“A blue sky would be nice,” Rinen, from the Asia class, had said, pressing his palms together as if in prayer.
“No, the glittering sea’s even prettier,” Faroni, from the Polynesia class, had said, shaking her braids—or that was how I remembered it.
I didn’t know much about the sea.
But I didn’t think I could ever come to like it.
The sky was fine too, but as for me…
After the sound of a door swinging shut, a faint smell of grilling fish came drifting in.
It was hardly a rare thing for lunch in our house—a favorite of mine.
Wrapped in the scent of that grilled fish, Mom called out to me in a bright voice.
“Sofuu, time for your medicine.”
I had been dimly turning over what had happened that morning at the EarthNet School, and Mom’s voice brought me back to reality.
“Haah…”
The small sigh I let out wasn’t because I’d been dragged back to reality.
Nor was it to keep Mom from hearing it.
I was hardly thinking about school anymore.
What I thought about was always soil. The earth.
“Ye-es…”
My voice was the exact opposite of Mom’s—dark, and hoarse. They called it the voice breaking, but mine never dropped low, never turned thick and bold.
It was a voice like bloodless lips.
“Did you drink your water like you’re supposed to?”
She set the tray on the table, and I felt her fix me with that searching, reproachful stare.
Beside it, the glass still stood there, its water not gone down by a drop.
“I’ll drink it now.”
“Honestly… keeping your fluids up matters, you know.”
At my dry, rustling answer, Mom puffed out her cheeks.
A little clink followed, so she must have been clearing away the glass I’d never touched.
Even at a moment like this, Mom’s voice stayed cheerful.
Mom had always been like that. At meals, at bedtime, even when she handed me the Genetic Altering Medicine—the GAM, with its taste of dry plastic—her voice stayed bright.
And the way she drew out the very end of my name, just a little, always tickled.
“Sofuu…? How long are you going to keep staring out there?”
Mom’s drawn-out voice dropped in tone.
She had a hand on her hip, probably. Less angry than exasperated.
When I gave no answer, her indoor slippers came sliding closer across the floorboards, soft and shushing.
Spread out before my eyes was a sandwich of blue and green.
It was land caught between sky and grass—in the upper half, through the window, white clouds drifted; from the middle down, it lay buried in soil.
The faintly yellow glass shut out ultraviolet entirely, and in return let me see deep down into the soil.
With little gravel or mud to it, the rich humus marbled black and brown. The labyrinth of an ant colony had added more branches than the day before.
My room was what people in the old days would have called a “half-cellar”—a build sunk about halfway into the ground.
What set it apart from a true basement was that the building pierced straight through the earth.
So along the lower part of that wall—one entire face of it a window—grass growing upside down bristled, pricking up at the sky.
The sky was not only overhead. It ran on beneath my feet, and further down still.
So close that with a single step out, I felt I could take flight.
The floating bedrock, built by bending gravity at will, held proper soil for growing things—artificial, yes, but soil all the same.
A walnut-brown underground world, sandwiched in green.
It was no wider than the wall, from end to end. It was my world.
“Sofuu…?”
A soft hand, the kind that seems to give your back an encouraging push, touched my shoulder.
Mom’s hand, stroking from my shoulder down my back, was cold enough to reach me through my shirt. Cold.
The room was always kept at a steady temperature, and yet Mom’s hands never once grew warm.
“Sorry, sorry.”
As I turned round as though to flee, Mom watched me, the corners of her eyes softening, as if to say, “Well, what am I to do with you.”
At the temple of her narrow, nearly bare face—she wore almost no makeup—a deep crease cut in.
Mom wasn’t old enough for lines like that to be etched there. And even if she had aged, they should never have stood out so sharply.
“Your mother was a flower on a peak too high to reach,” Dad often said, with the face of a man who could not be prouder of having won her.
But the truth was, over these past few years, Mom had grown old—enough for Dad and me to see it.
