Homegrown

That day had been inevitable. I always had a feeling that it would come to me. We'd been brought up to find the whole thing noble; lessons and scriptures throughout our time at school had made it very clear how much of an honour it was to be one of the Bearers. My older sisters loved the idea. I think the tragic romanticism of it all was attractive to them at first; being able to tell people they held such a hard-hitting and burdenous responsibility seemed to make it all worthwhile, despite the drawbacks. I'd never felt the same way, not even as a child.

I sank further and further into my chair as the Captain spoke, feeling my sister's expectant gazes burning into the back of my head. He swiped through a few pages of legislature, barking out the highlighted passages and cross-referencing the corresponding evidence, and then it was all over. I almost didn't hear it when he finally announced the verdict. Or perhaps I was choosing not to.

"Preliminary date of installation, 24th April. Court dismissed."

As my sisters burbled insincere protestations and offered timidly to take my place, I stared at the box in the glass cabinet. I'd always wondered why they made them look so beautiful. Little filigree flowers woven around a silver heart. Each one unique to the family, but each one recognisable as a symbol of what could have been. Despite its beauty, I was already starting to think up ways of hiding it. I couldn't stand thinking about all the kindly stares, the patronising touches of passers-by. I didn't want it.

"This was instructed to be passed on to you before installation."

The Captain slid a chunky brown-paper packet over the desk towards me. I looked at it, tracing my finger over the wording. It was mum's handwriting. I nodded thanks to the Captain and slid the package under my arm, curious about the name mum had traced onto the label.

She'd written the name of each of my sisters, one beneath the other and then opposite them, the name 'Ben'. At some point, perhaps on the instruction of the ship's legal advocates, Cynthia and Sarah's names had been crossed out, leaving only mine. I considered my own children, when the time inevitably came which of them would I choose?

The short shuttle ride back to my quarters passed in an instant. I kept staring at the name on the paper, touching the string, tracing the folds in the wrapping. I'd never even known any of their names. Ben. Mum had never really spoken to us about him before. I used to watch her tired eyes in the morning, staring off out into the window as she held the locket between her two fingers.

One night, when I was about twelve, she woke up screaming. It was nothing she told us, ordering all three of us back to bed, but the locket clutched in a rapidly tightening fist suggested otherwise. I remember those fingers whitening. Whenever we asked bout them from that point on, she'd always change the subject.

I used my keycard and entered my quarters. I cleared a space on the small metal dining table and tugged at the string of the package, carefully unfurling the wrapping. It was a set of old notebooks. Again, the name Ben had been artfully written onto each front cover.

I flicked through each of the books Mum had bequeathed me, each a jumbled mixture of pencil drawings and carefully written notes, Mum had an excellent hand and was a truly accomplished artist. She worked in the technical department, producing architectural designs on command, but she could often be found on the ship's botanical deck drawing flowers. It calmed her, or so she said and one of the ship's scientists told me the higher levels of Oxygen in those parts of the ship may have been somewhat stress relieving. It didn't help in the end, Mum wasn't the first Bearer to resort to suicide and I have no doubt she won't be the last.

My mother's neat hand eventually gave way to my grandfather's spidery and illegible scrawl. He had been a ship's doctor, one of the last trained before the ship entered the Cloud. His notes on the Anderson family were brief, clinical even with an objective medical detachment which gave away nothing of the man with the bushy eyebrows I remembered fondly. It was likely this clinical detachment that saw him live to old age, though old age on-board these days is little more than sixty-five. Radiation sickness takes more than its fair share.

The first night I wore the locket, the official installation date of the 24th April, I dreamed of Ben.

He has a beautiful coarseness to him. That's something earned, not made. Years of toil in the midday sun have furrowed his face with wrinkles and left his hands rough and weathered. Blackened nails and blisters seem to give him no bother as he nurses his crop, those thick, dark fingers patting down the earth with firm tenderness. They almost look like giants hands to me. I feel like I could wrap my entire palm around his thumb and still not have my fingers touch. Wrists so broad and sturdy that you could hang from them, skinny legs dangling in mid-air as he sways you from side to side. Solid, like a tree.

I didn't feel grown while I was there. And I'd learn that that was just how it was. I'm always a child with him. I'm maybe seven, eight years old? Dirty knees and a face stained purple by the blackberries I'd been so impatient to pick. I stand there in pigtails, staring at him. Breezes course through the long grasses surrounding the allotment, birds chirp and pick at the insects in the hedgerows. But he never talks, just tends. Sometimes he looks over toward me, but it's never with happiness. He just looks through me, brows drawn, mouth pursed tightly shut.

