Chapter One

She opened her eyes and spread her arms; like wings, the dust of comets showered in a bright streak over her shoulders and back, into the blackness.

Don’t look back

A naked red planet floated in the distance, she looked at it dispassionately. She had spent so many years staring at this planet, at its crust, its substructures, the fabric of its being, that she felt she knew it, inside and out, like a lover.

Don’t look back

There was a painful contraction of her insides, as if a harpstring tightly wound between her larynx and her solar plexus had suddenly, violently, been pulled. The small red planet tumbled. Meridian focused on it, extended one hand, willing it to come to life. She frowned, concentrating on the things it would need: water, plants, microbial life, aware that she had done this before, many times in fact. Disconnected images flowed through her mind: maps, charts, chemical formulae. These were comfortable things, things she understood. Vials of life thawing innocently in her white-gloved hands, the microbial machinery that would help reconstruct a world and keep it healthy.

But there was something behind her—

Don’t look back

Meridian shook her head, but the images kept coming. Her hands, manipulating tubes, gels, huge robotic machines. Rows of small circular wells in a transparent plastic plate, coloured yellow, blue, purple. Hairy fungal mats growing on flat white biofiltration screens, embryonic cloned plants suspended in tissue culturing gels, the massive silver chemostats in which the terraforming bacteria grew, sloshing about in a pale brown froth. The small red planet, pinned in the viewscreens of the mother ship like a specimen under a microscope, slowly growing clouds. Meetings, countless meetings, with other faces in the flesh or on computer screens, slowly and carefully mapping out the guts of a colony, of a world.

Something was definitely behind her.

It was gaining momentum.

The awakening planet, her shipboard laboratory, the guts of a colony— water lines, sewer lines, waste composters and biofilters— images of these things rotated silently around her like a carousel. There was something else, though. She felt sick with fear and dread, she didn’t want to look, but she could feel it, beating reproachfully at her insides, forcing her neck muscles to turn her head.

Don’t look—

Meridian looked over her shoulder.

Suddenly she was back in the oncology unit in the new colony hospital, one year ago, her fists on the glass, watching helplessly as the nurses hovered over him, fumbled with the defibrillator, syringes; the cool glass pressed against her skin as the glowing lines that registered his heartbeat, his brain activity, spasmed once, then twice. She cried out to him, wordlessly: please, don’t leave, don’t go. The nurses lay the defibrillator on his emaciated chest once more, and the thin body jerked. Please, Meridian prayed. Please, David, come back. The lines lay flat. Again the charge was applied, and again; what was left of his beautiful body was being tortured, she couldn’t watch any more. He had gone. She spoke his name, a croak past the tremendous pain in the back of her throat. He couldn’t hear her; he would never hear her again, and as the pain built and spread throughout her ribcage there was nothing she could do except slide to the white floor, and lie there, unmoving, like a corpse.

The noise of her own sobbing awakened her, and for a few minutes she continued to sob, great heaving, shuddering gasps that eventually left her with a feeling of calm emptiness. She reached under the unused pillow next to her, pulled out a thick, soft grey sweater, and hugged it, burying her face in the wool. She imagined she could still detect David’s scent on this, his favourite sweater, even though she knew it had been washed many times since he last wore it. Finally, after gently smoothing the tear-dampened sweater out on the bedspread to dry, Meridian rose, pulling on a bathrobe and shuffling sleepily to her little kitchen, one hand absently combing through the tangles in her long brown hair. There were larger, newer homes being built on the edges of the colony, but she liked her little house just fine— it was close enough to work, and big enough to suit her. Although if she ever had a family—

The harpstring in her gut yanked painfully, and Meridian bit her lip. No, that dream had died along with David. She couldn’t imagine finding someone else like him, and she couldn’t imagine being able to settle for anything less than what he had been.

She pulled open a cupboard and went through the motions of brewing a pot of herbal tea. Mescon was a small colony on a simple world; Meridian was in charge of maintaining the colony’s water supply, and monitoring the water and sewer lines for various contaminants. It was simple work that she was grossly overqualified for, but she didn’t care. Dr. Lucy Munagala, her closest friend in Mescon and yet still someone who didn’t know her very well, once said that, for an intelligent woman, staying on the planet of Ception longer than a year or two was a slow form of suicide.

Maybe Lucy was right, but it didn’t matter. She had no plans to leave. She had no plans at all, save to go through the motions of living and working until, some day, her aging body gave out and her ashes could be scattered with David’s.

Meridian took a sip of her tea. It was too hot, and burned her tongue, but she drank it anyway.

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