Mom? Are You Here? #5
While OS diligently gardens, I walk along the soil beds in that last greenhouse, run my fingers over soft felty plants that are the colors of rust and bricks.
They thrive equally well on Minerva’s soil as they did on the ship.
I wonder how competitive the plant’s home world was, for it to be so robust in so many sorts of environments.
What a motley ecosystem we’re forming here, with beings from three different worlds.
We’ve been six months on Minerva, which means OS and I need to adjust the algal crop’s fertilizers to prevent burnout.
A pail of extruded fats, proteins, and carbs hanging from the crook of an elbow, I return to the table of our home base, with its mixture of chairs, both newly printed and scavenged from the Endeavor.
I set the elements heating and mixing into our usual meal, then open the black book to the “Month 6” tab while I wait for Kodiak to return for his lunch.
I didn’t sleep much the night before, and can’t keep my vision from blurring as I read through rows and rows of recommended nitrogen percentages.
I almost miss the footnote at the bottom of one plasticine page: Welcome to your sixth month, Settlers Cusk and Celius.
Now that you’re established, you may access special messages for you in the Endeavor’s stored memory. Partition 07:14, code Bb06.
As soon as Kodiak’s on the horizon, making his slow progress back to base, I’m up and waving my arms. “Hurry, hurry!”
The young man sits on a folding chair in a plain room. It would be totally nondescript except for the window behind him that blazes with blue sky, sunlight flooding the frame. The Earth sky. The Earth sun.
The boy is spangled in the highest fashion Fédération accessories: a gold circlet around his head, a cream-colored wrap of the softest fabric, hemmed in silver. Expensive skinprint mods glitter on his cheeks and neck.
He’s me.
“Well, this is weird,” the boy with my voice says.
“No kidding,” I whisper back, cutting my eyes to Kodiak. He’s impassive, hands clasped before his lips, barely blinking as he watches the recording.
“I’m Ambrose Cusk. You know that. Because you’re Ambrose Cusk, too.
” He whistles awkwardly. “I’m the original.
We split after I had that medical screening.
They recorded my, our, brain there. A couple of months ago.
Now I know the truth. That Minerva’s distress beacon never triggered, that mission control lied to me.
You needed to believe that, though, to have the will to survive each time you were woken up, so that’s why they mapped my neurons while I still believed, too.
“Mother saw the writing on the wall for Earth, had a plan to continue the human race, wanted her own offspring to be the foundation of its second stage, to be the one who carried the torch of human civilization.” He laughs ruefully.
“You know, typical Mom. She’s always been a woman of simple ambitions. ”
He looks at someone off camera, then shakes his head slightly.
“No one ever asked me about this plan,” he continues.
“I was furious about it for a long time, what it was doing to me—to you—without your permission. The violin was my one small rebellion—I insisted that mission control give you that. It’s the very one we grew up playing.
One small thing that you got instead of me.
At least, since you’re hearing this, you’ve arrived on the exoplanet.
I’m sorry there wasn’t one any closer. You’re the lucky clone, the point of all this.
You’re also likely the last humans alive.
You and whichever spacefarer Dimokratía wound up selecting.
The mission was just too ambitious to accomplish without Cusk, Fédération, and Dimokratía all involved, and Dimokratía wouldn’t have invested without getting to place someone on board, too. ”
Ambrose fiddles with a gold bracelet. “I hope he’s kind to you.” He looks off camera again, where there’s clearly someone monitoring what he says—maybe the Academy Admiral, maybe our mother. Ambrose nods.
“Save this recording for the rest of humanity to turn to in the centuries to come. Let them know who sent you, and why. You should call this planet Cusk. That’s Mom’s dream.”
Kodiak is suddenly on his feet, fast enough to fling his chair along the muddy heath. He staggers out of the shattered wreckage of 06. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Delete it!” he yells over his shoulder as he stalks off.
“Kodiak!” I call, running after him while the long-dead version of me drones on in the background.
His back is to me, with the green-purple sunset sky of Minerva before him, the bioluminescent plains spread out underneath.
Kodiak’s shoulders heave. I approach him, lay a hand on his shoulder. He goes still.
I position myself in front of him. Looking into his eyes, making sure it’s okay for me to embrace him now, I press myself against him.
In the background, the Earth Ambrose is still speaking. “Are you okay, Kodiak?” I ask.
He sobs in response, his tears wet against my cheek. “Shh,” I soothe him. “Shh.”
He shakes and shudders, his body wracked with convulsions. I stand against him, holding him in, shocked into silence by his tears.
“I hate them,” he finally manages. “I hate them all.”
“There’s a recording of you up next,” I say. “Don’t you want to hear what the original Kodiak has to say?”
“No.” He shudders. “He doesn’t deserve for me to hear him. None of them do.”
I nod against his cheek. “Okay. We’ll turn it off. I don’t want to delete it, though. Okay?”
