A story from the coast of Kael
The First Visitor
Before you begin
You do not need to have read anything else. This is the whole of it.
Four people came through a wormhole, a shortcut across space, to a world they named Kael. The wormhole closed behind them, and they never expected to see it open again. They had been sent to start a colony, with no way home.
Kael has two suns, so it is almost never dark. To stay sane, everyone sleeps twelve hours at a time in a cool, pitch-black pod, and calls it lights-out. The air outside is too thin to breathe for long. In the sea live huge, gentle animals the colonists call the neighbours, who talk by knocking on the rock.
It is eight years since the first children were born on Kael. There are twelve of them, and twelve more toddling behind. The eldest is a girl called Ama, who can hear the neighbours in her head.
Malik flies. Lena builds. Inez is the doctor, and she is in charge. Their computer is called LOL, short for Local Operations Liaison, a joke that stuck.
This time, Jun, who studies the sea life, tells the story.
The door
I am a biologist. I like things I can put in a tube. Water samples, red weed, the little silver finger-fish, and a scale from a neighbour that Ama found on the beach and gave me for my birthday. I keep that one in a jar by my bed, and I have never told anyone until now.
The door over the bay would not go in a tube.
It opened during lights-out, eight years after the first children were born. LOL woke us all at once, which it had never done before. Every light in the pod snapped on together, white and shocking, and LOL’s voice, which is usually calm enough to send you to sleep, sounded very slightly less calm.
“Something is happening over the bay,” LOL said. “I do not know what it is. Recommendation: wake up.”
We were already awake.
From the window of Dome One you could see it: a ring of light hanging above the water, half a mile out, as wide as the cove. It shimmered like a soap bubble on a wire loop. Inside the ring, the sky was the wrong colour, a soft, dusty blue that none of us had seen in eight years, and it took me a full minute to understand why my eyes were stinging.
It was an Earth sky. Through that hole, I was looking at an Earth sky.
“That’s the wormhole,” said Malik. He had his flying jacket on over his pyjamas. “That’s exactly how it looked when we came through.”
“It closed,” said Lena. “We watched it close.”
“Well,” said Malik, “it’s opened.”
Nobody said what we were all thinking, so I will say it now. When we left Earth, people were fighting wars over who got to live for ever. We had come through that door with fifty thousand frozen children and a vault of recordings that people had already killed each other over. Whatever was coming back through it, we had no idea whose side it was on.
Inez was already giving orders. “Children into the vault dome. It has the strongest walls we’ve got. Malik, warm up the lander, in case we need to leave fast. Lena—”
“I’ve got the nail gun,” said Lena.
“Of course you have.”
I was given the job of counting children. I counted them four times, because one of them, Ama, kept slipping out of the line to look at the bay.
“Jun,” she said, tugging my sleeve. “The neighbours have all gone deep. Every single one. They say something’s coming.”
“What kind of something?”
She listened to the sea for a moment, her head on one side.
“They say it hums,” she said. “Like a bee.”
Bell
It came through at the turn of the light, the eleven minutes when one sun sets and the other rises and the whole bay goes the colour of copper.
It was not a ship. It was not a weapon. It was a silver ball about the size of a football, and it floated out of the shimmering ring and across the water towards us at walking pace, humming softly, exactly like a bee. It stopped at the end of Lena’s harbour wall, a polite distance from the nail gun, and waited.
Then it spoke. It had a voice like a kind teacher, warm and unhurried, with an accent none of us could place.
“Hello,” it said. “I’m sorry to wake you. Doors are hard to open quietly. My name is Bell, because I ring when a door opens. I have come from Earth with the post, and with a question. May I come closer?”
Nobody moved. Then Inez lowered Lena’s nail gun with one finger, the way you move a branch out of your path.
“You can come closer,” she said. “Slowly.”
“Thank you,” said Bell, and came closer, slowly.
From the speaker on the harbour wall, LOL said, “Excuse me. I am the computer here.”
“I know,” said Bell. “You must be LOL. I’ve read all your reports. They’re wonderful.”
There was a pause.
“You have read my reports?”
