“You have a choice,” Kiva had said. “And whatever you choose, the future of my planet depends on it. The future of my people, and yours. And our future.”
Matthew had been silent after that, but he knew what she was saying. She was saying that no matter how she felt about him, no matter the way her body had gone soft under his touch and melted into his as they pressed their lips together just moments earlier, there were some things that the two of them could not overcome. Some things that she could not forgive.
Now, walking back, Matthew felt certain that he knew the choice he had to make.
He had to decide if he would tell Earth that Gle’ah was a habitable planet or not. He had to decide between the Vagri and the human race.
But did he really have to choose? What if the Vagri and the humans could learn to live in peace?
Even as he thought it, he began shaking his head to himself. No. The thought that his people and Kiva’s could live together on the planet was naive at best, and dangerously ignorant at worst. Matthew himself had admitted to Kiva that his people destroyed everything they touched. And it was true. How else to explain what had happened to Earth? Animal species driven to extinction, the atmosphere ruined beyond repair, the land bled dry of everything that humans could consume or sell for profit.
Matthew glanced out over the landscape of Gle’ah and wondered what it might look like five, ten, or twenty years hence if the human race resettled its billions to this place. In his mind’s eye, he saw small settlements crop up here and there, growing slowly upward and outward as they changed into massive, ugly, filthy cities that stretched from one horizon to the next. He saw massive machines digging the grasses away, bulldozing smooth the gentle swell of the hills. Quarries reaching down into Gle’ah, mines and oil rigs and factories spewing contaminants into the air.
His people didn’t deserve this planet. They’d destroy it, just as they’d destroyed Earth. Even the Ancestors, an alien intelligence that existed only to protect life, wouldn’t survive—some businessman would find a way to capture them, package them, and sell them to the highest bidder.
Humans were a disease. A cancer.
Matthew’s steps grew quicker as he became more sure of his decision. When he really thought about it, it was obvious. He couldn’t allow Earth to resettle on Gle’ah. The human race had had its chance in the great evolutionary struggle to survive. Now, it was up to Matthew to make sure the Vagri had theirs.
When Matthew returned to the Corvus, he saw the speeder hovering riderless just outside the airlock.
Dunne was back.
He went inside the ship and found her in the lab.
“Matthew,” she said, lifting her head. “I’m glad you’re back.”
“Where were you this morning?”
“Before you woke up, I had a visitor.”
Matthew’s brow lifted in surprise. “Oh? Who?”
“It was that boy. Po. The one who almost killed you. He came not long after you left.”
“And what did he want?”
“It was hard to tell. Without you and Kiva here to translate, we had to communicate with hand gestures. But I gathered that he wanted me to come with him.”
“And where did you go?”
“He took me to another village. It was all men. He seems to be part of some warrior culture, separate from the Vagri.”
Matthew nodded. “Kiva told me about them. She said that they’d been banished from the village. The Vagri only use them when they need to, as mercenaries.”
“Yes, that’s what I gathered. But that’s not the most interesting thing. Look at this.”
Dunne reached out her hand, and Matthew came forward to see what she was holding. It was a downy, whitish substance that reminded Matthew of cotton.
“What is that?”
Dunne shook her head. “I wasn’t sure at first. But they’re using it as a kind of drug. Eating it, smoking it.”
“Po told you all this with hand gestures?”
Dunne smiled. “Yes. It was difficult. Almost like a game of charades. But I didn’t have to guess too hard. While I was in the village, practically half the people were high on it. I could see exactly what was going on. I also heard what they call it: maiora.”
“Maiora,” Matthew repeated, puzzled. Just when they thought they’d figured out this planet, it revealed new mysteries. “Did you analyze it?”
“I did. It’s the Ancestors. The same nanite we saw earlier. But arranged together into a crystalline form.”
Matthew worked the ball of maiora back and forth in his hand, rubbing the white substance between his fingers and thumb. “Like snow,” he offered.
“Yes. Like snow. And when they eat it, or smoke it, it lets the Ancestors loose in their body, and—”
“Let me guess. Hallucinations? Visions? Telepathic communication?”
“Well, Po and I didn’t get that far. Telepathy would’ve been a hard one for our little game of charades. But that’s my guess, yes. And there was something else. Before I left.” Dunne squinted, her eyes growing cloudy.
“What? What is it?”
“Something Po was trying to tell me. I didn’t quite get it. I was trying to ask him where the maiora came from. In response, he waved his hands off toward the horizon.”
“That seems clear enough,” Matthew said.
“I suppose. But it was what he did next that was so puzzling. I still don’t know what he was trying to convey with his hand motions. But it seemed like he was describing structures. Buildings, or ruins, maybe. I don’t know.” Dunne shook her head and trailed off. “Anyway, I came back here to analyze the maiora. Maybe we can take out the speeder later to find what Po was talking about. What about you? I forgot to ask you what you talked to Kiva about yesterday. Did you get anywhere with her?”
Ears burning, Matthew turned away and glanced at Dunne out of the corner of his eye, checking her expression. There didn’t seem to be any double meaning in her words. She simply wanted to know if he’d discovered anything new about Kiva or the Vagri.
