Part One
MINERVA (SAGITTARION BB)
YEAR 17 OWL
Chapter 1
Ambrose watches digits count down. Clad in the gauzy blue fabric of a regulation Fédération suit, he pulls out a tray of water pouches and sifts through them while he’s waiting for his meal to heat. He holds two up to the ship’s fluorescent lights: identical sleeves marked water, though the word is printed in different fonts. He centers one in front of each seat of the dining chamber.
The light inside the device blinks off, and he removes a food packet from inside, setting it on a plate. He puts another in and resets the timer, then goes about preparing the rest of the table: straws for the water sleeves and a simple printed runner, playing cards centered in the middle. While he waits, Ambrose shuffles them and straightens the stack.
I know what comes next, because I’ve seen this recording many times before. A shadow from the doorway, then Kodiak is beside him. This younger space-borne version of Father is jacked up, networks of veins standing out on his arms, his back a thick triangle.
Ambrose says something I can’t hear—a side effect of the blind room they’d set up nearby is that there’s no audio on this reel, just moving images—and Kodiak smiles. He curves his larger body around Ambrose’s where he waits at the counter. Ambrose settles in, hangs his head back so Kodiak can kiss his neck. Kodiak presses himself tighter against him.
It’s romantic, but gross. These are the dads, after all.
I avert my eyes to the window—the screen—behind them to see what it’s showing. Revolving stars, among them the glowing clots of galaxies. I study the newness of the ship’s materials. Some relics of the Coordinated Endeavor still exist at our settlement—like the chair that Ambrose is currently settling into as the reel continues to play—but the ones we use are dingy and cracked.
The dads play cards, take drags of water (the label printed sans serif for Kodiak, serif for Ambrose), and converse easily, probably about the subtleties of their sleeves of roasted eggplant and tofu curry. It makes my heart pang with nostalgia, even if it’s for something I’ve never known. I’m jealous of them, even though I don’t think I want what they have. This life—one with a romance—is not in my future. I’m the only human alive with a womb, so I might end up carrying a child if the gestation device goes down, but it won’t be the result of sex.
Just when I get hopelessly moody and internal, Father interrupts. Real Father. He walks right through the projected reel, causing the images of his younger beefcake self to jump and stagger across his face. “You’re late,” he says. “Turn this off. I don’t see why you’d want to watch that, anyway.”
I tap my bracelet to stop the projection. “Really? You want to take this away? There’s basically nothing I’m allowed to watch already, since you won’t let us learn anything about Earth.”
Father passes through his own image, stalking toward the mucklands. I fall in line behind him. We pass along the inside of the settlement’s perimeter fence, until Father deactivates the gateway and we slip through to the outside. I’m relieved when the pneumatic guns resume their protective buzz at our backs. Once we’ve scanned the area for malevors, we start slopping out the reserve cistern.
We use polycarb paddles to scoop out clods of soil and glowing microorganisms. Each scoop makes a thwuck noise as it hits the ground. It’s the sound equivalent of my slurpy mood. Thwuck thwuck thwuck.
Father prefers to stay silent unless there’s something important to say. And normally that’s fine, I guess. But not today. I’m going for it. “So far it hasn’t happened, but what if this makes us sick at some point?” I ask. “I mean, look at this stuff that lives in our water. It’s gross, and it grows quick.” To emphasize my point, I hurl the next scoopful to the ground, so it makes an extra loud thwuck. It also sprays Father’s pant leg. Whoops.
He looks down at his stained pants, then at me. His face is perfectly controlled. “What do you propose we do instead, Owl? Your usual idea?"
“Well, yes, actually,” I say as I resume scooping, leaning deep into the cistern to scrape the seam where wall meets bottom. My words echo on the polycarbonate. “The usual. What if the rains go from occasional to never happening at all? What then? You need to let me go search for standing water. A sea or a lake.”
“Not likely,” Father grunts.
“Sure, okay, but if the rains did stop, it would be too late to go searching for water because we’d be lying around, all dried out,” I say. I drop my paddle and lean against the cistern, glaring out at the horizon. We’ve explored almost none of this planet. It’s ridiculous.
“If the water gets unhealthy, we can reprioritize how we use our metals,” Father says. “We can print some advanced filters.”
“You’re being obtuse!” I say. It just comes out of me. I’m not even sure if I used that word right. I read it for the first time yesterday, and I’ve been wanting to try it out. Judging from Father’s expression, it’s maybe a little harsh? I make a mental note to try out new words only on Dad, not Father.
