Five Days Until Sunset

Bering Stiles laid himself down in the hibetank, and as the sedative billowed into his thoughts, he whispered a prayer of thanksgiving and sank into nothingness. Then, with no clear sense of the passage of time, he felt his self rematerializing like a fog slowly solidifying.

Over a span of a few hours, drifting between stupor, sleep, confusion, and fleeting instances of clarity, he formed three slightly more complete thoughts. They came all at once—that he was not dead, that he was waking up, but disturbingly, that he was alone. There should have been doctors and their assistants at his side, monitoring his vitals, offering him water, and speaking soothing words. But there were no human beings darting in and out among the rows of hibetanks, only the inanimate arms, tubes and tentacles of med drones. It took another foggy while—he was not sure whether minutes or hours—before he realized something else.

At the fourth tank to his right another person was also awake, having just stood up from her tank. “We’re on the planet,” she croaked.

He considered answering her, but he was still fumbling to even string thoughts together, let alone words. As he pulled himself up to a sitting position, she did a deep knee bend, holding on to the side of her tank, then stood up straight again. Apparently, she had less of a hibernation hangover than he did. She cleared her throat. “Feel the gravity?”

She’s . . . What’s her name? I met her about a week before going into the tank. Naka . . . Right, Jeremy Nakamura. What did she say? The planet. The gravity. Bering lifted his arm and let it fall, realizing that she was right. The recon probe that had swung through the Epsindi system a century before he was born had estimated the surface gravity of Epsindi Ta to be thirteen percent higher than Earth’s, and now he felt just a little heavier than he was used to.

This means we survived the voyage. We survived the 144 years in hibernation! We crossed light years!

None of these things had been certainties when they were put under. Bering silently repeated the same prayer of thanksgiving he had whispered one hundred forty-four years earlier—moments ago.

But questions began to taint his elation, and as she slipped on a robe, Frau Nakamura asked one of those questions as if reading his thoughts. “Why did the system wake us?”

He made no attempt to answer, not yet trusting his vocal cords. Then, as she began inspecting the other hibetanks, he took a few more deep breaths, swung his legs over the edge of his tank, and carefully stood up. Once he decided that he was not going to faint, he also put on a robe. Then he shuffled to a console, sat down, and began demanding answers.

“Where is . . . ?” He coughed up some phlegm then tried again. “Where is Dr. Kumarisov?”

<<Drop ferry Assiniboine touched down on Epsindi Ta three hours and forty-eight minutes ago at 65.3 degrees north latitude, 94.3 degrees east longitude.>>

Nakamura laughed. “I told you. We’re not in the ark; we’re on the planet.”

A shrill claxon from one of the hibetanks startled them both, and immediately the ferry shot mnemonic scents into the air. Bering inhaled, letting the smell prime his memory, and then he realized why he, the youngest of the entire family of pilgrims, had been revived together with Jeremy Nakamura. His main contribution to the colony was to be engineering and construction, but like everyone, he had some training in other areas as well. His included astronomy, horticulture, and basic medicine, including hibernation revival.

As Nakamura moved to inspect the hibetank sounding an alarm, she again voiced what he was already thinking. “You and I—we’re the alternates to the alternates. Kumarisov was meant to oversee the hibernation revivals. If the system needs us to revive the others, it means Dr. Kumarisov, Dr. Apshana, their assistants, everyone meant to serve on the initial revival team—they’re . . .” Her voice trailed off, and Bering had no need to hear her finish the thought.

Before moving to help her, he checked the displays on three other hibetanks. At two of them, their fellow pilgrims were already in the preliminary stages of being revived. Bering’s training, though narrow, was profound, having been cross-learned through qigonic meditation, olfactory priming, and hours of kinesthetic repetition, and it sprang up to guide him. By the time they had helped eight fellow pilgrims through stage four of the revival process, another eight were beginning stage four.

The ferry continued waking the pilgrims in batches. Bering and Nakamura did what they could to resolve the emergencies and calm those who awoke in confusion or panic. In each batch, at least one person asked, “Where’s Dr. Kumarisov?” By the fourth time he heard the question, Bering was getting annoyed—not annoyed at the repetition so much as annoyed at being reminded of what the situation implied. If the hibernation system called on the third alternates to do this, it means something went terribly wrong.

But he had no time to dwell on that, because the revivals kept coming. Eventually, they learned that the other two drop ferries from the ark had also set down nearby. Someone from the Serengeti radioed, and it became clear that the same thing was also happening there and on the Haida Gwaii. Two people on each ferry revived first, then everyone else in stages.

As Bering attended to the successive waves of revivals, he heard someone from the first batch of patients try, as he had, to get information from a console. “Who ordered us revived?”

“Where are the shuttles, Guanahani and Beijing?” They were smaller than Assiniboine, Haida Gwaii and Serengeti, and not equipped with hibetanks. If the initial revival team had been revived according to the default plan—ahead of everyone else while still in orbit on the ark—then they might have taken one of the smaller landers down to the planet surface.

If the consoles don’t know where the landers are, where the lead medical team is, or even who initiated this revival of everyone . . . Bering did not let himself think about what might have happened. He needed to concentrate. Someone in the last batch of revivals was hyperventilating.

As Bering helped her, one of the first people revived after him and Nakamura took readings of the external atmosphere and confirmed the recon probe’s analysis, hundreds of years earlier—19.0% oxygen, 78.7% nitrogen, 1.5% argon, 0.4% neon, trace carbon dioxide, and nothing poisonous. It was slightly thicker than Earth’s atmosphere, and so although as a percentage oxygen was less than on Earth, its partial pressure was actually higher—all-in-all, quite breathable.

Twenty-four hours after Bering regained consciousness, the successive waves of revivals had finished, and no one was left in hibernation. On the Assiniboine, two people could not be revived, and one revived, but then had a seizure and died. Between the three ferries, three hundred fifteen had been brought down to the planet surface, and by the time the last hibetank had been opened, two hundred eighty-eight emerged alive. But this meant not only that twenty-seven people died coming out of hibernation, but also that one hundred fifty-four were unaccounted for.

Once he had done everything he could for the last of the waking pilgrims, Bering stepped out of the ferry and found dozens of others all admiring a sublime sunset. Euphoria briefly lifted him above the questions and worries. The family of pilgrims had successfully escaped their oppression, left it one hundred thirteen trillion kilometers behind so that they could become humanity’s first flowering beyond the Sol system. And Bering, having lived as an orphan and refugee, never being able to stay in one place for more than a few years, would finally build a home.

But what happened to the others? How can a hundred and fifty-four of us be missing? He pushed the doubts down. Then, his adrenaline spent, he laid down in the grass, ignoring the gentle breeze that caressed him to sleep.

