Nobody, not even the rain

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
 and opens;only something in me understands
 the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
e.e. cummings

There is something sinister in infinity, and magnificent. The stars cease their winking charade and stare: cold, incessant, pitiless in eternal surround.  Space is not a sea in which we float amongst the heavens, but a hole, an absence, crushing ever inwards.  The fragile veil between us and without: beautiful; the journey into the void: fraught.

            Lost stared vacantly behind as his home, all their homes, receded into a glowing point in space.  He didn’t know why, but watching the digital streams of their departure made him feel… something.  Maudlin? Solemn?  It was getting more difficult to do that these days: feel.  The echoing thrum and whirr of magical machinery whined behind Lost as a counterpoint to the numbing silence of the stars.  The control room faintly glowed with nurturing light, a laughable counterfeit sun.  Overhead, a glass dome glimpsed into forever as the vessel drifted through space.  Lost paced his rounds throughout the control room: watering the hydrangeas, rhododendrons, roses and disparate vegetation that survived the apocalypse to accompany the journey to a new home world.  Numbly, he noticed once more that the peas produced nicely, but the tomatoes seemed reluctant to produce under the fraudulent light, the squash curled inwards, strangely subdued, and none of the flowers, save the poppy, ever bloomed any more. 

            The ship was enormous, far larger than the simple requirements of its occupants.  The control room itself was a large, circular room illuminated by ambient light and filled with diverse flora in maze-like rows and obscure patterns: flowers yonder, vegetables by that edge, fruits and trees collected by half-fence over there - a semblance of composition.   

            The room contained an unpleasant quality of contradiction: light, yet lacking in sunny disposition; full of fruit-bearing trees, a garden, and a trickling creek, and, somehow, still devoid of life; silent, serene, yet deafening with incompatible whirrings and clammerings of machines;  and, of course, the faux skylight above a thaumaturgically sealed semi-sphere of glass revealing a sky without sun, and unblinking stars.  Esoteric machines lined the arced walls and mounted screens detailed different portions of the ship and outlying space.  Inside, no breeze stirred the trees, no sunlight graced those leaves, and no animals nested within their solemn branches.

            But the grief of the trees and the melancholy dirge of the creek were naught compared with the pathos of the man as he numbly walked the ritual of tending the garden, a mindless machine.  There was no décor in his dance – though a strange dance it remained. A faint trace of emotion occasionally flickered across his face as he glanced upwards, furtively, towards the monitors on the far wall, but no more than a glimmer. 

            Mounted slightly above the arcane machinery that sparkled on the far wall from the entrance were monitors where every motionless sector of the entire ship was revealed: the kitchen with its giant cupboards, plastic counters and quasi-marble floor tiles; the storeroom crammed tightly with miscellaneous “everythings” for conceived eventualities: tools, wood, fittings and bolts, rope and thousands of constructive materials and machinery. There were many rooms emptily displayed: the bathrooms, bedrooms which doubled as pods for emergencies, hallways, the leisure and exercise room.  Each empty, isolated, and pathetically morose in their vacancy.  Only one other room contained occupants: the infirmary.

            It was to this monitor that Lost’s gaze periodically returned.  Clean, and staggeringly so (as infirmaries are want to be), the too-white room contained eight cocoon-shaped vessels like organic sarcophagi.  Arranged in an octagon with slabs at corners, each vessel rose from the floor by a single, slender metal bar - almost unnaturally. At the focus of the circle, a giant IV drip suspended from the ceiling, drizzling a purple liquid through an octopus of slender feeds into the compartments.  Tiny ice crystals formed on the outside of the feeding tube as each appendage conjoined with the capsules.  An aura of argentine light shimmered around each of the sarcophagi, and in all save one of the vessels laid a comatose male or female: three males and four females total. Magically sealed, they slept as beauties for the journey through space, interred as they were in their separate sepulchers. 

            A careful inspection of Lost’s face when viewing this screen revealed nothing spectacular: no magnificent revelation regarding the logic behind these furtive glances.  And after each tiny distraction, his attention shortly returned, and nary a glimmer of that curious look remained.