This is what the sun looked like on the day my grandchildren climbed aboard the space elevator and we all said goodbye.
The ocean was a sullen color, like pewter, but with a shine. Maybe tarnished silver would be a better comparison, the surface dull but with a brightness hidden underneath. The sun had a pinkish tint to it. Pink is normally a warm color, but this pink was cold. Like the inside of a shell fresh out of the sea or a thin sliver of pickled ginger. Like skin, when all the warmth of blood and a beating heart has gone out of it and it’s just a container, no longer full.
There were clouds, a very few of them, scattered across the sky. The kittiwakes and skua glided on the wing, and every now and then one of them would let out a cry.
Ella, that’s Kathe and Linde and Ivan’s youngest, cried when she hugged me. She put her arms around my waist, and pressed her face into my stomach. I think she’s too young to really understand the nature of this goodbye, but she could read the mood. Ryan, he’s the middle child, promised to video call every day as long as they were in range. Dani, the eldest, didn’t seem to know what to say. They shook my hand like Linde had, very formal, and that was the end.
I watched the elevator as far as I could. After a while the sun shifted to a white-yellow, cold, pure. The color of goodbye.
§
June 26, 2176 - Luang Prabang
There’s nothing particularly special about this day, no reason it deserves to be memorialized, but life isn’t all about the big moments. In fact, life is mostly what happens in-between, and the sun shines on those days, too. That’s what this catalogue is intended to capture, after all.
I remember the day because it’s the day I stopped thinking about the future as an abstract. For as long as we’d known each other, we’d been working toward the future, cataloging and protecting and gathering seeds in the vault at Svalbard. But that future was a nebulous concept. It was for someone else, not us. That day, I started thinking about the future as a personal concept, like maybe one day we’d have a family, and they would make everything we were trying to do to make the world a better place—even in small ways—worthwhile.
We were about 60 miles outside of Luang Prabang on that day, hiking. I don’t remember the names of all the villages we passed through, but we started at the temple at Mt. Phoushi, overlooking the Mekong River.
We were there to pick up three new and heartier strains of Oryza sativa—rice, in layman’s terms. They could have been shipped to the vault, but you convinced the director to let us act as couriers. We changed each other over the years, Mila. When we first met, you would quote rules and regulations and procedure for hours on end. I like to think I taught you to appreciate the spirit of the law, as much as the letter of it. It’s like the way my concept of the future changed. I’d like to think I helped you see that we weren’t just protecting plants as a nebulous concept; we were protecting living things you could touch and hold in your hand and appreciate for more than just their potential.
And you taught me to see a wider world. Before I met you, I never thought much beyond the present moment. You expanded everything. I loved you more than I loved myself, and that made my world so much larger than it had ever been before. You taught me that the future is worth protecting, even the parts I won’t live to see. You taught me to have hope.
We did some touristy things in Luang Prabang—the temple, the Royal Palace, the Night Market—but it’s the hike I remember the most. Our guides took us in a boat across the Nam Xuang. I think there were about ten of us, total. Tourism was on the decline already in those days. We hiked for maybe five or six hours, past rice paddies and through jungles. We stopped in a little village where we watched children play soccer.
And that was where it hit me, the idea of having a personal stake in the future. We hadn’t even talked about kids yet, but I found myself wondering what our family would be like. Not if we would have one; it suddenly seemed like a given. We were so in love, how could that love help but spill over and spread outward and keep on multiplying itself?
I wondered if our kids would be happy. If they’d play soccer, running around with pure, unfettered joy. I wondered if they would grow up to have kids of their own.
When Kathe was born, I worried about so many things. I wanted to do everything to protect her. You were the one who finally got me to relax, to let go a little. She would be her own person; we’d given her everything she needed to get a good start in life. And you were right, Mila. We raised some good kids. Or, really, they grew into good people, and we managed to not fuck it up by getting in their way.
After that first village, we hiked to another village where all the houses were on stilts, and they gave us strong rice wine to sample. At our last stop, the villagers had set out a dinner to share with the hikers and our guides on a long wooden table in a barn. Before we ate, we watched the sun go down. It was less a sunset and more a sense of the light being swallowed by the mist, diffusing and turning the sky the color of a new peach, sliced thin and still holding the warmth of the day—sweet and melting and bright on the tongue.
What I remember most is the way the light caught in a curl of your hair, just before the sun vanished. It reminded me of our wedding day, except instead of flyaway strands, the hair stuck in the sweat on the back of your neck. It was like you’d found a way to braid the sunlight and make it a part of you.
I know that sounds incredibly sappy, but it’s true. Or, at least, I’ve built it into truth over the years. That’s what people left alone with their thoughts and their grey kittens named after prehistoric animals do. They invent narratives to make sense of their lives and to fix the pattern of those lives more firmly in their minds. Even if that isn’t the way the sunlight looked on that particular day, that is how I choose to remember it. That is the image I’m sending out among the stars.
