“Blessed are the lazy,” said Joseph Synczlowieczy, the so-called messiah of the Thirteenth Colony, “because they don’t fight wars, they love the idleness of reading, and indolence feeds the ingenuity necessary to preserve it.”

Somebody laughed from the aisles, but others hung around to listen to him willingly, rolled up like doughnuts on their gravity-controlled gurneys in the rehabilitation ward.

I had started my apprenticeship a few months ago, just days after he’d been admitted. All I knew was that he’d been a promising botanist before he was enlisted for the conflict between Earth and the Colonies of Mars, and that he was among the few survivors of the eighty-seven-person crew who’d been aboard the cruiser Olympus Mons.

Nobody here knew him before the tragedy, but many thought the accident was what had driven him crazy. Others thought that it had been the guy inside who’d made him speak strangely. I didn’t know what to believe, but I liked Joe, and I wasn’t as sure as everyone else that he was crazy.

“Blessed are the old, because they remember and they forget.”

The space cadet Henry Larsen, only nineteen, a burn wound along his right arm slowly recovering, nodded toward me.

“Hey, Rosy! Sit with us. I’m sure that here on Mars they also accept women apostles, right, Joe?”

Joe, the messiah, gave me his lanky boy smile when he saw me appear from the group gathered around him.

“Hi, Nurse Roselyn.”

Not all patients had the adolescent air that Joe and Henry exuded so effortlessly—there were several veterans on the Thirteenth Colony—but there were enough like them to remind me that the first victim every war claimed was innocence.  

“I’m sorry to interrupt because I know you’re all pious men of faith,” I said, nosing my way into the crowd and getting some laughs, “but I need to check your vitals and update your charts.”

Their controlled floating beds returned to their respective positions without complaint. Joe’s presence often had that effect.

When I finally reached him, the last on my list for the day, I couldn’t help but pick up on his usual, spiteful anguish for the absurdity of his condition. A feeling familiar to when I’d started working at Mars Medical Hospital and Joseph Synczlowieczy became my patient.

Of the three survivors of the Olympus accident, Joe was the only one who didn’t sustain particularly grave injuries, aside from the broken right leg for which he was currently in rehab. As for the other two, the one in better shape needed cultivation of new, synthetic optic nerves to see again from just one eye. The other was still in a pharmacological coma while skin slowly regrew over the ninety percent of his body that had burned.

The fact that Joe had emerged from the massacre practically unscathed had attained the air of a miracle, at least until the diagnostic scan revealed the guy inside. That was the euphemism they’d started using around the ward for his brain tumor, ever since Joe had become the messiah. Whether it was the tumor or who knew what to make him speak and act the way he did, the guy inside tick-tocked an hour that would fatally toll for Joseph Synczlowieczy within a few months. To be optimistic.

“Will we meet at the greenhouse later, Rosy?”

A small nursery had been built below one of the cupolas of the colony. Theoretically, it would have grown produce to supplement the food imported from Earth or created in labs on the base, but in the end the preference had gone to the latter for the ease of production, and the greenhouse had fallen into disuse. Until Joe had asked for its repair and they’d listened.

“Of course,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

Joe smiled even though he hastened to hide the hand he’d been using to massage his head. “Never better.”

I liked that place, especially once Joe had shaped it, transforming it into a real garden, unlike the pale imitations constructed under the cupolas of Mars. Inside were plants I’d never seen in the holodocumentaries about Earth. In no time, the nursery had grown lush with vegetation. I didn’t listen to all the rumors that had begun circulating about him recently; he was a peerless natural in the greenhouse.

At the end of my shift that night when I reached the greenhouse as promised, Joe was taking care of one of his new projects. He was one of those men who lost himself in his passions. Watching him work was beautiful. Even though there was a war outside, in that moment it seemed far away, lost among the currents of space and confused by the swarm of stars above our heads.

“What are you up to?”

“An idea. Something I want to complete as . . . as soon as possible.” He smiled.    

My good humor had already faded once he’d paused. I would have liked to say something, but both he and I understood the situation.

“Look,” he said, distracting me with the little plant in front of him.

It was something I’d never seen before: a strange organism, like lichen, but supported by extensive roots that plunged into a plot of Martian land. Fine, tender, but resistant trunks extended beyond the rhizosphere, overflowing with buds and almond-shaped seeds, no bigger than a fingernail.

Before my incredulous eyes, the plant shook as if a light breeze fluttered through the nursery. Joe removed a seed and swallowed it. From his expression it seemed simultaneously sweet and salty.

“Does this have to do with your idea?”

