Goddess of the Dawn

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

Selah couldn’t decide whether this thought was comforting or frightening. She gulped in a breath of precious air, feeling sweat begin to bead on her brow. That was one thing about lifesuits no one had ever warned her about. How do you wipe away the sweat or scratch your nose? Presumably the makers had figured you would have other things to worry about. But that also assumed you would rather focus on the loneliness and utter terror of drifting alone in a void.

She involuntarily lifted her suited glove hand to the face of her helmet, trying to brush the sweat away, and that was when she noticed the fingerprints smudged on the glass. Lukasz’s. She winced and closed her eyes. Only 7 hours left.

Selah’s nonna used to whisper stories of the Old World to her at night, first for her own comfort only when she thought Selah was sleeping, but later it became their special ritual. It didn’t matter that Selah couldn’t truly understand—her feet would still tingle and her tongue pucker at the descriptions of touches and tastes unknown and unknowable, her ears itching to hear of people and creatures who measured their lives in 365-day rotations around a star she would never see. Tales of a world of green that everyone said was dying. Her nonna would tell her how she and her own grandmother would pick wild blueberries and how the fog would float across the vista of their valley home, playing hide and seek with the mountains. How as a girl she would run barefoot through the forest, her feet cushioned by beds of springy moss that would launch her into her next step. How she would look forward to the peak of summer to taste tomatoes from her mother’s garden. How by the time she was grown she would wait for her own in vain because she couldn’t afford the right seeds.

As she floated, trying to look anywhere but at those fingerprints, Selah wondered—how many times did something have to take place for it to transform a memory from the utilitarian “we used to” to the more haunting, nostalgic implications of “we would” in the teller’s mind? Is it simply enough that the possibility to do it again is lost forever?

We would, we would, we would

What stuck with Selah most about her nonna’s stories was how concepts and experiences that seemed to her so strange could be such an integral part of the identity of someone she loved and knew better than anyone in any world. Although not officially forbidden, it was generally considered taboo for cryos to talk much about their personal experiences of the Old World, even amongst themselves, but especially with the later generations.

Only a few of the Original Pioneers—more commonly referred to as cryos—were left. It had been almost 60 years since they broke ground.

At 19—Selah’s age now—her nonna had signed up for one of the first trials to be frozen in cryo on the vague hope that she would possibly wake up some day, somewhere, to help preserve humanity along a new frontier.

She awoke on a new planet with 350 others—mostly young, fertile men and women, some families with kids, some older scientists, and hundreds of vials of sperm and embryos with which to ensure genetic diversity and the future success of their new civilization. They had enough ready food for themselves and planned new offspring for 10 years. Which should give them enough time with their seeds, customized fertilizers, and cryo’ed microorganisms and insects to establish a permanent living on the silty substrate of this new planet, which, though it had water and oxygen-producing aquatic plants, had not yet developed any life forms worth eating, and nothing on land.

A pre-recorded orientation video promised that, if they were successful, more people would be sent. Coordinates were provided for other planets that had been identified as having favorable growing conditions; it wasn’t clear if other pioneers had been sent to those yet with their own tidy instructions and customized packets of soil supplements. None of the other planets were in their same solar system.

Although there were scientists, farmers, engineers, and doctors among them, and they had amenities and information aplenty–tools, medicines, minerals, thousands of manuals and digitalized reference materials–the instructions for establishing a connection with the Old World failed. They were completely on their own, with no way of knowing if there was even anyone left on the other end.

The video referred to their new home as “Ushas,” for the Hindu goddess of the dawn, the breath and life of all living creatures—an aspiration and prayer for an auspicious start to their quest to coax life out of a bunch of rocks.

At first, the colonists could hardly believe their good luck. Ushas seemed to have no harsh seasons; the climate was always cool in the mornings and warm in the evenings, providing ideal growing conditions. Rain was frequent but gentle, and the nearby lakes and rivers were easily tamed into irrigation systems for the rare occasions that the rains passed them by. Most of the ready food sat in storage, unneeded and eventually remembered only by the cryos as a minor detail when recounting their origin story.

