by Neil Clarke
Another way in. Another way out.
“It makes a swishing sound, like wind, and then the sounds are a music that might keep me there forever. They are … enchanting.”
Pele hears what Bean hears; it assails her even now, calling her.
But she cannot, will not, succumb.
Bean’s eyelids are half-closed. She speaks as if in a trance. “Alcubierre pulls the mountain closer when she gallops. She and I—we do not move. We remain the same, and in the same place. The wheat is time. Flowing and parting around me.
“I thought of this story for a whole year. I worked on it in my head when I rode. I see us from above. Alcubierre’s tail flows out behind her, white, blending and waving with the golden wheat. It is long … long … long …” She lowers her head as if in apology and whispers, “But still. The story is not in words.”
“Ah,” says Pele, grateful when Bean stops speaking, and the imperative music fades. She has tried to wake before. It may be still a dream.
But she does not think so. “Show us.”
The showing unfolds. It is complex, and long, as Pele knew it would be, and wakes her fully. All of them struggle to understand, to master various parts of it, to use theory to imagine this drive, to picture the concept of the space that it would use.
Xia, Chief Nanotechnologist, prepares to infuse the ship with her work and the work of a million materials engineers, biomedical engineers, environmental scientists—a synthesis of every science and engineering discipline—generated from a century of research and application.
They gather for a ceremony. Xia’s black eyes are serious and steady when she speaks. “We will be enabled, today, through enlivenment, which is how we describe this coming change, to manipulate the matter of our ship at the atomic level. The rules we hereby embed within the ship are the final arbiter of what is and is not permissible, and the laws of physics govern what is possible. Among other benefits, we will all enjoy perfect health from now on.”
Nucleus fills with huge, idealized atoms, strings of splitting and reconnecting DNA, and long sections of text. One section glows next to Pele, and she rapidly scans it, aghast.
Grinning, Xia shouts, “And we will all have tremendous fun!” Everyone except Pele whoops and cheers.
“Should we discuss it and vote?” asks Pele. They all look at her with amazement. “I’ve seen this before. It’s a plan for—it is, I gather, a universal assembler—”
“There’s nothing to vote on,” Xia explains, her voice as gentle as if speaking to a small child. She holds a sheaf of small, square envelopes in one hand. “This was always part of the plan. All of us have contributed to it, in one way or another. We all know everything there is to know about it.”
The fields of nanotechnology, a discipline drawing on all scientific disciplines, have blown far past Drexler’s early visions. Pele has sat on international committees that debated the use of various iterations of nanotechnology. Some were approved, and some, which embodied the possibility of change so rapid and radical that the results could not be predicted, were left unused, and locked away.
Pele understands, and now knows that they understand as well, that this particular iteration is the ability to change matter swiftly, from the bottom up, to grow rather than to machine. This chameleon-like ability, this new plasticity, will include themselves—their minds, their bodies—as well as their surroundings. Everything. Within what limits? The limits of physics have not been fully explored. Not by a long shot. Things will change, evolve, and Pele doesn’t know what, or how. Neither do they.
Alicia gives everyone an envelope. Pele opens hers and pulls out a round, paperish object.
“Why does this look like a communion wafer?” she asks.
“A what?” ask several children.
“The circle was my idea,” says Bean. “It’s … simple. It doesn’t have any religion in it.”
“I wanted water balloons that we could explode and scatter the replicators around,” says Ta’a’aeva, scowling. “Nobody listens to me.”
“Do we eat it?” asks Pele.
“You can,” says Xia, but, imitating the children, Pele presses hers to the side of the ship, where, warmed by her hand, it is rapidly absorbed.
A brief, dazzling light rushes through the walls of Nucleus. The children break into wild dance, laughing, and spinning through the air.
O brave new world, thinks Pele, that has such people in’t! She recalls her child-self, almost flying off the sheer cliff, and wants to grab them, and hold them back.
But it is far too late for that.
She soars and spins with the rest of them. Laughs. Forgets.
Is brave, again. For now.
The enlivenment, as the nanotech changes move through the ship, transforming its matter to a medium that they can easily manipulate, is slow at first, but increases in speed exponentially.
It makes their work much easier, and their environment becomes more dense, as if full of worlds it had been waiting to manifest.
Despite her fears, it is good, as far as she can tell. A rich and joyous thing.
The children, she realizes, do know more than she does.
For instance: Pele, strolling through the city, enters a musty used bookstore. It draws her in, past piles and towering shelves of books, farther and farther, until she realizes that she is in the children’s library that Zi mentioned. Each title strikes her heart. Some make her cry. All open worlds in her mind, worlds she thought long-gone; worlds that submerge her, change, and release her.
With wonder, she pulls out an old, tattered, black book. On its cover is an illustration of a girl and boy unlatching an arched, stout, wooden door set in a stone wall. The Latch Key. Opening it, she first reads the frontis poem, written by Olive Beaupré Miller:
Its windows look out far and wide
From each of all its stories.
