The Voyage of the White Cloud

by M. Darusha Wehm

  Harald had never understood how the Chamber could have been lost—his great-grandmother’s generation rediscovered the room and found that it had been abandoned for centuries. Harald couldn’t imagine that people could be so uncurious about their past to manage to forget that the kahuna even existed. It baffled him as much as his childhood friends’ discomfort.

  But now, Harald began to empathize with the unease his friends had felt. He took a breath and palmed open the door. He saw the communication stations as if for the first time—image screens, input pads, a hard chair to sit on. They could be testing stations for school exams, a console in the most basic quarters. They looked shabby and old, and for a second Harald felt like he might cry. He tried to shake off the feeling and walked over to his usual station.

  He slipped onto the stool and entered the code to call up the construct of Iona Kalani. The screen brightened and Iona’s face appeared. Harald imagined that he detected a slight look of confusion in her eyes, but told himself he must be imagining it.

  Elias had explained that she wouldn’t be able to tell that anything was wrong. “It’s not like dementia,” he’d said, and although Harald hadn’t said anything, that was what he’d been thinking. “The ancestor constructs...”

  “The kahuna,” Harald said.

  Elias had looked uncomfortable. “Yes, I understand that’s what some people call them.”

  “It’s not some kind of metaphysical hokum,” Harald said, “it’s a term of respect, for their knowledge, their connection to our past. We don’t think they are magical beings or anything like that. But they were chosen by their peers—for their knowledge, for their wisdom. They are, I have to believe, among the best of us.”

  “I...” Elias said, not meeting Harald’s eyes, “I understand that they are important to you, that you learn from them, that you respect their opinions. But,” he took a breath, “but regardless of the way the ‘kahuna’ appear, they are programs, not people. They are like living stories, repositories of knowledge and personality. The construct of Iona is not the same as Iona was in life, not even when it was functioning properly. And now... well, now it’s like a bad translation of a dubious source with half the text missing.”

  “I find that characterization insulting,” Harald said, fighting to keep his voice level. “She is not a... bad copy. She may not be human, but she is a person and she deserves to be treated with respect. They all do.”

  “I’m sorry,” Elias said, “I’m not trying to be insulting. I’m just trying to help you understand the reality here. Her reality.”

  Harald stood and walked to the galley. They’d been at this for nearly an hour and he needed something to do to help him process it all. He rummaged through the cupboards looking for tea and started organizing a snack. He knew Elias was right, at least from the technical perspective. But there was more to it than technical specifications. Sure, Iona was technically just a computer simulation. But what was his own consciousness but a series of electrical impulses? At least she knew what she was. That was more than any human being could ever have claimed.

  “Do you think she’s in any pain?” he asked as he poured hot water over the leaves, his voice low.

  “No,” Elias said, and Harald could hear real empathy in the other man’s voice. “As far as we can tell, for her nothing will seem any different. Her memories exist only when the program is run, so she has always essentially recreated her whole existence each time she is initialized. She will have no sense that anything is wrong, because from her perspective, nothing is wrong. It’s just that her experience is diverging from the human Iona further and further each time she is run. Arguably,” Elias said, with a sad smile, “she is becoming more and more her own individual.”

  Harald looked into those eyes which were so familiar to him and wondered who this was looking back. Her memories no longer corresponded to the woman who had been his ancestor, but her face still widened in a smile of recognition when she saw him. Harald watched the lines on her face deepen with what, a day before, he would have thought of as decades of laughter. Now, they seemed like fissures in time, the markers of an entropy that neither technology nor faith can forestall.

  Yet, when Iona smiled at him and said, “Hello, my boy,” he found that he just couldn’t think of her as a broken program. She was his old friend and confidant, a lifeline to understanding the past which was his greatest joy. Maybe she couldn’t provide him with reliable information anymore but Harald knew now that their relationship had never really been about that.

  His voice caught in his throat when he answered.

  “Hello, kahuna.”

  Chapter 5

  Dust

  He didn’t want to be here. He imagined that everyone in the room felt the same way, that they would rather be anywhere else. Fixing the waste recyclers would be better than this detail. But everyone had to take their turn, and this was his. He took a breath and walked toward the body.

  Karyl Spencer had never seen a dead body this close before and he sorely wished he weren’t seeing one now. It was Su-Ann Miyoki, lying on the table naked, her body a testament to the inexorable flow of time. Karyl hadn’t known her well, had probably never spoken to the woman. He was a physicist and she’d been a biologist in her youth—there wasn’t much common ground. But she had lived over a hundred years in this corner of the ship and he, too, rarely left the neighbourhood, so their paths had crossed. It never occurred to him that there would come a day when the old woman was no longer walking the paths between the teahouse and the market where she’d sold decorative wreathes.

  He kept his focus in the middle distance between himself and the corpse and tried not to think too much. He swallowed hard, but his mouth tasted as if it were full of dust. Dust just like her body would be—no, he couldn’t think of that now.

