When I was a child, I made my life into a labyrinth of petty superstitions. If the sandfish seller looked me in the eye some morning when I walked with my father through the Great Market, I thought I would turn into a sandfish that night while I slept. If I was out on the back patio and happened to see a transport ascending into orbit, I had to hop seven times on my left foot-- immediately-- or else water witches would come and drag me down the drain in the middle of the lawn. If I forgot three times in a row to say “thank you” to the house, dwarves would come all the way from the Horizon Hills and take me away in a goat-cart to live with them in their houses under the dunes. I probably knew a few too many fairy tales.

This was understandable since, with no other children in Rivercross Station close to my own age, most of my friends were stories. During the spring and fall tides, however, with the adults all gone to the shore and most of the town's electricity redirected to the harvest-crawlers, I was truly alone. The house's most vital systems spoke in little more than stuttering monosyllables; its cozy-voiced storytelling programs fell silent. The days wore on too long. I padded up and down the brownout twilight halls, shouting wonder tales against the whisper-quiet.

The superstitions began in these self-told stories. Simply imagining trolls in the kitchen or kobolds in the attic gallery was too easy-- I had to put some obstacles between me and the happy-ever-afters. I made up scroll-long lists of rules, cross-referenced with even longer lists of ways to atone for breaking them. Maybe I’d neglect to sing a song in honor of the troll-queen before I asked the kitchen for lunch, or I’d go up to the gallery without the shiny stone I needed to bribe safe passage from the kobolds. There were always ways to set things right, baroque rituals to mollify offended trolls, propitiatory quests to keep me in the good graces of the laundry-djinn. I could complicate a single story across two or three days, and by the end of the first week of any tide-month, my world was thoroughly tangled up in the intricacies of imaginary cause and effect.

I don’t remember why I started locking the garden gate in the evenings, but I think it had something to do with dragons.

It took me two or three days to notice that anything was wrong in the garden. I was out by one of the fountains, way in the back, by the apple trees, and I stumbled while I was running to find the Lost Chalice of Serendipity, and I fell, scraping my knees on the rough grass. The grass seemed dry, sharp-tufted, and a bit maroon, but I’d left a pooka waiting at the back entrylock, and pookas aren’t known for their patience.

By the end of the week, the change was so drastic that I paused my story in mid-quest and went out to investigate. The lawn was purple now, the way it got in the winter-- my dad was always proud of the lawn, “one of those drought-tolerant hybrids from Mars,” he’d say, “an old terraforming standby, with a really dense rhizome network…” He’d go on and on when his office friends were over for a barbecue. But I didn’t think it was supposed to look like this, not so early in the year.

The lawn wasn’t the only thing that had changed. An oily gray film covered the surface of the water in the bird baths and the reflecting pool. The trees were losing their needles; whole branches had already gone bare. The rose bushes were wilted into green heaps as soggy as old spinach. The leaves had rotted off all the vines on the back wall. Even the creosote bush seemed a little sickly.

As I walked around to the front of the house, I noticed that the neighbors’ gardens and lawns didn’t look any better. Their birdbaths were just as oily, their trees just as bald, their flower beds just as spinachy as ours had been. I had a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach, a feeling I usually got when something was my fault, even before I figured out what it was that I’d done wrong. In three days, my parents and all the other adults would be back from the harvest and would wonder what had happened.

So I got to work. I asked the house to open the little storage pyramid by the back gate, and I armed myself with a rake and a pair of shears. I pruned any dead branch I could reach, skimmed scum out of the fountain, raked all the debris into a heap nearly as tall as the pyramid shed itself. The work wasn’t much different from the way I’d been playing, full of running back and forth for tools I’d left one place or another, needing to start one task before I could complete the next, or realizing that I hadn’t been careful enough the first time and had to go back and redo something. I didn’t notice when dinnertime came and went, or when twilight slid further and further into night and the house began following me with its floodlights.

I was back by the garden gate, wrestling with a bag of mulch that may have weighed as much as I did, trying to get it into a wheelbarrow that kept rolling away from where I wanted it to be, when I heard a tapping sound. I thought maybe it was something I was doing, but it continued while I stood stock still and listened. It was a perfectly steady tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, and it was coming from the garden gate. The one I’d been locking to keep the dragons out.

My stories seemed very far away as I gathered my voice and said, “Um, hi? Hello? Who’s out there?”

The tapping stopped. “I am the gardener. Please let me in.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. I’d never heard of this gardener. I jumped a couple steps away from the gate and whispered as loud as I could: “House! House! He says he’s a gardener. Is it OK to let him in?”

There was a no answer and I worried that the house hadn’t heard me.

“Hold on,” I yelled back at the gate.

The house used the hidden speakers in the trees to answer me.

“Gardener: ident unclear.” The house paused. “Await voice approval,” another pause, “for unlock: gate 5R9.”

I cringed; I was sure the gardener could hear everything.

“OK,” I said, “open the gate,” and then, belatedly, “thank you!”

The gate opened and the gardener stepped into the garden. At first I thought that it was a man who was wearing all green, but then I realized that it wasn’t a man at all. It was a robot.

His skin was made out of some kind of clear plastic, plates of it like a fairy tale knight’s armor. The plates were filled with water and the water was thick with algae like what grew in my mother’s turtle tanks whenever the autoclean wasn’t working. Under the floodlights, the gardener was a green so bright he almost glowed.

He was looking around at the garden.