“Yes, still a prototype now, but I’m on the right track.”

“Something useful or only beautiful?”

The messiah laughed. “Beauty isn’t useful?”

I laughed, too. Joe had a certain effect on people like I’ve said, and in spite of my doubts I was happy to not be immune.

I should have asked him about his migraines, but I didn’t feel like disrupting our peaceful intimacy. In that moment, a small butterfly flew before my eyes.

“And where did that come from?” I asked, stunned. I’d never seen a real butterfly, a live one. I belonged to the third generation: born on Mars, I’d never set foot on Earth. And since the war for independence had exploded in the colonies, currently that possibility seemed remote.

The butterfly landed on the strange plant that Joe had just shown me. Its wings were small, an iridescent blue, delicate like baby powder but darkening toward the edges. Abstract designs decorated its veins. Its delicateness moved but troubled me.

“It’s stunning,” I murmured. I was captivated.

“Who knows if it’ll be at all useful . . .” Joe said, and when he turned to look at me we both exploded in laughter.

I remember this day because the following day Alvaro Mendez suddenly recovered from the leukemia he’d been diagnosed with at a routine physical, when he was still in the service. Word started circulating about Joe Synczlowieczy, who’d cured him.

When I accompanied Dr. Kemp for our first round through the ward in the morning, Joe’s fame had already spread among the hospital’s other wings, so much so that some gurneys were floating in the corridors, the room already full to the brim.

“Every important decision is always between love and fear,” the messiah was saying as we passed through the crowd. “We’re all afraid, but don’t act from fear. Love is the only truth.”

“And love, Joe? What is love?” one guy asked.

“Your sister!” someone from the back of the room yelled, unearthing an eruption of wild laughter.

Even Joe laughed. If he really was a messiah, he was different from any stereotype you could associate with him.

It took us a while to reestablish order, which irritated Kemp, and once it seemed that only legitimate patients remained in the room, a man, a veteran from the first Battle of Deimos, hurried his bed towards Joe.

The veteran had sustained grave lesions on his spinal column, suffering from near total paralysis except for his head and right hand, which he used to steer his bed. Every attempt to heal him had become futile.

I didn’t understand what was happening at first. Not until he glided towards Joe at a lower height. If he’d still had control over his body, he would have been genuflecting.

Not even Kemp could find words in that moment. I remember watching Joe, sitting on the edge of his bed, legs dangling off like a boy, torn between fascination and a strange, incomprehensible unease.

The messiah of the Thirteenth Colony didn’t speak while around him the silence and waiting had thickened like honey. He seemed only slightly hesitant, but above all afflicted for the man before him.

Joe once told me that he still dreamed of the fires and explosions on board Olympus, just before the space cruiser collapsed on itself in the silent vacuum of the solar system. It was the screams, the terror, the excruciating agony of the men who died all around him that kept him awake the rest of the night. 

When I saw him reach out his arm and rest his hand on the immobile man in his bed, I heard someone next to me hold her breath. I realized I was holding mine, too.

Nothing really happened. Afterward, nobody would say they’d seen anything strange or felt any particular sensations. The guy simply exhaled, as if he’d released what all of us had been holding in and Joe, after a moment, lay down, maybe a bit worn.

Nobody dared to speak. At some point, Kemp decided to continue with our checkups while I brought the veteran back to his room.

That evening Joe and I met in the greenhouse and the night passed peacefully, but the following morning, when the veteran presented himself in Joe’s room on his own two legs, pandemonium erupted.

In the following days, nobody could explain how he could have possibly recovered. Joe was reluctant to say anything about it. But his fame began to grow and spread among the colonies. People even started feeling optimistic about the war, which had until then felt hopeless.

Just getting into his room became a challenge. Patients clogged the corridors with their gurneys when they came to listen to him. The last ones were so far back that they couldn’t even hear him. They had to make those closer repeat what he was saying.

 The medical personnel tried to put a stop to the situation, but that created a frenzy of protest. In the end, they decided to move his bed to an old, disused gym. That way, they could guarantee treatment and necessary tranquility for the most ill patients.

I was worried mostly about him. Even though I never saw him, I knew how much it taxed him, that it was stealing time from the project to which he dedicated his few free moments. Not to mention that all that stress would certainly exacerbate the obtuse rage of the guy inside.

I wondered if his so-called disciples realized that, or if they were purely blinded by his “miracles,” which people had started calling them. I suspected they wanted a god who could solve their problems and heal their sickness. His humanity escaped from them, or they preferred to ignore it.

