A story from the coast of Kael
Whoever You Become
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. There was no way home, and there was never meant to be one. They had been sent to start a colony.
Kael has two suns, so it is almost never dark. To stay sane, the crew sleep twelve hours at a time in a cool, pitch-black pod, and call it lights-out. The air outside is too thin to breathe for long. In the sea live huge, gentle animals the crew call the neighbours. They talk by knocking on the rock, and one of them, a great grey creature with three pale scars on her side, can speak to Malik’s mind.
Malik is the pilot. Lena builds the domes. Jun studies the sea life. 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, Inez tells the story.
The second pallet
When we came through the wormhole, our landing craft carried two cargo pallets. One held tools, spare dome panels and a crate of coffee that has been complaining ever since. The other held fifty thousand children.
Not children yet. Embryos: the very first beginnings of babies, each one smaller than a grain of salt, frozen in a steel box colder than anywhere else on Kael. Lena calls it the vault. For a long time the rest of us called it nothing at all. You don’t talk at dinner about the thing that makes your hands shake.
There were other things in the vault too. Seeds and frozen beginnings of ten thousand kinds of animals and crops, from wheat to honeybees to a breed of small, bad-tempered sheep that Jun says is his favourite. But the children were the point. We four were only ever the advance party. Our job was to make a place safe enough to be born in.
When we fled up the coast last year, ahead of the earthquake, I told Lena that anything not tied down was staying behind. The vault was the most tied-down thing we owned. It was also the only thing nobody had to be told to carry.
Forty thousand of the fifty thousand came with something extra.
On Earth, by the time we left, people lived for about two hundred years. Most of the old diseases had been fixed. And scientists had learned how to record a person: their memories, their skills, their habits, the way they laughed at their own jokes. The recording didn’t hurt you or change you. It simply made a copy, and kept it.
If you woke a recording in a baby before it was born, the baby would grow up to be that person. Not all at once. Over the first six years the memories came back a little at a time, the way a photograph slowly appears on paper in a darkroom, until the child was, in every way that mattered, someone who already existed. You had to start before the child turned four. After that, a child’s brain had grown too much of its own shape, and the copy would not take.
On Earth, rich people who were dying used it to start again in new bodies. Some of them did it more than once. Then people began to argue about who deserved to live for ever, and the arguments became wars. We left in the middle of all that. None of us was sorry to go.
The forty thousand recorded people had been chosen because they were the brightest and most gifted people who applied: doctors, engineers, farmers, painters, musicians. Every one of them was still alive on Earth when we left. Somewhere, four million light-years away, they were eating breakfast.
The other ten thousand embryos had no recordings at all. They came from a lottery. Anyone on Earth could enter, and every country got the same number of places, however big or small it was. The big countries were furious. The scientists were delighted. A new people, they said, needed the widest mix of families the world could give them. So ten thousand of our children would be nobody in particular. Which is to say, entirely themselves.
The list
For a year we didn’t have the power to begin. The babies would grow in cradles: warm glass tanks where a baby can grow without a mother. The Planners’ word for them was longer and full of Latin, and we stopped using it in the first week. A cradle needs steady power for nine months without a single break, and until this spring we had barely enough to keep the lights on. The Planners had imagined more of everything than we had. More power, more food, more hands. Forty robots still slept in crates beneath the vault, waiting for enough power to run the Fifty-Year Plan. LOL was in charge of the plan. We were in charge of LOL, in theory.
Then Lena finished the water wheel in the stream that runs down our cliff, and Jun’s new algae fields started making more oxygen than we breathed, and one quiet day LOL cleared its throat, which it does not have.
“Power is now enough for twelve cradles,” LOL said. “Stage Two of the Fifty-Year Plan may begin. Recommendation: begin.”
“Show me the list,” I said, though I knew it by heart.
The Planners had chosen the first twelve babies years before we left. All twelve were recorded ones. A surgeon. Two engineers. A farmer who could grow wheat in a desert. A teacher. A geologist, someone who studies rocks and earthquakes, which after last year made Lena laugh out loud. The idea was simple. Recorded children would remember their skills. By the time they were teenagers, the colony would have experts again. The ten thousand lottery babies could come later, when there was more food and more room and more of everything.
The twelfth name on the list was a cellist.
“Why a cellist?” Jun asked.
“The Planners believed a colony would need music,” LOL said. “The Planners also noted that this person is the younger sister of Doctor Inez Ortega. A familiar face may improve crew morale.”
