“So many samples,” Dan moaned. “And no one will ever see them again.”
They were sitting in the lab, on the stools. The equipment they needed for the Ark had been packed away and taken to the ship, which was perched on a massive aircraft carrier just beyond the bay—former military, from God knew what country; it didn’t matter anymore. Samantha’s bag was packed, sitting at the end of her bed. Dan had brought the record player into the laboratory because he played music constantly now, like he didn’t want to hear his own grief.
Reality was setting in, Samantha thought. She had heard Averill sobbing in the shower that morning. Josh kept stopping in the middle of sentences, in the middle of steps, in the middle of thoughts. Now that she didn’t have any pressing work to do, Samantha went every day to see Hagen, who was steady as ever, tending to his plants.
He told her about them as she helped him. About the Rhizanthella gardneri, which grew underground in Western Australia. And the Caleana major, which looked like a white bird in flight, its petals frayed at the edges, featherlike. Anguloa uniflora, which curved around its center column like cupped hands keeping a match from going out. There was no end to the flowers’ variety, and he listed them with increasing frequency, every day, showing pictures when he had no living example to present to her. She didn’t know why, of all the last words he could have chosen, he chose these, and he chose her to say them to. But she listened.
“Let’s each do one more,” Samantha said.
“What?” Averill said. “Why? It’s not like any more samples can be stored.”
“So?” Samantha shrugged.
“All right,” Josh said. “I mean, the computers are still hooked up.”
They each claimed a cart of living samples, stored in their little glass containers, afloat in life-sustaining fluid. Samantha peered into each one, searching for flowers. There was no point in pretending she wasn’t partial to them now, and no value in it either.
She saw a hint of blue and slid her fingers between the containers to pull up the right one. She grinned when she saw the little flowers—tiny, really, not even the size of her fingernails, and light sky blue. Or likely, she thought, considering what Hagen had told her, just a very specific shade of purple.
She carried the container to her lab station, flipped on the work light, and jiggled the mouse to wake up the computer screen. The plant was simple: waxy, thick leaves at the base, with a somewhat fragile center column, like a vine. The flowers branched off at the top, in clusters of blue and white. Each one had three petals that came to teardrop points and three sepals, blue and white spotted. At the bottom was a small labellum with furry edges, also blue, though darker than the petals and sepals that framed it. In the center of each flower was a dusting of yellow pollen.
It looked like an orchid, but she would have to verify that with the microscope. She opened the container and used a pair of long scissors to clip one of the flowers from its stem. This would be delicate work—orchid seeds were already tiny, and these orchids were the smallest she had ever seen, if indeed they were orchids. She picked up the delicate metal tools at her station that reminded her of the dentist’s office—the one that scraped between your teeth in particular.
The others were already talking about their discoveries, Averill bending over something that resembled a cherry blossom, Dan squinting at a vine with veiny leaves, and Josh poking at some variation of a protea that had not yet been logged. Samantha set about preparing a slide, then dragged the heavy microscope over and plugged it in.
She had seen enough seeds in Hagen’s greenhouse to identify an orchid seed’s telltale lack of endosperm, the starchy tissue in most seeds that provided nutrition after fertilization. An orchid likely didn’t have it, meaning most of their seeds would come to nothing, failing to find the right fungus to aid in their growth.
Samantha let out a little yelp.
“What?” Dan asked from across the room.
“It’s an orchid,” she said.
“Cool,” Josh said. “What kind?”
“No idea,” she said. She slid over to the computer and selected Orchidacae, logging all the plant’s details: height, number of petals, number of sepals, appearance of leaves and central column, color. The screen then presented her with a row of photographs, close-ups of flowers with relative sizes noted beneath.
“Huh,” she said.
“What?” Averill, seated at the next station, frowned at her.
“I’m not sure, but . . . I don’t think I have a match,” she said. “Second opinion?”
Averill abandoned her station and went through the same steps Samantha had: looking at the tissue sample on the microscope, measuring the plant with a ruler, tapping the container with the tip of her pencil as she counted petals and sepals, noting symmetry, labellum, pollen, column, country of origin (Brazil).
She, too, sat back from the computer screen at the end and frowned. By then, Dan and Josh had left their own samples and were staring at the container from either side, the work light casting odd shadows on their faces.