It hurt, as if my heart were being wrung out.
“…Time for the ‘corrective.’”
The words I’d forced out in my distress came out as that—a piece of sarcasm. It wasn’t what I’d wanted to say at all.
Before I knew it I’d looked away from Mom and was grinding my teeth.
My own parched voice sounded to me like that tyrant of the soil—the centipede.
“No. That’s not it, Sofu.”
Denying it in a hard voice, Mom caught her breath for an instant, a flame seething up in her black eyes.
I was about to be scolded.
But instead, quietly and calmly, Mom only drew her spine straight—and her words, when they came, were firm.
“Don’t talk about yourself that way.”
“Isn’t it, though? My DNA is the part that’s wrong, so…”
“Sofu!”
At my throwaway words, this time Mom’s fire truly caught.
Her pale hand seized my even paler upper arm and bore down hard. The skin that had been cold now felt hot.
“We heard it together last week, didn’t we? Your chromosomes are almost repaired. If you can just bear it a little longer…”
“The SI said it was fifty-fifty!”
As I shook off her hand, Mom’s eyes went wide.
“…Fifty-fifty? Fifty-fifty about what?”
Her voice had gone rigid, and it clung to me as it asked.
I could see her lips—as drained of color as my own face—dragging in air in rough, whistling gasps.
“A complete cure.”
Meeting Mom’s eyes, I had stopped breathing without meaning to.
Maybe that was why the words felt so terribly heavy—so heavy I thought my lungs might not stand it.
“So… you heard.”
I didn’t answer Mom’s murmur—didn’t say that yes, I’d heard—and turned my eyes to the far side of the room.
There stood a mahogany-patterned door, as though cut out of the beige wallpaper.
The timber, its grain running vertically, had taken on a sheen under the artificial daylight—wholly without ultraviolet—that poured from the ceiling, which mirrored the moods of the sky.
Beyond that door lay my parents’ bedroom and a few other rooms, but there were only so many reasons for me to leave my own room, apart from meals and the toilet.
It was when I had a checkup with the doctor, or the SI examination the doctor had ordered.
SI was short for Support Intelligence, an advanced kind of machine intelligence. It wasn’t like the chatty AIs. That spherical artificial mind, strangely, uncomfortably attentive, never suited me.
And when the doctor couldn’t come out to our house, I was the one who went—all the way to the SI’s chamber, shaped like a transparent hexagonal pillar.
“Our MEDIC connects straight to the Origin’s SI, doesn’t it? And the Origin’s MEDIC is the best in the world, isn’t it?”
I poured out everything I knew, all in a rush, as though this were my one chance.
My parents thought I knew nothing.
But I wasn’t going to stay in the dark forever, either.
Stealing glances at Mom’s strangely calm face, I went on.
“GAM works at the moment the genes copy themselves, so it’s always unstable. Which means the odds of it turning cancerous go up, too.”
It was, strictly speaking, no more than the doctor’s aide, but the SI’s cool, objective judgment was said to outstrip that of any human physician.
And what I had heard from that SI, straight from it, I now flung at Mom, word for word.
“The SI said so. ‘The likelihood of invasive cell division advancing is fifty-fifty’—those were its words.”
“…Yes… you’re right.”
Mom dropped her gaze and let out a breath, limp, as if all the strength had gone out of her.
She must have heard it long before I ever did.
The black eyes that turned back to meet mine had gone quiet now, the fire in them wholly put out.
“We’ve still got a way to go, haven’t we.”
Silent, Mom said nothing more as I slipped past her side.
“…I’ll wash my hands and go to the living room.”
From the knee-high table I picked up two gray grains of rice off the lacquer tray.
I swallowed them down without any water, and as always the medicine tasted of faded petroleum products, the kind I’d seen adrift on the sea in old archive footage.
“…See you, then. Tomorrow.”
I raised a hand lightly and saw my classmate off.