Data, analysis, collective intuition, five different religious traditions, and the Promise of the Teacher who reunited those traditions have all told us that the time of human flowering has finally arrived. I am convinced now that this world can be one of the new gardens for our flowering. But instead of accepting the gift as it is, we fretted and dallied over Epsindi Ta’s inconveniences for decades.

—From the journal of Adam Leifson found at the fourth cairn

WHEN, SOME HOURS LATER, someone woke Bering, birds were singing and the sun was still suspended on the western horizon. Seeing the sun sitting at the same point in the sky unsettled him even though rationally he understood it. Data sent back to the Sol system by the recon probe had suggested that the planet was tidally locked—an eyeball planet that permanently presented the same face toward its K5 orange dwarf star. The probe had swung by Epsindi Ta only three times before going silent, and the data it returned were scanty. Nevertheless, thermographic analysis assessed the temperature at the substellar point—the longitude experiencing permanent noon—to be seventy-nine degrees Celsius, while the night side of the planet was nearly cold enough for carbon dioxide to freeze out.

But the data had also shown that in the planet’s twilight ring, where the day-night cycle was suspended in a never-ending sunrise/sunset, photosynthetic life thrived. Bering’s faith in the Promise of humanity’s flowering was strong, but this world would be a strange fulfillment of that Promise. A place where time felt different, where day and night were undesirable destinations rather than markers on the flow of time. Nevertheless, signs of the Promise were all around him. He was breathing the air, the temperature was perfect, and the bed of grass and flowers that he had slept on was evidently Earth flora. And he was hearing birds! And, not only was he hearing birds, but the trill call and a check-check-check response was completely familiar.

For his whole life, Bering had fled from place to place, hidden from mobs and from men in uniform, and been shunted first from one orphanage to another and then from one refugee camp to another. His faith in the Teacher and in the Promise had kept him going, but never had he imagined that the Promise would be so bounteously fulfilled.

But he had no time to marvel at how this planet was teeming with what seemed to be Earth life, or to appreciate the permanently paused beauty of the sunset, or to meditate on the play of light and shadow across what seemed to be trees on the hills to the south. A concourse had been called, and the two hundred eighty-eight pilgrims were gathering on the grassy plain between the Haida Gwaii and the Serengeti.

First, the names of the twenty-seven who had died were announced, and a hymn chanted. This was more than they had hoped to lose to the risky hibernation process, but still within the range they expected, so the voyage could only be considered a success, and prayers of praise, thanksgiving, and anticipation were offered from three of the five religious traditions represented among their number. Then Fatuma Chisholm, one of the deputies elected to the family council before the voyage and the person presiding over the concourse, explained what Bering already knew. The consoles on the ferries either lacked or had been instructed not to provide what should have been straightforward information.

“Nevertheless,” she called in a loud voice so everyone could hear, “we have made two important discoveries.” She pointed to her right. “First, look over there. There at the midpoint between the three ferries. It’s barely visible from here, but there’s a small mound. It’s a pile of rocks in fact, and though it isn’t obvious from here, it’s actually a cairn. The rocks were stacked up that way by human hands. Our ferries landed in a triangle because each landed 290 meters from the cairn and a safe distance from each other. The rocks were protecting a radio beacon—a beacon set there by a fellow pilgrim to direct us here.”

“So, the missing brothers and sisters,” someone called out, “they’re not dead?”

“Well, that brings us to the second discovery. We examined the beacon. It was placed there a long time ago and set with a timer. And from the control systems of the hibetanks, we confirmed the information from the beacon.” She took a deep breath. “Our hibernation did not last one hundred forty-four years. It’s been three hundred and eighty-four. We arrived in orbit around Epsindi Ta two hundred and forty years ago.”

There were scattered gasps, and then silence settled over the assembled concourse. This meant it was not only the twenty-seven who were dead, but also the missing hundred and fifty-four. Even if every single one of them survived revival, they had all died of old age more than a century ago.

As they absorbed the news, some people cried and some comforted each other in twos and threes. Bering stared off at nothing, thinking of Ulysses Degana, his mentor, and one of only two people in the whole ark family he had known before being selected for the crew. It was Degana who had vouched for him in the crew selection process. But Bering knew that for some, the loss was much worse—some of the pilgrims had spouses among the hundred and fifty-four.

After a suitable pause, Frau Chisholm called for silence. She initiated a discussion of practicalities, but agreement was elusive. Did their fellow pilgrims who preceded them intend for them to build the village here, or was this a location chosen randomly by a malfunctioning semi-mind on the ark? Several people voiced their impatience to activate the default settlement plan and start building. Eventually, however, they reached consensus that first they needed to learn more. Once that was decided, most of the two hundred eighty-eight easily fell into one of two broad groups. One group had the task of investigating, of finding out whatever they could about what had gone wrong. As the concourse concluded, leaders of various investigation teams—geology, climatology, biology, edaphology, ships’ engineering, and others—shouted out to assemble their teams.

Bering knew he belonged in the second group: those who would support the first group, preparing food and temporary shelter, providing medical and spiritual care, and managing logistics. His primary role in the family was to be engineering and construction, and even for a temporary camp there would be printing and fabricating to be done and shelters to be built. For the next few hours, Bering worked with one of the engineering teams setting up a hydroponics system. At first, they were entirely focused on the work in front of them, but as they fell into a rhythm, conversation soon zeroed in on the oddities in their revival, the uncooperative consoles, and the missing hundred fifty-four members of their family.

Ford Cyltemstra, the deputy head of engineering, made it clear that he thought there was no point worrying about it. “Beaumont or Elysium will reestablish contact with the ark. They’ll figure it out when they figure it out.” He spoke to Bering and the others of his hopes and plans for their life in this new world and his confidence in all the preparation the family and their fellow believers back on Earth had done. He framed these thoughts mostly using the terminology of his Francisco-Nasrian Faith—the same as Bering’s—but also pausing to draw connections to beliefs and concepts from the other four religious traditions of the family. His faith in the Promise shone, but it could not lift Bering away from his disquiet over the unanswered questions. So, when the team finished the hydroponics installation and Ford announced a short break, Bering took his assistant from his pocket and asked it to locate Taamir Beaumont.

He found the elder alone in a flat grassy field two hundred meters from the Assiniboine, assembling an antenna. Beaumont’s weathered face and greying hair only hinted at his age. Although most of the pilgrims selected for the ark were between twenty-five and forty-five years old, Bering knew that forty years before their journey even began, Beaumont had spent decades designing the engine that powered the ark.

“I know; I was on the committee that selected you for the ark when an opening came up. But, don’t you have construction work to do?”

“I do. But something went wrong here—something with our arrival in this system, or with the landing, or something—and the sooner we find out what it was, the better.”

