“Sometimes I feel like nobody actually listens to me, except for you.”

The plant, predictably, did not respond. But Jenna smiled at it all the same.

Her whole lab was filled with plants—part and parcel of the job, being an exobotanist on the Ariadne, a Guardian-class science vessel—but this one was her favorite. Probably because it was the one she had most recently acquired, but also because it was just so lovely. The plant had wide, velvety-soft leaves of a gentle green, with undersides of violet. It had no apparent flowers, but she’d been monitoring it every day in the hopes that it might bloom somehow, and surprise her. The whole of the plant was squat but sturdy, and it moved with the sun, curling up at night when the overhead lights dimmed, and unfurling in the morning like a greeting when her presence in the lab made the lights come back up.

It was one of several specimens the scouting team had found down on the surface of RX-529-B, the second small moon orbiting a gas giant. Jenna had been eager to go down for herself, but it had been Grant’s turn to go, and he’d told her, almost apologetically, that it wasn’t his fault her last mission had been a dud.

Well, this one hadn’t been a dud.

RX-529-B had been home to dozens of new species of flora, and they’d been brought up in container after container to the lab, sealed of course, but scanned and meticulously examined before determining that they were safe. There was no strange pollen or interference with the ship’s atmospheric controls.

And now, this one, out of all of the others, sat in her office, by her desk, leaves opening, tilting to the artificial light as if searching for the star it had once worshipped.

“Aww, I’m sorry, bud,” Jenna said, petting one of the leaves gently. “I bet you miss her, don’t you? Your star?”

She sighed, tilting her head to the side as she examined the little plant. It was interesting, what they did to plants and creatures. All in the name of research, of course; humans had stretched out their reach across the stars, searched numerous planets and found life, but not any kind of sentient life.

Plants couldn’t think, but they could feel. They could respond, in their way. And if she had been taken from the only sun she’d ever known, well, she’d be frightened.

She’d want to go home.

But home, for her, was complicated.

With her hand still on the leaf, Jenna looked up, and looked out the window.

Beyond the glass, space stretched out in an endless, eternal void. Black velvet, spangled by starlight—a view beyond imagining for all but the bravest humans a few hundred years ago. A hundred years before humanity had first ventured into space, they’d witnessed the Great Meteor, and thought space travel was fantastical, a dream.

And now she was here.

Now, it was her everyday view, this blanket of stars. She did not fear the glass would break, and suck her out into space, compress her and freeze her in its uncaring grasp. She felt safe, comfortable.

This was the closest thing to home she knew.

Jenna looked back down at the plant.

“If I can,” she whispered, “I’ll try and take you back home. Back to your star.”

Jenna smiled, and walked back over to her desk. She set her datapad down on it, and the whole unit chimed and woke, displaying her tasks for the day, updates on research she’d queued overnight, communications and replies. Still standing, Jenna leaned over and flicked away some of the lower-priority notifications, setting them to review later in the day. She sipped her coffee, read a little, and—

The plant moved.

Jenna froze, every muscle in her body stilling as her gaze flicked up to the little plant.

It was still.

She let out a sigh, and smiled a little to herself, before glancing down at the mug of coffee in her hands. Whatever they were putting in this stuff to wake her up certainly was working. She took one last sip of it before setting it down on the table and focusing once more on the tasks for the day.

Plants couldn’t move.

She was just tired.

But she didn’t have time to indulge in her daydreams. She had work to do: experiments to check on, reports to read, orders to propose. Then she’d have to set things in the queue to be sent back to Earth once they were close to one of the transmission lines—the huge veins of energy and power that humanity had unspooled throughout all they had explored.

The notifications chimed even as she tried to catch up with them, and soon enough, the flicker of imagined movement was the furthest thing from Jenna’s thoughts.

She got to work.

~*~

 

When her shift ended, Jenna made one last pass through her office, setting down her datapad for it to sync up one last time with her desk and the main onboard computer system. It had been a frustrating day of dead-ends and ideas that were non-starters before they even got out of the gate. The Ariadne was only going to be staying a day or two more before it powered up and continued on to the next moon around star RX-529, surveying onwards, documenting, cataloging, taking samples for review that would stay in their greenhouses and end up in a research facility on a science station somewhere.

