One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries (2 page)

The one on the left seized a piece of tyre in one tentacle and inspected it carefully, first bringing it up to its eyes, then wiping it against its chest, where there was a moist looking patch between the armoured plates of its hide. Then, quite suddenly, a hole opened below the patch — it looked like a round, pink, fleshy mouth. In went the rubber and then the hole was gone.

“
Cool.” It was Mark’s voice rising from his hiding place amid the Grass.

I found that I was grinning.

The other alien had wasted no time in imitating its fellow. Within a few seconds all the rubber was gone.

The shirt went into the same hole as the rubber, after being carefully divided between them. The vegetable scraps went into a different hole, further up, just below the head.When everything was gone and the questing tips of their tentacles had inspected every bit of ground, their heads turned towards me. There was a brief humming sound in the air, something that echoed inside my skull rather than through my ears, then they turned away and headed back to their collection of dismantled hut parts up the hill.

“
Cool,” said Mark again from behind me.

I watched their retreating forms. “I hate you,” I said. “You had no right to come here.” But the words felt hollow as they came out of my mouth and I didn’t even know why I had said them. Was there something wrong with me? Some defect that prevented the self-righteous anger I knew that I was entitled to, that my father was entitled to? I suddenly felt I had betrayed him by helping these things, by failing to hate them the way I should.

In the distance, the tinny rattle of our yard bell sounded, calling me home. I reached back and grabbed the squashing board behind me. The track we’d made getting here over the Grass had already disappeared, blades springing back up neatly into place as though they’d never had our weight crushing them down.

I wanted to hate the Grass too, but I couldn’t manage that either. Maybe if I’d been born on another world, like my parents, and hadn’t always looked out over a dazzling velveted landscape of green. Our town looked like a scar to me, the bare earth around the houses stark and naked, the various Earth species that struggled to grow in the depleted soil all sickly and wrong. All around the Grass stretched out, perfect and unstoppable. I was proud of it in an odd way. I didn’t tell my mother that. Every day since my father had died, the defeat had pushed itself a little further into the lines of her face. It sat in the distant unfocused look in her eyes and every aspect of the way she moved. I wanted to lift it away from her as though it were a clinging veil, to reveal the mother I remembered. But I didn’t know how to begin and my concern for her had started shifting into anger.

The thought dragged at my movements as I made my way over the Grass towards the road, leather gloves protecting my hands from the blades as I replaced one board with another before me. There had been times, before The War, when I’d actually wished my father would leave, when the strained silences over the dinner table or the sudden vicious arguments had made me wish for peace, an end to the tension that sat like a live thing in the air between my parents. But the two of them had always worked it out in the end. There would be a huge fight and then the next morning it would all be gone. For a while at least.

It was gone forever now, and the guilt I felt at ever having wished it away sat like a small furtive animal in my mind, darting out when I least expected it.

At the road, Mark headed off in the opposite direction, waving a hand in farewell, boards tucked under his arm. I wasn’t the only one who had clearing to do before dinner.

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The small rectangle of our yard was empty when I got home, my mother probably inside preparing dinner. I grabbed the heavy secateurs from their hook by the back door without going in. There would be enough indoor time this evening for me to sit through.

I started with the track to the creek, like I did every day. The narrow path ran downhill from the end of our yard for about a hundred meters to the slow, twisting, rocky banks of the stream that cut across our claim. On every side was Grass, blades reaching inwards about waist high to swipe at the skin of anyone who wandered by without their leather coveralls on.

I started by cutting back the overhanging blades, needing both hands to close the secateurs on the fibrous stalks, tossing them back into the ocean of green as I did so, methodically working each side down to the slick mossy banks of the creek. Then I turned around and did the runners, green tendrils inching across the clean soil of the track. They grew about ten centimeters a day here, this close to water. I pulled them up, cut them off and threw them back to join their fellows.

My father told me once how amazing it had been to see this new world as they descended from space. How beautifully, dazzlingly green it had been. How the colonists had laughed and hugged one another with joy that their world seemed so rich and abundant.

You never could tell, he said, what you were getting, no matter how many bribes you’d paid. There were always stories of colonists being sent to desert planets, or frozen wastelands, or worse. After all why should the Earth authorities care? It wasn’t as though you could go back and ask for a refund.

As it turned out, our world was a sort of wasteland after all. And he’d been right, we couldn’t go back.

Once the track was cleared, I hauled water in buckets up to our straggly vegetable garden, which covered most of the cleared area of our yard. Something was still eating the cabbages. I examined the neat semicircular defects along the edges of the leaves and searched for the hundredth time for caterpillars or other insects. There was nothing. I suspected it was a fuzzer, one of the matted puff-ball rodents that lived in the underlayer of The Grass. The thing had obviously braved the exotic terrain of the open yard and developed a taste for something besides Grass stems, but there was nothing to make a trap with and no money for netting.

I hated cabbage anyway; it made the whole house stink like garbage for days.

Clearing the edges of the yard took longer. I was half way around when something caught my eye out in the grass. It was red; a red that I’d never seen before. Pure and vibrant, it glowed in the afternoon sun like a beacon a little more than a metre out in the sea of blades. I stared at it for long minutes trying to work out what it was. It had to be man-made to be a colour like that, though I couldn’t remember seeing anything in the town that had ever been that red. How would it get out here, on our claim?

I reached out a gloved hand, shuffling up to the wall of the Grass. Blades pushed against my treated leather coveralls but none came as high as my face. I stretched as far as I dared, leaning out, careful not to overbalance, acutely aware that the further I stretched the closer my face came to the knife edges below me.

My fingers brushed the red thing and it swayed. It seemed to be attached to the Grass around it. A second attempt and I’d grabbed whatever it was attached to and pulled, but the Grass refused to break.