§
June 30, 2232 - Svalbard
Today was the last day, or the first day, depending on how you look at it. The Arber has officially set sail, or whatever word one uses for the departure of a ship the size of a city without masts or cloth or anything resembling a sail.
This is the first day of the new age of humanity.
Our children’s children’s children, will they even be human anymore? Born in space, living all those years on a ship under sunlamps and breathing recycled air. Will they still call themselves human when they land on a new world and make it their own?
I don’t have any answers. How can I speak to the big questions of life when the small ones still elude me? How do you love someone and let them go? How can someone be a stranger and still be your own flesh and blood? How can you feel closer to someone who isn’t even on Earth any more than you ever did when they were right there beside you?
Indulge me for a moment, Mila. I know you always hoped my relationship with Thomas would be more like my relationship with Kathe. The truth is, there was always a rift between us. Maybe we both sensed it, and so we kept our distance. Or maybe it was just a failure on both of our parts to try.
When you died, the rift widened, and everything came crashing down. Thomas blamed me. He told me in no uncertain terms that I should have forced you to undergo gene therapy. As if your body, and the decisions you made regarding it, were any business of mine. I told him over and over again it wasn’t what you wanted. You’d considered and discarded that option.
There were days I agreed with him though, and that hurt the most. I lashed out at him, when I really wanted to lash out at you. At the end, when you were delirious, I couldn’t help thinking—could I have done more? Could I have forced you? In the end, I respected your wishes. In the end, I sat by and watched you die.
I know, there are no guarantees that the gene therapy would have worked. It might have led to more suffering. But I can’t help wondering. . . . You dedicated your life to the vault and to Svalbard, to cheating nature by finding stronger, heartier crops to withstand droughts and monsoons. You were determined to do everything you could to give t
hem more than a fair and fighting chance to survive. Why wouldn’t you take that road yourself?
I didn’t understand at the time. I think I’m closer to understanding now. At my age, death is no longer a nebulous concept far away. I’ve thought about it and what I do and do not want it to be. I don’t want to be hooked up to machines on a space ship fighting for a few more hours or months or years. I don’t want to be stuck in a cold-freeze drawer just so my distant descendants can put flowers on my grave under an alien sun. It’s my death; I want to own it. Death is the last thing we do as human beings, so I’m damned well going to do it on my own terms.
Does that make sense, Mila? That I can blame you and hate that you left me and still send our children off into space and insist on staying behind? I suppose we’re all a bundle of contradictions in the end. Maybe that’s what ultimately what makes us human. No matter what other changes or adaptations occur, that will survive.
Kathe came and sat on the porch with me before boarding the last elevator to the station. We sipped strong black coffee. She held my hand. We didn’t speak. In the end, at the end, we sat and watched the skua and the kittiwakes. We watched the sun play on the water. Then she kissed my cheek and that was goodbye.
I watched the sky for a long time after she left. I imagined if I shaded my eyes just right, I would be able to see something as the Arber set sail. I would know, or feel it deep in my bones. But there wasn’t anything to see.
No, that isn’t quite true. There was the sun. On the last day, on the first day, the sun was bright and clean and it threw a halo around itself, a celebration or one last goodbye, although it was only those who were staying behind who would ever see. The light on the last day of the world was every color the sun could be, all the colors it won’t be in space.
I read once that every person who sees a halo around the sun or the moon sees their own individual halo. Even two people standing right next to each other wouldn’t see exactly the same thing. The light breaks through different atmospheric crystals for each of them, no two beams fracturing in quite the same way. Every halo is unique.
I suppose that’s all there is. I’m sending this out into the stars to travel to new worlds, so new generations will be able to look back to know how the sun looked on a particular day back where their parents’ parents’ parents came from. So they’ll know how the sun looked to one specific person as it bounced off the water or rested against the skin of someone he loved or slipped beneath the rim of the world.
Now, I’m going to make myself another cup of coffee and sit out on the porch a little while longer. Maybe I can even coax Predator X onto my lap. I may be alone, but I’m not lonely. I have everything I need. You’re buried here, and from the moment I met you, I’ve never known how to be anywhere else but with you. The future is out there among the stars, but I’m where I belong. I’m home.
Her Own Captain
Likhain
About the Contributors
Jess Barber lives in Cambridge, MA, where she spends her days (and sometimes nights) building open-source electronics. She is a graduate of the 2015 Clarion Writing Workshop, and her work has recently appeared in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection. You can find her online at www.jess-barber.com.
Santiago Belluco is a neuroscientist born and raised in Brazil before moving to America to get the usual degrees needed to become a real scientist (namely a funded one). He now lives and works in Switzerland, where he writes speculative fiction and studies the neurocircuitry of vision.
