A story from the coast of Kael
The Long Way Home
Before you begin
You do not need to have read anything else. This is the whole of it.
More than twenty years ago, four people came through a wormhole, a shortcut across space, to start a colony on a world they named Kael. Kael has two suns, so it is almost never dark. The eleven minutes when one sun sets and the other rises are the closest thing it has to night, and the colonists call them the turn of the light.
Kael’s seas are home to huge, gentle animals the colonists call the neighbours. One of them, a great grey creature with three pale scars on her side, has spoken to the pilot, Malik, inside his head since his very first year on Kael. He calls her ParelLaia.
The four founders can never go home. When the wormhole opened again, they learned that time runs differently through it, and that thousands of years had passed on Earth. Everyone they knew was long gone.
This time, Malik tells the story. He has been keeping a secret.
Teeth
The first time I saw a dinosaur, it tried to eat me.
Jun says, technically, it wasn’t a dinosaur. It was a sea lizard. Jun was not there.
It was longer than a bus, with a jaw full of teeth like a drawer of kitchen knives, and it came up out of a dark green ocean eighty million years ago with its mouth wide open and its mind on lunch. Above us, creatures with leathery wings wider than a car is long wheeled and screamed. The water was as warm as a bath and smelled of iron.
ParelLaia turned so fast I felt it in my teeth. The sea folded like a door slamming, and we were somewhere else, and the lizard closed its jaws on nothing at all.
She laughed. Not out loud. Inside my head, the way she does everything. She thought it was the funniest thing she had seen in a thousand years.
I didn’t laugh. I was too busy being alive.
That was twenty-three years ago, in my first year on Kael. Everyone thought I was dreaming. I let them think it. That was my secret.
The secret
Let me explain. I’ve had twenty-three years to work out how, and I still find it hard.
In my first year here, I walked down to the bay every day to sit with ParelLaia. Then I got headaches, and stopped going. Then the dreams came: bright, close, full of weather. Seas that weren’t Kael’s sea. Islands of glass. A sky with three pale moons and no suns at all. And always, beside me, a great grey creature with three pale scars on her side.
I told the others they were dreams. I half believed it myself. But they weren’t. She was really out there, travelling, and I was seeing it all through her eyes. And near the end, she showed me she could take more than my eyes. She could take all of me.
Her kind can fold space and time, the way Earth folds them to make a wormhole. Earth needs machines the size of mountains to do it. ParelLaia does it the way a swallow finds its way to Africa: without a map, without even thinking, because that is what her kind is made for.
One night, at the end of the dreams, she made me an offer. She could take me back. To Earth, before we left. To my mother’s kitchen, and my father asleep in his chair, and my brothers shouting at the football. I could see them one more time.
I said no. I was frightened that if I went, I would never come back. That I wouldn’t want to. So I said no, and I told nobody, and I let everyone believe I’d had some very good dreams.
When I was nine, I watched an old Earth television story about a starship captain who lived a whole lifetime on another world in twenty-five minutes. I loved it. I never thought anything like it would happen to me. And when it did, I was too scared to tell a soul.
I kept quiet for twenty-three years. Then a young woman called Marisol came through the door from Earth with a cello, and Inez cried on the harbour wall in front of everyone on Kael, and I thought: you coward. You could have given her that years ago.
So I told them.
The rules
I told them at the kitchen table in Dome One, where we have argued about the mugs for twenty-three years. Just the four of us. I told them everything: the teeth, the glass islands, the offer.
Nobody said anything for a while.
Then Lena said, “You’ve had a time machine in the bay for twenty-three years, and you let me build a harbour by hand?”
“She’s not a time machine.”
“She’s a time machine with fins.”
Jun wanted proof, because Jun is a scientist, so we asked Bell. Bell is the small silver machine that came through from Earth when the door reopened, and it has stayed on Kael ever since, mostly helping with the new hospital and annoying LOL, our own computer. That evening, at the turn of the light, ParelLaia opened a fold over the bay the size of a dinner plate, just for a moment, and Bell measured it with everything it had.
“Well,” said Bell, after a long hum. “That is a fold in space and time. A small one, but a real one. Earth would need a power station to make that.” A pause. “She did it while yawning.”
