<
“No,” Tate said wearily.
The old arguments. Amelia hadn’t wasted any time bringing them up. Tate felt a great sadness well up. Amelia was their pessimist — no, worse: their existentialist. She never let Tate lose herself in her experiments for long without pointing out how useless they all were.
<
“I don’t know,” Tate said quietly. “As many as we could find.”
<
<
<<— were castaways,>> Amelia interrupted. <
Amelia had a point.
Tate had spent sixty years searching the universe— more than three times longer than she’d lived on Earth. She’d learned the universe was a big and empty place. The messy human civilization on Earth had been a more precious thing than anyone had ever imagined. Even Attbi had turned out to be empty, dead.
“We’ll just have to keep looking,” Tate said sadly as she began to pack up her camera and notes.
The bug had long since vanished into the goo. It might be hours before another appeared and Tate’s knees weren’t up to the wait.
<
<
<
Tate sighed as she slowly made her way up the ramp and into the ship. She suddenly found herself wishing Amelia had remained silent. What was the point of going over the same ground again and again?
She preferred to look forward to a long bath. The goo was already crusting in her boots. Field-work took a lot out of her these days. Not surprising, considering she was nearing her eightieth birthday. She sat on her bed and peeled off her filthy socks.
Over the years, she’d transformed the bridge into a more human-friendly space. She’d gotten rid of some of the old Shipwright furniture and replaced it with what she needed — a bed, a bathroom. The view screens were still there and so was a chair that allowed her to control Daughter. She rarely ventured into the other parts of the ship now. It had been years, maybe even a dozen years, since she’d visited the basement.
Tate was lost in her own thoughts, hardly paying attention to Yago and Amelia’s banter Then she realized they’d grown quiet. They were waiting for her to answer a question she hadn’t heard.
“What?” she asked irritably.
<
“We can’t go because I don’t want to go,” Tate said mulishly. She was aggravated to be having this conversation yet again. Why couldn’t they just accept the way things were?
The discussion made her feel like a petty tyrant. Yago and Amelia couldn’t do anything but nag her.
They couldn’t go anywhere she wouldn’t take them. Well, too bad. Earth wasn’t on the itinerary.
<
Tate froze in the middle of untying her boots. This wasn’t the old argument. Yago was taking them in a new direction. Tate stared at the floor — and then flung her boot across the room. It looped through the air and landed harmlessly.
“Why?” she yelled angrily. “Why go back there? What’s it going to prove? You — you’re hoping some green Eden is waiting for us there and it’s not, it’s not! All that’s waiting for us is devastation! It’s only been sixty years. Nothing will have changed!”
<
after seeing all of those empty planets — to see even the relics of a civilization …>>
<
“Enough,” Tate said with disgust. “This isn’t an argument, it’s nostalgia.”
<
<
“Well, snap out of it,” Tate said. “I said we’re not going and that’s final. Now, if you don’t mind, I want to take a bath and rest.”
<> Yago promised. <
Yago didn’t press the issue. Perhaps he guessed she’d never answer his question.
She couldn’t tell him. Telling him would mean giving up the one secret Tate had successfully kept from Yago and Amelia for all these years. Her dreams. Her dreams had kept her alive.
They’d come to her regularly for sixty years. She’d walked with the ragged bands of people thousands of times. Sometimes the dreams were indecipherable. Sometimes they were sad. But often they were hopeful. And, occasionally, she dreamed of the green Earth, of Jobs and his children, of a society born again on Earth. A dream like that could sustain her for weeks. She fed off the joy. If she went back to Earth, she’d be forced to admit that her dreams were just that — dreams.
That was never happening.
The sorrow of it would kill her.
The dream came again that very night.
One part of Tate’s mind was aware of her body, sleeping aboard Mother, the goo still caked under her fingernails. Another part of her brain was on Earth, the good green Earth.
Billy was there, looking as young and fragile and strange as he had on that day long ago when they’d gathered to board the Mayflower. He was holding her hand gently and leading her through a lush forest. They were barefoot. Twigs and ferns and tiny saplings broke under their feet. Leafy trees towered overhead. Tate heard crickets and birds and the chirping of chipmunks. The air was warm and moist on her skin, the thousand tones of green soothing to her eyes.
She’d never had this exact dream before.
It was lovely.
Billy led her to a clearing and Tate saw Mother. She had no sense of surprise. Her dreams were always haunted by the same elements, recombined in endless ways. Billy, the ragged band, Mother. The same pieces shuffled over and over.
This time, in this dream, Mother was nothing more than a ruined hulk, half-submerged in humus and vegetation. A huge hole was torn in her hull, exposing the bridge.
Mother crashed on Earth. That was part of the puzzle.
Billy squeezed Tate’s hand and pulled her forward. They climbed up a small crumbling embankment of soil the wind had piled up under the ship and stepped into the bridge.
Tate saw that Billy’s face was heavy with sadness. She tried to step back. She didn’t want to have a sad dream. She wanted one of the sweet, idyllic ones. But Billy shook his head vigorously and pushed her on.
Tate stepped reluctantly onto the bridge. She saw the forest was claiming Mother, burying her, hiding her Vines grew over the console
s. Mushrooms sprouted on the soft cushioning of the seats. A bird of some sort had built a messy nest of sticks above the door.