Father stares at me, then goes back to scooping out the cistern. “We’re done here.”
I pretend I’m not scared of Father, so I can push further. “We’re not done!” I say. “Yarrow will be sixteen in a few days. I’ll be sixteen a while after. That would have been adult age in most any Earth frontier society. We can’t hide away in some tiny little safe corner of this planet forever.”
He pauses, the cords in his neck tight. Then he goes back to scooping.
“Listen to me for once! Send me out. You three can keep the settlement safe. I’ll be careful.”
“I know you think you’re capable of going on a solo expedition,” Father says, his words evenly spaced. “But you’re still my daughter, and I’m the one who will make the decision of when and if you go adventuring.”
“I don’t care how many kids died before and after me and Yarrow. That’s not our fault.”
All goes still. It’s like the planet itself is in shock. I’m hot with anger, and being mean is the only way I know to get rid of that sort of heat.
Father stands, looking down at the paddle in his hands. Then he hurls it to the ground, hard enough to spray his pants in muck all over again. “Don’t come back in until you’ve finished cleaning this cistern,” he says, his gaze somewhere over my head.
He stalks to the gate in the perimeter fence. Its defensive buzz pauses, then he’s inside, and I’m alone.
I look at the cistern, with its stupid, sloppy, boring mats of microorganisms that stubbornly spread inside. I won’t spend my life cleaning out algae. I fling my paddle down on top of Father’s, hard enough that I hear it crack.
Then I hurl myself to the ground, curl up, and hug my knees until they press against my eye sockets, so I’m almost a sphere like Rover.
Slowly, the heat drains, and takes with it my intense this-discussion-is-the-end-of-the-world feeling. I’m left with the fact that Father and Dad had a bunch of babies that filled them with love and hope, that those kids all died except two of us, and I just threw it in Father’s face because I want to go on an adventure.
I am a bad daughter.
I wish I would cry, so I could prove to this whole boring planet how upset I am.
“Owl.” I look up. My brother is holding out his arm. “Come on.”
Yarrow looks at me with his all-seeing expression and nods, meaning let’s walk barefoot along the packed dirt and have a sit with our backs against each other so together we can see in all directions and won’t we feel better then?
He and I go sit on one of the smooth, soft slopes, back-to-back. Our usual position. I sift the loose glowing grains of Minerva’s soil between my fingers and enjoy the sensation of my brother’s lungs rising and falling against my ribs. I can feel his bones and the muscles between them.
The wide-open flatness of Minerva spreads out before us. The microorganisms that abound in the soil—the only life we’ve found here, except of course for the malevors—glow in all directions, excited by our friction. Our footprints leave a glowing trail all the way back to the settlement, like Yarrow and I are ghosts. Father’s footsteps have already faded.
Yarrow let me chop off the sides of his black hair yesterday, and he scratches absently at his exposed scalp. There’s plenty of Father in his long-lashed eyes, his sturdy and thoughtful presence. That’s just a coincidence, though, since he’s genetically unrelated to any of us.
“Do you want to tell me about that fight just now?” Yarrow asks.
I shake my head.
“It helps to talk,” he says.
“Don’t even start with that sensitive brother nonsense,” I say, giving him a strong enough shove with my back that he has to reach a hand out to prevent himself from sprawling flat. “It’s the same fight Father and I always have. I don’t want to talk about it.” Playing it safe is one of the family decisions we make so wordlessly now that it’s not a decision anymore, it’s a law. I know that cautiousness can be our doom just as easily as recklessness, but no one else seems to see it.
Yarrow moves to face me, wipes his tunic free of glowing soil the best he can, and rubs his hands together. Slick organisms bioluminesce along the ridges of his fingerprints. Little Sister glows palely on him, the first rays of Big Sister appearing beneath her. “I hate to tell you, but you did just talk about it,” Yarrow says.
“You think you’re so clever.”
“Don’t worry,” he says, his wide eyes taking on luminous gray-red tints from the rising suns. “Someday you and Father will find something
new to bicker about.”
“I’ll cherish the day.”
I do a mental countdown until Yarrow speaks again. Three, two, one. And there he goes.
