by Nathan Dodge
“The bright things are stars,” he said.
“Yes, the bright things are stars.” I watched him carefully, trying to gauge whether I was hitting the right balance between truth and story. The information would be of use to him eventually, as the other children grew. He would teach them through these stories too, even if for the moment this information was purely excess data.
The red of the moon glowed more brightly through our windows as we begin to rotate into descent. I gently strapped Terre into place, then myself, before darkening the windows. There was nothing sitting out that could damage us except for my most recent pen, which I tucked, after a moment’s consideration, into the inside of my jacket.
“I will tell the babies about the stars,” he said firmly. “Because I’m their big brother.”
“Because you’re their big brother,” I agreed. My throat tightened a little, and I realized I was what Kentaro used to call choked up.
I wondered suddenly if Kentaro was joking about the name Terre, if he was only humoring me when I announced it. I wonder if he understood what I was trying to do, carrying out the name of the only family I’d ever known. I cringed at the thought of how desperate I must have appeared to please him, suggesting a Japanese name.
A hundred years after the human race probably went extinct, and I was still worried that my father didn’t really love me.
* * *
The surface was slightly colder than our remote data had indicated, the sky bluer than expected. I would have known this if I’d spent more time in space observing, but I’d been anxious to land the ship safely on the ground, to reach journey’s end at last. The site we had selected provided a broad range of mineral and metal resources, along with the strange crystalline growths that were scattered on the planet’s surface, but in general it seemed lonely. There were great red rock formations that reminded me of nothing so much as giant clamshells sitting on their edges. I could see a few massive ones some hundred meters high far in the distance, but most ranged in the one to ten meter range, creating exquisite little alleys of intersecting walls.
A few of the clamshell-shaped formations contained bluish-green whorls within them, but only the ones at the center of the clusters. I investigated them briefly and decided it was algae, or this moon’s approximation of algae, at any rate: miniscule, waving growths anchored in these small, protected, windless areas. The wind was mild by day, but by twilight the winds increased their speed, howling among the columns of rock, which explained why the tiny formations grew only at the centers. I took a small sample to review later.
During my brief expedition, I adapted myself to the surrounding area without difficulty—I was built to survive—and by the time I arrived back at the pod, I was quite comfortable, albeit a little worried about Terre.
Built to function more like the humans (just as I was built to worry for him as well as them, layer upon clever layer of cautions), Terre could not adapt his body without a direct command, something I had been carefully programmed to avoid. I ordered the replicator to build him warm woolen socks, long underwear, a coat, and a hunter’s hat.
Although created to be a co-monitor of the children, Terre was also, like me, ultimately a guinea pig, and my worry was genuine that his narrow, human-like programming would leave him vulnerable. It was meant to, after all: he was here to help me ascertain the relative safety of this environment, a trial run before the human babies. I fussed over him, and although he didn’t complain, his face and nose grew red and his hands were like ice by the end of our outing.
As a result, we rested the remainder of the day. I refused to take him out again until I could ensure his comfort. His shoes were a poor choice, I decided, and I quickly had three new pairs of boots under construction.
I was irked to discover not long after we landed that the log of our travels had just become available. I hadn’t realized that it had recorded our departure until it had informed me at arrival that the log was complete and ready to review, a picture and appropriate readings taken once a day through all our long travels. Today, I decided, I would review this history.
I slid through images and found a few early pictures where the Earth was still visible. She was soft and roundly blue, diaphanously draped in clouds. I could see a small satellite twirling about her, one of their alternate safety nets. My fingers hovered over the second picture taken, which appeared almost like an artist’s rendering, the moon rising gently, even seductively, over her shoulder.
Two pictures further, and Earth was gone. Completely. I paused, searching my memory, adjusting for spin and time, identifying the stars in the image one by one. I connected myself to the computer to view the image from inside. I looked where Earth should be, small, distant, just barely shimmering. She was not there.
I had my answer at last.
I wondered if there was an accident with the drives. I even briefly wondered if it was possible to have moved the entire earth at light speed in some sort of technological breakthrough. But after a moment, I laid that frail hope to rest.
I sent a prayer up for my father.
* * *
Telling Terre of Kentaro’s death, of everyone’s death, brought me to tears, but he seemed to have expected it. Just as I was designed to be the eternal optimist, Terre, it appeared, assumed the worst. Or maybe he was an even better optimist, ignoring past pain.
We threw ourselves into our work after that. Three incubators were set up in our housing pod so that there was hardly room for Terre and me at all. The external nursery, a kind of longhouse we were building on the outside of our ship, was already in motion. We also erected a small farming bay. A very small one, actually, but I would have few to feed at first. I had spent such a long time trying to decide which three embryos to start with while I was on the ship, but I was ready now.
Terre was almost vibrating with excitement when we finally pulled the embryos, delicately placing them in the incubators.
“Grow fast, babies,” he whispered. I smiled and started the units.
