We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  [Daley and Taban leave the ship. The HARE follows, marking the landing site’s coordinates as an arbitrary Prime Meridian, with coordinates of 53°45′N 0°0′E. The two men shield their eyes and scan the horizon. Except for their heights, it’s hard to tell the difference between them: their suits and golden faceplates look exactly the same.]

  Daley: Hey, this isn’t so bad.

  Taban: I guess. Careful; don’t fall and break your hip.

  Daley: Let’s look around.

  Taban: What? I thought you wanted me to repair the FTL engine.

  Daley: You can do it in a minute. Come on, you don’t want to look around? This is an undiscovered planet. Where’s your sense of adventure?

  Taban: Just a second ago you were scared shitless of even going outside. Now you’re calling it an adventure?

  Daley: The fresh air is inspiring.

  Taban: Should I get the railgun?

  Daley: What for? There aren’t any humans on this planet, the thing said so.

  HARE: Correction: there are no humans within the parameters of the area I scanned.

  Daley: No one asked you.

  Taban (sighing): Okay, fine. Just a quick look around.

  Daley: That’s what I’m talking about.

  [The camera lens frosts over slightly. There is no sign of the fractal structures on the horizon, the ones that had been in sight during the Wyvern’s descent. The ground around the HARE is icy and flat, but it looks like it has a strange consistency: not like snow, more like frozen cobwebs. Daley and Taban seem to have trouble walking through it. Their boots sink several centimeters into the ground with each step, in squeaking crunches. Daley curses for a few moments, his breathing labored. Taban remains silent.]

  Daley: Look at all this. Think about it. We’re the first and only humans to set foot on this planet. If I hadn’t taken that shortcut around Luxue, we never would have found this place.

  Taban: Uh-huh.

  Daley: Look at that shit. What is that? Snow? Ice? Who knows? It’s all new. Right?

  Taban: Yeah.

  Daley: Isn’t this great?

  Taban: I mean, sure. But it’s not like we can tell anyone about it, afterwards. Otherwise ISF will be on our asses faster than a rocket of snakes on a jackrabbit.

  Daley: What?

  Taban: Nothing. Never mind. Also, isn’t Sunfarer going to be pissed that we’re so late with their payload?

  Daley: Fuck Sunfarer.

  Taban: All right.

  Daley: . . .

  Taban: . . .

  Daley: We could sell the coordinates, you know. On the sly.

  Taban: Huh?

  Daley: You know. Anonymously. I bet we could make a lot of money that way. It’s like—space tourism. You know? Like a secret club. I bet people would pay a lot of money to have access to a planet no one else knows about.

  Taban: I don’t think anything stays anonymous with ISF.

  Daley: Trust me, it does. And why do they get first claim on new planets, anyway? Whatever happened to the spirit of entrepreneurship? Anyone who finds something first should get the rights to it, right?

  Taban: There must be a reason for them to do it this way.

  Daley (snorting): I bet.

  Taban: . . .

  Daley: . . .

  HARE: . . .

  Daley: Daleytaban. Hapfin?

  Taban: What?

  Daley: What we could call it. Some combination of our names. That’s fair, right? I like Hapfin.

  Taban: . . .

  Daley (breathing heavily): What do you think?

  [Taban and Daley are working their way across the sticky half-ice in a circle, keeping the ship at their right shoulders at all times. The HARE focuses its lens on seemingly random patches of frozen ground.]

  Taban: You hear that sound, HARE? The sound of Daley wheezing away?

  HARE: Affirmative.

  Taban: That’s the sound of a lifetime of spongeburgers and milkshake cubes.

  HARE (processors whirring): These are the things that nourish USER Daley?

  Taban: That’s right.

  Daley (breathing heavily): Fuck off—with your—alpha wave diet. That shit’s for Martian hippies.

  Taban: What are hippies?

  Daley: Group of people—back on Earth. In the old times.

  Taban: Oh. Did they also support eco-friendly, waste-free eating habits?

  Daley: Something like that.

  Taban (checking his wrist console): Okay, I think it’s time to head back.

  Daley: What? Why? It’s only been twenty minutes.

  Taban: Yeah, but I need to look at that engine if I want to make the most of the daylight and this oxygen tank. And you’re fat. So you need to go back and rest.

  Daley: I’m fine.

  Taban: No doubt. But we really need to get back. This has been fun and all, but it’s not what we’re here for.

  Daley: It could be.

  Taban: Let’s go back.

  VIDEO LOG #10—Ship Designation CS Wyvern 7079

  Day 2: 19:02 UTO

  [Back inside the ship. The HARE sits in the corner of the cockpit while Taban lies on his back, tinkering with something under the dashboard. Daley enters the room, sweating.]

  Taban (speaking from under the dashboard): Where have you been?

  Daley (taking off gloves): Out.

  Taban (rolling out from under the dashboard): Out? You were out there again?

  Daley: Yeah. Just going for a walk.

  Taban: You really shouldn’t go out there alone, Daley. What if you slipped and fell on the ice? Or your oxygen tank sprung a leak? Or you got lost? We wouldn’t know.

  Daley: Who’s ‘we’?