The greenhouse became the only moment of intimacy for Joe and, when I could, when he asked me to, I joined him there at the end of my shift.

When people discovered this, gossip circulated about us. It was like that with everything that involved Joe. It didn’t bother me, Joe even less. In any case, even though he was a wonderful man and I younger than him, I could only see the boy who emerged from that smile he gave me when he showed me his progress in the greenhouse. In those tender moments, I could glimpse his real divinity.

“I made some changes,” Joe said.      

He had. The strange lichen, if that’s really what it was, shook with new vitality. Its stalks appeared more fibrous, vibrant, occupied with a process that constantly changed their appearance before my eyes. It was probably a manifestation of the roots’ unrest below the topsoil because those too turned without any apparent motive. A strange heat rose off the scant fronds above the stalks, and I noticed the small, almond-like fruit Joe had swallowed before now seemed more solid. Numerous and mature.

“Your followers will wait for this plant to produce manna,” I joked.

Joe laughed, a spontaneous laugh, a laugh that still couldn’t absolutely mask the deep bags below his eyes and the bluish veins in relief on the back of his too-thin hands.

“You’re right,” he said. “But this time I’ll have to disappoint them. I have other plans in mind for this . . . thing.”

He was still smiling and I don’t know why he said it. Or maybe I did. I didn’t want to see him suffer. Maybe in that moment I loved him, and despite what Joe would have said about love, I knew that too often it tended to be something that came to pass in an ambiguous way, confusing itself with narcissism.

“You’ll disappoint them, Joe. When they realize you’re not a god, they’ll turn their backs on you. And even if you were, when they realize that what you can give them isn’t what they desire, some of them will hate you.”

I thought I’d disappointed him, that he’d be mad at me for those words, which I’d started regretting once they were out of my mouth. Almost. Instead Joe burst out laughing. He reached out his hand and caressed my cheek, his touch light and gentle for a man that tall. 

“Little Rosy, “ he said. In that moment, I felt like a child again. “I’m only doing what I can and what I think is right. Everyone is responsible for themselves. And not even a god can be crucified twice.”

When he told me, I thought of the first time I ran into his room, at night, when the screams from his nightmares of the last moments aboard Olympus woke him from his own, tormented dreams. The fright I’d felt before him paled next to his heart-rending cry, his tremor, the acrid stink of sweat while he told me about the horrors of the battle. And then the guy inside.

Joe didn’t tell anybody, but I’d read his clinical files. I knew that the tumor had spread to his cerebellum and metastasized. His migraines were already painful, and soon would come the nausea and vomiting. In the end, the guy would compromise his coordination and balance. I didn’t know what to think after the recoveries and “miracles” of the last few days, but inside I found this feeling that even if he could’ve avoided his destiny, Joe wouldn’t have done it.

He removed his hand and I’d never felt more alone in that moment, until I saw the butterfly scampering along his finger, as if he’d just done a magic trick and pulled it out from behind my ear.

It was beautiful like the one I’d seen before, if not more so.

Joe was smiling, and I thought if that were a miracle, it had been done to assuage my fear with beauty.

I searched for words but couldn’t find any, and I realized that none were needed.

Joe winked at me. Into his mouth he popped a few of those strange almond fruits from the bizarre plant. He munched them with gusto.

Just a few days later, the incident involving Dr. Kemp’s daughter happened.

It wasn’t just the patients of Mars Medical Hospital who listened to Joe. By now, people from outside, from the other colonies, had come. Every day the gym was packed with gravity controlled gurneys while the rest of the people crowded into the bleachers and all over the floor. Joe usually hovered by the tattered basketball hoop. If someone tossed him a ball, I bet he would have enjoyed trying for a three-pointer in front of his star-struck congregation.

I wasn’t there that day, but I heard everything. When the structure of one of the bleachers gave way, the crowd was so tightly packed that those at the other end didn’t even notice. The screams of the injured raised the alarm. Dr. Kemp was among those yelling. Her daughter had insisted on seeing Joe that day, and she lay buried below a pile of detritus, dust, and scraps. Dark, thick blood slowly escaped from a deep gash on her head. When they finally managed to extract her from the ruins, she wasn’t breathing. They told me that Kemp screamed like a mad woman and that two people had to pull her from the lifeless body of her daughter.

Then somebody told Joe.

They say that the crowd opened before him while he neared the girl on her bed, that the crowd hushed when he passed, that even the injured stopped crying to see what would happen.

When Joe reached her, he stepped off his bed and took her hand. Bending down, he rested his chest against her face. Then he lifted his head and announced, “She’s not dead, only injured. Look, she’s waking . . .”

