Gareth's Day

It was the 21st of Nevermore: Gareth's Day.

On Eden, each of the 214 days of the solar year are named for one of the "Saints"; the heroes that kept the colony going in those early days, the days when it didn't look like mankind was going to make it off the Earth after all.

Eden: The serene garden that was to be the cradle of humanity's second birth. Hah. They should have called it Clusterfuck.

There were a lot of brilliant men and women that studied Eden for years before selecting it as the destination of the Terran Federation's first (and unless it was a really resounding success, only) Colony Ship. They determined or estimated its location, its climate and weather, its native flora and fauna, its distribution of natural resources, even a rough mapping of the major landmasses.

Well, they got the location right. But what the hell. None of them actually got on the ship, did they?

It was a hell of a lot colder than the researchers predicted. The gravity was a good deal higher. And there were an awful lot of mountains where the fertile plains were supposed to be. Hardly any of the fish-like critters were edible after all. Oh, and the land-walkers turned out to be frighteningly intelligent. And MEAN.

But it takes a certain kind of person to volunteer (hell, COMPETE) to leave behind every person, every restaurant, every waterfall, every facet of the civilization they knew and loved to climb into an oversized tin can. Especially when that can would blast through space for half a lifetime and IF THEY WERE LUCKY land on a distant world that would likely be trying to kill them.

A very special person indeed. Looked at that way, they were all heroes: Every single person that made it through the selection and training process and got on the ship. And then there were the ones who designed the ship and the tools and the training. The ones who fought the bean counters and beauracrats and naysayers and made it happen. And lets not forget the group at MIT that figured out that mother earth was doomed and came up with the whole mad plan to begin with. They were all heroes in the finest human tradition.

But this is not their story.

A lot of the Saints were those who died fighting off wave after wave of land-walker attacks until somebody figured out how to keep them out of the compounds. And not just the military types. Many were scientists, farmers, or just children who picked up rifles, laser cutters, even sharpened poles when things got really bad. They killed and were killed to buy the rest a little more time.

Others were techs who froze to death cranking the generators by hand when everything else had failed, keeping the heat on and the incubators going. Or doctors who died testing vaccines on themselves in order to get treatments ready before the whole colony fell. Or engineers who walked into the hot reactor and fixed enough of the repair systems by hand that the pile didn't have to be dumped (rendering the already off-line power plant useless forever) while the radiation literally burned the skin off of them. All acts of selfless heroism that show what man can do when pushed to the wall. All proof of what men and women can accomplish when they damn the consequences and throw their souls at something.

But this isn't their story either.

When things finally stabilized, when the air and the water and the locals and the ground itself wasn't killing people anymore, when enough of the equipment was working that it looked like the colony had a fighting chance, when there was enough organization to come up with some kind of plan, there weren't a whole lot of the colonists left. Less than a quarter of those who landed on Eden lived to see a second winter. And those who did weren't in great shape. Oh, the farms and hydroponics kept them fed, and there were enough fertile women that another generation was already coming into the world.

But there wasn't much in the way of... joy going around.

On the first day of that second spring, all of the Gardeners (as the new residents of Eden had taken to calling themselves) gathered in front of the Ship. They broke out the last of the luxury stores and celebrated being alive. They drank to the dead and finally let themselves grieve. Then they cleaned up the remains (and with them, the memories) of their old lives, and settled into the new routine.

It's funny the things that can get routine after a dozen years or so. There was so little to go around, and so much that needed doing. Out of simple necessity, work was paid for in chits redeemable for food. Supply and demand meant it often took as much as 16 hours of work to earn the 1800 to 2500 calories a person need in a day. In theory you could sign up for work you were good at, but critical tasks could conscript if undersubscribed so... Even procreation was assigned in order to get the population up. The colony couldn't risk an ovulating woman on the attentions of a man with a low sperm count. Again, in theory there was supposed to be a good impartial rotation, but some names seemed to get assigned more often than others. So as not to reduce parents' ability to work, all child-care, feeding, and education was taken care of centrally. In short, the concept of "family" was as extinct as the pets that they had shipped with. There wasn't much administration to speak of, and no law enforcement. Come to think of it, there really weren't any laws. If you worked, then you ate. If you did anything that jeopardized the colony, you got put outside the walls.

Eden. After the fall.

