Last Night on Proxima

Six cycles. That's how long since Rachael moved her stuff out of my quarters and back to the geology wing. Nine years down the drain, and all she left was a dent in the mattress and half a bottle of sunscreen I can't throw away.

I'm 42. I'm too old to mope. I do it anyway.

My shift ended at 2200, artificial night cycle. I logged the last chart, checked Lester's bandage one more time, and walked out into the corridor. The lights dim around here at night. Everything goes orange and quiet. It's supposed to be soothing.

And there he was.

David. Standing outside the clinic like he'd been waiting a while. He had that look. You know the one. Guy holding something behind his back, trying to look casual, failing at it completely.

He's the hydroponics engineer. 44 years old. I pulled a piece of shrapnel out of his shoulder five months back when a pressure seal let go in the grow bays. Standard stuff for me. Apparently not standard stuff for him.

"Nurse Susie," he said.

"It's 2200, David. Off the clock. Just Susie."

"Right. Just Susie." He shifted his weight. "You got a minute?"

"I've got a whole night and nothing to do with it." I regretted how that sounded the second it left my mouth. "I mean. Nothing scheduled."

"Sure." He brought his hand out from behind his back.

It was a small parcel. Wrapped in the grey cloth they use for seed shipments. Tied off with a strip of rubber tubing, which is a very hydroponics thing to do.

"What's this?"

"Just open it."

I opened it.

Flowers. Real ones. Small, pale, and glowing. Faint blue light off the petals, soft like the night lamps in the med bay. The native kind. The ones that grow wild out past the southern airlock, out in the dark, in the sand.

"Oh," I said.

And then, because I am apparently incapable of receiving a nice thing gracefully, I said, "David, you can't bring live biomass into the habitat ring without logging it."

"It's logged. Permit's in with it. Angelo signed off." He almost smiled. "I'm not an idiot."

"You grew these? In the bays?"

"Yeah. Took a while. They're stubborn. They only bloom if you keep the light cycle low and the air dry. I killed two trays before I figured it out."

I looked at him. He's not a small man. Big shoulders, big hands, the kind of hands that spend all day in dirt and nutrient solution. Grey coming into his beard. He was standing there like a guy waiting for a grade.

"Sit down before you drop them," I said.

There's a bench outside the clinic. There's a bench outside everything on this rock. We sat. The flowers sat between us on the parcel cloth, glowing away, lighting his face blue from underneath.

"How did you know I liked these?"

He looked surprised that I asked.

"You mentioned it. Back when I had the tube in my arm and you were doing the dressing changes." He rubbed his jaw. "You said everybody hates the dark cycle except you, because the wild blooms light up when the shutters close. You said it was the only thing on this planet that felt like a gift."

I did say that. I'd forgotten I said that. It was one of a hundred things I'd said to that man while I picked at his sutures and he made bad jokes about scar tissue.

"That was months ago," I said.

"Four. Two weeks."

"Four months," I said. "It was four months."

"Right. Four." He nodded slowly. "So it took me four months and two dead trays. Give me a little credit."

I laughed. First time in a while. It came out rusty.

"They're beautiful," I said. "Thank you. Really."

"You're welcome." He paused. "That's the whole reason I'm here. I want to be straight with you about that. You saved my shoulder, maybe my arm. I owed you something better than a thank-you card, and I don't have any money worth mentioning, so. Flowers."

"Flowers work."

"Good." He stood up. "So. Good night, Susie."

"Wait."

I don't know why I said it. Or I do know, and I didn't like knowing it. Six cycles of eating alone in the commissary, and here was a man who remembered one sentence I said while he was half out of his head on pain meds.

"You just walked here to hand me flowers and leave?"

"That was the plan." He sat back down. "Wasn't it a good plan?"

"It was a fine plan." I looked at the blooms. They really did glow. Soft little blue stars in my lap. "It's just, the commissary closes at 2230, and I haven't eaten since 1700, and you probably haven't either, because hydroponics people forget meals the way nurses do."

"That's true."

"So get dinner with me. That's all. Two colleagues. Food. You can tell me about the two trays you murdered."

He laughed at that. A real one, low.

"All right," he said. "But I'm buying."

"You're on colony credits like everyone else."

"I'm buying."

* * *

The commissary at 2215 is a sad place. Half the lights are off. There's a woman named Brooke behind the counter, logistics officer, keeps to herself, and she looked up at us with the expression of someone doing math about who's dating who.

"Two of the stew," I said.

"Two stews," Brooke said, and gave me a look I ignored.

We took the corner table. David ate as if he'd forgotten food was a thing, which confirmed my guess. Between bites he told me about the native blooms. How they photosynthesize on the dim red light that leaks in through the surface vents. How the glow is some kind of chemical defense against the night moths, except the moths figured it out eons ago and now navigate by it anyway.

"So it's useless," I said.

"So it's useless. It's beautiful and it does nothing. That's what I like about it."

I looked at him across the table. Blue light, stew, colony-issue tray.

"Why did you come to Proxima?" I asked. "Five years ago. What was wrong with Earth?"

"Nothing was wrong with Earth. I just wanted to build something that mattered. Earth has a lot of gardens already. This place has none." He shrugged. "Now it has two trays' worth of one kind of flower and two dead trays I don't talk about."

"You just talked about them."

"Consider yourself special."

I considered it. I considered the whole evening, actually, sitting there with a man who grew a useless glowing flower because I said one dumb thing four months ago while changing his dressings. It was the nicest thing anyone on this rock had done for me since Rachael left. Maybe since before that.