Carefully, I stretched out with my other hand, which held the secateurs. I’d need to cut the thing free of the Grass. It was much harder reaching out with both hands. I found myself standing on tip-toes in an effort to get more reach, my balance hanging by a thread. Then the secateurs bit into the Grass and the red thing came free. It did so with a sudden jerk and suddenly I was unbalanced and falling.

It happened in slow motion. I windmilled my arms, desperately trying to stay away from the wall of Grass before me. A picture came into my mind of Amy Rice, who had tripped and fallen face first into the Grass. It had cut off her nose and sliced open her lips and one of her eyes. I wanted to scream, to let out the fear and horror that had blossomed in my chest, but in this sluggish, treacle world I had no control over my body.

Then I fell, hard and backward, landing bottom first with a thump on the cleared soil of the yard.

For a few moments the world swayed and shifted around me as I sucked air down into my lungs. Then it all settled and I was able to look at the thing I held in my hand.

It was a flower; five luminescent, gently curving petals with a round yellow bulb at the centre. It was half way up a long stalk that must have come up from the Grass. There were more flower buds at intervals along its length, but none of them had opened.

Taking off my left glove, I carefully stroked a fingertip along one of the delicate petals. It was soft and warm and left a faint tingling sensation on my skin. Leaning close, I put my nose to it. There was no smell. I gazed at the wall of green before me. Now I was looking, I could see other stalks with buds. They looked almost exactly like normal blades; only slight symmetrical swellings gave them away.

I had never really thought that the grass might flower. It certainly hadn’t in the sixteen years since colonists had been here. I’d seen flowers before. There were beds of them, carefully tended, around the Council chambers, seeds brought the vast distance from Earth. There were seeds in the Archives too, waiting for a time when ornamental vegetation was no longer a luxury only civic authorities could afford. Some people didn’t think that time would come. Some thought that we would never win, that the Grass would consume us. Swallow us whole, the way it had swallowed almost every other thing on this world.

Unnatural, my father had called it. On land, he said, we had discovered only fifteen species of vegetation, four species of animal, thirty-two species of insect and twelve invertebrates. The seas, as though in compensation, teemed with life. Certainly most of the meat we ate was fish, brought overland along narrow, laboriously paved roads. It cost a lot; we hadn’t eaten any since Dad died.

“
Should have chosen the coast,” my father had muttered whenever we’d painstakingly extended our yard, slashing the Grass at ground level, digging out the metre deep root systems, shredding and composting it all. It wouldn’t even burn.

But the coast had problems of its own. Near Landfall something had come out of the sea one night. At least that’s what they thought; the next day the whole town was empty with not a clue to where everyone had gone. There wasn’t any blood, or signs of panic. There weren’t any people either, but a few days later some bits washed up on the beach.

That town was deserted now, everything usable taken away to safer ground, leaving a pillaged skeleton, as though the things in the ocean had done more than just make a meal of the populace.

I looked down at the flower in my hand, feeling oddly as though this hostile world that was my home had given me a gift, a peace offering of some sort. Behind me the light in the house had come on.

I hurried to finish the rest of the yard, then tucked the flower inside my coveralls before going inside.

My mother was in the kitchen, doing something with vegetables. The food tasted different since Dad had died, as though the oppressive air of the house seeped into everything that was created there.

“
Wash your hands, Jennifer.” My mother’s voice followed me as I ducked into my room. “Nina Sung just lost three fingers to that fungal infection that’s going around.”

I pulled the flower from inside my coveralls and put it into the glass of water that stood beside my bed. Even in the dimness of my room it seemed to glow. I stroked the petals and again felt the oddly pleasant tingling in my fingertips.

My mother’s voice came again from the kitchen. “Dinner’s on the table.”

I left the flower in the darkness of my room.

I hated dinner; of all the times of day it was the worst. My mother and I sat across from one another at the table, under the single globe that we could only run at half intensity since two thirds of our solar array had gone offline. Neither of us spoke. The vegetable soup tasted bland and almost metallic, as though my mother had forgotten to put salt in it. Perhaps we’d run out of salt. I didn’t dare ask.

It took me until the bottom of my soup bowl to muscle up the nerve to say what I’d been wanting to say for days.

“
Mark says we should apply for a Council subsidy.” The words came out in a rush, as though my normally unresponsive mother might jump in and cut me off. “He says we’re entitled to one on account of Dad being killed in the fighting. He says we should be getting it already, but maybe there’s been a mistake in the records or something.”

My mother just sat there, her grey eyes focused a little to the left of my face, as though I wasn’t really there at all.

“
It’d help.” I said. “Maybe we wouldn’t have to sell any land.”

The silence stretched further for a few moments. Then my mother said, “Have you been discussing our finances with your friends?” There was an edge to her voice that told me I should have kept my mouth shut.

“
No, not really, it’s just that…” How could I tell her that everyone knew we were in trouble, that I hadn’t even needed to mention it.

“
I don’t want you seeing Mark Trenton anymore,” said my mother, her gaze still on the space beside my head. “He’s not a good influence on you. Besides, there’s more than enough work to be done around here.”

And with that, she got up and began to do the dishes, leaving her dinner half eaten on the table. In a fit of anger I grabbed it and ran with it to my room, where I drank it down straight from the bowl, before she could come and look for it.

I was sick of being hungry all the time. Sick of the pitying looks people gave me in town. Sick of my mother’s misery. And I certainly wasn’t going to do what she said. Pure rage washed through me, the emotion so strong it left me shaking. How dare she just give in? How dare she opt out and leave me with all of it? She had even stopped going out and looking for work. Was that my job now? What were we going to do when our coveralls and gloves wore out and there was no money to buy more? Or if one of us got sick?