Shelters were built, canals dug. Schools were established, with a heavy focus on natural sciences, physical tasks, and creativity. Families were formed, new children were born, communal rules and patterns settled into, specializations and apprenticeships selected as youth grew older. In those days, there was little downtime and much optimism.

Sometimes, when Selah would beg, her nonna would tell her about her mother. Baby #24; healthy, happy. Later withdrawn and distant, a constant daydreamer. How when she was a child, she would always be found looking up at the sky instead of working at whatever task she had been assigned. How later she would go to the N₂O bar, returning with less of the look of a trapped animal in her eyes. How she and Selah’s father would disappear for long hours in the evenings at his lab.

She never told the end of her story, a one-off deed ending a lifetime of habits.

She would, she would, she would

Selah checked her oxygen again. 4 hours. Should she just let it all out now? So tempting to just not have to worry or wonder what would happen next, to not have to keep checking how much time she had left. Her rationally trained mind knew there was nothing she could do, that no one knew she was here, that no one was here, that no one would ever find her. But—no. Her animal mind won out. Even still, it did not want to die.

Not wanting to risk their precious cryo’ed pollinators and invertebrates before establishing a sure foothold, the colonists pollinated most of their crops by hand in the early days. But after a few years they released their bees and butterflies and wasps, and their Eden flourished. They unfroze the chickens, and many children tasted their first real eggs with wondrous delight, wide-eyed smiles smeared with orange yolks. The bees brought honey, and honey meant the luxury of occasional sweets, and Selah’s mother’s 7th birthday was marked with her first ever taste of sweetbread.

The colonists were even starting to talk about establishing larger grasslands on the outskirts of the community so that they could eventually incubate and release the pre-fertilized goat and sheep ova they had been sent with. The cryos described to their skeptical children the tastes of fresh milk and meat and cheeses.

And then they learned why all of Ushas’s native plants were in her lakes and rivers.

Selah’s mother and father had just had their handfasting ceremony. As they were celebrating with their friends and families, someone noticed a purple cloud far out on the horizon. Everyone watched it with curiosity, and perhaps some unease, but it was so far away and didn’t appear to be moving. It was an Unknown, but since all of Ushas’s previous Unknowns had been benign or even beneficial, there was no reason to suspect this one would be any different.

By the next day, it was obvious that it would come their way. And that night it was upon them, an electrical storm unlike anything any human had ever experienced. A cloud of super-charged dust descended upon the settlements, blue light crackling and morphing into green and purple and yellow, electrifying everything in its path. Anyone who was inside was spared the worst of it, their grounded light-weight aluminum tent shelters acting as enough of a Faraday rod to divert the brunt of the energy. Those few who were unlucky enough to be caught outdoors were obliterated.

After two days, the crackling died down and the cloud passed. The survivors emerged from their doors to a nightmare. Their crops were fried to black. Their chickens splinters of bone. Not one insect remained.

Anyone alive on Ushas at the time would experience tingling—not unpleasant, or so Selah was told—at the slightest human touch for the rest of their lives.

The loss of that season’s crops was a setback, but they had plenty of stores to make it through to the next planting. The loss of the insects was a catastrophe. They hadn’t saved any in cryo—an unimaginable act of hubris.

They soon found that the soil itself was also catastrophically damaged. Not only were their worms and beetles dead; the colonies of microorganisms, so critical to their ability to grow food and whom they had so lovingly and carefully tended for the past three decades, had been wiped out. It would be a slow process, but they had at least saved enough bacteria and fungi in cryo to reestablish some measure of soil health. But they were back to pollinating and gently aerating the soil by hand, and the days of plenty were over. Grasslands and milk were never mentioned again.