Beaumont looked down at the antennas at his feet, then looked back up. “Absolutely. And as it turns out, everyone else with training in astronomy was among the hundred fifty-four, so you and I, the oldest and the youngest of the entire family—we’re all that remains of the astronomy team. So, I guess I better say yes. Not that our new culture on this world will do much astronomy, at least not visual astronomy.”

“We could eventually build observatories on the night side of the planet,” Bering offered. “Not at the midnight point, but somewhere where the cold is at least manageable.”

“One day, Sen. Stiles. But for now, the only star we can observe in the visible spectrum is that one.” He pointed to the orange orb that still hung on the western horizon, now partly obscured by a thin stratus cloud. “We can use some prehistoric astrometric techniques. Do you know how to measure the angular size of our new sun in the sky?”

“Good. We should confirm if the recon probe data about the size of the star and our distance from it are correct. But you can do that later. First, help me set up this radio array. You can use it to start making images of the sky.”

It took the two of them a little over two hours to set up the array of half-meter antennas, Bering doing most of the physical labor as Sen. Beaumont stopped frequently to rest. They instructed the antennas to upload their data to a console in the Assiniboine, then entered the ferry and confirmed that the data was arriving and being saved.

When they stepped back outside, Bering noticed that the breeze had died down, and looking to the west he saw that clouds had formed, blocking the view of their new sun.

“I thought the weather was going to be absolutely constant here. No planetary rotation, no day and night, no moons, and no axial tilt—so no changes in weather.”

“It seems we have much to learn. But as for measuring the width of Epsindi, that will have to wait until the sky clears.”

“Sen. Beaumont, why do you think we were set down somewhere different than the first pilgrims? And why would a fellow pilgrim have set the timer on that beacon for two hundred forty years?”

“In the concourse, Fatuma was preoccupied with sharing the bad news and with how people would react, so she omitted some of the finer details. Actually, the timer wasn’t set until about forty-five years after the ark arrived in orbit. And then it was set for 194.89 years, as were timers in each of the three drop ferries. So, for some reason, our brothers and sisters were here for forty-five years and saw fit not to revive us. And, then in planting the beacon and giving instructions to the ferries, they decided we needed to wait another one hundred ninety-five years. As for ‘why?’—that question has my mind spinning. It’s what we’re all trying to find out. Maybe this . . .”—he gestured toward the antenna array—“maybe this will give us some clues. In the meantime, I think you should get back to your construction team.”

Bering went running back to the hydroponics installation and the main site of their new camp, but the others had ended work for the day. He checked his pocket assistant. There were no messages, but there were several broadcast announcements. One of them explained that with no planetary day and night cycle to shepherd their circadian rhythms, a standard time had been set and was now synchronized to everyone’s assistant. He checked and saw that the time now was six and a half hours after standard noon. That gave him an idea of where he might find Ford. He went straight to the tent designated as a dining hall and found him there just finishing his meal. As Bering took a chair beside him, Ford looked at him but said nothing. Bering quickly explained and tried to apologize, but Ford stood up, interrupting.

“Being a pilgrim is a responsibility and a gift,” he said, then left the tent.

By the time he was done, a fog was descending over their camp and the temperature had dropped at least a degree—another subtle deviation from what he had been led to expect here. It joined the other anomalies and questions swirling around in his mind as he went to find a sleeping mat in one of the tents.

Because of the disasters that beset us, most caused by our own inaction, I was left with little choice but to then add another nineteen and a half decades to your sleep. One hundred ninety-five years—or should I say “thirteen days”?—was my best estimate of where to strike the balance between the danger of extending your time in hibernation versus giving the semi-mind on the ark, and the gene lab and incubators it is guiding, enough time to do their work.

Before you curse me for imposing that calculation upon you, know that where you set down is an Eden compared to where we first tried to start the colony. That most of this planet is, in its own way, a paradise is almost certainly thanks to a seed ship. Sent out thirteen thousand years ago before the Dark Ages at the end of the anthropo-unification era when, for a brief eight or ten centuries, humanity was united, the legend says the seed ships were the only attempt the ancients made at interstellar travel before the Chaos. They carried flora and fauna, a great DNA library and artificial wombs of various sorts, but no human passengers. One of those ships certainly must have come here to Epsindi Ta. The seed that it planted was the Promise.

For thirteen millennia, the seed ship prepared this world for us, and like a child copying its mother, I have added another thirteen days, enough time, I pray, to make a few small additions to this garden.

—From the second cairn epistle of Adam Leifson to the third generation

WAKING EARLY, BERING quietly dressed so as not to disturb those who were still sleeping, and stepped out of his dorm tent. Clearly, members of one of the other building teams had not slept at all. More large tents and some prefab panel structures had been erected. Then when he reached the dining tent, he saw that someone had hung two rows of luzglobes—with the sun still obscured by haze and clouds, the natural light was not enough. Permanent structures were yet to come, but already the camp was starting to look like their new home.

Among the other early risers in the dining tent, he saw Jaykella Tahirani. Aside from Ulysses Degana, she was the only other fellow pilgrim he had known before being selected for the ark, essentially at the last minute—only four weeks before departure. They had been together as youths in the same refugee camp after fleeing the pogroms. Bering sat down. She introduced him to the two people she was sitting with, both of them part of the same biology team as her. Gopal Nairobiani was a handsome, athletic-looking guy—in his mid-thirties, Bering guessed—but Arsen Kazakii was younger; he could hardly be older than Bering himself.

“We’ve only been here one day,” Jaykella answered with a laugh. “But, yeah, we’ve learned a few things. Except for some moss, everything’s completely familiar—plants and animals. It’s not just that they’re related to Earth life; they’re all known species.”

“Are ya knowin’, man, about the legend of the seed ships?” Arsen asked in a thick belt colony accent.

“I bin sequencin’ the genomes,” Arsen said. “That might be tellin’ us. In fact, I need to go see if my first analyses are finished. The team leader has a meetin’ with the other team leaders at the cairn in a few minutes.”

“Wait. First tell me what else you found. Did you find any clues about what happened to the rest of the family?”

Jaykella answered. “Nothing about what happened to them, but we have learned some interesting stuff. For instance, almost all the animals I saw on my transects are migratory species. Some of the insect species aren’t but, every bird species I saw is migratory. So that’s kinda strange.”

“The planet doesn’t have a day and night cycle, and it doesn’t have seasons, as far as we know. But all the birds I saw were flying west. Even the antelopes I saw were moving west too.”

“It was probably the same antelopes,” Jaykella replied. “But, the question is, if there’s no weather and no seasons, why migrate? But team leader Watersmith wasn’t interested. He just wanted to know what plants could be weeds to the crops we’ll grow and what animals will be pests.”

Gopal leaned forward. “So many of the plants we found—wow!—so, so many are edible.”

