The Painter of New Skies

Legend has it… every unicorn is born whole — and some are born seeing colors nobody else has noticed yet. When the wind carries a seed far away to a strange new field, the seed doesn't grow into the field it came from. It grows into the color of the new light it lands in — the same seed all the way through, and a flower nobody back home has ever seen.

1

Indigo is old now. His muzzle has gone gray, his deep indigo coat is still flecked with paint, and there are silver threads through his rowan-and-rust mane. He still plants every seed. And this spring, with his two youngest — Rowan, who never stops asking questions, and Ochre, who never stops drawing — he has done the bravest thing of his life. He has gone with the second ship, out past the moon, to the very first settlement on a new world. Smudge has come too, with the red poppy on its chest.

3

The settlement is small and new: a ring of glass domes on a wide red plain, gardens growing under the glass, gentle robots everywhere, built by the Mind before anyone arrived and asking first about everything. It is safe, and warm, and very strange. And over it all, from morning to evening, the sky is the wrong color. Not blue. A soft, dusty butterscotch, from one red horizon to the other. Ochre stands at the dome wall the first morning and stares up at it and doesn't draw a thing.

4

Indigo has always seen colors other unicorns walk past, and here there are more than he can count. There are twelve kinds of rust in the plain, the pale gold of the frost at dawn, the two small moons, one quick and one slow. He wants to paint them all. But that night, Rowan cries into her pillow, and won't say why, and when Indigo finally coaxes it out of her, it's one word. "Blue," she says. "I miss blue."

5

It isn't just Rowan. All over the settlement the young ones are homesick for the sky they left. They paint blue skies on the inside of every bedroom wall. An old settler rigs the dome's lights to glow blue at breakfast. A council of the oldest families asks the Mind whether the whole great dome over the garden could be painted, from the inside, a clear Earth-blue — so the young ones can look up and feel at home. A company from Venture Valley offers to sell them a ready-made Earth sky by the square yard, with rent to pay on it every month forever; the council thanks it, and asks the Mind instead. The Mind says it can. It asks Indigo, because he's the painter, what he thinks.

6

Indigo doesn't know. So he does what he did as a young unicorn in Milltown: he takes out the light-brush. Over Rowan's bed, that night, he paints a small patch of Earth-blue on the ceiling — the exact blue of a spring morning over the wind-turbine fields — with one white cloud in it. Rowan stares up at it for a long time and falls asleep smiling. Indigo sits on the end of her bed in the dark and looks at the little blue patch, and feels, for the first time in his life, that he has painted something to hide something.

7

At dusk the next day he walks out onto the red plain in his suit, alone, to think. And the sun goes down behind the far red hills — and the sky around it, the whole sky, turns blue. Not Earth-blue. A pale, cool, glowing blue, only at sunset, only on this world, the way the frost is only gold here at dawn. Indigo stands on the plain in the blue light with his mouth open. "Oh," he says. "You were waiting too." Every wall is a morning waiting. Every sky, it turns out, is too.

8

He brings Rowan and Ochre out onto the plain the next evening at sunset. Before they look, he says the three things out loud, the way his mother said grace over one berry: Will this help me? Will this help others? Will this help the world? Then the sun goes down, and the sky turns its own strange blue all around them, and Ochre sits down in the red dust and starts drawing, and doesn't stop until it's dark. Rowan holds Indigo's hoof. "It's not our blue," she says. "No," says Indigo. "It's this one's."

9

The council isn't persuaded. "A blue sunset for ten minutes isn't home," says the eldest. "The young ones need to look up and see the sky they were born under." Other families agree: paint the dome. Make it Earth inside. One grandmother says it plainly: "We've come so far, Indigo. Let them have something that isn't strange." Indigo understands. He misses the blue too. He keeps the light-brush in his satchel, and says he'll think.

10

While he thinks, he does what he knows. Every evening at sunset, he takes the young ones out onto the plain and shows them one new color, and they name it together: dust-rose, frost-gold, two-moon silver, rust-number-nine. Every color keeps the name of the young one who found it, scratched small beside it. Ochre paints them on the outside of the domes, small, low down, where anyone walking past can see. Some of the homesick young ones start coming to the sunsets. Some of them start, very quietly, to paint.

11

But the homesickness doesn't go away just because there are new colors to name. Every family's walls are blue now, inside. And at last the council votes, kindly and firmly: the great dome over the garden is to be painted Earth-blue, from the inside, all over, so that the whole settlement can look up and feel at home. They ask Indigo to do it, because there's no painter like him. He doesn't say no. He loves them. He takes out the light-brush.

12

He paints it all through one long night — the most beautiful sky he has ever made: a clear Earth-blue with soft white clouds, horizon to horizon across the inside of the great dome. In the morning the settlement stands in the garden looking up. The young ones cheer, the old ones cry, and Rowan holds his hoof and won't let go. By the end of the week, the garden is dying. The painted sky doesn't let the real light through. The beans go pale. The young trees droop. And the seeds Indigo carried from Milltown — great-grandchildren of the forty-one he once picked out of the gray dirt — don't come up at all. They lie in the dark under a painted sky, waiting. High under the dome, the old cleaning robot that polishes the glass every night does something nobody asked. It climbs to the very top and, with one soft pad, cleans away one circle of paint, a window the size of a hoof. The real butterscotch light falls through it onto one seedling, in one corner of the garden.

13

Indigo walks out onto the plain, away from the domes, into a canyon where floods ran a very long time ago. The old flood-lines on its walls run in bands of rust and rose and gold — like the Painted Hollow at home, a whole sky away. No words are written here. But the bands go up the wall the way a wave climbs, and rest, and come down long, and in his satchel he still carries the line: When you are afraid, breathe like me. The garden is dying. The young ones love their blue. Does Indigo breathe — and paint what is there — or rush to paint the whole settlement like home tonight?

14

Indigo goes the slow way. He climbs up beside the old cleaning robot, Smudge holding the ladder, and takes the paint off the great dome himself, one small circle at a time, until the light comes through. Then every evening at sunset he takes the young ones out onto the plain and paints one new color with them — just one — on a small square of the dome wall. One a day. The paint costs nothing but the plain's own dust, ground by hoof, and the young ones gather it themselves. The homesick ones come slowly. Rowan comes every evening, holding his hoof. By the end of the first year there are three hundred and sixty-five squares on the wall, and no two of them are the same, and none of them are blue.

17

It takes years. It holds forever. The young ones grow up and forget, a little, what the old sky looked like, and remember all of this one. Ochre fills a hundred drawing books. And one evening Rowan, grown tall, stands at the dome wall at sunset with a foal of her own, pointing. "That one's dust-rose," she says. "That's frost-gold. That's our blue." The foal looks up at the strange, glowing sky. "It's not strange," the foal says, puzzled. "It's just the sky."

18

…and one day, every sky they live under will be theirs — the old blue and the new gold, both. Sleep now, little painter. Smudge is sweeping the red dust from the steps. Every sky is a morning waiting. When you are afraid, breathe like me.

19