He pulls away, puts his hands tenderly on my shoulders, turns me around. “Look at this sunset.”
The sky is a violent crush of greens and pinks and purples, Minerva’s distant second sun jagging it all with reds and oranges. “It’s so beautiful,” I whisper.
Kodiak presses against me, arms wrapping around my torso as he pulls me in tight. “Don’t get me wrong. I love being here with you. I am in awe of what we’re doing together. It’s terrifying and wonderful, all at the same time. But it’s ours. Not theirs. Ours.”
I nod, grateful for the warmth of Kodiak’s body against my back, his arms holding me so near. Grateful for the simplicity of what he’s just said.
We never watch the rest of the recordings.
One good thing does come out of watching those reels: Kodiak tracked down the violin in the wreckage. He made it his present to me on the one-year anniversary of our arrival.
It’s an important milestone in more ways than one. I play the violin all morning, then put it away. Kodiak and I stand solemnly in front of the gray portal. There’s something we need to bring out. Something alive.
Considering how closely we stuck to the Endeavor during our first few weeks, it’s surprising how far we’ll range now. We spend days at a time away from the wreck, sleeping on our slow floating polycarb hovercrafts, waking from our tight embrace only when we hear OS starting to tend our algae crops.
The Endeavor has been slowly sinking in the muck.
Room 06, which was once the main viewing point for the stars around us—real and fake—is now fully dark, and half-full of liquid methane.
It’s only a matter of time before the ship disappears entirely, becomes a ruin for future residents to excavate and ponder.
The gray room has risen higher into the sky as the heavier end has sunk. We have to climb to reach it, using the very rungs that our previous clones must have used back when it was in zero g.
There’s a hum inside.
At the very back of the hold is a whirring device.
Kodiak and I place our palms against it, like expectant parents.
As expectant parents. The vibrations give an extra throb every 1.
3 seconds, when the centrifuge’s arm spins past. The revolutions provide force identical to the gravity of Earth, for optimal fetal development.
On the outside of the machine is a clock, which has been counting down since Kodiak and I activated the gestation device 217 Minerva days ago. Only seven minutes remain.
We hadn’t been able to choose which embryo would grow first. According to the Minerva book, there are thousands of zygotes frozen in the shielded interior unit, extracted from genetic strains from across Earth, from both Dimokratía and Fédération and the few unincorporated territories, to prevent inbreeding in the future generations on the planet.
We will relocate the gestation device to our base and then draw from these embryos for thousands of years, as long as there are humans alive on Minerva to raise them.
I imagine, sometimes, what will happen if Kodiak and I die from a freak storm, if these feral children will grow up worshipping shreds of polycarb and a half-broken violin, digging up a sunken ship and studying its artifacts for information about the old gods who abandoned them to figure out the world’s meaning for themselves.
Maybe all young parents have a version of this worry. But ours is extreme.
Only six minutes remain. I take Kodiak’s free hand in mine.
We’ve spent the last few weeks preparing for this moment. Raiding the ships for whatever soft materials remain, introducing strains of algae that produce a mix of nutrients close to breast milk, creating a cozy smaller habitat with a higher temperature. A nursery.
We’ve talked forever about names. We could name this child after people who have been dead for thousands of years, leaders and thinkers from Earth that our new society ought to acknowledge.
But we’re not going to name this child yet.
We’re living on a frontier, and this child is more likely to die than to live.
Once they’ve reached their second Earth birthday, we’ll name them.
Four minutes left now.
I think of our long-dusty home, struck by an asteroid, likely losing its atmosphere in the process. Not just humans gone if that happened—everything eradicated, except maybe some anaerobic undersea bacteria.
I think of this fertile, primordial planet, ripe and unexplored.
I think of OS and the Coordinated Endeavor, its thousands of years traveling across the universe to find a new home. Its murderous Rover, now the gentle gardener of a new world.
Kodiak leans his ear against the gestation pod, a look of wonder on his face. A new father.
One minute left.
I put my face right alongside his, staring into his eyes as the centrifuge slows. The vibrations subside.
We ease to the lip of the gray room, where it tilts into the face of Minerva’s blue-green sky, and perch in a ray of chill sunlight. We don’t know how much space the pod needs to deliver. We have never witnessed a birth before.
The timer clicks down to zero. For a moment, all is still.
Then a panel in the gestation pod clicks open. Kodiak and I watch and wait. My hand is in his. I kiss the side of his neck. “It’s happening.”
A cry.
Kodiak clambers to the gestation pod and gasps. He turns with a small human creature in his hands. It’s moving. Little arms and little legs, little fingers and little toes. All of it slick with clear goo.
A baby.
I clear the small face, hold the newborn upside down so its airway will open. Then I cradle it in the crook of my arms, warming it with my own body heat.
Kodiak joins me, stroking the baby’s face, his heat joining mine.
Our child is born.