Dotwork pear on a forearm

The last pear came off the south wall this morning, the one that got through the frost in the dead corner of the dome. I held it up to the lamp the way you taught me, and the speckling on its skin had shifted again, as if someone had been stippling it with a fine brush while I slept. Hollis says it is only sugar bloom. I have decided he is wrong, because I counted the dots and there are four hundred and twelve, which is the number of stars the old survey called bright enough to steer by.

I know you think I have gone soft out here with nothing but tins and grafting knives for company. Perhaps I have. But the orchard ledger is open on my table, and every row in it is a tree, and every tree carries the name of a star, because your grandmother named the first one before the hull was sealed. Bartlet's Cross. Lantern Seven. Yesterday I took a bud from the one called Vela and set it onto the stock beside the sluice, then wrote its position in the book: forty degrees from the hub, two metres off the floor, facing the false sun.

What I had never noticed until today is the swirls. They curl through the fruit like the eddies in the water tanks when the pumps kick on, and I think they are the currents the first crew followed before anyone thought to chart the sky. Maybe the pear was never just a pear. Maybe it is a little map of where we came from, pressed into skin so we would not forget it.

I have kept one seed in my pocket, wrapped in a strip of old ledger paper. When the hatch opens and the real dark comes in, I will plant it under a sky that has not been painted on the dome ceiling. Bring the children to the wall in the morning and tell them to hold the fruit up to the light. Let them count the dots. Tell them the number.