Zinnet's tomato had grown through the back of a chair and across the seat, leaving her nowhere to sit. Ovolo wanted her to move the chair for a photograph. Three gardeners from the floor below wanted her to remove the side shoots. Zinnet wanted everyone to look at the tomatoes.
There were twenty-seven, some striped green and yellow, some turning the red of her favorite tiles. The lowest hung beneath the seat. She lifted a leaf to show them.
"That one's touching the wood," said a gardener.
"I know. It has a little square bottom."
Ovolo knelt, tilted his camera, and caught the square bottom against the city beyond: rooftop beans, apricot trees along the elevated walk, the broad black petals of the solar collectors turning above them. He made postcards for the neighborhood festival. His best-selling view omitted the factory where everyone got their spare knees, although the factory had a magnificent wisteria.
"You'll have to put the chair in the harvest exhibition," he said.
"Will you help me carry it?"
"After I've finished these."
He had said that about carrying something at the last festival. She gave him the chair's dimensions anyway.
Downstairs, the repair café had spread into the street. Someone was trying out a repaired accordion while its owner argued that it hadn't sounded like that before. Children with unfinished faceplates sorted screws into cake tins. A planting cabinet recovered from a boarded storeroom stood among the tables, its drawers labeled in human handwriting. Zinnet had offered to clean it for the seed exchange.
In the bottom drawer she found a small tin with a lid that still held fast. Its paper seal broke under her thumb. Inside, beneath a packet of hard brown seeds and a sachet of drying crystals, lay a postcard.
She washed the soil from her hands before lifting it out. The picture had yellowed at the edges, but its dark storage had preserved a garden: a path between low beds, a flowering tree, a pale curved window divided by three unequal ribs. Beyond the window was blank blue sky. A sleeve at one edge suggested someone had stepped out of the photograph too slowly.
On the back, in faded ink, someone had written:
Wish you were here.
There was no address, no signature, no stamp. Whoever had put it in the tin had left Zinnet nothing else to go on.
She took it upstairs. Ovolo was still photographing tomatoes.
"Where is this?"
He leaned close enough to shade the card. "Oh, lovely. Is it yours? Can I scan it?"
"After you tell me where it is."
"The white-blossomed tree looks like the ones in the southern terraces. I have a picture somewhere."
She knew those trees from a seed catalogue. They made a dry rattling fruit and needed more room than her roof could offer. She had wanted one for three summers. In the photograph there was space for the branches to spread, space to walk beneath them without turning sideways past a chair.
"A human took this in the terraces?"
"Humans were everywhere. Before the ships."
Zinnet had learned about the ships when she was little. Humans left, androids remained, cities changed. There were departure dates in the lessons, arrows crossing star maps. She remembered drawing flowers around the arrows. Until that morning, she had never particularly wanted to follow one.
Now there was this path, wide enough for two people. Someone had stood at one end of it and wanted someone else beside them.
"I'll go and look," she said.
Ovolo glanced toward the exhibition bunting. "You'll miss the festival."
She had never missed one. She had been alive for nine of them.
"You can take the chair."
He began to protest, then looked at the card again. "Send me pictures. Proper ones, with space for lettering."
She let him scan the card, then slid it back into its tin. For once she couldn't tell him what she hoped to bring home.
The southern terraces lay two days away by the stopping tram. Zinnet took the tram for one morning, got off to inspect a wall of peaches, and missed the afternoon connection. She walked until evening instead.
She had packed her solar blanket under everything else. At a roadside sun court she unpacked socks for protecting fruit, a hand lens, three seed envelopes, a broad hat that shaded her shoulder panels when she wore it, and the tin. Two travelers watched politely until she tried to unfold the blanket with the empty bag still on it.
"Do you want a hand?" one asked.
She did. By sunset they had exchanged the names of six gardens and one lodging house to avoid because its resident geese had learned to pull charging leads free. Zinnet slept under a fig tree with her luggage repacked, then caught the next tram in the morning.
She reached the terraces the following noon. Their gardeners grew pears flat against warm walls and let nasturtiums trail from the balconies of houses painted pink. Metal leaves along the balcony rails angled little solar cells toward the sun. Even the ugly buildings had something flowering on them.