They assured me the girl wasn’t breathing, her heart had stopped beating a few minutes before Joe had reached her. They told me it was a miracle, a real miracle. Even in that moment, I didn’t know what to believe, but somebody told me they’d seen butterflies flying when the girl opened her eyes. Small, blue butterflies. The next day, I visited her personally. She didn’t even have a scar from where the blood had coursed from her body.

In the following days, people came without pause to see Joe, to listen to him, to touch him. Mars was crazy. It seemed like the people of the colonies had forgotten about the war going on.

In order to not compromise the functionality of the hospital, it became necessary to transfer him elsewhere, but not too far from the medical presidio.

The precarious gym had been vacated and beneath one of the cupolas that housed the only Martian stadium, unused because of the conflict, they claimed one of the press boxes for Joe. People camped out wherever he went, among the bleachers and on the artificial turf. Some stayed through the night just to see him the next day.

I knew that in every rare moment of freedom, Joe retreated to the greenhouse. By now, his condition was rapidly deteriorating. The last time he asked me to accompany him, his gaunt face, the deep bags beneath his eyes, his ruddy complexion unsettled me, saddened me. I knew in that moment he didn’t have much time left. His spirit leaked from him with great effort through the blanket of extreme exhaustion he wore, through the pain of his migraines, through nausea.

And yet, when once again he turned to show me the strange organism he’d dedicated so much of his remaining life to, his smile, his indomitable gaze were those of a child.

It wasn’t my first time seeing the roots, the stalks, the leaves. But just like how the speed with which it germinated those strange almond fruits stunned me, this new surprise left me without words. The plant, if that’s what it really was, had produced tiny chrysalises, compact and silky.

Joe plucked a fruit and chewed quickly, as if it could give him relief from the headaches and nausea. Then, he pointed to one of the chrysalises, its casing jagged, about to burst open.

“Look, Rosy,” he murmured, and before my incredulous eyes the shell opened. A small, delicate blue butterfly emerged, hesitant in the air around us.

The plant had woven the chrysalis, I’d seen it myself, but I still couldn’t believe it.

“It’s . . . it’s incredible,” I murmured. It really was.

Joe looked at me, his face serious. “There’s just a bit left,” he said. In that moment of confusion, I misunderstood his words. I thought he was referring to how much life he had left, and maybe that was partly it, but he meant something else.

“Can I do something?” I asked.

Joe looked at me and smiled, “It’s enough that you’re here. It is almost finished.”

He looked around, looked up beyond the panes of the nursery where the stars filtered through the leafy fronds. He grasped my hand to avoid succumbing to vertigo. “It’s marvelous to not be alone.”

In the following days, everything happened quickly.

I was there when it started, far away, in the middle of the ever-growing crowd. I knew he wasn’t well, that the unease and pain would by now become unbearable, especially among the commotion of the crowd. Though far away, I tried to see how much more he could bear. I didn’t think I could do anything, but I couldn’t help but look.

“Be careful of they who want to change the world,” he was saying that day, putting the convened on alert. “More often than not, they desire that it exist in their image. Support those who try to improve themselves for the good of the world.”

The people listened even when they didn’t know what he was saying. Maybe for many it was just a spectacle, like a flash of light they’d noticed at night. This bothered me, but I was sure Joe would have kindly reprimanded me for thinking like that.

“Let them come,” he’d told me once before. “Maybe their reasons don’t matter. Sometimes things happen when we open up to the possibilities.”

I didn’t see who screamed, but I remember his words. It wasn’t far from me, in the compact crowd.

“Lead us against Earth, Joe!” He’d started making a ruckus, and quickly others began applauding. “Help us!”

“Lead us! Help us! Free us!”

Similar invocations suddenly rose from all over the crowd. A rumbling spread and started growing into a buzz that shook the entire stadium. It was like the noise of a huge beast that awoke from its hibernation. Still confused, lethargic, but famished.

Joe said something, but I couldn’t make out his words. There was too much chaos in that moment, arms rising up all around me, articulating the same, persistent pleas.

“Lead us! Help us! Free us!”
            The buzz of before quickly transformed into a roar. I glanced at Joe again. He hovered a bit above them, to avoid the crowd reaching him and throwing him into the air. He looked exhausted, but hardly surprised. Just distressed. Then the crowd shoved me forward and I lost him again.

Upon his refusal to humor their requests, the crowd started getting desperate.

Suddenly, that beast was wounded.

“Traitor!” I heard someone yell. At first, I thought I’d misheard, but then the accusation rose again.

