Free They Dreamed of Poppies (a novelette) by Saul Tanpepper Page B

canopy. The second half I passed on the cramped station.
    I often think back and wonder, did I ever notice that there were fewer blooms each year leading up to the end?
    We took it for granted. All of it.
    Until it was gone and it was too late.
    After all these years of living on the space station, I remember how much I’ve missed that hill, those fields. That tree. After four decades of confinement within narrow, sterile walls of corroding steel and decaying plastic, it comes back to me how important it is for us humans to connect with the living soil. How vital.
    “They’re home,” I whisper. And soon, God willing, I will too.
    * * *
    Our first task is to locate the colonists, assuming they’re still alive  — their bodies, if not — and to try and figure out what happened to them.
    From my position high above the ground, I divide the crew into thirds and assign them to the initial search and assaying teams; the last group remains aboard the pod to tend to the animals.
    As the teams prepare, I take a moment to wonder if the GenAtmos units scattered about the planet are still functioning. At some point, the gas levels will stabilize, but it remains to be seen if that stasis point has yet been reached. At the moment, the atmosphere on the ground is thin, thinner than I would’ve guessed given the robustness of the plant growth. You wouldn’t want to be running any marathons in it, but it’s certainly capable of sustaining life.
    Despite the availability of breathable air, I tell everyone to suit up. I have to take into consideration unknown risks. I tell them they’ll be better oxygenated this way and won’t wear themselves out as much. But the pretext quickly crumbles the moment I instruct my second-in-command, Bryson Allendon, to take a chicken with him. “In an open-air cage.”
    Bry chuckles. He’s one of the older folks from Before, like me. We first met after our evacuation to the station as children. His forebears were all coal miners, so he carries a lot of guilt around with him, which he medicates in a way that most of us disapprove— with illegally made alcohol. In this particular case, though, he also carries a bit of knowledge from that archaic profession. He says, “Too bad we don’t have any canaries.”
    Some of the others give him a confused look. They were born on the station After, so their familiarity with animals and plants and their uses for other than food covers only extant species, not extinct ones.
    Neither of us bothers to explain.
    I watch the team step out onto the surface, away from the ramp. Knee-deep in growth, sometimes hip-high, they appear to be sinking down into the planet, and a wave of irrational panic washes over me. Like a tidal wave, it drowns my desire to be down there. But as the minutes pass without harm coming to them, this, too, ebbs away, and I wish once more that I weren’t stuck so far away.
    They step single-file through a lush patch of marigolds, gingerly snapping stems, crushing leaves and petals. They brush their gloved fingertips over their delicate heads in wonder. Twenty minutes later, they’re out of sight of the ship’s external cams, vanished over a ridge.
    I check on the analytical team, who are collecting samples around the immediate vicinity of the pod, then switch to Bryson’s video feed for the scouting party.
    “You seeing this, Joe?” his voice welcomes me, crackling through the speaker.
    I nod, clear my throat, and say with what little breath hasn’t been stolen from my chest by the incredible expanse of blooms filling the screen before me, “Yeah. I do.”
    “Poppies. Big’uns.”
    He bends down and the image on my screen swivels dizzyingly, smearing into an indistinct blur. The lens quickly readjusts to the nearer focal point and his hand reappears, sharp and clear. I watch as he cups the petals of one plant between his fingers, and once again I’m left speechless by the flower’s girth. A dark purple pupil inside of a crimson