They had promised me a garden.
There were other promises, of course: a repaired body, useful work, a house beneath a sun whose name I had not learned. But it was the garden I remembered signing for. I had never kept a plant alive longer than a season. Apparently I considered this a geographical problem.
Outside my window, the next galaxy lay like a thumbprint on dark glass.
The window was a screen. The real hull was buried beneath water and shielding; at our speed, even the sparse matter between galaxies required considerable attention. The ship corrected the incoming light to something my eyes could bear. I had once requested the uncorrected view. The room filled with a narrow, savage brilliance, and I asked to have my universe put back.
That was the extent of my courage that evening.
My library occupied the curved wall opposite the bed. The books had been made aboard, their paper grown from recycled cellulose, their old blemishes reproduced from scans. On page eighty of one volume there was a brown ring left by somebody’s cup.
I was absurdly fond of it.
The woman who had made that mark was almost certainly dead before we departed. Since then, outside the ship, ages had passed. Inside, there had been sleep, maintenance, sleep again, and these brief intervals of waking in which I was expected to exercise, eat, and remain psychologically suitable for arrival.
I had become very good at eating.
In the corridor, the other pods shone behind their closed doors. Thousands of people lay suspended, carrying their unopened intentions toward a place where the agents were already building our houses. Those agents had gone ahead long before us, small machines bearing the means to make larger ones. They sent reports that arrived years out of date. Reservoir completed. Soil organisms established. First rainfall.
Rainfall! I had spent half my old life irritated by it.
My father used to stand at the kitchen window watching rain. I would come in, speak about some urgent inconvenience, and leave without asking what held him there. After his death I acquired an almost scholarly interest in his silences. While he was available for questioning, I had been busy.
No, that is too kind. I had been bored.
Must I make everything into a confession? Even here? A man cannot look at a window without convening a tribunal.
I put the book down.
“When we arrive,” I told the room, “I intend to be different.”
The household agent lowered the lamp slightly. It had learned that I spoke more freely in the dusk.
“What would you like to do?”
“Grow things. Read properly. Have people over.”
The last item surprised me. I had meant to say something about discipline.
“We have a common room,” it said.
“I mean there.”
It waited. Its patience had begun to irritate me, chiefly because I depended on it.
“You think I’m postponing my life.”
“I don’t know what you think of as your life.”
A reasonable reply. I disliked it intensely.
I stood and walked to the window. The artificial floor held me with its gentle weight. Somewhere beyond the wall, pumps moved the same water through the same pipes, keeping us alive through distances I preferred to describe poetically.
I wanted to arrive without the man who had booked the passage. Yet he was the only person I had brought. I could already imagine him in the garden, checking the weather, finding the light unsuitable, deciding to begin properly in spring.
Behind me the lamp brightened. The agent was adjusting it for my return to the chair.
“Who taught you that?” I asked.
“You did. During your second waking.”
I could not remember.
“You said your mother used to leave a light on when you came home late.”
I stayed at the window a little longer.
There was a man awake in the next cabin. I had heard him moving that morning and waited until he passed before opening my door.
“Can you ask my neighbor whether he’d like some tea?”
“Yes.”
“And leave the light as it is.”
While we waited for his answer, I went to find another cup.