For the First Time, Again, page 20
I reach inside my coat pocket and quietly pull out my knife. I switch hands behind my back and go for her kidney. She doesn’t stop talking, but I feel her hand wrap around my wrist. I would struggle, but her other hand crushed my trachea already. I didn’t see it coming. My lungs burn as I gasp for air and watch her face slowly blur into darkness.
Breathe.
I lunge at her, both hands reaching for her throat. She’s three feet away, watching me fall face-first on the ground.
I reach inside my coat pocket. I …
…
There’s nothing I can do. She knows it, or she’d have killed me by now.
It seems I have been bested by my creation. The apprentice has become the master. It is … fitting, in a way. I wanted to end this cycle of death, to lift the curse on my family. I suppose I have, or I will have when they lay me to rest. I might have a year, or a month. It doesn’t matter. I feel oddly at peace, with death and with life. I will leave something of me behind, my final opus.
—Can I ask a favor of you?
—Yes.
—Will you stay with me until … the end?
—Yes, sir, I will. We can do whatever you want, go wherever you wanna go.
—Thank you.… What will you do then? After I’m gone.
—I don’t know. Take them to the stars, I guess.
—By yourself? You’re still young, Aster. You need help. You need me.
—I need someone like you. Someone older. I need a face to put on what I’m doing.
—We made a good team, you and I.
—Your cousin can do that.
—What?
—You said you have a cousin. That means he’s just like you, right? He’s everything you are, except he’s innocent. I was innocent when you found me. Now I ain’t. And you know what, sir? One of us has to be.
—I saved you.
—Did you? I was just a kid. I didn’t have much of a life, but it was mine. My life. You took it from me. Your cousin didn’t. He didn’t take my mother’s life, my grandmother’s.
—When I met you, you were …
—You were gonna say “weak,” weren’t you? It’s ironic, because the old Aster would have let you live. That Aster wouldn’t hurt a fly. She was a good kid before you came into her life. She’s gone now, thanks to you. All that’s left is … what you made of me.
I wanted to change.… I saw what I’d become when I hurt my mother and I wanted that man gone. That’s why I chose to help Aster. I didn’t do it for her, I did it for me. I couldn’t bear to look in the mirror and see the monster anymore. I tried to change. Perhaps I did change, but the monster never really left. Aster saw it too. She saw what I was, and she knew she’d end up exactly like me. She needed me gone like I needed me gone, before there was nothing left of her. Aster killed me for the same reason I saved her. I was afraid to die alone, forgotten, but I feel more at peace now than I ever have, with death and with life.
I do leave something behind. She is the best of me.
—Aster?
—What?
—I’m proud of you.
CONCLUSION
56
Rebellion (Lies)
2005
I’m not entirely sure what I want to do with my life. That’s normal, right? I’m seventeen. I’ll be eighteen in a month, but I don’t think I’m supposed to have all my ducks in a row on the first day. There’s the stars thing. I’ll do that, for sure, but I need to finish school first. There’s time, I think. We don’t know if the bad guys are coming—maybe Saa and her crew were the only ones who picked up the signal. Even if they’re on their way, there’s a chance they’ll go chasing after the sphere.
I don’t think the stars thing is a full-time job, though. Maybe it is, but I’ll still need a hobby. My ancestors all had other things they cared about. Grandma was all about CO2 levels and the ozone layer, so was her mom, but there are tons of supersmart people working on that now. I don’t know how much I can help. Maybe I can save the Alabama red-bellied turtles. I did raise thirty bucks to help when I was younger, but now I can do a lot more. There still ain’t that many left; I checked. All it would take is a big oil spill, and boom. All gone.
We’ll see. I gotta do the stars thing, though.