  Taban: Me and the HARE.

  Daley: Oh. Well, come out with me next time.

  Taban: I’ve been fixing this damn engine.

  Daley: How’s it looking?

  Taban: I’ll need at least another half-day or so to get it running. It’s a two-person job. The HARE helps, but—

  Daley: Uh-huh. So, listen—

  Taban: —unfortunately neither of you have any engineering experience. What?

  Daley: Let’s claim this place.

  Taban: I thought we already did. What’d you call it? Hapfin?

  Daley: It’s better than Harpa, or whatever you said for its designation. But I mean officially claim it.

  Taban: And how do we do that? You wanna leave a flag with our names here after we leave?

  Daley: No. I say we go to ISF and tell them we found it.

  Taban: Oh. So . . . No.

  Daley: Hear me out.

  Taban: Huh.

  Daley: We go to ISF, right? We tell them that we found this amazing, virgin planet. But we don’t give them the coordinates to it unless we get credit for finding it. And a cut of the profits.

  Taban: Profits? Have you seen this place? It’s a frozen ball of ice in space. What kind of profits do you think we’re going to get?

  Daley: It’s a brand spanking new planet, Fin! There’s gotta be something here. Some resource, some chemical element we don’t have back on Earth! Something! They’re at least going to pay to have researchers come out here. We don’t have the resources to mine anything other than ice, but if something’s here, and the ISF can get at it—

  Taban: And what makes you think they’d honor any agreements they made with us? They’d say, “Oh, sure, you can have the money, you can name the planet,” we give them the coordinates, and then it’s fuck off Fin and Hap, no one’s ever going to believe you.

  Daley: We’d come up with a backup plan. We could—we could threaten to release the HARE tapes to the public. Yes! We could do that. Their reputation’s already hurting bad, with the rebels and the privacy shit—they’d be scared shitless,
they’d have to listen—

  Taban: Daley . . .

  Daley: Listen. This could be big. I know this is your first job, but you’re thinking too small—clients, deliveries, Sunfarer, all of that other shit. But trust the guy who’s been doing this for twenty years: it’s not worth it. I don’t think you’ve really grasped how huge it is that we’ve found this place. I think we’ve gotta take advantage of it. I think we’ve gotta make our mark. It was—

  Taban: Don’t say it was fate that led us to this place. Please don’t say that.

  Daley: Okay. I won’t say that. But I’m serious. I have this feeling that something valuable could be here. We just have to spend a few days looking around. If we find something, we can take a sample, show it to ISF. We say, “There’s a lot more where this came from!” But we don’t tell you where it is until we get paid. And recognized. You know?

  Taban: Daley. I just want to go home.

  Daley: So do I. But I want to go home rich. The king of a new planet.

  Taban (rubbing his face): . . .

  Taban: So, what, you want us to stay a few more days and . . . look around?

  Daley: That’s exactly what I want.

  Taban: . . . Okay. I mean, it’s going to take me at least another day just to repair the FTL, anyway. I guess we can explore more while I do that.

  Daley: Yes! That’s what I’m talking about, Fin!

  Taban: But no going out without each other. Or without the HARE. I’m serious, Daley. No going out by yourself.

  Daley: Sure, sure. We’re all in this together. No making it alone.

  6.

  Park grew up an only child. She never knew her mother, who was a Dryad—one of the traveling nomads that now lived in the wildernesses blanketing Earth. Park’s father, a plant researcher, had encountered Park’s mother during a field study of the kudzu vine, the growth rate of which had been drastically mutated by the Comeback. He told it that way to his brother, too—“encountered” her, as if Park’s mother were a wild animal that he had happened to come across. Maybe that was how he really thought of her. He said that the woman, Willow, had been born into the jungles of the Comeback, had grown up with no education and no modern technology to speak of. She’d come with him into the city for a short time to give birth to Park, then vanished back into the dense wildlands, never to be heard from again.

  Park’s father went after her, of course. They found his body weeks later, bloated and stripped naked by human scavengers. He had walked right into a pocket of hyper-rich, dense oxygen created by the Comeback plants, a natural trap that filled a victim’s blood with tiny, rapid bubbles as he hiked on. He’d had a grand mal seizure and died without leaving a will. After that, Park was given to his only living relative, his younger brother Sylas: a terse zoologist who was not very comfortable around human children.

  After hearing the stories, Park—who even as a child was not overly given to whimsy—often fantasized that her mother was something of a jungle queen. Tanned, muddied, she’d roam the dark groves of Park’s imagination with an untamed mane of hair and rattling anklets of animal bone, ululating to her tribal kinsmen and fending off genetically spliced leopards with spears she’d carved from flint.

  When she grew older, Park realized that the reality of it was probably not so glamorous. Real Dryads and Dryadjacks—or Ferals, as the unkinder term for them went—were dirty, vicious scavengers, thickly cloaked to protect themselves from thorns and masked to prevent their own suffocation from the oxygen traps. Illiterate, they were usually ready to cut your throat for anything as shiny as a keychain.