Seeing this, Tate’s chest ached with longing. The simple organisms humans took for granted, or even despised — the spores, the fungi, the bacteria — Tate had spent most of her life searching for them in the dead universe. They seemed precious to her now.
Tate turned to Billy. “How can you be sad here?” she asked. “This is glorious! This is life!”
With a heavy slowness, he nodded toward one of the Shipwright’s chairs, toward a lump or clump of
— something she hadn’t noticed because the bird’s nest and the mushrooms had claimed her attention.
Tate moved closer. More puzzle pieces. She wanted to understand. She, too, knew her time was short.
Some rotted colorless fabric with a darkish stain underneath. It moved faintly, undulating in an unseen breeze. Tate leaned forward and pushed the material aside.
A body. A human body. Two arms, two legs, a head.
Dead.
Tate stepped back, her hands hovering in front of her mouth.
Someone had died sitting in one of the Shipwright’s chairs on Mother’s bridge. Nobody had come to claim the body. Nobody had slipped it back into the Earth and hid It out of sight. What was that?
Tate caught sight of something gray, coarse, fuzzy. It looked like hair It looked like her hair, her nearly eighty-year-old hair No. No, it couldn’t be.
One of the band. That had to be it. One of the band had gotten onto the ship and died. Of course, none of the people she had dreamed about had kinky hair like hers. None of them were African or African American. But — so what!
This was a dream. Mother wasn’t on Earth. She hadn’t crashed. Tate couldn’t possibly be looking at her own final resting place. She turned to flee. She didn’t want to contemplate her own corpse.
Billy was right behind her. Tate stopped running when she realized he was moving toward the corpse. She recoiled as he leaned over it and gently pressed his lips to its skull.
“Thank you, Tate,” he whispered. “You were always the most generous of the Remnants.”
CHAPTER 16
“HE’S GONE.”
Tate felt terrible when she woke up. The images from her dream — the corpse, Billy’s kiss, his words — were still storming through her mind. And her body felt lousy. Her limbs were achy, her throat scratchy. She felt like she was coming down with something.
“Oh,” Tate moaned before she even sat up.
<
“I’m aware of that,” Tate said dryly. She groaned as she sat up and swung her stiff legs out of bed.
“Why are you in such a foul mood?” Since the voices in her head weren’t able to sleep, she often woke to an argument in progress. <
“What did he say now?” Tate asked, mustering her patience. Sometimes Yago and Amelia behaved like two ill-suited roommates.
<
“Come on, Yago,” Tate urged halfheartedly. “What’s your side of the story?”
Yago was silent.
Tate felt a flash of irritation. Bad dreams, the flu, and the silent treatment from Yago?
Beautiful. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so awful.
The ship was completely free of disease-causing germs. So, on second thought, this couldn’t be the flu. It was probably sore muscles, a touch of arthritis. God, she felt terrible. She hadn’t been this sick since — when? Right after Charlie died? Decades ago.
<
An easy opening. Tate doubted Yago could resist the temptation of pointing out that Amelia was the queen of sulking — and that she was several years older than he was.
Yago was silent.
Tate experienced a cold flash of fear that made her stumble on the way to her chair Yago was dead. Suddenly she knew it was true. He — he must have felt something. He must have known the end was near. That was why he’d made that comment the day before. He’d known …
Tate was having a hard time breathing. She was alone now with Amelia. Only Amelia. And who knew how long Amelia would live? One day, possibly one day quite soon, Tate would find herself entirely alone in the empty universe.
“He’s gone,” Tate whispered.
<
All that long and sad day, Tate sat on her bed and told Amelia what she could remember about her dreams.
Amelia listened. She asked questions. And she began to help Tate solve the puzzle.
It took them seven cycles to decide what to do and another 544 cycles to figure out how to do it.
Some of the things they needed to know were there in Daughter’s database.
Other things they needed to know were beyond human understanding when those databases were created. So Tate and Amelia worked on finding the answers themselves. Tate’s patience helped. So did Amelia’s intellect and her deep knowledge of physics.
And the dreams.
Many of the answers came from the dreams.
The puzzle pieces fell slowly into place.
Tate plotted a complicated course, their last, on the day of her eighty-first birthday.
She and Amelia were waiting, seventeen cycles later, when Earth loomed up in the viewscreens. They could see firelight. A few civilizations clung to the coastlines in Europe, Africa, and South America.
Not new civilizations.
Old ones.
Because Tate and Amelia hadn’t just traveled through space, they’d traveled back in time. The year wasn’t important. The only important thing was that the Rock wouldn’t hit Earth for centuries to come.
North America was still largely dark, home to only a few thousand Native Americans.
Somewhere out in space the asteroid was winging toward the planet, destined to wipe out all of the beautiful green and blue.
But now, Tate was convinced, there was a vanishingly small chance that all that devastation could be — not avoided, but undone. She was planting one of the tools to undo it before it ever happened.
“Daughter, identify the continent of Asia,” Tate said.
“Identified.”
“Accelerate,” Tate said.
Mother began to shiver from the speed. Tate and Amelia saw a golden fire around the viewscreens as particles from Mother caught fire as the ship entered the atmosphere.
A few traders felt the impact of the crashing ship.
Tate died instantly. Amelia lingered for a moment longer and then her consciousness also blinked out.
Remnants 13 - Survival Page 9