“Wish we could’ve brought them along?” he finished for me. “All the time. Every single day. But their bodies couldn’t handle the strain. Neither could our parents’. Ours barely can. You know that. And they knew that even while they helped us build and grow the things the colony needs.”
“Yeah,” I said, my thoughts a thousand light-years behind us. “Yeah, I know.”
The thought of those we’d left behind put a somber mood on the conversation, and so it ended. I got off the lift, each of us departing to handle our respective tasks. Overwhelming tasks to be sure, but these days if it wasn’t overwhelming it wasn’t important.
“Authorize,” I said as I entered the outer room of my laboratory. The dry automated voice of the ship’s virtual assistant filled the room as I quickly stripped out of my uniform and into a clean pair of scrubs.
“Kweku Aboah, age seventeen, ship’s acting research officer, Liberia, Black Star Line. Authorization complete. Welcome back, Kweku.”
Liberia.
The first and greatest colony ship, the sweet chariot that swung low and carried us home, the mule that pulled us to our proverbial forty acres.
Liberia.
It was still surreal, even now, seventy-five years after the first wave of settlers arrived in the Colonies. Yet this would be the last voyage this ship would make before being retired, carrying the youngest generation possible, the teenagers who would grow to be the scientists, the doctors, the engineers, to push the Colonies into the future.
Liberia.
I smiled. The name was fitting.
The outer door shut, and the sterilization process began. Several minutes later the inner door hissed open, and I stepped into a different world.
Sweet, rich, earthy scents pulled me deeper into the laboratory, past hanging vines of kudzu creeping up the walls, around the obstacle course of floating herb pots humming waist-high off the floor, and through fingerlike tendrils of bean plants dangling from the ceiling. But it was the bed of earth stretching across the floor that called to me.
Rows and rows of chest-high cassava plants lined the laboratory, their stems standing rigid and tall. Broad green leaves twice the size of my hand stretched to the artificial ceiling light and rustled beneath the recirculating air. I held out my hand to brush against them and inhaled.
In the far corner, more than twice as tall as the others, stood a single cassava plant. Deep green leaves the size of my arm fluttered in the manufactured breeze, and the thick stem dropped ramrod straight to a wide patch of soil all its own. Beneath it spread a tuber-and-root system that arched out of the soil like leaping dolphins frozen in time.
“Nice to see you again, Nana,” I murmured.
It was magnificent and by far my favorite place on the ship, though I needed to do one thing before working in my sanctuary.
“Secure,” I called out.
“Outer door locked. Inner door locked. Laboratory secured.” The voice came from a speaker somewhere off to my right, though it was probably covered in kudzu now. I nodded—as if the AI could see me—and then slipped off my thin, gauzy gardening slippers. My toes stretched and wiggled, as if knowing what came next and too eager to remain still, and I stepped forward into the loamy earth.
My feet sank into the cool soil, and with one deep breath all of the day’s stress and confusion leached out of me, as if the garden needed it for nourishment, when in fact I needed it for my sanity.
“Skip to next recording,” I said after several seconds of restorative breathing.
“Current recording not complete—would you like to finish?”
I must have paused it during the last whole ship power interruption. “Yes,” I answered before dropping to my knees to examine the leaves of a stunted plant below me.
“Playing.”
The voice stopped, then a popping, crackling, hissing sound filled the lab as I began to weed. It carried on for several seconds before another voice, a woman’s voice, loud and deeply accented, started speaking.
“Look here. If you don’t lissen to one thang else, you lissen to this: Ain’t no village without the harvest. And ain’t no harvest without the village. You understand? You can’t do this thang by yo’self.”
I listened to Nana Gbemi’s words as I moved down the rows of cassava plants, pushing fertilizing beads down to the tubers and pruning wilting leaves.
“Yo’ bent back is all you can control. Can’t control the sun. Can’t control the rain. Can’t control any of that ’cept for yo’ fingers and yo’ back. Work, and work hard, and know that when the time comes help will arrive. Why—”
Two loud beeps cut through the recording.
“Kweku, it’s Jen.” The ship’s pilot sounded apologetic. “Harry’s looking for those revised food budget numbers.”
I closed my eyes. “Yep, I’m on it, Jen. Thanks for checking, though. Tell Harry I’ll bring them up in the morning.”
“You might want to bring them up tonight.” Her voice dropped to just above a whisper. “He’s been hovering around me for the last half hour during run-throughs, and I can’t take much more.”
“Why doesn’t he—” I began, then inhaled and counted to five. “You know what, never mind. I’m on my way.”
“Thanks, Kweku. And I’m sorry.” Jen signed off, and I sighed, staring at my dirt-covered hands. After some time I brushed them off on my scrubs and headed back out to the office.
“Liberia, rerun Resource Analysis on current projected yields,” I said.
“Existing parameters found. Would you like to revise them?”
I stared at the garden that took up most of the space in my lab—an acre’s worth of crops stuffed into what once was the lower level of Liberia’s holds, now repurposed as the Science and Research module. I stared at the young plants propagated from Nana, the giant cassava cared for by dozens of others in preparation for this moment. I imagined Nana Gbemi showing me how to harvest the tubers without damaging the roots, with my mother crying softly in the corner when we found out I was selected for the journey. I imagined the thousands of faces gathering at the landing site on the colony. Eager, hopeful faces.
“Existing parameters,” I said. I couldn’t justify lowering the colony’s requirements. I just couldn’t.
I stripped and put back on my uniform and removed most of the dirt from beneath my fingernails. Every movement seemed to require three times as much energy, and I grabbed a coffee cube from my stores. Any help right now was appreciated.
“Analysis run. Verbal or hard-copy report?”