The lights in the commissary went down to the late shift setting. Brooke started stacking chairs. We hadn't noticed the time.

"We got kicked out of a commissary," I said. "That's a new one for me."

"I've been kicked out of worse." He stood, gathered our trays. "Where do you want the flowers?"

That stopped me for a second.

"My quarters, I guess. They'll need the light cycle kept low." I heard my own voice do something odd on the word quarters. So did he, probably, because he went very careful all of a sudden.

"I can walk you there," he said. "Drop the parcel. And then that's me done. That was the deal I made with myself. Thank you, flowers, walk home, gone."

"Whose deal?"

"Mine. You just went through a thing, Susie. Six cycles ago, everybody knows, this is a small colony. I'm not going to be the guy who made it worse by being in a hurry."

"That might be the least romantic thing anyone's ever said to me."

"It wasn't supposed to be romantic," he said. "It was supposed to be honest."

And that, of course, was worse. Or better. I couldn't tell which.

"Walk me home," I said.

We walked. The corridors were empty. Orange light, then blue where we passed the night gardens. He carried the parcel in both hands like it was made of glass. I caught our reflection in a panel and we looked like two middle-aged people walking slow, which is what we were, and for the first time in six cycles I didn't mind it.

At my door I keyed it open and turned around.

"David."

"Susie."

"You want to see how they look on my windowsill?"

He glanced at me for a moment. Then he looked at the flowers, glowing up at him out of the parcel, little blue liars that did nothing and cost him four months.

"Yeah," he said. "I do."

My quarters are small. Most quarters on Proxima are small. Bed, desk, a window with a view of rock if you angled your head right. I cleared a space on the sill and set the parcel down.

"Go on," David said. "Open it properly. You've been holding it like a ration pack."

I untied the rubber tubing and peeled the grey cloth back. The stems had been cut that afternoon. Six blooms, pale, giving off that faint blue glow. On the dark sill they looked like something from a dream you half remember.

"Oh," I said. That was all I managed.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "That's about the reaction I was hoping for."

We stood there a while. Just looking. The air recyclers hummed. Somewhere down the ring a door closed and that was all the sound for a minute.

"I should water them," I said, mostly to break it. "Do they need water? You grew them. Tell me how to keep them alive so I don't become the third tray."

He told me. Sand substrate, a capful of nutrient solution every four days, keep the window dark during the artificial day and they'd hold the glow longer. He talked with his hands. He was the kind of man who talked with his hands and didn't know it.

"So," I said, when he finished. "Now what?"

"Now I say goodnight and go," he said.

"Right."

He didn't move. Neither did I.

"Or," he said, "there's the tea I was going to offer you before you derailed the whole plan with dinner. Common lounge has a kettle. I have actual dried mint, grown it myself, and I'm not even going to apologize for how proud I am about that."

"It's after 2300."

"It's Proxima. Nobody sleeps on schedule and if they do, they're lying."

I should have said goodnight. That was the smart move. Six cycles of quiet, a bed with a dent in the mattress I still hadn't flipped, a half bottle of sunscreen in the cabinet that made my throat tight every time I saw it. The smart move was the door and the dark and another night of counting ceiling panels.

"I like mint," I said. Which was how I said yes.

* * *

The common lounge at 2330 was a room with four mismatched chairs, a kettle, and a botanist named Chen asleep in the corner with a datapad on his chest. I knew Chen. He was 39 and could sleep through a hull breach. David put the kettle on like it was a ceremony.

"You steep it too long, it goes bitter," he said. "So we wait. Sitting is the whole skill here."

"I can sit."

"I know. You sat with me for an hour in the clinic while I whined about stitches. You're a professional sitter."

"I'm a professional shrapnel remover. The sitting was extra."

He smiled. He poured when the kettle clicked off, timed it, actually timed it on his wrist unit, which was such a hydroponics thing that I laughed into my cup. The mint was good. It tasted like Earth. I hadn't tasted like Earth in a while.

The silence stretched. Not bad silence. But the kind that lengthens if you let it, and I could feel it lengthening, both of us aware of the hour and the empty room and the fact that neither of us had mentioned the walk home again.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"You've asked me about four things already. Sure."

"Why'd you say yes tonight? The dinner. You didn't have to."

I looked into my cup. "You know why. Because you grew a dead planet's only pretty thing in a tray because I said something dumb. And because I've eaten dinner alone for six cycles and it turns out I hate it and I never used to."

"That's honest."

"You said honest was the point."

"It is." He turned his cup in his hands. "Then here's mine. I didn't grow those flowers to get a dinner. I want that understood. I grew them because I was stuck in a bay for four months and needed to not be stuck. But when they came in, you were the first person I thought of. And I've been thinking about you since you pulled metal out of my shoulder and told me to quit flexing."

"I never told you to quit flexing."

"You thought it very loudly."

I laughed. It surprised me, the laugh. Chen stirred, muttered about capillary pressure, went back under.

"David," I said. "This is the part where I ruin it. I'm 42. I just got out of nine years with somebody. I don't know what I'm doing and I don't want to be somebody's project or somebody's rebound and I especially don't want it to get back to the geology wing by breakfast."

"Rachael's in geology."

"Rachael's in geology."

"Then the flowers stay in your quarters and I stay out of the corridor gossip by walking home like a gentleman." He said it lightly but his ears had gone a little red. "However. I