Does that make sense, Mila? That I can blame you and hate that you left me and still send our children off into space and insist on staying behind? I suppose we’re all a bundle of contradictions in the end. Maybe that’s what ultimately what makes us human. No matter what other changes or adaptations occur, that will survive.
Kathe came and sat on the porch with me before boarding the last elevator to the station. We sipped strong black coffee. She held my hand. We didn’t speak. In the end, at the end, we sat and watched the skua and the kittiwakes. We watched the sun play on the water. Then she kissed my cheek and that was goodbye.
I watched the sky for a long time after she left. I imagined if I shaded my eyes just right, I would be able to see something as the Arber set sail. I would know, or feel it deep in my bones. But there wasn’t anything to see.
No, that isn’t quite true. There was the sun. On the last day, on the first day, the sun was bright and clean and it threw a halo around itself, a celebration or one last goodbye, although it was only those who were staying behind who would ever see. The light on the last day of the world was every color the sun could be, all the colors it won’t be in space.
I read once that every person who sees a halo around the sun or the moon sees their own individual halo. Even two people standing right next to each other wouldn’t see exactly the same thing. The light breaks through different atmospheric crystals for each of them, no two beams fracturing in quite the same way. Every halo is unique.
I suppose that’s all there is. I’m sending this out into the stars to travel to new worlds, so new generations will be able to look back to know how the sun looked on a particular day back where their parents’ parents’ parents came from. So they’ll know how the sun looked to one specific person as it bounced off the water or rested against the skin of someone he loved or slipped beneath the rim of the world.
Now, I’m going to make myself another cup of coffee and sit out on the porch a little while longer. Maybe I can even coax Predator X onto my lap. I may be alone, but I’m not lonely. I have everything I need. You’re buried here, and from the moment I met you, I’ve never known how to be anywhere else but with you. The future is out there among the stars, but I’m where I belong. I’m home.
Karin Lowachee was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. Her first novel, Warchild, won the 2001 Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. Her third novel, Cagebird, won the Prix Aurora Award in 2006 for Best Long-Form Work in English and the Spectrum Award also that year. Her books have been translated into French, Hebrew, and Japanese, and her short stories have appeared in anthologies edited by Nalo Hopkinson, John Joseph Adams, Jonathan Strahan, and Ann VanderMeer. Her fantasy novel, The Gaslight Dogs, was published through Orbit Books USA.
MERIDIAN
Karin Lowachee
T hey all tried to save me.
“I think this one’s still alive.”
“Tag him.”
In that space between life and death, you make a decision whether to wake up. Maybe that’s when time ceases to matter. I felt older than four years old and too young to remember. My world was telling me not to remember how the strange crew and its dead-eyed captain came to our far-away colony and nothing was the same again.
I might’ve fought, giving them a reason to shoot me.
Or maybe there was no reason at all.
A long time later, after I was better, I heard them. Other people. Not the same bad crew. Speaking outside the door of the medical room where they kept me. It was a family ship, and they talked about dropping me at the nearest station, but—
“He’ll just cycle through the system, and how will that help?”
“Well, what do you wanna do with him?”
“Maybe we can just keep him here.”
“We don’t even know his name. He won’t talk to us. In the system, they’d be able to find out. They’d have the colony manifest. DNA records.”
DNA. In school, they ran a test for fun to find out where on Earth I was from and what kind of people I belonged to, people who had lived long ago on a faraway planet. East Asian: 61%. Spanish European: 22%. Anglo-Saxon: 17%. I coloured a map of Earth, highlighting the places those people had come from and took it home to show my parents and brothers. We had things in common that spoke of our heritage: dark eyes that tilted at the corners; dark hair.
“I don’t want to give him to the system,” this woman said.
“Now we’re kidnappers?” said the man.
“We weren’t the ones who attacked his colony.”
“No, we just swept in like those pirates right after.”
“You’re being ridiculous. We legitimately found him. Only him. Look at him. It was the pirates who did it. You want to hand him over to EHHRO?”
“He might still have family outside of the Meridia colony. We don’t have the right.”
“Where’s EarthHub now? What’re their human rights organizations doing when their colonies are being attacked?”
“Look—we’ll hand him over. If no other family speaks up, we’ll apply to foster him. Eventually adopt him if it comes to that. They’ll want to get him out of their hands so it shouldn’t be too hard. That way no authorities will get on our ass.”
“Your name’s Paris, do you remember?”
I remembered. But a part of me didn’t want to.
This new lady at the station said my last name was Azarcon. They’d gotten my DNA and matched it to the records. Paris Azarcon. I remembered my two older brothers. It hurt right where I’d been
