And that was where it hit me, the idea of having a personal stake in the future. We hadn’t even talked about kids yet, but I found myself wondering what our family would be like. Not if we would have one; it suddenly seemed like a given. We were so in love, how could that love help but spill over and spread outward and keep on multiplying itself?
I wondered if our kids would be happy. If they’d play soccer, running around with pure, unfettered joy. I wondered if they would grow up to have kids of their own.
When Kathe was born, I worried about so many things. I wanted to do everything to protect her. You were the one who finally got me to relax, to let go a little. She would be her own person; we’d given her everything she needed to get a good start in life. And you were right, Mila. We raised some good kids. Or, really, they grew into good people, and we managed to not fuck it up by getting in their way.
After that first village, we hiked to another village where all the houses were on stilts, and they gave us strong rice wine to sample. At our last stop, the villagers had set out a dinner to share with the hikers and our guides on a long wooden table in a barn. Before we ate, we watched the sun go down. It was less a sunset and more a sense of the light being swallowed by the mist, diffusing and turning the sky the color of a new peach, sliced thin and still holding the warmth of the day—sweet and melting and bright on the tongue.
What I remember most is the way the light caught in a curl of your hair, just before the sun vanished. It reminded me of our wedding day, except instead of flyaway strands, the hair stuck in the sweat on the back of your neck. It was like you’d found a way to braid the sunlight and make it a part of you.
I know that sounds incredibly sappy, but it’s true. Or, at least, I’ve built it into truth over the years. That’s what people left alone with their thoughts and their grey kittens named after prehistoric animals do. They invent narratives to make sense of their lives and to fix the pattern of those lives more firmly in their minds. Even if that isn’t the way the sunlight looked on that particular day, that is how I choose to remember it. That is the image I’m sending out among the stars.
June 30, 2232—Svalbard
Today was the last day, or the first day, depending on how you look at it. The Arber has officially set sail, or whatever word one uses for the departure of a ship the size of a city without masts or cloth or anything resembling a sail.
This is the first day of the new age of humanity.
Our children’s children’s children, will they even be human anymore? Born in space, living all those years on a ship under sunlamps and breathing recycled air. Will they still call themselves human when they land on a new world and make it their own?
I don’t have any answers. How can I speak to the big questions of life when the small ones still elude me? How do you love someone and let them go? How can someone be a stranger and still be your own flesh and blood? How can you feel closer to someone who isn’t even on Earth any more than you ever did when they were right there beside you?
Indulge me for a moment, Mila. I know you always hoped my relationship with Thomas would be more like my relationship with Kathe. The truth is, there was always a rift between us. Maybe we both sensed it, and so we kept our distance. Or maybe it was just a failure on both of our parts to try.
When you died, the rift widened, and everything came crashing down. Thomas blamed me. He told me in no uncertain terms that I should have forced you to undergo gene therapy. As if your body, and the decisions you made regarding it, were any business of mine. I told him over and over again it wasn’t what you wanted. You’d considered and discarded that option.
There were days I agreed with him though, and that hurt the most. I lashed out at him, when I really wanted to lash out at you. At the end, when you were delirious, I couldn’t help thinking—could I have done more? Could I have forced you? In the end, I respected your wishes. In the end, I sat by and watched you die.
I know, there are no guarantees that the gene therapy would have worked. It might have led to more suffering. But I can’t help wondering … You dedicated your life to the vault and to Svalbard, to cheating nature by finding stronger, heartier crops to withstand droughts and monsoons. You were determined to do everything you could to give them more than a fair and fighting chance to survive. Why wouldn’t you take that road yourself?
I didn’t understand at the time. I think I’m closer to understanding now. At my age, death is no longer a nebulous concept far away. I’ve thought about it and what I do and do not want it to be. I don’t want to be hooked up to machines on a space ship fighting for a few more hours or months or years. I don’t want to be stuck in a cold-freeze drawer just so my distant descendants can put flowers on my grave under an alien sun. It’s my death; I want to own it. Death is the last thing we do as human beings, so I’m damned well going to do it on