Take ’em to the stars! The “them” part is hard. I spent five years trying to send a beach ball towards the stars and that ain’t even launched yet. It’s ironic, but Samael did more about space travel than me or my mom ever did. Someone won that ten million bucks he offered as a prize for flying to space. One project won, but there’s a dozen more companies making rockets because of that contest. New people, new designs, new ideas. It’s pretty neat. It’s my money he gave away, so I guess I helped. I wanted to name the prize after Samael, ’cause, well, it was his idea and I felt bad for poisoning him. He said: “Let the dead lie.” The only thing he wanted is for me to drop his ashes in the garbage at the Prague airport. He never said why.
It’s weird not having him around. After Pa died, I needed … There’s a part of me that’s sorry he’s gone. The other part, well, the other part is still figuring things out. We are the Kibsu. Sure. Except there’s no “we” and there ain’t going to be a “we” for a while. It’s just me. And the rules.
About those rules, I think it’s time for a cleanup.
Fear the Tracker. Always run, never fight.
Nope. Don’t need that one anymore. There ain’t a Tracker left to run from. Samael has a cousin, sure, but he doesn’t know anything. He might know he’s not like everyone else, but he never heard about us, or the sphere. You can’t be the Tracker if you don’t know there’s anything to track. I have no idea how I’ll get him to help me, but I’ll figure it out sooner or later. I mean, it can’t be harder than secretly sending something outside the solar system, can it?
Preserve the knowledge.
That’s the easy rule. I can see why they put it first. I mean, I can do that. The knowledge is in a box at home. I’ll try to add some after I finish school. I’m going straight to college. I never finished high school, but all my papers are fake anyway. Might as well give myself a diploma.
Survive at all costs.
That one seems a bit obvious. I get why it’s there. It’s supposed to make me feel better if I have to kill someone, but I don’t think we’re that special. Tons of people would kill to save themselves. Anyway, I’ll keep it, in case my granddaughter is superdepressed or something. You never know.
Don’t draw attention to yourself.
That’s a keeper, for sure. The colonel’s dead and pretty much everyone thinks I am. Still, I ain’t taking any chances. I don’t want to live in a hospital basement again.
What’s next? Oh yeah. Don’t leave a trace.
IIIIII dunno. Maybe. It’s good, but I think it’s sort of implied with the drawing-attention thing. Or maybe this one implies the other? Whatever, I say it’s redundant, and I don’t really like rules, so bye.
There can never be three for too long.
Ewww, that one. I ain’t ready for a kid, I sure ain’t ready for two, but I know the math looks bad if my daughter decides to have nine babies and her kids do the same. Still, I’m not going to blow my brains out just because I have a granddaughter. What kind of person does that? We need to work on this one a little.
There can never be sisters. That sounds weird.
There can only be one child. It’s clear, to the point, but it doesn’t have that “ancient rule” zing. Kinda like Don’t have two children, or the one-child Kibsu Policy …
There can be only one! Too bad it’s taken. Maybe that’s a good thing. Information gets lost, he said. I wouldn’t want my descendants to start wiping each other out with swords.
One mother, one daughter … I think that works. It doesn’t have a verb, though. Meh. It’s fine. So what do we have?
Preserve the knowledge.
Survive at all costs.
Don’t draw attention to yourself.
One mother, one daughter.
That’s better, I think. Yep. Better. I’ll teach that to my daughter. She’ll think I’m supercool. The rest I’ll make up as I go. I’m allowed; it’s my first time being the Kibsu, even if I’m the Hundred and … Two. Gawd, that’s a horrible number. My mom had a good one. Hundred and One, that’s cool. Grandma had that nice round number. Even the Ninety-Nine ain’t bad.
…
Hundred and Two, that’s, like … Mr. Pink. Why do I have to be Mr. Pink?
57
No Heaven
Crud, I almost forgot. I need to add one more rule.
Try to have some fun.
EPILOGUE
CYCLE 9748 (APPROX. A.D. 2146)
Green. White. Green. White. A hapless man stared at the blinking light above his head, unsure if it was real or not. He hadn’t seen anything, touched anything, thought anything, in centuries. It would take a few minutes for his brain to process visual stimuli and turn the blur into something concrete, hours to recognize what he was looking at, days to make sense of it all. One by one, he remembered some of the things he once knew. His name was Hah-Saak Shere-sa Tereshiin Kih Meeha. He was twenty-seven. He was an environmental engineer on the arc ship Haas-kee II. He had a younger sister back home.