“Recommendation,” said LOL, “be nice to her.”
Then I told them the rules, the way ParelLaia had told them to me.
She could take each of them back to Earth, to any moment they liked, as long as it was before we left. But the past is heavy. She could only hold a door to it open for eleven minutes, one turn of the light, and only once for each of us. And she could only reach them through me, so I would have to go too, and hold their hand.
And nobody could change anything. The past is finished, she says, like a wall that has already been built. You can’t knock it down. But sometimes, she says, you find out you were one of the builders.
“Eleven minutes,” said Inez quietly.
“Eleven minutes,” I said. “Anywhere you like. Then home.”
Lena folded her arms. “No,” she said. “I build forward. I don’t go back.”
Inez and Jun didn’t say anything at all. They didn’t need to.
Jun
Jun went first, because Jun always goes first when there’s something to learn.
ParelLaia came up beside the harbour wall at the turn of the light. I took Jun’s hand, and I felt her reach through me like a warm current, and the world folded.
We were standing on a beach on Earth on a grey morning. Cold wind. Gulls. The smell of seaweed and wet stone. Jun made a sound I had never heard a person make.
It was the day after we left. His father had flown home the night before, after waving us off. And down at the far end of the beach, an old man in a woolly hat was walking slowly along the rock pools, alone, pretending it was the wind making his eyes water.
Jun walked up to him. He didn’t run. I think he was afraid that if he ran, it would end.
His father looked up at this stranger, a grey-haired man in odd clothes, who had stopped beside him at a rock pool.
“Morning,” said his father.
“Morning,” said Jun. His voice cracked on it.
They looked into the rock pool together. There was a crab, and a little fish, and a red anemone like a blob of strawberry jam.
“Beadlet anemone,” said his father. “My son always knew that one. He knew the name of everything. He went away yesterday. A long way.”
“He’ll be all right,” said Jun. “He’s good at naming things. He’ll find a lot of new ones.”
His father looked at him for a long time. Then he smiled, the way you smile at a stranger who has said exactly the right thing without knowing why.
They named everything in that rock pool together for eleven minutes. When the light began to fold, Jun said goodbye, and his father said, “Mind how you go,” and walked on along the beach.
Jun didn’t speak all the way home. Then, on the harbour wall, he took a notebook out of his pocket, tore out a page, and gave it to me. It was his poem. The one he had been writing for twelve years and never shown anyone.
I’m not going to show it to you either. It’s his.
Inez
Inez went second. She knew exactly where.
A concert hall, warm and golden and full of people, four thousand of them, on a night more than four thousand years ago. We stood at the very back, by the doors, two strangers in odd clothes that nobody noticed, because everybody was looking at the stage.
Sofía was playing.
I had heard about that night for twenty-three years, and I had never once imagined it properly. She was small, behind a big cello, with her eyes shut, and the sound she made went right up into the roof and stayed there. And in the second row, a younger Inez sat with both hands over her mouth and tears running down her face, not caring who saw.
The Inez beside me didn’t cry. She stood very still with her hand in mine and listened to every single note, the way you drink water after a long walk.
The music ended with four of our eleven minutes still left. The whole hall stood up. Sofía bowed, and laughed, and looked out over the crowd, and for one second, I swear, she looked straight at the back of the hall. Straight at us.
Then Inez grabbed my arm and pulled me out through the doors at a run. She knew that building. On that night, long ago, she had gone round to the stage door afterwards to find her sister. This time she meant to get there first.
Down a side alley, through a door propped open for the heat, into a narrow corridor behind the stage, crowded with stagehands and musicians and buckets of flowers. We got there just as the applause died away. And out of the wings, still breathless from her bows, came a young woman carrying her cello by its neck. She was looking back over her shoulder at the stage, and she walked straight into Inez.
“Sorry,” said Sofía. Then she stopped, and looked at her, puzzled. “Have we met?”
Inez smiled. I have known her for twenty-three years, and I had never seen her smile like that.
“Not yet,” she said.
Then the light folded, and we were home. In the nursery dome, a very small girl called Chelo, who has Sofía’s hands and nobody’s life but her own, was refusing to go to sleep.