All of it felt so… pointless.

And maybe that was just her exhaustion speaking, but the cynicism surprised her. Life on other worlds—her ancestors would’ve thrilled at this news. But it was all the same, planet after planet, rock after rock. They would find water, and little tufts of plants, here and there. But never life. No fauna, no beings. Humanity had looked out to space in the hopes that it would be a mirror, and instead they had found a void.

Through the dimmed lights of her office, Jenna walked softly to the window, and to the array of little plant friends she’d collected. She touched each one in turn, brushing the alien leaves, wondering at their origins, their future. This one had come from a world with soil as blue as lapis. This one, beside it, from a hazy, dusty world, where the scrubby, stunted plants had fought against the windstorms to survive. And this one, a vine, had come from a planet with steam and fierce, harsh sunlight. It barely had enough now, and Jenna frowned, adjusting the overhead lamp and checking the soil status on the side of the plant’s smartpot.

Beside it was the newest one, the one she had spoken to that morning.

The one she’d imagined had moved.

Jenna sighed softly and picked up the plant, lifting it up to read the side of the pot. The soil temperature, hydration levels, pH and chemical composition were all kept precisely in accordance with the planet where it had been found.

Impulsively, she took it with her as she left her office, muttering a ‘good night’ to the late shift crew as she left, walking the halls of the Ariadne back to her quarters.

 

~*~

 

As the door slid shut behind her with a soft, familiar hiss, Jenna stood there, plant in hand, and looked at the four walls which had been her home for the last eighteen months.

This place wasn’t home.

It was just a place she slept. Just the place where she hung her uniforms, or shoved them in the chute to get cleaned. There, to the left, the door to the small washroom, and beside it, a small desk with a chair pushed in; she never used it, she was always working. On the far wall, under the window to star-spangled nothingness, the narrow cot where she slept as best she could every night with the heartbeat of the ship’s engines around and inside of her. It was like being inside some great animal, some being so vast and unknowable that it did not care that it had made a meal of them all.

“Wow,” Jenna muttered, setting the plant down on the empty desk, “you are fucking morbid tonight…”

As usual, there was no reply.

 

~*~

 

When she’d been a child, Jenna had always craved solitude.

Growing up in an orphanage back on Earth, there had never been a moment where she wasn’t surrounded with other children. Most of them had been like her: children of miners or spacers who’d taken contracts out in deep space, contracts that paid well but didn’t allow for children. She didn’t begrudge her parents for leaving her; she would’ve had to do the same, had her application for aid to one of the universities not been approved.

Strange, how humanity had progressed so far in some ways—science, medicine, research, even travel to the stars—and remained stagnant in others. Families, leaving their children behind with a promise to return.

Some of them did.

Most didn’t.

Jenna had been young when she’d been left there, and her family never came for her. She didn’t remember their faces, or their names, but could refresh her meager memories if she accessed the file on board.

She didn’t care to.

They were just her parents, just biological donors. They weren’t her family.

Life at the orphanage had been good. They weren’t cruel there, but they also weren’t particularly cozy either. The rooms were long and crammed with narrow bunks, stacked three high. Girls in one wing, boys in the other. At nighttime, there would be sniffling, coughing, children singing themselves to sleep with half-forgotten lullabies.

All she had wanted, back then, was quiet.

Now, quiet was all she had.

As she lay there in the bunk, staring up at the ceiling, Jenna wondered—not for the first time—what it was she had come out here to see. What had she hoped to find?

Once, perhaps, she would’ve told herself it was to find her family.

But now she knew it was just defiance. Defiance against those who said she’d never amount to anything. Defiance against the hand she had been dealt, the deficit she’d had to overcome just to be on level ground with everyone else.

Defiance against the stars themselves.

Maybe leaving Earth had been less about what she’d find out here, and more about proving that someone could go, and come back.

You can’t take all of us, she thought, curling on her side, staring out through the hazy-dimmed glass at the pinpricks of light in the distance. You can’t have me. I’ll come home.

Just like they couldn’t.

