Third Rock

by S E T Ferguson

  It was a possibility they all had known for months now. Iris had told them this could be the case moments after she had told them Whit was alive that night at Gamma’s Bar, when she had first revealed to them that Whit was, as far as she knew, still alive. Even as Iris had told them of that possibility that first night, Vlad knew Beryl had tried to ignore said possibility. Beryl would never say as much, but he knew Beryl well enough to know it was what she would be trying not to think about.

  Now, though, there was no more ignoring it.

  Vlad edged close enough to Beryl to be able to smell the shampoo in her hair, the same citrus-y scent it had been since the days when they were dating.

  Ahead of the ship, Vlad searched for Libertas, the planet they were supposed to have called home once upon a time.

  As he did, Vlad felt something touch his hand, then felt Beryl slip her small fingers into his. He knew she was vulnerable then. Other than Iris—and maybe more than Iris—there was no one left in the world to whom Beryl was closer. This wasn’t something Beryl did because of residual romantic feelings toward him. Like that night before the drone attack when Beryl had slipped into his bed, this was about familiarity and comfort, and nothing more.

  Even if Vlad sometimes hoped it was something more.

  *

  Beryl felt comforted with Vlad by her side, but she also knew having his hand in hers served a practical purpose: it would give her something to steady herself with.

  Eighteen minutes.

  That was how long Iris told them it would take to get to Libertas.

  In eighteen minutes, she would know for sure whether her father was dead or alive.

  In the months since Iris had told her that her father was alive, then almost immediately told her that there was a chance, however slim, that he might not be, Beryl had done her best to ignore that grim possibility.

  Ignoring the bad news had been easier than Beryl had thought it would be.

  The months since that day had been so full—of preparations for this journey, of increasing their physical fitness and fighting capabilities, of learning about what they might be facing when they arrived at Earth after their brief stop at Libertas—that Beryl had been able to lose herself in what had become the new normal of her life. She could forget that not only might she still be alone, but that humanity might not have any way to fight against the Earth AI that sought to destroy it.

  Beryl thought she had done a good job of hiding her fear and worry about her father from everyone around her, but Iris surely knew. Iris knew more than she ever let on, thanks to her near-constant monitoring and ability to see and sense things that a human possessed of normal faculties would ever be able to.

  Because Iris knew, Beryl suspected Vlad knew about her worries as well.

  He didn’t have Iris’s superhuman capabilities, but he didn’t need them.

  He knew her better than any other person had ever known her.

  Nothing romantic had happened between them in years now—the night she slept in his bed while they were in the caves had been anything but romantic—but he still seemed to know her better than she knew herself at times.

  Right now, with her hand in his, that he probably knew how nervous she was, was a comfort.

  The eighteen minutes until they went into orbit around Libertas ticked down as the ship almost imperceptibly slowed to the speed it would need to be in to orbit. As Rediviva slowed, the world outside the ship’s bridge came into focus.

  And there, ahead of them, Libertas grew into the blue and green planet she remembered from her childhood—the three continents arrayed in their familiar shapes among the blue oceans, the white clouds floating above it all in patterns that seemed to swirl across the planet’s atmosphere, somehow stormy and peaceful all at once. Its two moons shone as little beacons floating around the larger sphere.

  Finally, the words Beryl had been hoping and fearing left Iris’s mouth.

  “We’re in orbit. I’m attempting to establish communication with Libertas now.”

  Beryl stared at the planet below her.

  It looked so familiar, but something seemed different than she remembered. But this far out in orbit, she couldn’t tell what it was.

  “Does something seem off to you?” Vlad asked, putting into words what Beryl was thinking. She nodded in response to his question, then touched the emerald necklace around her neck.

  “Iris, can you get me a current close up view of my dad’s last known whereabouts on my phone?” Beryl requested.

  “Give me about thirty seconds. I’m working to establish our communication uplinks to get whole planet coverage, but don’t have it yet. I sent out satellites, but they will take a few minutes to get into position and link up with me. Whit’s last known whereabouts should come online here shortly. I synced our own position so we would be as close as practical to that location when we arrived.”

  It only took twenty seconds for the requested image to pop up from the phone around Beryl’s wrist. She felt Vlad over her shoulder, straining to see what was there as well.

  “Holy shit.” Vlad drew out the words so their combined three syllables lasted several long seconds. Beryl was glad he had said the words she was thinking.

  “What’s going on?” Beryl didn’t have to look up from the image to know it would soon be on all of their phones. This was not the sort of thing that they could ignore.

  “And you’re sure this is Libertas?” Vlad asked, “It’s not some parallel, evil universe where things are just slightly different and we’ll all meet our counterparts with mustaches when we step foot on the planet?”

  “It’s Libertas,” Iris confirmed.

  “I don’t get it,” Heming squinted at the image that had popped up from his phone, as if he was looking for something he couldn’t see in the image. He had never been the sort of person who was interested in science or a planet, beyond that which was necessary for him to function on a day-to-day basis. Beryl was not surprised, and suspected no one else was surprised, that Heming had somehow missed this major detail among the reasons they were at Libertas.

