Cass was a sugarcane. Clockwise from Cass were Rochelle, Douglas, Bree, Mack, and Bert, and spiralling out from there were Tully, Miranda, Muriel, Murray, Kathryn, Tommy, Hec, and the rest. Their fronds lent on their friends in rows and diagonals as they stretched out to the sun. The sticky winter breeze shuffled through their green and crispy brown arms. A soft brush of pink seedpods rose from Cass’s neck, and Rochelle’s and Douglas’s and the rest of them’s too.

Up past their heads, past the daylit full moon, veer right at that big warming sun, think about the furthest distance you can think of and then double it, or triple it, depending, was a small wave of energy. A neutrino, making its way. Been making its way since its way began, eons ago. Tracing back along our path, this quantum bean swung past the sun, rounded the moon, and headed down, down through the atmosphere and into Cass’s outstretched seedhead.

The wave crashed, and continued crashing. Vibrating through the outermost seedshell, seed, hizote, stem. Branching inwards and down still. Layer of stem after layer, past leaf, through root, rhizome, mycelia. Then up. Retrace our path. Rhizome, root, stem, seed. Rochelle, Douglas, Bree, Mack… Bert, Tully, Miranda…. The rest. From road to barbwire fence, connected through all crop, arrested by only clay, silt, sand. The sun arced, rounded the sky, then fell past the horizon. The moon glew brighter, then took a bow and followed its warmth below the horizon. Darkness stuck for some time.

One pink tassel detached from Cass and fell quietly onto a green frond, slid to the side, then down to the dry earth. The wind blew cooler but otherwise unchanged and irreverent. Cass shivered, then brustled against their neighbours, and they with their neighbours. Fronds overlapped, interleaved, small doses of friction across long and many blades. And then Cass lay down.

So did Douglas, Bree. Muriel, Murray, Kathryn. Leaning on their neighbours and they on theirs, each at a slight angle, arcing in a slow and graceful radius around the centre of the paddock. Some leant out at a sharper angle, sparking offshoot circles tighter and against the grain of the first. Rochelle, Tommy, and others remained upright, rustling in the breeze as they had always, as if unchanged and unphased by what had struck their neighbours, yet their stillness unequivocably critical as movement in this universal plot. Within the main circle, smaller groups followed the pattern, leaning more sharply the more central they began. In the middle, each cane growing less than a canelength from the perfect centre leaned directly inside, forming a twisted, perfect, concentric cone.

Lying, standing, lying, standing. Each cane hummed its natural hum, as they had done since their first sett was staked in its row, but now with a new resonance. An energy, spreading through neighbours and on return home finding its strength has grown. A wave reverberating through itself, each peak lifting the next and each trough deepening. Though only a few stars found their way through the clouds, a dry glow began to heave in this humid darkness, pulsing and stretching, cresting through the cloudcover and up to the sky. With no need this time for sun, moon, or path, this wave echoed a tunnel through our galaxy. Vibrating through the stuff of time itself it found its own way home before it had yet left the earth.

A mighty pulse of energy zig-zagged through the ship’s wiring, ending in a terminal that flashed green, green, green, green. “Head,” the operator flashed through a pair of glass communication fibres that led to the navigation chamber, “we have it.”

Roy saw the message flash through their grey eyelids, which were only translucent at this early stage of rest. They sprung out of their bedpod, peeled the young eyelids away, and washed their eyes in the fountain to make sure they saw clearly. The nav chamber’s satellite link flashed the same green, green, green.

Roy looked out the ship’s wide forward porthole at the terrifyingly dark nothingness that had defined their entire life. Generations of lives, really, defined entirely by the 48 colours generated by the ship’s terminals, and the 49th – absence. Roy knew there were other colours. They remembered how they glowed in their grandparents’ bedtime stories. But having grown to form entirely in dark transit, Roy had only lived a 48-bit life. When they tried to use the old words, they came out coarse and tactless. With no ancestors left to communicate with, their language drifted slowly into predictable and inadequate 48-bit rhythms. When Roy dreamed, their dreams were mostly of darkness.

Not any more. As Roy gazed through the abyss, their vision grew filled with swirling hues, gradients of light and dim, cool and warm. “Good bean,” Roy flashed out to their old neutrino friend, one of trillions who had searched the universe without the capacity to understand why or what for. Without the capacity to sense Roy’s message, or perhaps to ever be reunited again. Roy dimmed a little, but continued. “Thank you, friend. We’re on our way.” They thought of that old toast, once shared over annual feasts with their ancestors and crew. Roy’s eyes widened.

“To light,” they flashed into the dark emptiness, now filling Roy’s eyes with hope. “To life.”