Inez went and sat with her until she did.
Lena
Lena had said no, and Lena does not change her mind. Everybody knows that.
She came and found me at the rock three days later, at the turn of the light, carrying a toolbag.
“My brother’s shed,” she said, not looking at me. “The door never shut properly. It banged all night in the wind. I promised him I’d fix it before I left. I never did.”
“You want to go back four thousand years,” I said, “to fix a shed door.”
“I build forward,” said Lena. “But I don’t leave jobs unfinished.”
So I took her hand, and ParelLaia folded the light, and we were standing in a small, wet back garden on a windy afternoon, beside a wooden shed with a door that banged.
Lena fixed it in nine minutes. New hinges, a plane along the bottom edge, a proper latch. She didn’t waste a second. When she shut the door, it closed with a soft, perfect click.
Then the back door of the house opened, and a man came out with two mugs of tea, and stopped dead.
“Who are you?” said her brother.
Lena looked at him. Just looked, for a long moment, with the hammer still in her hand.
“The builder,” she said. “It’ll shut now.”
He looked at the door. He looked at her. Then, for no reason he could have explained, he held out one of the mugs. She took it. They drank tea together in the wind, without a word, for a minute and a bit, which is the longest I have ever seen Lena stand still.
When we got home, she went straight to her bunk and took out the drawing her brother had sent in the post from Earth, the one of a dome with a smiley face. She had looked at the front of it a hundred times. She had never once turned it over.
On the back, in her brother’s handwriting, it said: Thanks for the shed.
She didn’t say anything. She pinned it on the wall above her bunk, where it still is.
The question
Then it was my turn.
Everyone assumed I would go to my mother’s kitchen. I assumed it too. But when I went down to the rock that evening, ParelLaia had a different idea, and she showed it to me the way she shows me everything: all at once, like a door swinging open.
She wanted to show me where she came from.
Her kind weren’t born on Kael. I had never known that. Long ago, longer than humans have had words, they came here from somewhere very far away, for the same reason we did: to see what was out there, and to make a home. She wanted to take me back there, and everywhere in between.
“How long?” I asked her.
As long as you like, she said. Out there, time does not count. We can travel for a year, or a hundred years, and still come home before the turn of the light is over. And you will not be a single day older.
I didn’t understand. She tried to explain it, the way you might explain rain to a fish. Time, she said, is cleverer than people think. It keeps count of everything, the way Lena keeps count of bolts, and it will not let anyone take more than their share, or the whole universe would slip out of step. So when you travel the way her kind travel, your body stays on the clock you left behind. You can live for years out there, and come home only as old as the minutes you were gone.
That was the secret of her kind. That was why they live so long. ParelLaia has travelled for thousands of years, and grown old in only a few hundred of them.
“And if I don’t want to come back?”
She didn’t answer that. She just waited, the way her kind always wait.
I went and told the others. I told them I didn’t know if I would come back. That was the truth. I didn’t know.
Lena didn’t say anything. She just hugged me, very hard, the way you hug someone before a long journey, and then shoved me towards the door. Inez checked my eyes, out of habit, and then held my face in both her hands for a moment, which was not habit at all. Jun gave me an empty specimen jar.
“Bring me something,” he said. “Something I don’t have a name for.”
At the turn of the light, I walked down into the sea. ParelLaia rose up beneath me, and I lay along her back with one hand on her old scars, and she wrapped a bubble of warm air around me the way you cup your hands round a candle. Then the sky folded like a sheet of paper.
Out there
I can’t tell you all of it. It would take years, because it took years.
I can tell you about the glass islands, which were real, and rang like bells when the wind blew across them under three pale moons. I can tell you about a world where it rained upwards every morning, and a giant planet so big that its storms had storms. I can tell you that I went back to that warm green sea eighty million years ago, and this time I wasn’t scared, and the sea lizard and I looked each other in the eye for a long moment before it decided I wasn’t worth the bother.
And I can tell you about her home.
It was a blue world, all ocean, under a small white sun. The water was so clear you could see a mile down. And it was full of her kind, thousands of them, singing and rolling and knocking on the sea floor in a rhythm I knew in my bones. Three beats. A gap. Four. They knew her. They came up in great slow crowds to touch her scars and look at me with their big old eyes. I was the first human any of them had ever seen.