  “All right.” A strong voice from near the head of the body broke the silence. “Now, I’m sure you all know that your role here is largely ceremonial, but nonetheless vital to the community. You will help me display the body for the witnesses, Su-Ann’s kin by heart and blood, and stand by during the service. But, as you know, the most important part of your duties is to come after.”

  Karyl looked around and saw that the others seemed as uncomfortable as he was. He saw several pale faces and one woman had already sunk to the floor—to avoid fainting, Karyl guessed. “Come,” the voice said and Karyl looked up. He still couldn’t see the source, having positioned himself as far away from the corpse as possible. “We will run through what is expected of you at the witness ceremony. We can’t have any of you fainting then.”

  The only other funeral Karyl had attended had been for Oliver, his great-grandfather. He was the first person Karyl had known who had died—it happened when he was only twenty-one. Karyl’s mother, Johanna, like her mother before her, was not very good with children, so Karyl had spent a lot of his young life with his great-gran. The older man was his favourite of all his kin—maybe it was the age difference, or maybe he was just a sweeter person, but he treated Karyl as if he were a special gift, rather than a necessary burden. He spent as much time with the old man as he could.

  When he was little, Oliver had entertained him for hours with tales of wondrous creatures, far away lands and long ago places, with exciting adventures and long lost loves. No matter what else was going on, when Karyl heard his voice, the ship melted away around him and he was transported to another life. One which he liked much better than his own.

  When Karyl was fifteen, he went to see Great-Gran in the quarters he shared with his partner, Ellie. “You’ve always seemed pretty happy,” he said over a cup of sweet hot milk with cinnamon. “How do you do it?” he asked.

  “Happiness?” Great-Gran asked, one white eyebrow arched. “You’re asking me the secret to happiness?” A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth and Karyl felt foolish.

  “No,” he said, though that was exactly what he’d wanted. “I mean, what’s the point? We’re all just specks on t
he timeline of history. Nothing any of us does really matters, not compared to the ones who will come after us. We’re insignificant—unimportant.” He stared into his cup of milk, watching the thin skin on top wrinkle, flecked with brown from the spice.

  “Well,” Great-Gran said, “I don’t feel insignificant.” Karyl shrugged. “There are many ways to be important, my boy,” he went on. “Certainly, without us, there would be no ship, no journey, no Earth. We are, in some ways, the most important people who ever lived.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Karyl said, hating the childish whine in his voice.

  “Okay,” Great-Gran said, ignoring Karyl’s tone, “then what do you mean? Think about it before you answer.” He stood and busied himself in the small kitchen. Karyl furrowed his brow and tried to think of an answer.

  “I guess I mean that I want to be important individually. I want to feel like it matters that I’m me, that I’m not just a walking DNA repository.”

  Neither of them said anything for a few moments, then Great-Gran turned back to face him. “Well, Karyl, that’s up to you,” he said. “You are alive in this place at this point in history. You can’t control that. But you can control what you do with that life. You can spend your days just going through the motions of a job, doing the minimum of what is necessary to survive. Or you can choose to find something that makes you feel significant.”

  “Like what?” Karyl asked.

  Great-Gran shrugged. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “It’s one of those things you have to figure out for yourself.”

  Karyl stared at the wall, thinking. “Did you find something?” he asked.

  Great-Gran nodded. “A few things, actually. Love, a family, sharing information and telling stories. When you care deeply about something, it is like rising water in a tub—it elevates everything else.”

  Karyl nodded. “How do I find it?”

  “Just open your heart and mind to new things, be willing to try something strange. One day, if you’re lucky, you’ll stumble on something that grabs a hold of your mind and won’t let go. That’s the one.”

  When Oliver died, Karyl didn’t leave his quarters for two days. He cried and slept and tried to pretend that it was all a bad dream, that Great-Gran would walk out of the medical lab all smiles and tell him that everything was going to be okay. But it wasn’t going to be okay and he knew it.

  He had tried to find that thing that would make him feel special, he really had, but he was starting to wonder if it was just another one of Great-Gran’s stories. By the time the funeral happened, Karyl was cried out. As he walked into the Witnessing Room, he felt empty. Not just empty of tears, or pain, but empty of everything, as if he were really a fabrication machine or a cleaning drone, dressed up in human skin. He walked without feeling his legs, spoke to people without understanding the words. He stood between his mother and his grandparents, their eyes red, their hands clutching his, and could barely recognize them. He felt nothing for them, these people who were by definition his family but in reality no different than any other neighbour he saw every few days. With Oliver gone, Karyl was alone. Just another interchangeable part of the biological mass of the ship. Necessary but not unique.

  It was the worst moment of his life.

  Karyl hadn’t thought about Oliver’s funeral in years. He also hadn’t thought about the existential angst that had filled him in the days between his death and the Witnessing. It was as if in the two days he’d spent mourning his Great-Gran, he’d also mourned the loss of his own hope for individual meaning. When he walked out of the funeral, receiving the condolences of his neighbours with an empty heart, it was as if he’d left all those adolescent thoughts of finding meaning and happiness with Oliver’s body, to be obliterated by the flames. As if they, like what remained of his Great-Gran, could be turned to dust and sent to the many communities of the ship, to nourish others as they’d failed to nourish Karyl.