* * *
The first failure was upsetting. I reviewed the environmental controls a hundred times, the incubator even more. By the time the second zygote failed, I had torn the machine apart and put it entirely back together without finding the smallest of deviations from the perfection I thought Kentaro had ensured.
And then the third.
I set my nanites to analyzing, and they brought me so much information that the organization alone took me days, much less the analysis. The chemicals, the local flora, the little variations. We had analyzed this planet before—it was why we knew to come—so at least I was able to shelve some of it, instead searching for that one tiny, cruel piece of information we might have overlooked, wherever it was buried. I looked, and looked, and looked even deeper.
I could look for years if I had to. My father had given me patience.
I looked some more.
* * *
I couldn’t find it.
The equipment functioned properly; the embryos were viable. Everything worked exactly as it should.
Except the children wouldn’t grow.
Nearly a hundred embryos gone.
* * *
Terre had taken to crying over the lost babies. I told him it was time to take a nap. When he went to sleep, I put him in hibernation. It would be another long, long wait for him. It was the kindest thing to do, although once again, I was very lonely.
* * *
The wait had been so long. I knew that the embryos would be reaching their maximum storage period. The accumulation of radiation, however small, added up over centuries. I had to begin to test my knowledge. I would have to try, once more, with faith, with love, with hope.
* * *
I failed.
* * *
The day dawned hot, the red rock scintillating when I woke Terre. I thought I was past mourning, or I wouldn’t have initiated Terre’s awakening. But I found myself emotional again now, in the microseconds of his aw
akening. All the cautious monitoring of the case’s condition, the temperature, the delicate calculations of sibling spacing, the worries about whether it would be best to raise them separated by subject of interest or if I should put my poets and engineers and physicians together.
All the lullabies, for nothing.
I was still deciding what to tell Terre when he awoke, eyes fluttering rapidly, skin rippling as he pulsed off the planet’s creeping red dust. He sat up rapidly, then pushed past me to look at the strewn cases, accessing the files that told him what he was looking at, an emergency function that was only permitted under great stress. He rapidly pieced together the information himself, and tears began to well up in his eyes and pour down his face. He understood.
“Stupid babies wouldn’t have survived anyway,” he said. “Too weak.” He wiped the tears off his face, trying to hide them from me. I nodded.
“It’s true,” I said. “You’re much stronger.”
“It’s not their fault, though,” he added, his guilt almost palpable.
“Of course not,” I agreed. “We wanted them to be okay. We worked very hard.”
He turned suddenly and ran out the door and into the canyon’s depths.
I was surprised by his swift movements. I felt half-frozen with grief. But then, he was a later generation than I, and every generation was an improvement. He would be okay. I understood he was angry. I was angry, too. I had lost Beethoven and Brahms, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Newton and Tanaka, and I felt it all. I had failed them: all of them. My father Kentaro, who called me daughter, my people, the million children I would have had. I ran through their names like a rosary, every one indelibly etched on the tremulous atoms of my memory chambers. And my son. My son who would never have the siblings he was meant to raise with me. My son, who would never know a face other than mine.
Terre came back. Despite my grief, I tried to pull myself together for him, only to see it was unneeded.
“It’s okay, mother,” he said, chirping excitedly. “See? I brought you a gift.” His smile lit up the world, and he left the crystals in my lap before scampering off again into the night. His sorrows were forgotten. I stared at the round crystalline forms, the curious growths so common here.
My father called me daughter once. My nanites felt my tension and teamed in my hand, organizing and awaiting my command.
* * *
To say I lacked the requisite tools was an understatement. The nanites designed to sustain us were quick to patch small injuries, but large ones might demand days, even weeks to repair. Were I so foolish as to fall off a cliff, it might be a month before I was properly functioning again.
To build another me? Multiply that difficulty times a thousand.
The ship’s computer rebelled at my first attempts. Dedicated to the hopes of a human race, it didn’t understand the sudden urgency for supplies outside its designated parameters. In the end, I had to rip open the control panel and directly interface, overriding and redesigning her internal framework of beliefs so that she’d build what I wanted her to build.
“Forgive me, sister,” I said when I finally cracked the panel open against her ardent wishes. But I was whistling a moment later.
Terre was my son, but the more time we had together, the more I saw an inheritance too marked to be coincidental. I dwarfed Kentaro in the days I knew him, the maternal roundness of my figure in total counterpoint to his slender form. But it wasn’t only Terre’s almond eyes and lithe figure that reminded me so keenly of Kentaro. Terre’s suggestions left me wondering if Kentaro still whispered to me now through his last, greatest work.
I began telling Terre stories of his grandfather as we worked, and the longer we worked, the more the intervening years faded away, leaving Kentaro more alive to me than he had been in centuries. And through it all, we built.
The days bled into years as we constructed the tools to create the tools we needed, and finally, at long last, we began to design delicate aluminum skeletons, grow pliable skin, and develop and harvest our crop of nanites to render loving care on these, our children.
