Ouloo replaced the capsule among its friends, put on her paw covers, picked up her shovel, and got to work – not with the new plants, but with the pretty white-blossomed mistdrops that were about to meet their end. She felt guilty tearing up plants that had nothing wrong with them. They were healthy. People liked them, she was fairly sure. But she didn’t want them anymore, and that was that. It felt slightly foolish, to have put so much time and effort and water into something destined for the composter, but what had been lovely then was just background now, and she was ready for colours and shapes she hadn’t played with before. It didn’t make her feel any less bad about ripping up the fat roots, but it did keep her from hesitating. She assuaged her guilt by telling herself that plants got eaten and trampled in their natural environs all the time. That was the way life worked, and she was allowed to have a hand in it.
A clot of dirt landed in Ouloo’s fur, just above the seam of her glove. She frowned and flicked it out of her fresh curls. Truth be told, she didn’t enjoy the actual work of gardening very much. It was fine, as tasks went. She’d much rather do this than muck out the water filters or scrub a gummy engine. But the thing she enjoyed about gardening was having a garden. She liked imagining it, and she liked sitting in it when it was done. The middle bit of digging and pruning and getting sap on her paws and dirt in her fur and a crick in her back – that, she would happily do without. But you didn’t get a garden if you didn’t do the middle bit, unless you hired somebody else to do it, and then it wasn’t really yours. It would never match the garden in her head, if she did it that way.
Not that the garden around her did match the one in her head. It had the sort of feeling she’d hoped for, and it served the purpose she’d intended, but the shape and the look were little like what she’d imagined at the start. She hadn’t planned on putting a seshthin tree in the middle, or that the eevberry bush would take over its entire bed, or that she’d ever rip out the mistdrops she’d been so in love with five standards ago. And no matter how hard she worked on it, there was always something missing. She’d step back and look, and she’d think, yes, that’s fine, or hmm, well, I’ll try again in a few weeks, but it never felt done.
On some level, though, that didn’t matter, because the garden wasn’t for her. If she’d wanted flowers all to herself, she could’ve just planted them around her house and left it at that. No, this garden was for her guests, and that’s why she’d chosen the seshthin, which Aandrisks loved the smell of, and why she’d chosen the blue eevberries instead of the purple ones she’d preferred, for the sake of her Aeluon guests, and why she was prepping this bed for the crate beside her now. The new plants were all vegetable starters, and they’d been sent by Speaker – not by her, exactly, but through her. She’d procured them from one of her countless contacts, after an ongoing message exchange about Akarak recipes had led Ouloo to the question of whether Akaraks still cultivated any plants from their homeworld. They did, Speaker had written, but she didn’t know of any grown for purposes other than food.
Ouloo had thought about that, and decided it was a wonderful idea. If Akaraks couldn’t enjoy cake in her garden, then she’d grow food for them to bring home. What each species took away from her wasn’t important. The only thing that mattered was that they felt welcome. And if they didn’t, well, then she’d figure out why not, and give it another go.
The mistdrops came up easier than she’d expected. She raked the bed smooth, put down a layer of compost, and got ready for the tricky part. The thing about the Akarak vegetables was that they needed the right kind of atmosphere, and this was the reason for the second crate, which contained all the components for a large, air-locked terrarium, complete with its own pint-sized life support system. Ouloo was eager to see it assembled, but first, she needed to put the plants in the ground, and she couldn’t do that inside a tank filled with methane. Speaker’s last letter had relayed the advice of a contact named Arikeep – Farmer – who assured her the plants would be all right in oxygen-rich air for a short time as they were coming out of stasis, but not for more than an hour.
Ouloo was not worried. She knew how to work fast, when need be.
She dug a small hole with her trowel, retrieved one of the capsules, and unsealed the lid. Nothing about the plant changed, of course, but she knew that with the seal broken, the tiny stasis gadget inside had shut down. The cells within the plant were now waking from their interstellar slumber, remembering how to ferry water and carbon, how to make sugar from sunlight.
As gently as she could, she pulled the gel-cased roots from their container, and placed the delicate plant in the waiting ground. She brushed dirt around it with her paws, tucking the roots in, making sure the stem had the purchase