It was time for Rinen to go home—Rinen, who had crossed the sea from a classroom on the far side, coming all that way just to see me.
The EarthNet School prized the real world: as dusk drew near, anyone with a home to go back to went back to it. Anyone without one was free to stay at the school. It all came from the school motto—“Live a well-ordered life.”
At my window the sun came pouring down, dazzling. Even away from the warm patch of it, I could tell the sun stood high just then.
Which meant that where Rinen was, the sun was already tilting low. The gap in time between his part of the world and mine was wide.
“(I have to get home),” Rinen said with a shrug, his mouth shaping strange words that seemed to run all their sounds together.
But to me it sounded like speech I was used to. My own voice was probably the same to him.
Bye-bye, waved Rinen—his holographic self, satchel and all—bounding off toward my window.
Rinen’s feet wore no shoes.
Instead, from the thigh down, his legs were blades, curved like the bowls of spoons. With their spring, Rinen could run terribly fast, and he was a fine dancer, too.
Rinen could see neither the glass of my window nor the earth that lay beyond it.
And yet, whenever he left my “room,” Rinen always took that last step as a leap, as though he could see it after all.
As if to say, “Someday, let’s fly together!”
“Aaand—juuump!”
At my cheer—one Rinen couldn’t hear—Rinen jumped, high and wide.
That figure, brimming with life, sailed straight past the edge of the hologram’s range and vanished into the soil of our garden.
Just then—I’d been gazing absently at the tip of that flat blade—something caught my eye, something left behind after the holographic image winked out in an instant.
“Huh?”
I scrambled up and hurried to the window, dropping my head low, almost sprawling flat against the floor.
The floorboards weren’t cold. They were kept at the very same temperature as the earth.
But I had never once mistaken that cork-colored planking for real ground.
“Grass…?”
There in the “upside-down earth,” out of the crowd of grass reaching toward the sky, one sprout alone thrust up. It stood about twice as tall as the rest.
Had the automatic mower left it behind, perhaps?
“No—that’s not lawn grass. It has too many leaves for that.”
Unlike lawn grass, where the blades seemed to grow straight up out of the soil, this sprout of some plant I didn’t know had a stem to hold its leaves.
A slender stem.
The stem—a black-brown much like mahogany—was thinner than the grass blades around it.
And yet, near its tip, no fewer than four leaves spread open.
The leaves were shaped like spoons, rounded at the tips, a rib running taut clean through each one.
Short leaves and long ones grew in alternation, until the whole shape was just like a star.
Drinking in all that sunlight on the floating bedrock, which came around once every twenty-four hours and a little more, that sprout was the first plant I had ever seen that wasn’t lawn grass.
“Um…”
Blood had rushed to my head and left it hazy, and I tried to remember what kind of plant this sprout might be.
Insects I knew, but plants I didn’t really understand.
“All right.”
When I laid my palm to the window, green text and graphs rose to the surface.
The glass was warmer than the floor, a soft, gentle warmth. The heat of the earth coming through, no doubt.
The text was telling me things—“Ultraviolet levels rising,” “Pulse elevated.” I swept my hand to the side and wiped the display away.
Next I raised the index finger and thumb of my left hand. I raised the same two on my right and set them at a right angle to the first.
Bringing the two finger guns together, I linked them into the frame of a “shutter.”
At the center of the frame my trembling fingers enclosed sat that sprout.
“What’s the name of this plant?”
My voice came out pitched too high. Nerves, I supposed. I felt less settled than the first time I’d ever stood out in the sun.
Taking a photo of a plant through the glass felt like something terribly embarrassing.
Paying me and my embarrassment no mind, the glass threw up a square frame and zoomed in toward its center.
At once, blue letters lined up beside the picture.
“…Mari… gold.”
Spoken aloud, the name was so beautiful. True to itself, it shone—gold, just as it promised.
Warm, too—and it set something fluttering in me, besides.
