Daffoldil

            I stand on the observation deck looking out at the stars and I ponder all that remains to be learned.  It seems strange, to be standing on this space station after a thousand years of silence.  I am not here because I long to see progress, or by some strange accident.  I have made choices few would understand.  It is not the future that calls to me, only the past that echoes in my ears.  I am a prophet and a disciple of my particular craft, and I spread it across space and time.  I have made of myself a god.
         My beginnings were humble.  I was born on Valdimor in the year 2581.  Old earth was overpopulated, and the exploration of other planets had become necessary. .  In the face of many challenges, the colonists of Valdimor thrived. They carved out cities amid the jungles and over time were able to stabilize their growth.  My sister and I were both born on the planet, and to us it was a perfect place.  My father often told us tales of old earth, with its green grass and colorful flowers.  Talk of roses and tulips sounded exotic to us.  We were used to the brown grasses, the red and purple crystal like leaves and the deep orange and grey mosses.  Mother had learned to grow the mosses in controlled patches, and from this she made a garden.  And in the corner of the garden, in a black and white clay pot, she kept daffodils.
         These dear flowers where her last link to old earth, and those she’d left behind.  My father’s whole family had moved to Valdimor, but mother’s had remained on old earth, despite its overcrowded state.  Often they spoke of going to visit.  My sister and I spent Sundays speaking on the vidfone to aunts and uncles we’d never met.  In all the years since then, I’ve never found a reason to return to old earth.  I feel no abiding tie to that ball of water and rock, save for daffodils.
         When my mother died, I was fifteen.  She had been healthy only days before, in her garden, replanting her daffodils in the grey soil of Valdimor after conflicts on Earth made it impossible to get supplies.  Some of these she gave to other colonists.  Then the illness came, and claimed her.  My father called it a plague and it soon spread through the town.  For days afterward, he would sit in her garden beside her daffodils and weep, oblivious of my sister and me.  A few weeks after her death, the illness took him too.  Eventually, we went to live with our aunt Verda on the other side of the planet.  My sister brought a few old paper books that had been among mother’s collections.  I brought the daffodils.  I had saved them from the refuse bin after father threw them away.  Replanted in a large red clay pot, they thrived.  I set them in the window of the proxy barn loft that was my room.  They were my main companion in the silence.  Then plague came to aunt Verda’s home too.  The doctors and scientists ran extensive tests, as they had in the town we’d come from.  They found nothing.  The only common element seemed to be the daffodils.
          That was when I first knew the truth.  Something in the soil of Valdimor had reacted with the daffodils to create the illness.  While I was immune to the illness, my sister was not.  She died in my aunt’s house, along with our uncle and our cousin Alice.  I knew that the conflicts that has cut off our supplies where caused by overpopulation.  People had been rioting over food, and had thrown the Earth government into chaos.  Overpopulation was the cause of all the deaths on Valdimor.  In the silence of my room, I reasoned and plotted.  I would put an end to overpopulation.  I spent years studying diligently, waiting for my opportunity.
         When I first went to space, I took the daffodils.  The ship was small, and we were crowded in like sardines in a tin.  And there was always noise.  In my small room, with its grey walls and narrow cot, the daffodils were a bright, silent companion.  I had brought a container of soil from Valdimor, and I continued to replant the daffodil periodically.  I found that the replicators could produce soil exactly the same composition as the soil of Valdimor.  Soon, I had rows of boxes around my room with the sunshiny flowers.  Members of the crew would come and admire them, and eventually I began to give one or two of them away. 
         And as it had on Valdimor, the plague found us.  First the Lt. Commander in charge of engineering, then half his crew was dead.  Next the Commander, and the Captain died.  Then my best friend and his wife died.  Eventually, I was the only one left on board.  As before, I was immune to the plague’s affects.  I walked the empty halls, feeling no remorse.  The daffodils were my tools to put an end to the overcrowding of some planets, and to the suffering and poverty on others.  I contemplated my power.   
         I put together a small stasis pod for the daffodils, and tested it.  Once I was assured that it wouldn’t kill the flowers, I put them in stasis.  Then I set the auto navigation module.  I stared out at the stars from the observation deck of the ship for a while. Then I placed myself in stasis.  I had programmed a safe, elliptical course, so it was safe to sleep.
         For five hundred years the ship traveled the edge of explored space.  Eventually, we were discovered, towed into a space station and the stasis systems were opened.  I met Lt Commander Alver and his staff.  I was able to ascertain the state of the universe, the recent wars and the troubles with poverty on several of the more recently colonized planets.  I was given accommodations and I set up a small booth selling my exotic daffodils.  People loved them, and soon I made enough money to purchase a small ship which I outfitted with an expensive stasis system and high end replicators.  I was preparing.
         The first reports of death came from Argus.  I had sold a large pot of daffodils to the ambassador of Argus and its moon.  Then reports came from Jura and Melicar.  In some cases, whole populations were decimated.  Sometimes a quarter or a half of the population survived.  When people on the station started getting sick, the Lt. Commander Alver issued a quarantine set.  Soon, the selling booths were shut down.  So, I spent my days visiting those who were well and simply confined to the station.  And of course, I brought them daffodils to brighten their days. 
         Soon, even the Lt. Commander was ill; I knew the time had come.
         I took my daffodils to my ship and then set the stasis control.  I was able to set the gates and soon I was out in deep space.  Once again, the daffodils and I slept the dreamless sleep.  A thousand years passed before the controls woke us.  As I maneuvered us back through space, I saw a few derelict ships floating.  The ghosts of the lost their only inhabitants, I could imagine the dying panicking in those metal hulls.  I came back to the space station, only to find it more derelict than any of the ships.  I even had to hack the life support system from my ship.  The silence was a blessing. 
         So now I move again to my ship, my purpose clear.  I will seek out places like old Earth, where life has grown too abundant and there I shall sell my daffodils. There are those who would call me mad, but I see the logic of it.  Every now and then, when the clamor of life grows too loud and the footfalls too numerous, I come.  I bring death in the form of a sunny, innocent flower contaminated by alien soil.  I cleave the light of life from its foundations, and sometime I leave silence in my wake. 
         Then I return to stasis, and I sleep in time until I am needed again.  Safe in the knowledge that I am as necessary to the universe as the stars themselves, and that I shall awaken when the time is right.  I’ve been an expert on stasis systems all my life.  Scientists will tell you that in stasis you don’t dream, but I do.  I dream of innocent faces, voices blending in mindless chatter, and bright yellow daffodils.