“There’s good reason they’re terrified about losing us. You know that’s what this is about, right? Father’s not just being a hardnose. He doesn’t want us to have an accident out there and die. They’ve lost too many kids already.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”
Before I’m even aware that I’m doing it, my eyes go to the unmarked spot outside the settlement walls where they buried the babies. Some days the dads will spend a few minutes there, kneeling and whispering, and that’s how we know it’s the birthday of one of our dead siblings. Some emerged from the gestation device gray and unbreathing, their zygotes gone inert during the thousands of years of travel, and some died in their first years of life. Sparrow and Purslane failed to draw enough of Minerva’s air; Thistle fell into a pit; Kestrel never adapted to the extra nitrogen in the atmosphere, her lips nothing but blue; Crane had a fever that left her body only once she was dead. Children one and two, four and six and seven. Every one except Yarrow and me.
Now I feel even worse about my fight with Father. My brother is excellent at making me feel bad. He doesn’t ever try to; he doesn’t need to, he’s that skilled at it. His constant reasonable goodness is enough.
I stand and reach out to him. He takes my hand, lets me pull him to his feet. “Big Sister is fully up in the sky,” I say. “The dads will be expecting us any moment. Which means you should go.”
“You mean ‘we should go,’ right?”
I hitch my sack over my shoulders, tighten the straps. My spear is lashed to the side as usual, waiting to finally be used. “I meant what I said. I’m going to find a river. Or something.”
“You’re just leaving? Now?”
I make myself look at him. “I’ll be back today. I’m not going too far yet.”
“Father is going to be furious,” Yarrow says. I notice that he hasn’t asked me not to go.
“What are they going to do, ground me?” That’s what the parents in Pink Lagoon call arresting their children. It was weird back on Earth.
Yarrow’s eyes dart around my face, searching for answers in my expression. I don’t think he’s finding any. “I don’t know how I’ll explain it to them.”
“You won’t have to. Let me deal with the consequences. Look, they’ll be so overjoyed by the fact that I’ve found a water source, and maybe a whale or a sea serpent or something, that they’ll forget that I’ve even broken the rules.”
Yarrow raises an eyebrow. “Really. That’s how this is going to go?”
“We’re happy enough
here now, but our life could get bad. Hiding away isn’t the solution. It’s the problem. We have to find standing water we can use, more metals so we can build exploration drones. Maybe I’ll even find us some company. It’s going to take old-fashioned exploration. Me with a spear and my two feet, like some caveperson.”
My brother’s meaty body presses deeper into the soil than mine does, and the life-forms glow prettily around his bare feet. I think they like him more. “You’re crazy,” he says. “But I know better than to try to stop you.”
“Wise as ever,” I say.
“Go quickly,” he says. “I’ll try to keep the dads distracted so they don’t notice for a while. Also, I really don’t want Father to see me letting you go.”
“Thank you, Brothership,” I say, giving him a hug. “I really will be fine.”
He chuckles. “I think that’s probably true. If any one of us is going to survive whatever disaster you’re about to bring raining down on our heads, it’s the clone of Minerva Cusk.”
That’s who I am—my aunt. I’m the spitting likeness of the star spacefarer of twenty-fifth-century Earth, dead for over 30,000 years. Everyone avoids talking about it, but around when Yarrow’s face started breaking out in pimples he also got very touchy about the fact that I had a heroic spacefarer to compare myself to when he had no one. That I was related to Dad and he had no blood relations. Then he abruptly stopped talking about it.
I kiss Yarrow’s cheek and start off across the wide plains of Minerva, choosing a direction almost at random. When you’ve discovered as few landmarks as we have, every direction is basically the same—so long as I avoid malevor territory. “Think about what we can make the dads for their arrival anniversary while I’m gone!” I call behind me. “Maybe you can create a special reel? You’re so good at those.”
Here I go, assigning my brother to be the one to show our dads we care while I go satisfy my wanderlust. I dig my nails into my arm. Selfish Owl.
Yarrow gives one long wave in reply, then starts back toward the settlement, shoulders slumped. He’s the solid one who holds us all together, and he’s really good at it—but I’m asking a lot, even of him.
Chapter 2
The way I figure it, if advanced life here were land- or air-based, it would have wandered past us by now. But maybe there’s an aquatic civilization somewhere on Minerva. If I can discover a lake or even a sea, then it’s a double win, because I’ll have located a natural source of water if the rains stop—and we also might find out we’re not alone.
I imagine dinosaur-like creatures paddling their massive fins in a tropical sea, Yarrow and me riding on the back of one and whooping up into the salty sunshine. How could I not go search that out? The dads are crazy not to have prioritized exploration.