Rachael didn't mind being on food chit detail. It was one of the less strenuous jobs given to the pregnant women. She'd heard miscarriage was a huge problem in the early days when even the baby-heavy tried to pull their weight. But it wasn't because it was easy that she enjoyed it. It was because it was one of the few duties where you got to talk to a lot of different people. She appreciated gossip as much as anyone, but it wasn't quite that either. She'd been born on the ship, so had no recollection of this other place, the one the ship came from. Not many of the older Gardners talked about it much, but a few did. And their stories helped break up the work-sleep-work routine a little.

And her favorite was Gareth. She was pretty sure he'd been some kind of artist Before. He liked to tell stories, and every once in a while he'd get a far off look in his eye, his mouth turned up at the corners and his eyes would... twinkle. She liked that. Sometimes he'd tease others, tell stories that weren't true but that made you feel good anyway. He even reproduced differently than the others. He'd only been assigned to her once, but the way he held her, the way he moved... It didn't seem like he was just doing it for the extra food chits. He did things she hadn't even imagined. And it took hours...

So she noticed when he wasn't picking up many food chits. In fact, most of the time she saw him he seemed to be just... walking. Not with a work detail, not in any kind of hurry, just walking. She heard rumors that he'd even been wandering around the remains of the ship a few times, though no one could imagine why (since anything even remotely useful to the colony had been stripped years ago). She missed his stories. Even when he did pick up food chits, he didn't talk much. He seemed... elsewhere.

About then there was some kind of emergency in the waste processing plant so she had to take over monitoring those displays while the techs got dirty. She only saw Gareth once that week and barely recognized him. From the grey grit that covered him it sure looked like he was working. But the way his bones stuck out, the cheeks hollow under those once dancing eyes... It didn't look like he'd been eating much. She remembered hoping that disease wasn't coming back, what was it called? Then she had to get back to work.

She was glad to get back on food chit detail so she could ask him how he was. But she didn't see him at all her first day back. That was pretty odd. She hardly knew anyone who'd managed to save enough chits to take a whole day off. Not that she could imagine what someone would do if the did... By the second day she hadn't seen him, she got nervous and started asking around. No one knew much more than she did. He hadn't been on any work detail they'd been on, and they mostly saw him walking. Someone noticed he'd been going in a peculiar direction, toward where the wall met the mountain. But they hadn't thought much about it. So she went back through the records, and he hadn't picked up a food chit in... days. Something wasn't right... She got the next person picking up a chit to spell her for a few minutes, and walked off in the direction Gareth had been seen last.

It had been a while since Rachael had walked anywhere but work and home. And her belly was really staring to slow her down. By the time she got out of sight of the village she was thinking more about her bladder than Gareth. So she nearly tripped over him. He looked... well, if she'd ever had a doll, she'd have thought he looked like that. Discarded. Not so much fallen as... spent. She took a moment puzzling over the strange implements near his hands before she looked up at the mountain above him.

And then she started to cry.

Still sobbing, she somehow managed to make it back to the village. Now, a pregnant woman was by far the most valuable commodity on the planet, so everyone who noticed came running. Each tried to get out of her what was wrong. But she wouldn't (couldn't?) speak. She just turned and headed back toward the mountain. Those who could leave their jobs for a bit followed her. Someone tried to find a wheelchair or cart for Becca, but it didn't look like she would slow long enough to get in it, so they gave up.

When they reached the clearing where the wall met the mountain, they stopped. They stopped as one, as if they'd hit the wall itself. Some might have seen Gareth, but most were looking up. Some wept, some gasped, no one spoke.

There, in the face of the mountain two figures were carved. A man and a woman, lovers tangled in one another. Though rough, still, they nonetheless radiated... something. Strength? Life? Eyes finally drawn downward, the figures stood atop a single word in clean block letters: HOPE.

As though the mountain had fallen on them, every man and woman there realized what they'd been missing. By now they all wept. Some with regret, some with relief, some with an overwhelming sense they didn't have words for. Two wordlessly headed back to town for shovels to bury Gareth (the first burial on Eden since the reclamation vats got up and running.) A few more sat in a circle on the grass and, without preamble, started to plan a new structure for Gardener society: Saints days, currency, education...

As word spread, more came, some went, and they took turns keeping minutes. Though the circle grew and shrank, the spot closest to where Gareth had lain always stayed open. Even when a formal Council got elected, and a permanent council chamber built on the spot, the chair beneath the window stayed empty. No one ever mentioned it, whether it was out of respect, in memory, or just to leave a clear view to The Lovers.

But the Council wasn't what mattered. What mattered was the moment. The moment when everyone stopped fighting for their lives and started living them. It was the 21st of Nevermore. But thereafter it would always be Gareth's Day. The day when you gave your heart to someone. To everyone. To yourself.