The Farm

Hera’s head is upright, facing towards the stars obscured by rainclouds. The twin moons and their silver sheen make the dark clouds appear like floating jewelary. Her eyes closed, she is letting the warm rain wash over her. The breeze carried the often arid air, now gentle and clean, past her. The hairs on her arms stood to attention. Her hands pressed softly into the small of her back, pushing her entire body towards the God in heaven. She is in a field. She is alone, surrounded on all sides by crops.  Wheat, or barley, she isn’t sure, dances without her. The soft hum of her automated equipment is the only unnatural sound. A fruit fly greets her with its fast moving wings. Her augments pick it up despite it being a few metres away. She still faces towards the God. Eyes still closed in supplication; no sound leaving her lips. Unworthy even to speak. 
It was once Josh’s God, not hers. But Josh is dead and Hera is alive. Hera is on one of her God’s many life-giving planets, Josh is presumably decaying in the vast frozenness of space. She does not know that his body was found, his armour taken, his body violently beaten by those who killed him and finally discarding the misshapen husk that remained. He is now rotting in some river on some half-named world, food for the unnamed scavengers. His lifeless eyes, incidentally, too face towards his God. He is at peace in the eternal silence. No troubles left to him, no more agonising screams fill his head. Only the heavenly abyss of nothing. The long, dark and undisturbed sleep. 
Hera does not envy Josh, she does not wish to be dead. But she knows he did wish to be dead. Every step taken and decision made in his final days and weeks showed his conviction to live had ended. Eroded and destroyed by the life thrust upon him. Hera does not know how close he came to finding life again. His conversations with the Priest unfinished and incomplete; a chapter half-written, its conclusions never known. It is unlikely that knowing this would change Hera’s view on Josh, his final days indelibly inked upon her soul. It simply does not matter for Josh is dead and Hera is alive. 
She thinks about Josh often. Curses his name, laments his part in her life. But what good would that do, she often asks herself. Before she asked this to the stars in front of her, from the cold seat of a spaceship. Now she asks the stars from below, from the fields of crops she is ill-prepared to tend. She knows she would not be who she is without Josh. She knows that wishing her life had been without Josh would alter so many connections made, the colours and shapes muted, different and unknowable. Hera likes, she thinks, who she is. Who she has become. You didn’t often enjoy the journeys taken, and who accompanied you on them, to get there, but there is joy to be found at the destination reached. Life is thrust upon you and the decisions made by and for you are all important. Friendships and love are ephemeral. Those who are in your life, who leave their mark on you, no matter how long, matter. Life is transitory and death is permanent. Everything is ordained before God and His tests, kind and unkind, mould you like iron in a forge.
She remembers how Josh had used to say that to justify the bad, to explain the all too seldom good.  Her eyes are still closed but her hands are clutched to her chest, wrapped tightly together. Her ashen skin fraying at the knuckles. She has been unkind to Josh recently, to those he helped, to those who barely knew him. To one who had loved him like a brother. He was unkind to her. But she was all he had and he was all she had and together it worked but Hera sunk as he drowned, dragging her down, uncaring or unknowing, his calloused hands gripping ever tighter on her. She is correct in this, Josh never knew how much he poisoned her. It does not matter. Hera lives, anxiously. Josh rots, peacefully.
Where Josh was an end, an inescapable finality, this world, Kropotkin, offers live anew. Hera knows she is anxious, she is afraid. The future is truly hers, now. Never before given to her. Always led, never free. Now she is free. The uncertainty of choice rocks her, the safety of structure has melted away. 
She opens her eyes to survey her farm. Her God’s gifts above now unobscured, the summer shower now passed, twinkling incandescent, matching her wheat, or barley, in dance. There is a little smile upon her face. Her chest, perhaps for the first time she can remember, is not heavy. There is no crushing weight upon it. Hera begins to walk amongst her crops. She allows herself to run her fingers across them. Their coarseness is amplified by the damage done to her by uncaring doctors. But now, absent the heaviness, perhaps, she realises, there is a gift here. Her senses renewed, experiences able to be enjoyed in their fullest. She is rationalising, but there is some truth to her feelings. 
Hera does not have grand wishes.
She wishes to be back in the rocking chair in her farm’s porch. She wishes for a cup of warm sweet tea, a cigarette and to watch this world’s sunrise. She wants to see the orange hues coat the sky in its sickly saccharine glow. She has hours to wait, and a long time to sit, perhaps she will read one of the books provided to her. She does not care.
Josh is dead. Amy is dead. But Hera is alive. And Hera is free to choose a life for herself, her decisions her own. The future ahead undecided and ripe to be plucked should she wish it. 
There are no more tests to take, no more futures to slip through her fingers. She is where she wants to be. Alone, content, and alive. 
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