Arkwright (41 page)

Sanjay felt his heart pound as he stared at the solitary figure seated in a chair in front of what appeared to be some sort of glass-topped desk. Like the Teacher in Childstown, it had a featureless face and oddly formed limbs; this one, though, wore a loose, single-piece outfit that had moldered and rotted over time, exposing the gray and mottled skin beneath. Yet the Teacher's eyes were as blank as those of his long-lost companion, and it was obvious that it too hadn't moved in many yarn.

“Benjam tells me it managed to survive the solar storm.” Nathan's voice was quiet, almost reverent as Sanjay crouched beside the Teacher. “It took refuge in here, and that's how it was able to remain active long after the one you have on the island became inert. Unfortunately, it appears that they couldn't disassemble the replicator—the Transformer, I mean—or the communications antenna in time to save them, so this was the only place where any electronic equipment—”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” Sanjay continued to peer at the Teacher. He prodded its face with a fingertip, something he'd always wanted to do with the one in Childstown. The Galmatter felt nothing like human flesh or indeed like anything that had ever lived.

“I know. I'm sorry. It's going to take a while for you to—” Nathan stopped himself. “Anyway, here's something else you need to see.” He looked back at Kaile. “Come closer. You ought to see this too.”

“No. I'm staying where I am.” She wouldn't budge from the hatch. Sanjay could tell that she was frightened.

“Suit yourself.” Keeping his head down so as not to bang it against the low ceiling, Nathan came farther into the compartment. “Look at these, Sanjay,” he said, running the light beam across the ovoid shapes arranged along the walls. “What do you think they look like?”

Sanjay approached the egg-like objects and examined them. Although they were covered with dust, he could see that their top halves were transparent, made of substance that looked like glass but resembled Galmatter. Raising a fore to one of them, he gently wiped away the dust. Nathan brought his light a little closer, and Sanjay saw that within the cell was a tiny bed, its covers long since decayed yet nonetheless molded in such a way that would accommodate an infant.

“They look like cradles,” he murmured.

“Exactly. They're cradles meant to carry down from orbit one hundred newborn babies.” Nathan shined the light upward, and Sanjay looked up to see an open hatch in the ceiling. “There are three more decks just like this one above us, and in two of them are more cradles, along with places for all the equipment that was transported here from Earth. But the babies were the most important cargo.”

Returning the light back to the cradle Sanjay had been inspecting, Nathan reached past him to tap a finger against a small panel on its transparent cover. “You can't read what this says, I know, but it's a name … ‘Gleason.' That's the last name of the child who was in this particular egg, and it's also the last name of the person who donated his reproductive material to
Galactique
's gene pool. All these cradles have names on them, and I bet that if you went through the lander and looked at them, you'd find the last names of everyone you know … except one. And you know whose that is?”

“No.”

“Yours.”

Sanjay turned to look at him. “I don't understand. You said—”

“There's no cradle here with the name of Arkwright, but that doesn't mean our common ancestor wasn't aboard the lander. These names were put on the cradles before
Galactique
left Earth, and the Arkwright genome—our family, that is—is supposed to be represented by the Morressy genome. But there are no cradles here labeled Morressy, which means something else unforeseen happened after
Galactique
arrived. And that's why your mother and I came to find you.”

“What was it?”

Nathan didn't respond at once. “I could tell you, but maybe you ought to hear this for yourself.” He turned about to look at Kaile. “Do you still not trust me?” he asked, not in an unkindly way but rather with great patience. “Do you still think all this was performed by some all-powerful deity?”

Kaile was quiet. Her gaze traveled around the compartment, taking it all in. Then she said, softly yet with determination, “I believe in Gal.”

“Very well … then let's go meet Gal.”

 

10

From space, Eos looked like nothing Sanjay had ever imagined. His people knew that they lived on a planet, of course; no one but small children thought the world was flat. But since only the deacons saw the global maps dating back before the Stormyarn—one more aspect of their history lost to Galian superstition—his people's knowledge of the place where they lived was limited to Providence, the Western Channel, and Cape Exile.

