Defying Mars (The Saving Mars Series) - By Cidney Swanson Page 0,62
Jess filling them with letters to Pavel, strenuous exercise, reading through blueprints of her brother’s inventions, and occasional one-sided conversations with Crusty’s orchid.
As dull day succeeded dull day, the nights grew ever more wearisome. Jessamyn had stuck to the twenty-four hours and thirty-eight minutes of a Marsian day until she reached day thirty-two, her half-way mark. Since then, she dropped the thirty-eight minutes and set her schedule to match Earth’s shorter twenty-four hour days.
Not that it mattered a great deal. She lay each night awake for what seemed like hours, trying various rooms to see if change improved her ability to sleep.
One problem that interfered with sleep was simply that Jessamyn felt as if she were doing a Very Wrong Thing each night by allowing the ship to fly itself. She would awaken with her heart pounding, adrenaline coursing madly through her system, and the fear that she’d forgotten something important, left something critical undone. Which led to an inevitable trip to the bridge to check on the ship.
She even tried sleeping at the helm. That didn’t last long. As she lay on the floor of the bridge, she couldn’t help but imagine the Red Galleon frowning sternly at her, demanding to know what, exactly, she thought she was doing asleep at the proverbial wheel.
Her letters to Pavel grew more frequent, although her memory of him seemed each day to thin out until only a gossamer thread of Pavel remained to anchor his memory to her. She recalled in flashes small things: his fingers, with sand pouring off of them; the bright bloom of red as he removed her subcutaneous Terran scan chip; and often, especially as she dreamed, his breath upon her lips as he leaned near for a kiss.
Upon her fifty-first day in space, Jessamyn broke her self-imposed ban from visiting the observation deck. Pausing before the seal-door, she attempted to brace herself against a rush of memories of her brother, an ache for his companionship. But as she passed over the threshold, she saw only the stars. Glorious, infinite in number, bright against an inky backdrop.
She sighed as she moved across the shallow room to lean her forehead upon the window. Why didn’t I come here before? She had no answer. Only a certainty that she’d been a fool to cut herself off from such beauty. It looked to her as if someone had frozen in time an image of rain, the small pelting bits caught stationary and then lit with fire, stretching unto an infinite distance.
Dear Pavel, she composed the letter in her head, I am staring out at Zhinü and Niulong this morning—if you can call it morning—and wondering if you think of me when you look into the night sky. I am surrounded by eternal night (or perhaps it is eternal day), and I know now that I cannot live without the beauty of this vision spread before me. Will we, as the lovers in the tale, find one another? Form a bridge across the distance? I am not crossing the Milky Way. My journey is a minute one, Pavel, and sometimes I have a sense of being caught in a river that carries me to you. Well, I hope it will. Earth seems so tiny when I view her in the vastness of space. How hard could it be to find you upon so small a surface? Your friend, Jessamyn
It wasn’t a letter she committed to her wafer. These were thoughts only, ephemeral, private, foolish. She walked to the far end of the arched window and tucked herself against the wall, watching the fiery worlds, wondering if any watched her back. And then, trying to number the stars between the smallest space she could form between two fingers, she fell asleep.
When she awoke the next day, she decided to move the orchid from the bridge to the observation deck. “The view’s a lot better from there,” she murmured to Crusty’s plant as she carried it. Pausing to open the ob-deck door, she disturbed the pot-within-the-bowl system Crusty had set up for watering. Instantly, her nostrils were assaulted by a smell so rare upon Mars that she had to stop to think where she’d encountered it before.
“Algae rot,” she murmured finally. “Like Mom’s bad pots.”
Wrinkling her nose, she adjusted the ob-deck’s low lighting so she could see the orchid better. The smell definitely originated from the plant—Jessamyn discovered a layer of slime where she’d disturbed the bowl. Quickly, she shifted it back to its