“Nothing new to report,” he said finally, then cleared his throat as he tried to change the subject. “I’ve been thinking, though. About what we talked about this morning. About what we’re going to do about Earth.”
Matthew took a long breath. Dunne looked up and waited.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Here’s what I think … ,” Matthew began, but at that moment the quantum transceiver squawked on a table in the corner of the room.
“Corvus,” came Alison’s voice on the other end. “Corvus, this is Control. Come in, Corvus.”
Dunne nodded toward the transceiver. “You’d better get that, I suppose.”
Matthew walked to pick it up. He pressed the button on the side and lifted it to his mouth.
“Copy, Control. This is Corvus.”
“This is Matthew, right? Matthew Tilson speaking?”
“Yes, Alison. Same as always.”
A pause. “Well, Matthew, we’ve got someone here who wants to speak to you.”
Before Matthew could say anything, another voice came on the line.
“Matthew? Matthew, are you there?”
He recognized the voice immediately.
Matthew’s heart slowed. His blood turned to ice in his veins. His hand clutched the transceiver in a grip so tight that the skin on his knuckles turned white. His thumb trembled as he pressed again on the button to speak.
“Mom?”
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Matthew’s stomach clenched. His vision went spotty and he began to feel lightheaded. He staggered back against the wall and sank to the floor, then put a hand to his forehead, the other still clutching at the quantum transceiver.
“Mom, is that really you?”
“Yes, it’s really me.” Through the buzzing and crackling of the transceiver, Matthew’s mother’s voice was exactly as he remembered it—low and sonorous, strong, but now with a slight quaver, making her sound as though she was goi
ng to burst into tears at any moment.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine, Mom. You don’t need to worry about me. Tell me about you. What’s going on over there?”
There was a long pause.
“I don’t know, Matthew. I woke up not that long ago, and they brought me to this room with all these men and … and told me that I needed to talk to you. I thought maybe something was wrong, something at school. But then they said no, they said that you weren’t in school anymore, that you’d signed up to … to fly across the galaxy? Matthew, is that true?”
“It’s true, Mom,” Matthew said. “But I did it for you, for the money, so you could wake up and get a cure for your cancer.”
She let out a shuddering sound, and Matthew understood that she was crying.
“I never asked for that!” she sobbed. “When you said I should go into cryostasis, I said yes because you and your sister wanted it—but I never wanted this. I never wanted you to ruin your life for—”
The line went silent.
“Mom!” Matthew shouted. “What are you doing to her? Put her back on, you hear me? If you hurt her, I swear to God I’ll—”
“Matthew,” came the sound of another voice through the transceiver. This one was familiar, too.
“Soph?” Matthew shook his head, letting out a kind of desperate laugh. Beads of cool sweat formed on his forehead.
“Yeah, it’s me.” Sophie said. She, too, sounded exactly as Matthew remembered her. In the hundred years he’d been gone, she hadn’t aged a day.
“Soph, what the hell is going on?”
“They froze me,” Sophie said. “Right after you. They froze me and just kept me … kept me on file, until you landed.”
“But what about the money?”
“There was never any money, Matthew,” Sophie answered dully. “It was all a lie.”
Matthew lifted his head and looked up at Dunne, who’d come around the table to listen to what was going on. Her face had gone ashen.
“What are you talking about?” Matthew asked.
“I’m telling you, they lied to us. If there ever was money, I never saw any of it.”
The wrenching pain Matthew felt in his gut began to turn into something else. His eyes narrowed. He gripped the transceiver even tighter, until he thought he might crush it flat in his grip.
“The day you left for the Core to start your mission,” Sophie said, “some guy came to the house. He said that he needed my ident to transfer the funds for Mom’s treatment. But then when I held out my arm for scanning, he grabbed me and injected me with something. Next thing I know, I’m waking up in this strange place, they’re telling me one hundred years have passed, and that I need to talk to you.”
Matthew didn’t say anything. He simply sat, stunned.
“Matthew, you have to listen to me. Are you listening?”
Matthew waited a moment before pressing the button on the transceiver. “I’m here.”
“Look, things are bad over here. I don’t know everything. But it seems we’re in some kind of space station, orbiting Earth. Something’s happened on the surface. Something bad. It’s worse here than when you left. I don’t know …”
Matthew waited. When it seemed that Sophie wasn’t going to finish her thought, he asked, “What is it?”
“I don’t know how much longer we can survive.”
The transceiver crackled and buzzed. Matthew heard a rustling as it moved from one hand to the next. A new voice came across the speaker. It was Alison.
“Matthew.”
Matthew looked off to the side, pressing the back of his hand against his mouth as he felt his eyes begin to water. He shook his head.
“I can’t believe this,” he said. “You betrayed me.”
“It wasn’t my idea, Matthew. I … I didn’t know.”
“Don’t say my name,” he said, his voice sounding weak and pleading in his ears in spite of his efforts to project his anger across the light-years. “You don’t get to say my name. Not after this.”