That alone was enough to make me happy.
From that day on, the marigold became the very center of my world.
Mornings, I woke early, unable to wait for the sun to rise.
The thought of the marigold all alone in the unlit garden at night wouldn’t let me sleep in peace, either.
Longing to see it even a moment sooner, I would get up while it was still dim, sit at the window, and wait for the sun.
The morning light, seeping in a little at a time, was maddening.
Wishing the sun would just hurry up and rise—there was something strange about that.
To me, the sun was a curse that made time run fast.
My time, so long as the sun kept rising, ran faster than anyone else’s.
And yet, without the sun, I couldn’t live either.
And while I turned such things over, the yellowish light fell across the marigold’s leaves where they spread in their star.
The marigold sprout was the tallest of them all. So it was the first to take the sun.
That spot was a stage set for the marigold, and the marigold alone.
Its smooth leaves caught the sunlight over their whole bodies and glittered, until I could even make out the water running through their veins.
The deep-colored stem gave off a muted gleam and stood like a length of timber cut from some great tree and buffed to a shine.
The shadow the marigold cast as it reached toward the sun fell across the grass around it, holding it back, proud that the grass could never catch up.
Through the daytime I stayed sitting at the window, and never moved.
I would mean to be listening to the translucent “hologram teacher,” and before I knew it I’d be looking out the window.
Even the virtual biology practicals, which I was good at, felt flat now—the touch feedback coming through my hands had gone dull.
I could hardly believe that not so long before I’d been enthralled by the insects wriggling across my palms.
When the teacher called my name and I came to with a jolt, the other kids laughed, but it didn’t bother me.
At dinner with the family, too, my head was up in the clouds.
To whatever Dad said, home now that it had gone dark, I gave only vague, noncommittal murmurs.
My parents traded glances at times, but they never cut in.
But one day, Dad spoke up.
“Tomorrow’s the mowing, isn’t it.”
In that instant, a power I had never felt before surged up into my head.
I slammed the table and shot to my feet.
“Don’t you dare touch my marigold!”
It was a cracked voice.
A voice like the shatter of a vase knocked over mid-play, with the thunder before the rain laid over it.
“…And so—what will you do about it, Sofu?”
As I stood there wheezing, the eyes behind the silver frames gave a small shake of the head—no, that wasn’t it.
Dad’s question, with no rise at the end of it, was very gentle.
“Huh?”
I hadn’t expected to be asked anything, and in one rush the power drained out of me.
Weariness came flooding over me and I sank back down. Mom watched me, worried.
“Howling alone won’t stop the mowing—and besides, I’m not the one who cuts it. That’s Rom’s job.”
Dad said it evenly, then took a slurp of his miso soup.
His way of speaking, not one bit different from any other day, was only stating the facts, and I couldn’t argue back.
“Mom’s miso soup really is the best. Just the right strength. And the chew of this wakame—Mom, another bowl, if you would.”
And Dad held out his oversized bowl to Mom.
The me of any other day would just have stayed quiet and admitted defeat.
But this time, the marigold was on the line.
I had to think of some way to save the marigold from the automatic mower we’d named Rom.
“If I change Rom’s program and have it hold off a while…”
“Pointless.”
My suggestion was cut down, just like that.
Power came simmering up in me, but Dad, paying it no mind, went on.
“So you put it off from tomorrow to the next day? And how long does that go on for?”
“Th-that’s…”
Dad watched me grope for words, working a mouthful of takuan. His eyes, a paler black than Mom’s, shone with expectation.
Sooner or later, the lawn would have to be mowed.
And left untended, the marigold too would be swallowed up in the grass.
Nothing would change, not really.
“Here you are, Sora.”
Dad took the steaming bowl Mom held out to him with a “Thanks.”
He plunged in his chopsticks and slurped it down with relish.
The moment I saw Dad do it, it came to me.
“Ah—!”