  “It’s the trees,” Fawn spoke up, smiling and almost crying at the same time. Beryl suspected the look on her own face was the same overwhelmed, joyous look she now saw on Fawn’s face. On Fawn’s screen, like all of them, a vast forest stretched almost across the screen, only broken in the distance by an ocean, several other bodies of water, and a mountain range. “There weren’t any trees on Libertas when we left. This was all a giant prairie, as far as you could see.”

  “It means it worked.” Beryl wiped a tear from her eye before it could fall. “My dad’s plans to speed up growth. It worked.”

  Beryl didn’t say what else she was thinking.

  If his plan had worked, he was still alive.

  And not just that, there was a chance he had the technology to save them all.

  As if on cue with her thoughts, a voice came through the speakers of the ship.

  Beryl was crying before the words of the first transmission were finished.

  “Rediviva, I have received your initial communication. This is Whittaker Roberts. Welcome to Libertas.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Whit, can you see me?” Beryl watched Iris look at a blank wall screen on the bridge.

  “I can.” A voice came from the speakers, and then an image cracked onto the screen.

  For the first time in twelve years, Beryl saw the living face of someone she had thought dead.

  Her father.

  Whit.

  “You look good, Iris. I can see you haven’t aged a day.” Whit smiled at the image of Iris he must have been seeing on the screen.

  “Neither have you,” Iris stumbled a bit on the words, probably as unable to believe what she was seeing as Beryl was. Iris didn’t age—she was, after all, not biological—but humans definitely did.

  Except, Whit truly did not look like he had aged. The face on the screen belonged to the same man who they had left on t
he planet over a decade earlier. Except it wasn’t that he looked the same…he somehow looked younger than the man they had left there.

  “Good, clean Libertasian air,” Whit replied. A sly smile spread across his face. “And a whole shit ton of science.”

  The shot onscreen panned out to show a comfortable home, surprisingly similar to the one Beryl and her mother had shared on Columbina, down to the large windows facing the forested land beyond the house. As it panned out, a medium-sized, black dog came onscreen, lying on a dog bed.

  “Is that Poydras?” Beryl blurted out.

  Immediately, Beryl put her hand to her mouth. She had wanted to say something important, or at least normal, for her first words to her father when she saw him. It was supposed to be a momentous occasion, something she would remember the rest of her life.

  Asking about the dog definitely did not qualify as something important.

  Still, it was a bit shocking. The dog on the bed certainly looked like Poydras, right down to the white on her chest and white-tipped paws, but Beryl knew it couldn’t be the same dog. Poydras would be in her twenties by now.

  She should have been dead.

  Even with advanced technology, dogs rarely lived into their twenties. And if they did, they showed their age, with white muzzles.

  But this dog was not aged.

  This dog was young.

  At least, it looked young. Beryl thought the dog looked even younger than Camp, with her sleek black fur and clear, brown eyes. Camp was starting to show white around his mouth, infringing on his otherwise brown fur.

  But it was impossible for Poydras to look younger than Camp. Camp was Poydras’s son, born when Poydras was nine years old, long after anyone thought she would be having any puppies.

  At hearing the name Poydras, though, the young looking dog picked up its head. Next to Beryl, Camp sat up from where he had been lying down, apparently keen to hear the name of a dog he hadn’t seen in many years. A small, almost imperceptible sound left Camp’s mouth, and Beryl saw her phone translate it as “Poydras.” Onscreen, the black dog behind her father jumped up and started whining, searching for the source of the sound.

  “I think you all saw the answer to that question. But in case you didn’t, yes, that is Poydras.”

  “But she…she hasn’t aged a day,” Beryl said. The camera on their end still focused on Iris. What she wanted to say was that Poydras looked younger than when they had left Libertas before, but that was even more implausible than her looking the same age.

  “Technically, she aged about eight months after Hodios left.” Whit referenced the ship on which he and the rest of them had lived until colonizing Columbina or, in Whit’s case, Libertas. “I had some other priorities before that. And I suspect she is still aging, though at an extremely slow rate. I think the slowed aging may make her look younger somehow, though. I have yet to work out the details.”

  “Holy shit. Do you know what this means?” Iris didn’t seem to be talking to anyone but herself. “It worked.”

  “It most definitely worked.” Onscreen, a smile spread across Whit’s face. “Everything worked. Better than even I could have imagined.”

  Everyone on the ship was quiet for a moment, letting the words sink in.

  Beryl knew exactly what it meant.

  If they could harness what Whit had done, they just might be able to take on the Earth AI. Humanity on its home planet might have a chance.

  Not just that, but humanity in the stars might survive.

  “You don’t know how relieved we are to hear that,” Iris finally said. “We have a lot to talk about.”

  With Iris’s words, Beryl realized for the first time that her father had no idea what had happened to them on Columbina.

  Or why they were here at all.

  Iris was right. They really did have a lot to talk about.

  *

  Vlad listened as Iris explained to Whit what had happened since they had settled on Columbina, hitting the main points without getting into much detail. She lingered longer on the recent events involving the Earthlings, spending most of the time telling Whit about the unexpected visitors to Columbina. Everything came out in broad statements, ignoring any details like the people who were involved in the Columbinians’ fight against the Earth AI.

