Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Dad and I are sitting cross-legged on the packed dirt in front of the terminal, waiting for the soil results to come in. Rover isn’t here—it’s off helping Father stress test the perimeter fence. But even without Rover, OS is nearby. When we’re in the settlement, OS is always here.

“How’s it coming so far?” I ask. We already tested the wood; OS found it is made of analogues of plant cells, with their own versions of cell walls. Though carbon is present, silicon dominates most of its biology. Scientists on Earth would have been thrilled by the discovery, but of course, there are no scientists on Earth anymore. Here, with so much that’s new and strange, it feels hard to be as excited about a silicon-based organism as I know I should be.

“The soil sample results will be available in twelve minutes,” OS says. “I can already tell you that the sample has no manganese and no vanadium, which is noteworthy.”

I nod, like the good student I am not. “Yes, very noteworthy.”

“It is, actually,” Dad says, giving me a nudge. “Most of the plants on Earth need those, at least in trace quantities.”

“And yet this alien moss didn’t.”

“Correct,” OS says. “But it needed something else, and found it by that site, which is why it was thriving over there.”

“Yes,” Dad says. He looks about to say something more, but he stops.

“Look,” I say. I pause. It’s hard to find the words for what I want to express. “When I found Yarrow, it was... really weird. Like he’d been possessed.”

“Possessed? Where have you come across that concept?”

“In a reel somewhere, I don’t know, that’s not the point.”

Dad sighs. “He has been acting strangely lately, and I’ve been talking to Kodiak about it. This is uncharted territory for us. It could just be something about being sixteen.”

I roll onto my back and then sit up again. “Dad. This isn’t a ‘it’s hard to be young’ moment. I mean that something was officially wrong with Yarrow. You saw what he did.”

“He could have been acting out. You’ve acted out before.”

“Did he seem like he was trying to get attention? Or more like he’d come to with no memory of how he got there? Those are two totally different things. And both of them are way different from my taking too long on my expeditions because I’m out for attention, or because I’m trying to live up to your sister, or whatever your theories about me are. You of all people should recognize someone who has no idea how he came to be somewhere.”

Dad flings his arm out vaguely. I’m not sure if he’s referring to the lab or the settlement or all of Minerva or his history as a clone who woke up on a spaceship, or the weirdness of raising his sister’s copy. “What do you think our options are here? It’s not like there are treatment centers or psychiatrists. Kodiak and Yarrow are talking right now, while they haul soil. I’m sure Yarrow will be able to explain himself.”

“I’m glad you’re confident,” I say. “It’s just that I’ve known him his whole life, and he’s never done anything like this. You know Yarrow. He’s sweet and gentle and uncomplicated.”

“You really are just like Minerva sometimes. From your point of view he’s uncomplicated. You’re not inside his head, so you don’t know,” Dad says.

“You know what I mean. Dad! I just want you to acknowledge that this is very serious.”

“I do know it’s serious,” Dad says, more softly. “And I know that people can have parts of themselves that we don’t have access to, until they choose to reveal them. That doesn’t mean they’re inconsistent or even that they changed. It just means that they’ve decided to let us see inside.”

Hmm. What are my sealed-off compartments? I don’t know. Am I supposed to have them? What were Minerva’s? I’ve been desperate to know that sort of thing, but anytime I bring her up, all conversation ceases, so I’ve learned to keep my wonderings to myself. “How’s it going, OS?” I finally ask, to fill the silence.

“One and a half minutes until my analysis is finished,” OS responds.

“Sounds good,” I say.

Dad rests his forehead against his kneecap for a moment, then raises his head again with what I know before I see it will be his fake parental “I’ve got this” smile. It must be exhausting, to have to pretend to be confident for Yarrow’s and my sake. I want to tell him he doesn’t have to do that anymore, but I can’t find the right words. I can find the right words for something else, though. “Dad, I know Yarrow and the fence post have taken all your attention, but can we talk for a second about how I discovered a small grove of trees out there? The first new thing we’ve encountered in years? Because I was right that I should go exploring?”

He blinks. “Yes! Owl, that’s amazing. I mean that. It really is.”

It doesn’t feel like he means it, not one bit. Yarrow is foremost on his mind. As he should be. It still stings, though. I blunder on. “I want to go back out with Rover, whatever this soil sample tells us. Okay? There’s more out there. Minerva might have seas, volcanoes, or even features that didn’t exist back on Earth. This isn’t just curiosity or wanderlust. This could be about our very survival. I don’t know how else to say it.”