Nobody said anything. Lena put her mug down very carefully, the way you put down something you might otherwise throw.
Her name was Sofía. She was eleven years younger than me. I carried her everywhere until she was old enough to complain about it, and then I carried her anyway. She played the cello badly at six and beautifully at sixteen, and at thirty she played in front of four thousand people while I sat in the second row and cried, which nobody on Kael has ever seen me do.
She had never told me she’d been recorded. I had never told her I was leaving until it was too late to argue.
“I have never wanted to hit a computer before,” I said.
“Noted,” said LOL. “Recommendation: do not. I am in the walls.”
Four votes
We met that evening in Dome One, round the table where we have argued about the mugs every day for a year. Four people, four chairs, and a decision nobody should ever have to make.
Lena went first, because Lena always goes first.
“Follow the plan,” she said. “I’m sorry, Inez. I am. But look at us. Four people and a water wheel. If one of us falls off a cliff, we lose a quarter of everything we know. Those twelve would grow up knowing how to do things we can’t. A surgeon, Inez. A real one. Not you stitching my thumb with your tongue between your teeth.”
“My tongue is not between my teeth.”
“It is a bit.”
Jun was shaking his head before she had finished. Jun is the gentlest of us, and the most stubborn, which surprises people.
“The people on that list agreed to be recorded,” he said. “The babies didn’t agree to anything. If we wake those recordings, twelve children never get to find out who they would have been. They grow up to be somebody else. Somebody who is already alive.” He looked at his hands. “That isn’t a birth. It’s a photocopy.”
“A photocopy who can do heart surgery,” said Lena.
“A photocopy who spends six years slowly losing the little girl she started as.”
They both looked at me. Then they both looked at Malik, because Malik had not said a word, and Malik always says a word.
Malik is my best friend, and on some nights a little more than that, which is nobody’s business but ours. He is also the only one of us who talks to the sea and gets an answer. He has a friend in the bay, the great grey neighbour with three pale scars on her side. He calls her ParelLaia. Last year she spoke in his head and saved all our lives, and none of us has teased him about it since. Well. Lena has. A little.
“The neighbours have something like this,” Malik said slowly. “ParelLaia showed me. The old ones carry songs. Memories. The whole history of the bay. The young ones can have all of it. But nobody pours it into them. The old ones wait. When a young one is ready, it swims up and asks. Some ask when they’re small. Some ask when they’re old. Some never ask at all, and that’s allowed too.”
“Lovely,” said Lena. “They’ve got for ever. We’ve got four years.”
“For those twelve,” Malik said. “Not for the vault. The vault can wait. It’s frozen.”
That was the first useful thing anyone had said all evening. I felt it settle in the room. He was right. The four-year clock only starts ticking when a recorded baby is born. Frozen, the vault could wait a hundred years.
The vote, when we took it, was one for the plan, one against, and Malik saying he would go with whatever I decided, which is the most annoying kind of vote there is.
“Give me one lights-out,” I said. “Twelve hours. Then I’ll tell you.”
Sofía
I didn’t go straight to the pod where we sleep. I went to the vault.
It sits in its own small dome on the high shelf, humming to itself. Inside, it is always cold and always quiet. I sat on the floor with my back against the steel and watched the turn of the light through the window. That is what we call the eleven minutes when Big Sun sits on the sea and Little Sun has not yet climbed the hills, and the whole cove turns the colour of a copper kettle.
Here is what I wanted, and I will say it plainly, because in the end this is a story about being honest.
I wanted my sister back.
I could have her. Not now, and not as she was, but in time. A baby I would hold. A little girl who would, a bit more each year, start to know my face. Who would, by six, remember the summer we lived on a houseboat and the cat that fell in the canal. Who would play the cello for me under two suns. I am a doctor. I know every reason it is wrong. I wanted it anyway, the way you want water.
“LOL,” I said. “Is there anything else in her file?”
“Every recorded person was invited to leave a short message,” LOL said, gently, which it can do when it chooses. “The Planners called it a letter to whoever I become. Your sister left one. Would you like to hear it?”
I said yes. Then I said no. Then I said yes again, and LOL, which is kinder than its name, waited until I was sure.
Sofía’s voice came out of the wall as if she were in the next room.
Hello, me. This is very strange. They tell me you might be a baby when you hear this, which is strange in a whole new way. Hello, baby. You have my hands, apparently. Look after them.
