The Galaxy, and the Ground Within Page 28

  Tupo mumbled something unintelligible, looking pleased.

  ‘Well,’ Ouloo said, surveying the kitchen. ‘How about we clear some space, and then I can take over the dumpling production.’

  ‘No,’ Tupo said. Xyr neck raised up assertively. ‘I. Am making. Breakfast.’ Xe lowered xyr head and shoved it against Ouloo’s side, nudging her toward the door. ‘Go back to bed. Or do something else.’

  ‘But—’ Ouloo began to fret over the mess, the wasted oil, the probably ruined pan. Her child glared back at her, frowning mightily. ‘All right, all right,’ Ouloo said. She ran her tongue over her incisors as she thought. ‘But maybe … maybe sunrise dumplings are something we could make together, another time. I can teach you how. What if right now, you made melon porridge?’

  Tupo’s neck drooped. ‘That’s not as fun.’

  ‘You’re good at it, though. That last batch you made was pretty tasty.’ This was also true, even though the presentation had left much to be desired.

  Tupo looked simultaneously reluctant to admit defeat, and relieved to be given an out. ‘Well … okay.’ The glare returned. ‘But you can’t help.’ Xe took the pan and spatula back, and gave her another shove. ‘Go away.’

  Ouloo laughed and surrendered her territory. ‘Okay,’ she said, backing out of the kitchen. ‘Okay. You’re the boss.’

  Going back to bed was out of the question, so Ouloo headed for her grooming cabinet, and thought through the day as the robotic hands washed and curled. Much as she preferred to see her dome filled with visitors, business had been good and steady, and a day with no guests was a rare opportunity to knock out projects in a leisurely manner. She could touch up the paint on her shuttle, she thought, but it wasn’t urgent, and wasn’t the sort of work she was in the mood for. The scale scrub stock in the bathhouse was getting a bit low, but she wasn’t about to make a new batch of that with the kitchen as it was. Oh, but the garden – she’d almost forgotten, with how busy she’d been. She’d received some new plants for the garden nearly a tenday ago, which were still waiting in their drone crates. She’d been so excited to receive them, but everything else had gotten in the way, as so often happened. Yes, that was the perfect thing to do on an empty day. She bounded out of the cupboard once the grooming program was complete, properly coiffed and full of energy.

  ‘I’m going to the garden,’ she called as she headed for the door. ‘Please don’t burn the house down.’

  Tupo presumably heard her, but the only reply she received was the sound of something non-breakable clattering to the ground, followed by muffled swearing.

  Ouloo walked through the door without another word. She didn’t need to know.

  She ducked over to the office to grab a slice of her neighbour’s jenjen cake to tide her over, then loaded up a pushcart with the drone crates, plus garden tools and paw covers. Ships and shuttles criss-crossed overhead as she ferried her cargo down the path – some landing, some ascending, some orbiting high above. Just another day. There had been a time shortly after she’d bought the patch of planet beneath her feet when the closeness of the sky-borne vehicles made her crane her neck all the way back every time one of them passed. She remembered Tupo – so fluffy and heart-achingly small then – crowing the categories of ships in view. That’s a cruiser! That’s a cargo hauler! That’s a … uh … a ship! The charm of that habit had quickly worn thin, but Ouloo couldn’t deny that she’d shared in the sense of amazement fuelling it. She had thought, then, that she’d never grow tired of looking at those incredible constructs, that they’d always be a bit magic to her. And they were, when she actually took the time to stop and think about it. But she didn’t need to look at every single one anymore. They would always be remarkable to her, but in the present moment, the thing that grabbed her attention most was the ground she now stood on. The ships above were strangers, machines carrying other lives and other plans. The world inside Ouloo’s dome was small, sure – but was there any world that wasn’t, when you stacked it up beside everything else? The dome was her world, that was the key thing. She had started with a blank slate and had built something upon it. She could put a sign here, slap some paint there, change whatever didn’t suit her fancy. That was a powerful thing, to Ouloo, more powerful than the biggest ship with the biggest guns. A ship like that was good for only one kind of job. The Five-Hop, on the other hand, could be whatever she wanted it to be. That was more compelling to her.

  The path wound its way into the garden, its paved edges now softened by bowing branches and playful vines. The summer ferns were exploding with new leaves, each still spiralled tightly inward around itself, waiting for the right moment to unfurl. The eevberry bush was in full bloom, and the pollinator bots diligently wove their way from flower to flower, ensuring there’d later be fruit to fold into pastry dough.

  She parked her cart by a bed filled with mistdrops, though not for much longer. These, she would replace with the newcomers. She opened the smaller of the two crates, revealing thirty egg-like capsules, waiting in tidy rows cushioned with protective foam. The capsules were transparent, and within each stood a small plant anchored in ghostly blue grow-gel. She’d been told all of the plants’ names ahead of time, as well as how to care for them, but every variety in this box was a mystery to her, a species she’d yet to meet. She selected one capsule at random and cupped it in her forepaw, turning it this way and that in admiration. It was a curious thing, with corkscrewed branches and circular leaves accented with delicate blue stripes. The plant was small but verdant, the roots white and healthy. A shadow fell over both Ouloo and the plant as some vessel hummed by overhead; she paid it no mind.