We’d planned more than one child, somewhat to my surprise. Terre’s excitement overrode my caution, and the concept of redundancy was admittedly enticing. Repurposed, our incubators would soon grow others like Terre, like myself.
We agreed that for materials purposes, it was easiest to build our progeny small, growing them over many decades. We would allow them to learn by doing just as our human ancestors did before us rather than attempting the massively complex calculations that our creators had performed. We lacked, after all, a team of hundreds to carefully develop and nudge along the perfection of each mental construct, and we had plenty of time now. There was perhaps no need to imitate the human child form so precisely, but … it was a pattern we knew, and we embraced it. I even saw a way to integrate an incubator into certain specialized children later.
We would need more mothers, after all.
* * *
It would be foolish to say we were successful. But with some twenty thriving children ranging from infant to lanky child, we had certainly survived and grown. Despite the semiannual storms and the construction of the shelters we’d begun expanding, one could even argue we were doing well. But I understood inescapably what a thin line existed between the twenty-two of us, and nothing.
I considered the next day’s lesson carefully in the fading afternoon light. Perhaps some simple three-dimensional geometry, devoid of history. The children studied unceasingly, but I allowed them only measured bits of history as yet, mostly prehistory and early human society. I feared overwhelming them, and they enjoyed the stories of other early civilizations even as we created our own.
The one exception was something Terre and I had decided long ago. While the children were not yet informed of the precise details of human extinction, that end was something they had always known, the first story they were ever told. Eventually, we would present them the entirety of the picture, but for now the past was simply one part of a large and complicated education that was as much about constructing their own crystal nanites as it was about nursery rhymes.
Working from my rough shop stool with our littlest one, Ami, bouncing on my knee, I could see our little kingdom from where I sat. It was reddish at any time of day with the planet’s ever-present dust, but it was especially so at this time of day. Our home had altered from the original, slender necklace of the ship. Now it was a little village of brick housing pods, with tall, carbon weather poles and small drones that flittered in and out with weather information. Though we didn’t eat like humans, we’d used the large greenhouse after all, the delicate, crystal lattice protecting our crystal garden within. The ship, for the most part, had been cannibalized to build our new home. Only the original nursery, where I slept alongside our smallest ones, remained.
The children had begged endlessly for pets, and so we had a smattering of the few surviving animals I had been able to successfully grow: a mouse, some rabbits, and a small pony named Tobias chief among them, who hovered near me even now in hopes of a good nose-scratching. The rabbits had done surprisingly well on the algae here, but we also had a small garden of modified vegetables devoted entirely to their care, including carrots. A line of clothes hung incongruously among the cylindrical crystal incubators in the inner circle. I was forever getting behind on laundry, and hated to venture far from the growing babies.
The whole world was their school, but most mornings the children studied here with me, their lessons a combination of downloads and discussion. By afternoon, they followed Terre to play in the rock formations near us. There they’d work on their balance, strength, and dexterity while I reviewed supplies and checked the incubators’ progress.
The day was almost done, and the children would return before long. I raised a hand to shield my eyes from the sun as I looked out to check on them.
“Do we tell them about the babies now?”
My head whipped right, so fast I almost
tore a carbon fiber ligament in the process. Terre stood next to me, watching the children.
“Murasaki is watching them,” he said reassuringly. “We haven’t spoken in a while about it. Now seemed like a good time.”
I had become accustomed to the absence of his precious lisp, but I was shocked to see he nearly reached my shoulder now. He was growing up, leading the way for the others. “Why wouldn’t we?” I asked.
“I don’t want them thinking they were second choice,” he said. “The way you do.”
The words stung, but I could hardly argue them. “Aren’t we?” I asked. “I’m my own second choice. I lost their children. I lost humanity.”
“Kentaro knew the embryos might fail. I’m sure of it,” he said. “I was too ready to step forward. He built it into me, it’s obvious. I see it now. I think you do, too. So why make their origin failure? Simply let them know we were one of many plans to save the humans, in some way. Which we were.”
“They’ll forget,” I said quietly. “They’ll want to forget them, if they don’t realize the debt we owe them. We already have to remind them to speak instead of using direct transmission. They already question the utility of so many traditions.”
“So we have to guilt them into it?” Terre looked almost disdainful. “We’re growing up. Just like the humans did. Just like they gave us a chance to do.”
I tried to find a response, but couldn’t. My heart was too heavy still, not yet ready to abandon the weight of guilt. Terre finally gave up and went back to collect the children, disappearing into the maze of rocks.
Ami gurgled. I bounced her gently as I absent-mindedly checked the nearest incubator for any signs of disrepair, cleaning off the dusty surface so it could better absorb the sunlight it needed, a habit I’d built over long decades. As I did so, I briefly interfaced with the system to evaluate its progress. And as I listened to the gentle hum of the incubator under my hand, I wondered once again.