“Right,” Arsen said. “That means if the farmin’ is hard, we can add bits’a variety by foragin’. But, man, the real question is, if the life we’re seein’ was placed here by a seed ship from Earth, aren’t these all invasive species?” At first, Bering thought he had heard Arsen wrong, but he went on. “And if they’re invasive species, doesn’t that make us the second wave of the invasion?”

“Invasive species?” Bering blurted. “No. The real question is ‘How are we going to live on this world?’” He jumped to his feet. “Invasive species? This world is the gift promised for us!”

He shocked himself with the intensity of his reaction, and clearly, he jarred Jaykella, Arsen, and Gopal as well. Embarrassed, he used their surprise as an opportunity to stride away. But the more he thought about what Arsen had said, the more he felt justified. How can he suggest we don’t belong here? He can question the Promise if he wants, but I won’t. We’re building our new home here, and nothing is going to stop that.

And so, as Bering reached the Assiniboine, he resolved to keep learning what he could, and follow through with the astronomical observations. If he was quick, he could still join his construction team before they even got breakfast. He wanted to do the measurement of Epsindi’s apparent diameter, but although the fog had lifted in the vicinity of the ships, to the west the sky was still hazy, so he would have to wait a little longer.

But not much longer, he told himself as he noticed sunlight illuminating the peaks of the hills to the south.

“Yeah, it cooled off a little,” a woman remarked, stepping out of the ferry. “I thought the weather here wasn’t supposed to change.”

Bering glanced over to her and shrugged, then snapped his attention back to the hills. It was slightly cooler, but that was not what had given him the chill. Something in what he was seeing was not right. In the light and shadow on the hills, there was something out of place. He looked to the west, then looked back to the hills one more time, and promised himself he would come back to meditate in view of those hills later. For now, he went into the Assiniboine to check on the radio telescope data. It had only been thirteen hours since he and Sen. Beaumont had finished setting it up, so only the first small square of the sky would have been imaged. Now in its second twelve-hour scan, the array would be observing the next square. It would take nine weeks this way to do a complete picture of the sky, but Bering wanted to confirm that everything was working. Rushing to a console, he almost knocked over a glass with some wildflowers that someone had picked. He steadied it, moved it aside, then called up the radio array data. He instructed the console to present the data for the first section of observed sky as a single image, the range of radio frequencies to be displayed as visible colors using the default conversion. Remembering his first hours out of the hibetank, he half expected to be told “that information is unavailable,” or perhaps to see a meaningless jumble or a black screen as a result of some technical fault or some mistake he might have made, but to his relief, a recognizable image appeared. Cutting across one corner of the image was the plane of the galaxy, a bright line interspersed with brighter spots along it. Ionized interstellar gas appeared as glowing wisps, and other bright dots—supernova remnants and distant radio galaxies—were scattered here and there.

However, the image was not as sharp as it should have been, and looking at a few of the dots, he saw the problem. They were not dots but short lines, all the same length, all oriented in the same direction, as if the objects had tracked faster across the sky than the radio array had accounted for. Even if the planet was locked to its star, it was still rotating as it orbited the star, rotating once for each of its years, and that meant that in the twelve hours it took to scan one patch of sky, relative to the stars the planet had turned just a little. This should have already been compensated for, but apparently some mistake had been made, otherwise the stars would have been crisp dots rather than short lines.

He confirmed what planetary rotation rate had been used in assembling the data: 317.96 Earth days, the same as the planet’s orbital period. That should have been correct. Then he instructed the console to work at the problem backward—to create a second image, aligning the data from across the twelve-hour period and then determine what rotation rate that corresponded to. The answer came—300.54 Earth days. The difference was small—small, but detectable, a little over three one hundredths of a degree difference, but that was enough to make the stars and other radio-bright objects appear as short lines rather than points.

Bering’s past forty-eight hours suddenly collapsed together into a singular understanding—the light and shadow on the hills, the shifting weather, the miscalculated radio array image, and even Jaykella’s fascination with migratory species. He stared at the number on the display—300.54 Earth days. Any lingering grogginess disappeared and all his senses snapped, like the second radio telescope image, into crisp focus. He felt the soft cushion of the chair under him, smelt a faint aroma from the flowers, and heard the fans of the ferry’s air circulation system.

He transferred the data and the two images—the original blurred image and the corrected one—to a portable screen, then jumped from the chair and sprinted out of the ferry.

He ran toward the center point of the triangle between the three ferries. The wind was picking up again, and it carried away the small dust clouds he kicked up from the dry prairie as he ran.

Ten council members were sitting in a circle on the ground near the cairn that the three ferries had centered themselves around. A few meters away on the far side of the cairn, an eleventh, Frau Annamiek Ismail, appeared to be looking for something in the grass. When Bering got close, he stopped a respectful distance away and waited. They all glanced his way, then continued their deliberations. He waited, catching his breath while making sure that the portable screen he had brought from the ferry was ready.

“As I was saying,” Youssou Watersmith explained to the council, “we have sequenced twenty-two flora genomes and two insect genomes. Among those, there was one lichen and one fungus which, based on genetic drift, are separated from any known species in our library by millions of years at least—they’re probably native to this world. But for all the rest, the genetic drift suggests they diverged from known Earth species only 13,200 years ago, plus or minus 350 years. Several of them have anomalies that I suspect, way back then, were engineered, but across the bulk of the noncoding and mitochondrial DNA, they have consistently drifted 13,200 years. So, I would say that some version of the seed ship legend is true.”

Fatuma Chisholm stood up. “Thank you, Sen. Watersmith. Is that all?” Watersmith nodded and Frau Chisholm called to Bering. “Young Sen. Stiles, are you delivering a message, or do you want to join our deliberations? What is it?”

Frau Chisholm sat down, but when Bering reached the circle, he remained standing.

Then, after a few seconds of silence, all of them staring at him, he realized he did not need any further permission to speak and that they were waiting for him.

“So, umm, I was checking the radio telescope array, and I found something—something important. First, it was the wildlife Jaykella told me about. Every single bird species she saw is a migratory species, and also an antelope species, and they were all moving west.”

“Bering,” Youssou Watersmith bellowed, “are you talking about your radio telescope or the wildlife? Please. We’re busy with important things here.”

Taamir Beaumont spoke up. “Let him finish.” Then he turned to Bering. “But please get to the point.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I also noticed it’s getting colder, and there seems to be too much weather. And that’s when I checked the first image from our radio array. The image didn’t track correctly.” Bering realized that Sen. Beaumont would understand, but that he would have to explain more carefully for some of the others. “It’s like this. The receivers don’t take an instantaneous snapshot. They’re meant to track the stars as the planet slowly turns. And in that time, they collect photons for twelve hours. But the image was streaked. It didn’t track properly.” He stepped over to Beaumont and gave him the portable screen.