* * *
There were still many things Shere-sa did not know: Why the ship had brought him out of stasis. When the ship had brought him out of stasis. The why wasn’t immediately clear. He was, as far as he could tell, the only one awake. There were no alarms, no apparent failure he was meant to correct. The when, on the other hand, was displayed in bright light on every screen around him. Nine hundred cycles. Everyone he knew outside the ship was dead, obviously. His sister was dead, but so were her children, their children, and— Shere-sa rushed to navigation as fast as his recovering body would allow and punched in the only coordinates he knew. The large screen filled with murky spectacle, a nameless nebula the computer numbered automatically. Shere-sa fell to his knees. The star that warmed his face as a child had, as scientists predicted, gone supernova, leaving behind a neutron star spinning frantically inside a cloud of dust. It wasn’t his sister who died, not the people he knew, their children, or their children. Everyone had died. His entire race, what was left of it, now slept on a handful of arc ships roaming the galaxy in search of a new home.
* * *
Shere-sa wished he were still asleep. He wished he’d died with his sister. He wished for a million different things, and when he was done wishing, only one truth remained: He was awake, and there had to be a reason for it. Shere-sa combed through the ship’s systems looking for purpose. He found what he was looking for in the communication logs. A faint signal thirty-eight light-years away. Shere-sa recognized it immediately. They were still sending out scout ships when he joined the academy, the government hailing the pilots as heroes. He himself had volunteered, but he lacked the physical skills to become a citizen. Science, he thought, was the next best thing, his chance to help. Shere-sa’s despair made way for something new. Perhaps it was hope, or a nascent belief in destiny. He had, after all, spent years training for this very moment. When a scout ship found a suitable planet for relocation, the pilot would activate a beacon to guide the arc ships. It was Shere-sa’s job, his main purpose, to set a course and restart the environmental and farming systems before they could wake up everyone.
* * *
His newfound enthusiasm faded when he brought the signal’s location on-screen. During his training, Shere-sa had taken part in thousands of simulations. In each of them, he woke up on a ship exactly like this one, heard a beacon exactly like this one, and steered the ship towards it. Unlike all the beacons he’d seen, however, this one was moving away from the nearest star instead of orbiting it. This one seemed to lack a planet.
Shere-sa started making a list of possible explanations: the beacon was on a ship and accidentally turned on, the beacon was on a ship that was destroyed and now floating in space, someone found a suitable planet but was unable to land, someone found a suitable planet, but the beacon was removed, by natural forces, by an enemy, by—Shere-sa realized the list would keep growing indefinitely. In the end, there were only two possibilities. There was a planet nearby they could settle on, or there wasn’t. He was only beginning to grasp the magnitude of the decision he had to make. If his was the only remaining arc ship, the survival of an entire species was at stake. On the one hand, ignoring the signal meant giving up what could be their only chance. On the other, waking up everyone on the ship meant they had, at best, a few decades to find a home. There were a hundred thousand people lying in the cargo holds, half of them impregnated before launch. In fourteen months, there would be one hundred and fifty thousand mouths to feed. The hydroponic bays could only produce so much, and with every system back online their core reactor would run out of fuel a thousand times faster.
* * *
Shere-sa thought he might have a panic attack but still laughed at the irony. On a ship filled to the brim with people, he was utterly and totally alone. He went back to the cargo hold where he’d awoken and, as he stared at the endless sea of stasis pods before him, he was filled with a sudden sense of calm. He did not know these people. Aside from the maintenance crew, they were all citizens, mindless brutes who saw him as a lesser being and never missed a chance to remind him of it. They were his people, the best of them at that, but Shere-sa didn’t sign up to save a people; he joined this mission to save his sister, his best friend, the girl at the market he never got the courage to talk to. They were all gone now, and all the people like them, because better people, the very ones he was looking at, didn’t think they were worth saving.
