Chapter One
The Chaplaincy
The list on the greenhouse door had forty one names on it, and Marisol Vega's was the last, and there would be no more.
She found it on her second day, while she was still learning the station's grammar, which doors sighed, which floors flexed, where the coffee was actually kept as opposed to officially kept. The greenhouse hung at the end of the east corridor, a module half the size of the others, and its door wore a laminated sheet, hand ruled, decades old, headed KEEPERS, and under the heading, in forty one hands, forty one names.
The first was faded to ghost grey. The most recent, in fresh blue, said T. Grann, and beneath it someone had now written M. Vega, and drawn a small arrow, and the arrow meant you.
Congratulations, said Tobias Grann, appearing behind her the way large quiet men do. You have the chaplaincy.
I am an atmospheric chemist, said Marisol.
You are, agreed Tobias. And the doctor is a barber, and the leader is Sunday's cook, and for the next eight months you are the gardener of the only garden on this continent. He unlocked the door and stood aside with a formality she would understand only much later, when she read the early volumes. Keepers first.
Inside was summer. There was no other word she ever found for it. Twelve square metres of racks under lamps, lettuce in ranks, tomato vines trained on strings, herbs in a tiered stand like a small green choir, and in the corner, in a tub, absurd and magnificent, a lemon tree, one metre eighty of dark leaves and three actual lemons, at ninety degrees south of everything.