And he goes back to his work.

I find myself thinking about him during my working day. He and I are both farmers. His small rectangle of carefully tended earth is nothing compared to the banks of hydroponic climate control troughs in which we cultivate almost all of the ship's fresh food. I am jealous though, the problems he faces are nothing like the sterility issues I face. I wonder about slugs - but I have only read about them in textbooks.

I often dream of him, but it is always only him.

It isn't known whether the Old Earthers can still feel our presence, but more than once during my dreaming, Ben has eyed me directly. Our relative speeds mean what are nightly visits for me are months apart for him. My grandfather inherited his family's locket from his mother, an original earther, and so far we have been tied together for three generations of my traveller family and eight generations of his earthbound one.

During Exodus, each of the four ships was entrusted with 80,000 lockets, distributed four per crew member and to be worn on a rotating basis. Many of the original crew, my great-grandmother included remained chronologically concordant with their earth-bound families for the first seven years. Once the ship had slingshot from Jupiter the two groups were quickly out of sync.

It was between Jupiter and The Oort cloud that most lockets disconnected. The families that bore them lost in the catastrophic consequences of human hubris. Even the most optimistic of scientists only gave humanity a fifty-fifty chance of avoiding extinction, realists put it closer to ninety-five percent.

Nobody ever said it was 100% but the four Exodus ships were efficiently manufactured and put into orbit.

The Andersons, to whom my family was connected, were a statistical anomaly, surviving against the odds and passing on their locket to subsequent generations. They'd carved a small niche for themselves in what was once a place called Brazil and had managed to avoid the worst of the Siberian Permafrost eruptions. 

New names were added to the inside cover of the book with every new birth and crossed off with every subsequent death.

I rarely look at this page in the book. A list of forty-seven names, with forty-six crossed out. A few questions marks dotted here and there in the hope of someone re-emerging, but false hope. Only one name remains, Ben Anderson. He is alone, the last of his family.

The answer to my unasked question presents itself two months later when I dream of him at the hand-hewn grave of his wife and child. He sits, a picture of stillness, a cup of freshly brewed nettle tea in his hand and says nothing.

Later that evening I wind my way along the narrative path of his life, jumping from page to page like a disgruntled scholar looking for an answer I know I don't want yet feel compelled to find.

His wife and their three children were killed in one of the many wildfires which are seasonal, I had wondered about the burn marks upon his arms. My mother had been witness to the wildfire that took his family and the few pages immediately after the text recording had been carefully torn out before her suicide.

I feel connected to him. His pain and my pain are the same, the same grief a light-year apart. Bearers often talk in hushed tones of something called a 'soul bond', the unspoken connection between two families who have used the locket. Something to do with quantum and consciousness someone had said over lunch in the canteen.

No further explanation had been forthcoming.

I was testing soil for nitrates on Monday morning when I was struck with an overwhelming urge to nap. It was perhaps an intrusive thought, perhaps even in retrospect it was a command. Forty minutes later I was asleep in my quarters having feigned an illness to excuse myself.

Our lockets bond across the vastness of space and I arrive at the allotment. He briefly stares straight at me and I hold my breath. I know he can't see me but for a heartbeat or two I don't believe it. He sings to himself, an Old Earth ditty I haven't heard before, pleasant to my ears but his voice is already hoarse from lack of use.

As he sings, he unclasps the locket from about his neck and hangs it on a rusty nail on the short fencepost. He sits himself down, his back against the hardwood, his eyes focussed on the horizon. I feel the locket beginning to disconnect and realise instantly what this means. His heart is no longer beating, he is the power source for his locket. 

I am both standing beside and am light years away from Ben Anderson, the last of his genetic line. I am with him at the moment of his death. The relative time difference allows me to stay there for a few hours, permission granted by a fading pulse and the gradual failing of consciousness. 

Of the 80,000 lockets originally on our ship, only twenty-eight remain connected to Old Earth, Ben's death brings the total to twenty-seven. I will need to log this, cross his name out of the journal and submit them to the ship's curator.

I have a moment of quiet relief. There will be one bearer on our ship who will have the last connection to Old Earth. A single tangible thread back to the people we once were. This is what it means to be a bearer, to wear the locket and bear witness to those who remained behind.

To see the death of a world and learn the mistakes so that when we find our new home among the stars, we don't make the same mistakes again.