“Yes and no, Sen. The error is easily corrected if we give the planet a sidereal day of 300.5 Earth days instead of 318.” Beaumont’s eyes went wide. Bering pointed to the south. “And those hills—that tallest hill there, it has a shadow cast on it from that smaller hill on the right. That shadow has been slowly moving.”

“I don’t understand,” said Jeremy Nakamura, looking quickly from Chisholm, to Bering, to Beaumont, and back to Bering again. “What does all that mean?”

“Yes,” Watersmith interjected. “It rotates exactly once for each of its orbits around Epsindi.”

“No, Sen.,” explained Bering. “It’s rotating just a little bit faster than that.”

One of the other councillors sitting on Bering’s left began whispering, “No, no, no, no.”

“Bering, are you saying this isn’t an eyeball planet?” Jeremy Nakamura demanded.

Taamir Beaumont answered for him. “At this incredibly slow rate of rotation, it’s definitely an eyeball planet. The probe sent back infrared images and measured the temperature at the substellar point to be seventy-nine degrees Celsius. And on the night side, we know it was colder than minus fifty.”

“The recon probe went silent after a short time in this system,” Bering added. “If it had functioned longer, we would have had more data, and maybe people would have realized. But this means the planet is not tidally locked.”

“It means,” Beaumont said, “this planet has a day and a night. A day lasts . . .” He looked down to the portable screen and tapped a calculation into it, then looked up. “About fifteen Earth years.”

Frau Ismail—the council member who was not sitting in the circle but was standing on the far side of the cairn—spoke up. “It is right. Come here, everyone, and I’ll show you.” They hesitated, and she said it again, “Come. Here.” The councillors all rose, and together with Bering walked over to Frau Ismail and gathered around her. “There are rocks laid out in lines in the grass. It’s so overgrown it’s hard to see them at all, but they are definitely arranged.” She pointed down to a line of rocks at her feet. “This isn’t natural; I imagine they were placed this way by our same pilgrim sister or brother who put the beacon into this cairn two centuries ago.”

She traced the lines the rocks made—two parallel lines of rocks a little over a meter long joined by a third, diagonal line. “Alef,” she announced, and then pointed to another arrangement of rocks to the left. “Miim.” And then another and another. “Double-jay. Omega. Omega. These are letters.” She pointed out all the symbols, laid out in two rows each about six meters long.

Then Bering and several others saw that Rosa Okonkwo was now pointing, her lips quivering but not making a sound. They all turned in the direction she pointed, to the west. The haze on the horizon had begun to clear and the setting K5 sun was visible again. In that moment, Bering realized that part of him had been hoping that he was wrong, that Sen. Beaumont would explain some simple thing he had misconstrued, but now that faint hope was smashed. They all stood gazing at the star. When they had first emerged from the ferries, just the tip of it had settled below the horizon, but now, almost half of it had sunk out of view.

“What does the message say?” Frau Ismail echoed. “It says, ‘Go west. Start walking.’”

We have taken to referring to ourselves as “generations” even though our actual ages had nothing to do with who got revived when. The first generation, observing our new home from orbit and realizing our conclusions about it being tidally locked were wrong, decided to locate the settlement at the North Pole. It was the only place we could build to avoid the day-night cycle and its 130-degree temperature swing. I was in the second “generation,” and awoke to see my friends had aged twenty years and had run out of hope.

Sadly, my generation made just as many mistakes. And we were just as stubborn as the first, clinging to our expectations for our lives on this world. I pray that you in the third generation, separated from the site of our mistakes by 3000 kilometers and 195 years, will be able to do things better than we did.

—From the third cairn epistle of Adam Leifson to the third generation

BY THE TIME THE COUNCIL called the whole family together for another concourse, the news had already spread. And, of course, with the sky clear, everyone could once again see the sun, see that it was slowly setting. Calculations also hinted at the significance of why the timers in the ferries and in the beacon had been set for 194.89 Earth years. It was equivalent to almost exactly thirteen planetary days.

But why not one day? Bering wondered. Or two? Thirteen days is a hundred and ninety-five years. Why leave us that long?

The questions were accumulating faster than answers could be found, and the gathering lurched and stumbled from one question to another and back again. If they believed what their eyes and calculations told them, that a day on this planet lasted fifteen years, and if they accepted the message written in the arrangement of rocks—“Go west; start walking”—what would that mean?

“We would walk and set up a new camp every few days,” came the answer. “No village to eventually grow into a city. No new civilization. No permanent home.”

And so, they agonized over how they might build in order to survive the seven-year-long days and the seven-year-long nights. They considered domes and underground habitats. They considered trying to construct climate-protected greenhouses, and they considered eating vat-grown food for the rest of their lives since farming might be impossible. People who had a poor sense of the limitations of their abilities, even asked about finding a way to slow the planet’s rotation to finish the process of tidal locking. In the concourse, and in small conversations afterward, they also talked about trying to retrofit the drop ferries. The three large ferries were designed as descent vehicles, meant to drop to the planet surface once, but perhaps a way could be found to enable at least one of them to fly again and they could use it to relocate to the North Pole. The rough map created from the recon probe’s data had shown the South Pole to be a sea, so the North Pole seemed the obvious choice. In fact, it was such an obvious choice that it led people to ask, “Why didn’t the ark set us down there?”

The answer came a day later when a data grain was found, wrapped in a piece of cloth and sealed inside a jar that was sealed inside another jar and interred deeper down in the cairn below where the beacon had been. It held gigas of data and hundreds of pages of notes on climate, ecology, physical geography, and geology, but the team tasked with sifting through it had found no executive summary, no editorial, no direct explanation or instructions. So the council copied it and distributed it to multiple teams, each assigned to comb through a different part of it, and when they did, a picture of the polar regions emerged. The data grain belonged to Adam Leifson, a member of the family’s agriculture team who had been thirty-two years old when he went into hibernation.

According to his notes in the data grain, the first wave of pilgrims—the first “generation”—had learned that Earth life thrived everywhere on the planet except at the poles. Within one thousand kilometers of the poles was the only place where the original endemic ecosystems still survived, little affected by the species brought from Earth by the seed ship thirteen thousand years earlier. Although the poles did not experience the fifteen-year-long cycle of temperature extremes that the rest of the planet did, the weather there was chaotic and abrupt, often lurching from forty degrees above freezing to thirty degrees below within a few days, and then back again. Leifson’s notes described tornados, which were common near the pole. And, in another section of the notes, Taamir Beaumont found a passing reference to coronal mass ejections from the star, geomagnetic storms focused on the poles, and damage to the earlier pilgrims’ electrical systems.

“This is why we don’t see any sign of the hundred fifty-four,” Fatuma Chisholm speculated during the third concourse. “Or the smaller ferries or the cargo landers. They’re at the North Pole. They tried to establish the colony there. They couldn’t.”

“It’s unlivable,” Frau Ismail added. “So, they never revived us. But Adam eventually told the ark to wait thirteen more of this planet’s days and then put us here.”