I’ll take the key and enter in;
For me are all its glories.
When Pele looks up, after reading for hours, the store is gone; the street, likewise, has vanished. She sets the book aside, perches on a rock, stares at the stars, and remembers Gustavo, her children, his children, and her descendants, for a long, sweet time.
She hears those children shout to one another as they hide-and-seek in Earth’s long, green summer evenings, sees them splash in their nightly bath and then their faces in soft lamplight, eyelids closing, as she reads to them these old, strong tales.
Perhaps, she thinks, that is the most good I have ever done.
She uses their new technology to create a tiny, whitewashed cottage that hangs in rain forest on a steep volcanic mountain. Far below, lush tongues of green, fringed with shining, black volcanic sand, invade the sea, which deepens to kane, the deep, blue shade of distance. Tatami mats cover the wide-plank koa floor. The trade wind rattles the hanging photos of Sunny, Walter, and all the kids against the wall. A bookshelf manifests any books she wants, including an old, well-worn copy of Through Fairy Halls, with its luminous cover plate of a girl and boy rushing ahead of a diaphanous winged fairy.
Pele sits on her front porch in a rocking chair, paging through the large, heavy book thoughtfully, as the growing drive undergoes troubleshooting and the songs of long-extinct finches wind through her thoughts. She hikes down an ever-manifesting ridge, rappels down a cliff to a tiny beach where she tests herself in treacherous currents, and flings herself, naked, on olivine sand, falling asleep to the roar of the surf. And wakes to space, ablaze with the stars she long planned to grasp.
Her soul rests a brief time, all she allows.
Then, while the children work, Pele turns to what needs to be done. She absorbs the threats, the messages, the stages of grief from Earth. It is hard. She can only do a bit of this task at a time, but she battles through it. She is the only adult here. It is her responsibility.
She wants badly to invent Sunny to have someone to talk to, and though she could, it would only be herself, so she does not. She is afraid
to think about why she slept so long. She both knows and does not know, and both are useless to try to understand.
She knows her purchase on this new reality is tenuous. The part of her that loosed them is not rational, and she has fought it all her life.
But there is something she must do now that is more important than anything else she has ever done. That task holds her sternly here, on Moku, with its precious cargo of life.
Moku holds the world genome. They will start species, including humans, growing when they get close. To somewhere. After an unimaginable piece of time, when it is likely that none of them will be here, or that they will be so different that one could spend a million years just imagining the possibilities. What Moku will nurture, and why, will be based on immense data about the planet. A complex task, the vindication of what she has enabled, awaits.
Pele wonders, what will these new humans, these mammals who absorb culture, know? Who and what will teach them? When they forage among the wilderness of what the ship holds, who will they become? What culture will they construct?
It is her task to help them answer this question.
When she calls the children together, they protest. “We are working,” says Ta’a’aeva, standing with her arms crossed as thirty-seven children gather in Nucleus.
“You haven’t spoken to your parents since we left. You need to do that. Now.”
Kevin sucks in his lips and clenches his hands, as he always does in times of stress, to keep them from trembling.
Ta’a’aeva’s face hardens.
Alicia, who is thirteen, curses, rips a cushion from the floor, and floats it as hard as she can in Pele’s general direction. “I told my mother I was leaving and that I’m never coming back!”
Bean bursts into tears and pushes herself down the tunnel to her berth.
“I hear all of you,” says Pele. “Your feelings are mixed up, and hard to live with. How do you think they feel?”
“I’m tired of always trying to think about what other people are feeling,” declares Xavier. “It’s too hard.”
“It’s the hardest thing to do,” says Pele.
When rent by a meteor, the ship heals. This is not magic. This is science.
Pele, Nedda, Bean, and Takay are sitting on the porch of her cottage, reading books.
As if in a dream, or a myopic haze, Pele sees sky and sea shatter, revealing an assault of blinding stars, and hears a huge rush, as on a beach where massive waves tower and break, and then they are enclosed by a thick, opaque membrane.
Pele is surprised when they all stand and begin to sing, each in a different language, in different tunes and meters, and that it sounds so beautiful. Time seems more slow, and although together they all speak their ever evolving Esperanto, they sing songs from their own earliest childhoods. Pele’s mouth opens; her own song comes out, rich and deep from her chest, from her toes, from the far spaces of memory: the Wayfaring chant. From star to star to star. Like a bird transverses the sea. Maybe, indeed, she moves them with this chant. It seems so.
As they sing, life encloses not-life with a net that then thickens, expelling not-life with energy captured from the meteor. Not death—a lucky catch! The net extracts minerals, oxygen, carbon dioxide.
The scrim of matter opaques. They are made whole; enclosed.
They have new stuff to play with, to sustain them. The ship uses the meteor to grow more space, add more air, water the lettuce, grow the infant bristlecone pines in High Sierra.
To regrow the shattered cottage, and chairs, where they sit rocking, turning pages slowly, as a standing wave edges the blue Pacific far below, and plumeria sweeten the air.