“Every one. When a door opens, messages travel through it both ways, all by themselves, like a letterbox. Every report you have ever written was waiting at the door when it opened, and came through to us in the first second. Eight years of them. The weather. The algae. The children’s heights. Lena’s dome.” A small, polite hum. “The dome looked a little like a hat.”
“It’s settling,” said Lena.
“Recommendation,” said LOL, sounding, for the first time in its life, pleased with itself, “everyone should listen to Bell.”
Four thousand years
We sat on the harbour wall, the four of us, and Bell floated in front of us like a small silver moon and told us the hardest thing first. I have always respected it for that.
“I need to tell you about time,” it said. “When you came through the door, nobody knew that time runs differently on each side. The Planners thought it would be the same. They were wrong. It’s like two clocks that slowly drift apart, except these drift very fast. For every day you have lived here, more than a year has passed on Earth.”
I am a scientist. I did the sum before I wanted to. Eight years. Nearly three thousand days.
“How long?” said Inez. Her voice was quite steady. “On Earth. Since we left.”
“Four thousand, one hundred and twelve years,” said Bell gently.
Nobody said anything. Down in the bay, the neighbours were coming back up from the deep, one by one, and the slow knocking was starting again, faint, through the stone.
I thought of my father, who taught me the name of everything on the beach where I grew up, and who cried at the airport and pretended it was hay fever. He had been dead for four thousand years. Nearly as long as the pyramids had stood when I was a boy.
I looked at Inez. I knew what she was thinking about, because I had been there the night she made her decision about the vault. Her little sister, Sofía, the cellist. For eight years Inez had believed that somewhere far away, Sofía was getting a little older every day.
She had got older. She had got old. She had finished, a very long time ago.
Inez didn’t cry. Inez never cries where anyone can see. She just laid her hand flat on the stone of the harbour wall, as if she was checking it was still there.
“They’re all gone,” she said. “Everyone we knew.”
“Yes,” said Bell. “I’m so sorry. But they didn’t forget you. That’s why I brought the post.”
The post
Earth had kept everything.
That was the first thing Bell wanted us to understand. When the four of us left, the people who loved us were told they could leave a message, in case the door ever opened again. They left them. And Earth kept them for four thousand years, through wars and peace and things Bell said we would not believe yet, because Earth had decided long ago that a message for someone is a promise, and you keep promises.
Malik’s mother had sent a recipe and a list of things he must never do, most of which he had already done. Lena’s brother had sent a drawing of a dome with a smiley face, which Lena looked at for a long time and then tucked inside her jacket. My father had sent a message that was mostly about whether I was eating properly. Some things do not change in four thousand years.
And Sofía had sent a letter.
Bell played it for Inez alone, at the far end of the harbour wall, and the rest of us looked very hard at the sea so as not to watch. But the wind was blowing our way, and Bell’s voice carries, and so I heard some of it. I’m sorry, Inez. I have never told you that until now.
It was Sofía’s voice, but old. Very old, and very happy.
Big sister. I’m a hundred and ninety-one. I played the cello until last spring, and then my hands told me to stop, so I did, which you will be amazed to hear, because I never did anything I was told.
I had three children. They had children. There are a lot of us now, and every one of them knows your name. We tell your story at birthdays: the woman who went through the door so that people could start again somewhere new.
I’m not cross. I never was. I hope you found somewhere beautiful. I hope you let somebody look after you, for once.
And Inez, did you sleep? Tell me you slept.
Inez sat at the end of the wall for a long time after it finished. Then she asked Bell something, quietly, and Bell hummed an answer, and Inez nodded.
Later, Bell told me what she had asked: how many of Sofía’s family, four thousand years on, still told that story at birthdays.
“Four hundred and six,” Bell had told her. “And every one of them has asked to say hello.”
The question
The question came the next morning, after a lights-out in which nobody slept, not even Inez.
Bell explained it in the kitchen, floating above the table where we argue about the mugs, while twelve children pressed their noses against the window and twelve smaller ones were held up behind them to see.
Earth, it said, was different now.
