Maybe the Arber‘s children, or their children’s children will see starlight on the dust of some distant world, watch it pool in the craters of their first new footsteps and call it the sun. But not the ones leaving. The ones who grew up under its light. This is my gift to them. A little something to take with them into the cold and the dark.
Today, the light is pure. There isn’t a cloud in the sky to cut it, no breeze to stir it off our skins. All the shadows are sharp-edged. There’s so much of it, it’s easy to forget it’s there. Ubiquitous sun. It gets over everything and under everything and inside it. Today, the light of the sun has almost no color at all, but if you squint just right, you can prism it, see the rainbow fractures flaring away from it. That is the sun here today, children. The sun you’re leaving behind. There has never been another just like it, and there never will be again.
There. That part is for the future. This part is for the present and the past. For you and me, Mila.
Kathe came to see me today and asked me one more time to go with them. There’s room, she said. You could stay with me, Linde, Ivan, and the kids until we figure things out. She didn’t mention Thomas.
Kathe has pull. It comes with being Head of Resource Management, Northern Division. She could make it happen, our girl. That’s what she does, after all. She manages resources. If she says there’s room for me, then there’s room. She could probably get me the nicest berth on the ship, if I asked.
Space travel is for the young, I told her. It’s no place for an old man like me. Besides, this is my home. I like it here. This is where I belong.
But your children, she said. Your grandchildren.
Her eyes. It’s hard to look at them sometimes. They remind me so much of you. I think she knew she’d already lost the fight.
What’s the point of space? It’s just another place to be without you. I have my kettle here. I have my woolen socks and my favorite mug. I have a library full of books and music. I’ve even adopted a cat. Or it’s adopted me. A little grey kitten I’ve named Predator X. They won’t have cats in space. They’ll have genetic material, of course, but it’s hard to cuddle a test tube on a cold winter’s night and be comforted by its purr.
May 23, 2171—Prince Edward Island
To hell with separating past and future. This is my catalogue, and I’ll tell it how I choose and to who I choose, and I choose you, Mila.
Obviously May 23, 2171 isn’t today’s date, and I’m not on Prince Edward Island. It’s when and where we were married. The sunlight on that day deserves to be memorialized.
It was golden in the way sunlight never is outside of photographs and memories. It caught in your hair, turning those fly-away strands you could never get to behave—even on that day—into individual threads of crystal. It was sunlight in its ideal form, its most romantic form. They say it’s lucky to have rain on your wedding day, but I think that’s just something to make people feel better when their bouquets and tuxedoes and cakes and dozen white doves are all soggy and miserable.
We were married on the beach, on the dunes, with the waves in the background and wild sea grass running everywhere around us. Those dunes are gone now. In another few years, the whole island will be gone, lost to rising sea levels like New Orleans and Florida, London and Venice. So many cities swallowed whole. But back then, it was beautiful.
Lupines and red sand—those stick out in my mind. You insisted on traveling back to your family’s home because your grandmother wasn’t well enough to travel, and you wanted her to give you away. I didn’t have any people of my own left, so one place was as good as another to me. You were all the family I wanted and needed back then. Now that my life is coming full circle, I’m finding that’s true once again.
The day I proposed to you was the day I stole the Gibraltar Campion from the seed vault. Silene tomentosa, your favorite flower. The first time I saw you, you were looking at a 3-D projection of it, part of the vault’s new finding aid. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was your program. You were also the one who got rare and endangered flowers added to the vault along with staple crops. You said beautiful things should be saved as well as useful ones, and besides bees and pollination and flowers—even rare and temperamental ones—are part of our ecosystem, too.
On the day we met, you were looking at the Gibraltar Campion from every angle, studying it with a scientist’s eye. I don’t think you knew anyone was watching you. Then, for just a moment, your expression changed; you weren’t looking at the flower like a scientist anymore. You frowned and reached out like you wanted to brush your finger along the pale silk of its petal.
Had you ever seen one in person? I imagined how many years you’d spent studying it and how you’d launched a whole program to protect it and other flowers like it. But had you ever held its thin stem between your fingers or breathed it in to
