One Green Hill

by Rudi Dornemann

A picture (a blue sky, a green hill) was found among her belongings.

She was the first of the first generation to die. The generation who knew Earth as home, not as story. The picture became the goal and they began to build the hill.

There was a poetic rightness to it, a commemoration, a remembering together. Their remains, turned to soil, building a patch of nature in the heart of the GreatShip’s endless metal and glass. For those who followed after, everything, always, was recycled.

The hill was their past and future, until they reached their destination, and then there was a planet with green hills by the million. There was talk of transporting the hill down to the surface, to a park in the middle of the first settlement. By now, however, the hill was its own ecosystem, a living thing that wouldn’t survive uprooting and transport.

So they went down without it, and it became a stop on the historical tours. Then history took a turn — disease, strife, struggle against a not-yet-domesticated alien world. A forgetting followed by a slow return. Societies re-formed, cities rebuilt, sciences reverse-engineered from artifacts.

When they were ready, they went up, into the sky, to the Star that Never Moves. They found an entire ship, larger than their largest city, empty and apparently devoted to sustaining a mound of soil covered in grass that didn’t look nearly blue enough.