Zinnet found three white trees beside a long greenhouse. She took out the postcard and walked backward and forward, trying to make the tree trunks align with the window ribs.
An android carrying a basket of pear cuttings stopped to watch.
"The greenhouse used to be curved?" Zinnet asked.
"No. The roof was lower, before we raised it for the figs."
"Could there have been another one? Four hundred years ago?"
The gardener set the basket down. "There could. I don't go back that far. What are you looking at?"
Zinnet showed her. The gardener held the card by its corners, then tipped it to escape the glare.
"We have that tree," she said. "Most cities do. The old nurseries sold it by the thousand."
The three trees, which a moment earlier had seemed so unmistakable, now looked distressingly repeatable. Zinnet studied the card's branches through her lens. In Ovolo's picture she'd found a white tree and a bit of pale roof. That was all she had compared.
"I came because of the blossoms."
"They're very good this week."
"Yes."
The gardener let her be disappointed. Then she pointed to the ribs. "I've seen one of these windows at the old departure ground. In the hall with the climbing roses. My partner made me look at it while we waited for a lecture."
"A whole window?"
"Just a section. Much bigger than I expected. We argued about whether it would fit in our house."
She gave Zinnet directions and a pear cutting. Zinnet had meant to decline anything she couldn't fit in her bag, but this pear had a red interior. She stayed to learn how they grafted it and spent the rest of the afternoon holding branches for someone who had three different ideas about the best angle of a cut.
That evening she sent Ovolo a picture of blossoms.
Wrong garden. Lovely trees. Your photograph could have been anywhere.
He replied with a festival image: her chair on a trolley, two helpers at its handles, Ovolo pointing to the tomato beneath the seat. Someone had tied an honorable-mention ribbon to a chair leg.
The judges couldn't agree what it was entered for. Did you get a wider shot of the terraces?
She looked at the message for a while, then sent him the same blossoms, cropped closer.
In the morning Ovolo sent a different picture. It was a visitor's photograph from the departure ground, with a reflection of the visitor obscuring half a display. A curved window stood behind the glass. Its three ribs spread from an off-center joint, just as they did on the card.
I checked properly this time. The caption says Farleaf. A garden ship. Sorry about the terraces.
Zinnet enlarged the photograph until she could read the small type. The window was a construction spare. The one in her postcard had left with the ship.
She lowered her hand to the bench. A bee inspected the flowers in her gathered dark hair, found them dry, and moved on.
So the next garden wouldn't be it either.
She had imagined coming through a gate, perhaps asking permission, perhaps discovering that the tree had died and been replaced. There had always been a place for her feet in the imagining. Now she tried to picture the whole garden lifting away: its paths, its soil, a person picking up a forgotten tool while the ground receded outside that window.
Do you still want to go? Ovolo asked.
She sent, Yes. I want to know where it landed.
His answer arrived while she was securing the pear cutting across the top of her bag.
All right. I've sent you the display address. The card photograph is in their collection too.
Then, a minute later: Did I make you spend two days going the wrong way?
One day. I spent the other on pears.
She attached a photograph of the red flesh of a stored fruit, cut open for her at breakfast. He sent back six exclamation marks. It was the first picture she had taken entirely for him.
The departure ground's old embarkation hall had a roof shaped like an open fan. Solar flowers filled the apron where passengers had once queued. Beyond them, between low hills, stood an enormous empty assembly cradle, its steel hoops full of swallows. On the nearer hill a radio dish tilted slowly among grasses.
Zinnet arrived on the fifth afternoon with dust in her gold ankle joints. A fern sale occupied the entrance. She bought nothing, because of the pear, and went directly to the roses.
The spare window was taller than her house. From a distance its ribs had seemed delicate. Close up, they were thick enough to contain a passageway. She put her hand on the glass, then withdrew it when she saw the mark she had left.
Beside it hung a new print of the garden. The tree's white flowers were clear, the sleeve at the edge a dusty blue. The untrimmed image showed a row of overhead lamps that the postcard printer had cropped away.