So he was unable to look away from the windows of the winged craft that had carried him, Kaile, Nathan, and Marilyn into space. On the other side, an immense blue hemisphere stretched as far as the eye could see, its oceans broken by dark-hued landmasses, its mountains and deserts shadowed by gauzy white clouds. The world slowly revolved beneath them, so enormous that he could barely believe that it could even exist.

“Beautiful, isn't it?” Marilyn spoke quietly from the right front seat of the spacecraft she and Nathan had led Sanjay and Kaile through the forest to find. It had been left in a meadow about a half kilm from
Galactique
's lander, where the expedition's contact team had touched down three weeks earlier.

“Yes … yes, it is.” Sanjay could barely speak. Fascination had overcome the terror of liftoff, the noise and vibration of the swift ascent, the invisible pressure that had pushed Kaile and him into soft couches barely suitable for their bodies despite the changes Nathan had made to accommodate them (during which Sanjay learned that the visitors had other words for their fores and hinds:
hands
and
feet
). The pressure was gone, and now his body felt utterly without weight, as if he were floating on the sea except without having to make any effort to stay buoyant; only the straps kept him in his seat. “Never thought it was … so big.”

“Eos is about 8,500 kilometers in radius and 17,000 kilometers in diameter.” Nathan didn't look away from the yoke-like control bar in his lap. “Kilometers are what you call kilms. Anyway, it's about one-third larger than Earth but just a little more than one-fifth of the distance Earth is from Sol … about .2 AUs, but you don't need to worry about that. The important thing is that it isn't rotation locked, which helped make it habitable.”

Sanjay looked over at Kaile. She'd closed her eyes shut the moment the spacecraft left the ground and kept them closed all the way up, but now she'd opened them again and was staring at Eos with both awe and dread. She clutched the too-short armrests, and when Sanjay reached over to lay a fore across hers, she barely noticed.

“And you say it … it wasn't always like this?” she asked, her voice barely more a whisper.

“No. Before
Galactique
arrived and began dropping its biopods, Eos was a largely lifeless world. The oceans were there, but they were almost sterile, and what little life existed on the surface was … well, very small and very primitive. The biopods and genesis plants changed all that, and very quickly too—just under three centuries.” Again, Nathan glanced over his shoulder. “That's about eighteen hundred yarn by your reckoning. A very short time … but then, your seasons are so much shorter, so it just seems long to you.”

“And you say you came here in another craft?” Sanjay asked. “One that's bigger than this?”

“Oh, yes, much larger.” Marilyn reached forward to press her fingers against a row of buttons between her and Nathan, and a moment later, a small glass plate above the buttons lit up to reveal an image of something that looked like an hourglass, with a drumlike cylinder at one end with spheres clustered around its midsection. Sisterlight reflected off its silver skin, and tiny windows gleamed in the forward cylinder; as Sanjay watched, the night side of Eos glided into view in the background. Although he couldn't understand how, he realized that he was viewing the vessel from a distance. This alone was just as miraculous as the craft itself—but then, he was becoming accustomed to miracles.

“That's our ship … the
Neil deGrasse Tyson,
” Marilyn continued. “It's a Daedalus-class starship over six hundred meters long—a meter is about the same length as your rod—and there are over two hundred people aboard. It took us over sixty-seven years for us to get here.”

“That long?” Sanjay was becoming accustomed to their way of counting the time.

“Yes, but we slept most of the way, so—”

“You
slept?
How did you—”

“It's rather complicated.” Marilyn shook her head. “Anyway, it's on the other side of the planet, where it can't be seen from Providence, but that's what your mother saw … its main engine firing to decelerate.” Again, she let out her breath in frustration as she gave Nathan a helpless look. “I never thought I'd have to explain so much.”

“No one did,” Nathan murmured.

“Where is Gal?” Kaile asked abruptly. “You said we could meet her. So where is she?”

