Nucleus fills with huge, idealized atoms, strings of splitting and reconnecting DNA, and long sections of text. One section glows next to Pele, and she rapidly scans it, aghast.
Grinning, Xia shouts, “And we will all have tremendous fun!” Everyone except Pele whoops and cheers.
“Should we discuss it and vote?” asks Pele. They all look at her with amazement. “I’ve seen this before. It’s a plan for—it is, I gather, a universal assembler—”
“There’s nothing to vote on,” Xia explains, her voice as gentle as if speaking to a small child. She holds a sheaf of small, square envelopes in one hand. “This was always part of the plan. All of us have contributed to it, in one way or another. We all know everything there is to know about it.”
The fields of nanotechnology, a discipline drawing on all scientific disciplines, have blown far past Drexler’s early visions. Pele has sat on international committees that debated the use of various iterations of nanotechnology. Some were approved, and some, which embodied the possibility of change so rapid and radical that the results could not be predicted, were left unused, and locked away.
Pele understands, and now knows that they understand as well, that this particular iteration is the ability to change matter swiftly, from the bottom up, to grow rather than to machine. This chameleon-like ability, this new plasticity, will include themselves—their minds, their bodies—as well as their surroundings. Everything. Within what limits? The limits of physics have not been fully explored. Not by a long shot. Things will change, evolve, and Pele doesn’t know what, or how. Neither do they.
Alicia gives everyone an envelope. Pele opens hers and pulls out a round, paperish object.
“Why does this look like a communion wafer?” she asks.
“A what?” ask several children.
“The circle was my idea,” says Bean. “It’s … simple. It doesn’t have any religion in it.”
“I wanted water balloons that we could explode and scatter the replicators around,” says Ta’a’aeva, scowling. “Nobody listens to me.”
“Do we eat it?” asks Pele.
“You can,” says Xia, but, imitating the children, Pele presses hers to the side of the ship, where, warmed by her hand, it is rapidly absorbed.
A brief, dazzling light rushes through the walls of Nucleus. The children break into wild dance, laughing, and spinning through the air.
O brave new world, thinks Pele, that has such people in’t! She recalls her child-self, almost flying off the sheer cliff, and wants to grab them, and hold them back.
But it is far too late for that.
She soars and spins with the rest of them. Laughs. Forgets.
Is brave, again. For now.
The enlivenment, as the nanotech changes move through the ship, transforming its matter to a medium that they can easily manipulate, is slow at first, but increases in speed exponentially.
It makes their work much easier, and their environment becomes more dense, as if full of worlds it had been waiting to manifest.
Despite her fears, it is good, as far as she can tell. A rich and joyous thing.
The children, she realizes, do know more than she does.
For instance: Pele, strolling through the city, enters a musty used bookstore. It draws her in, past piles and towering shelves of books, farther and farther, until she realizes that she is in the children’s library that Zi mentioned. Each title strikes her heart. Some make her cry. All open worlds in her mind, worlds she thought long-gone; worlds that submerge her, change, and release her.
With wonder, she pulls out an old, tattered, black book. On its cover is an illustration of a girl and boy unlatching an arched, stout, wooden door set in a stone wall. The Latch Key. Opening it, she first reads the frontis poem, written by Olive Beaupré Miller:
Its windows look out far and wide
From each of all its stories.
I’ll take the key and enter in;
For me are all its glories.
When Pele looks up, after reading for hours, the store is gone; the street, likewise, has vanished. She sets the book aside, perches on a rock, stares at the stars, and remembers Gustavo, her children, his children, and her descendants, for a long, sweet time.
She hears those children shout to one another as they hide-and-seek in Earth’s long, green summer evenings, sees them splash in their nightly bath and then their faces in soft lamplight, eyelids closing, as she reads to them these old, strong tales.
Perhaps, she thinks, that is the most good I have ever done.
She uses their new technology to create a tiny, whitewashed cottage that hangs in rain forest on a steep volcanic mountain. Far below, lush tongues of green, fringed with shining, black volcanic sand, invade the sea, which deepens to kane, the deep, blue shade of distance. Tatami mats cover the wide-plank koa floor. The trade wind rattles the hanging photos of Sunny, Walter, and all the kids against the wall. A bookshelf manifests any books she wants, including an old, well-worn copy of Through Fairy Halls, with its luminous cover plate of a girl and boy rushing ahead of a diaphanous winged fairy.
Pele sits on her front porch in a rocking chair, paging through the large, heavy book thoughtfully, as the growing drive undergoes troubleshooting and the songs of long-extinct finches wind through her thoughts. She hikes down an ever-manifesting ridge, rappels down a cliff to a tiny beach where she tests herself in treacherous currents, and flings herself, naked, on olivine sand, falling asleep to the roar of the surf. And wakes to space, ablaze with the stars she long planned to grasp.
Her soul rests a brief time, all she allows.
Then, while the children work, Pele turns to what needs to be done. She absorbs the threats, the messages, the stages of grief from Earth. It is hard. She can only do a bit of this task at a time, but she battles through it. She is