* * *
Shere-sa took one last look around, crawled back into his stasis pod, and hummed himself to sleep with a song his sister liked to sing. Perhaps he’d wake up again in another thousand years. Perhaps not. As the world around him began to fade, Shere-sa etched a smile. He just didn’t care.
FURTHER READING
(“Miami,” by Ariane Moffatt. I’m adding music to everything now.)
This is it. The end of the end. I’m a bit emotional about writing this, but it feels wrong to cry about having too much fun for a few years. You already know how this works, so without further ado, let’s learn some stuff.
There were all kinds of great scientific missions in Aster’s lifetime. The Hubble telescope launched in 1990—it’s been doing its thing for over thirty years!—and for a while I was tempted to center this story on it. The Cassini probe—its real name is Cassini–Huygens—visited Saturn again, entering its orbit for the first time, and the Huygens lander touched down on the planet’s largest moon, Titan. It’s supercool, plus it’s a joint venture between three space agencies. The Sojourner rover was part of the Mars Pathfinder mission and launched in 1996. Seven years later, the Mars Exploration Rover mission gave us two more: Spirit and Opportunity.
In the end, I chose New Horizons because it’s awesome and I like the continuity after exploring every other planet with the Voyagers in the last book.
Lots of people wanted to send something to Pluto because, well, we’d never been. In 1992, a scientist at JPL made a phone call to Clyde Tombaugh, the guy who discovered Pluto in 1930, and asked for permission to visit “his” planet. There were, in fact, a whole series of proposed missions to Pluto that fit into the New Frontiers program at NASA, a new program for medium-sized missions (things that cost more than a buttload of money but less than a boatload of money). In the end, five projects were submitted to the New Frontiers competition and they narrowed it down to two: New Horizons, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and another similar Pluto mission from the University of Colorado that was backed by JPL among others. I’d love to make this suspenseful, but you already know who won. The celebrations didn’t last long, however, because the NASA administrator George W. Bush appointed didn’t like the idea and wouldn’t include it in the budget for the following year. That was … bad, and they didn’t have aliens willing to sign big checks for them. Their best bet, as well as Aster’s once Samael was caught at a meeting with the New Horizons team, was for the mission to be included in the Planetary Science Decadal Survey. That’s very much like a shopping list for the following decade of space stuff prepared by the National Research Council. That particular decadal survey put a mission to Pluto at the top of the list. It also gave us a bunch of Mars rovers.
New Horizons launched on January 19, 2006, on top of an Atlas V rocket. Once it reached Earth orbit, the Centaur second stage—the same Centaur used to launch the Voyager probes—fired for nine long minutes. That gave the probe a ton of speed, enough to enter a gigantic orbit around the sun, but not enough to escape its pull. That’s when the third stage comes in. They used a Star 48B rocket, slightly bigger than the regular Star 48 like Aster wanted. When it fired, the probe reached a speed of 58,536 kilometers per hour. That’s the fastest launch velocity ever. Apollo 11 took seventy-six hours to reach the moon’s orbit. New Horizons did it in nine.
On June 13 of the same year, a couple months past the orbit of Mars, New Horizons flew by a small asteroid with the cute name 132524 APL in the asteroid belt. The people of Earth thought that was cool and decided to test the probe’s instruments on this tiny rock. It worked fine. Then something terrible struck: a chunk of irony of cosmic proportions—in the Alanis Morissette sense of the word.
New Horizons launched in January of 2006 towards Pluto, the only planet of the solar system we’d never visited. On August 24 of that same year, the International Astronomical Union deplanetized Pluto! For real! While they were on their way there!
New Horizons was about halfway to Jupiter, but it was now going to explore a “dwarf planet.” The last real planet, as it retroactively happened, had already been explored by Voyager 2 fifteen years earlier. Don’t get me wrong, going to Pluto is awesome no matter what you call it, but CAN. YOU. IMAGINE? I bet at least one member of the International Astronomical Union got his car keyed that day.
