“Amazing, I know.” She pushed her hands into her hair. The seed pod in her throat swelled yet again, and she was a flower, blooming—
Bursting into tears.
“Oh dear.” Hagen’s lumpy sweater was against her face, her head nestled beneath his chin, and he held her tightly.
“There is so much left for you to see.” His hand moved in a slow circle between her shoulder blades. “Don’t you know that?”
They stood close, tasting each other’s air, their arms circled around each other. The tears dried on her cheeks, pulling her skin taut.
Over his shoulder she saw the orchids bending toward the windows, seeking light.
Samantha kept her eyes closed. Just for a little while, before she was really awake and had to put her outerwear back on and trudge through the snow to the facility. She had fallen asleep on Hagen’s couch, in full view of his bedroom.
She had dreamed in scattered images, with no story to connect them. But one of them was clinging to her still, the feeling of grainy concrete under her knees as she knelt on the floor of her father’s garage, an old cardboard box in front of her.
Her father had died a few weeks before. She had just broken things off with her live-in boyfriend, Greg, and gone to stay in her father’s empty house while Greg packed up his things. The cereal in the cupboard wasn’t stale yet, and there was still a glass in the drying rack.
There had been no point in going through his things or packing anything away. There was no selling the house; no one was buying. There was no consigning of old jackets, no reclaiming of valuable possessions, no hollowing out of spaces to get rid of the ghost of him. The world was ending, and the house would be consumed in the flames along with everything else.
Still, she found herself in the garage, kneeling in front of the box marked “Naomi.” The flaps were open, as if he had recently gone through it himself. Sitting on top was a stack of letters. Her mother had liked sending letters, though Samantha had teased her, when she was young, for being the only person left on the planet who did. She assumed they were from her parents’ courtship, the glowing years of their romance, before it all went sour and they turned away from each other.
But when she skimmed them, she realized they were more recent. From after the divorce. Sammy quit orchestra, I think it’s for the best… the rosebush out front finally bloomed, remember how we used to say it was broken?… Mom’s had a bad cough all winter, I’m worried it’s something serious…
She hadn’t known that her parents were still in touch. That her mother had updated him about the state of the rosebush, about the daughter he spoke to so gruffly, about her dreams, her parents, her work. All written out in her mother’s familiar scrawl, close and narrow, with scribbles every other sentence as she second-guessed herself.
Samantha’s chest ached.
He had saved every word.
She picked up an envelope, wedged in the stack of paper, and opened it. Inside was a flower, pressed flat. It had been white but had turned the color of old parchment. She tipped it into her palm.
The concrete was cold under her knees. The air smelled of mildew and firewood. The flower was an orchid.
“There is so much left for you to see.”
She opened her eyes and looked at Hagen, asleep on his stomach with one arm reaching for the empty pillow on the other side of his bed. She wondered if he had learned as much about his wife in her absence as he had in her presence, just as Samantha had with her father. His heart, still open, despite having appeared closed for so long. The letters reminding her of all that she did not know.
Dread pooled inside her like poison, and it was nothing new.
At the harbor in the bay nearest to the Ark’s facilities bobbed an old fishing vessel, the Naomi. The white paint was peeling away from its hull, revealing the matte metal beneath, but it looked sturdy enough, with a long bow and a cabin large enough to fit a twin-size mattress, a gas-powered space heater, two jugs of drinking water, and a few days’ worth of food.
Samantha saw it as a white speck in the distance as the helicopter lifted off from the landing pad behind the facility. She leaned forward, across Dan’s sturdy lap, to see Hagen’s greenhouse glinting in the daylight. Perched on his desk, still suspended in the life-preserving fluid developed by the Ark scientists, was the Oncidium Samantha. Hagen had confirmed, before she left it with him, that it was in fact purple, not blue.
Hagen had told her about so many flowers in their final days together. They were all he had spoken of. Vanilla planifolia, which most people knew as simply vanilla. Bulbophyllum nocturnum, which only bloomed at night. Platystele jungermannioides, with flowers only two millimeters wide. One of the two largest flowering plant families in the world, he had told her, as if begging her to listen, as if it would save her life.
Twenty-five thousand species of orchid, and counting. The world would never run out of them. And the universe would never run out of discoveries.
She had spent the last year with her head buried in the tiny things of Earth, the roots that gripped the soil, the fine hair that covered stems, the veins of color through the center of a petal. Plant cells you couldn’t see without a microscope. But pulling away from the ground in the helicopter had a way of simplifying things. Flakes of snow disappeared into white masses of frozen land dotted with floodlights and abandoned buildings. Fierce waves dissolved into a stretch of flat navy-blue ocean.
Soon it would break apart, break free of its orbit, scorch and burn. Soon the crisp blue sky would turn dusty with debris, and all the things of this world that made it beautiful—the fish with their multicolored scales, the flies with their iridescent wings, the churring squirrels and the deep sighs of whales, the new leaves, still curled and pale, the earth rich with red clay—they would all be gone.
But not yet. And Samantha had always loved autumn.
A NOTE FROM THE CURATOR OF THE FORWARD COLLECTION
A year and a half ago, my partner and I were driving across the Rocky Mountains, not far from where I live. The aspens had just begun to turn, and the air was redolent with all the smells I associate with falclass="underline" incense, dirt, the start of decay. As we drove, we were debating some emerging technology I’d read about in Scientific American and circling around the larger topic of growing up in the bubble of rapid change and technological advancement. While a lot of it has been amazing, some of the change has come with effects we’d rather roll back.
How does anyone know at the moment of discovery where their work will ultimately lead?
Should we let that uncertainty stop forward momentum, or do we roll the dice and let the chips fall where they may?
How does it feel to change the world?
These questions intrigued me, so much so that I wrote a story about it. But my obsession didn’t stop there—I also wanted to know what other writers would write when posed with the same questions.
And so this collection was born and filled with writers whose minds work in ways that fascinate me.
N. K. Jemisin (the Broken Earth trilogy) is writing fantasy and speculative fiction like you’ve never even fathomed. Paul Tremblay is the greatest horror novelist working today, and his novel A Head Full of Ghosts still gives me nightmares. Veronica Roth created an unforgettable world and populated it with amazing characters in her iconic Divergent trilogy. Andy Weir captured the imagination of the world and scienced the shit out of his already-a-classic The Martian. And Amor Towles, with A Gentleman in Moscow, has simply written one of the best novels I’ve ever read. I recommend it every day.