But as a shallow, fitful sleep began to settle over her, and answering thought, somewhere hidden away in her half-conscious mind, replied:

Or maybe they didn’t want to come back for you.

~*~

 

I’m dreaming.

Jenna was walking across a vast, alien landscape.

The ground was soft beneath her bare feet, the soil shifting and changing with each step, color radiating out in rippling circles as she walked. Red, shimmering gold, violet, rust brown…

It did not trouble her.

She lifted her gaze to the horizon. It, too, shifted and changed as she watched, fading and shimmering. A thousand worlds, passing before her in a blink of an eye.

Jenna continued looking up, and up, until she was gazing into the sky above.

And there, spread out across the pastel heavens, were lines. Pale blue, white-hot like the heart of a flame, they streaked across the sky like captured lightning. In her dream, she reached up, and could touch them, though they were miles overhead. She brushed her fingertips along one of the cords of energy, and her hand tingled, energy racing down her spine, grounding her through her feet. It did not hurt.

She felt alive.

This is a dream.

It was, and she knew it was, but she did not wake. She did not want to wake; she wanted to stay, and to touch, and to feel this fierce aliveness, something stirring in her soul like a slumbering animal waking from winter’s rest.

She reached up again, and her hand held fast to the cord of strange energy. And in her dream she felt herself shift and change, felt her awareness rise up and out of her own body, looked down and saw that she was not herself. She was changing; the energy came down inside of her, and it spread out from her, and her feet became roots, and her body became the trunk of a tree, and her hands rose up, stretching towards the sky, and—

Her alarm went off.

Jenna bolted awake, searching the room in a disoriented, panicked motion, slamming back into her body with such reverberating force that it felt as if the ship had taken damage. But all was calm and quiet around her, save for the softly blinking light on her datapad that indicated a priority message.

With a wide yawn, she reached out and edged the datapad closer with the tip of her finger, sliding it across the desk until it was almost in reach. The edge of the datapad bumped against the pot, and she reached out just in time to keep that, too, from sliding off the desk.

“God damn it,” she muttered, and pushed the pot to the side, picking up the datapad and squinting at the dimmed light as the message came up.

It was an automated alert from one of the greenhouses.

Nothing urgent. Nothing whatsoever that the shift on duty couldn’t handle. She’d tried twice already to deactivate the alert, but for some reason it was still being sent out to her.

Jenna let out a soft noise of exasperation and dismissed the message. She checked the clock. It was still two hours before she was meant to wake up. Two precious hours of sleep she desperately needed before she’d have to get up, and repeat the same day she’d had for the last month, or more. Months, maybe.

She sighed, set the datapad back down on her desk, and flopped back into her bunk.

Back on Earth, there might be the faintest stirrings of dawn on the horizon, but here, space was black, and there was no horizon.

Earth-sickness was a thing, apparently. Oh, the ship was calibrated to provide the proper amount of vitamin D in the lighting, and their shifts were structured to ensure optimal work, leisure, and rest time, but space wasn’t Earth.

Some people came here because of that. Some, in spite of it.

Jenna didn’t know anymore which one of those she was.

She groaned, and rolled to her side, facing away from the window, in towards her room. It was too late to be this maudlin. Or maybe it was too early—

From beside her, something rustled.

Jenna stilled, and glanced up in the direction of the noise. It wasn’t familiar, the soft, almost fluttery sound. It wasn’t anything she’d heard in her room before…

And yet it was familiar, once she realized what it was.

She could see the plant in the dim light of the screen above the desk, the time shining down, illuminating the leaves.

They were still.

Damn it, Jenna thought. She was losing it. Going spaced, like the folk tales said. Spend too much time out in the black, and you lose all sense of—

The plant moved.

“Holy shit,” Jenna muttered, body freezing, eyes going wide.

There was no mistaking the origin of the rustling this time. She’d seen it with her own two eyes.

And as she watched, the plant—for lack of a better, more scientific term—wiggled.

This was it.

She was losing her mind.

Plants didn’t wiggle.

“Maybe this is a weird dream,” she said, sounding far more rational and controlled than she felt in that moment as she lay there in bed. “I’m probably half asleep right now. I’m probably dreaming.”