To Bering, this felt like a betrayal. He had devoted himself to the cause and to the Promise that the human race was ready to begin building a new home. He had dedicated himself to the precepts of that Promise: that it was not a largess bestowed from above, but a mission the pilgrims, and their fellow believers back on Earth, would carry out with perseverance and sacrifice; that they would live in harmony with the new worlds they reached; and that they would do better than what had been done on Earth. And, not having dared to hope that he himself would be chosen as a pilgrim, he had been rewarded, only four weeks before departure, by being added to the body of pilgrims bound for Epsindi Ta. He would finally have a permanent home, and as a junior engineer, his role in the family would be to literally help build that home.

But now, it felt as if someone was trying to take that from him. There was not even any work for him to do so that he could at least feel useful. The temporary shelters had already been built, and half the pilgrims chose to sleep on the ferries anyway. From bits and pieces of conversation he overheard over the next twenty-four hours, he learned that many people were feeling similarly betrayed. Some seemed sad, some frustrated, some angry. Many were defiant, insisting they could still find a way to move ahead with their plans to build a colony, a few even suggesting that some mistake had been made and that the apparent rotation of the planet was just a wobble or some other astronomical anomaly that had momentarily deceived them. It was those sentiments that felt most like his own as he fantasized about standing in front of someone and saying, “No! You won’t take this from me!”

Some people were calling the situation a crisis, but for Bering it was simply incomprehensible. He could not make sense of it, so instead he focused his thoughts on imagining the colony post-crisis. Someone would come up with a clever mix of technologies to solve the puzzle, and then the current confusion would be just a memory.

Our generation waited too long. We delayed until we had no choice but to leave you with no choice. Please forgive us.

—From the second cairn epistle of Adam Leifson to the third generation

WHEN ONLY A QUARTER of Epsindi remained visible above the horizon, another concourse was held, at which options already rejected were revisited and rejected again. Factions began to cleave the family. Those who felt they needed to immediately start moving the camp westward were the most emotional but were in the minority. For most, the response to that was simple and straightforward, “What you’re suggesting is impossible.”

“Three and a half years from now, the temperature here is going to be fifty degrees below freezing! And eleven years from now, it’s going to be seventy-five degrees above freezing. Blindly following our plan is what’s impossible! Adapting the plan and learning to live a different way—that’s just inconvenient.”

“So, you’re saying we came to this planet to live like primitive nomads? No. I don’t believe it.”

Watching the fourth concourse go on like that, the deliberation becoming debate, the debate becoming mere contradiction, hit Bering viscerally. This was not the way the family was meant to operate. No one seemed to care that with each new opinion and pronouncement they were sowing strife, contention, and estrangement. Bering noticed, though, that these new cleavages did not follow the divisions between the family’s five religious traditions in any way. He could not decide if that was a good sign or simply an ironic accident. Briefly reunited just so we could find a new way to rip ourselves apart again.

From what he could discern, the concourse ended with no real strategy. And during all this time, for two full days—two days by Earth reckoning he reminded himself, because an actual day on this world was five thousand times longer—he hardly spoke to anyone. He thought about the home he had imagined helping to build, about the Promise that had seemed for a moment to be abundantly fulfilled, and about what the Promise really meant if it was only going to be fleetingly fulfilled once every seven and a half years.

Eventually, however, he needed to share his feelings, to hear someone tell him, “Yes! Exactly!” And so, when he saw Jaykella Tahirani, the closest thing he had to a friend among the pilgrims still alive, sitting with a group of five others, he went toward them, hoping to find someone who might share, or at least empathize with, his confusion. Sitting beside Jaykella was one of the council members, Frau Annamiek Ismail, and there were three young pilgrims whose names he had not yet learned. And there was Arsen Kazakii. Remembering Arsen’s disrespect of the Promise, Bering decided to just move along. But then, Jaykella saw him and invited him to sit.

As he joined their circle, he saw that several items were spread out on the ground in front of them. The word artifacts came to mind. There were also neatly organized piles of various berries, mushrooms, and leaves.

“I know,” a tall redheaded woman replied. “He helped me get through a panic attack when I revived.”

“I don’t mean he’s from the Assiniboine,” Jaykella said. “No, he’s actually from Assiniboine, in the North American plains.”

“From age six to age fifteen,” Bering hedged. “I had to flee when the pogroms started. But yeah, I guess I’m from there as much as I’m from anywhere.”

“Good!” Frau Ismail proclaimed, snapping her fingers as if in celebration. “A lot of the flora in this valley is native to your region. From our drones, it seems that twenty kilometers south, it’s mostly African species, and twenty kilometers north, there’s a mix from various places. But here, mostly species from the North American prairie.” She pointed to a small pile of purple berries. “Do you recognize these? They’re not blueberries.”

Bering looked at each of them in turn as he squished the berries around inside his mouth. The gentle sweetness seemed to spread from his tongue to his whole body and then blended with a nutty, earthy flavor. The taste took him back fifteen years to his childhood—summer in the valley, canoeing on the lake, Frau Harris’s berry crumble. “They’re Saskatoon berries.”

“They’re named after the philosopher from the early Dark Ages, Jonathan Saskatoon.”

“Oh, for wild mushrooms, I wouldn’t know. But aren’t most of you ecologists or biologists or whatever? All I know is what I learned in summer programs at the orphanage.”

Jaykella had no chance to respond. “Bering,” Frau Ismail said, motioning toward some very old looking pouches, sticks and jars, “we found these in a cave. In the hills south of here. We think they belonged to Adam Leifson. The jars and bags had some dried food—almost two hundred years old.” Then she pointed to the fresh berries, mushrooms, and leaves. “For each one we could identify, we tried to collect fresh specimens of the same thing.”

“From our surveys, we found twenty-nine edible species so far,” said Arsen. “Thirty if we can be confirmin’ the mushrooms.”

“There were goose bones and antelope bones in the cave too,” the redhead added. She picked up a stick about three centimeters in diameter and almost a meter long with a hook and notch at one end and a groove running almost the full length on one side. “This is an atlatl—a spear thrower.”

Jaykella pointed to two thinner and much longer, very straight sticks. “It’s used together with these.”

“They’re darts for the atlatl,” the redhead explained. “The points are ground from pieces of carbon-resin composite. Maybe from a seat or a cabinet from one of the missing shuttles. And there was a handheld pheromoner—he may have been using that to help with his hunting.”

The group broke into an excited discussion about learning to tan hides, their willingness or unwillingness to learn how to eat meat, and whether the owner of the items had in fact walked all the way around the planet following the setting sun.

“It looks as if Adam was alone,” Frau Ismail added. “But we’ll be working together—strength in numbers—so, yes, we can do it.”