“Gah—!”
As I shot to my feet all at once, Dad sprayed out a mouthful of brown soup.
A strand of seaweed clung to his lip like a mustache put on crooked.
“That’s it!”
“M-Mom, isn’t that the floor-cloth—?”
With a dishcloth Mom briskly wiped the table and then his face, and Dad let her have her way.
To the two of them, I blurted my idea out in a rush.
“A flowerpot! All we have to do is transplant the marigold into my room!”
At my breathless words, both my parents stopped their hands and looked at me. Neither of them moved, as though frozen.
“Huh…?”
Moment by moment, the heat of my excitement drained away and left me cold.
I had forgotten.
To do the transplanting, someone had to go outside.
But I—I could not go outside.
“Sofu.”
Dad called my name in his usual, even tone.
When I raised my face, Mom was smiling there beside him.
“Let’s go and do that transplanting right now, shall we.”
A scrap of wakame clung to Dad’s cheek as he broke into a grin.
An alarm like someone striking a xylophone rang out through the room.
I had long since been ready, and with a quick sweep of my hand I silenced the timer.
“Last watering of the day, then.”
Little by little, I tipped the emerald-green watering can toward the pot.
A shower in many fine threads rained down over the marigold, soft as a drizzle.
“There!”
I set the can down on the floor while it still felt like not quite enough. Root rot would be a catastrophe.
Then I looked my treasure slowly over, glittering there under the artificial light.
“So beautiful…”
The marigold, grown now to some ten centimeters, was thick with leaves.
Droplets dripped from those leaves, and the leaves beneath caught them.
Robed in water, the marigold caught the faint indoor light and turned each droplet into a tiny jewel.
In sunlight, the marigold was beautiful, truly.
But the marigold there in its pot was dearer still.
“See you later.”
Holding down the wish to go on looking forever, I drew away from the pot.
Even after the marigold moved into my room, I was as spellbound as ever by this plant, aching for it to bloom.
But a few things had changed, if only a little.
I found I could settle down now and give my attention to other things.
In my lessons at the EarthNet School, I took to sitting properly at my desk and listening.
During class, whenever the marigold caught at my mind, I had only to shift my eyes.
There, right there, stood the marigold, its spine drawn crisp and straight.
I ate my meals properly, too.
The watering can was heavier than you would think. Unwilling to give the watering up to anyone, I ate my fill and built up my strength.
At night, I slept well.
Perhaps because the marigold was near, I always slept deep and sound.
I fell asleep so quickly now that Dad—who, since I couldn’t go out in daylight, used to steal a look into my room at night and whisper, “Let’s go for a walk”—was left with his lip stuck out in a pout.
As the marigold gained in height and I gained in strength, the dose of my medicine fell too.
According to our SI, “It is possible that the improvement in immune function is having a beneficial effect on DNA repair.”
GAM was down to once a day now, and when I mentioned this to Mom as she brought it to me, she winked and said, “Love’s a cure-all, you know?”
What the SI said and what Mom said—neither made much sense to me.
As ever, the taste of plastic hadn’t changed.
But it didn’t bother me the way it used to.
“Sofu, what do you say we try coming off the GAM soon?”
My doctor, whom I hadn’t seen in a while, said this around the time I’d finished repotting the marigold some ten times.
It was summer, and the midnight “gardening” had become a fixed ritual; on those nights alone I too would fight down my yawns and spend the dark hours outside with my parents.
Besides our own house, floating plots of land here and there lit their lamps and drifted, buoyant, in the air.
Seen under the night sky, the marigold caught the light faintly and looked demure.
It had a loveliness quite unlike its usual self.
Gazing at the marigold, I would sometimes find the sun rising up in my mind.
And in an unguarded moment, a place that was not home would come into view.
I was in a place like an open grassland, the marigold’s pot cradled in my arms.
Under a glaring sun I sweated, my breath coming ragged.
