Page 87 of The Brightness Between Us

I won’t be alive to make her lemon cake for her birthday. But at least she has the lemon I didn’t have for mine.

I press my body hard into the ground as Owl looks around her, through the translucent walls, down the dirt alley of the greenhouse, and out the door. She’s searchingfor someone. She’s searching for me.

I hope she enjoys the fruit. I wish I could be around to watch her eat it.

Owl tugs at the lemon, but it isn’t ready to separate from the branch. She presses her nose against its shiny, dense surface. She scratches a fingernail along it, then sniffs. There’s a hint of a smile on her face. A modest joy.

Owl emerges from the greenhouse, takes a step toward the smelter. Then she turns and passes instead behind the infirmary, where we used to watch reels. Our private space. The site of the Museum of Earth Civ.

She squats on the packed soil behind the infirmary, where I watched Dad’s and Father’s reels for their future selves. She sifts through our drawings, our models, our pathetic little vehicles with their dented surfaces and missing wheels. She examines each one.

Much as I try to find any other reason for what she’s doing, I’m left with only one: Owl misses me.

I remember the conversations we had right at this spot, the games we played, the songs we sang, the ugly crafts we’d make that the dads would then have to admire. The model malevor I once made, that Father wrinkled his nose at but then kept by his bedside, wearing the figurine’s head around his neck when the doll finally broke in two.

Tell me the most... purple thing you saw yesterday, Owl once said.

Ooh, good one, I replied.Purple. Okay. There was a nitrogen fixing node on a pea shoot in the trial tank of the greenhouse. It was mostly gold brown, but had a really nice lavender sheen, too. My turn. What’s the... softest thing you touched yesterday?

Owl glances at notes we left for each other, before going deeper into the museum. She comes up with a triangular piece of polycarb. She examines it, confused.

I know what it is, of course. If she squeezes it, it will project the reel I recorded for the anniversary of the dads’ arrival. The last exhibit of the Museum of Earth Civ. I’d never had a chance to show Owl, because she’d gone off on her unauthorized expedition before she could watch it. The anniversary went by unremarked, weeks ago.

She’s going to watch it.

I will watch it with her, not that she’ll know.

Owl gasps as words project in the sky:Eighteen Years. Congratulations, Dads!

This reel is something I made using the limited processing power available through OS’s systems. It’s nothing fancy, not likePink Lagoon.My grainy footage doesn’t even track Owl’s eyes and resolve further where she focuses. As it begins, something is blobbing through space. It’s supposed to be the dads’ ship.

I’m already wincing. It’s so amateur.

This projection is a good six meters high, full of saturatedcolors that are shockingly bright in the gray-red lights of twilight. A starry sky, a ship blobbing through it. It is tiny and fragile. It glows. Even though it looks sort of like a lumpy rock, it’s also lonely and precious.

The directors ofPink Lagoonwould have zoomed in and entered the ship. But there was no way I could pull that off. Instead the reel stays outside as the ship’s lights blink off, and then time speeds up, the galaxy passing in parallax behind it. Then the ship lights up again and time slows, the stars going static.

It’s probably best I couldn’t pull off bringing the reel inside the ship. That would have been too traumatic for the dads to watch.

TheCoordinated Endeavormodel goes bright one last time before it careens into a planet. Our planet, the second body circling the Sisters’ center of gravity. For Owl’s sake, I rendered our home with seas along the equator.

When the ship crashes, it cleaves into two. One of the dads emerges from each half. They’re not digital re-creations—they’re puppets. I made them each using ancient pre-reel techniques. Stop-motion. These I’m proud of. They’re actually pretty cute.

As the reel continues, Owl rummages around the museum until she finds the puppets I made. She hugs them while she watches the rest of the reel.

The two spacefarers lurch toward each other andembrace in a jangly marionette way. The Kodiak one even has the swoop of hair that Father has, cascading over his brow. The Sisters rapidly rise and set, and—shwoop—the wreckage of theEndeavorpops out a baby. It looks like me. The baby shoots through the air, and stop-motion Dad catches him like a football. I meant it to be serious, but it looks like a comedy.

Then there’s anothershwoop, and another baby pops out. Owl laughs. It’s her. The babies start running circles around the bewildered puppet dads. Accurate.

Rover is there the whole time, a little sphere hovering over the terrain. In the background, it builds our settlement. Puffy polycarb units. The living unit, the nursery, the laboratory, the infirmary, the greenhouses. These are digitized, because creating puppets for those would have taken weeks and I had soil to lug and seedlings to nurture.

Scary grunts from the hilltop nearby. The malevors. Rover hastily constructs the perimeter fence, each post topped with its own pneumatic gun. The malevors retreat and the grunts subside.

The settlement slowly expands as theAuroraandEndeavorsink into the muck of Minerva’s surface. I tend to the greenhouse algae and plants, and Owl patrols the fence.

The puppets of our dads withdraw from their embrace. Dad falls from the top of the lab and breaks one of his stick legs, and we all pick him back up. I lie flat for a bit andeveryone watches. (That fever I had. Father stayed by my side the whole time.) Rover rolls down a hill and breaks in two, and Dad puts the two pieces back together. All the major events from our lives are here.

Finally we all line up awkwardly and wave. The reel zooms back out to space, so Minerva is joined by its nearby planets, Cuckoo and Eagle. We get a glimpse of the whole binary solar system before the reel ends. No comet in view; we didn’t even know about it yet. I didn’t really know how to finish a reel. I tried a few options, but nothing worked.

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