They have communicated with one another by this time. The children and their parents.
Their parents had not remembered how strong the force of growing is. They had not remembered how they fought to leave home.
They wanted some kind of magic to protect their children, but all their love could not invent it. The children had torn themselves away, but that is what children do.
Before all this, the parents had worked very hard, even before the children were conceived, because this was The Future, and there was a lot that they could do. These parents wanted their children to be the very smartest, the very best, the most successful. They particularly did not want their children to turn out like the children of their relatives or their friends, who always did a terrible job, and in whose children the ways in which they had gone wrong were so obvious. They would do better.
When the children became teenagers, their sweet child faces changed, and their behaviors were not encouraging. Even though the parents had been teenagers and were sure that they would understand their own, a dark magic veil had grown between them.
I think that this is the first mention of magic in this fairy tale, but I’m not sure. Don’t be too hard on us for not knowing exactly when this happened. A lot of fairy tales don’t even realize that’s what they are, much less come right out and admit it.
Anyway, once the kids were teenagers, the parents lost control. And yes, they were afraid, because they remembered how stupid they had been, and they had tried with all their might to deflect or change this stupid energy, and because it was The Future and they knew more about brains and human development, they thought they had it licked.
But no. They were still the same old humans in important ways.
The children didn’t know that they were acting like robots and that they would miss their parents. They didn’t know that just growing up creates this energy, and that there was nothing they could do about it. So all of the humans on Earth were pouring out their love, which was helpless to do anything now.
If the children had known how sad their parents would be, they would never have done it. At this point they are beginning to understand, but still do not learn how deep sadness can be. Not yet. Perhaps no one reaches the end of it, and, to survive, must simply choose another path, one with more useful stories. But, as you may know, that is another part of this story.
Worse than all that, the children finally realized that they had stolen something that their parents had worked hard for, Moku. The ship, and all of space and time, wasn’t meant just for the children. It was meant for everyone in The Future, and for all the people in the world to benefit from. The people of Earth didn’t realize this when they were building it. They thought they were making something they could let go of.
It didn’t turn out that way.
It was all heartrendingly sad.
Finally, they had to let go.
The parents, the children. The children, Earth.
The people on Earth take a long time to decide how to say goodbye. They form committees, consider proposals, argue violently or with subtle skill, make deals, publish editorials, write learned papers.
It is taking longer and longer for Earth and Moku to communicate.
Finally, one day when it is almost too late, at a signal no one recalls initiating, they gather in cathedrals and squares and sing. They sing from flotillas of boats tethered together while they drink rum beneath fiery, poignant sunsets. They sing from observatories to the deep night sky, and as night flips swiftly to day in Bogota.
They sing from self-driving vehicles. Old people stop their tennis games to sing. Children sing in schools; there are still schools, only much better ones. Tech advisors, stock manipulators, and people who still do not have clean water but who do have a device sing. They sing from bars, from the Moon, and from every point in space where humans live.
When the song arrives at the ship, as they are passing Neptune’s orbit, they piece it together and gather, standing, and listen, looking back from whence they came, those tiny dots of life holding all they have ever known. Seas, mountains, the three remaining tigers. The deep time and lucky chance that caused life. Winds that flatten vast fields of wheat with great, caressing hands, like the hands that once caressed them with such love and care.
This is what they hear:
&nb
sp; Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee,
All through the night
Guardian angels God will send thee,
All through the night
Soft the drowsy hours are creeping
Hill and vale in slumber steeping
I my loving vigil keeping
All through the night.
The children, and Pele, hold hands and cry, knowing what they have lost.
Pele knows that, for the children, it is the first step. It changes their brains.
She does not know how she will get past it.
Perhaps, she thinks later, alone and staring at the place she thought she always wanted to be, she never will.
And now within the old gray tower
We’ve climbed the winding stair,
And look out over all the earth
From topmost window there.
Far stretches all the world away,
And naught shuts out the sky,
As knights and maids and all of life
Go marching, marching by.
—Olive Beaupré Miller, From the Tower Window
Finally, as they pass out of the solar system, it is time. They must get moving. They must set forth. They must transform.
And they do need her; they did bring her for a reason. She has lived this project, this drive, for decades, every detail of it. Bean’s work has brought it to life, but there is no way to know how it will manifest, if they will survive, and, if they do, how it will change them. That part of it is greater than that which one can imagine.
All is in readiness. She is awake. The fulcrum is here. She has the lever to move it.
The minds, the dreams, of the children are the weight. They offer her thoughts, ideas, visions, insights, like flowers, which she gathers, and they all spark together, pointing toward fruition, the shift that will carry life forward.
This is humanity’s main chance. She knows, but cannot think about, how important that is.
She prepares to play a vast chord, the way her piano teacher taught her, knowing it all first, in the instant before her spread fingers descend to the cool, hard, certain keys, back straight, elbows wide, with all she is contained within that force.