  But when the message arrived at his terminal, informing him that it was time for him to fulfil his duty as a distributor, the memory of Great-Gran’s smiling face returned unbidden to Karyl’s mind. He felt something break in his chest, a hardening that he’d failed to notice, a block between himself and the pain of engagement in the community. It was as if Oliver had died all over again, as if he’d never grieved the loss.

  Karyl’s roommate, Leanne, came home to find him staring at the screen, the dried salt tracks of tears staining his face.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, a stunned look on her face. Karyl had never let his emotions show before.

  “I don’t know,” he answered, turning to face her. “How would I tell?”

  During the service, the distributors helped bring in the body, then stood behind it as an honour guard while the Returner conducted the service. They were arranged in a triangle shape, and Karyl’s position in the service as the representative of Su-Ann’s community, meant he stood at the back of the group. The Returner, the owner of the voice and a man called Charlie, explained that the formation was symbolic of the dead person being surrounded by members of her community, her kin.

  “You bind the Witnessing,” he’d told Karyl with an air of sincere solemnity, but all Karyl really heard was that he would be furthest away from the body. As he took his place and prepared to suffer through the seemingly endless ceremony, he reminded himself that this was the best he could have hoped for; that once it was over with, he’d never have to do it again.

  Karyl heard the sounds of the attendees softly weeping, quiet voices of condolence from around the room as the Returner walked around the body to stand between it and the people who had come to the service. Karyl looked down at his feet, not wanting to hear the words designed to comfort, but that only reminded him of his failure.

  He could never explain what it was about the service that so bothered him. He had kept his feelings of unfulfillment so close that he couldn’t even describe them to himself, let alone to someone else.

  “But, it’s an honour,” Leanne had said when Karyl finally managed to explain that he’d been called to serve.

  “It’s morbid,” he’d answered, refusing to meet her eyes.

  “We’re all going to die, Karyl,” she’d said, putting the loaf of bread on the table and shuffling the salad over to the side. “It’s the way it works. Don’t you want your kin to come witness when you go? I do.”

  “I don’t like thinking about it,” Karyl said, slicing the bread and spreading hot vegetable sauce on top. “No one would care anyway.”

  “Come on,” Leanne said, “you know that’s not true. There are lots of people who care about you—your mother, the other people at the lab… me.”

  Karyl shrugged and worked to change the subject. “I don’t understand why everyone has to be part of this ceremony, anyway. It’s not like they need the people—the whole process is practically automated now.”

  “That’s not the point,” Leanne said, putting a spoonful of salad on her plate. “It’s about making sure that everyone understands what happens when we die. It’s about making sure that the communities are connected, that every life is valued.”

  “It’s macabre,” Karyl said, “and I don’t want to talk about it any more. Let’s eat.”

  Karyl wished that he could have traded places with Leanne. She would have felt the correct amount of solemnity at this moment. She would have paid attention to the meaning behind the words that were intoned by the Returner, rather than just standing there and waiting for it all to be over. Repeating the instructions over and over that the man had given him that morning: One hand on the body, one hand on the next person. Walk to the oven. Pause. Turn. Push. Wait.

  Karyl fought not to think about what happened inside the ornately decorated sepulchre. The searing fire, the total destruction of everything that had been Su-Ann. He blinked his eyes and tried to focus on the service.

  “Death comes to us all,” the deep, solemn voice of the Returner said, the cliché sounding more omin
ous to Karyl now that it had ever before. “That is certain. All we can do is hope to live long and well, to leave our legacy intact, to give back to the community in life and in death. And so it was and so it will be for Su-Ann. She was a sister, a mother, a neighbour. She gave her life in service to the greatest journey any member of our species has undertaken: to her daughter Penelope, her grandchildren Asta and Chen and her great-grandson Elias; in her work helping to feed her community. And now, as the last gift she will give this community, her dust will be divided and used to nourish the soil in the gardens. As it has always been, as it will always be, life feeds on life. We all live on in each other, we become our own legacy.”

  Karyl knew it was a lie. Maybe not literally—he knew that the ashes of the dead were used to fertilize the food gardens, and he knew that in a closed system like the ship everything was recycled in some way or another. But it was just the atoms, the constituent parts, which were retained. Everything that made Su-Ann unique, everything that made her human, would be gone with the fires. If there really was anything unique about anyone. He doubted there was.

  “I know some of you feel a particular sorrow,” the Returner said, “at the death of someone so close to the end of our collective journey. But none of us here will live to see the day when the White Cloud reaches new Earth. This is as it has been for our ancestors before us, and just because we can now count the remainder of this journey in decades rather than centuries, we need to remember that we live as our parents and grandparents did, in the knowledge that we have prepared the future. And while we all dream of that moment of humanity’s landfall, we know that its splendour is promised only to a few. Our destiny is to ensure that they arrive, healthy and whole, to begin the next phase of humankind. That work is as valuable, as necessary, as the work those first settlers will undertake. And so, as we return Su-Ann Miyoki to the soil of our gardens, remember that her contribution to our mission was no less than that of any other that has been or that will be.”