Lisa M. Bradley writes speculative poetry and fiction inflected by her Latina heritage. Most recently, her work has appeared in Interfictions, Uncanny Magazine, and Strange Horizons. Her collection of short fiction and poetry is The Haunted Girl (Aqueduct Press 2014). Forged in the scalding heat of South Texas, she now lives in Iowa. She loves horror movies, gothic country music, guerilla art, and art journaling.
Chloe N. Clark holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment. Her work appears in Abyss & Apex, Bartleby Snopes, Apex, Hobart, Midwestern Gothic, Sleet, and more. She currently writes for Nerds of a Feather and Ploughshares. She can be followed @PintsNCupcakes.
An Ottawa teacher by day, Brandon Crilly, has been previously published by On Spec, The 2017 Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide, Third Flatiron Anthologies, and other markets, with an upcoming short story in 49th Parallels: Alternative Canadian Histories and Futures. He was a semi-finalist in the 4th quarter of Writers of the Future 32, contributes regularly to BlackGate.com, and is the Assistant Editorial Director of TEGG Games. You can find Brandon at brandoncrilly.wordpress.com or on Twitter: @B_Crilly. His first TEGG short story, “Wizard-sitting,” is now available at onderemporium.com.
Yilun Fan is a PhD student of comparative literature at the University of California, Riverside. She loves reading and writing science fiction because she believes in the power of story. She used to work for the official website of World Chinese Science Fiction Association as an editor and is now a columnist for Science Fiction World magazine.
Jaymee Goh is a Malaysian-Chinese writer currently based in California, writing a dissertation on steampunk. Previous publication credits include Strange Horizons, Science Fiction Studies, and more recently recompose magazine.
José M. Jimenez is a programmer with the heart of a poet. As Director of Research Information Systems at the University of Iowa, he creates systems that streamline administrative processes so researchers can focus on their projects, not paperwork. His interests include data visualization, workplace diversity and inclusion, geocaching, cooking, and Ingress. He is a proud parent and a beleaguered cat guardian.
Likhain is a Filipina artist and writer who works in ink, watercolor, poetry, and odd bits of creative non-fiction. She is a recipient of the 2016 Tiptree Fellowship and has been nominated for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist. A loving albeit wayward daughter of Metro Manila, she now lives in regional Australia with her partner, their pomeranians, and their princess cat.
S. Qiouyi Lu is a writer, editor, narrator, and translator; their translation with Ken Liu of “Chimera” by Gu Shi appeared in the March 2016 issue of Clarkesworld. Visit S. online at s.qiouyi.lu or follow them on Twitter at @sqiouyilu.
Maura Lydon is a college senior studying Environmental Science with a minor in Creative Writing at Hollins University. You can find her stories in Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology and the online magazine Abyss & Apex. She enjoys writing, reading, and growing as many plants as will fit in her room.
Camille Meyers is a writer and wildlife conservation biologist with wanderlust. She has worked with falcons in Belize and as a zookeeper in Washington State. Currently, she is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University, where she received the 2014 Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship in Creative Writing. She served as poetry editor for Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment and volunteers in wildlife rehab at the Iowa Wildlife Center.
Lev Mirov is a queer disabled mixed race Filipino-American living in rural Maryland with his spouse Aleksei Valentín. Before he was a published poet, he studied medieval history, magic, and religion. His Rhysling-nominated poetry has appeared in Through the Gate, Liminality Magazine, Strange Horizons, and in other magazines and anthologies, and his speculative fiction has appeared in the anthology Myriad Lands.
Canadian illustrator and comic artist Christine Moleski recently graduated from the University of Regina (BA English, BFA Visual Arts). She self-published her first original comic book, ICE, as part of her graduating exhibition. She is interested in the individual human experience and how that experience resonates with humanity as a whole. “Solar Flare” was inspired by cybernetics, i-tech, and clean energy sources. You can find ICE, and more of her work, at www.christinemoleski.com.
Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of eight books of fiction and poetry including, most recently, Black Arcadia, Meditations of a Beast, Butterfly Dream, and Age of B
light. She serves as poetry editor of LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction and was co-editor with Nalo Hopkinson of the original fiction section of the Lightspeed Magazine special issue People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! Widely anthologized and published in magazines, she grew up and continues to live in a rural town in southern Philippines.
joel nathanael is a second year MFA candidate in the Creative Writing & Environment program at Iowa State University. His writing interests are in and around the nexus of art and science. He has been given the title of space poet, due to his unrelenting obsession with the subject matter, and where he is often situated, the honorific is apt. While in the MFA program, Joel wishes to further his understanding of poetry through practice. He is currently working on multimedia thesis exploring recursive methods of interpretation of a given source text—space poetry.
Clara Ng is a confused snail scooting through life, soon to be a confused snail with a proper degree. Her greatest desire is to be a Renaissance snail, skilled in all the disciplines, but that’s sort of up in the air right now. She has appeared in several university theatre productions, been published in some other small magazines, and is very honored to be included in this anthology. Someday, she hopes to live in a solarpunk world, as one might have guessed.
Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation Page 27