From imh@gardencitynet.co.uk Sun Aug 4 01:49:58 1996 Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 18:31:05 +0000 From: Inga Marie Horwood To: b5-creative@lists.best.com Subject: story If this story works at all, it is thanks to Adele and Mary and Cheryl. The Gardens of Babylon 5 It is the start of a shift on Babylon 5. Morning, if there were a sun. A stream of shabby figures emerges from Downbelow. The lucky ones, the ones with job cards. Among them, a man in green coveralls, stooped, easy to miss. On his way to the gardens of Babylon 5, where he has worked for almost a year. About time, he thinks, for the maze. Clip it and prune it a little. Box can look after itself, but is worth some care now and then. He is looking forward to his day, is relaxed. He has only just started to relax, only just lost his sense that there is something he has, dangerously, forgotten to dread. He does not suspect what will happen today. Does not know that today Londo Molari will enter the heart of the maze, and meet there the man with three shadows. The gardener steps off the travel tube. Ahead lie the gardens; he is breathing easier already. He always feels stifled Downbelow. The guard checks his pass, recognises him, and the clutter of letters which pass for his name. "Welsh?" thinks the guard. "Finnish? Sinhalese?" It is as though the letters have been typed at random. The gardener passes, ducks his head: he never looks up. Not Downbelow, lest he see the faces of those he wishes to help, those he fears he has already failed. Not in the gardens either. There he keeps his eyes on his plants - much more easy to keep alive these. The guard tries to remember his face. "Maori? Innuit? Faroese?" But the gardener is an easy man to forget. Even he forgets who he is. He remembers the gardens, however. Has always remembered them, knew them the first time he saw them. His one stroke of luck, being hired for a day's casual labour. He never questions this luck, never thinks, "They saved my life," though perhaps they did. Two people, a man and a woman, offering three meals and pay, picking five from the crowd, adding him as a sixth, on impulse. "Poor chap," said the man. "Looks like he could do with a break. He can sit in one of the gardens, get some rest." She said, "There's something about him. When I look at his hands, at his knuckles. I remember his hands. They're like my grandfather's hands, the sort made to work in a garden." And he, half choked by the fug, sick with the smell of greased metal, heard them say "garden" and followed. "Light," he thought to himself, the first time he entered the garden. "Air. Home." Standing straight for the first time since he came to the station. Then, "I have been here before." He was not even surprised. "Here is the maze, here the fountain, the Japanese Garden, everything, just where it should be. Except for the trees. Far too few trees." At the end of that day he was sure. He could live only here. And she was sure, too. Theresa Okorebe, Chief Horticultural Engineer. A gardener in spite of her title. She kept him on for a week, for a month; took him onto her permanent staff once the system was used to his presence. He broke all the rules, sooner or later. She let him, said, "Leave him be. Whatever he does seems to work. He's got green fingers, that one." She began to log stunning successes, began to cloud her meticulous records with vagueness, rediscovered how to lie by omission. He works in the maze all the day. Near the end of the shift, Londo Molari saunters in. They see one another. Molari looks flustered; the maze has been deserted before. He begins to strut, pompous. Ambassadorial inspection of maze. The gardener ignores him, clips here and clips there. The hedges are plush as plump cushions. Molari comes closer, claps a hand on the gardener's shoulder. "This maze does you credit," he says. "You deserve a reward. Here take this, go early and spend it." He has thrust out his hand. The gardener looks at it, curious. A chit for some credits. He has a pile in his quarters. He wishes Molari would move. There is a shoot to be cropped. Molari is nonplussed, then tries again. "Yes, magnificent. I will commend you to the Centauri Academy of Topiarists. They may give you an honoury honour." He is steering the gardener out of the maze. "Indeed, my dear fellow. A veritable masterpiece. Do go." At the edge, the gardener stiffens. Wishes to slip the ambassador's grasp. Then he senses a flicker: two flickers. As though the light has just stuttered. He is here, the man with obsidian eyes. He smiles, turns this smile and those glimmering eyes on the gardener. Who has gone. Spurred by a fear which drives him out of the garden, back to his room Downbelow. He fights sleep for half of the night. When he loses, his fear sparks a terrible dream. He is in the New Grove. The seedlings he planted, not two months ago, are now grown, are nearly full size. He is standing among them, waiting for something. For something like Spring? No; for a dull thud, so it seems. The ground shudders briefly. He is terrified, wanting to run, his thoughts dizzy, remote from his stiff, stupid body. More jolts, then another, much harder. He can not tell which is ringing the louder, his head, or the hull, or the air. At some point, he is thrown to the ground. Above his head, branches flail wildly, lose twigs, buds, scraps of their bark. A great gale is blowing through Babylon 5, its caged atmosphere shocked into tumult. The next blow is so strong that he is bucked through the air, sees the ground buckling. A great hand is crumpling the station. He sees roots detach, tree trunks tilt. He breaks one of his rules, and looks up. He never looks up, preferring to think of the sky as a sky, not a ceiling, not somebody else's firm ground. Now, he looks through the branches, looks across to the opposite wall of the station. His sight seems to blur, to grow cloudy. He forces himself to focus. The cloud is soil, plants and trees, is pebbles, stones, people. They