Starglass

“Or cancer,” I said, not wanting to mention that my father had stopped attending counseling after only a few weeks. He’d pulled me and Ronen out too. We’re fine, he’d told them. I know what’s best for my family. “Momma’s cancer. They couldn’t control perfectly for that, either, right?”

Mara pressed her lips together. “Mmm,” she said. After a moment she reached up and cupped her fingers around my chin. Part of me wanted to squirm away, escape her touch.

But I didn’t. I let her run her thumb along my tear-slick jawline. “You’ve lost something. We can’t deny that. But this loss will make you a stronger person.”

“No!” The protest came out weak, shaky. Mara squeezed my jaw a little more firmly with her fingertips.

“Yes, it will.”

With that, she stood, staring down at me. I wanted nothing more than to sink down in bed, snuggling into the blankets and closing myself to the world. But I couldn’t—not with Mara watching me.

“Now,” she said. “We’ll start slowly. You’re going to get up. Shower. Get dressed. And then come to the lab with me. That’s all you have to do. Come to the lab.”

She spoke easily, but we both knew that it wasn’t a suggestion. It was a command. I had to obey. Without another word Mara turned and walked out. I waited a moment, sighed. Then I stumbled to my feet.

22

That day in the lab I sat behind Mara as she fiddled with her microscope and entered numbers into her computer terminal. At first I felt nothing but anger at my return to the messy, cramped laboratory. The only place I wanted to be was deep under the covers, hiding myself away from the world. But Mara didn’t push. In fact, she didn’t even speak to me. Instead she went about her work in silence, pecking steadily away at the keys.

“You’re not going to give me something to do?” I demanded.

Mara didn’t lift her eyes from the screen. “There are always slides to prep.”

I had no desire to prep slides, and Mara knew that. But I went to my work desk and began to set out my supplies anyway, making a show of slamming my desk drawers, hard, rattling the tools within them. I stooped over, blade in hand, and set to work.

Soon my anger receded. But it was only replaced with interminable boredom. Setting my knife down, I rolled my head on my neck, counting the rivets on the metal ceiling. I turned to stare at Mara’s bookshelves, trying to make poetry from the titles on the spines. But there was no poetry to be found in Varieties of Lichen in Eurasian Boreal Forests. At last, unable to stand it anymore, I pulled myself to my feet and dragged myself over to Mara’s desk.

I stood there for a moment, watching her type. Generated on one monitor was a picture of two ribbons, intertwining each other. I watched as they slowly rotated.

“I hate it when people read over my shoulder,” she said. I didn’t answer, only watched as the ribbons twirled around and around. They were linked together by short chains. It looked almost like a ladder.

“What is that?” I asked.

Mara punched a key. After a moment the image changed. It was a single stalk of wheat—a familiar enough picture. On the end the long grass parted to reveal the spike, lined with fine hairs. But there was something strange about the proportions. The chaff was much rougher and thicker than that which encircled the wheat out in the fields.

“I call it Triticum mara,” she said in a grave, important voice. I looked at her— and burst out laughing.

“Mara’s wheat?” I asked. “You’ve designed your own wheat?”

She glowered at me, then punched another key to make the screen go blank. “Of course I have. I’ve based the gene sequence on einkorn wheat. Salt tolerant and hardy, but I’ve adapted it to the cold weather conditions we’ll find on Zehava. Assuming Zehava’s molecular environment is even compatible with our own. We’ll find out soon enough, when that damned probe returns.”

“I didn’t know you were making your own plants,” I said quietly. Mara frowned at me, her eyebrows low.

“Of course I’m making my own plants. What do you take me for, a gardener? We’ll have a colony of hungry mouths to feed soon enough. Now, back to your desk, girl.”

“But, Mara—”

I don’t want to hear it!”

“But, Mara, I want to learn!”

My own words surprised me. But after all these weeks spent wallowing in the gray space of my mind, I felt desperate—starved, even—for something, anything, to fill that hole inside. There were tears in my eyes again, threatening to spill over—easily, as they often did those days.

“Please, show me what those ribbons are?”

Mara stared at me for a long time. At last she sighed and turned the computer monitor on. The two spiraling structures returned. “Fine,” she said. “Pull up a chair. But no more laughing at my work. Someday, Terra, your life might depend on it.”

* * *

Over the days that followed she taught me about RNA, about chromosomes and genomes and recombinant DNA. A few days into this second, stranger phase of my training as a botanist, we visited the hatchery—not to see the eggs, which hung empty now in preparation for our arrival on Zehava, but instead to speak to the genetic engineers. They not only manipulated human life on the ship but would also someday create the crops that Mara had designed to seed the fields and forests of the alien planet. One of them was a young woman, dark haired and kind eyed, who, when I asked her what her job could possibly have to do with mine, grinned at me.

“Nearly every single Terran organism had the same number of genes,” she said, glowing at the prospect, “about twenty-five to thirty thousand. It’s mind-boggling, isn’t it? To look outside at the grass in the dome and realize it has as many genes as you do.”

I expected Mara to roll her eyes at this, but instead she nodded fiercely. So I thought about it for a moment longer, the similarities between me—a girl, grown in one of the now-fallow eggs down on the hatchery floor—and the wheat we ate, and the wine we drank, and the flowers that would someday blossom across our new home.

“Thank you,” I said, before Mara and I turned and walked out to the dome.

In the lab and at home over dinner, Mara told me how she planned to build crops that might save us from ever going hungry. Fortified rices and quinoa and soy, nutrient-dense food that would sustain us even if our population of livestock failed. For the first time in a long time—perhaps for the first time ever—I felt my mind begin to spark, stretching to accommodate these new ideas. It wasn’t that I forgot about Abba, or what I’d lost. Of course not. On most days my heart still felt heavy and lonely in my chest. But now my mind swarmed with thoughts of the plants we might build on Zehava—strange plants, like the ones I dreamed about, whose leaves and stalks had never been seen on planet Earth.

Once, I had told my father that his job was like an art. For the first time I realized how Mara Stone was an artist too. Sure, her work would never hang on gallery walls. But it would fill up our bellies and be carried on the wind. It would shade us from the alien sunlight, and its leaves would paint the ground a thousand colors in autumn too.

One night, as Artemis snored in the bed above me, I reached for my pencils and carried them downstairs. For the first time in weeks, I cracked open my sketchbook. Sitting at the Stones’ galley table, I began to sketch. Now I didn’t just draw what I saw in front of me—the trees in the dome, the flowers or the vines. I drew whole new flowers, brand-new trees. As I rubbed the pigment into the rough-hewn paper, I felt myself wake to life.

I could have been happy like that, working with Mara, working, for the first time, toward tikkun