My whole body was burning, as if scorched.
Far off, the horizon wavered orange.
It was like a mirage, and yet somehow not.
It was as if a swarm of orange were being blown about in the wind.
“Water… I have to give it water…”
Bloodshot and frantic, hunting for water, I spoke to the marigold.
“It’s all right. I’ll protect you…”
Then, all at once, a strong wind came up—a sand-laden gale so fierce I couldn’t even open my eyes.
“What—?!”
I crouched down, trying to shield the marigold from the wind.
But the marigold thrashed wildly, as though it hated it.
“What’s wrong, Mari…?”
As I leaned closer, a faint voice—her voice—came to my ear.
“…I beg you… let me go…”
As long as the wind blew, her anguished voice would not stop.
It was around then that the marigold’s leaves began to yellow and wilt.
“If it isn’t too much water, then—is it sick?”
Lifting the pot, I muttered to myself.
A few drops of water trickled down into the tray, but only a little. The pooled water in the tray, too, I changed every day.
Even holding a leaf close enough to prick my eye, I could find none of the spots or blotches that mark a plant disease.
“That’s not it…”
The star-shaped leaves, so green and lush a little while before, had gone from yellow to a burnt brown, and some had already withered and dropped.
The stem, which had climbed up and up, was beginning to bend, as if it could no longer bear even its own weight.
“Why…”
Panic bled into my dry voice—a voice I hadn’t heard in myself for a while.
“Sofu, dinner’s ready…”
“Later!”
A voice with thorns on it, this time.
Even Mom’s words as she came into the room sounded to me like the dry rustle of fallen leaves, and I didn’t so much as turn around.
“Sofu, that’s enough now. You haven’t eaten a thing in ages, and you haven’t been taking your medicine either.”
“I don’t need any of that! When Mari’s the one suffering…”
“Which one matters more?! Sofu—are you going to die over a mere flower?”
Mom seized my shoulder.
For all that it was summer, her hand was terribly cold.
And cold or not, she was bearing down so hard her hand must surely have gone white.
Those words, as flat as the palm on my shoulder, gave me a surge of power.
“She isn’t just some flower!”
The power held long enough for me to spring to my feet.
“To me… to me, she…”
But the moment I turned around, the power snapped.
I should have had so much I wanted to say, and yet nothing would come.
Only my parched lips flapped, open and shut, open and shut.
“Sofu!”
My legs wouldn’t hold me, and as I staggered Mom’s arm shot out on the instant.
“…Ow, ow.”
Thanks to her I didn’t fall, but my body ached, seized up all over.
“Sofu, if you aren’t well, how are you going to look after your flower?”
She sat me down on the floor and lowered herself beside me.
There was none of the usual brightness in Mom’s voice. Even as she said, “It’s all right now,” the hand steadying my shoulder gripped hard enough to hurt.
“I’m scared… Scared that Mari is going to die.”
As if to escape Mom’s level gaze, I dropped my eyes.
It was all I could do not to cry.
“You did so well, Sofu. Look how big it has grown.”
Mom soothed me, her voice gone gentle now.
For a brief moment she glanced back toward the pot—I could tell by the rustle of her clothes.
“…Not yet.”
“Hm?” Leaving Mom to tilt her head, I got up, took the pot from the table, and came back with it.
I must have looked unsteady, for Mom reached out a hand, but I wouldn’t let go of the ochre pot.
“Look at this.”
Carefully, I lowered the pot onto the floorboards.
As I wobbled, Mom clenched her fists tight.
“It’s on the underside of this leaf.”
Once I’d made sure the pot sat steady, I gently pushed aside, with a finger, one green leaf still left low on the stem.
“I found it yesterday. There was one at the very top, too, but…”
Hidden under the umbrella of the leaf, a crumpled green knot hung, bowed low.
Shaped like a rugby ball, its tip had taken on a bright orange.
“…It’s withered.”
