Was it a heroic act, a Noah for the arc?
Blind, rushing ignorance?
This is our house.
This is our bed.
These are our chairs.
“We have left Oz in a magic balloon,” says Targa, lying on his back with his hands laced behind his neck. “We made the fire, like the professor. So who is the Wicked Witch of the West who will punish us for trying to get to our new home?”
“Pele,” yells Oscar.
“No!” several chorus. Ki says, “Pele is Glinda!”
“Pele is the sleeping princess,”
“She’s awake.” “Not really.”
“And so are we all munchkins?” asks Juno indignantly. “Or flying monkeys?”
“I’m a flying monkey,” says Targa, flipping over and pushing off, soaring with arms extended.
“And do we have hearts?”
“I am working on mine,” says Bean, splaying two long-fingered hands across her chest. “I am working very, very hard.”
Pele, hunched near-fetal in her berth, hears voices. She always does, but these wake her, for some reason. She opens one eye and sees that they have furnished her with a crystal ball with which to watch the proceedings. She allows herself a brief, tiny smile, uncurls, stretches, and leans forward on her elbows. “Wicked witch,” she votes aloud, her long-unused vocal chords pushing it out as a rusty whisper.
They all look at the monitor, wave and cheer. “Pele! Pele! Pele!”
She tests the most important word: “Courage!”
“Courage,” they yell back. “Courage!”
How long can longing last? Is English really so sparse?
Pele finds the German word sehnsucht. Sounds like a sneeze. And that C.S. Lewis said it is “That unnamable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of “Kubla Khan,” the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves, carrying the freight of longing’s complexity, modified by underlying stratum of utopias particular to each individual.”
But English has its strengths, for longing indeed is … long. Endless, in fact. Until what she imagines will be that eyeblink, sudden as their previous transition to the inescapable longing of perpetual now.
Presently, that is Pele’s name for this planet.
Sehnsucht. “Zeenzucht,” Pele says, and saying it changes her brain. Or something. Maybe.
Despite all we know and all we have learned about Shining Leaf, as Ta’a’aeva insists we call this planet, there is much that remains unknown.
Shining Leaf is just a blip. Another flash, a nanosecond opening that, taking, we risk all.
We have seeded other planets with our clones. As far as we know, they all died. We all died. But here we are. Still.
We are, at last, restless. In fact, we are able to realize that we are mad.
That we are ready to choose.
Pele never votes. “I voted once,” she says, and we say, “Yes, and we are glad that you did.”
She makes us promise something. And, at last, we do.
We cannot even talk about the painful changes that swept through us when we disengaged the drive. How it looked, felt. The precise analytics, biological and physical. How long it took in mundane time. The unspinning. Realizing the door of us, each unique. Moku could tell that story, and those in the future will want to know.
Having lived it is enough for us.
Moku was our home. It sustained us in our search, kept us alive, taught us much, but kept us in a state of fear and hesitation. We wanted to grow up badly enough to die if it did not work. Like Pinocchio, we wanted to be real.
We saw our main chance, and we took it.
And so became human again.
How can you tell the choice between good and evil when that choice is hard upon you? How do you recognize it? Is there a way to measure the road not taken? Why would that matter?
We have learned much about taking risk. We could not help moving into this.
From the Giant’s abode in the sky, Jack stole the harp that plays by itself. The ship is that: we stole it.
From the Giant’s abode in the sky, Jack stole the goose that lays the golden egg.
Perhaps that is us.
Will we live happily ever after?
Time will tell.
When a horse wins a race, she is heaped with flowers. She snorts and prances and feels proud.
Our horse, on which we placed all bets, won.
So many suns, so many planets that did not suit. You know that tale. Some, seeded by us with life, might now be flourishing, but we will never know.
It is not luck that brought us here, to this perfect planet, with its perfect star. It was courage.
Beneath this glorious, intense blue-violet sky, buffeted by sea-wind, I know, ineluctably, that I am here, on this loud coast. Crashing waves suck rattling, tumbling stones back into the shorebreak, nicking my bare feet and calves with delicious sharp pings. Sunset-tinged clouds billow like great swans on the horizon. I pull in breaths of sweet salt air, keeping an eye on my great-granddaughter, playing tag with rushing foam.
Shining Leaf is no game, no illusion, no manufactured reality, and it is no fairy tale. I spin round and see the gully-ridden cliff behind me rise, thick with massive virgin trees, relatives of red alder, bigleaf maple, Sitka spruce—trees that relish deep morning fog. They ascend in tiers of wind-tossed greens to the long grasslands above.
The pampas stretch for fifty miles to snow-peaked mountains, where just below the tree line buffeting winds twist and gnarl the bristlecone pines. Across the plains gallop herds of savannah animals, for our biosystems found homes here as well, and have flourished. And when I ride my real horse there, she actually moves, and we do reach the plane trees.
Sometimes, after opening my bedroll and making tea, a human speck amid a sea of high, sweet-smelling grasses where the sound of the rushing wind combing and flattening the grass is equally sweet, I gaze at the stars among which I lived for I do not know how long and am
