The Pod That Waited
Ren ran a thumb along the little pod and felt its ridges, fine as a cat's tongue. It hung from a vine in the garden module, grey-green and shut tight as a fist. Bram floated beside them with one paw hooked through a strap, his striped face close among the leaves. "It was like this yesterday," Ren said. "And the day before that." The pod was warm from the growing lamps. Ren turned it and found the seam, a thin raised line running down one side, bumpy under the fingertip. They pressed. Nothing moved. Outside the round window, Earth turned slowly, blue and quiet.
Ren tried the handle of a soup spoon first, sliding it along the seam. The pod only rocked on its vine and stayed shut. They tried warm breath. They tried tapping. Bram watched, and did not hurry them, because Bram almost never hurried. Then he nudged a dry pod from last season out of the leaves with his nose. It drifted to Ren, light as paper, split neatly in half down its middle. Ren touched the inside. It was silky, the softest thing in the whole station. "So they do open," Ren said. "Just not for spoons."
Ren hung in the air with the empty halves, one in each hand, thinking. Nothing had torn them. Nothing had cut them. The edges were smooth all the way round, the way a seashell is smooth. Bram pushed off the wall and came back with a third pod, older still, furred with dust. Same smooth split. Ren held the closed pod again and laid both palms around it, not squeezing, only cupping, the way you hold a bird you do not want to frighten. The ridges warmed under their skin. "Slow hands," Ren said, "and it opens on its own."
So Ren stayed. They tucked their feet under a rail to stop from drifting and held the pod loosely in both hands. Bram settled beside them, broad and heavy and perfectly still, his shoulder resting against Ren's arm. The lamps hummed. The air moved in its long warm circle through the module, lifting a leaf, letting it fall. Ren's hands grew warm. Then the hands grew hot, and itched, and wanted to do something. Ren let them want. They counted ten slow breaths instead, the way you count steps in the dark, and the wanting went quiet again.
There was a great deal to notice while waiting. A loose drop of water had escaped the watering tube and hung near the mint, round as a marble, with the whole room bent small inside it. A root had grown out through the netting and curled back in again. Bram's fur smelled of soil. When Ren looked very closely at the pod's skin, it was not grey-green at all but a thousand tiny green scales with silver between them, like a lizard, like a pine cone, like nothing else. Earth went on turning in the window. Ren went on holding.
Something moved. Ren felt it before they saw it: a small flick against one palm, no bigger than a heartbeat. The seam had lifted. Ren's fingers jumped to pull it wide, and then stopped themselves halfway, hovering. Bram's ear twitched. Ren breathed out and set the hands back, light as before. The seam lifted again, a hair's width, then a whisker's width, with a sound like a thumbnail across cloth. Ren did not help. The pod did it all itself, slowly, the way slow things do, taking the whole long time it needed and not one moment less.
It opened. The two halves swung apart like a book falling open, and out came the seeds, each one wrapped in a tuft of silver fluff. They did not fall, because nothing falls on Space Station Nine. They rose. They turned over in the warm air and drifted past the lamps and the mint and the window, dozens of small soft stars going everywhere at once. Ren laughed, quietly, with their mouth closed. Bram batted at one and missed, and let it go. "Slow hands," Ren whispered, "and it opens on its own." One seed landed on Bram's nose and stayed there.
Ren caught the seeds in the netting, one by one, and tucked them into the soil beds for next season. Each tuft was softer than the last. Then Ren climbed into the sleep hammock by the round window with the two empty halves held against their chest, smooth side in. Bram floated in beside them and wedged himself comfortably under Ren's arm. The lamps dimmed a notch. A last seed turned over in the dark above them, going nowhere in particular. "Slow hands," Ren said, and the words came out on a yawn. Bram's breathing slowed. Ren's slowed to meet it.
