He must have seen me, how my tears shone in the streetlights, how my hair was a tangled knot. Because I saw him. I braced myself, waiting for his apology. “So sorry about your father,” that sort of thing. But none came. He only touched two of his wrinkled fingers to his heart, saluting me. Then he turned away.
I walked briskly. Not forward, to where Rachel and her parents lived in a bright home full of fashionable wall hangings and warm conversation. Not to the starboard district, where Koen and his parents fought over their galley table. Or aft, where Ronen and Hannah were probably pacing while Alyana screamed and screamed. No, instead I walked down the straight, narrow roads of my own district, the port district, the place where the specialists and teachers and librarians and lab workers lived. My feet found the path easily, though I hadn’t ever visited the quarters of this particular specialist before.
I’d forgotten my gloves. When I pounded the heel of my hand against the door, the cold metal bit at my skin. Pepper let out a meow through the fabric of his pillowcase. But no one answered us. I knocked again, and this time I didn’t stop at three. I pounded and pounded and pounded, until at last the door swung open.
In the dim light from the streetlamp, dressed in her pajamas and a too-big robe that had to be her husband’s, Mara Stone’s face seemed to be carved out of concrete. Her skin was gray and pebbled from lack of sleep. She just stood there, blinking at me.
I opened my mouth, drew in a breath, and readied myself for my own sob story: I was alone now. I had nowhere else to go, not really, not anywhere with anyone who understood.
“I need—” was all I managed. Mara held up a hand. She spared me that, simply motioning for me to come inside.
Then she closed the door behind me.
Autumn, 464 YTL
Dearest Terra,
We weren’t alone in our nostalgia, your father and me. By the time you were a child, I noticed how the ship’s passengers had begun to pepper their speech with snippets of Yiddish and Hebrew—the language of our parents and their parents before them. It was a comfort to recall our baby names and the songs our grandmothers had sung to us. Our nostalgia tied us more firmly to Earth than any decree ever could. Even I found myself guilty of this, singing as I combed the snarls from your hair: “Shaina, shaina maideleh.”
The Council would tell you that this was natural and right—the perfect execution of the contract we had signed. We were preserving our culture, saving these ancient tongues from certain death.
But I wonder if we shouldn’t have been more vigilant, if we shouldn’t have kept our minds on the future and our words circumspect. The past is a distraction—the Earth we left behind, kaput. All we have now is the present and the bleak, endless journey ahead.
Early winter, 462 YTL
My Terra,
Perhaps the world within these walls won’t kill you like it does me.
On Earth, even before we knew of the asteroid’s approach, there were several closed biomes. The TeraDome. The Arcosphere. BIOS-6. Experiments, populated with earnest students who were certain that their contributions would someday have a tremendous impact on the world at large.
Little did they know that the world at large would soon no longer exist.
I was asked to join one of these communities when I was in college. The ArcLab II. They needed psychologists—the first ArcLab project dissolved because of discord among its inhabitants—and offered me a scholarship in exchange for my services. I accepted, but then a few weeks later I met Annie. I dropped out. I couldn’t stand the idea of being apart from her for eight months. I thought that I had abandoned life under a dome forever.
Will you laugh when, grown, you read of that? Clearly, we both know better now.
Perhaps if I had lived in the ArcLab II, I would have never boarded our ship. I would have known the claustrophobia that presses down on me whenever I let my gaze drift up above the treetops, the way that I have to swallow the water quickly here before I can think of how many times it’s been recycled, the way that even the air smells overused—stale. But I knew none of these things until we launched, and by then it was too late.
I’ll be honest: There were times when I wanted nothing more than to hijack a shuttle, to trade this small space for another even smaller space. Times when I wanted to throw myself out of an air lock and go swimming in the airless stars.
But I had you to worry about—my child. And your brother, too. Perhaps that’s why the Council demanded that we all be parents. Perhaps they knew how our children would tether us to this place.
I’ve fulfilled my duties. But that doesn’t mean that I’ve grown obedient.
Seven years into our journey I noticed how listless and sad the other citizens were becoming. Purposeless. I petitioned the Council to let us use animal DNA from storage.
At first they denied my request. “What need do we have for pets?” they asked. They called the idea frivolous. I explained to them all the ways that animals could be therapeutic—how caring for creatures has long been known to lead to longer life spans, better health. They denied me again. I was enraged. This was my vocation, my job—the job they had given me. And they wouldn’t even let me do it.
Finally your father intervened. He started a petition. Staged protests. Soon citizens were visiting us to speak of the animals they’d left behind. They were so lonely without little Barney, without Sampson, without Tilly, that good old mutt.
Daughter, you might scoff. It may seem like such a minor thing to you. Pets. At first the Council thought so too. Until we stormed the Council antechamber with our demands.
Only then did they give in. Of course, even then they insisted that these creatures be useful in other ways—pest control.
At long last we awoke fat calicos. Rat terriers. Dachshunds. Companions. Creatures we could care for and care about. Creatures that would depend on us and give us something to look forward to on every new, dark, stifling morning.
Daughter, heed my warning when I say this: Don’t trust the Council.
Every comfort you’ve had was one for which we had to fight—even Alfalfa, your yellow dog who curled at the foot of your bed every night until he was old and gray-muzzled. If the Council had their way, we would live a life of bread and water and nothing else. They’ll tell you that they have your best interests at heart. I’ve come to suspect that they truly believe this. They can lie to themselves. Please, daughter, don’t let them lie to you.
PART THREE
ARRIVAL
DEEP WINTER, 6 WEEKS TILL LANDING
21
I slept on the floor in Mara’s daughter’s room. Her name was Artemis and she was only eight, and she talked in her sleep every single night, calling out for her mother, who never came to comfort her. Pepper was able to sleep through it, but I never could. I stared up at the ceiling, counting my breaths up through the thousands. There was no one left for me to call for.
In the morning I ate breakfast with them. Mara’s husband, Benton, was a dark-skinned man with bone-white hair, and he read books every morning at the table through a pair of tiny spectacles. Artemis was more like him than like Mara—dark and soft-spoken and polite and largely distracted. But Apollo, who had just been bar mitzvahed, was cut from the same cheap cloth as his mother. At the rare times I tried to speak to him, he’d just roll his pale eyes or let out exasperated syllables. Once his father chastised him when the boy called me “a speck-brained fool.” Mara smiled wryly at that, even as she let her husband scold him.