I still have the damn thing, Mila. Or at least its descendant. It’s sitting on my windowsill. Predator X hasn’t knocked it over yet, not for lack of trying. I want that flower to be the last thing I see in this world. When I’m too old and frail to walk around anymore, I’ll keep it by my bedside. It’s a little piece of you, so when I die, I won’t be doing it alone.
June 24, 2232—Svalbard
Linde and Ivan are taking the kids to get settled on the ship today. Kathe will join them just before launch. Thomas and Leena are already on board.
Before Linde and Ivan boarded, Ivan asked me if I was sure I hadn’t changed my mind. I never expected him to be the one. I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking if Kathe had put him up to it, but there was genuine regret in his eyes. Linde shook my hand, firm and strong as always. Ivan hugged me. I couldn’t ask for better children-in-law.
Sometimes I think of the dangers Kathe, Linde, Ivan, and even Thomas will face up there. What would you think of me, letting our children, their spouses, our grandchildren go off into the dark alone? Kathe, Linde, Ivan, Thomas, and Leena will likely never see an alien world, let alone set foot on one. It’ll be their children, their children’s children who will colonize the stars. If they make it that far.
I think of all the things that could go wrong—a critical failure in the engines; explosive decompression blowing them all out into space; a plague; failure of the ship-board crops and death by slow starvation. Those possibilities are next to none. Kathe gave me the figures, something like a 0.001% chance. Me being on board certainly wouldn’t tip the balance one way or another. Still, it’s a parent’s job to worry.
This is what the sun looked like on the day my grandchildren climbed aboard the space elevator and we all said goodbye.
The ocean was a sullen color, like pewter, but with a shine. Maybe tarnished silver would be a better comparison, the surface dull but with a brightness hidden underneath. The sun had a pinkish tint to it. Pink is normally a warm color, but this pink was cold. Like the inside of a shell fresh out of the sea or a thin sliver of pickled ginger. Like skin, when all the warmth of blood and a beating heart has gone out of it and it’s just a container, no longer full.
There were clouds, a very few of them, scattered across the sky. The kit-tiwakes and skua glided on the wing, and every now and then one of them would let out a cry.
Ella, that’s Kathe and Linde and Ivan’s youngest, cried when she hugged me. She put her arms around my waist, and pressed her face into my stomach. I think she’s too young to really understand the nature of this goodbye, but she could read the mood. Ryan, he’s the middle child, promised to video call every day as long as they were in range. Dani, the eldest, didn’t seem to know what to say. They shook my hand like Linde had, very formal, and that was the end.
I watched the elevator as far as I could. After a while the sun shifted to a white-yellow, cold, pure. The color of goodbye.
June 26, 2176—Luang Prabang
There’s nothing particularly special about this day, no reason it deserves to be memorialized, but life isn’t all about the big moments. In fact, life is mostly what happens in-between, and the sun shines on those days, too. That’s what this catalogue is intended to capture, after all.
I remember the day because it’s the day I stopped thinking about the future as an abstract. For as long as we’d known each other, we’d been working toward the future, cataloging and protecting and gathering seeds in the vault at Svalbard. But that future was a nebulous concept. It was for someone else, not us. That day, I started thinking about the future as a personal concept, like maybe one day we’d have a family, and they would make everything we were trying to do to make the world a better place—even in small ways—worthwhile.
We were about 60 miles outside of Luang Prabang on that day, hiking. I don’t remember the names of all the villages we passed through, but we started at the temple at Mt. Phoushi, overlooking the Mekong River.
We were there to pick up three new and heartier strains of Oryza sativa— rice, in layman’s terms. They could have been shipped to the vault, but you convinced the director to let us act as couriers. We changed each other over the years, Mila. When we first met, you would quote rules and regulations and procedure for hours on end. I like to think I taught you to appreciate the spirit of the law, as much as the letter of it. It’s like the way my concept of the future changed. I’d like to think I helped you see that we weren’t just protecting plants as a nebulous concept; we were protecting living things you could touch and hold in your hand and appreciate for more than just their potential.
And you taught me to see a wider world. Before I met you, I never thought much beyond the present moment. You expanded everything. I loved you more than I loved myself, and that made my world so much larger than it had ever been before. You taught me that the future is worth protecting, even the parts I won’t live to see. You taught me to have hope.
We did some touristy things in Luang Prabang—the temple, the Royal Palace, the Night Market—but it’s the hike I remember the most. Our guides took us in a boat across the Nam Xuang. I think there were about ten of us, total. Tourism was on the decline already in those days. We hiked for