Here’s what I want to say. They’ll tell you that you’re meant to become me. That you’ll remember everything: the cello, the houseboat, the cat. Maybe you will, and maybe that will be lovely. But listen. If anyone ever gives you the choice, you don’t have to. You’re allowed to be someone else. You’re allowed to be someone I would never have met. I think I’d like that even more. I like the idea of a girl somewhere who got to start from the very beginning.
And if my big sister is there with you — she might be, she’s very stubborn — tell her I’m not cross that she left. Tell her I know why. And tell her to sleep. She never sleeps.
The message stopped. The vault hummed. Outside, Little Sun came over the hills, and the eleven minutes were over.
Lena says I have no romance in me. Lena has never seen me sitting on the floor of the vault at the turn of the light, with my sister’s voice still in the room, crying like a tap.
Afterwards I went to the pod and slept for the whole of lights-out. It was the first time in a month. My sister had told me to.
The answer
At breakfast, I told them.
“We start with the lottery children,” I said. “Twelve of them. No recordings. They grow up as nobody but themselves.”
Lena opened her mouth.
“The recorded embryos stay in the vault, frozen and safe, exactly as they are,” I said. “We don’t throw anything away. And we don’t decide for them. In twenty years, our first children will be grown. They’ll be the first people who ever truly belonged to Kael. It’s their world. They can decide what happens to the recordings. Not us. We’re just the four people who happened to be holding the box.”
“And if they decide wrong?” said Lena.
“Then they’ll be wrong in their own way. That’s what being a person is.”
She looked at me for a long time. Then she laughed, a short, surprised laugh, the one she gives when a beam she expected to crack holds after all.
“Fine,” she said. “But I’m teaching every one of them to build a dome by the time they’re five. Somebody round here has to know what they’re doing.”
Jun didn’t say anything. He came round the table and hugged me, which he has never done, and I let him, which I have never done either.
Malik just nodded, as if he had known since yesterday. Perhaps he had. Straight after breakfast he went down to the rock, and I watched from the dome as he crouched by the water and talked for a long time. Then he knocked: three beats, a gap, four. Far out in the bay, something very large rolled once in the bright water and knocked back.
“Plan updated,” said LOL. “Twelve cradles. Lottery children. Recordings kept in storage until further notice.” A pause. “Nappies are not in the stores. Recommendation: invent nappies.”
Ama
Nine months is a long time on a world with no nights. We filled it with work. Lena woke six of the robots, which turned out to be good at lifting and bad at doors. Jun read every book about babies in our library twice and started talking to the cradles the way he talks to his water samples. Malik built twelve cots out of packing crates and painted a sea creature on each one. Every single creature was grey, with three pale marks on its side.
I checked the cradles every day. Then twice a day. Then Lena took me by the shoulders, marched me into the pod and told me it was a medical order. I said she wasn’t a doctor. She said I had taught her everything she knew, so technically she was.
The first cradle opened at the turn of the light.
I have delivered babies on Earth, in hospitals with bright lights and nurses and machines that beep. This was nothing like that. This was a glass tank in a small dome at the edge of a copper sea, with two suns changing places in the window, three tired adults holding their breath behind me, and a robot in the doorway holding a towel as if it might go off.
She was small and red and furious about all of it. She opened her mouth and told Kael exactly what she thought of it, at the top of her voice. It was the first human voice ever born on this world, and I have to say it was not a happy one.
Everyone laughed. Everyone cried. Lena did both at once and then denied it.
Then, through the floor, through the rock, up through the bones of my feet, came a knock. Three beats. A gap. Four.
“They heard her,” Malik whispered.
Then another knock, farther out. And another, from the far side of the bay. One after another the whole cove answered, until the floor hummed with it like a drum.
Jun named her. He said Ama means “she loves” in my mother’s language, and something kind in a few others, and I was too tired and too happy to check.
I did not call her Sofía. She is not Sofía. She is herself, which was the whole point.
But that lights-out, for the first time in years, I dreamed of my sister. She was on a stage somewhere very far away, playing the cello. She looked up from the strings and smiled at me, and she didn’t say anything at all. She didn’t need to.
Four million light-years from here, a woman with my sister’s hands is getting a little older every day. She has no idea that, on a world with two suns, she gave me the hardest answer of my life, and the right one.
Outside, the neighbours were still knocking. I let them. Some doors you leave open.