Kate Day - In the Quick

I returned to the grow rooms every morning. I watered. I fertilized. A schedule for all these things was posted in neat script on the wall and I followed it. I’m not sure I had any thought the seeds I planted would grow, but every day I tended to them and planted more, until all the limp stalks and leaves were cleared away and both grow rooms were filled with neat grids of dark brown earth.

When I was done in the grow rooms I worked out in the gym. At first it was hard to do anything but run on the treadmill or ride the exercise bike because of my hands. But when they started to heal—the fingernails on two of my fingers pulled away from the skin and eventually fell off, revealing new pink nails underneath—I was able to lift weights, following the same routine Lion and I used at Peter Reed.

Only now I took my time with the exercises; I didn’t speed through them like I had at school, or squeeze them in between other tasks like I had on the Sundew. I did extra reps and stretched in between intervals. I noticed which movements came easy and which were more challenging. Some things depended on the day, or the hour. Squats were harder in the morning, running on the treadmill easier. I tracked my progress from one day to the next and noticed slight changes in my body in the mirror in the shower module. At first my torso had a lopsided look to it—my shoulders were round and strong from hauling water tanks and cleaning solar panels, but my posture was stooped from bending over the fuel cell for hours. My legs were pale and thin, my stomach soft. Now I watched as my arms shrank and the shapes of the muscles under my skin turned sharper. As my legs gained bulk and my stomach flattened.

I’d never paid much attention to my body. Now I slept when I was tired. I drank when I was thirsty and ate when I was hungry. I had time to make real meals. They were simple but were better than anything I’d eaten in months. My skin was healthier looking in the mirror; my nails grew and my hair seemed stronger and shinier. My teeth were the only part of me that wasn’t improved. When I pressed my tongue into the holes where my fillings used to be my molars throbbed.

At the end of the day, after I’d tended to my plants, worked out, and eaten three meals, I watched the light change through the transparent walls of the grow rooms. I’d thought the weather was almost unchanging on the Pink Planet, but it wasn’t. In the mornings the light was soft, almost woolly, and the gusts of wind gentle; in the afternoon the horizon grew sharper and the wind stronger and more continuous. At the end of the day there was a peculiar sort of twilight I hadn’t noticed until now, when the landscape grew long shadows and the color of the silt intensified and became almost jewellike. Then I’d shut the blinds before the smudgy gloom of night, when the ridges of silt yawned and the dust-covered junk started to look like things that weren’t real.

At night I read in bed. I’d pushed all the other cots to one side of the sleeping module, found a small table, and put it next to my bed. I set a pitcher of water on it, and a stack of books. The books I took from a shelf in the corridor that contained a hodgepodge of novels and poetry and old magazines. They didn’t teach literature at Peter Reed, and as a child I’d ignored my cousin’s picture and chapter books. Now I read it all, everything on that shelf—a book of Coleridge’s poems, Calvin and Hobbes comics, a biography of Jane Goodall. I liked the stillness of my room and the weight of a book on my lap. I liked being alone. My body was tired from the physical exertion of the day, my mind quiet and slack, receptive to whatever was on the page; it didn’t really matter what.

But when I slept I tossed in my cot and dreamed of James. Once I dreamed he stood across from me at the workshop table, his angular face focused, intent on an object in his hands. It looked like the fuel cell but he held it as if it were a living thing. As if it might spring from his hands. A steady hum came from it, like a purr or a growl, and I felt the sound in my body like something was scrabbling under my skin.

It’s almost done, he said.

His hands moved forward. He wanted to give it to me, gently, cautiously, as if it might run away. I wasn’t ready to take it. But I didn’t want it to escape, so I reached out, my palms open—

When I woke cold sweat dampened my forehead and under my arms. A prick of pain pressed inside my jaw. I ignored it and went to the grow rooms and did my jobs. A few sprouts were beginning to poke out of some of the trays in the soybean room, and I felt a deep sense of satisfaction when I looked at them.

But as the day went on my toothache grew, became a hot coal in my cheek. In the mirror in the shower module I pressed my finger against my back molar and the sensation was like an ear-splitting sound. I found a cabinet with medical supplies, swallowed four pain pills, and tried to lie down. But being horizontal made it worse; I tried my left side, my right, back, front. I got up. I paced the room.

I’d had every kind of pain imaginable on the Sundew —headaches that pressed like a burn against my eyes, sinus pressure that made my head feel like an overfilled balloon, stomach cramps that twisted my abdomen into knots. But they all dissipated with sleep or water or pills—or time. This pain didn’t pass; it stuck around for that day and the next. It kept me from sleeping, from eating. I couldn’t seem to sit still with its hot pulse in the back of my mouth. I had to move, to walk, to do anything except sit.

I went to the grow rooms and the shoots that had given me so much gratification the day before looked tiny and feeble. They weren’t as big as they should be, and only about a third of the trays had any sprouts at all. I started to look things over—the irrigation, the temperature controls. The modules were heated with metal coils about the size of a dinner plate that lined the fabric walls and the floors, and with two box blowers installed in the ceilings. Some of the coils weren’t functioning, and the system wasn’t efficient at all.

I roamed the outpost and found a box of replacement heater coils, the pain in my tooth a tender backbeat in my cheek. In the soybean room I pulled the broken coils from the wall and started to replace them with new coils. But the way the whole row was installed made no sense. I could think of a million better ways to do it.

I stood back. I rubbed my jaw and tried to imagine my uncle standing beside me, but I could picture only James.

He rubbed the stubble on his face and looked at the whole of the fabric wall, counted, considered. He held up one of the coils, rotating it in his hands to the left and then the right. Do you see it? he asked.

I looked again, and the right configuration began to form in my mind.

Do you? he asked again.

I set to work as the ache in my jaw began to radiate upward into my cheekbone, my ear, my eye. But even as the pain intensified my mind quickened with each coil snapped into place. Time began to move in a way it hadn’t since I left the Gateway, with a sense of urgency. I wanted to figure this problem out, to understand it, to make the grow room better. My mind skipped ahead, from the step I was on to the next, and the next.

I took more pills, pulled more coils. Then when the sun began to recede on the horizon and make the ridges of silt outside sparkle, the greenhouse dimmed and the pain began to dim too. I had the thought that I should finish the job before the pain came back. My arms ached and my body itched with sweat, but I’d already completed the first wall and part of the second. So I turned on the lights and kept going.

When I finished it was early morning. The pain had disappeared. I hit the power button for the heating system and watched the soft glow of the coils move down and down the long room.