“You hear about the ship that withered?”
I nodded. Ever since we’d reached port the day before, I’d overheard nothing but variations on the same rumor while I did my rounds, becoming slighter and weaker as water sloughed from my hands onto the ship-plants. Even if my work hadn’t needed doing so often, as a Source I was the only member of crew who wasn’t allowed to leave the ship.
Something in my stance must have told the Captain I was depleted, as she gestured for me to sit. I did so hesitantly, as there were still large gaps carved out of my hips and upper back, where I hadn’t yet recovered my reserves of water. As usual, she didn’t inquire about my condition. By the time I began tomorrow’s watering rounds, my water would have reconstructed at least most of my body.
“Unfortunately, the gossip is correct this time. The enemy has developed a new pest, which our ship-plants are vulnerable to.” The Captain extended a small vial toward me, which I took instinctively, horrified by what she’d just said. She jerked her fingers away before they could touch mine. “The ship caught in the Parallax Route was withered beyond salvageability before it could reach a Guild hub.”
I found I held a vial much like ones I’d been given before, when either the ship-plants or myself required medicine. The liquid inside, sloshing back and forth like water, was a pale pink.
The Captain said, “The Shipgrowers’ Guild has worked up an antidote to the pest.”
I was startled. “So fast? But the wreckage of the withered ship was only found a few days —”
“Take it before your next round of watering!” she snapped, and I began to suspect that the antidote hadn’t been developed so quickly after all. How many ships had already been withered by this pest, and what did the Captain know that port gossip didn’t?
I placed a hand against the nearest wall, feeling the play of stems against the liquid of my hand. Wishing I could protect them. Wishing they could protect me from the dissatisfaction radiating from the Captain like sunlight.
She sat back in her chair and glanced at the door, obviously ready for me to leave.
#
Once I was back in my quarters I carefully opened the stopper, only to nearly drop the vial once the liquid’s scent hit me.
This was a poison.
The Guild could call it whatever they wanted, antidote, cure, pesticide. It might fight off whatever had withered that ship, but sooner or later this substance would damage the ship-plants themselves, and then it would go on to harm everyone living within them.
It would start by harming me. I imagined drinking it, that pink hue spreading through the clear water of my body. Like the veins I must have had, once, when my body was still flesh and not self-regenerating water. In the vial, the liquid’s color seemed sharper now, like it was angered by my not drinking it yet. And once it had infested me, it would infest the ship, through the water that dripped from my hands. It would take longer to work on such a large ship as ours, and probably longer still for the poison to seep out from the vines and act on the bodies of the crew...
Suddenly I was distracted by a shifting within the ship-plants’ awareness. A sense of sustenance, of possibility and rivulets—
There was another Source aboard my ship.
Too startled to feel anything else, I stepped out of my quarters only to see a gloved figure at the end of the hall. She pushed back her hood, revealing features as watery and worn-thin as mine, and began hurrying toward me with the pained, intentionally-delicate stride I knew all too well. She was worn down from too much watering without time to replenish.
My mind flared with warnings about contamination protocols, but all I could see was this fellow Source, struggling toward me. I hurried to support her into my quarters, feeling how much of her water was missing through her sleeves.
Perhaps my ship wasn’t the only one whose Source was asked to stay heavily clothed, so no one else had to be disconcerted by our watery nature. So no one had to acknowledge what they asked us to do every day.
#
The other Source collapsed on my bed. It had been so long since I had been allowed to encounter another Source, I wasn’t sure how to help. Finally, I peeled off one of her gloves and wrapped our hands together. The sensation was so strange it was impossible to tell whether water was flowing from me to her, or from her to me, or both. But after a little while, her eyes opened, pupils sharp against the watery expanse of her face, and she pushed herself up to a sitting position, studying the ship-plants making up the nearest wall.
When she finally spoke, her words were a torrent. “A few weeks ago, we had a break-in while docked. They didn’t get much, but they opened a container of seeds in our cargo hold.”
I winced. The ship-plants were engineered to be resistant against intruding species, but carefulness regarding botanical materials was drummed into everyone who worked even tangentially with the Shipgrowers’ Guild. And not without reason, as this recent pest reminded us.
“At first there didn’t seem to be any damage. Just these occasional clusters of blue flowers around the ship. And then we came here, though the Parallax Route.”
Our hands separated, and I couldn’t be sure which of us had initiated that change. I stared at her. “But… the pest?” Was she here because she needed a new ship? But we were no better equipped to survive a withering than regular humans were.
“Oh, it got us. We had to pull out the emergency seedlings, patch up some places. But nothing bad enough we couldn’t stumble the rest of the way here for better repairs.”
“No withering?”
“No withering. I gathered all the seeds left in the cargo container.” She held an object out toward me, just as the Captain had. This time I resisted the urge to take it.
“Please,” she whispered. “This is the first ship I’ve managed to sneak onto.”
I looked closer. She held a locket, a thin wire chain ending in a periwinkle-colored teardrop shape. “Introduce them to your ship. Once they blossom they’ll be able to fight off the pest. You won’t need that poison they want us to drink.”
Even as I was struck by the echo of my own thoughts, I said, “I can’t introduce a strange plant to the ship!”
Her gaze hardened even as the outlines of her face sloshed desultorily. How much water had she been forced to expend, for her to be so worn down?
I realized something about her then. “You’re not going back to your ship.”
She shook her head. “They’ll remember how to do without us, like they did before the lab accident. We’re just the most convenient way to water the plant-ships.”
My translucent hands, clenched in my lap atop the grey folds of my tunic, suddenly disappeared. In their place I saw a window, looking out onto a river, and against the sill there was a hand, my hand but it had skin, and the blue veins pushing against the back matched the river’s curves…
“Or,” she looked out the window, voice sharp enough to slice me away from my memory. “Who knows? Maybe they’ll be another ‘accident’ and the Guild will find they’ve got fresh Sources.”
The screen embedded in the wall blazed with sudden text. On orders from the Guild, we would be taking off within the hour. I waited, but no details about our new destination or route followed.
The other Source stood, wobbling as unsteadily as a drop of water lingering on a leaf. Before I could say anything she was through the door, moving soundlessly down the halls, as the ship-plants’ confusion simmered through me.
I could run after her. But I knew the plants of my ship would stay rooted in my mind, until the last moment when the pest withered them. The guilt the Captain and crew held over me was nothing next to the sense of the ship-plants, desperate for water.
The locket cracked open at the merest pressure from my hands. Green-brown oblongs spilled across my palms and I closed my fingers, the motion of my water blurring the seeds’ outlines, but not entirely hiding them from my sight.
Please work.
I let water flow from my hands into the walls, sending the seeds drifting along the runnels. Through my awareness of the ship I felt a series of faint clicks, like droplets of water falling inside my head, as the seeds latched onto the network of ship-plants and began making places for themselves.
Tears forced themselves from my eyes, generating a cold current that swept down through me, and water seemed to run from my hands even faster than before.
By the time my hands were empty of seeds, the ship was aloft again.