  No way of knowing whether her mother fell into this group, or if she was one of the rarer, more peaceful Dryads who roamed the jungles crooning about Providence and the bounty of Mother Earth. No picture of her existed, and her father had never even told anyone the woman’s last name. For all they knew, Park’s mother hadn’t even known it herself.

  There were plenty of those homeless, nameless transients in the world back then. The Comeback was just beginning to die out: a series of natural disasters that had devastated Earth’s population, tailed by decades of hyper-accelerated plant growth. People went to sleep in their normal beds and, overnight, found their walls and mattresses invaded by plants. And that was only if they were lucky—if they had beds left at all, after the relentless barrage of tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that had wiped out half of the world’s cities.

  But everyone agreed that the plants were the worst part. There was no way to fight them; how could anyone battle the encroachment of something that swallowed human structures so utterly? How could they fight against the planet itself? Bombs did nothing; bullets were wasted on targets that threaded through the very floorboards. Any chemicals that might have been effective at beating back the invasion would have also killed or sickened any humans in the area. There was no winning that war. Maybe if they had had time to prepare, some kind of warning—but everything had fallen apart so fast.

  Pundits claimed that the phenomenon was Earth’s retaliation against millennia of human pollution: the planet’s immunoreaction to heightened levels of carbon dioxide. A cleansing event. The system purging itself of the diseases that were killing it. The plants soaked up and converted the dangerous levels of CO2 in the atmosphere—but they also happened to subsume the very structures that had created that CO2 in the first place. It was, the pundits said, the era of humanity’s reckoning. Earth’s Comeback.

  Hence the aimless wanderers, the refugees, the people raised to adulthood in the wild. There were biodome cities, of course, which offered some protection against the colonizing plants—but they never had enough room, or otherwise people didn’t have enough money to make it in.

  And then there were the budding colonies in space, providentially placed by the Interstellar Frontier mere years before the Comeback hit. Most people fled to the sanctuaries on Phobos and Mars; there was plenty of room there. The only catch was affording it, and if you couldn’t afford it, you had to contract yourself to a lifetime of employment to the ISF. A rite of conscription, it was called. A lifetime of obeying their every command. But it was, people claimed, a small price to pay considering the devastation that awaited them back on Earth. They shed and discarded their old planet like it was yesterday’s damp coat.

  Park was fortunate enough to grow up in one of the biodomes, a shining construction off the California coast. Often she looked out past the clear walls, toward the shore, and imagined a figure emerging from the compressed green carpet of trees. The figure, blurrily, would have a face similar to her own, with wild cascading hair and arms tattooed with plant dye. She imagined the figure spotting her in the heart of the city and beckoning. At her signal, Park would be lifted out of New Diego’s glass bubble and deposited into her mother’s arms, which would feel like the bowers of a tree.

  But of course, the figure never came.

  “What was my father like?” she asked her uncle Sylas once.

  He had been silent for a while. “He was a God-loving man,” he said, finally, decisively.

  At the time, Park misunderstood this: she did not know who God was, and assumed it was some other, secret adult term for her mother. And therefore, her mother must be God. But later she would realize that Sylas was most likely being sarcastic: would a God-loving man really tumble around with an unwed Feral woman in the mud and the leaves?

  “Perhaps,” Glenn had said once, when she was older. “Recall the story of Adam and Eve.”

  “That would make me Cain,” Park said, who had been reading up on the subject. “And you’d be Abel. And that means we’ll try to murder each other.”

  He’d blinked, perfectly serious. “I would never harm you.”

  Park had turned away. “I know.”

  She was a stoic child—watchful, perspicacious. Almost fierce in her solitude. Throughout her youth, her uncle—awkward in the presence of
a little girl—left the majority of the child-rearing to a top-of-the-line nanny bot: an android named Sally. And then, when Park was older, Glenn.

  Park remembered the first time she encountered Sally, with her shining limbs, her bland smile. She had entertained no notions that Sally was her returned mother: she was far too tame, too ordinary-looking, with her crisp white uniform and her brown hair scraped back in a bun. The child that had been Park had said, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Sally,” Sally answered. “I live here now.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m here to take care of you.”

  Park had said nothing; had only gauged this new presence silently. Sally hauled her up by the armpits and set her on the high barstool her uncle had forbidden her from climbing on; she began to roll the dough for a flourless bread. Park had never seen or eaten bread before. Many common crops, including wheat, had been wiped out by the invasion of the Comeback plants, and were only eaten now as a luxury.

  At first she merely watched, fascinated by the contortions of forming dough in Sally’s hands. When Sally offered her a wad, Park refused, shying away; she wasn’t used to dirtying her hands.

  “I just want to look,” she said. She was five.

  Sally switched tactics. “Don’t you want to help me?” Her kind, tinny voice sounded as if she were speaking from the inside of a metal trash can. Park was surprised, and strangely moved; she nodded. No one had ever asked her for her help before.

  She remembered the softness of Sally’s dusty hands—the comfort of kneading the cool dough. Sally had encouraged her to taste a piece of it. “Children at your age develop through sensory play and kinetic experimentation,” she said.

  Park had not understood this or what it meant, but sensed that it was important. She obeyed, putting the soft little triangle of dough in her mouth, making a face as it dissolved saltily on her tongue.