you and as I passed by the living quarters I saw that they are already clearing out your room... I managed to save your old ragtag doll, photo album and at least some of the drawings you made when you were small. I have the things with me here. Please, if you could only wake up now and could tell them to stop because they won’t listen to me... I’ll even pinch you if that’s what it takes...
...
Wait! Your eyes... they opened, briefly ...
You’re healing! You’re definitely healing! The big, red eyes you have, I missed looking into them so much and seeing your eyes marvel at everything in the world ...
I would get Dr. Instance right now but I couldn’t find her anywhere coming in here, she must be working on some research project right now. Probably with Tang. I hope it’s at least something useful, sometimes I feel they’re probably just torturing xenos in there and doing questionable things with fungi... Remember how they could only figure out the cure to that horrible disease that made purple fungi shoot up all over your body *after* it took your father away from you? And from me... alongside your mother he had taught me almost everything I now know about plants and how to be a good parent to them. And he was so adept with the xenos, too.
Now I have to figure things out myself, I guess. Trial and error, observing nature, thinking of ways to accommodate the plants better... Better than just listening to lectures in a classroom where I feel like the walls are closing in on me and the words refer to nothing real and don’t reach me at all. Botany is a practical science! You can’t teach or learn it in the abstract. You need to be outside to understand it and look at the plants yourself.
And the same is even more true for gardening and the ecological knowledge it requires. If you haven’t tried it with your own hands, seen life change and adapt with your own eyes, heard the sounds of the seasons with your ears, felt the rain and the soil and the crawlies on your skin you won’t get it. It’s hard to explain to someone else, you can’t really describe the smell of a garden at sunrise, or of a single flower. Much less compress it into a few words that can never fully encapsulate the feelings it evokes.
That’s why I dislike pouring over books at night, especially our modern holo-books that always seem to put a strain on my eyes. I need to sleep then anyway, to be up early enough to look after the xenos and check the plants for bugs... plus some plants need to be watered early in the morning before the suns are up! Also honestly, uhh... I never learned to read. I stopped going to school soon after I realized we wouldn’t just be doing experiments with plants and fungi and see how we can help them grow better and live together with them, and just went to your parents to let them teach me that. It’s what I had dreamed of ever since before we landed on this planet anyway. And they could just show me everything, there simply was no need.
When I really had to know what some writing says, I could always ask you or something, but usually I managed to find a way around it, learning to distinguish fertilizers by taste as was done in the past on Earth, memorizing crop rotation schemes, recognizing weeds and telling apart beneficial and harmful xenos large and small. I told you, my memory is good!
I’m not that good with that kind of technology anyway. Just sometimes I wish I could repair my hoverboard, because it’s not like I can get a new one out here...
I know that research does need writing to make sure the results of experiments are stored safely for later times, or for other people. With all the numbers and other hard-to-remember things it makes sense, it’s just not my world at all. I prefer to stick to simple things like a weeder or other tools like that. Some of them have fun names, like taraxacuminator, supposedly named after a strong and powerful Earth plant that ruled over much of the planet, I think. It even traveled with us as stowaway on our ship and now grows here, too! I guess that’s why it dominated life there, it seems like it can survive anything.
Would be cool to know where its limits are, honestly. Some day I could do some experiments with it. And later you could analyze the results in this xenobiology lab that had been set up in geoponics! You were honestly amazing with it in the past, discovering the problems that eating the native pixie beans had been causing... Or when you researched this weird plant that turned out to be radioactive! We made a great team. And then the famine happened and I’m still not exactly sure why and we didn’t really have time to spend on doing extra research, or the energy... And then this man Lum appeared with all those soldiers and somehow became governor. I still don’t know why we just let that happen. Your father said something about better to be ruled by them than having to fight them all, but I can’t say that ever sat right with me...
No, we can resist them. Even if quietly. We can’t outnumber them, but we can stick to what we believe, what we believed in since growing up, right? That this land isn’t ours, it’s just shared with us. Shared by the plants, the fungi and the xenos. And we better start showing some gratitude soon, or we won’t like the consequences. The xeno attacks will probably only get worse. And my mind still keeps going back to how we understand so little as to why, so little about what’s happening in the planet’s ecosystem at all, and almost no one seems to even *want* to understand it... Are they all scared to find out what it’s really like?
Wait, not everyone. Dys isn’t! In fact, he seems to seek the life outside the colony. Always going on expeditions or something, wasn’t he? I remember you telling me about some of them, maybe I should ask him what he has discovered... Although I haven’t seen him since that night when I was running out of the greenhouses three days ago. I’ll try to find him.
Together we might be able to get ourselves out of this mess. At least we can do our best, right?
Ugh, sorry. I’ll work on becoming a better motivational speaker. And on convincing Dr. Instance that you’re making a lot of progress! She just needs to understand that your recovery is underway ... and... and we can’t just give up on you just because you need some more days this time around.
Days we can fill by looking through your photo album, and me sharing you what I have managed to get out of our gloomy wilderness fan.”