Vibrant Hope

Many among the crew of Colony Transport Daedalus were angry when Chief Hydroponics Officer Sylvos insisted on planting marigolds from seeds he’d brought with him on the journey in with the fruits and vegetables. “They’re a waste of crop space,” they said. “What good is a pollinator plant when you’re pollinating artificially anyway?” they asked.

But Officer Sylvos planted those flowers anyway. He could have explained that the petals of the flowers would spice up the many salads they would be having with the spinach, arugula, and other greens already planted. He could have said that it was just a few containers out of three whole bays of plants meant for human consumption and air purification. He could have insisted that a little beauty was necessary, just to alleviate the monotony of the hydroponics bay.

He could have, but he didn’t. He knew they wouldn’t listen.

And then the ship hit an asteroid. And something about the way in which it hit caused that one particular hydroponics bay to catch fire in a control panel on the bulkhead.

Officer Sylvos was in another bay at the time, and so was unable to extinguish the fire before it ran rampant throughout the highly oxygenated space. The only thing he could do was seal off the bay, hit the emergency fire release, and pray that at least some of the crop survived—it was one-third of the colony ship’s food supply for the season, after all.

The contents of the cargo bay—anything that wasn’t bolted down, at least—flew through the blasted-out window in the outer bulkhead. Even the tightly sealed lids on the hydroponics containers could not keep the plants from being sucked through their growth holes into deep space. Officer Sylvos looked on from the corridor through the sealed bay doors, tears streaming down his face as he watched the spinach, the arugula, the cabbage, and even the marigolds fly out through that open window after the now-extinguished fire.

What felt like an eternity later but was really only about fifteen seconds, the emergency force field covered the open window so that repair crews could get in and replace the transparent alloy that otherwise protected the crew who wished to see outside. Officer Sylvos rushed to key in the override and jammed his slender body through the door as soon as it opened the few inches necessary to fit him.

Once through the door, he stopped in his mad dash. He had seen it through the small portholes in the door, of course, but actually being inside the room where such devastation had occurred was sobering. In the control box where the fire had started—the life support control system, oddly enough—the bulkhead was charred, as well as a few rows of containers farther into the room. There was not much soot, but the durable plastic of the containers was noticeably melt-scarred.

On the opposite side of the bay, however, there was a much more interesting effect. Not all of the plants and supplies had been sucked out of the window; some had not had time to get from their part of the room to the window before the force field turned on, and some of the plants’ root systems had been too large to squeeze out of their containers’s lids quickly.

Those plants that remained were covered in frost, the liquid in which their nutrients were administered frozen. There was some onion, some peppers, even a few tomatoes, all dead of a sudden frost that never should have happened.

And in one such container, a single marigold, perfectly frozen, petals unfurled and blazing orange.

Officer Sylvos, overcome by some mad urge to preserve this beautiful dead thing, ran to the storage locker for a tiny suspension container. He had used larger sizes of such containers before in research, trying to find ways to keep fruit crops producing for longer periods, or to prolong the growth time and allow a later harvest than a particular plant would normally have, but never this smaller size yet. This size was meant for seed saving over multiple seasons, and Officer Sylvos still had seeds leftover from the originals he had brought on the voyage.

Carefully, he opened the stasis container, and taking a pair of secateurs from the pouch on his belt, clipped the marigold below the highest pair of leaves. With even more care not to crack the ice on the flower, and eschewing gloves in his haste, Officer Sylvos gently laid the flower in the stasis container and shut it before the warmth of his fingers and the rapidly warming artificial atmosphere in the hydroponics bay could melt the ice even more. He set the controls on the container to maintain the ice cover and preserve the flower as long as it possibly could.

He presented the frozen flower in its box to the captain as a symbol of his hope that they would survive the inevitable rationing necessary until a new crop could mature in the damaged bay.

When Officer Sylvos died years later, his wife told their grandchildren the story of the single marigold flower that, with its beauty, gave the crew hope after such a devastating loss that better times would come again.

And though most of the crew had by then forgotten the significance, when Daedalus and her crew finally found a new world to call home, many generations after even Officer Sylvos’s grandchildren were dust, the first crop sown on their new world included marigolds.