Kevin is right.
We might have missed the news. It might have failed to penetrate to where we were. It would have been better if we had never known. Instead, it is a scream of deepest sorrow that runs through the ship, penetrates to our very core.
We are now, evermore, and henceforth alone.
The Earth, and all its life, is gone.
There was a nuclear war. All their painstaking and careful safeguards could not hold against a handful of people who did not care for life.
Unknowable flashes, garbled pictures, sick-making nightmares, and mornings of waking in our own beds as the sweet birds sing. There is no way to measure that time.
We wonder if the Librarian’s clock has anything to do with this. But she will not say.
Ta’a’aeva keeps telling Pele that she had no choice, that they had sussed her out from the beginning. Pele knows that isn’t true. They had no idea why she did it. They didn’t know because neither did she. It is a big fat tragic mystery.
She makes that mystery into a vase that she keeps on her kitchen window. She fills the vase with starlight as the memory-threads holding her to Earth stretch, and finally snap, leaving her weightless.
She needs weight to live.
We read the stars, their signatures and histories, and calculate the planets they may have spawned. There are gas giants, dead rocks too cold or too dark for what we might call life, and some don’t spin, but some of them have water and it is toward them that we navigate until we are close enough for searing disappointment.
During our navigation, we turn into ourselves again. We remember that our personalities are formed by the languages of genes, not stories, but that our actions can be influenced by the stories we learn. It’s actually very scary. When we are lucky enough to grow up with stories of love, and not meanness and hate, then we can love. Love makes us happy. Stories of hate teach us only how to be victorious and to hurt others. What is most scary is how many ways we can hurt each other without even knowing that we have, or how hard it is to learn to act in ways that do not hurt others the next time. That is because there is never a same next time, so something has to be constant and at the same time fluid inside of you in the place that acts. Sometimes it is easy to think that there isn’t anything anyone can do about this. Sometimes sadness teaches lessons that lead to more sadness, but sometimes it can lead to changed behavior. Sometimes happiness cannot figure out how to give itself to others. Sometimes joy can only be lived, a lucky chance that one takes, a risk that says damn the consequences. But sometimes the consequences can lead to all kinds of bad places. One must keep air inside a bladder and shoot back to the sun.
Not everyone knows how to do this.
Not everyone has a bladder, air, a sea, or a sun.
We are lucky.
We wake from another coldsleep. Sometimes we are in cocoons; other times, in coffins and kissed to consciousness by the prince-of-allgood-dreams; sometimes we pass the time as equations or as prime numbers: one unique majestic mountain peak after another. That’s infinity. That’s real fun. And, of course, it takes a very long time. Or so it seems.
We incorporate ourselves and grow ourselves and enhance ourselves with the genes of other species. We invent new species. We discard them, and sometimes they discard us. Then we bloom again, but different, somewhat. Still, we keep the memory of Life, rich Life, towards which we long with all our hearts. And the palette of a planet which we will change. Which will change us.
Life.
We fire the forest, stand back from the searing heat, retreat behind a clear panel and watch the blaze.
Though they live longer than anything else, bristlecone pines eventually need fire for regenesis. On Earth, lightning performed that function.
Yes, it has been that long. And longer.
Alcubierre has no colors, or more colors than we can know. She is immense; invisible.
Some of us grow new senses that we use to pat Alcubierre on her withers, even though it looks as if we are making the bed or splitting firewood or watching ants have wars. These are things no one has to do any longer, but some of us think it is helpful to believe they are doing them, so we make work for ourselves and say it keeps us sane.
Alcubierre is so huge that we will never see the beginning or end of her. In fact, the only way to think about her is with other kinds of symbols, not words.
That accounts for how the story keeps changing. Who we are and how we tell it.
We look at Pele’s vase. “What is that?” asks Xia.
Pele says, “It is sadness too strong to bear. But it is something I need to feel. If we cannot understand how our actions impact others, we will bring nothing to the place we are going.”
Kevin frowns. “That makes no sense at all.”
It does to me.
The Librarian has been in the library for a very, very long time. Through two coldsleeps at least. Now she sits, smiling at the clock.
Amelia, who has been lying on her back, thinking, jumps up, smiling. “I have an idea!”
She gently lifts the clock from the Librarian’s hands.
The Librarian stands, stiffly. She moves her arms forward a few inches but no farther. She stares at the clock, her mouth slightly open, distress in her eyes.
Amelia opens the little door holding the rattling key, and then the door to the face that contains the keyholes.
“That won’t work,” says Ta’a’aeva.
“We must keep trying,” says Amelia. She winds, winds, winds each mechanism. “Hold this,” she says, handing the key to Jaques. She opens the door for the pendulum, and sets it ticking.
Then she takes the clock and presses it to the wall. It adheres,
