The Garden Before Sunrise
The tick was small, like a seed dropping onto a tin plate. Sena heard it in her sleep and opened her eyes. It came again: tick, from somewhere in the wall above her bunk, where the station changed one hour quietly into the next. The air smelled of cold metal and clean cloth. Beside her, Bram lay with his striped face resting on his paws, already awake, already listening. Sena unhooked her blanket and pushed off from the wall, and the push carried her slowly across the little room. Bram came after her, broad and unhurried, holding the rail with one paw. The night lights along the floor glowed the colour of a banked fire.
Space Station Nine was asleep, and it was the kind of asleep that filled every corner. The fans turned at their slowest. The long corridor lights sat low in their sockets like coals. Even the hum, which never truly stopped, had gone down to a thread. Sena moved along the rail hand over hand and the air moved with her, warm and faintly dusty. Bram's claws made a soft tapping sound on the metal, and he slowed them when he noticed. They passed round windows, one after another, each holding a slice of dark Earth with a thin bright rim far off at its edge. The rim meant the sun was coming. Not yet, but coming.
The garden room was the last door on the curve, and Sena pulled herself into it. Inside, the cold hung soft and still. The lamps above the trays were dark. The bean vines held their leaves folded, the mint stood with its tips drawn in, and the soil smelled of almost nothing at all, the way soil does when it is cold. Sena breathed in anyway. Under the nothing there was a thread of green, waiting. She knew what it was supposed to smell like by the end of a warm hour: like rain on a path, like crushed leaves, like something you want to stand in. Bram settled by the tray edge and waited with her.
Sena reached for the lamp dial. It turned a notch at a time, with a little bump under her thumb for each one, and she knew all of them by feel. The whole hour was hers to do. Nobody else on the station would be up for a long while, and the garden would wake before they did or not at all. "Wake it slowly, so the quiet stays," she told Bram, and he gave one slow nod. She pressed her thumb against the first bump. The lamps came up the colour of weak tea. The nearest bean leaf did not move, but its edge caught the light and turned from grey to a pale, honest green.
Then her thumb slipped and the dial jumped three bumps at once. Light flooded the trays, white and flat and far too much. The mint looked startled in it, every leaf sharp-shadowed, every grain of soil glaring. Sena winced and turned it straight back down. The room went dim again. She hung there in the air, holding the rail, feeling her heart knock twice. Bram leaned over and breathed on the mint, which was the kind of help only Bram would think of. The smell that came up was faint and sweet. Sena laughed under her breath and put her thumb back on the dial, lower down this time, where her hand was steadier.
One notch. She counted ten slow breaths. One notch more. Ten breaths again. The lamps warmed as they brightened, and the warmth went down into the trays, and that was when the soil began to speak. The smell rose the way steam rises off a cup: dark, damp, a little sweet, with something mushroom-ish folded inside it. Sena hung above the mint tray with her eyes shut and let it reach her. The bean leaves unfolded by degrees, so slowly that she only knew they had moved by comparing them to the memory of a minute before. Bram's nose twitched. The thread of hum in the walls seemed to thicken, as though the room were joining in.
The water line came next, and the water line was stiff. Its wheel had sat all night in the cold and it did not want to turn. Sena braced both feet against the frame and pulled, and it gave nothing. Bram put one paw on the rim beside her hands. He was strong, and he knew it, and he used almost none of it. The wheel moved a finger's width. Then another. Water came through the pipe with a knocking that Sena hushed by easing the wheel back, and after that it came quietly, beading up out of the little holes above the trays. "Wake it slowly, so the quiet stays," Sena whispered, and the beads sat shining on the mint.
Each bead held a tiny curved window with the lamps bent inside it. Sena touched one with her fingertip and it came away onto her skin and sat there, round and whole, because nothing falls on Space Station Nine. She brushed it against a mint leaf and the leaf took it back. The smell that came off that leaf was so green and so sharp that she tasted it at the back of her nose. Bram pressed his black-and-white face close to the tray and drew in a long breath, and then another, and his eyes half closed. Water crept down through the soil. The trays ticked faintly as they warmed, the same small sound that had woken her.
Last was the fan at the end of the room, the one that carried the garden's air out into the rest of the station. Sena knew it rattled when it started cold. She held the blade still with one finger while Bram eased the switch, and the motor began under her hand instead of banging into life. When she let go the blade turned, soft as a moth. Air moved. The smell of wet soil and mint and warm leaves went out through the doorway and down the long curve of the corridor, past the round windows, past the quiet doors, into every low-lit corner where the station lay sleeping. Sena watched it go, though there was nothing at all to see.
The bright rim at the edge of Earth had grown. Sena pulled herself to the window and Bram came and hooked his paws over the sill beside her. Light came up over the curve all at once, gold first, then white, laid out across cloud and water. It poured in through the glass and fell on the trays, and the lamps that Sena had spent an hour coaxing were suddenly small beside it. But the garden was already standing open to meet it. Leaves flat, tips lifted, beads shining, soil breathing out its dark sweet breath. It had not been startled into the morning. It had arrived there, the way you arrive at the top of stairs you climbed slowly.
Sena rubbed her hands together and smelled them: soil under the nails, mint in the creases, the clean flatness of water. It was the best smell on the station and she had never once thought about it before this hour, when she had to build it back up from nothing, notch by notch and drop by drop. She picked one mint leaf, the smallest, and tore it in half. One half for Bram, who ate it and then sat with his tongue out, considering. One half she kept, folded in her palm, so her hand would smell of it later. Behind them the fan turned. Somewhere far off, a door sighed, and the hum rose another thread.
Then Sena turned the lamp dial down one bump, because the sun was doing that work now, and the garden did not need two mornings. She and Bram went back along the corridor the way they had come, slower, hand and paw on the rail. The smell went with them. Her bunk was still warm. She hooked the blanket over herself and under one knee so she would not drift, and Bram wedged himself along her side with his back against the wall, the way he always did. "Wake it slowly, so the quiet stays," Sena said, mostly to the room. Earth turned past the little window, bright now, and the light moved across the ceiling in a slow band.
Her eyes shut. Under her, through the wall, the station went on with its small sounds: the fan, the beads of water settling, the tick of the trays as they warmed. Bram's side rose and fell against her ribs, slow and heavy and even, and after a while her own breathing found the same measure without being asked. The mint leaf lay folded in her hand, giving up its green smell a little at a time. Far down the corridor the garden breathed out, and the air that reached her bunk was warm and dark and sweet, and it kept arriving, and arriving, all the long way into morning.