  “What’s the plan now? Assuming there is one,” Whit asked. “I don’t think you would have traveled this far to my little corner of the universe if there wasn’t a plan that somehow involved me.”

  “Well…” Iris started saying something and stopped.

  “We were hoping you could help us.” Vlad jumped in. He pulled his hand out of Beryl’s. He hadn’t even realized until he pulled away that he had still been holding hers.

  “Cale?” Whit used the name of Vlad’s father, his voice light and familiar.

  “No, it’s Vlad,” Vlad replied, not volunteering the information he knew Whit would want to hear about his father, Cale. Before his exile, Whit had been one of his father’s closest friends and colleagues on Hodios, the ship where they had all grown up.

  “You sound so much like your father. Is he there?” Whit asked. Iris kept the video feed on herself, still not showing anything but a limited view of the bridge.

  “No, he…he was killed. He was part of the group who made first contact with the AI when they got to Columbina.” Vlad’s voice cracked a bit as he relayed the information. He could talk about it now, but it was still difficult. Saying that his father was dead out loud again, to someone who had yet to hear the news, brought a lot of the pain back again. Maybe the pain wasn’t as pointed as it had been after it happened, but it still hurt to bring it up again.

  “Oh, Vlad, I’m so sorry to hear that.” Whit paused. Vlad couldn’t tell if the pause was because Whit had just heard something unexpected, or because Whit had heard something expected that he hadn’t wanted to believe. “Cale was a good choice to represent you in that contact. He was always a good man. He would not have wanted to send someone in his place on such a potentially dangerous task.”

  “Thank you.” Vlad swallowed hard. “He never had a bad word to say about you.”

  “That’s a lie, but one I appreciate hearing.” On the screen, Whit smiled. It was the sort of smile that made others do the same. Even after Whit was gone and exiled, people had remembered and talked about that smile. “Who else is with you?”

  “We’re sort of a bare bones operation.” Iris jumped back into the conversation.

  “What do you mean by that? And don’t try to fudge anything, Iris. I know you’re uploading all of your information to me here as we speak, so I can find out for myself if you’re trying to lie to me.”

  “Fine, then. Including me?” Iris stalled. “We have six of us.”

  “Six?”

  “Yes, six.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t hijack a ship to come get me. This sounds less like an army and more like a rogue band of rebels in some implausible movie plot.”

  “We didn’t hijack anything. It’s just that, well, we didn’t have many takers for this particular mission.”

  “Who else is there? Rona?” Whit asked. At the sound of the name of her mother, Vlad looked to Beryl. She looked pale, like someone who had been asked to identify a ghost.

  “No…” Iris stopped, not telling Whit what the rest of them knew. Beryl jumped in. She may have been upset by the conversation, but she knew it was her place to answer that particular question. Vlad knew she wouldn’t want to answer it, though.

  “She…she died, too. During our first contact.” Beryl’s voice was stronger than Vlad would have expected it to be when making the comment. Since they had boarded Rediviva and left Columbina, Beryl had mostly ignored the death of her mother, even though she kept a small bag of Rona’s ashes tied to her belt at all times. It was now as much a part of the way she looked on a daily basis as was the emerald she wore around her neck.

  Whit didn’t say anything for a moment, his eyes sad with the imm
ediate mourning of the loss of his wife a second time, this time in a permanent way. “Did it…did it happen quickly?”

  “It did. And she wanted to be there.”

  “Of course she did. She probably thought the Earthlings were peaceful, too.” Whit shook his head and wiped tears from both eyes at the same time. A bittersweet smile tugged at the tips of Whit’s lips.

  “What about,” Whit paused, as if he didn’t want to ask the next question, in case the answer to it was something he didn’t want to hear. “What about Beryl?”

  “I’m here,” Beryl said. For the first time since Iris had opened up the video connection with Whit, the view showed someone other than Iris as it moved to show Beryl, standing next to Vlad in front of one of the bridge’s windows.

  As Beryl and Whit looked at each other, neither father nor daughter said anything.

  “I’ve been waiting for this day since the last time I saw you.” Whit finally said something.

  “I never thought I would see you again.” Beryl wiped tears from her eyes. Vlad hadn’t even realized she was crying before she did that.

  “Is that the emerald?” Whit pointed at Beryl’s chest, and her hand went to the green stone on the necklace around her neck. Vlad had seen her make the same gesture a thousand times, but it felt somehow more meaningful now than any of those other times.

  “I never take it off. Remember? I told you I wouldn’t.” Beryl wiped another tear from her face and let the emerald drop to her chest. “I missed you every day.”

  “I hate to interrupt,” Iris said, clearly not caring about the conversation between Beryl and her father that had been years in the making, “but I just picked up a signal.”

  “A signal?” Vlad asked. He had no idea what it might have been, but that it was enough to interrupt this moment meant it was something important.

  “I dropped some drones as we came into the system to keep an eye on things. They just picked up a ship entering the system.” Iris’s voice suggested that this was about the last thing she had expected to hear. She may have been an intelligent being smarter than anything else in the known universe, but Iris was still not always able to hide her emotions.