Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Malevor is delicious. The charred flesh tastes like it smells—like a rock in the moment of shattering, sharp and bright. Only this version is very tasty. Unlike a rock. “Sear,” Father calls the flavor. Yarrow’s eyes widen as he watches the juices drip down my chin.

“What?” I ask him as I tongue-wrestle the gristle in my mouth. “Aren’t you having any?”

He takes a long look at the bowl of algal proteins and fats and carbohydrates in his lap. He loves algal porridge. Then he peers at the rack of sizzled malevor ribs on a cutting board on the table, bloody juices making slick trails through the packed soil of the floor. He looks at Dad and Father, chowing down on their own heaps of malevor muscle. Then he finally speaks. “No.”

Yarrow watches me chew. Curious, probably. Definitely disgusted. Maybe a little desirous, too. I decide to chew with my mouth open, to heighten the experience for him. Just to help him decide how he feels. I’m a helpful sister.

Father scowls. “Owl, mouth closed.”

I shut my mouth and stop chewing. Then I start again slowly. With exaggeratedly small movements. My mouth is totally full of saliva and I’m tired of the meat, but it’s still too chewy to swallow and I guess I’m making a point. Not that I’m sure what it is. I appear to be in a mood?

Maybe I’m not nailing my argument that I’m mature enough to start taking multiday treks.

I swallow too soon, half choking before daintily dabbing my printed napkin to the corners of my mouth.

One of our family dinner rituals is to each take an Earth minute to summarize the day. Then we all pose a question. Last time Yarrow asked what my purest emotional experience had been and I replied that it was my morning pee and Father got mad at me. But I was telling the truth! Today, though, we have a lot more to talk about.

We have two days to cover this time, since I was passed out last night. Yarrow goes first, pointedly focusing on the first part of yesterday, before the malevor attack. I ask him when he was most bored, and he gives me a shrewd look before answering that it was turning over the compost at the fecal pits.

He picks Dad to go next, and Dad slows down when he gets to the part when he had to tell me the truth about the ducks. Father asks him what the scariest part of yesterday was and Dad answers that it was hearing Father screaming at me to stop, and then seeing the blood on my back.

Dad picks Father, who talks about how the attack went down on his end, his running to the fence, caring for me, then letting Dad and Rover patch me up while he went to finish off the malevor. Then he talks about how he made Yarrow and me help him butcher it, and Dad asks him if butchering came back to him easily, and Father answers that it did, except that he forgot to cut the skin from the hooves before trying to peel it away.

Like it does every evening, OS participates by giving a rundown of how much processing power we each took up on its systems. I’m not usually the top data hog, but today I definitely was. Father asks OS how it would describe its experience of fear and OS responds that it was like trying to run uncompressed quaternary code in a binary bios, a flood of information without immediate channels to dissipate it. We all nod like we’ve been there. Running uncompressed quaternary in binary. Overwhelming.

OS asks me about my experience of yesterday. I try to thread a needle, capturing the importance and excitement of it all while playing down the danger, so the dads will let me keep exploring once I’m better. OS asks me how I feel now that I know the truth about the malevors and the duck, which I take to really be asking, in an OS way, how it feels to be lied to by my own parents. OS is genuinely curious about stuff like that.

“Probably a lot like our dads felt when they found out that their guardians had lied to them about their purpose back on Earth,” I tell OS.

Rover rotates so its hydration spigot faces me, which is the closest OS can get to looking at me. Not that OS cares which way it’s facing, but it knows that signaling that sort of thing matters to us humans . “Very interesting,” it says in its toned-down Devon Mujaba voice.

“That’s not fair,” Father says, aligning his fork and knife beside his plate before laying his heavy arms on the table. “It’s not the same at all.” There was a time he used to stalk away when he got upset, but then he and Dad had some secret talk that Yarrow and I tried to eavesdrop on but failed and now Father doesn’t leave the dinner table anymore even if we all know he’s gotten mad and would prefer to be broody and alone.

“I understand it’s a shock, but I think you can understand our reasons for keeping the truth from you,” Dad says. I get that he has to be both a partner to Kodiak and a parent to us, and that those two things are probably in conflict right now. Probably most of the time. It makes me want to just chew my food quietly and listen and learn from how he manages this dance. He and Father are all I’ve got for figuring out how to be a good human.