She slowly slid her hand down beneath her blankets, over the edge of her sleep shorts and the curve of her hip, until she could touch her bare thigh with her hand.

With the nails of finger and thumb, she pinched herself, hard.

Nothing happened. Well, it hurt like fuck, but—she didn’t seem to wake up.

The plant moved again.

“Okay,” she said slowly, sitting up on the bed. “Okay. So either something is moving you, or—”

The plant wiggled, as if to disagree.

“—or you’re moving by yourself?”

Cautiously, she put her feet on the floor and leaned closer. A gesture of her hand brought the lights up halfway in her quarters, and there she saw the plant, the same as it always had been, sitting in the pot on her desk.

“Can you understand me?”

The plant didn’t move.

For a brief moment, relief washed over her—relief, mingled with embarrassment.

But then—

The plant moved.

“You can understand me,” she said, once her voice had returned to her throat.

The plant wiggled again.

“You… holy fucking shit, how is this even…?”

Jenna’s voice trailed off as she stared at the plant. Reason told her to engage the safety protocols, to lock down her quarters, set the air filtration to high alert, in case the plant had some kind of… hallucinogenic contaminant, some kind of pollen that was making her imagine that it could move.

Instead, as if compelled by some unknown force, she reached out, and touched the edge of a leaf.

As soon as her finger made contact with the leaf, an image began to unfurl in her mind. And it was strange, but it didn’t hurt; it wasn’t an invasion, only an… impression. The closest thing Jenna could relate the feeling to was when her grandfather had taken out a roll of film, physical film, and uncurled it, slowly lifting the strange, fragile, amber strip up to the overhead light to show her the frames.

It was like that.

In her mind, but not her mind.

There were no words. But there was sensation, and there was perception—not sight, but—

The sun.

“RX-529,” she heard herself say.

A feeling of acknowledgement. Yes.

“I didn’t see it, but—the reports—” Jenna stopped talking, and instead, on instinct, closed her eyes and thought of the images the scouting team had captured. The bright light of this little moon’s star, the only sun this plant had ever known.

Take back?

She didn’t hear the question in words, but the images that poured out from the plant left its meaning with a message that was as clear and focused as daylight.

Yearning, for the light. A sense of disorientation, a blindness, here on board the Ariadne. Loneliness; its other plants, ones like it and ones different from it, could not be sensed or perceived.

Take back? Sun?

The feeling of need was so profound, Jenna had her hand lifted to her face before she even realized she had taken it away from the plant itself. Before she even realized she was crying.

She opened her eyes, and looked down in bewildered wonder at the little plant.

It was quivering still, the central stalk of it pointed up, and Jenna reached out to touch it again, her fingertips still wet with her own salt tears.

She made contact with the leaf. Felt it move beneath her, absorb the faint, subtle moisture.

And send out a feeling of… of understanding, reassurance, back.

We thought we were alone in the universe, she felt it say. The images that were shared with her were profound: Tilting to the sky, looking, watching, wondering.

“We were looking for beings like us,” she responded. “But you’re something different. Aren’t you.”

Go back, it replied. Will die here. Take back?

“Yes,” Jenna said softly. “Yes, I’ll take you back.”

~*~

 

All of her reason and logical mind screamed at her as Jenna trailed her fingers along the edge of her suit’s mask.

It had taken some careful maneuvering to make it out of her quarters, down to the shuttle bay, and into a shuttle without being seen, but frankly even if she had been seen, her override would assuage any questions.

Most of them, anyway.

Her commanding officers would have questions for her.

But she wasn’t going to be coming back to the ship to answer them.

The certainty of her own convictions shocked her, and she wondered if this was some strange side effect of the plant, some will being impressed upon her own.

No.

It was only the truth she had long ignored, the feeling of restlessness.

She remembered her dream, then, as she stood on the alien soil. Suddenly her suit was too thick, the shoes separating her from the ground.

They were unnecessary.

So she took them off. All of it.

First the mask, which came away from the neck seal with a soft hiss and a faint chirped warning in her ear which she ignored. She’d read the reports of this place; the air was breathable, an oxygen-nitrogen mix that rushed into her lungs, damp and thick and sweet.