Dad nods. “I think you’re right. It scares me to send you out, but we’re all just going to have to get over that, I think.”

“You could always come with me,” I say.

“I’d like to. But with the embryo machine going, I need to be here in case we’ve got another viable one. You’re going to have to be our resident explorer. With Rover, of course.”

He’s right—I can hear the hum from the gestation centrifuge. I reach out and touch my dad’s elbow. “You’re trying again for a child? Dad. I didn’t know. That’s amazing. Whatever happens, I’m proud of you.”

He gives me a complicated look. He probably doesn’t want to hear his daughter is proud of him, I guess?

“Results are in,” OS announces. Dad and I both instinctively get to our feet, as though the situation calls for some formality.

“In order of quantity, the sample is fifteen-point-four percent silicon dioxide, twelve-point-eight percent sodium oxide, nine-point-zero percent calcium carbonate, eight-point-nine percent chromium oxide, seven-point-five percent—”

“Wait, chromium oxide? At eight-point-nine percent?” Dad interrupts.

“Yes,” OS responds.

His eyes are wide open.

“What is it? Why is that so good?” I ask.

“Metal,” he says. His voice turns into a shout, and he’s running out of the laboratory and into the settlement. “Hard metal!”

“Hard metal!” I echo, running after him.

I tail Dad to the dining table, where Father is seated next to Yarrow. They both look up at us blearily. Yarrow’s eyes are red. “Metal?” Father asks back.

Like a cloud passing, the gloom lifts—the brother I know is there, and shining. “Metal!” he echoes. It’s still a long time until I turn sixteen, but now it feels like I’ve gotten another early birthday present.

We become our own mining operation, Father and me taking turns accompanying Rover back and forth to the alien rust site, returning with as much soil as Rover can tow. The rust moss spores had been our own scouting party, and found a jackpot of heavy metal for us, marking the spot with their overgrowth. All without having an intelligence of their own. It’s kind of amazing to think about. I was relieved that we didn’t need to destroy the aliens to get the chromium; it was in a lot of the surrounding terrain.

We consider relocating our whole settlement to the jungle site. But, though our habitats are all designed to be mobile, the gray room from the sunken Endeavor is trapped, and it contains the gestation device that Dad is dutifully tending. After twelve years avoiding new heartbreak, they’re going for it—having another kid. Already six weeks in; they hadn’t wanted to let us know until they were sure the zygote had become an embryo. May this one make it.

Mining makes for a lot of trudging back and forth, our repeated route creating ruts through the muckland. One time I find something especially pleasing at the jungle site—a piece of chromite sticking out of the ground. It’s rough and pitted. Only the top corner is visible, and I have to wedge out what remains from the soil, scooping away as much as I can with a polycarb paddle. The ingot is a crush of flat surfaces, heavy enough that I’m only just able to drag it to the tarp. This will make a lot of bunker wiring. Not that we’ve even broken ground on the site yet.

I imagine a future years from now, automated systems operating a mine that stretches deep below the planet’s surface, bringing up enough metal to create airships and exploration bots, buildings wired with electricity, appliances making our lives comfortable and safe while we wait for word of the rest of the planet.

My mind is buzzing with possibilities as Rover and I begin our return journey.

We break for a meal over the site of the long-submerged Aurora . I hold the chromite chunk on my lap and marvel at its surfaces as I chew my algae.

Ingot. The Aurora below .

Father’s ship! That’s our bunker.

It’s ludicrous that we didn’t already think of it, but I guess our emergencies have kept us seeing only a few meters ahead at a time. The Aurora ’s walls need repair but are mostly intact. All we have to do is build a device to hollow out the space beneath the ship, sink it even deeper underground, pump out the muck inside, stockpile supplies, and build an access shaft to the surface so we can get back out once it’s safe someday.

We’ll be riding out any comet strike in the dads’ spacecraft, like we’re on a voyage. It’s wild to think about. Then, once the comet crisis is in hand, we’ll build ourselves a proper home.

My mind races through logistics as Rover and I begin our post-Scorch hike to the settlement. It will be key to make the access shaft sturdy enough to survive the blast, so it doesn’t weld shut and entomb us. Fortifying the shaft will take metal, too. I try to estimate how much in my head. Ideally, we’ll find... half a ton of chromium to make it work? We’ll use the first hundred kilograms to construct the drill to bore away at the soil beneath the Aurora , then we can work to increase our metal supply as fast as possible.

