A quote: “Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.” ~~ C. S. Lewis
I’ll start with a story …
***************************
Everything had been packed and was two days ahead. I looked around the space I had as my office these past 40 years, the crowded surfaces now empty. Habit drove me to wipe them down, to check every cabinet, and even to water the plants I know will be dead within a few weeks.
At the beginning, when I awoke to pain and a Noah hovering over me, I knew something was terribly wrong. Ship had traveled too long, too far. Ships, by design, were to scatter into space like dandelion seeds, to new worlds on which all the cryo-lives she carried could thrive.
But something happened, something Ship and her last Noah refuse to divulge.
All I know is that we are alone here. Cut off from all other Ships. Now it was my mission. Bring forth the rest of the lives, to teach, to care for, to make them ready.
This was the last group of many, eager to set out for their new settlement. I wave them on, watching as the wagons pull out, laughter and song reaching back to me.
I embrace Noah, now ancient and bent, at the portal into Ship. He slips back into shadow as I mount my horse.
I hear her voice in my head, “Thank you, Doctor. We will sleep sound.”
The connection is cut and I head out after the wagons. I do not look back.
***********************
Now, it’s your turn.
.
.
.
.
.
.featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
I’m still amazed at how generous the Kitties have been with their technology. I grew up on the Matter of America, the Wild Frontier and the Taming of the West, so when we were invited to homestead on one of their uninhabited worlds, I was thinking in terms of covered wagons, horse-drawn plows and tallow candles. I’d thoroughly expected to be at best handed an axe and told to hew a cabin out of logs we’d felled and dressed by hand.
Imagine my surprise after we’d staked our claim, when we got issued a set of boxes and told these would expand and snap together to construct our house, barns and machine sheds. And yes, our grubstake would include the necessary machinery, seeds and breeding stock to establish our farm.
It’s not entirely generosity on their part. We’ll be paying off our loans over the next twenty years, through the provisions contract we have with the Imperial Fleet Quartermaster-General’s Office. The Kitties need us to be as productive as possible, to help provision the military that holds back a xenocidal enemy who would exterminate all our species for the unforgivable crime of being individuals, not hives.
It can be grim to think about, but when I sit in the kitchen of our farmhouse, its plastic and metal softened by the planters full of philodendron and spider plant, I can gaze out over the farm we’ve built from nothing and see a mountain as beautiful as Mt Shasta or Fujiyama back on Earth.
1 Comment