“If we stay put,” Jaykella added, “we’ll freeze to death in the dark. We change our plans. That’s all there is to it.”

Bering decided this was not the kind of conversation he had been looking for. They actually sound as if they’re glad to tell the rest of us we can’t stay and start growing our crops, can’t start building our home. So he made an excuse and then slipped away. He walked away from the group, away from the three ferries and from their camp, once again wanting to be alone. He headed northward. Any direction but west.

He had joined the family to have a chance at something he had been denied until now—a home. But they had come to a world that was telling him he had to become a nomad, perpetually homeless, perpetually chasing the sun. No, he would not go west.

And so, he walked north. He walked nearly three kilometers until he reached the edge of the wide valley where they had landed, and then began to hike up into the hills. Once he felt he had come far enough, he chose one hill and began to hike toward the top. As he ascended, the bushes became thicker, and eventually were an impenetrable thicket.

Choosing a grassy spot below the thick tangle of bushes, he turned to face west, and sat. For a moment he peered at the sliver of the star that was still visible above the horizon, but knowing that, like the Promise itself, it was slowly leaving them behind, he could not bear to keep looking. So as he began to pray, he closed his eyes.

He chose one of the prayers of flowering, “Your grace is plenteous; it cannot be veiled. We have abased ourselves, but with Your help we now arise. With wings that You bestowed, we soar now to our new habitation. We are Your seed, make us now worthy to flower. Make us worthy to recognize Your gift. We will accept that gift and become part of it.”

The prayer seemed to bring some clarity, but no peace. He knew what they had to do. They all did. According to the legends, thirteen thousand years earlier, shortly before the end of the millennium-long era during which the human race had been united, humanity had engaged in a series of grand collective projects, beginning with restoration of the Earth and ending with the dispatching of ten or perhaps twelve automated ships that would seed other worlds. The pilgrims were agreed on at least one thing—that one of those ships had arrived here and begun preparing this world for them, making subtle adjustments to the genomes of the Earth life it chose from its libraries to ensure that each of the plants and animals it placed here would migrate, or be blown on the wind, or would set long lasting spores and seeds that would wait through the long cold nights and the long hot days. And the biology team kept finding edible species. The climate was gentle. The day and the night might be unlivable, but in the twilight in-between it was a paradise. Your grace is plenteous, it cannot be veiled. All they had to do to live in that paradise, Bering thought, would be to give up everything and walk—at this latitude, a mere three kilometers a day to keep up with the setting sun. Not difficult to do once, but they would have to do it every day. Forever. That meant no building houses, no farming, no village.

We’ll never be in one place long enough. But you promised us a home. Haven’t I shown perseverance? Haven’t I sacrificed?

He considered what he had heard from pilgrims from the other four religious traditions—how they were each making sense of the situation. They had all been united in their belief in the Teacher and in the Promise that She had made, but they each understood that Promise through their own peculiar tenets and practices. The Samsarans were meditating, the Al-Mustaqimists were praying, and the Ecohumanists were debating hypotheses. Three different Samsarans he had spoken to reiterated the need to be detached, but sounding as if they themselves were anything but. In the last concourse, a Wexlerian had explained her belief that failure to heal from their collective trauma had collapsed a wave function prematurely, resulting in the illusion that the Promise had been broken. Bering heard one of the Ecohumanists, for whom all spiritual truths were emergent phenomena of complex systems, wonder aloud if the Promise had ceased to exist because now their “civilization,” with a mere two hundred eighty-eight people, did not have sufficient complexity to sustain it. The Al-Mustaqimists he had engaged with, always eminently practical, had little to say about the Promise and instead were telling each other that the family just needed “to get on with it,” but were unable to agree over what the “it” should be.

Two hours later, or perhaps three—he was not sure—Bering stood up, still feeling lost, and plodded back to the camp. As he neared the Serengeti, he saw Arsen Kazakii emerging from it carrying a large backpack apparently jammed full, his hands held out to the sides to help him balance.

When Arsen saw Bering, he quickly looked away. Then he seemed to have second thoughts, because he looked toward Bering again, waved nervously, and then kept walking, not making further eye contact.

That was just fine for Bering. He was in no mood for Arsen’s incomprehensible mix of doomsaying and excited optimism. Instead, he went to find one of his engineering colleagues at the group of tents near the Haida Gwaii that served as their workshop. The first person he saw there was Ford Cyltemstra, sitting under a canopy, two large view screens set up in front of him, and three portable consoles beside him on a table. Now that the natural light had dimmed, a luzglobe had been hung in the canopy above him. He leaned forward in his chair, his eyes darting back and forth between two of the screens as he ate a grey vatcake.

“Because we don’t have the materials to build our habitat above ground and construct a big, insulated dome over it. Going underground is our only option.”

This was not what Bering had imagined their life on this world would look like. “So . . . We would live about seven years at a time underground, just coming out for a few months each planetary morning and evening?”

Ford tensed. “I came here to build!” he said. “No one’s gonna stop me from doing that.”

Seeing that Bering agreed, Ford shifted from defensive back to enthusiastic. “I think if we could put most of the habitat between twenty and thirty meters deep, that would be enough to insulate us from the temperature swings. That’s what I’ve been working on here—the calculations for all that.”

Bering looked at the screens, one of which showed plans for a tunnel-boring machine. While I’m busy feeling sorry for myself, Ford is actually doing something so that we can start to live here. “Makes sense. We need a permanent place for our manufacturing base.”

“I’m thinking that if we can reestablish contact with the ark, eventually we can also work toward orbital manufacturing, and ultimately put giant mirrors and shades in orbit to give us some heat and light at night and to reduce the worst of the heat in the day.”

Ford was all enthusiasm and determination, and as much as Bering admired that, the idea sounded like something far beyond their capabilities. They had come equipped to provide for a colony with a starting population of four hundred sixty-nine people, not to build giant structures to terraform a whole world. But he held his tongue, and Ford continued expounding his ideas.

“Bering, this is the time of the human race’s flowering. I believe that. This is our new home. And we will build a home here. That’s what I came here to do.”

Maybe he’s got some details wrong. Maybe his exact plan isn’t what will let us live here. But he has the right attitude.

Ford took his assistant from his pocket and looked at the time. “The next concourse is about to start,” he said as he stood up.

“I know, right? Blah, blah, blah. I don’t understand why there’s even any debate. Being humanity’s seed is a mission we vowed to carry out with perseverance and sacrifice.”

Exactly! He’s putting into words what I haven’t been able to. Listening to Ford was like looking into a mirror that showed him how he wanted to be.

“That’s what I’m gonna tell them in the concourse,” Ford continued. “We can conquer this place. We can sculpt it to our needs.”

In that moment, the mirror shattered. Conquer? Sculpt it to our needs? But we’re supposed to do better than we did on Earth.