No human had ever breathed this air.

The team had never done what she had done.

Jenna smiled.

She pressed her fingers along the central seal of her suit, taking it down, down, stripping gloves and boots, letting the body of the suit fall away as she stepped out of it. Beneath it, she wore the standard-issue bodysuit, for heat regulation and temperature…

It was all so unnecessary.

She took that off too.

Standing bare on the alien moon, Jenna raised her arms to the sky, remembering her dream. She couldn’t see the energy lanes overhead, nor the roots of any great tree, but there was something wild and holy about this moment, an awakening to awareness that had been stifled for as long as she had been shoved onto that ship. She felt open.

She felt alive.

At her feet, the plant wriggled in the pot.

Jenna smiled, and knelt down in the dirt, scooping out a place for it among the others, careful not to disturb their roots too much with her clumsy hands. At last, it was settled.

It felt like a sigh of relief.

She tossed the pot aside. Wherever it landed, she didn’t look.

Slowly, Jenna lay down on her back in the dirt.

She lay down beside the plant; both of them were nestled in the dirt, but while she could almost sense the plant’s roots growing, searching, relishing the nourishment it found there, she only felt dirty and alone.

And very small.

Jenna felt the tears slide down her face, trickling into her hairline. For the second time in a day, she was crying. It made her feel pathetic, and weak, and everything her darkest thoughts had spent a lifetime telling her was true.

Everything in the galaxy had roots, except for her.

Even fucking sentient alien houseplants had roots.

But she didn’t have anything, anyone.

She was alone.

Not alone, came an answering voice in her thoughts.

Jenna looked to her left, and to her right. The plants were all around her—some like the one her team had taken, and she had returned, but there were others, too. Some with long, elegant leaves, deep verdant green, striped with a paler hue. Some were tufted with sprays of yellow, some were vinelike, and it was those which were reaching up to caress her suit-covered ankles.

A brief moment of clarity broke through the haze of grief.

This is where I’m supposed to be, she thought. 

And it wasn’t the plants speaking, it was her. This feeling had been inside of her all along, this yearning, this need. She had gone into space because it was the next frontier, gone further and further, searching behind every star for the answer to a question she could never phrase, or speak.

Where do I belong?

The thrum of rightness came in the response to her answer: Here, the plants said. You belong here.

“Yes,” she said, and the words came out on a pleasured sigh. She was still crying, but it wasn’t in grief. Not anymore.

She felt her body sinking down, down, on an exhale that grew and stretched and softened, until it was the wind, blowing over the tops of the trees. It didn’t hurt, the transformation; she gave into it, and it was like the moment after the crest of pleasure, when a lover rolled off and the pulse began to steady, but the afterglow didn’t subside. She hardly noticed when the dirt fell across her lips, or into her mouth. She didn’t feel it at all when the dirt fell on top of her open eyes. And then she shivered, and swallowed it, and when she blinked her eyes open for the second time and saw through new ones for the first time, looking up to a vision no human had ever seen.

There was an ultraviolet radiance to space, a glowing energy that danced and swayed above her, around her.

Vines grew over her empty form, her consciousness shifting away from the body which had brought her here, changing, opening, widening, until she was every living thing, until she was the planet itself. She felt round and full, soft and perfect and aware.

Home, she thought—and all the plants on the surface of the little moon shivered, and danced with her joy. Home.

 

~*~

 

“So you’re saying, what, she just stole a shuttle in the middle of the night, came down here, stripped, and disappeared? That makes no sense.”

“Maybe she never came down here.”

“She rigged the shuttle to land and—but then how would her gear—? No, she’s here. Scan again.”

A sensor array beeped. Negative.

Boots crunched across the dirt, heedless of the plant life they marched across. Scanning for the only life they cared to find.

Negative.

“With all due respect, sir, there’s no trace of her.”

A sigh.

“Well, what the hell are we supposed to put in the report, then?”

“Exactly what we found. A stolen shuttle, gear, and no body. She’s just… gone.”

“Fuckin’ weird… well, you take her shuttle back, I’ll follow. I guess we’ll think of something to say…”

“Yes, sir.”