How High We Go in the Dark(84)

*

The destruction of Earth’s first advanced civilization was partly my fault, I admit. I gave the Atlantians too much too soon. They weren’t ready for the knowledge. I felt sorry for the children—how they ran, screamed for their parents as Atlantis shook. Oh, and how it shook. Their scientists shot three tiny stars beneath the ground, hoping to quell the shaking of the volcano, absorb the energy of the planet. They twisted my words, weaponized them, until even I could not say for certain what would happen. And so, the stars grew until the ground cracked and glowed red. The quake amplified and the sea enveloped the barriers of the city’s outer rings, swallowed the land for as far as I could see. Stone guardians and ancient kings the size of skyscrapers collapsed, crumbling beneath the waves. I watched from one of the few boats that made it out, holding a girl who had no one else. I sang her lullabies from seven worlds, the same songs I sang to Nuri. And when we landed in what would become Greece, I slipped away, leaving the child beside the belongings of a young couple. But before I left, I whispered to her: “Your family will always be with you. Don’t forget them. Be strong.” I walked and walked and spent the next few ages alone. I let humanity be.

*

On my home world right before I left, I came upon my husband in the seed fields showing Nuri how world builders inject possibility into each seed, adding with trained precision the chemicals and minerals we debate for thousands of years.

“It’s not entirely up to you,” my husband explained to Nuri. “We plant potential realities. What we see through our scopes may or may not happen—at least in this universe.”

“So, who decides?” Nuri asked.

“Some of it is chance,” I explained. “Hope, love, ingenuity. Possibility is more than what runs through our veins, little one.”

Nuri walked up to the seed that was assigned to her and held a possibility scope to its glowing membrane.

“I want these flying creatures to live,” she said. She wanted her world to have a fighting chance, a species of furry animals that might fly one day. That world has a 70 percent chance of being known as Vara to its first civilizations and as a series of three long, high-pitched whistles by the last intelligent species to inhabit it before its star burns away its history. I’ve watched the possibility of this last civilization, seen their slim chance of escaping their star’s destruction. You see, this is partly why Earth hasn’t received any messages from other worlds. Most have perished by the time their light reaches our sky. Sometimes hundreds of light-years exist between even the simplest forms of life.

*

You’d think someone who came from outer space wouldn’t be as susceptible to astronomical pickup lines, but you’d be wrong. In the sixteenth century, I lived as Marina Gamba in Venice, and was taken in by the passion of a scholar who, of course correctly, believed that the Earth revolved around the sun. He said the cluster of moles on my back looked like the Pleiades. Now, what else can I tell you about Galileo? We mapped the stars together before and after making love. And even though we couldn’t see many worlds with his telescope, I would point to a dark patch of sky and say, There. There is so much light you cannot see. And there, past it all, is where I come from. He’d ask me about other species, why the spaces between civilizations were so great. And I’d tell him that most worlds can’t handle the company. They’d destroy each other out of fear or ignorance. So, the spaces are a deterrent, but they are also a challenge, for the worlds to rise above the odds, to thrive together, and perhaps even find us—what is left of us.

In the seventeenth century, perhaps fifty years after my death as Marina, I became Isaac Newton’s roommate while at Cambridge. Isaac mostly thought I was a fool, but maybe a part of him believed my stories every time I corrected his math. When we got drunk, he’d ask me to tell him tales of my home world. I told him about Earth’s seed and Nuri and the promise my husband made to send my daughter to me, to care for Vara in her stead.

“But you would never see him again,” my dear Isaac said, as I again corrected his math.

“We’ve spent more lifetimes together than you can imagine,” I answered. “I spent my little girl’s childhood creating this planet. I missed it. I need to see who she’s become.”

*

As more opportunity and freedom pulled many across the ocean, so did I find myself aboard a ship to America, landing first in Virginia in 1820. I lived quietly for decades, exploring this young country with whatever face and society could grant me passage and access. I attended the Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights in 1848, posing as a milliner from Delaware, filled with the spirit of possibility, and listened to the words of Mott and Stanton. I thought about all that had become possible for humanity simply because I had chosen to break the rules, to dare to dream.

I unexpectedly found love again not long after the conference and headed south, instead of following the gold rush as I had originally planned.

“A big family. Three boys. No, four,” my Elliot said one evening as we worked to build our house outside of Raleigh.

“I see. And where am I during all of this?” I laughed. I had told him I wanted a family, too. I think it took a few thousand years for me to really want to try again. I told myself I would be careful this time, that I had become adept at understanding the human form. Despite the tremors of war, our farm felt like it existed in another realm of hope. And for a time, it seemed like the distant echoes of musket fire would never reach us.