Already, just an hour’s walk from the settlement, I make a discovery. A minor one, but still: the soft, moist yellow green of the land rolls far in either direction, but there, in the lee of two hills, the old ethylamine pond has disappeared. The same one the dads mistakenly logged as methane when they first arrived. See? Something has happened. This expedition is already paying off.
Big Sister has shrunken almost to the size of Little Sister, which means I’m well into the day’s long twilight. I have time to investigate this dried-up pond bed before I need to get back. Maybe. During the twilight, time stretches long and then snaps into night. It can surprise you.
The dads’ voices play in my mind: Father saying I’ll get no algal sugar for a week for sneaking away even as Dad quietly protests that I’m basically an adult now, that fifteen is plenty old enough to manage my own risks on a frontier exoplanet, Father replying that even at fifteen I need rules and consequences, even if I claim that I don’t. It makes me smile: they’ll fight bitterly, not because they’re upset but because it’s far more interesting to fight than to find something to say about another identical day tilling the soils of Minerva for hydrocarbons.
I’ve read books. I know people can die from boredom. I know versions of the dads did, back on the Coordinated Endeavor. They’re lucky I’m here to do interesting things.
I tie my straps tight over my shoes, cinch my belt over my long tunic. All my gear has been printed from elements we’ve extracted from Minerva’s soil. This newest tunic is OS’s best work yet, a fabric that’s slippery-smooth across my shoulders.
The ground turns loose as I approach the pond bed. I’ve been going at a fast walk, but now I slow. I don’t want to twist my ankle and make someone come rescue me.
The soil pitches downward, steep and crumbly. As soon as I’m heading down the slope, it becomes clear what happened here. No big tentacled alien monster attacked from below and drained the fluid, unfortunately. The ethylamine boiled off. Minerva was cold when I was born, according to the dads, and its temperature has been rising ever since. It’s not exactly hot now, except for the daily Scorch, but who knows when this warming will end.
It all makes perfect scientific sense. No big story here. I should head back. I might already be too late to make it before dark.
But!
In the tumbled soil, something gleams. Something white. A few white things, actually, poking up out of the litter. Not a color we find in the wilds of Minerva.
I pretend to debate whether to investigate, I guess so I can tell the dads later that I did, but it’s not even a question in my mind. I use my spear like a staff, testing out the loose soil as I make my way down.
You’re doing fine, Owl. They’ll be grateful for what you’re discovering.
I tumble on the last stretch, rolling down the slope, microscopic spores puffing into the air around me. Up close, it becomes clear what I’m seeing. Bones.
I’ve seen bones in my learning reels, and in real life from dead malevors and that one time when Dad fell from a habitat roof and sheared off half
his pinkie finger. I’ve broken bones, too, but they never punctured the skin, so generally I have to imagine what they look like, like teeth but encased in muscle and blood and skin.
Here’s a complete rib cage, almost intact. Could it be Crane, whose body my parents buried far from the settlement after she got sick? But this skeleton is not human, and it’s not malevor. Horror prickles the back of my neck as I push away the loose soil to expose more. A spinal column branches out into . . . arms? No, or at least they’re not like any arms I’ve ever seen. These are broader and finer, and they don’t end with hands. The skeleton has feet, too . . . but no legs. I shiver. Long-boned feet, fragile toes ending in narrow points. The skull is long, light, broad-planed, ending in a sort of spade where a mouth should be. The whole thing is small, the size of Rover.
If it’s not human, and it’s not malevor, then it’s some sort of alien we haven’t seen before. My breathing turns shallow. This might be the most important thing I’ve ever found. New alien life. That lived in a pond.
Proof that this scouting isn’t unnecessary. That reckless, impulsive Owl is useful to the family after all.
I gingerly tap one of my fingers against the creature’s dreadful spade-mouth, then snap back, ready for, I don’t know, for it to infect and devour me, spring into motion and . . . I guess I don’t really know what. But the skeleton remains a skeleton. Inanimate like skeletons should be. I work my hands under it and shake, so the dry flakes of soil tumble away. My sack is far too small to carry it—I was figuring I’d find water today, not proof of new alien life—but I wrap the skeleton in the hem of my tunic and roll it up and over so it’s bunched at my waist, where I can tuck the bundle in my arm as I run. It means exposing my whole bottom half to the microfauna of Minerva—and my family, once I’m home—but it’s not like there’s anything down there that all of them haven’t seen many times before.