  Ouloo replaced the capsule among its friends, put on her paw covers, picked up her shovel, and got to work – not with the new plants, but with the pretty white-blossomed mistdrops that were about to meet their end. She felt guilty tearing up plants that had nothing wrong with them. They were healthy. People liked them, she was fairly sure. But she didn’t want them anymore, and that was that. It felt slightly foolish, to have put so much time and effort and water into something destined for the composter, but what had been lovely then was just background now, and she was ready for colours and shapes she hadn’t played with before. It didn’t make her feel any less bad about ripping up the fat roots, but it did keep her from hesitating. She assuaged her guilt by telling herself that plants got eaten and trampled in their natural environs all the time. That was the way life worked, and she was allowed to have a hand in it.

  A clot of dirt landed in Ouloo’s fur, just above the seam of her glove. She frowned and flicked it out of her fresh curls. Truth be told, she didn’t enjoy the actual work of gardening very much. It was fine, as tasks went. She’d much rather do this than muck out the water filters or scrub a gummy engine. But the thing she enjoyed about gardening was having a garden. She liked imagining it, and she liked sitting in it when it was done. The middle bit of digging and pruning and getting sap on her paws and dirt in her fur and a crick in her back – that, she would happily do without. But you didn’t get a garden if you didn’t do the middle bit, unless you hired somebody else to do it, and then it wasn’t really yours. It would never match the garden in her head, if she did it that way.

  Not that the garden around her did match the one in her head. It had the sort of feeling she’d hoped for, and it served the purpose she’d intended, but the shape and the look were little like what she’d imagined at the start. She hadn’t planned on putting a seshthin tree in the middle, or that the eevberry bush would take over its entire bed, or that she’d ever rip out the mistdrops she’d been so in love with five standards ago. And no matter how hard she worked on it, there was always something missing. She’d step back and look, and she’d think, yes, that’s fine, or hmm, well, I’ll try again in a few weeks, but it never felt done.

  On some level, though, that didn’t matter, because the garden wasn’t for her. If she’d wanted flowers all to herself, she could’ve just planted them
around her house and left it at that. No, this garden was for her guests, and that’s why she’d chosen the seshthin, which Aandrisks loved the smell of, and why she’d chosen the blue eevberries instead of the purple ones she’d preferred, for the sake of her Aeluon guests, and why she was prepping this bed for the crate beside her now. The new plants were all vegetable starters, and they’d been sent by Speaker – not by her, exactly, but through her. She’d procured them from one of her countless contacts, after an ongoing message exchange about Akarak recipes had led Ouloo to the question of whether Akaraks still cultivated any plants from their homeworld. They did, Speaker had written, but she didn’t know of any grown for purposes other than food.

  Ouloo had thought about that, and decided it was a wonderful idea. If Akaraks couldn’t enjoy cake in her garden, then she’d grow food for them to bring home. What each species took away from her wasn’t important. The only thing that mattered was that they felt welcome. And if they didn’t, well, then she’d figure out why not, and give it another go.

  The mistdrops came up easier than she’d expected. She raked the bed smooth, put down a layer of compost, and got ready for the tricky part. The thing about the Akarak vegetables was that they needed the right kind of atmosphere, and this was the reason for the second crate, which contained all the components for a large, air-locked terrarium, complete with its own pint-sized life support system. Ouloo was eager to see it assembled, but first, she needed to put the plants in the ground, and she couldn’t do that inside a tank filled with methane. Speaker’s last letter had relayed the advice of a contact named Arikeep – Farmer – who assured her the plants would be all right in oxygen-rich air for a short time as they were coming out of stasis, but not for more than an hour.

  Ouloo was not worried. She knew how to work fast, when need be.

  She dug a small hole with her trowel, retrieved one of the capsules, and unsealed the lid. Nothing about the plant changed, of course, but she knew that with the seal broken, the tiny stasis gadget inside had shut down. The cells within the plant were now waking from their interstellar slumber, remembering how to ferry water and carbon, how to make sugar from sunlight.

  As gently as she could, she pulled the gel-cased roots from their container, and placed the delicate plant in the waiting ground. She brushed dirt around it with her paws, tucking the roots in, making sure the stem had the purchase needed to stand on its own. The gel would dissolve, in time; the roots would spread far, forever seeking. She cleaned some dirt off a leaf with the tip of her toepad, and nodded with satisfaction. This might not be her favourite part about having a garden, but she couldn’t deny that lush little plants in a fresh bed looked awfully nice. Nothing felt quite so clean and pleasing as the start of something new.

  She picked up her trowel, and dug another hole.

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  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Ending a series is bittersweet, especially given how seismically this one shifted my life. Like all big things, I could never have done this alone.

  On the professional side, the biggest of thanks to Molly Powell, Oliver Johnson, and Seth Fishman for their constant support and good advice. Hugs all around to the amazing teams at both Hodder & Stoughton and Harper Voyager US, as well as to my publishers worldwide.

  On the personal side, thanks to Susana, who helped me reverse engineer some tricky bits, and who usually knows what I’m trying to say better than I do. Thanks to Greg, the best Girl Friday and my friend forever. Thanks to the Hammers for charging my creative batteries when nothing else would. Thanks to my friends and family for putting up with my nonsense, yet again. Thanks to my wife, Berglaug, who brings me more joy than all the words in the dictionary and stars in the sky. (Is that too sappy? Probably. I don’t care. If only one scrap of my writing outlives me, I want it to be the one that says that I loved her, and so I will write it wherever I can.)

  I’ve said this many a time before, but here’s one more for the road: neither me nor these books would be anywhere if it weren’t for legions of people who I don’t know at all. To my backers and fans, to the lovely people I’ve met the world over, to everybody who wrote me letters and hugged me at cons and told me their own stories and cracked me up and made me cry – I will never, ever be able to tell you how grateful I am. Thank you for this amazing ride. I can’t wait to show you what’s next.