Tracing the stem upward with my finger from the bud on the leaf’s underside, I found a similar swelling left at the crown of the marigold.
But that bud was wilted, plainly so, and drained of color.
The part that should have become petals was a dull, earthen brown.
At this rate, the healthy bud might end up the same.
“Mom.”
I lifted my face and held her in my gaze.
And then I told her, straight out, exactly what I had been thinking.
“I want to see Mari’s flower. A real flower, not a hologram—that’s what I want to see.”
“Sofu…”
Murmuring my name, Mom wore a look that was startled and, at the same time, glad.
Holding back the sharp sting behind my eyes, I drew myself up straight.
“So I will never let Mari wither—never. Even if I go down, I’ll keep Mari safe, if nothing else.”
With the pot between us, Mom listened, still and intent, to what I said.
Once, she looked upward; her expression scarcely changed, but I could tell she was turning all sorts of things over in her mind.
“…Say, Sofu.”
Mom, too, drew herself up straight.
“Have you asked your biology teacher?”
“Yeah, I asked. They told me things like ‘too much watering’ or ‘a disease,’ but it doesn’t seem to be that. The soil’s dry, and there weren’t any spots either…”
“What else?”
Mom asked at once, without missing a beat.
“Else…?”
Before I’d even finished, Mom leaned in—and though her words struck me as odd, I followed the thread of my memory back.
The account of the marigold I’d given the biology teacher.
Its state now, and how it had been before.
How I’d gone about raising the marigold.
“Ah—!”
Without meaning to, I too had looked up at the sky. On the ceiling of my room, the real-time weather showed a clear, cloudless sky.
At its center, the sun blazed round and yellow.
A sun neither dazzling nor hot.
This sun had only its long wavelengths stripped away, for my sake.
And the very contrivance that kept me alive was, to the marigold, nothing but harm.
“…I’ll go warm up your lunch again.”
Just as I was about to say something, Mom got hurriedly to her feet.
Without looking back, she strode quickly to the door.
“Mom…”
“You be sure to come back to me… Sofuu.”
She said it at the door and no more; without waiting for an answer, the back of her apron vanished down the hall.
The room went suddenly quiet, and I only gazed, blankly, at the place where Mom had been sitting.
From there, I let my eyes travel to the far end of the room.
Beyond the wall of glass, the freshly mown grass stood lush and green, pointing upward.
From “above” the lawn, unobstructed light came pouring down.
Now that the season was turning toward autumn, the night-dew lawn was a little cold.
The sharp leaf-tips prickled against my bare feet, and it tickled.
Crunch, crunch…
The soil, near the color of the darkness itself, held the damp and lifted away easily.
In the far sky, a deep-indigo light fell faintly over the hole in the ground and the mound of turned earth beside it.
“I’m sorry.”
Gently, I lifted the marigold out of its pot.
Withered leaves drifted off, one by one, on the soft autumn wind.
The stem and branches I held had gone limp, bowed and slack. To think the fault was mine sent a small, sharp ache through my chest.
But I’d made it in time, just barely.
“You were a child of the sun. You can’t live without it.”
I brushed the soil from the roots—still firm with life—and carried her to her new “home.”
The hole I’d dug while lost in thought came out too deep, and I had to shovel a little of the earth back in.
As I dug and filled, dug and filled, the night wore on, and sunrise was near.
“I wanted to be like you, too…”
Into the hole that gaped open in the ground, the marigold settled just right.
I lifted the lower leaves, which looked cramped, and sprinkled the loose earth over, a little at a time.
“Even so, I shouldn’t have kept you all to myself.”
There was no one there to hear my words of regret.
Because I had slipped out of the room, just the two of us.
And that time, too, was coming to its end.
The deep blue of the sky gave way to scarlet and grew brighter and brighter.
Our garden began to show sharp and clear, and from the other plots of land adrift in the far sky, one small vehicle after another lifted off.
