Out there, winter was a live savage creature waiting to hunt you down and kill you.
Here in my own little greenhouse, a second crop of seedlings was sprouting third sets of leaves.
Out there, the thaw was a month late. But here, in the geothermal zone, everything was comfortable, beautiful and safe.
If you were a kid, wouldn’t that make you itch?
***
Uninhabited planet, they call it. All the flora and fauna out there didn’t yell loud enough to be counted.
They were desperate for people with kids to, you know, put down roots. To be cheery exemplars of the organic evolution of outworld research stations into thriving natural communities.
We’ve got these huge greenhouses to make us self-sufficient, and a great big wilderness area right inside the perimeter for four-season recreational use.
The central complex is a sweet little nano-town for families with primary-age kids, to simulate that friendly neighborhood feeling.
Thrilling. Like living inside your very own diorama.
It’s sad when the little ones cry for the friends they left behind, but heck—we’re only stuck here till college. The grownups have fabulous contracts swearing the kids won’t have to stay. They get repatriation and resettlement credits and they’ll send you anyplace in the Union that’s on a shuttle route, and they’re mapping wormholes and trapdoors so fast you’d think they had a horde of space termites tunnelling through the continuum.
But my parents still felt a little guilty for dragging me here, a gazillion lightyears from home, and they fought for a housing assignment that might soften the inconvenience.
Got us a double-size lot at the far end of the colony, right up against the fence.
Perfect, really. They want us to be resourceful and self-reliant, and design our own special projects, so Marinth and I are doing one together. Overview? Going Outside When Nobody Else Is Watching.
***
Us turning up in the same place is seriously miraculous. Like we’d ordered each other from the Cosmic Superstore.
In the beginning we’d hang out together but think our own thoughts. Get over-enthusiastic with some random person just stuck here like you, confiding all those girlish little secrets too soon, you might really get burned.
But Marinth understood every principle of protective coloration. Number One? Don’t get noticed at all. Number Two? Always seem dumber than you are.
She was naturally disadvantaged, though, with that odd rangy elegance even a dead guy couldn’t miss, and eyes a sharp clear color like sea ice reflecting light from a distant star. Cold fusion for sure.
***
The Preserve is sensored because it’s big enough to get lost in, and no entry without your wrist Kazam and D-ZastrPak. The littlest kids can’t even hiccup without setting off alarms.
It’s different back here. Subsidence from the hot spring vents keeps making gaps in the barrier, but they’re covered by all those outside vines and brambles that reach towards the warmth as soon as the weather turns.
Last spring we’d found another species of bramble canes poking up through the sunny patches outside where the woods start. We dug some up and planted them behind the greenhouse, near one of the vents.
They cover the whole back end of it now and keep poking inside through seams in the sides and roof. They cling to the frame, forming a canopy of big heart-shaped leaves.
They’re fast growers and self-pollinators, and stay vigorous and green while everything outside goes dormant. The berries are something special.
***
I love plants. I don’t croon madrigals to the radishes or anything but I want them to be happy. Think they don’t have feelings?
I told Marinth how interesting they are, with their circulatory systems and muscles; how they can interpret vibrations; how some can give pollinators a nice little zing and enemies a huge zap, just by adjusting concentrations of the same chemical.
“Anything does that,” said Marinth, “has a real brain somewhere.”
***
My brambles have a longer growing season than the ones outside, so we get a second crop. Sparkling new berries glitter in the moonlight.
“Bioluminescence,” I told Marinth. The changes in light and humidity had sharpened their taste to a deep lingering tartness you kept wanting more of.
“Complex and woodsy, with grace notes of subversion,” said Marinth. We almost killed ourselves laughing.
***
You can try to plan for everything but you can’t control nature. They sent only partnered people and family units with kids here, but they couldn’t put blinders on everyone and they sure weren’t going to neuter them.
Dr. Kreitboim was hoping to do some extracurricular partnering with Marinth.
Seemed like he was at the near end of hearty middle-age and he must’ve been practicing that genial smile from the time he started crawling. With our parents working crazy hours and rotating shifts, he’d volunteered to supervise all our schoolwork.
Sometimes you understand the core of the enemy as if he was your soulmate. It’s like you’re on a different pitch of the same frequency, or something. And nobody else can hear it.
He tried to put his hand on Marinth’s shoulder once, and she was out of his range almost before the thought in his brain translated into movement. That smile of his just got wider but all three of us knew it was the opening of the war.
We stayed away from the media center as much as we could, and we finished every assignment early so he’d have no honest reason to hunt us out. We were careful not to go exploring when he was off-shift, and it was the beginning of the cold season by the time he started coming around my greenhouse again.
By now it was completely covered with brambles—the ones we’d transplanted and the others, seeking to survive winter. I’d set up strings of crystalights to compensate so the other plants didn't suffer. At night, the canopy of leaves and newly-ripening berries glowed like constellations.
“You need to cut this down,” Dr. Kreitboim said, heartier and even more genial, like he'd been reading to the preschoolers till he could get his fill of Marinth.
He pushed his way inside, snapping off a vine with his thick horrible fingers. “Not such a good little caretaker, hmmn?”
He smiled at me, and pinched off another bit. The atmosphere changed inside the greenhouse, static electricity flickering and crackling. He broke off a cluster of berries, crushing half in his hand. He popped one in his mouth as if he couldn’t help himself as he went out.
I burn when I’m angry, but Marinth goes colder. A berry, dangling from a torn stem, hit the floor. And I felt all the other little minds in the greenhouse, thinking just like us.
***
Maybe an underground channel had deepened or spread, and this year some of the brambles outside hadn’t quite gone dormant. The light, the glow could’ve come from anything. Maybe it was a sort of slime mold, adapted to the cold, shining through a crust of ice on a boulder.
We were waiting when Kreitboim came back. We’d locked the greenhouse, found something to wire the door shut and he’d have needed a cutter to get through it. He looked like a guy who needs another drink.
We’d cut a couple of clusters of berries and tied them to the vines tangled in the fence. You could see one of the gaps, bigger this year because the ground had sunk a little more. Kreitboim stuffed the berries in his mouth and searched for more. He saw the third cluster—the one we’d tossed outside. It glittered on the ice like treasure spilled from a jeweler’s pouch.
He squeezed his big clumsy body through the fence and ate what hadn't frozen to the ice, and he looked around for more. He saw that faint blue-green light, a few meters away, and stumbled towards it.
***
They didn’t find him till after the spring thaw. He’d gotten pretty far on those frozen feet, until he fell. He’d been well-preserved so the autopsy was easy; clearly he’d been intoxicated. But they just couldn’t pinpoint where he’d exited the station.
***
The leaves are thick again behind my greenhouse; you’d never even guess the fence was there.
__________________________
An earlier version of this story was published 12/12/14 on Perihelion SF Magazine.
Ha HA!!!!!!!