“There has been considerable livescape degradation since I was here last,” he said, his voice buzzing like a box of bees. “Without intervention, the existing ecoforming will fail throughout this subdiv.”

I had thought I’d done a pretty good job of fixing things up.

He picked up a trowel that I’d left on the ground and set to work, digging, watering, pruning, fertilizing-- doing all the gardening things I’d tried to do, but doing them right. Several times, I saw him stop in the middle of a task and simply thrust his hand down into the soil around the roots of a plant and pause for a moment as if listening, then continue. I tried to help where I could, but I had trouble guessing what he was going to do next, and it was around then that I realized I was exhausted and found a place on the lawn where I could sit and watch and be mostly out of the way. The green robot went about his tasks silently, steadily, tirelessly. I went to sleep.

I woke sometime the next morning.

“It looks better,” I said. The roses were staked up. Branches I’d chopped off had been reattached and were already filling in with needles. There was fresh water in the birdbaths. The neighborhood looked less wrecked.

The robot stood in the middle of the still-purple lawn. He had his hands out like he was feeling the air or maybe the sunlight. He moved slightly with the wind.

I watched until curiosity got to me. “What are you doing?”

“I still need to stabilize the oxidizible organic carbon components, enhance the molecular aggregation of biologic constituents of the humic substrate, trigger a pseudo-Maillard reaction, and induce a nano-accelerated recolonization of the soil by the standard microbial spectrum.”

I didn’t understand and I’m sure I looked like it.

“I need to fix the soil,” said the robot.

“How did I hurt it so badly?” I asked. “I only locked you out for a few days.”

“None of this was meant to be here,” he said. “The plants, the animals, would not be here if humans had not brought them. Even the soil will not survive without help. This subdiv is too small and its ecoforming too new.”

“When will it be able to live on its own?” I asked.

“In a thousand years, when the whole planet is fully terraformed,” said the robot. “The land will not need so much gardening then. But you can help me today. Simply bring me a shovel at nightfall.” With that, he stopped talking or moving, and spent the entire day like a statue on the side lawn.

It was a strange day for me. I spent most of it back in the house. I couldn’t seem to get back into my story, and it was just as hard for me to start a new one. I kept saying to myself, “Once upon a time,” but it just didn’t take.

I went outside a few times. Looking at the robot while the water stirred slowly in his armor skin, the algae an even brighter green than it had been under the floodlights, I could still believe in fantastic creatures. I just had trouble seeing them when they weren’t there. So I went inside and found myself some new games and waited impatiently for the sun to get closer to the horizon.

I was out again when the sky was barely pink. I gathered all three shovels and one of the garden spades from the storage pyramid and set them neatly next to the robot’s feet. He woke a little after the cricket birds began to sing and the swallows started swooping around.

“Thank you,” he said, picking up the nearest shovel.

He dug a rectangle out of the lawn, and then lay down in it as if it had been a bed. The hole wasn’t very deep, but, with the floodlights, he was mostly in shadow, so I had to look very carefully to be sure I was seeing what I was seeing. He wasn’t green anymore-- the liquid in his armor puddled out on the ground beneath him, and then it was gone, absorbed into the dirt. He was just a shell now, mostly transparent; he looked like one of the insects I’d seen in my science lessons, or the husks they’d leave behind when they molted. And then what was left of him began to melt into the soil.

He was gone within ten minutes. I touched the ground in the hole to see if he’d just sunken down, but no, he was gone. I’d gotten something on my hand, however-- a buzzing stinging tingle spread up from my fingers into my arm. Even though the robot was gone, it didn’t feel as though he’d finished whatever he was doing. I doubted he would leave that big hole in the lawn. So I lay down on the grass to wait and wound up sleeping another night outside.

When I woke up it was nearly dawn and my parents had returned. They wanted to know why I was asleep outside in the middle of the lawn, so I had to do some explaining. I’m afraid my story started at the beginning, and while I was still narrating some intricate business about kobolds and trolls they were already patting me on the head and sending me to my room to get some proper rest. If they heard the bit about a green robot gardener who disappeared into the ground, I’m sure that they didn’t credit it as anything more than the final wrinkle of a very convoluted plot. There was nothing wrong with the lawns or the gardens, not that they could see. I myself spent most of the afternoon looking, but could not find any sign of where the robot had dug his rectangular hole.

In the years since then, I have watched for his return, or the return of another robot like him, creeping out into the back garden at all hours of the night, but I have never found anything like proof. Once the power came back, my parents were amazed at how avidly I studied the history of our planet’s early settlements, but those searches never yielded more than a few vague references to terraforming drones. No pictures and no descriptions of an army of gardening robots busily maintaining our planet’s earthlike biome. The terraforming guilds have always been evasive on the issue, and these days, all of their lines are programmed not to receive my calls.

But some nights, when the wind is blowing in over the sands of the ever-shrinking dune sea and I sit in the garden of my own house, listening to the cricket birds sing and watching the swallows dance and dodge overhead, I’ll catch something in my peripheral vision, some stirring in the shadows under the pines, some glimpse of unexpected emerald, and my arm will tingle from my elbow down to my fingertips, and in those moments, I know that the night gardeners are still at their work.

The End

Bio

"Rudi Dornemann's fiction has appeared in Shadowdance and Conduit and he has work forthcoming in Electric Velocipede. His story "Detail from a Painting by Hieronymous Bosch" was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Portland, Maine and is at work on his first novel."
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