“Traitor!”

The extended hands from moments before closed into fists that launched towards Joe. I continued to be bumped forward by the waves of frustration without control.

When the situation seemed about to explode, the police force finally intervened. I glimpsed him for one last moment while the security barricade clung to him, only to be dragged away by the enraged crowd. He held a hand to his temple and dark blood coursed down along his arm. Somebody must have hit him with a rock or a shard of plaster.

I couldn’t believe what was happening. Until then I’d always been hesitant to believe whatever concerned Joe. Maybe that was my fault.

Thinking back on it now I ask myself, in light of all these considerations, why he’d grown fond of me among all of his disciples. Sometimes, when I’m among butterflies, I remember what he told me about love, and I think that’s the only response that matters.

“True love, Rosy,” he said, “doesn’t need reasons.”

If the uproar and accusations thrown at him in the stadium that day had shaken me, two days later, when I heard that the Colonies of Mars had decided to detain Joe to try him for treason, I remained completely shocked. It seemed so absurd, so implausible I couldn’t accept reality.

Two days passed, as I tried to obtain a pass to visit him in the quarters where he was held, but I wasn’t allowed to communicate with him at all in the end.

My requests were simply ignored. All I knew came from the words of others, and like a lot of Joe’s life, it was full of contradictions.

The only thing that seemed certain was that his health had deteriorated, and this I didn’t need to struggle to imagine.

I never saw him again.

The last image I have of him comes from an amateur video, still in circulation, of him being escorted to an unknown destination for medical exams.

In the video, Joe struggles to stand by himself, his face haggard, his hand pressed against his head, in what I imagine is a futile effort to ameliorate his migraines. It seems like he’s murmuring words to himself or chewing something. A woman draws near him. She seems disappointed and angry at the same time.

She spits, “I thought you were the son of god.”

In the video, Joe turns briefly to face her. Even though it seems impossible, a sort of smile lifts his sunken face. “Aren’t we all?” we hear Joe ask her.

On the morning of the third day, after a night spent tossing in bed and crying alone without tears, I heard the news that Joe had escaped. Or simply disappeared.

When the guard entered in the early hours of the morning to bring him breakfast, after hearing his anguish all night, only quieting at dawn, they found nobody inside the room. His small room, devoid of windows, had now become a site of pilgrimage.

Though they searched for him in the following days, neither he nor his body were ever found. This only served to heighten the rumors and legends.

The morning I heard about his disappearance, I didn’t go to work. I ran instead to the greenhouse. Despite all my hopes I found an empty room, an oasis of peace, refuge from all the absurdity of those strange days.

I remember wandering in silence between the plants, trying to remember Joe’s face the first time I’d met him in that place, but I couldn’t. His image continued to escape me, until I saw the decompression chamber door that led onto Mars left ajar.

Holding my breath, I disrobed and put on the one spacesuit that I knew Joe kept in the armoire next to the door. Beyond the glass walls of the greenhouse, my eyes glimpsed something that I struggled to accept.

I went through the door. It wasn’t my first time venturing onto the Martian soil outside of the colonies’ cupolas. It was the first time my feet stepped on a grassy, verdant lawn, streaked with flashes of violet in the hot light of the red planet.

Joe’s strange organism romped along the soil, digging deeply with its roots and stretching towards the stars with fearless leafy stalks, fighting against the Martian aridity. Fruits budded from the shoots before my eyes. A chrysalis burst open in that moment and a small butterfly flapped its wings a few times before falling to the ground, in an atmosphere still inadequate for its functioning.

In the distance, other lush patches were dispersed among the Martian soil, like a trail of footsteps that vanished into the horizon.

Mars’s terraforming, which should have required centuries, took no more than twenty-five years to be completed.

The organism emitted greenhouse gases through its roots’ processes in the ground, heating the planet, melting the permafrost underground and releasing pristine water. The atmosphere thickened, enriched with oxygen emitted from photosynthesis. The small blue butterflies nurtured the pollination and growth of other plants.

Many years have passed since then. The war ended long before terraforming was completed, when conditions of the planet allowed us to become independent from Earth not just in our dreams.

Now, when I sit in the shade of a giant oak basking in the sunset, people only see a crazy old woman cupping her ear as if listening for something.

It doesn’t matter.

After all this time, when the swarm of blue butterflies soars by me in a form I know well, it’s good to listen to Joe again.

To hear his voice in the beating of their wings that softly pronounce my name with the same sweetness from a time past.

“Roselyn . . .” they say.

“Roselyn.”