Her expression had tightened, her eyes no longer filled with wonder. She had endured enough already; now she wanted to see what she'd been promised, the face of her creator. Sanjay was almost embarrassed for her. He'd become convinced that what Nathan and Marilyn had told them was the truth, but she remained stubborn in her beliefs.

“Just ahead.” Marilyn pointed. “There … look.”

Stretching forward as much as he could against the straps, Sanjay peered through the bubble. At first he saw nothing but stars. Then something came into view, a small, bright dash of light that twinkled in the sun. It steadily grew larger, gradually gaining shape and form.

“It was much larger when it left Earth,” Nathan said as he guided their craft closer. “It once had a sail larger than Providence, but that was discarded once it reached Eos. The lander we visited was once attached, as well. Now there's only this.”

Hovering before them, slowly tumbling through the night, was a slender, cylindrical object about a hundred rods in length. Sunlight reflected from its silver hull, and what looked like sticks, dishes, and barrels stuck out here and there. In no way did it look like a deity, though, or in fact like anything except a toy some imaginative child might have cobbled together from discarded household implements.

“This is Gal?” Kaile's eyes were wide, her voice weak.

“This is what you call Gal.” Marilyn was apologetic. “I'm sorry, Kaile, but yes, this is all there is.”

Sanjay looked down at Eos again. It took him a few moments to recognize the shape of the land that lay below, but the finger-shaped peninsula protruding from the northeast corner of an equatorial continent was probably Cape Exile, which meant that the large island just off its coast was Providence. Calliope was beginning to set to the west, which meant that anyone looking straight up from the island would see the very same thing they saw.

“He's telling the truth.” Sanjay's mouth was dry as he turned to Kaile. “We're above Childstown.” He pointed through the windows. “This is what we've seen whenever we've looked at the sky.”

Kaile didn't speak, but when she peered in the direction he was pointing, her face became ashen.

“Now I want you to hear something, Sanjay,” Nathan said as he did something with his controls that caused the yoke to lock in place, and then he bent forward to push more buttons. “Many, many years ago, while
Galactique
was on its way here, one of your ancestors on Earth sent a message. Her name was Dhanishta, and her father, Matt, helped her send this to
Galactique
. The ship received the message and stored it in memory, and we found it when we arrived. Here's what Dhani had to say.”

The glass panel lit again, this time to display a child's face: a little girl, probably no older than seven or eight sixyarn, as dark skinned as any islander but with a yellow flower in her long black hair. She was sitting upright in a chair, smiling brightly, and as Sanjay watched, she began to speak.

“
Hello, Sanjay. My name is Dhanishta Arkwright Skinner, and I'm calling you from Earth…”

The image was grainy and occasionally shot through with thin white lines. The girl's cheerful voice had a blurred tone to it, but nonetheless her words were distinct. “
I know you're still asleep and so it will be many years before you see this, but when
Galactique
finally gets to Eos, I hope you will…”

A slight pause; she looked flustered. “
I mean, I hope you'll see this. Anyway, I wish I was there with you, because I'd love to know what the new world looks like. I hope it's as nice as Earth and that you'll have a great time there. Please think of me always, and remember that you have a friend here. Much love, Dhani.
”

The girl stopped speaking. She blinked and then looked away. “
Is that okay? Did I—
”

Then the glass panel went dark.

Sanjay didn't know what to say. He couldn't tell which astonished him more, the fact that he could see and hear a little girl speaking to him from across the worlds and yarn or what she'd said. When he raised his eyes again, he found both Nathan and Marilyn smiling at him.

“She said her name is Arkwright,” he said.

“That's correct.” Nathan nodded. “Dhanishta Arkwright Skinner … Arkwright is her middle name. She's your ancestor. Mine too.”

“But how did … how did she know I was here?”

“When she was much older,” Marilyn said, “Dhani wrote her memoirs … her life story. She explained that Matt Skinner, her father, had told her that there was a little boy named Sanjay aboard
Galactique,
and he let her send that message to him.”