Dad considers his words before he continues. “How to put it. When Father and I arrived here, we had two options: we could either rebuild a new civilization on the models of Earth or create something new. There wouldn’t be any do-overs. You both know our initial instructions were to name this planet Cusk. But... Earth fell into war. Our original selves probably fought against each other. Even without war, Earth was in terrible shape, dust cyclones and overheated seas, and Cusk was a big part of that. So was human nature and human history. Did we want to repeat all that?”

“We’re humans, though,” Yarrow says. “We’re still going to make human choices, which will probably ‘repeat all that,’ whether or not you hide the past from us.” His words trail off as he takes in Father’s scowl. “Don’t you think?”

“One of the characters says something really wise on Pink Lagoon ,” I say. “‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’”

The dads stare at me, which makes me ramble. “It was Mittens Magoo. He’s a talking raccoon. Really, um, funny. Like, an unusually humorous character. Except when he’s being wise.”

Father snorts. “That didn’t originate in Pink Lagoon. That particular cliché has been around for hundreds of years. In both Fédération and Dimokratía.”

“More like tens of thousands of years,” Yarrow corrects.

Dad waves at us all to stop. “I know that you two think you have all the answers, but you’re fifteen years old, which means you’re also idiots. Can I continue? If we kept it all from you, if we made Minerva a true blank slate, then there was a chance we could make this a much better version of what human life on Earth was. That’s what we were thinking.”

“Yeah, we got it,” I mutter. “Even this ‘idiot’ can understand that.”

“I meant that lovingly,” Dad says.

“I know,” I say softly. I like getting teased by Dad.

“The presence of animal zygotes was unexpected,” Father says, his voice low. “We weren’t sure whether to raise them or not. We printed pens, but there was a risk that the yaks and especially the ducks could get free. And to survive, the animals needed terrestrial microbiomes, which meant feeding them the same fecal pellets all the human clones had to take, and we don’t have an infinite supply of those.”

“Please don’t say ‘fecal pellets’ again,” I say.

“We could always make new fecal pellets,” Yarrow offers.

“Yarrow, what did I just say? Anyway, now we know the truth,” I say. “Does that mean we can watch more Earth reels? Find out all the rest of Earth history that you’ve been keeping from us?”

“Our Museum of Earth Civ is pretty paltry,” Yarrow says, pointing behind the smallest greenhouse. There we’ve accumulated Dad’s broken violin from the Coordinated Endeavor and some busted old playing cards. When we were little we had Rover print some models of skyscrapers and antique vehicles and figurines from scrap polycarb. Those are still there, dented and half-melted and missing wheels. Toys without kids.

“I think those twenty seasons of Pink Lagoon will have to do for now , ” Father says, with the hint of a smile. Dad kisses him. “You’ll have to turn to Mittens Magoo for all your Earth insights.”

“You two are the actual worst parents in the universe,” I say.

“The only parents, actually, which means we’re also the best ones,” Dad counters. “And the handsomest and the prettiest and the greenest and ugliest and—”

“This is the kind of thing that’s inevitable, don’t you think?” Yarrow interrupts, his voice unexpectedly harsh. “You wanted to keep this world protected from us, but you also wanted livestock, so now there’s another invasive species on this pristine planet. Formerly pristine planet. It didn’t work. You didn’t actually protect Minerva from us. Not at all.”

I steal a side-eye at Yarrow. This would usually be my sort of line, not his. He’s our melancholy optimist. I’m our exuberant pessimist.

Dad watches Father, who’s busy controlling his breathing, flexing and unflexing his digits. Dad tousles Father’s dark hair. “We aren’t pretending this isn’t complicated. We’re doing the best we can, okay?”

Yarrow nods, twisting his hands in his lap. “It’s a lot of new information,” he murmurs. “And I’m sad that malevor is dead. I think it’s weird that you’re all eating it. I’m just sad, that’s all.”

I help myself to another piece of meat from the pile, bite into it with gusto, take my time chewing and swallowing and then drinking from a cup of water. “While we’re on a roll, is this the sum of it? Anything else you’ve kept from us that you want to get off your chest?”

Dad and Father look at each other.