“It’s new,” Averill said finally, saying out loud what Samantha had been thinking but couldn’t dare say herself.
“It can’t be new,” she said. “That’s just. I mean.”
“Think about it. We had only discovered, like, ten percent of all plant species at the start of this project. And orchids are one of the most diverse groups, so . . .” Averill gestured at the container. “It’s new.”
Samantha sat down on an empty lab stool.
“It’s new,” she said.
For some reason, she felt heavier now.
That evening, when the others were at dinner, Samantha took the container from the laboratory and put it in an insulated bag, the kind they used to transport hot food. She put on her boots and her coat, her gloves and her scarf, her hat and her goggles. She zipped herself up and fastened all the straps and buttons and walked out into the snow.
It was dark, and her way was lit by floodlights casting wide circles of yellow onto the packed snow. The path to Hagen’s greenhouse was well trod now from her frequent visits, but she had still taken her snowshoes with her, just in case she needed to wade back. The wind whistled around her, but otherwise all she could hear was the scuffle of her own feet over the ice.
She hugged the container tight to her chest as she walked, breathing heavily, though the walk wasn’t taxing. There was a lump in her throat that she couldn’t explain. She pushed through the outer door of the greenhouse and set down the container, gingerly, before removing her outerwear and tossing it in a pile in the corner.
Hagen had heard her come in, evidently, because he was standing in the greenhouse when she carried the container in. He wore a lumpy gray sweater, and his salt-and-pepper hair was more rumpled than usual, its curls sticking up in the back.
“Hi,” she said. “I need you to verify something for me.”
“Okay,” he said, looking confused. She unzipped the insulated bag and took out the plant in its glass sleeve.
“I thought the identification had stopped, since we can’t transport anything new to the Ark,” he said.
“Officially, it has,” she said. “But you know us horticulturists—we love a good last hurrah.”
“It seems to me,” he said, “that you need some less boring hobbies.”
“Hilarious,” she said. “Have a look, would you?”
Hagen took the container from her and carried it back to his worktable, which was littered with plant cuttings. He had taken to making little bouquets and putting them all around his small cabin. She had seen them the day before when she used his bathroom and drank a small tumbler of whiskey in his living room as he talked to her about plants, plants, always plants, never the people and things they had both lost, or would soon lose.
She forced herself to sit at his desk while he looked the plant over under his own work light, clipped to the shelf above the worktable. He was silent as he evaluated the plant and then disappeared into his cabin, returning a few minutes later with a book. He searched it for a while and then disappeared again. This time he was gone for so long that she lost her patience and peeked into the cabin, attached by a heavy door to the greenhouse. He was sitting at the computer in his office, searching.
The lump in her throat was swelling like she had swallowed a distended seed pod. The longer he was gone, the more certain it became that she had found something new, and the more twisted and strange she felt. She thought of the Naomi, stocked with cans of food and bottles of water and spare fuel for the journey. The map next to the steering wheel of the boat, marked with the spot in the middle of the nothingness that she had chosen to put down the anchor and watch the apocalypse.
Hagen finally came back, his glasses dangling from pinched fingers. He was smiling, but then, Hagen was always smiling a little, his cheek creased with it, eyes crinkled with it. She had gotten used to that smile.
“What shall we call it?” he said. “The Samantha orchid?”
She scowled at him.
“So it’s true,” she said. “It is new.”
“It appears to be,” he said.
“You’re sure?”
“Well, I could never claim absolute certainty about anything in science, really, but—” He frowned at her then. “Why do you seem angry? You’ve just found a new species, in the last forty-eight hours of human occupancy of Earth. That is—”
“Amazing, I know.” She pushed her hands into her hair. The seed pod in her throat swelled yet again, and she was a flower, blooming—
Bursting into tears.
“Oh dear.” Hagen’s lumpy sweater was against her face, her head nestled beneath his chin, and he held her tightly.
“There is so much left for you to see.” His hand moved in a slow circle between her shoulder blades. “Don’t you know that?”
They stood close, tasting each other’s air, their arms circled around each other. The tears dried on her cheeks, pulling her skin taut.
Over his shoulder she saw the orchids bending toward the windows, seeking light.
Samantha kept her eyes closed. Just for a little while, before she was really awake and had to put her outerwear back on and trudge through the snow to the facility. She had fallen asleep on Hagen’s couch, in full view of his bedroom.