After we left, the wars got worse. Billions of people died. And when it was finally over, the people who were left made a choice. Over three hundred years, slowly and carefully, they changed themselves, deep down in the instructions every body is built from, so that cruelty no longer came easily to them. They could still be angry. They could still be sad, or stubborn, or wrong. But hurting each other had become, Bell said, like trying to write with your wrong hand. Possible. Just very hard, and nobody wanted to.
“They’re kind,” said Bell. “Kinder than you will quite believe until you meet them. They have opened doors to nine hundred worlds since you left. Yours was only the eleventh. They never knew which colonies had lived until they could open the doors again, and opening one takes an enormous amount of power. Now they can keep a door open for ever. Yours is one of the colonies that lived. Some of the others…” It hummed very quietly and didn’t finish.
“And now they want us back,” said Lena. She was still holding the nail gun, though it was no longer loaded.
“They want you to choose,” said Bell. “You can join the Earth Federation. The door stays open. People can visit, if you invite them. Medicine, knowledge, help, whenever you ask for it. Or you can stay independent. I’ll close the door and come back once every ten years, just to say hello and bring the post. Either way, I’m leaving you a gift: a copy of everything Earth knows, all of it, to keep. That isn’t a bribe. It’s yours whatever you decide.”
“And if we say no to everything?” said Lena.
“Then I’ll say goodbye and close the door very gently,” said Bell. “I’ll be sorry, but I won’t be cross. Nobody on Earth gets cross about that sort of thing any more.”
I’m a biologist. I couldn’t let it go.
“You changed yourselves,” I said. “Deep down. So you couldn’t be cruel.”
“Yes.”
“Who decided?”
“Everyone. It took three hundred years to agree.”
“And the ones who didn’t agree?”
Bell was quiet for a moment. “They were left as they were,” it said. “It was their choice. Most of their great-grandchildren chose differently. Not all of them.”
I looked at the window, at twenty-four small faces against the glass. Twenty-four children who had been left, on purpose, to grow up as whoever they turned out to be. Most of them were kind. One of them had bitten Lena on the ankle last week. All of them were exactly themselves.
“Is goodness you’re born with,” I said, “the same as goodness you choose?”
“I don’t know,” said Bell. “That’s a very good question. Earth still argues about it.”
Inez stood up. “We’ll need time,” she said. “And this isn’t really our decision. In twelve years those children will be grown. It’s their world. They should choose.”
“Then I’ll come back in twelve years,” said Bell, “and I’ll knock first. We have become very good at waiting.”
Three beats, a gap, four
Before Bell went home, it told us one more thing. The door works both ways, and Earth was listening. Whatever we wanted to send, Bell would carry.
We argued about it for an hour. Lena wanted to send her harbour plans. Malik wanted to send a film of the neighbours. LOL wanted to send another report, and Bell gently pointed out that eleven million people on Earth had already read the last one, and LOL did not say a single word for four hours. Lena says it was the happiest she has ever heard it.
Inez didn’t say anything. That was how I knew she was still sitting at the end of the harbour wall, in her head.
In the end, Ama decided, because Ama usually does.
“Send them the knock,” she said. “Everybody knows what that means.”
So that is what we did. At the next turn of the light, every person on Kael went down to the harbour: twenty-eight people, six robots and one silver ball that hummed like a bee. Twelve children crouched on the stones with a pebble each. Twelve smaller ones were helped. And all together, slightly out of time, we knocked.
Three beats. A gap. Four.
For a moment there was nothing. Then the whole bay answered. Every neighbour in the cove, from the seven young ones, bent fin and all, to the great grey one with three pale scars on her side, to the old ones far out beyond the harbour. The answer came up through the wall like a heartbeat, rolled out across the water and up into the ring of light, and Bell caught every bit of it and carried it home.
The last thing Inez did, before the door closed, was give Bell one more message. Just for the four hundred and six.
“Tell them I slept,” she said.
I am a biologist. I like things I can put in a tube. Some things don’t fit in a tube, so I have been writing a poem about this one instead. I am not going to show it to you. But it ends with a door, and a knock, and somebody answering.