The skeleton is light, so light that I can barely feel any weight. I can keep the bundled fabric of my tunic together with just a pinch of two fingers, which is the only reason I’m able to get out of the pond bed as easily as I do. Then I’m speeding back toward home, spear in one hand and bundle awkwardly pinched in the other while I check the sky for signs that twilight is ending.
Little Sister is already halfway down the horizon, flushing the sky’s edge to the color of my inner lip. If I return via the same route, it will be hours until I make it home, long after Big Sister has set. The dads will be beside themselves with worry. That’s if I don’t fall into a pit and fail to get there at all; even the glowing creatures in the soil aren’t enough to light my way once the long night arrives. Thistle died in a pit in the dark.
Without losing speed, I consider my options. The way I figure it, I have three: I can continue the way I am, and arrive at night; I can camp out alone away from home for the first time in my life, here in this place where aliens once lived (currently live?), and finish the trip at first light; or I can take the most direct path, which would get me home before the twilight is over . . . but only by bringing me through malevor territory in the process.
My hand gripping the spear turns slick as I make my decision. Malevor territory it is.
The malevors roam the felty hills to the south of the settlement, where the liquid water from Minerva’s occasional rains puddles on the slopes and microorganisms cluster in edible mats. Maybe elsewhere on Minerva the malevors are healthy and thriving, but here they barely get by—the herd numbers only nine. Those nine are really irritable, though . . . the four adult males have long, sharp horns, and charge any of us who get close.
We have a tenuous sort of peace: the malevors have learned not to get near the perimeter fence anymore, with its pneumatic guns that maim and kill. In return, we leave the territory south of the settlement to them. But because of my arcing route to the dried pond, the only direct route home is from the south.
“All this to get you back,” I say to the alien skeleton bundled in my tunic. “You’d better be worth it.”
The moment they come into view, I find the malevors are already alert to me. Even though I’m still a few hundred meters away, the females and their two calves are in the center, while the horned males circle them, each one facing me.
“I’m not coming for your young,” I shout to them, in Fédération and then Dimokratía. Not that malevors speak any language I know.
I stand motionless on the hilltop, fingers flexing so hard on the spear that one of my knuckles makes a popping sound. I’m just wasting time, because I’m scared. Which is stupid of me. The light is almost gone. I need to buck up and get moving.
There’s Father, at the gate that we used this morning. He’s pacing back and forth, looking out to the west, the direction Yarrow would have told him I left from. My poor distraught father.
“I’m here!” I yell as hard as I can.
The malevors feint toward me, stop and stamp their hooves. Father cocks his head, as if uncertain whether he heard something.
“I’m over here!” I yell.
He faces my direction, his eyes widening.
I begin down the hill.
“Owl! No, stop!” he yells back.
But what is he going to tell me, to sleep out here? Is he going to put himself in danger, too, by coming out to rescue me? I’m not going to let Father risk his own life because of my recklessness. “Open the fence when I get there!” I cry.
Then I’m tripping down the hillside. The horned malevors grunt and growl, shift their weight, their shaggy gray hair trembling with each agitated movement. Yarrow and I have been taught all our lives to fear them. But maybe the dads have been exaggerating. I haven’t seen a malevor attack anyone, after all.
“I’m not here to hurt your young,” I call as I go. If I can somehow convince them of that, I think I’ll be okay. I mean, their favorite meal is
green goop—there’s no sign that they’d be interested in eating human flesh. But those horns have to be used for something.
A horrible thought crosses my mind as I run. What if this ultralight skeleton is some ancient enemy of theirs that they thought had gone extinct, and now I’ve brought it into their midst? What if they sense it, and attack me for it? What do I really know of life on Minerva?
It’s too late to turn back. The Sisters have almost disappeared, the final rays of twilight highlighting the terrain in shades of gray, deepening the shadows in between.
As the slope shallows out into muckland, the malevors stamp toward me. “No, no,” I say, shifting my path so I’ll stay even farther from their young.
I thought that I could avoid them. But they’re moving toward me.
I guess they do eat people? But if I shift any more to the left I won’t be heading toward the fence at all anymore.
“Turn around, turn around!” Father yells.
I don’t dare look in his direction. I don’t want to see how angry he is.
I’ll have to veer toward the malevors. There’s no other option. ...
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