They Dreamed of Poppies (a novelette) (4 page)

She shakes her head. “It’s not just honey bee anymore.” Her face darkens. “I was analyzing some clover samples from the animal paddock, and I discovered another anomalous sequence, this one from cow. At first, I thought it was another contaminant, but the sequence reads are consistent. One section starts off plant, then it transitions to animal.”

“They’re contaminants, have to be.”

She shakes her head. “The segments are fully contiguous. The cow genes, they’re . . . embedded.”

“Come again? Are you saying they’re genetically engineered? That somebody cloned animal genes into the plants?”

“I’m only reporting what I’m seeing, not making any conclusions at this time.”

I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. Frankly, I’m not sure what I was going to say. Whatever thought I had or response I’d planned is gone, and in its place is the vacuum of confusion. Why would anyone do this? Why would we repeat the same old mistakes we made in the past?

“There was a type of moss growing inside the living quarters,” she quietly adds. “One that was common on Earth.”

For the first time, I see the terror in her eyes. “What are you telling me?”

“It contains human genes.”

* * *

Save for some localized inflammation of the pleural tissue, most likely caused by the excessive amount of pollen in the air, the necropsy of the chicken is unable to pinpoint a cause of death. Siobhan’s biochemical and cytological analyses fail to detect the presence of toxins. The tissue on the chicken’s feet appears to be infected, but there’s no sign of parasites. No known virus or bacterium, anyway.

I send instructions that they are to immediately stop eating the plants and make the same restriction for the animals. Several of the crew members complain, and Hallem outright refuses.

Surprisingly, Bryson sides with Hallem. He tries to tell me I’m overreacting and that I need to avoid alienating everyone. He reminds me that chickens aren’t the most robust of God’s creatures, evolutionarily speaking, and even the slightest disruption to their diets can cause them to fail. He thinks this one was probably just sickly to begin with. “Besides, do you really trust Siobhan’s conclusions? She’s not exactly qualified as a forensic pathologist.”

I don’t have time for their petty squabbles. And I might be inclined to abide his advice, but then the remaining chickens start exhibiting the same symptoms.

I don’t have to wait long to see what happens. One by one they stop eating, stop moving, stop doing anything but sitting there. Two days later, they’re all dead.

The cows go next. Whatever ailment they’ve contracted hits them fast and hard and all at once.

Hallem and several of the others become listless. They stop caring about anything.

Siobhan works feverishly through the night. In the morning, she reports that she’s found human DNA in the poppies. “Except they’re not poppies,” she informs me. “Not entirely. I think it’s some new form of plant, some new species that looks like poppy. The red petals, they’re not floral. I think they’re digestive organs.”

I blink in surprise. “Why do you think that?”

“They’re covered in digestive enzymes.” Her face is ashen, and the dark smudges around her eyes are deeper than ever. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days. “That’s not all.”

I close my eyes and brace myself. The bad news just keeps coming.

“One of the enzymes targets a class of plant chemicals called phytohemagglutinins.”

“Wouldn’t that be harmful to the plants?”

“This one contains an extremely rare mutation that renders the protein nonfunctional. The plant can tolerate it. What’s more, I traced where it came from. One of the colonists was being treated with medications so she could eat vegetable matter. In fact, her DNA appears to be spread all throughout this plant.”

* * *

Ten days after arrival, we suffer our first human casualty. It’s a little girl, daughter of one of the first two families I’d moved into the colonists’ living quarters. Her name is Emily—
was
Emily. She was ten, and her death hits me almost as hard as it does her parents. The fact that we came here to Mars knowing death was a very real possibility seems not to make a difference to our mourning.

I attempt to console her parents, but from orbit, my efforts are feeble, at best. I feel impotent. The girl’s mother is sobbing openly while the father stares off at nothing. I can’t touch them. I can’t connect in any meaningful way. My guilt is so strong that I’m tempted to abandon procedure and go to them. I almost succumb to it.

I move the ship closer, hovering close enough to land, but Siobhan runs out and waves me off.

What stops me isn’t see her or even remembering that my family back at the station needs me, but a dawning awareness of what the mother is saying: “Wuh-wuh-we dreamed,” she wails, nearly incoherently. The familiar words send a chill down my spine. She says they dreamed of poppies while they slept.