“I’m sorry. Really, I am. You have to believe me. But you also need to listen, now more than ever. Look, things on Earth are bad. After you left, resources really started to get scarce. Not just oil and gas—basic stuff like water and crops. And about a year ago, the storms started. Huge sandstorms, over the entire face of the Earth. OmniCore crumbled. Billions died. The survivors had to go underground to stay alive. Communications are spotty, but we know they’re down there.”
Alison’s voice cut off. There was a moment of silence, then the transceiver crackled and a new voice came on. A man.
“Matthew, this is Charles Keane,” the voice said. “You know me, Matthew. I spoke to you on the day that you went into the freeze. I went into the freeze the same day. Do you know why I did that? Because I believed in you, Matthew. I believed in the mission. I believed that one of you would find a place for the human race to live.”
Matthew tried his best to breathe slowly. He could feel his heartbeat in his temples.
“But my mother. My sister …”
“We had to do it, Matthew,” Keane said. “The Exo Project was perfectly designed, but it had one flaw: after we sent people across the galaxy, how could we be sure that they’d fulfill their mission properly? So far away, traveling for so many years, you might forget about the human race. Lose perspective. That’s why we had to keep your family alive. So you’d be invested in what was happening over here. The human race is surviving, Matthew—just barely, but we’re surviving. And waiting. Waiting for something that could give us hope. Waiting for you.”
Matthew didn’t speak. He didn’t know what to say.
“I understand that you’re angry, Matthew,” Keane said. “And I would be, too. But your mother and sister—they can survive. You can see them again. If the planet you’re on is the one we’ve been waiting for, you can go back into cryostasis. They’ll go into stasis, too. And when they arrive on the planet—when we all arrive—you can pick up exactly where you left off. You understand?”
Matthew pressed his lips together and breathed through his nose, trying to calm himself. “I understand.”
“Good. Now can you put Dunne on? We’ve got someone who wants to talk to her as well.”
Matthew looked up at Dunne. Her mouth came open and she lifted a hand to cover it, as if to stifle a sob—but Matthew could barely see her. His vision had gone blurry; there was a ringing in his ears. In shock, he set the transceiver clattering on the floor and dragged himself to his feet. Dunne crouched to pick it up and began speaking into it, but Matthew didn’t hear what she was saying. He left her behind and staggered to the door.
Stumbling, Matthew made his way through the corridors of the Corvus and came out into the airlock. His breath came quick and panicked as he waited for the door to open, then he rushed out into the open air of Gle’ah. On the grass, he crouched and put his hands on his knees as a wave of nausea overtook him. He felt as though he might vomit. But the moment passed. Panting, he spat a single glob of foamy white spittle onto the ground, then pushed himself up to his feet. There was a rustle of footsteps behind him. He turned to see Dunne, her face streaked with tears.
“They’ve got one of your people, too?” Matthew asked.
Dunne nodded. “My grandson.” Her voice was a thin croak, and Matthew understood at once that she had been weeping in the ship.
“How old is he?”
“Seven. Only seven.” Dunne dropped her gaze and blinked the last of her tears into the grass. “He should have lived a full life. That money was supposed to be for him.”
“What are we going to do now?” Matthew asked.
She pointed to the horizon. “I’m going,” she said. “I’m going to the place Po told me about. The place where the maiora came from. I’m going to figure out what’s going on here, once and for all. If we’re going to bring Earth to this place, then I at least want to understand what it is we’re destroying.”
Sh
e turned back toward the airlock, probably to retrieve the speeder to go search for the maiora—but Matthew didn’t follow her.
Instead, he stepped forward, further into the plain. His steps were slow at first, hesitant, but the farther he went—the farther he got from the ship, from the transceiver, from the voices of his mother and his sister and the manipulations of Charles Keane—the faster his steps took him. He didn’t think about where he was headed. It was as though his feet had aims of their own. Soon he realized: he was walking toward the village.
Toward Kiva.
When he drew near to the village, when he knew that the crest of the next swell would bring him within sight of the clustered huts—Matthew broke into a sprint. He flew. He’d never run so quickly before. His legs churned beneath him, muscles burning, toes kicking up behind him with each step. He felt as though he was barely touching the ground.
And then, in the distance, at the foot of the hill that led to the village beyond: a figure. Distant, small, but unmistakably distinct from the sameness of the landscape.
It was Kiva. She lay in a cleft place beneath a small hillock, her eyes closed.
Matthew came to a halt a dozen paces away from her. He was panting.
On the ground, her eyes snapped open, and she sat up, her hand propped on the ground behind her. For a moment, they simply looked at each other.
Matthew gasped as the memory came surging back into his body.
Of course. This was the place. This was where they had met.
“You remember now, don’t you?” Kiva asked. “You remember the dream.”
Matthew didn’t answer at first.
“Yes,” he said finally, once he’d caught his breath. “I remember.”
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kiva
Kiva looked at Matthew’s face and felt his mind across the space between them. She knew at once that something had happened. Something was wrong.
“So,” she said, bending her knees toward her chest and grasping the backs of her thighs. “Your choice has come at last.”
The Exo Project Page 25