She had dreamed in scattered images, with no story to connect them. But one of them was clinging to her still, the feeling of grainy concrete under her knees as she knelt on the floor of her father’s garage, an old cardboard box in front of her.
Her father had died a few weeks before. She had just broken things off with her live-in boyfriend, Greg, and gone to stay in her father’s empty house while Greg packed up his things. The cereal in the cupboard wasn’t stale yet, and there was still a glass in the drying rack.
There had been no point in going through his things or packing anything away. There was no selling the house; no one was buying. There was no consigning of old jackets, no reclaiming of valuable possessions, no hollowing out of spaces to get rid of the ghost of him. The world was ending, and the house would be consumed in the flames along with everything else.
Still, she found herself in the garage, kneeling in front of the box marked “Naomi.” The flaps were open, as if he had recently gone through it himself. Sitting on top was a stack of letters. Her mother had liked sending letters, though Samantha had teased her, when she was young, for being the only person left on the planet who did. She assumed they were from her parents’ courtship, the glowing years of their romance, before it all went sour and they turned away from each other.
But when she skimmed them, she realized they were more recent. From after the divorce. Sammy quit orchestra, I think it’s for the best . . . the rosebush out front finally bloomed, remember how we used to say it was broken? . . . Mom’s had a bad cough all winter, I’m worried it’s something serious . . .
She hadn’t known that her parents were still in touch. That her mother had updated him about the state of the rosebush, about the daughter he spoke to so gruffly, about her dreams, her parents, her work. All written out in her mother’s familiar scrawl, close and narrow, with scribbles every other sentence as she second-guessed herself.
Samantha’s chest ached.
He had saved every word.
She picked up an envelope, wedged in the stack of paper, and opened it. Inside was a flower, pressed flat. It had been white but had turned the color of old parchment. She tipped it into her palm.
The concrete was cold under her knees. The air smelled of mildew and firewood. The flower was an orchid.
“There is so much left for you to see.”
She opened her eyes and looked at Hagen, asleep on his stomach with one arm reaching for the empty pillow on the other side of his bed. She wondered if he had learned as much about his wife in her absence as he had in her presence, just as Samantha had with her father. His heart, still open, despite having appeared closed for so long. The letters reminding her of all that she did not know.
Dread pooled inside her like poison, and it was nothing new.
At the harbor in the bay nearest to the Ark’s facilities bobbed an old fishing vessel, the Naomi. The white paint was peeling away from its hull, revealing the matte metal beneath, but it looked sturdy enough, with a long bow and a cabin large enough to fit a twin-size mattress, a gas-powered space heater, two jugs of drinking water, and a few days’ worth of food.
Samantha saw it as a white speck in the distance as the helicopter lifted off from the landing pad behind the facility. She leaned forward, across Dan’s sturdy lap, to see Hagen’s greenhouse glinting in the daylight. Perched on his desk, still suspended in the life-preserving fluid developed by the Ark scientists, was the Oncidium Samantha. Hagen had confirmed, before she left it with him, that it was in fact purple, not blue.
Hagen had told her about so many flowers in their final days together. They were all he had spoken of. Vanilla planifolia, which most people knew as simply vanilla. Bulbophyllum nocturnum, which only bloomed at night. Platystele jungermannioides, with flowers only two millimeters wide. One of the two largest flowering plant families in the world, he had told her, as if begging her to listen, as if it would save her life.
Twenty-five thousand species of orchid, and counting. The world would never run out of them. And the universe would never run out of discoveries.
She had spent the last year with her head buried in the tiny things of Earth, the roots that gripped the soil, the fine hair that covered stems, the veins of color through the center of a petal. Plant cells you couldn’t see without a microscope. But pulling away from the ground in the helicopter had a way of simplifying things. Flakes of snow disappeared into white masses of frozen land dotted with floodlights and abandoned buildings. Fierce waves dissolved into a stretch of flat navy-blue ocean.
Soon it would break apart, break free of its orbit, scorch and burn. Soon the crisp blue sky would turn dusty with debris, and all the things of this world that made it beautiful—the fish with their multicolored scales, the flies with their iridescent wings, the churring squirrels and the deep sighs of whales, the new leaves, still curled and pale, the earth rich with red clay—they would all be gone.
But not yet. And Samantha had always loved autumn.