Within three years it became obvious that Ushas would not be able to support the current population to the end of their natural lives, let alone any more growth. Selah’s mother had already been pregnant when the storm hit; Selah was the last child to be born before the lottery system for new babies—originally meant to be a temporary rationing measure—went into place.

Selah’s hands found her belly. There was no way she was pregnant—birth control was 100% effective. But for the first time she thought about how, if she had a different life, she would have liked to have been some day. Even though she thought about the implications of it often, until now she had never really felt what it meant to be the end of a generational line. It made her breasts ache.

That the colonists were even on Ushas at all was thanks to a discovery on the Old World that harnessed power from what their ancestors surely would have thought of as thin air. A truly renewable, never-ending supply of power. A physics student conducting experiments at a desert observatory solved one of the universe’s greatest puzzles when he found a way to attract and harness the energy of neutrinos. Working with psilocybin as his primary material, manipulating and mixing it with amalgams of base and precious metals and minerals, as he leaned over to look closely at one mixture, it moved. It didn’t take him long to discover that it was buzzing with jumping, dancing, joyous neutrinos, pouring in at a higher mass than had ever previously been seen in one location.

The particles released spirals of measurable, explosive, micro bursts of energy that it was later discovered could be harnessed to produce movement and power. Gone were the days when humans would need to rely on fuel to power their dreams and conveniences. The psilocybin mixture was cheap, lightweight, and easy to make. The final key ingredient was life—it was the student’s breath that had sparked the dance. No one knew exactly what it was that the neutrinos were doing or why they came in such vast quantities, but later studies would determine that it was a sort of voluntary, symbiotic relationship; an individual would arrive, bask in the presence of the amalgam, dance for hours, and then leave, depleted, to make room for its brethren, only to eventually return for more.

Deep-space ships were thus constructed of what came to be known as Pluteon, a nacre, almost translucent skin that had only to be occupied by living, breathing creatures to travel forever if need be, fueling itself on the life-giving dark matter emanating from every corner of the universe.

A blessing and a curse, as far as Selah was concerned.

Thus, the original settlers had arrived on Ushas in three such ships, all of which were still fully functioning. The Old World planners had filled all three ships almost to passenger capacity, assuming that they would all set out together to search for a new home if Ushas were to prove inhospitable. They hadn’t anticipated the planet turning on the pioneers after almost 40 years of success. By that time, there wasn’t enough space on the ships to accommodate the colony’s budding population.

Difficult choices had to be made.

The first ship left in Selah’s first year, setting course for one of the other potentially life-giving planets they had originally been given coordinates to. It would take them 3 years just to get to the first. If they could, they intended to return some day to guide a greater exodus, in iterations, to a new land of plenty.

Lotteries were held amongst the various guilds and apprentices so that all skill sets would be represented both in the group leaving and amongst those left behind. Personal choice was taken into account only in so far as a colleague could volunteer to swap places if their skill set matched the one who had drawn the lot. Fate had to be respected in that regard, at least.

Selah’s father had drawn the cloth marked with the black dot. The only other two chemists qualified to take his place had young families of their own. No one volunteered to go for him.

Of the astrophysicists chosen, no one would heed Selah’s mother’s pleas to let her go in their place, as they had partners and dreams of their own to cleave to.

And so Selah had never known her father nor, by extension, her mother, who retreated into herself and her work, until one day, when Selah was six, she disappeared. No one even pretended it was an accident. Selah’s nonna, a born talker, had raised her, so she probably had heard more firsthand Old World and early Ushas stories than anyone else in the Third Generation.

In this moment she was glad to have all those second-hand memories to distract her from focusing on all the missed opportunities of her own life. And from wondering what it would feel like to run out of air. And from thinking of her final human interaction, and of how it had ended.