At some point in the future, we’ll build a second bunker on the other side of the planet. Which means exploring won’t be a whim anymore, but a pressing survival need. We’ll make a scouting drone using a metal-polycarb mix, and I’ll follow once it locates promising lands. We can print a simple radio tower so I can stay in contact with home, even if I’m hundreds of kilometers away. But that’s getting months ahead.

Each time I return to the settlement from a mining trip, the vibe is different. Sometimes it’s back to old times, with OS reading obscure twenty-third-century literature to Dad and Yarrow while they clean or cook or debug. They’re particularly interested in Indonesia, the last country to disappear into the giant global globs of Dimokratía and Fédération—and, from the sound of the transmissions the dads’ clones picked up on the Coordinated Endeavor , the one to have harbored the known survivors of the nuclear war.

Other times the settlement feels like it’s under a low gray cloud, Yarrow hauling hydrocarbons while the dads find excuses to hover nearby. They pepper him with small meaningless questions throughout the day, about weather and ailments and books. They make up even more songs than usual, sketch stupid caricatures in the dirt to try to make him laugh. I watch Yarrow get more and more irritated by it, this campaign to monitor him, to make sure he doesn’t have another sabotage moment, or an “episode,” as Father calls it. His words get terser and terser, his shoulders bunch up just like Father’s do when he’s feeling engulfed.

The pile of chromium grows. Rover used the first batch of metal to print us a smelter, which busily bakes the chromite to titrate off the chromium, creating a pile of shiny silver marbles. Each time I return from a mining run, the first thing I do is ask for the current weight of our metal supply. I’m so excited to find out, in fact, that Father has taken to meeting me at the settlement gate, shouting the current weight as I approach.

“Eighty-four kilograms!”

“One hundred seventy-nine kilograms!”

“Two hundred kilograms even!”

This time, forty days after we first discovered metal, he calls out, “Three hundred and seven kilograms!”

As soon as we’ve dropped the soil off at the extraction zone, Father heads back out with Rover to get more. I settle in around the solar heater with Dad and Yarrow; tonight is unusually chilly.

Dad and Yarrow are trying to catch me up on the novel OS has been narrating to them. The problem is that they remember each scene totally differently, and their versions contradict. It’s almost like they’re listening to different books. Yarrow swears that the inspector died in an early chapter, and is a ghost now. Dad says that’s absolutely wrong, and Yarrow must have made that up. OS offers to settle the dispute, but I’m having too much fun listening to their theories to let that happen. “So wait,” I say, “if the inspector is a ghost, how is he opening doors?”

“They auto-open, obviously,” Yarrow says. “All he has to do is approach with his vital signatures, which he still has in ghost form. They were already using that tech in the twenty-third century. Without the ghost part, of course.” His voice wavers. “Or he’s a ghost with a body. That can happen. Right, Dad?”

“Sure,” Dad says carefully.

I’m looking at Sky Cat, warming my hands at the solar heater. That’s why I’m the first to see it. A bright light, by the point of Sky Cat’s right ear.

I go cold. There’s never been a bright spot by Sky Cat’s ear. “What is that?” I ask, pointing.

Maybe it’s a distant planet of our solar system, on a long orbit around the Sisters, finally coming into view. Maybe.

Dad glances up, then staggers to his feet. The bright spot has already slid toward Sky Cat’s chin. It’s moving fast enough to follow its path in real time.

“Is that a comet?” I ask, my voice rising and choking off. “It’s going so fast.”

If it’s a comet, we’re far too late to save ourselves.

The light is brighter and bigger now. Big enough to cast glittering light on our settlement. We might have only minutes or seconds left to live.

Dad holds out his arms. Yarrow and I barrel into them, and he presses us tight. Yarrow closes his eyes, his long lashes tickling my cheek. I keep my eyes open. If this is the end, I want to witness it.

My breath comes out in gasps. The light intensifies until it’s streaking across the sky, right across the night and into the horizon. It gives off a high-pitched whine, the air around it screaming.

Nothing is exploding. There is no horrific heat. This is not the end.

The object projects red glimmering light behind it. It takes me a few moments to realize that I’m seeing words. Words in the clouds. They repeat in a line, sparkling against the dusky sky as the foreign object continues its path to somewhere distant.

The words are:

Find this beacon. Ambrose and Kodiak, come. Find this beacon. Ambrose and Kodiak, come.

I look up at my father. Dad?