Code for serious emergency.
The hair on Pele’s arms rises.
All crew members are ready to fully assume many roles on the ship, according to situation and scenario, and are well-qualified for each. He is calling her to one of hers. And he must remain here.
He grabs her hand, squeezes it with tremendous warmth. Turns his face for a brief kiss, an embrace she returns, giving herself to it completely, suddenly knowing it might be their last.
She rises, gives Ann and Gustavo a brief Buddhist nod, hands pressed together, and in that action prays for all sentient beings. Since her childhood, this prayer has been vast, and, as she followed her devotions, her definition of the scope has grown daily.
“Excuse me, please.” As she passes murmuring groups of people she feels resigned, sad, but also infinitely lightened, pulled by glowing, roiling galaxies, by the romance she first felt upon the midnight sea between Tonga and Hawai’i, when she was twelve, the stars so close she could almost grab them by the fistful, when time seemed like a miraculous toy, something she could put her mind to and learn, a story to which she might give voice.
She has always been that child. As she approaches the lock, she cannot help breaking into a run, eager as all those children. All her sensible, deep fears cannot hold her back. She turns at the last movement and becomes a mudra. Signs to Gustavo:
Aloha
He signs back. She sees tears on his face, feels them on hers.
She spins abruptly; enters the real world.
Fairy tales are as good a way as any to say these things. They lived in cities as they had in dark forests. They live in space and they live in time, however strange it has become.
This is the foot of the wave function hitting bottom. This is the flying foam of the wave flickering off, blending with, becoming another kind of time, dynamic, compelling.
This is a girl walking downhill on the flank of a mountain overlooking Pearl Harbor, bare feet on hot white concrete, immersed in plumeriascented eversummer, flipping a small, white, smooth stone into the air, leaning forward, catching it, and thinking: if this flip, and this flip, and this flip could be described by mathematics, that is a thing I would like to learn.
She is the princess, waking.
She is the one who wakes time.
There is a console immediately inside Pele’s portal, amongst the wires, tubes, and pipes of a functioning spacecraft, positioned on one of the long arms that lead to the fifty acre central atrium. Opening several screens at once, she sees that her fears are correct.
Someone has begun the launch. In fact, four days earlier. No one knew; she doesn’t know why they know now. A shadow program.
Yes, they are brilliant.
Ninety minutes left until the nukes, behind the shield, move them from their perch. The entertainment and other modules are not designed to stand the thrust, a situation she opposed from their inception. After that—well, Zi is partly right. Who knows what might happen? She has always fought for reconfiguring the ship to support a different drive, but it remains theoretical, so she had little support. Still, many possibilities are embedded in Moku. Solar sails; many models of generation ships to which the ship can mechanically reconfigure. And other possibilities, awaiting the kind of nanotech enlivenment that has not yet been born.
Pele says, “Override launch progression,” her voice empowered to enact the procedure, as are the voices of a few colleagues.
“Cancelled,” says a child’s voice above her right ear.
Within minutes, she realizes that she is powerless to stop the launch. If she cannot stop it, no one can; her colleagues have equal abilities.
“Invoking emergency plan seven,” she says. Seven will detach the external modules of hotels, gift shops, restaurants, and bars, after evacuating civilians, whom she sees are being extracted from the virtual environments, the ecosystems, the build-your-own-exoplanet immersion attraction. They will head back to Earth, safe. She sees that, luckily, a third of the civilians are in their hotel rooms, probably sleeping.
A face appears; it is her colleague Selena, brushing a wisp of brown hair away from her eyes. “Pele. We’re all on L3, 7.”
Blue dots on a map. “Together? In a breakaway?” Breakaways are, essentially, modules to be jettisoned in an emergency. She finds the yellow dots, the children. “Why are the children all on the bridge?” But she knows why.
“You don’t understand,” says Selena. “We all need to talk. In person. Now. Hurry.”
She does understand. She does hurry.
Pele enters the breakaway breathless, and sees her friends, her colleagues, her fellow dreamers, surrounded by screens on which blink schematics, warnings, plans, arguing.
She has known all of them for a very long time. They have labored together, here and in their various universities, think-tanks, and labs, over the past fifty years, as technologies changed and changed and changed again, holding to the same vision, generating theoretical and actual drives, ship design, exoplanet possibilities, and iterations of Moku in model and, slowly, in reality. Most have rotated onto Moku for a total of at least five years, with breaks, and something is always new when each arrives. They are only a handful compared to all their colleagues on Earth, the Moon, Mars, and various space communities. They have never been together in this particular configuration, which changes monthly as some rotate out and others in, but have known each other from meetings and through their work for longer than most humans have lived. They number thirty-two.
She knows that they, like she, feel as if Moku is their own body.
“Pele is here,” says Selena, and they all turn.
Pele says, “Earth should know, by now. We’ll have radio backup.”
Bijo, usually laboring in his beloved rain forest, which will never be ready, shakes his head, bowed like a slender, heavy-headed blossom after a downpour. “We are completely isolated. The children have blocked all communication.”
The face of