Selah’s favorite bedtime stories were about trees. Her nonna would talk about them for hours, weaving together science and magic as she endowed the featured tree of the evening with a personality, dreams, regrets, and desires. The royal oak who dressed up in Spanish moss to show off her sense of style; the flighty paper birch who would giggle as she passed out mementos to anyone who came by; the crotchety pitch pine who was really a softy once you got to know him. More than any other, Selah wished she could meet a giant sequoia. But even in her nonna’s youth they had already been only legends. The tallest plants Selah had ever seen were stalks of corn, and when she was little, wondering among the rows before harvest, she would imagine that she was walking under trees. Her nonna laughed—not unkindly, but sadly—when she told her. There is no comparison, she said.

By the time Selah was 15, conditions on Ushas had worsened, and a referendum was held on whether to send out the second ship, both to increase the chance of finding a new home and to relieve the pressure on the meager living they were scraping off the land. Anyone who was eligible to draw lots—everyone 13 or older—had to vote. 86% came back yea. Selah’s vote had not been among the yeas, but that hadn’t stopped her from becoming the sacrificial lamb of the engineering apprentices.

Her nonna did not draw a marked cloth, and though she volunteered to go, again no one eligible was willing to stay. Their little family was torn apart again. But it was far from the only one. Everyone accepted their separations with dignity and equanimity, at least publicly. It was a simultaneously cruel and civilized solution in the face of the age-old dilemma of potential starvation, and it could have been far crueler. By leaving or staying they could at least imagine that their loved ones would make it. And there need not be any direct sacrifices, at least not yet.

During the interminable hours staring out the windows of the ship the voyagers had darkly christened the Annabel Lee, Selah would wonder if humanity was cursed to wander the galaxies forever in their search for deliverance from an exile of their own making. The Annabel Lee’s food stores were drawn from the original ready food the cryos had arrived with. It was repetitive but nutritious, and she hadn’t felt so satiated in years. She continued her lessons with the master engineers, and the 162 travelers all tried to pass the boredom as best they could. She tried to embody her nonna’s adventurous and optimistic young spirit, and even her mother’s longing to be among the stars, but she didn’t always succeed. In her heart she longed for shades of green she had only ever seen in pictures.

They had charted a different path from her father’s ship, and their first destination was 1,572 days away—a little over four years.

She started spending time with Lukasz during the third year on board. They had played together indirectly as children amongst the roving bands of their peers, sneaking in adventures between chores. Childrearing was largely a communal affair on Ushas, and there was never a shortage of adults on the lookout for an idle pair of small hands to mend a sock, transplant seeds, or deliver a message.

Now they visited the observation deck together, watching the universe pass them by.

She had always vowed that she would never let herself be as dependent on anyone as her mother had been, so she was surprised—and annoyed—when she would catch herself thinking back on his freckled hands expertly tuning the telescope on the deck to a new nebula or star, or how, when she would regale him with her own made-up stories of trees she had never seen, he would close his eyes and move his lips subconsciously, as if he could feel the sun-speckled shade on his cheeks.

At least they never talked about getting handfasted. There was an unspoken agreement amongst all the voyagers not to plan for a future that seemed tenuous on good days and absolutely doomed on others.

And so almost four years passed.

That morning they had been in his cabin, cramped onto his small bunk, procrastinating leaving for their lessons even though they were already late. She was just rolling over onto her stomach to air dry the sweat tickling the small of her back when they heard the alarm go off and the cabin door seal itself shut, a protective measure indicating that the oxygen cycling system had been compromised somewhere on the ship. I didn’t know we had a drill today, he said.

Only 3 hours left now. Thank the gods. At least then she could stop thinking about the last pair of eyes she would ever look into. Gold-green nebulae ringed with copper rims so dark they were almost purple under her dimmed cabin lights.

Each cabin was equipped with a lifesuit. He reached for it. They did drills often, and they knew she could pick up one of the extras stashed in the main corridor so that when they arrived at the rendez vous she wouldn’t get any demerits. In an emergency, they would only have 4 minutes of air in the cabin once the doors sealed, and they would be severely reprimanded if they were late to the rendez vous. But to their mutual alarm, they noticed that the oxygen level on the meter actually was going down this time, and quickly. Their eyes met and he seemed to be making a decision, his lips pursed. His better nature won out. He shoved the suit at her. She froze. You can go get me one, he reassured her. Just bring it back. Fumbling, she put her legs into the suit, the Kevlar lining cold against her skin. Once her helmet was latched into place, he pressed the button to manually override the sealed cabin.

