How High We Go in the Dark(83)

I remember holding the scope to the seed, helping Nuri carry its weight, adjusting the dials so she could see what might happen to Earth. Probability scopes are an important part of our technology—they’re like telescopes but fitted with lenses made from the jellylike remains of our ancestors. They allow us to see through reality based on the contents of each seed. My father used to say our planet and everyone on it was made of pure possibility and that’s what made us special, made us able to create, become anything we wanted.

And what happens to us when we leave our world? What happens to us as we travel the stars? Children were trained to answer: “We become everything we pass until we become the thing we created.” Our bodies would transform as we passed star system after star system, a catalog of everything our race had given birth to—a Xhilian, a Parsu, a Tarlian Mork, a Quiali, a Dimetrodon of Pangaea.

*

After millions of years I decided to start my first Earth family in order to feel whole again, despite the strict world builder tenet to observe, never to interfere. As a Neanderthal, I helped my tribes survive migration and winter and wars with early humans. I fell in love with a man who killed a saber-toothed cat with nothing but his muscular bare hands and a small stone blade. We made love in caves and beside the carcasses of woolly mammoths. And when my womb began to grow, I thought I could finally be happy with the illusion of a mortal life. But when my daughter, whose name was a series of trills, came, I realized that I had imperfectly shape-shifted into my humanoid form. Maybe a gene where there shouldn’t be one, or a chromosome, led to my newborn glowing like a nebula when she took her first breaths. She had her father’s brow ridges and eyes and stubborn demeanor. She had my nose and shards of my home world flowing through her veins like stars—and for a time, I thought my loneliness and desire to create from nothing but love and hope had produced a most beautiful life.

But then a virus bloomed in the fragile bodies of my cave mates around my daughter’s eighth year, and I realized there was a cost to my selfishness. At first, we believed it was a normal sickness from the cold of the tundra, the nights when our fires went dark. But then, one by one, our hunters returned with fevers, mothers caring for children struggling to breathe. I could see parts of me glowing hot inside their translucent skin. Soon I was the only one tending the fires, roaming the plains for game, cradling the lifeless bodies of those who would not wake. Everything I put in my daughter’s mouth came back up. I prayed that because she was mine, whatever plague I had inadvertently passed to the others would somehow spare her. But I watched her stomach sink into itself, the blood bubbling from her lips. I held her close to my chest, absorbed her last heartbeats, her last breath, the last sounds she’d ever utter, a strained and mournful krrrrrrrrrrrrr. I left my daughter on a bed of leaves and grass beside a carving of my star system, a place I wanted her to dream about as she left this world, covered her in a hide decorated with the seashells I had collected during my early travels as a hominid. I told her she had a sister somewhere out there. I told her that she would always be a part of me. I etched the memories and songs and science of my world that I did not want lost to time into the floors of the cave. I built a fire, sang one final lullaby to my daughter, and left as the sun rose. I crossed sheets of ice, transformed into a human, and lived alone for centuries, trying to forgive myself for being so selfish, so careless, ensuring my mistake would never happen again.

*

Other world builders might have left them to their struggle, but how could I when my humans crawled toward the precipice of possibility? They called me Tiamat, the Sumerians. And while I wore another face back then, I can assure you I was no multiheaded dragon goddess as the myths recorded. I taught them to fish, to craft nets and small vessels. I taught them irrigation, how to wield the power of the Tigris and Euphrates. It was a busy time, as you might guess. I immersed myself in these teachings, with side projects like building ziggurats. If I stopped for long, I would miss Nuri and my cave daughter whenever I saw a couple embrace or heard a child crying. I had a cat named Nuri during the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar. For a while, saying her name out loud brought me comfort. I could pretend my daughter was with me. Nuri, dinner is ready. Nuri, time for bed. Nuri, I love you. Nuri, have you met your sister among the stars? Where are you, Nuri? Where are you?

*

Do you see them? I asked her. Through the scope, we saw people hunting strange beasts with long sticks, people much smaller than us with skin you couldn’t see through, no light dancing within like nebulae. They had hair, like so many species, and traveled great distances in groups, carrying fire. The grass was green, not purple like our rolling hills. Some families had four-legged pets like her Zhirian Jabi (except without the horns and scales). I saw wars among larger tribes, wars of people clad in metal. I saw tiny vessels breaking free of the planet, great cities floating above in rings of glass. I saw a civilization that could destroy itself before it even reached the nearest star. But I also saw a world that would be the first to witness the quiet of intergalactic space and walk on the ruins of whatever remains of us.

When I think about my world, I imagine my husband in the fields, tending to the last seed our people ever launched. The riverbeds have grown dry and dull, no longer gleaming; our ganglia of caves succumbed to darkness long ago. Most of our kind have already left to tend their worlds, find other homes, blend in somewhere, living out eternity as simply as they can. The fields are empty now save for one seed, leaving large tracts of our planet pocked with craters holding only remnants of the worlds they once contained—voices, moments in history, the sounds of animals, the smell of exotic fruit. I’d like to believe my husband and daughter are getting on well, that in my absence they’ve learned to lean on each other. Do they visit Earth’s seed crater and train a probability scope on scraps of light in the soil to catch a glimpse of my new home? Do they dream about the lives I’ve lived? Do they, as I do, gaze at the sky, all the billions of years of light that separate us, before going to sleep?