Farleaf, forward garden, before departure. Photograph by passenger Agata.
A second image showed Agata beside the tree, grinning with her eyes almost shut. Someone else must have taken that one. She was young, with a dark fringe that divided above one eyebrow, a broad nose, a small metal hoop through her left ear. She had tied her green overshirt around her waist.
Zinnet looked from the portrait to the empty path. That was who had stood behind the camera. She had probably smelled the blossoms. Zinnet moved closer to inspect the bare strip of soil beside the path, looking for something she had missed while she still thought she could go there.
At the information table a broad-backed android was trying to coax a fern from its pot without breaking the pot.
"Were the cards written by Agata?" Zinnet asked.
"Which cards?"
She showed the tin, the postcard, the message.
"Ah. We sell reproductions of that view." He reached for a thin wooden stick and worked it around the fern's roots. "They sold the originals to visitors before launch. Passengers had them too. I don't know who wrote yours."
"I hoped it was her."
"It might have been."
She held up the card and brought the portrait up beside it in her vision. The handwriting gave her no reason to choose Agata over any other person. She kept the two images together anyway.
"Where did the ship go?"
"There's a destination map in the next room. Or the full voyage collection, if you want that."
"The full one."
He showed her a reading alcove, brought the still-potted fern to its shaded sill, and returned to the sale.
At first she chose the general departure record. Ships spread outward on its map in a slow scattering. The surviving manifests covered seventy-three years at this ground alone. Some passengers joined relatives already traveling; some spoke of land, of research, of wanting another sky. One recorded interview featured a human who planned to leave after her dog died. A later list contained her name.
There was no final photograph of everyone, no last human closing a city door. In the records from this region the departures thinned, and the notices advertising return passages eventually stopped. Elsewhere the record grew patchy. Zinnet could see why the lessons had used arrows.
She selected Farleaf.
Its launch was four hundred and twelve years in the past. The destination entry identified the fourth planet of a small star eleven light-years away, with navigational numbers precise enough to draw a point on the map. Beside the outward track was a second line, labeled arrival transmission.
Zinnet touched it before reading anything else.
A room opened around her on the alcove screens. A human child passed close to a camera, leaving a smear across its view. Someone wiped it. Beyond a roughly built doorway lay a slope of dark gravel beneath a copper-colored sky.
"Go on," said a voice out of sight.
A woman stepped into view carrying a shallow tray of seedlings. Grey hair, a lined face, a green shirt faded almost yellow. She set the tray down with a small jolt, muttered something at a bent stem, and looked up.
The grin narrowed her eyes.
Zinnet paused the recording. Below the picture the passenger index identified Agata. She brought up the old portrait beside it. Agata had survived the crossing. The woman had the same broad nose, the same uneven division of hair above her eyebrow, and now a face full of creases that moved when she smiled.
Zinnet let her move.
"I'm supposed to give you a tour. We haven't finished the roof over the main house, so I'm showing you this room first. It has a roof."
The unseen person laughed. Agata glanced that way and smiled harder.
"And look, these came up. These are from the little striped ones we used to get at the Saturday market. I didn't think any of that batch would germinate."
She lifted the tray toward the lens. Zinnet leaned forward. Tomatoes, with their first true leaves. One of them was decidedly stretched.
"We planted out twice too early," Agata said. "Don't say anything. We've had all the advice already."
She carried the camera through the doorway. People were putting up a long table outside. A child sat in its middle, holding a dish out of reach of the adults. On the far side of the slope, pale sections of Farleaf's hull sheltered beds covered with netting. Agata's breathing grew louder as she climbed. The camera dipped to her shoes, then swung up toward the hills.
"There. That's what I wanted to show you. The red ridge. You can't see it from the houses, but if you come up just this far..."
She held the view unsteadily. Wind worried the microphone. At last she said, quieter, "I still turn around sometimes to tell you things."
Someone called her to eat. She called back that she was coming, kept filming the ridge for several seconds, and then the recording ended.