Terror begins to rise inside of me. It builds as I frantically flip through the cameras in search of Bryson. He’s not in his quarters. I call out his name over the pod’s intercom, but he’s slow to respond, and when he finally does, he acts as if he’s drunk. This time, I know he’s not. “Where’s Gavin?” I shout. “Where’s Clara?”

He doesn’t seem to know who I’m talking about.

“Your wife!” I scream. “Your son! Where are they?”

“In their dreams,” he says. He turns from the screen and drifts away down the corridor.

I locate Clara in the pod’s kitchen, collapsed in a heap against a corner and mumbling soundlessly to herself. Gavin is lying on his back, an ancient stuffed teddy bear by his side, probably his father’s, brought from Earth. Their eyes stare glassily up at the ceiling. The boy’s chest quickly, though shallowly, rises and falls.

They’re already gone.

By the time I return my attention to the grieving parents back in the settlers’ living quarters, they’re unresponsive. Clutched in the mother’s hands is a small bouquet of flowers.

No, not clutched. I peer closer to the screen and see that her hands are gone, dissolved. The flowers are newly grown, rooted in the bones of her arms.

“You need to leave,” Siobhan tells me. Her breaths come in gasps. “Get away from here.”

She’s struggling to keep herself together. Spasms wrack her body, and her head twitches. Random sounds spill from her lips as she stumbles into the room. She pulls Emily’s body onto a table to see it better.

“Don’t,” I groan into my mic.

“Ever— everyone else . . . gone,” she says. “I need to know what happened.”

“No,” I beg. I begin flipping switches, preparing the cavity thrusters so I can leave this horrible place behind.

She lays the poor girl out and smoothes her hair. She laces the tiny fingers together and rests them gently across her belly. All tension has left Emily’s face, and a slight smile touches her delicate lips.

“They’re not dreaming anymore,” Siobhan says.

I can barely stand to listen, much less watch.

Siobhan’s knees weaken, and she collapses to the floor. She dangles by a hand still grasping the edge of the table. I feel entirely helpless.

“Go . . . back,” she says. “Tell them . . . to please come. Tell them we’re waking up now.”

The fingers lose their grip. Siobhan lays herself on the floor and exhales.

I can’t move. I watch as her breaths slow until I can’t see her chest moving anymore. I don’t know how much time passes. Hours maybe. It could be days. And yet I still can’t tear my eyes away from the scene, not until the first bud emerges from her empty eye sockets and unfolds into a giant red bloom. It looks like a rose.

Where Clara Allendon’s body had been, I now find a shapeless mound of lilies. They’ve already begun to spread across the floor toward where Gavin is, almost impossibly, still alive.

“Son?” I yell at him. I’m afraid he’ll actually answer. “Gavin? Can you hear me?”

His lips move. They make the shape of the words: “We. Dreamed.”

“Of poppies,” I say, sobbing now. “Yes, I know.”

He coughs and his eyes clear for a moment. “Not poppies,” he says. He sounds defiant.

They are his final words.

I remain there until his chest stops moving and the most incredible display of daisies begins to spread over him. I imagine myself laying down with him and closing my eyes and dreaming.

* * *

Six months and two days after I left Mars orbit, I finally draw near to the station. I still haven’t told them what happened. In those long hours, out here alone in all this silence and darkness, there were moments when I wondered if it really happened.

They tell me they’ve managed to get the biolab up and running again. They discovered that some of the hydroponics components had been secreted away. I have a feeling I know where they found them.

“It’ll buy us some time,” they tell me.

But I wonder for how long, or even if we deserve it.

Still, as I draw near to my family, I can’t help but feel a new spark of hope. It is unquenchable, and I cling to it like a life raft.

I don’t know what to expect when I will arrive twelve hours from now. I don’t even know how I’m supposed to feel, being the only one to return. I know my survival was never guaranteed.

Tonight, as I fall asleep alone for the final time, I have strange and vivid dreams. They are filled with the most wonderful images and memories, though not of poppies. Never of poppies.

I am a seed. That’s what I dream. And I’m waiting to sink my roots into the rich loam of my own making. I dream of cows and chickens and people.

And, yes, I even dream of puppies.

* * *

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