“Check this out,” Kodiak says, leaning against a printed crutch while he nudges the wall of our latest structure. It pushes back at him, like a bouncy castle.
“That’s, um, fun,” I tell him.
“Ambrose, I’ve gotten it to float! With the right composition of gases inside the hollow polycarb walls, it will stop being a habitat and start being—”
“A vehicle!”
“A floating balloon, yes. So once we really get going, we can predict the weather patterns, and move our entire installation as needed.”
“Let’s hope that’s not needed for a very long time.”
“Yes, nhut.”
“‘Nhut.’ It’s time I learned some Dimokratía. It’s not fairthat all this has been on my terms.”
Kodiak looks at me with sudden gratitude. “Thank you. I would be happy to teach you my language.” I stand alongside him, arm draped across his shoulders. He’s a stranger, a lover, and my life partner. We have lived and died lifetimes together, and it makes me shiver every time that odd truth comes over me.
“Hey, have you come across any regulations on how to name this planet?” I ask him.
“You’re the one studying the black book. I thought you said this was Sagittarion Bb.”
“Yes. How do you feel about making humanity’s last stand on something called ‘Sagittarion Bb’?”
He shrugs.
“I was thinking we might name it something a little more meaningful.”
“Like ‘Earth’?”
That shuts me right up. Human civilization on Earth is gone. We’re the last humans alive. Does that make this Earth? The prospect makes me feel like the narcosis has come back, like I could float right up into the atmosphere and go careening into the blue-green sky. Everything looms too large.
“Ambrose, are you okay?” Kodiak asks, eyeing me nervously.
“I’m a little faint, I guess.” I can’t look into his eyes, so Ilook into the sky, which gives me the view of the pale second sun. That only makes me even more light-headed. “I think I don’t want this to be another Earth. I want it to be something else. Something new. Something better than Earth was.”
Without quite meaning to, I sit heavily. Kodiak kneels beside me, stroking my back.
“This has all been a lot to adjust to,” I manage to say.
Kodiak surprises me by nodding. Heedless of the sludge that soaks his pants, he sits beside me, takes my clammy hand in his. The struggle we face has drawn us tight. “Would binge-eating engineered algae make you feel better?”
I laugh despite myself. “I don’t think it would, oddly enough.”
He rubs his fingers into the centers of my palms, hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to relieve. “What would make you feel better?”
I look into his eyes. My first thoughts about what would make me feel better all involve his full lips, shrouded in stubble. But there’s something bigger than that in this heaving mind of mine. “I know she’s been dead for thirty thousand years. But I miss Minerva.”
He tilts my chin so he can look into my eyes. “I have a thought about that,” he says. “Since Sagittarion Bb isn’t quite cutting it. I wonder if you’ve had this thought, too.”
I peer into his eyes. “I don’t know, have I?”
I do know where he’s going with this, and I surprise myself by crying. Kodiak’s thumbs stroke away the tears. His skin is so soft, so new.
“Welcome to Minerva,” he says.
There are four greenhouses now, and Rover-sphere is in the process of printing the fifth. A soft mechanical whining cuts the dawn air as our robot caretaker passes between the first four, tending the algal strains, testing for the right composition of oxygen, nitrogen, water. The fifth unit is reserved for growing something else.
While OS diligently gardens, I walk along the soil beds in that last greenhouse, run my fingers over soft felty plants that are the colors of rust and bricks. They thrive equally well on Minerva’s soil as they did on the ship. I wonder how competitive the plant’s home world was, for it to be so robust in so many sorts of environments. What a motley ecosystem we’re forming here, with beings from three different worlds.