As she had taken her first steps out the door she couldn’t stop herself from cursing the suit makers for their lack of foresight in the event that someone might have to put one on while naked. Why hadn’t they at least lined them with something more comfortable? Now, she relished the cold and discomfort. It made her feel less guilty. Maybe if she hadn’t been so focused on it at that moment, she would have moved more quickly. If the corridor had been breached, she only had seconds, after all.

But it hadn’t been. The corridor was empty and oxygen levels were normal, and the alarm blared eerily and irritatingly. She motioned to him to come out and they ran. They hadn’t taken more than six steps when suddenly everything just—stopped. The noise. The lights. Utter darkness. She couldn’t even hear the familiar hum of the air system. She’d never realized how viscerally comforting it had been, or that anything could even be viscerally comforting.

She fumbled with the light on the suit, finally getting it on. She whirled around, looking for him and found him collapsed on the ground behind her. Then they both started to float. She turned to try to swim down the corridor for a suit but he grabbed her ankle and shook his head. His breath was ragged, his skin tinged with blue, like how she’d imagined the Picts in her nonna’s stories of the old forests. His bloodshot eyes were pleading, for what she didn’t know. The blood highlighted their bronze undertones and she felt like she was looking at someone inhuman. She knew there was no point in leaving for the suit. She swam toward him and awkwardly pulled his head into her lap as she floated cross-legged in the dark. She knew he couldn’t hear her through her suit, but she stroked his forehead and whispered an old song her nonna had taught her as a young girl to help her understand her mother’s grief at losing her father.

When the light left his bulging eyes she tried unsuccessfully to close his lids.

She sang again to herself now, her voice cracked from lack of use as she recounted the singer’s unanswered queries of the trees and the rain and the clouds and the moon, asking where his love had gone.

Eventually she stirred. She knew she should go look for others, that to stay here would be a waste of not only her life but his. Her suit, which ran on batteries, would work for 36 hours. Had anyone else had time to put one on? What had happened?

The next few hours searching in the dark revealed the answer to the first question. They had not. It didn’t even seem as if anyone had been trying to put a suit on—had the alarms not gone off toward the main or the bow? They had been the only two still in the sleeping quarters in the stern.

She spent the day counting bodies. She hadn’t really needed to; there were no other lights and none of the lifeboats were gone. They didn’t appear to be working anyway. In fact, nothing on the Annabel Lee worked. Chilled and killed by an unknown wind. Selah couldn’t even get the back-up batteries to power a single light bulb. They looked almost melted; maybe they had blown when they set off the alarms and sealed off the back half of the ship when she started to lose power.

It didn’t really matter anyway. When she was down to 10 hours and had exhausted all potential avenues for ship repair that she knew of, she decided to disembark. She didn’t want to end her life floating inside a sepulcher. At least outside she could drift amidst the stars and pretend she was closer to her father. With fewer visual reminders of her failed quixotic mission to conquer the universe, she could instead imagine happier possibilities for his.

Had the Annabel Lee been breached or failed somehow, killing her passengers, or had she succumbed only after they had, deprived of their life-giving breath that the Pluteon needed to keep her operating? It bothered Selah that she would never know.

Her nonna sometimes would tell Selah about her own father, who had been a linguist on the Old World. He had once told her about a language that used the same word for “to smell” and “to hear.” This tidbit came back to Selah now. She knew that it was impossible, floating in the soundless vacuum of space, locked into her lifesuit, but in her gut she also knew—she heard it, she smelled it, before she saw it. Then, a shadow was blocking out the stars and, suddenly, all she could see was light, and she was too dazzled even to scream.