I am alone when the flower moves.
That should be the first thing I write, if the recorder is still working, if anyone ever finds the ship, if anyone ever listens to a dead woman talking to herself on a planet that should not know how to listen. I am alone.
The others are still asleep in their clean white coffins, three hundred meters behind me, behind the hill, behind the sealed door I closed because I wanted the first step to be mine, selfish, stupid, human. I wanted a private miracle. I wanted one moment not shared through glass and reports and trembling voices.
So now it is mine. The flower turns toward me.
It is taller than I am, pale and soft-looking, though nothing here is soft, not really. Its petals are thin like skin over a candle. Light moves inside them. Slow. Blue. Blue like veins under a wrist. The center is black, and I do not like that, because it feels less like color and more like depth.
I say hello. My voice sounds ridiculous in the helmet.
The valley answers. Not with a sound. Not at first. The ground gives one small pulse beneath my boots, as if something huge has opened one eye far below me. The silver grass bends away, then back, then away again. A line of red light runs through it, root to root, hill to hill, a message too fast for me to understand.
I should go back.
I take one step forward.
There are trees here, if trees can be called trees when they grow in spirals around empty air, when their leaves are shaped like little hands, when the fruit hanging from them is clear and full of tiny storms. One fruit breaks open as I pass. Not falls. Breaks open. Inside it, a mist curls out and becomes, for one second, a bird.
No, not a bird. A memory of a bird. Then it disappears.
I laugh because there is no one to hear me laugh, because fear has to leave the body somehow, because if I do not laugh I might start saying my mother’s name and then I will not stop.
Something runs across the path. It is small, knee-high, made of light and bones and too many legs. Its body is transparent. I can see sparks moving through it like thoughts. It stops when I stop. It has no face until it looks at me. Then the face forms, badly, as if copied from a reflection in broken water.
Two eyes. A mouth. Mine.
I whisper no.
It opens its borrowed mouth. No sound comes out, but my visor fogs from the inside.
I should go back. I should wake the others. I should be a scientist, not a child at the edge of a dark room, not a thief stealing wonder and finding teeth inside it. But the river is singing.
I can see it below, cutting through the valley, not water, never water, something clear and slow and filled with lights that rise and sink like breathing stars. Black reeds grow on the bank. They bend toward me before I reach them. They know where I am going before I do.
Maybe everything here is plant. Maybe everything here is animal. Maybe those are Earth words and Earth words are already dying in my mouth.
The little creature follows me. Step, step, step. My shadow becomes its road. When I kneel beside the river, it kneels too. When I touch the surface with one gloved finger, every light in the river comes up at once.
The valley goes still.
I see myself in the river. Not my helmet. Not the suit. Me. My face at seven, at nineteen, at thirty-four. My face sleeping in the ship. My face dead. My face opening like a flower.
The recorder says my pulse is too high.
The flower on the hill says my name. Not aloud. Inside.
Mara.
I fall backward and tear my glove on a stone. The alarm screams. Air hisses. My skin touches the ground. Warm.
The whole planet shudders.
For one perfect second, I feel it all. Roots under roots. Blind white animals turning in the soil. Flowers drinking starlight. The floating herds above the clouds. The river carrying memories instead of water. The great slow mind beneath the valley, waking, curious, gentle, enormous.
Lonely.
That is the worst of it. Not hunger. Not malice. Loneliness. So old it has become a landscape.
The little creature touches my bleeding hand with its almost-human fingers.
Behind the hill, the ship calls my name. In front of me, the planet does.
And I realize I was wrong from the beginning.
I did not come here alone.
I came here first.
