The Last Voyage of the Cavalier

Sometimes I look at them - the flowers, I mean. And obviously, yes, I look, I'm supposed to be growing them - but properly. Properly looking and properly growing. I would love to watch how they move over days and weeks, how they jostle with one-another for space... how they reach for the light, even now when the sun is long gone. Perhaps they will one day see another.

Most plants are not particularly well-adapted to interstellar travel. We provide them air, of course, and nutrients, but the lack of true, authentic sunlight - and gravity - has been known to cause some issues. Plenty of seeds will just flatly refuse to germinate. And those that do just encounter a whole load of other problems. Take case forty-three, the Venus flytrap - as it turns out, a master artificial gravity. The flies we were trying to feed to it? Less so. In fact it was worse than that, any that did get into the air made, invariably, straight for the LED rig and were fried before they got anywhere near the plants.

The roses look quite promising, though. A few have died off, sure, but those that remain seem, in a strange kind of way, to be modestly asserting themselves. The stems, slightly warped, are hardening, and building their thorny defences - they will need re-potting before too long. There's even the merest hint that one or two may one day flower.

"What are you on about, Matt? This is supposed to be a log book, not ruddy Shakespeare."

"Look, who's going to need to read this once we arrive? Me. I'm leading the whole recreational botany thing. So really, I think it's up to me."

"Fine... anything you want me to do, or can I pop back into my stasis pod again?"

"No, I'm wrapping up - I'll join you in a minute. See you in a hundred years!"

Where was I? Ah, yes...

We'll check on the roses again in a hundred years' time. Hopefully I catch them while they're flowering - though I realise the chances of that are pretty low. At the very least, I want some roses to be alive. We've had enough false starts with this project, and we're running out of new seeds to try. A greenhouse on a spaceship is comical enough without it being utterly devoid of plants. Comical to other people, I should say. I know we don't need them for food anymore, or pigments, or scents, but that's part of the point - I think, as humans, we need something to do from time to time that isn't in any way productive. Something that's slow, and tactile, and that might, if nurtured properly, flower in the most beautiful way.

I don't know where I'd be without them to share my time, and thoughts, with.

And music, of course. I'm leaving them with a Johann Strauss (the younger) waltz tonight - Roses from the South. I think it is appropriate. Good night.

"Matt, come and look here! The roses!"

"Oooooooo... Ian, where's my notebook?"

"Where you left it."

"Right. Nice. Here it is. On the side table. I'm now going to write in it. You can go and check on the Petunias. Or something."

The roses are not in bloom, but they must have been not long ago. Their petals, decaying, still show remnants of the vibrant red they must once have been. Oh, to see a rose flower again... perhaps next time. I will get on with moving some of these to a larger room, as, despite a few hundred metres of floor space, they have become a tangled mess. A hundred years will do that to garden, I suppose. I'll also collect up some of those petals, they might come in useful.

That red - darkened by their time in the soil, but still there - it's like blood. It's life. These flowers, or flowers like them, have to live - they are one of the last pieces of old Earth that we have left.

"Petunias are dead."

"What are we trying next? Tulips?"

"Yep."

Okay, now they really have to live. I thought those petunias were going to work. Never mind.

Today's shift is all done, but I'm not heading off just yet. I've had an idea to make use of all these petals - I'm going to try and paint a mural, watercolour-style, on the back wall of the cockpit. We call it the cockpit - piloting is all automatic like the rest of the fleet (and a good thing too as we'll be in stasis for most of the voyage), but this ship predates the mission - and us - by a good few years. It's a pity that its makers didn't anticipate its eventual conversion to mobile plant laboratory... they could've given us more sockets to plug the lights into, for a start. As it is, we have a few too many haphazard Heath Robinson suspended series of extension leads. We could also have done with an inbuilt way of delivering water...