I lived there with her for a long time. I learned some of the songs. I learned what her name really sounds like. I still can’t say it, and she still doesn’t mind.
One evening, under that small white sun, she asked me the question again. Did I want to stay? We could go on like this for ever, she said. There were galaxies she hadn’t shown me yet. Millions of them.
I thought about it for a long time. I thought about the stars, and the songs, and her.
Then I thought about a kitchen table where four people have argued about mugs for twenty-three years. About Ama, knocking on the rock every evening. About a hundred and eighty-two children who call me Grandad, and a bent-finned show-off in the bay, and the way Lena laughs when a beam she expected to crack holds after all.
“Kael is home,” I said. “All of this is just the long way round.”
She didn’t mind. She had known all along. She only wanted me to choose it for myself.
“But we can come back out here,” I said. “Can’t we? Whenever we like?”
Every turn of the light, she said. If you want. Time will wait for us.
The kitchen
We took the long way home. And on the way, because she knows me better than I know myself, she made one stop.
Eleven minutes, in a small warm kitchen on Earth, on the night before I left. My father was asleep in his chair. My brothers were in the next room, shouting at the football. My mother was at the sink. And I stood in the doorway, a grey-bearded man twenty-three years older than the son asleep upstairs, with the light of strange suns still in my eyes.
She turned round, and looked at me, and dropped a plate. She didn’t scream. She just looked.
Mothers know. I don’t know how, but they do.
“You look tired,” she said at last, in the language I spoke as a child.
“I’ve been travelling.”
“Are you happy?”
“Yes,” I said. “Very.”
She nodded slowly, as if that settled something. Then she dried her hands, sat down at the kitchen table, pulled a pad of paper towards her and started to write.
“What are you doing?”
“Writing you a list,” she said, without looking up, “of things you must never do.”
I laughed so hard I had to hold on to the door frame. Thirteen years ago, Bell had brought me that list in the post from Earth, four thousand years after she wrote it. I had read it a hundred times. I had already done most of the things on it.
I kissed the top of her head. She held my hand very tightly. Then the light folded, the kitchen was gone, and the last thing I heard was my brothers yelling that somebody had scored.
Eleven minutes
I walked up the beach on Kael at the turn of the light, eleven minutes after I had left.
Everyone was still there on the harbour wall. Big Sun had just slipped under the sea. Little Sun was clearing the hills. I had sand from four worlds in my boots, a sea lizard’s tooth in my pocket that I’ll tell you about some other time, four years of stories in my head, and, according to Bell, who checked me over twice to be sure, not one single extra grey hair.
“Eleven minutes older,” said Bell. “Exactly. Not a second more.”
“Conservation of time,” Jun whispered, already writing. He has filled three notebooks about it since.
Lena looked me up and down for a long time.
“Four years,” I told her. “I was gone four whole years.”
“You were gone eleven minutes,” she said, “and you still need a haircut.”
Then she grabbed me and didn’t let go for quite a while.
Inez checked my eyes, out of habit. Then she kept hold of my face, not out of habit at all.
I gave Jun his jar. Inside was a small blue shell from ParelLaia’s home world, which rings very faintly if you hold it to your ear, like a bell a long way off. He looked at it for a long time.
“I don’t have a name for that,” he said, delighted.
“That’s the idea.”
And Ama, who is twenty-one now and hears everything, just grinned at me from the end of the wall. “She says you were very brave about the lizard,” she said. “The second time.”
Tomorrow
That night, at the turn of the light, I went down to the rock as I always do. ParelLaia was there, as she always is, already waiting, holding in the clear water as if she had been poured into it and left to set. She is older than me by more years than I can count, and she will be swimming in this bay long after I’m gone. I’m glad of that.
Some people say love can’t cross the gap between a man and a creature of the sea. They have never had their whole life folded into eleven minutes and handed back to them, safe, by someone who didn’t have to.
I knocked on the rock. Three beats. A gap. Four.
“Goodbye,” I said, the way I always have. “See you tomorrow.”
Tomorrow, my love, she said. Where shall we go?