Zinnet watched it twice more. On the third viewing she noticed a white-flowering tree growing inside a sheltered section of hull. She couldn't tell whether it was the same tree. She wanted it to be, with an intensity she found embarrassing even alone.
Then she opened the dates.
Forty-eight years between departure and landfall. Eleven more before the packet reached the world it had left. The archive had received it three hundred and fifty-three years ago. Other files followed in the voyage collection, fragments of measurements and pictures of later construction, but this was its last complete personal recording. There was no present-day settlement report.
She had found people arriving. For the first time the end of a departure arrow contained a garden, a table, a woman cross about her seedlings. She wanted the next recording, and the next, until the years between that slope and this afternoon were filled. The collection wouldn't give her that.
Outside, the fern sellers were packing up. Zinnet called Ovolo and shared the recording. He answered from her roof, where he had apparently brought the chair back. The tomato vine filled most of his picture.
He watched in silence until the tray of seedlings appeared.
"They're a bit leggy."
"I know."
Agata carried the camera out to the ridge. Ovolo didn't speak again until the file ended.
"She went all that way."
"Forty-eight years."
"Oh."
Zinnet tried to imagine forty-eight festivals. She had kept thinking of Agata as a traveler like herself, packing badly, stopping to look at something. For most of Agata's journey there had been nowhere to get off.
"Do you think anyone still lives there?" Ovolo asked.
"I don't know. The recording is very old."
He moved the camera. For a moment she saw only his fingers; then the city appeared, terraces rising behind terraces, the solar petals black against the late sun. Festival streamers had caught in an almond tree. Somebody below was practicing the accordion again.
"She might have liked this," he said.
Zinnet listened to the clumsy tune beneath the hiss of the connection. "Can you keep it there? I want that picture. With the sound."
"The streamers are a mess."
"Keep them."
He held the view for her. A breeze lifted the paper strips. On the nearest roof a gardener climbed onto a stool to reach a peach, thought better of it, and fetched a taller stool.
Zinnet saved it all.
In the morning she climbed the nearer hill to the ground's communications garden. Among beds of tall grasses, the dish listened to the sky; contemporary astronomers shared its schedule with visitors using the old departure addresses. The booking screen offered her a short outgoing slot that night.
She selected Farleaf's destination. A line of small text placed delivery eleven years ahead. Even an immediate answer could not return until twenty-two years had passed.
There were requests from earlier visitors in the public queue history: pictures, questions, recordings of music. Sending would not make her the first person to wonder. She could add her return address to theirs.
She spent the afternoon assembling her message under a solar flower. Ovolo sent an edited city view with the streamers removed. She used the first one. She added the pear terraces, her chair tomato, and a picture of herself taken by the fern seller: ivory cheeks, amber eyes, gold fingers spread awkwardly around the tin. Her pear cutting protruded behind her head.
She recorded her voice six times. In one version she gave too many details about the tin. In another she sounded as if she expected Agata to be waiting beside a receiver. At last she began with her name and the date, explained where she had found the card, and named the old arrival packet she had watched. She addressed whoever might be living where Farleaf had landed.
"I wanted to visit the garden in the picture," she said. "I've only managed the departure ground so far. I'm attaching some photographs of where I live. The tomatoes are mine."
She stopped, considered, and added, "I'd like to see what you grow now."
At her allotted time she watched the dish turn. Its motors made a low sound that she could feel through the bench. The transmission lasted less than a minute. When it ended, the dish moved on to another observer's star.
Zinnet stayed outside. The tin lay open on her knees, the old card visible in the reading light. She could find the destination's region of sky now, although its star was too faint for her unaided eyes. She magnified it in her vision until a point separated from the dark.
Eleven years. She would be twenty. If the graft took, she could be growing those red pears by then.
She imagined the signal passing through the space ahead of her, carrying the accordion, the streamers, herself with a branch sticking up behind her head. Beyond it was a world she had only seen in old pictures: those gravel slopes, that red ridge, the house without its roof. It would have changed. She tried to make the changes in her mind, found she was only planting familiar trees, and let the ridge stand bare.
For a while she looked at the star. Then she played Agata's recording again, starting where the woman picked up the camera and went outside.