I'm nitpicking. The last days of planet Earth were upon us, and we took what we could - and who we could. And we floored it to the only space station far enough away to be one-hundred-per-cent safe from that particular catastrophe. Well, maybe ninety-nine. Ian and I - and the others, in the other ships flying alongside us - aren't so different from the roses we grow here. Perhaps we'll live - perhaps not for long - but while there's a chance at seeing another flowering of our species, a rebirth on a new world - we must keep going.

More Strauss tonight - Vienna Blood.

No flowering roses today - just row upon row of bare heads, with severed petals scattered below. Still, this is the most promise any plant has shown to date, and by quite a long way, so I must look on the bright side. I need to engineer something that will wake me up next time they flower, though, or the-

"Crikey, Matt! Did you do this?"

"Yeah, sorry. I'd give it a minute."

"What?"

"You know what it's like, your first bowel movement after a period in stasis, I'd use the other loo if I were you..."

"No, not the ruddy loo. This painting of a flower in the cockpit!"

"Well as we're the only two people on this ship, what do you think? Yes that was me."

"This is fantastic. Looks a bit grim with all the red, but I'm sure one of the other ships will have some other colours you can borrow..."

"But those aren't flower pigments, are they?"

"I'm sorry?"

"A chemist can make any colour under the stars, yes, I know. But I want a real colour."

"Huh? How is paint colour not a real colour?"

"Maybe real is the wrong word... authentic? Painting a flower with a flower."

"I still think it would be better with a bit of green in there for the stem - but it's up to you. Properly nice work there, anyway. What are you up to now?"

"Logbook."

"Can I have a look? Hmm... Matt, have you written about anything other than roses for the last six hundred years?"

"The roses are our most promising project. I've got quite attached to them."

Ian is shaking his head, disapprovingly. He doesn't know how much work I've put into them. He also has a daft hairstyle and a rubbish sense of humour.

"Matt? Excuse me?"

This is where Ian is supposed to take the hint, and leave me to write my logbook in peace.

Ah, he has. Excellent.

What shall I play you all, this evening? I think I have a box set of Richard Strauss operas somewhere.

***

"Matt, are you okay in there?"

"No."

A stupid question.

I hate stupid questions.

Here's another one. What, in the past hundred years, had gone wrong with the laboratory apparatus while I had been in suspended animation? Had the electrical system malfunctioned? Had the oxygen equipment, or the temperature?

I don't care.

I'm lying in the large area of soil formerly known as the rose garden.

We didn't stockpile the seeds - we didn't know which would work, and we didn't have the space.

So now that's it.

I grew the last roses in the universe, and never got to see them flower.

Maybe they were the last plants.

It's an interesting feeling, knowing you're the last person ever to do something.

I don't like it.

Why is it that beauty is always so fleeting? And the universe so empty?

And life?

Space was black. Black like the bottomless well on a dark, wintry night, black like volcanic stone, set in time like a frozen river, black like nothing, absolute nothing.

Within this black nothing, like flies hovering over an inky pool, a fleet of spaceships huddled together, alone.

One was not like the others. That was a small, battered, old vessel, clad in whatever metal its builders could find. One piece had, just now, actually appeared to break free and drift off into space. It was falling to bits - or perhaps just jettisoning something, it was difficult to be sure. It was, in all, a rather ramshackle affair, but this is not what made it different.

That was what happened next.

Without warning, the hull exploded, violently. Great jets of flame reached out, arcing, into space, like burning petals. The metals of the ship gave them colours - not just reds, but oranges, with flashes of blues, greens and pinks. Any trace of what it once carried was gone forever - and, in the blink of an eye, so was the ship itself. With the oxygen exhausted, the final fiery tendrils died off, leaving only a sea of blackened, metal junk. Junk forged from Earth metals, now forever lost and far from its dead home. Another of the last pieces of old Earth was gone.

It'd finally had its fleeting moment in the sun. This cobbled-together old ship had been beautiful. An ephemeral, destructive beauty - a final flowering.

With his face pressed tight against the window of the escape pod, Matt was able to witness this flowering for himself.

He cried.