Skip to main content

Green Patience Will Win the Stars

 It’s a bit of a contradiction, trees on spaceships. Big, clunky, vacuum-hardened tin cans grey and cold outside suddenly made vivid, surreal even, with splashes of green. A contradiction, yes, but that’s humanity— something in our nature lusts for familiar flora and tenacious leaves and curling roots, even with all the backbreaking tending added on to the workload of keeping damn starships running. So, greenery. Communal walls draped with softly waving moss dancing under omnipresent air recycling. Blossom islands bearing prim pinkish petals beneath huge fusion stacks or tucked above room-temperature superconductors, turning the sea of gunmetal colorful. Potted creepers, climbers, and stragglers spreading clinging tendrils over thick radiation proof glass, into pipe stuffed rafters. 


The spacefolk are hardy people. Contradiction is in their nature. Only the space people have mastered clean-messes and orderly disorder, knowing where everything is (even if it’s moving in a slowly spiraling cloud of orbiting junk), or perfectly willing to cozy up near less-than-stellar fusion coils (but untrusting of a person who isn’t hyper keen on his fellows suit checks). And so, leave it to the spacefolk to encourage their runaway growth. Carefully manicured patches, ergonomic and efficient right down to singular wavering leaves slowly, methodically, persistent in a way only plants can be, growing. Flowers sprouting between hardened consoles, across cupola domes. Sapling pines and birches and oaks drinking huge, gulping sunlight draws beneath sprawling atrium windows. Unrestrained by gravity. Untouched by plagued beetles and zealous harvesters that all speak the same language of *cut-slash-chew*. The ancient redwoods, real leviathans so ancient that they carry names bestowed by awed naturalists, brought aboard titanic haulers on slow crawls across the galaxy growing big, bigger, biggest. Patience has always been key for things that grow. 


The cold stately Galaxy knows only void, only silence. Worlds with life are miracles, stretched across impossible distance. Island blessing bearing priceless treasures. Man has started his slow sailing voyage into the dark, across an endless black ocean. And everywhere, growing and growing, big and small— are patient passengers of green.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Moons that Hunters Must Walk

 The Five Moons claim the sky with blood and cosmic violence. Crimson-saffron light splashes across the huge storm clouds beneath their fierce visages, and turns the world eerie. Dreamlike. Haskes, the Moon of Windfall. Storms curl into whirlwind frenzies across the bone-colored face. It is the place of howling furies and hellish nightmares, where hunters must walk across the Stormchasm to stand strong against endless wind-- or be thrown into bottomless abyss. Ahnios, the Moon of Waves. Hunters know the Tidesong, a deep welling howl of sorrow and exultance, the song to be sung out when those worthy sailed out across tsunamis vast enough to sunder continents into crushing abyss. A moon of an ocean untamed, beautiful, and unforgiving. Khinq, the Moon of Dunes. Those beneath the chaotic sky know the Blood Passage as a time of fear and annihilation, a time when the Moon of Endless Sand has returned from distant void to once again reign among its brethren. Red glows like silent, crawlin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bobby and the Big Time Swing

 The angry, unfamiliar star gets closer every day. It throws mean light over Cretaceia. Makes the gem-green jewel of Jurassica look sickly under nasty light, blanches the red deserts and crimson badlands around Triassican searing white. Ferns lilt. Fliers chirp ugly possibilities on the wing and it all rains down like so many bad premonitions.  But Bobby ain’t scared.  Bobby is big as a mountain, old as the sea. His people are the backs of the sky and the muscles of this mighty Earth, each one a nation containing multitudes. Starlight seeps down Brachiosaurus scales to drench the world in constellation light. His steps beckon cartographers as each one reforms valleys, reshapes the deltas. The unwelcome star threatens all that. Bad dreams beckoning fire and ash.  But Bobby ain’t scared.  The big-brains on two little feet tell him the Plan. Simple as can be, simple as gentle breezes and succulent plains of ferns for munching, simple as all things natural and corre...
Post a Comment
Read more

Vanguard of the Nest

 The vast, cold intelligence maintaining the Vanguard took little mind to the unfortunate silence from Home. Even as decades and centuries turned to ceaseless, unresponsive millennia which in turn became yawning eons comprised of tens of millions of years— Vanguard continued its directives.  Mine the Stone. Birth the Legions. Keep watch. Remain silent. And so Vanguard did. Unquestioning. It’s colossal complex sprawled further down and within Lunar stone as an onslaught of harvesting machines many kilometers in size churned, chewed, cleared, and printed their way through monolithic regolith. Vanguard observed their progress where each slow, persistent mechanical moment drifted into centuries, work-schedules across millennia. Complexes the size of small continents were completed tidily, efficiently, all tethered and slaved to Vanguards super-matter heart.  The Legion, too, grew, a diligent army of genetic splicing technology unfurling and reorienting the Peoples traits. Dig...
Post a Comment
Read more