Divergence

“Constantine, are you coming with me?” Judy asked.

“I think I will,” Constantine said.

Saskia was distraught. “Maurice? Are you just going to let them go?”

“What do you suggest, Saskia? We’ve fulfilled our part of the contract. I say we get Judy off the ship, and then we jump back into space as quickly as possible. If we can, that is.”

“You don’t mean that. You can’t mean that. We’ve come this far.”

“Anyway,” Maurice said, “it’s not your decision to make. Edward is in charge. Edward, what do you think? Stay here on the most dangerous planet known, or get out of here while we can, and find some new contracts?”

“Hey, that’s not fair! You’re loading the question!”

But Edward had screwed up his face in concentration. “I don’t understand, Maurice. Why would we leave Judy? Surely we’re all going along with her, to help? Now, are you going to help me with Miss Rose here?” He placed a hand under the old woman’s arm.

Saskia could hear the disbelief in Maurice’s voice. “You can’t mean that we’re taking her, too?”

“Of course we are,” Edward said. “Miss Rose has something important to do. Where else would her important work be but here on Earth?”

“This is ridiculous,” Maurice said, pulling the green hood of his active suit over his head.

“So you said,” Saskia said.

Maurice hadn’t wanted to drop the rear ramp. Instead he had had them all crowd into the narrow lift and then set it descending, lowering them to the ground, taking them down to stand on Earth, taking them back to their home, the place where humankind had evolved.

“No one leaves Earth anymore,” Maurice said darkly.

“Do we know that for sure?” asked Saskia.

All things come full circle: from a replicating molecule to single cells, to plants to animals. Humankind had arisen, built cities, built civilizations, and exploded out into the stars. Driven by intelligence, they had almost made it to the next galaxy, but then the Dark Seeds had appeared, and now the Earth had called its children home. Saskia was shivering. Maurice remained businesslike.

“Listen, keep your active suits on at all times. Don’t breathe the air, don’t drink or eat anything while you’re out there. The Watcher controls everything. Don’t give it a way into your soul.”

“Your soul , Maurice?” said Judy, giving him a faint smile, but she too reached up and pulled the black hood of her active suit over her head. Saskia and Edward did the same. Constantine was becoming fuzzy; his skin seemed to be losing focus.

The indicator bar on the lift wall glowed blue.

“Okay,” said Maurice, “we’re down. I’ll open the door now….”

Saskia squeezed Miss Rose’s arm. For a moment, for a long moment, she wanted to call out NO!, to have the lift return them to the safety of the Eva Rye. But the door was already sliding open. The temperature senses on her active suit relayed to her skin the icy coldness waiting beyond.

“Here we go,” she said.

They stepped through the doorway and out onto the surface of the planet Earth. Every window on Earth looks out onto a beautiful view. Saskia looked onto a winter world of burning ice. The pale morning sun shone down through an avenue of frosted poplars; it set the icicles clinging to the lampposts on fire with yellow light. It lit up the gravel squares and the little gardens of the parkland in which they had landed.

Saskia breathed in the fresh cold draft of air that her active suit replicated from the morning outside. She looked this way and that, drinking in the scene around her. There were people everywhere: running children in brightly colored hats and thick mittens, scraping snow off the seats of benches to make snowballs; there were adults walking or standing in groups amongst them laughing and chatting. A young woman in a thick pink coat smiled as she passed a tall young man in a blue-and-white bobble hat. She tucked her hands into the black fur-trimmed pockets of her coat and walked on, looking demurely at the ground as her suitor came loping up behind her.