He remembered the words of the prayer, “Make us worthy to recognize your gift. We will accept that gift and become part of it.” In that moment, Bering saw again all the things he had seen over the past four and a half days, but now with different eyes. This world is a gift, and we will become part of it. He almost started to speak, to object to Ford’s understanding of their mission, but then suddenly he remembered Arsen acting suspiciously a few minutes earlier and realized what the quirky ecologist was doing. He realized, too, that he had to move fast—there was no time to get into an argument to try to convince Ford.

“You sure? I’m sure at this one we’ll finally decide to stop procrastinating and get on with the colonization plan.”

“All that arguing and people not listening to each other wears me down,” Bering replied truthfully.

As people proceeded toward the gathering, Bering returned to the Assiniboine. He sat at a console and searched through the equipment library. When he did not find what he was looking for, he found images in the historical library and extrapolated 3D templates. He was not able to find everything he hoped to, but he decided he needed to limit the research to half an hour. By then, the ferry was quiet, everyone having gone to the concourse.

Bering rushed to the fabricators and loaded the templates he had created, and then as the printing began, he found a backpack and stuffed equipment into it—a sewing kit, a knife, twenty meters of rope, a change of clothes, and some food. But he made sure to not let the pack get too heavy and to leave room for the equipment that was still printing. At one point he stepped outside and looked around. There was no sign of people returning from the concourse yet, but he did not want to take any chances, so by the time ninety minutes had passed, he halted the fabricators and loaded what he had produced into the backpack.

They’re already out of range. It doesn’t matter—I know what direction they’re going.

Bering put his backpack on his shoulders, exited the ferry, and began to walk. He looped far south of the Serengeti to avoid being seen by anyone at the concourse, then he turned west and kept walking. Two kilometers west of the landing sight, the valley began to gradually descend, and the terrain began to undulate. And then he spotted two parallel trails where the grass had been freshly trampled, pointing due west. He followed the trails until he came to a ridge that looked like a dune that had solidified in the process of cutting diagonally across the valley. It was about twice his height, and as he got closer, it blocked his view of the western horizon and the remaining remnant of the sun. He climbed and as he reached the crest, below him on the opposite slope was a group of pilgrims—Jaykella, Arsen, Frau Ismail, and more than a dozen others.

They all went quiet. Bering looked down at them from the ridge, a few of them standing, most sitting, each one of them with a backpack nearby. And every one of them stared back up at him, a few of them wide-eyed as if they had just been caught in the commission of a sin.

He started slowly down the hill. “Can I . . . Umm . . . I mean, I’d like to come with you. I’ve printed a bunch of spear points like the ones you showed me that belonged to Adam, and a couple of axe heads, and some other equipment. I think maybe I—”

Jaykella jumped up and ran to him. She wrapped her arms around him, laughing as she called out his name. Then she turned back to the others. “I told you we should have invited him.”

“That you did,” Frau Ismail admitted, as she stood and reached for her own small backpack. “And it just wouldn’t be right if the first person to open his eyes to this world wasn’t with us for the start of the journey. But clearly, he figured out what we were up to anyway.”

“He can tell you as we walk,” Frau Ismail said. “We’ve dithered long enough, and we have some ground to make up. Although we only need to average three kilometers a day, if we want to catch up to where we should be, we should go at least four more kilometers before we sleep, and then eight or ten tomorrow.”

“But we’re supposed to meet Gopal here,” the tall redhead objected. “He was staying to see what got decided at the concourse.”

Frau Ismail just tilted her nose up toward the ridge crest. There, coming up over the ridge right where Bering had come, was Gopal. He bent and rested his hands on his knees and caught his breath. Clearly, he had been running.

Gopal loped down the hill, picked up his bag, and within seconds, everyone was up and ready to continue the journey.

As they walked, Bering listened to the conversations around him, and to the strange mix of elation, humor, and sadness. Jaykella fell into step beside him and, when he caught her glance, he smiled warmly.

“You’re only saying that because your pack is too heavy,” another one answered. “Did you stuff a plow in there? Or just your geological samples?”

“Well, some—Wow!—some unexpected news. Not all the Earth species we’re seeing were brought here 13,000 years ago. Someone captured one of those goats I saw, and when Watersmith couldn’t find Arsen, he sequenced the genome himself. The goat was descended from DNA in the ark’s gene library, separated by about fifty or sixty generations. So, for goats, that should be about two hundred years. That means those weren’t seed ship goats I saw; they were our goats—or, you know, their descendants—gone feral. But not only that; Watersmith also said the goat’s DNA also has some sequences from wildebeest spliced in, probably something related to migratory instincts.”

“There was one other interesting bit of news at the concourse,” Gopal said. “The communications team said they still haven’t been able to contact the ark. But they said another beacon just started transmitting, thirty-two kilometers due west of here.”

“You see! It’s been two hundred years, but our brother Adam prepared things for us.”

“Wanna bet a third beacon further west will start transmitting in a few days?”

“The goats, and the new beacon—that must have swayed them in the concourse.”

Some of them stopped briefly once in a while to collect leaves or berries, and someone else pointed out some antelope tracks. Eventually the conversations died away, and they walked in silence, soaking in their surroundings. As they walked, the hills to the north and south became smaller, the valley floor came to an end in front of them, and they saw that they were at the top of a small escarpment. A vast, flat prairie was stretched out in front of them, and beyond that an orange, coral, and blood red sky. Four or five kilometers ahead was a herd of what Bering guessed was bison, the sun casting long shadows from the animals toward them. Awe and gratitude swept over Bering like a warm breeze, reminding him of a night as a child when, after his astronomy lessons and learning of the vastness of the Milky Way, he lay on his back in a field and let the night sky call to him. But he also realized that although the plain in front of them, and this whole world in fact, were miniscule in comparison to the expanse of the galaxy, the awe he felt now was greater, because this was life, life that spoke to his soul.

A wide path, trampled with countless hoof prints, showed them a way down the escarpment that was not very steep. As they followed it, Bering, still at Jaykella’s side, spoke, “Do you think the others will follow us?”

“Leifson seems to have arranged things so that they don’t really have any other choice.”

And yet, he thought, they still don’t want to make that choice. He thought about Ford and his zealous conviction in his interpretation of the Promise. And he also thought about how close he himself had come to mistaking his desires and preconceptions for his actual faith.

Jaykella nodded. “Yes, but although Leifson seems to have left a second beacon for us, we don’t know that there will be more after that, or other directions or help.”

“Even if there isn’t, he’s already done so much for us. Either way, we’ll just need to have faith and figure it out as we go.”

“The hardest part will be letting go of what we wanted this world to be. Instead, we need to accept the gift as it is and become part of it.”

By the time they stopped to make camp, a bit more of the star’s disk was visible above the horizon. They slept a while, and when they broke camp, a gentle breeze at their backs propelled them on.