Page 48 of The Brightness Between Us

I turn to face inward. Our settlement looks fragile and hopeful under the setting Sisters. This frontier house, so underpowered in the face of a vast undiscovered world. Cuckoo is bright in the sky, nearly in Sky Cat’s teeth. Below it huddle our inflated structures, trembling in the Minervan wind. At the far edge of the fence is the nearly submerged wreck of theEndeavor, including the room with the gray portal that contains the thousands of Earth zygotes inside it. Where I emerged just over sixteen years ago.

I’ve done this walk many times. Paced the boundaries of our home and prison, soil lighting up under my feet. Still, I begin the walk yet again. My feet bring me to the portal that produced me. I lean my ear against the hull of the old ship, feel the slightwhoompevery 1.3 seconds that gives the gestating fetus the experience of Earth’s gravity.Who will you be?It’s already predetermined. By a machine. I hope this sibling survives.

In a few minutes the dinner bell will ring, and we’ll sit down to our evening meal, will answer the same prompts and repeat the same stories and wonderings. Everyone will talk to and around and over me, will avoid the Thing, will reward every normal thing that I do and bristle at every weird thing that I do. They don’t want any part of the new me. They want this new Yarrow, the one that they have to worry about, to go away.

But he will not go away.

I don’t want to pretend anymore. I just want tobe, and feel like that’s okay. Maybe if I could be alone with Owl for a few days, or even alone with Dad, I could warm up enough to just let it all out, tell them how many times I’ve imagined them all dead, and then I’d feel better. But Father... I can feel the heat of his gaze on me, the worry and the disappointment, the need to have everyone be normal and focus on the productive future and not worry about the past or even the present.Just be strong, Yarrow, he’d say. You can fight this off.

I can try that. I have been trying that. I have been failing. But I can keep trying. I should not burden them.

Even before this change came up within me, Father wished he could erase the part of me that wanted to know about the past. If he could remake me without the morbid tendency to wonder about the lost, fateful Earth, he would do it.

But I’m not my sister. I am not the copy of someone whose history we all know. All of Earth is my heritage. I can’t give that up.

My footsteps have brought me to the Museum of Earth Civ. Owl’s and my playground, before she moved on and stopped building with me. Here are the mock-ups we made from scrap polycarb, vehicles and buildings and monuments from Earth’s history. Tanks and horses and an EiffelTower and Cristo Redentor. All crude and ugly. They’re sprinkled with actual artifacts: the felty scraps that remain of the playing cards from theCoordinated Endeavor, Dad’s broken and time-softened violin in its dinged-up case.

Now, too, the duck skeleton. I’ve kept it hidden under a rag, because I know how alarming it would look to the rest of my family. I’ve glued the bones together with molten polycarb, dropped dirt onto the hot printings so it would have the color of plumage. The head is still just a skull on a lumpen body with broken bones sticking out of it. I wanted to see what a duck would look like. To know a new animal. But I made a monster.

Dry-eyed, I stamp the skeleton into the dirt. Stupid broken Yarrow.

Breathing heavily from the exertion, I feel what little scraps of excitement I got from ruining the skeleton drain away. The feeling that’s left behind when the buzz fades is loneliness. I feelalone. It is the biggest emotion of them all, huge and elemental and utterly dominating. There used to be an “us” in my world, and it got taken away by my own mind.

What was it that Dad once said?Intimacy is the only shield against insanity.Okay. But how can I be close to my family if they don’t want me to be who I truly am? Since I don’t want to witness their disappointment all day every day, my darkness must be a secret. And that makes me feelashamed. It’s the dearest friend of loneliness, shame.

I’m tempted to wreck the rest of the Museum of Earth Civ, but if I did Owl would notice and we’d have to talk about it. No one knew about the reconstructed duck, so I can avoid all that painful talking about feelings and actions if I just stop here.

I walk back by the gestation unit and rap my knuckles against its siding. I do hope you survive, little one. I hope your lungs are strong enough to breathe this air, and that frontier life doesn’t claim you. I hope that you live until you’re sixteen and that when you do, you don’t find a new and sudden darkness blooming inside you.

The bell for the evening meal goes. Rover glides over to the table, tray hovering above its spherical body. It’s the same meal as yesterday and the day before. I imagine one of the lavish dinner sequences fromPink Lagoonand find myself wondering if one of those characters would be able to understand me. There were billions of people on Earth. Surely there were some who would relate to the surprises happening inside my brain. Maybe my loneliness isn’t from the fact that something is wrong with me. Maybe it’s from having too few other humans around.

I stalk across the settlement, planning my path so I’ll cross Father’s as he walks toward dinner, mopping his brow. Back in the before, we were the closest pair of all of us. We’d work together for long hours in quiet, the onlycommunication from him a squeeze on my shoulder as we headed back in for the day. Now he often avoids looking at me. He probably thinks I don’t notice.

He looks up when I cross in front of his path, and unexpectedly tries to chat. “Yarrow. What’s going on? Want to walk over to dinner?”

These are strange words for him. He’s probably been practicing them. “Sure,” I say. “Sounds good.”

I start walking and then stop again. This walk won’t be long enough to give me time to say what I’m yearning to say.

“Yarrow?” Father prompts.

“I need to talk to you about something,” I say.

He surprises me by coming to a stop, facing me directly, giving me his full attention. “Of course. What is it?”

I hadn’t imagined he’d take the direct route. I’m grateful, even as I struggle to find words. “I... thanks. Um. I know you know that life has been strange for me lately, that I’m having these thoughts... that intrude?” I see pain enter Father’s eyes, his pain at the thought of my pain. It makes me want to eat my words back up until I choke on them. “I think it’s getting better, I really do, I think I’ve got it under control.” No, I don’t. Coward. “But I also think, now that I’m sixteen, and an adult, at least sort of, I want to access it all. To know all of Earth’s history. I want to make that choice. To know as much of my origins as I can. Like theMuseum of Earth Civ, only for real.”

He looks at me. Deeper than anyone else in my life does, even Owl. When Father sees, hesees.All is still for a long moment.

I continue. “Owl is connected to Dad, because she’s his sister. She knows where she came from. You knew the Celius provincial orphanage, even though your parents left you there before you knew them. I’m the only one of us who doesn’t have a background. Like any at all. It’s sort of killing me, not knowing the past.”

He shrugs.

I cock my head. Did he really justshrug?

“You’re right,” he says, “you’re an adult now. If it will make you feel better, you can learn whatever you want to learn. I’ll tell OS to give you the same full access to its systems that your dad and I have.”

“You think Dad will be okay with that?” I ask.

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