“Exquisite timing,” Alice complains. “Can you imagine? They just missed us.”
“They did not miss you,” Eve points out.
Alice shuffles her feet and drags the chair to a stop. “That message would get there long after we’re all dead.”
“But it would confirm their hopes,” Eve says.
Alice smiles a tired smile. “You’re an optimist.”
“I’m programmed as such,” Eve says. “I have astronauts to care for. You’re—delicate.”
Alice laughs. “I think that’s the most human thing you’ve ever said.”
Alice sleeps that night, and dreams of a root cellar. The walls are sod, reinforced with heavy planks of old, rotting wood. The roots of deep-set trees have pushed between the planks, into the seams, and have crawled into the socket of empty space so deep beneath the earth. A generator rattles in the corner. A bare bulb dangles over a metal shelf stacked with swelled cans of food, the labels dried out and sagging off. There are bugs everywhere—cockroaches scuttling over the pantry shelf, spiders staking out the high corners and the gaps in the invading roots.
“Hungry,” a voice whispers, choked and thin, and Alice turns to see a shape in a rocking chair.
She looks at the shelves, and sees an open can of syrupy peaches. Alice sniffs them. They smell sweet, a little cloying, but unspoiled.
“Peaches?” she asks.
The rocking chair person nods, and the chair creaks.
Alice finds a bent spoon on a lower shelf and picks it up, shaking a beetle off of the handle first. She carries the spoon and the peaches to the chair, and kneels down.
“Here,” she says, scooping up a spongy slice of saturated peach. “Eat.”
She feeds the shadowy person. The first few bites go down, but then something plops into the dirt. Alice looks down and sees a chewed hunk of orange peach lying there, spotted with grime and bits of blood and dirt. She looks up at the person in the chair, who shrugs, still in shadow, and croaks, “Sorry.”
Alice looks down and sees a gaping, chewed-apart hole in the person’s gut, and as she stares in horror, the second hunk of peach slides out of a rotten pucker and tumbles into the dirt, too.
“I loved you,” whispers the shadowy person. “I wish I’d been up there with you instead of not.”
Alice recoils, and wakes up, and says, “Eve!”
—six of us. My name is Roger. My wife is here. We—<distortion>—bleeding.
Alice says, “They’re all dying. You could hear it too, couldn’t you?”
I have a sweater. He will not feel a thing.
Eve says, “It is not an inappropriate conclusion.”
“I wanted to save them when I heard them,” Alice says. “But I can’t do that, can I?”
“You are not equipped to save anybody,” Eve says. “If you returned to Earth, you would not survive the fallout. You don’t have adequate supplies or protection.”
“Right,” Alice says.
My toes are breaking up. I think it’s gangrene. But it might be radiation. Hell of a thing, ain’t it?
“I’m the last woman,” Alice says. “They’re all going to die.”
“There may be survivors yet,” Eve says. “There are many shelters and safe zones, even in such terrible scenarios.”
“But it won’t ever be the same. They’ll have to stay underground for fifty years, they won’t be able to farm or hunt. It’ll be a miracle if they survive, or ever come out.”
Eve does not disagree.
“Play it again,” Alice says.
“Which message?”
“The important one. Don’t read it. I want to hear it.”
It sounds like enormous metal gears, turning and cranking and lumbering. Now and then there is a grating sound, as though a piece of metal has fallen in between the teeth and is being gnawed and shredded.
“It is not something that ears alone can parse,” Eve apologizes.
“It’s—” Alice pauses. “Sort of beautiful.”
Eve is quiet.
“Will you read it to me again? The words?”
Eve says, “Of course.”
Greetings and peace.
In the vastness of space, all life is family.
Good fortune to you.
May we meet in peace someday.
Eve falls silent.
“It’s like the most beautiful poem ever written,” Alice says.
She and Eve are quiet for a time, and then Alice says, “I can’t imagine why you would let me do this,” and she tells Eve her plan.
Eve listens, and says, “Do you wish me to calculate the probability of success?”
“No,” Alice says.
“Very well,” Eve says. “I will help you.”
Alice sits in the cockpit of the excursion ship. It
“Twenty-four years was a prison sentence,” she says.
Eve says, “It was not likely you would live even that long.”
“You told me I had adequate stores for twenty-four years!”
“Humans are fragile,” Eve says. “There are emotional factors that I cannot compute accurately. You likely would have succumbed to a human condition that I cannot project with any certainty.”
“What condition are you talking about?”
“Loneliness,” Eve says.
“Eve,” Alice says, pulling the heavy restraining straps over her shoulders and jamming the buckle home. “Everybody on Earth is dead.”
“Not yet,” Eve interrupts.
“Dead,” Alice repeats. “Or close to it.”
“Yes.”
“Everyone is dead or almost dead, and I’m healthy and well-fed and going crazy on a metal dirigible a million miles above a dead world.”
“Two hundred thirty-four miles,” Eve corrects.
“Two hundred thirty-four miles,” Alice says. “And we’ve just received confirmation that we aren’t alone. I might be the last woman, but I’m not the last living thing.”
“There are other life forms alive on Earth,” Eve says.
“You’re a buzzkill,” Alice says. “This is my one giant leap for mankind moment. Are you recording it?”
“I record everything,” Eve says. “Although on this transport vessel my storage capacity will exhaust itself in a shorter amount of time.”
“How much time?”
“Sixty years, approximately.”
Alice considers this.
Greetings and peace.
“Are you certain you do not wish me to calculate the probability of your survival?” Eve asks again.
“You’ve already done it, haven’t you?” Alice says.
“I have.”
“Fine. What are my odds?”
Eve says, “One in—“
“Wait, wait, no, no, don’t—I don’t want to know,” Alice says loudly. “I don’t want to know. Okay?”
Eve says, “Very well.”
In the vastness of space, all life is family.
“The extra oxygen stores will help,” Alice says to herself. “Extra food. Medical supplies. Eve, did you bring books?”
“I did not know you had an interest any longer,” Eve says.
“Shit. Eve, did you? It’s going to be a long trip.”
“I have four thousand volumes,” Eve says.
Alice smiles. “Okay. I’m nervous, can you tell?”
“Your heart rate is higher than usual, but still within reasonable limits.”