It seems just a second, but I cannot be sure how long it lasts, that flash during which I am transformed; illuminated. It could be eons. It could be Planck time, the tiniest bit of time we can measure. But when I am there, and perhaps always, I am like a pebble of pure consciousness, tossed into the most lucid medium imaginable, where my ripples intersect with and are changed by other patterns, and this goes on forever.
It is then that I know that I am not as I was, and it is then that I long to be back among the stars, and to never touch land again.
But here, I invent new languages to map the house of thought I build. My thoughts were useful once; they may be useful again. Or not.
I could tell you how our chimerists, biophysicists, engineers, artists, and mathematicians generated experimental interim environments to test and refine our interaction with this new planet as we explored it virtually, hungering to land and climb its towering young mountains and sail its vast seas. We studied its weather patterns, developed plans for symbiosis, testing and re-testing, accelerating path after path, answering question after question, for we had time, and we had to be satisfied. But that is all in our library; you can experience it there. We grew, changed, exploded into larger life, real life, using Moku‘s vast genetic library and modeling algorithms to make decisions about populating Shining Leaf with ourselves and other fauna, learning from stories of failures on Earth, merging with what was here. The very last step, the most serious, was deciding where best to settle, and how.
We chose well. We changed, very slightly, to adapt to Shining Leaf, to its particular chemistries, its atmosphere, and its wilder seas, which Ta’a’aeva’s tribe explores with zest, though Moku mapped its every fractal coast, her motto being “the map is not the territory.” We grew defenses against that which would have killed us, larger and different lungs to inhale and use a slightly different atmosphere. Alcubierre gave us time to do that.
We live in towns and villages scattered around the planet, and have plans for golden cities, both far and near, which now assemble. We have new sciences, new technologies, communications networks that run on new symbioses, and the sure knowledge that we are still changing, because life is change, and because change is life.
I have young Bean’s heart and mind, yet my grown mind is different, a human/spacetime hybrid, and my hard-grown soul my own.
Is a soul courage? Is it philosophical depth? Is it simple immortality? Is it the being that runs through us, animates us, the foundation of all love and hope and deep satisfaction in the art of living, in community, in life itself?
Here, we and our children chart their own courses; they are pioneers, seekers, builders, dreamers. One son is an artist: one daughter, an engineer. My many descendants flourish.
The wind, evening-strong, blows back my hair. I lean down and pluck up a cool, gleaming golden stone from the tumble, hold its water-honed, near-translucent thinness up to our new star and think of all the time this one stone holds and might reveal, from when it exploded into being until now, after being crushed and washed and tumbled and honed into this beauty that I, also a part of the same story, can see, hold, taste, and smell.
I give it to my great-granddaughter, who is four, to play with and she flips it in the air and laughs. Her eyes are hazel, like my father’s.
I think of the librarian, who died long, long ago, and know for a certainty, which has not always been the case, that she was real, and that this is not a fairy tale, but something we have done.
We named our star for her: Pele.
She helped me grow a soul.
And that makes everything worth it.
Here’s a heigh and a ho! for the purpose strong,
And the bold stout hearts that roam,
And sail the Seven Seas of Life
To bring such treasures home!
—Olive Beaupré Miller, The Treasure Chest
—With everlasting thanks to Irma Gwendolyn Knott
Poems herein by Olive Beaupré Miller, My Bookhouse,
The Bookhouse for Children Publishers, Chicago, Illinois, 1920
Yoon Ha Lee’s debut Ninefox Gambit won the Locus Award for Best First Novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Awards. His short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other venues. He lives in Louisiana with his family and cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.
EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
Yoon Ha Lee
W hen Shuos Jedao walked into his temporary quarters on Station Muru 5 and spotted the box, he assumed someone was attempting to assassinate him. It had happened before. Considering his first career, there was even a certain justice to it.
He ducked back around the doorway, although even with his reflexes, he would have been too late if it’d been a proper bomb. The air currents in the room would have wafted his biochemical signature to the box and caused it to trigger. Or someone could have set up the bomb to go off as soon as the door opened, regardless of who stepped in. Or something even less sophisticated.
Jedao retreated back down the hallway and waited one minute. Two. Nothing.
It could just be a package, he thought—paperwork that he had forgotten?— but old habits died hard.
He entered again and approached the desk, light-footed. The box, made of eye-searing green plastic, stood out against the bland earth tones of the walls and desk. It measured approximately half a meter in all directions. Its nearest face prominently displayed the gold seal that indicated that station security had cleared it. He didn’t trust it for a moment. Spoofing a seal wasn’t that difficult. He’d done it himself.
He inspected the box’s other visible