have been shaken away from the opposite wall, are beginning to fall, slowly at first, but tumbling towards him. And he must be falling as well. He hears the next blow. Black stars pierce the opposite wall, first mere pinpricks. They expand rapidly, silently, tearing metal like tissue, then join up to make one vast hole. All around him, whirlwinds spring up. They take topsoil and leaves, grow stronger, take plants and all living beings, twist them and themselves into one tightly wound vortex that's aimed at the heart of this hole. He shuts his eyes, reaches out with his hand, clutches the nearest tree trunk. Stupid, he says to himself. It's falling too. I'm doing no more than hang onto a log as it's swept over a cataract. Yet he isn't. His hand, his whole body stubbornly tell him that he is not falling, and nor is the tree. He opens his eyes. The tree is an oak. It is massive. Two hundred years to build such a tree. He is clutching the trunk, looking up at blue sky through a yellow-green dappling. The colours of May. Only Ash shows its leaves later. The sun is quite low but is strong, the wind cool, a northerly, fresh from regions still chilled by the snow. He gets up. The trees all around are mature, are established. There is lime, birch and aspen: mixed woodland, the kind which he longs for, the kind which once covered the Earth. Now it exists only in parks, in gardens. In histories. All these are trees he has planted. They must be. He remembers the pattern he has followed: not random, although it might look it. Something he remembered when he remembered the garden. But more trees grow here, and they stretch much further. He makes his way through them, touches smooth trunk and rough trunk, cups hands about leaf as he might do a candle. It is sound which makes this true Eden. The rustles and buzzings of squirrels and bees. Deer snipping the grass. A dry, fluttered throb of birds, flying. The gardener wakes with tears on his cheeks. He is back in his room on the station. Breathing metal and sweat, air squeezed from the lungs of thousands of others. He should feel despair: he remembers his dream, knows it is memory, knows he has seen the death of the station, knows this is the doom that he dreaded. Instead he feels hope, feels elation. He knows that the dream is a promise. Is an offer, gives him a means to serve life. He sees roots stretching out from the grove in the garden, reaching though space like rivers of light that flow back to where the trees came from. A vision of refuge. Not what he dreamt: more its meaning. He should tell someone. Someone who will know what to do. His heart nearly fails him. He is not one to like being noticed. He lies in the dark, undecided, until it is time to set out for work. He can think while he works in the garden. He steps out of his room, is caught in a current of people. He looks at them now. Now there is hope, he can bear the death in their faces. He asks himself questions he has dreaded before, "What will happen to them when this place meets its fate? Who will care that we lurkers must share it?" The Captain might care. He came straight to the garden, just after he boarded. Made for the orchards, at first, stumbling his way between melons and vines, marvelling at apples, at peaches, at nectarines growing in Space. But later he moved on, wandered more widely. He has been to the grove, he has looked at the saplings, even asked for their names. Stopped by the redwoods and fingered their bark with affection. Strange about that. The gardener had started quite small. Rowan and birch. He had not dared to embark on a forest. That engendered itself, by peculiar ways. Traders and tourists handed him seeds, he found others tucked in odd places. Combed some from his hair, shook others out of his pockets. Planted oak trees and beech, maple, sequoia, later trees from dozens of planets. Or the commander. He found her coffee plant potbound and dying, gave it a bigger container, added other varieties, concocted a miniature coffee plantation. It is a secret they share, never speak of. They try different blends of the beans, swap samples in small twists of paper which they leave near the plants without comment. Or the Minbari Ambassador. He remembers her before, in the Zen garden, watching the ripples of rock, the swirls and the currents of pebble. Somehow its centre, as still and as certain as stone. He remembers her altered, less focussed, more restless, ill at ease and roaming the gardens. Remembers her pausing by blossom, absorbing its colour, its scent, its drama of bud, fruit and seed. Remembers her grasping how change conjures beauty, then, calmed by the vision, sitting at peace in green shade. He waits for a travel tube. Metal surrounds him, humming, constricting, a serpent of steel, squeezing hard. Standing thus, idle, he cannot ignore where he is. He expects to feel hot, to feel sick, to feel strangled. He expects to feel hate for this place he has seen as a cell, as a coffin. It does not happen. He touches the skin of the station. Every atom within it came from some planet. As he boards and is carried up to the garden, he surprises himself with a change of perspective. The place is more like a bubble hatched out of bed-rock, fragile and faithful, and doing what all planets do: providing a foothold for life. Its cause is the same as his own. The travel tube slows: it will soon be his stop. He sees light ahead. The car slides to a standstill. He disembarks. Looks around him. All around. He takes in the whole of the gardens. Looks up, very deliberately. Neat plots, a patchwork of greens starred with crimson, with gold, arc over his head. Impossible place. A hoop, a ring of a garden. No start and no finish, just birth and rebirth without end. No wonder, he thinks, that I feel I have been here forever. His mind is busy with plans for the day, with thoughts of cuttings and graftings and fertilisation. Now he knows. He has nothing to do beyond tending the garden. The right person will come to him here.