Chapter 5

Chapter 5

A very short parade. One humanlike intelligence and four humans, tromping across the surface of Minerva. Rover goes first, tireless and always at top morale. The dads are next, holding hands. Yarrow and I slump after, as strange as we usually are around each other whenever life gets extraordinary, all limbs and jerky movements and furious inexpressible thoughts.

I do like seeing our parents like this, though. Their silent closeness. They deserve it. They’ve gone through things that no human couple in history has gone through. They lived multiple cloned lives, each one leaving messages for his later selves before getting killed, until this set became the first humans to settle on a new planet, with only each other for company. I wonder sometimes if they’d have given each other a second look if they’d met back on Earth. I’m sure they wonder it, too. But here, they have no other option. Maybe love is more complicated than just finding your “one true match,” like Madame Zingian claimed on Pink Lagoon.

Not that love is something I’ll ever experience. At least not the romantic kind. The only person around my age is my brother, and... no. Yarrow might be genetically unrelated, but we’re still siblings. I used to pin him down and fart in his face. Am often still tempted to, to be honest.

I watch the characters on Pink Lagoon and wonder sometimes what it would be like to kiss them, even Madame Zingian, who’s one-quarter reptile. It doesn’t bother me except at these moments, when I watch the dads hold hands and walk in step under a sky full of stars, when I know their peacefulness is somehow tied to their romance, to their love, that it’s a source of relief and comfort I’ll never have. Unless some sexy alien suddenly appears over a hillside, batting their eyelashes at me. That’s been the subject of plenty of sci-fi reels throughout history, lots of sexy green big-haired aliens, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that’s not what the dads are leading us toward right now.

Instead we’re heading to a puddle.

Rover rocks back and forth beside it, runs its metallic appendages over the surface at high speed, producing patterns of intersecting ripples.

Yarrow leans over the puddle to look at the ripples, the stars flickering in and out of resolution on the moving surface. “Really cool.”

“Is it?” I ask. “Why are you showing us this? Does this have something to do with the isotopes you were using up all that processing power for?” I ask, drawing my heavy tunic tighter around me.

Dad laughs, gives Father a punch in the upper arm. “See? This wasn’t hidden from them after all. We’re hopeless at keeping secrets.”

“It’s only because you mentioned it earlier, Dad,” I say.

“Oh, did I?”

“Yeah, like right when I woke up.”

Father fixes him a withering look.

“The water is heavy?” Yarrow asks. Sensing our attention on the puddle, Rover stops flicking its rippling pattern on the surface.

“Yes,” Father says. “This water is heavy. Far more deuterium isotopes than we’d expect if this were a planet like Earth.”

I draw my tunic even tighter. “What does that mean? Minerva is radioactive?”

“No,” OS responds. “The level of isotopes in this body of water indicates that its ice is extraminervan in origin. Likely from a comet strike, and a relatively recent one, at that.”

“That’s where Earth probably got its water, too, right?” Yarrow asks. “Ice from comet strikes? I think I remember learning that.”

“We think so, yes,” Dad replies.

“This is the second heavy water puddle we’ve found,” Father says.

“The first one was from a strike seven Earth decades ago. This one is closer to two decades ago,” OS interrupts.

“Quiet. Let me explain this to the kids,” Father tells Rover. I tap my foot impatiently. It’s time he stopped trying so hard to control the flow of information.

“Comets used to strike Earth,” I say. “It’s normal. We know that from our learning reels.”

“Yes, and when they did strike, they caused mass extinctions. Like the K-Pg boundary 66.5 million years ago that killed off most of the dinosaurs. We’d either be vaporized, if we were near the strike, or we’d be thrust into a yearslong winter.”

“It’s actually quite a bit worse than that,” OS says. “For starters—”

“Those two recent strikes could be a coincidence,” Yarrow interrupts. “Maybe there won’t be another one for a very long time.”

“This is so statistically unlikely as not to be worth considering,” OS says.

Father walks away from the puddle, looking up into the night sky, arms crossed over his chest. Dad puts his arms around Yarrow and me. “There’s nothing to be too alarmed about.”

“Dad! Just a comet strike ,” Yarrow says.

“We are very likely in the orbital paths of extrasolar objects. We need to get working on a solution as soon as possible,” Father says.

“Does this mean we might need to find a new home?” I ask.

“That’s partly it. We made rudimentary hovercrafts when we first settled here, until we reallocated our metal supply to better purposes. With algal strains that can produce biofuel, we could slowly move our settlement across Minerva, if we have enough warning of a comet strike, and a good location for it.”

“I can provide moderate warning, even with my current equipment,” OS says. “There is no sign of an incoming comet anytime within my forecasting range. So we have weeks at least.”

“Weeks. That’s good,” Yarrow says. He’s grasping for the positive, like he usually does.

I give him a half hug. I’m not particularly good at them. It’s so nice whenever Dad gives one, but it’s all elbow-y and awkward when I do. “Say the comet strikes on the other side of the planet,” I say. “We’d still need a substantial shelter to live in here, to make it through the aftermath. A... what’s the word for it?”

“A bunker,” Father says.

“That’s it. A bunker.”

“It’s a small sample, so this is terrible data modeling, but given that the two strikes we know about were fifty years apart, we could assume that we’ve been lucky so far. We’ve already been seventeen Earth years on this planet.”

“Almost eighteen,” Yarrow says, cutting a glance at me. Reminding me about the anniversary reel he made for the dads, that I haven’t seen yet.

“We need to get building,” I say.

It’s chilly around this puddle, and the night sky vaults without limits above. I get a momentary feeling that I’ve had off and on my whole life, that maybe gravity will decide to flip and send us up into that expanse, never to return. I rub my hands on my arms. My wounded back hurts. “This has been a big couple of days.”

“We weren’t planning on telling you this now, but you did ask,” Dad says. “So here’s what we’re going to do. Kodiak and Owl, you’ll work on the bunker. Yarrow, you and I will start planning how we’ll make our settlement mobile, in case the comet strikes nearby.”

“The maybe comet,” Yarrow says.

“Right. The ‘maybe comet.’”

I turn to Father. “We’re coworkers now. How refreshingly unpaternalistic.”

“Thank you,” he says. “Though, Owl, Fédération might be a second language to me, but I’m pretty sure that ‘unpaternalistic’ isn’t a word.”

I gesture to our habitats, glowing up at the Sky Cat constellation. “I don’t think these would hold up very well under a superhot explosion.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” Father says. “We’ll need to burrow. And, most essentially, we’ll need to find metals in the soil that we can use to build with, instead of just hydrocarbons.”

“Metals we haven’t located yet,” I say. “Not in almost eighteen years.”

“That’s right,” Father says. Is there a little twinkle in his eye?

I think for a moment. “So... we’ll have to go search for metals.”

He nods.

“We’ll need... to explore?”

“In order to search for metals, yes,” he says gruffly. The twinkle is still there. I swear I’m not wrong about it.

“Maybe I’ll be the one to find them,” I try. “Because of my knack for exploring?”

He gestures to my wound. “Maybe you won’t get yourself gored in the process this time.”

I look between him and Dad. In the midst of all this, my sixteenth-birthday present has arrived early.