Another day was beginning.
“There. Now you’re free. You can be with the sun forever.”
I returned all the dug-up earth to the marigold’s roots and tossed the shovel away. I doubted I’d have any more use for it.
I sat down cross-legged beside the marigold and narrowed my eyes toward the light.
An orange light—a marigold-colored light—came spilling up over the “horizon” of the garden.
The light was so strong I raised a hand against it without thinking.
“Mmh—so bright.”
My skin began to prickle and sting, the way it does fresh out of a hot bath. Behind my eyes, too, everything flickered and swam.
But it felt good.
A heat rose from somewhere inside me, and strength came welling up. My heart raced, and it felt as if I could do anything.
This, surely, was how Rinen felt when he jumped.
“It really is beautiful…”
When I turned my eyes to the marigold beside me, its slender shadow swayed and wavered across my leg.
From now on, it would grow bigger and bigger.
And someday…………
In one corner of the Float Residence—a housing district where floating bedrock stood in ranks—was a single house, built as though driven straight through the bedrock.
Its garden was all but buried in orange.
The house bore a nameplate with no family name—“Sofu’s Marigold Field”—and plants of the daisy family, of every different height, covered the ground from the wooden-arch gate all the way to the square-built house.
Beneath the jungle of long, narrow, star-shaped leaves, the grass vied for what few patches of sun it could reach.
In early summer, “Sofu’s Marigold Field” came into its full bloom, and orange flowers shaped like globes and bowls turned their faces toward the sun, reaching for its light.
In the wind that swept through, the bright orange flowers swayed as if in delight.
One face of the cold gray house was a wall of glass, throwing the sunlight back in a strong, bright glare.
Through the window—which almost seemed to give off a pale yellow light of its own—the study desk at the sill and the emerald-green watering can set on the floor stood as though they’d been in use only moments before.
In that garden, nearly untended, one place alone—the open ground beneath the wall of glass—had been kept as a space where people could stand side by side.
The tall marigolds gave way at the edges, and the low ones laid a wreath of flowers on the ground—a small, round plaza of lawn.
On the neatly trimmed grass of the plaza, two pairs of hollows lay side by side.
They looked like the marks left where people had knelt.
At the center of the plaza, in full view of the room, stood a small, modest monument.
The stone—an ordinary granite carved into the shape of a dome—bore a single name and a span of years.
The epitaph, in a bold, sweeping hand, read: “Here sleeps a child of the sun.”
A slow heave…
From beneath the gravestone, something pushed the brown earth up into a mound.
Two feelers, out ahead of the body, waved this way and that, testing how things stood.
A dry rustle…
And what crawled up out of the soil was a pill bug.
The pill bug turned its feelers once toward the gravestone.
One glance, and the little decomposer of the soil made an about-face and set off across the ground.
For all its wandering left and right, the pill bug kept on straight across the surface of the earth.
Before long it found a single marigold, tapped the stem with its feelers, and climbed the branch smoothly, up and up.
It was the marigold plant nearest the gravestone, the one that bore the largest blooms.
Climbing and climbing without pause, it poked its round head out at last from the underside of a single marigold leaf. Taking no rest, it pressed on along a branch thin as a rope, never once hesitating.
And there, at the end of it, was the marigold flower.
But the flower was still far off.
From here on, there was only a path far narrower than the stem.
At last it reached the side of the rounded corolla. The pill bug came to a stop, as if in relief.
Just as though it were catching its breath.
And then, almost bashfully, it stirred its feelers, slow and shy.
Even so, it could not quite reach the flower yet.
In that instant, with a soft rush, a gust of wind swept through.
A fresh breeze, still holding a trace of spring, set the marigold swaying.
Desperate not to be shaken loose by the strong gust, the pill bug clung to the branch with all its might.
Not yet knowing that its own feelers had come, ever so softly, to touch the orange flower.
(The End)