She wants badly to invent Sunny to have someone to talk to, and though she could, it would only be herself, so she does not. She is afraid to think about why she slept so long. She both knows and does not know, and both are useless to try to understand.
She knows her purchase on this new reality is tenuous. The part of her that loosed them is not rational, and she has fought it all her life.
But there is something she must do now that is more important than anything else she has ever done. That task holds her sternly here, on Moku, with its precious cargo of life.
Moku holds the world genome. They will start species, including humans, growing when they get close. To somewhere. After an unimaginable piece of time, when it is likely that none of them will be here, or that they will be so different that one could spend a million years just imagining the possibilities. What Moku will nurture, and why, will be based on immense data about the planet. A complex task, the vindication of what she has enabled, awaits.
Pele wonders, what will these new humans, these mammals who absorb culture, know? Who and what will teach them? When they forage among the wilderness of what the ship holds, who will they become? What culture will they construct?
It is her task to help them answer this question.
When she calls the children together, they protest. “We are working,” says Ta’a’aeva, standing with her arms crossed as thirty-seven children gather in Nucleus.
“You haven’t spoken to your parents since we left. You need to do that. Now.”
Kevin sucks in his lips and clenches his hands, as he always does in times of stress, to keep them from trembling.
Ta’a’aeva’s face hardens.
Alicia, who is thirteen, curses, rips a cushion from the floor, and floats it as hard as she can in Pele’s general direction. “I told my mother I was leaving and that I’m never coming back!”
Bean bursts into tears and pushes herself down the tunnel to her berth.
“I hear all of you,” says Pele. “Your feelings are mixed up, and hard to live with. How do you think they feel?”
“I’m tired of always trying to think about what other people are feeling,” declares Xavier. “It’s too hard.”
“It’s the hardest thing to do,” says Pele.
When rent by a meteor, the ship heals. This is not magic. This is science.
Pele, Nedda, Bean, and Takay are sitting on the porch of her cottage, reading books.
As if in a dream, or a myopic haze, Pele sees sky and sea shatter, revealing an assault of blinding stars, and hears a huge rush, as on a beach where massive waves tower and break, and then they are enclosed by a thick, opaque membrane.
Pele is surprised when they all stand and begin to sing, each in a different language, in different tunes and meters, and that it sounds so beautiful. Time seems more slow, and although together they all speak their ever evolving Esperanto, they sing songs from their own earliest childhoods. Pele’s mouth opens; her own song comes out, rich and deep from her chest, from her toes, from the far spaces of memory: the Wayfaring chant. From star to star to star. Like a bird transverses the sea. Maybe, indeed, she moves them with this chant. It seems so.
As they sing, life encloses not-life with a net that then thickens, expelling not-life with energy captured from the meteor. Not death—a lucky catch! The net extracts minerals, oxygen, carbon dioxide.
The scrim of matter opaques. They are made whole; enclosed.
They have new stuff to play with, to sustain them. The ship uses the meteor to grow more space, add more air, water the lettuce, grow the infant bristlecone pines in High Sierra.
To regrow the shattered cottage, and chairs, where they sit rocking, turning pages slowly, as a standing wave edges the blue Pacific far below, and plumeria sweeten the air.
They have communicated with one another by this time. The children and their parents.
Their parents had not remembered how strong the force of growing is. They had not remembered how they fought to leave home.
They wanted some kind of magic to protect their children, but all their love could not invent it. The children had torn themselves away, but that is what children do.
Before all this, the parents had worked very hard, even before the children were conceived, because this was The Future, and there was a lot that they could do. These parents wanted their children to be the very smartest, the very best, the most successful. They particularly did not want their children to turn out like the children of their relatives or their friends, who always did a terrible job, and in whose children the ways in which they had gone wrong were so obvious. They would do better.
When the children became teenagers, their sweet child faces changed, and their behaviors were not encouraging. Even though the parents had been teenagers and were sure that they would understand their own, a dark magic veil had grown between them.
I think that this is the first mention of magic in this fairy tale, but I’m not sure. Don’t be too hard on us for not knowing exactly when this happened. A lot of fairy tales don’t even realize that’s what they are, much less come right out and admit it.
Anyway, once the kids were teenagers, the parents lost control. And yes, they were afraid, because they remembered how stupid they had been, and they had tried with all their might to deflect or change this stupid energy, and because it was The Future and they knew more about brains and human development, they thought they had it licked.
But no. They were still the same old humans in important ways.
The children didn’t know that they were acting like robots and that they would miss their parents. They didn’t know that just growing up creates this energy, and
