The librarian said nothing. Safrah waited, still hoping to hear its voice, wanting to believe that it might somehow repair itself after not speaking for so many days, but the only sound emitted by the console was a low, almost indiscernible whine.
“Speak to me,” Safrah whispered. The librarian continued to whine. Safrah could still call up any records that the library held, but now she had to write what she was looking for on a screen with a stylus, then wait until lines of writing and images appeared. Occasionally, the images and writings were only marginally related to what she was seeking. She had been here for much of the morning, searching for records on the subject of artificial intelligences, hoping that she might find something that would tell her how to restore the librarian’s voice, but knowing that that kind of repair was probably beyond her and her companions’ capacity.
The whining suddenly broke off.
Safrah rested her elbows on the table and frowned at the screen in front of her. The screen showed an image of a rocky worldlet against a black space dotted with pinpricks of light. The rock suddenly swelled in size, until she could see what looked like large metallic bowls on its surface and a flicker of light at one end. The library had responded to her search by offering her an image of Ship, the artificial intelligence that had seeded Home.
The door to her left slid open and Mikhail slipped inside. “Any change?” he asked as the door closed behind him. “Never mind,” he continued as Safrah shook her head. “I can tell. It’s still not speaking, is it?”
She nodded.
“We’ll have to tell the young ones sometime.”
“We don’t have to say anything now.”
“Sooner or later they’re going to find out. Better that they hear it from us.”
“They won’t find out for a while,” she said. “They don’t care about anything in here.” Once, they had been curious, pestering her with questions she could not answer and that they did not know how to ask of the librarian. Now they avoided this place. She, Mikhail, Awan, and Jina were the only ones who came to the library nearly every day. Perhaps by the time any of the others came here, the librarian might have repaired itself.
That, she told herself, was a ridiculously hopeful thought. For over a year, she had seen signs that the librarian might be failing, had noticed the hesitation in its voice and the ever longer silences before it responded to her queries. She had said nothing, not even to Mikhail, even though he was clearly aware of the problem; she had noticed the worried look on his face, and on Jina’s and Awan’s, whenever they were speaking to the librarian. And then the librarian had fallen silent, responding to their queries with only a whine.
“We’d better keep this to ourselves,” Jina had said, and Safrah convinced Awan and Mikhail to go along with her advice. Lately the younger ones seemed to value the four of them largely for their labor and their ability to tend and repair the technology that supported the settlement. If they failed at that, they would be of little use to anyone else here and would eventually have almost nothing to offer the outsiders in trade.
Mikhail sat down on the floor next to her and folded his legs. “We shouldn’t just let it go,” he said.
“We can get along without it.” That was the truth, but she missed the librarian’s voice; she had grown up with that voice.
“If we gave Awan more time here alone,” Mikhail continued, “with nothing to distract him, he might be able to—”
“I don’t think even Awan could fix this.”
“We have to try. We have to hold things together, do what we can. If we don’t do anything, things might get worse.” Mikhail leaned toward her. “Right now it’s just the librarian’s voice. What if it loses its search functions?”
She looked up at the shelves of records on the level above this one, wondering how she would ever be able to find anything in them without the librarian’s help. Then she looked down at the screen again. Too much had been going wrong lately. Lanterns and light wands flickered and then failed, weapons had to be recharged more often, fuel cells failed for the last time and could not be replaced. It seemed to her that such failures happened more often than they had when she was younger, but maybe she was only imagining that.
“It’ll repair itself,” she insisted.
“What if it doesn’t?”
“It has to,” Safrah said. “It always did before.”
“Don’t be so stubborn, Safrah. Even if it does, it might fail again.”
They would have to embed more records in some of the remaining empty screens and keep those records where they would be safe. They would have to think about which of the records were most essential and which might be expendable. They might lose parts of humankind’s past forever and never know what it was they had lost.
She looked toward the back of the library, where the closed door to Ship’s Room was concealed by two shelves of old records, and thought of the radio on the other side of that door. She had not gone inside Ship’s Room in some time, thinking it was better to keep away, to leave the door closed and the radio protected. Not that it mattered. The mind of the space vessel that had carried her people to Home had most likely forgotten them long ago.
As a child, whenever she had come to the library with Moise, Safrah had almost always visited Ship’s Room with him. He had shown her how to press buttons and move dials so that they could listen to the snaps, crackles, and hums emitted by the radio. Moise had explained that many of the sounds were produced by lightning, even if the storms that produced that lightning were far away, and that other sounds came from space. The radio could also pick up Ship’s voice, which Ship was able to transmit over a wide range of frequencies, so the radio would be able to hear Ship when it entered this planetary system, long before it was orbiting Home.
“We’ll be able to talk to Ship then,” Moise had told her, “and maybe when it finds out what’s happened here, it will help us restore this settlement to what it might have become. Maybe it will even remain near Home and never leave us again.”
“How do you know Ship will come back?” Safrah had asked him.
“That was Ship’s promise to us,” Moise had replied, “that it would return to see what we’d made of ourselves.”
“Maybe Ship’s forgotten that promise.”
“Oh, no.” Moise had shaken his head. “I have to believe that Ship would remember and keep any promise it made to our ancestors.”
After that, Safrah had occasionally gone to Ship’s room alone and whispered to the radio, hoping for an answer. Later, her hope had grown into fear. Ship might not be all that pleased to see what had happened to its people. Maybe it would be better if their radio did fail.
“We’d better go,” Mikhail said. “We’ll talk to Awan and Jina, see what they want to do now. Awan might want to try repairing the librarian again, or he might think it’s better to leave it alone, but he’s better at repairs than we are, so he’s probably the one who should decide. As long as we can still search the records, we can get by.”
Safrah stood up, reluctant to leave the library. The refuge of the library and her bond with Mikhail, Awan, and Jina were all that kept her here now, that and her lingering fear of the people outside the settlement.
Lina and Awan were keeping watch outside the entrance to the library, even though it was unlikely that anyone else would come that way. “The librarian’s still not talking,” Mikhail said to them.
Awan let out his breath. “Should we say anything about it to the others?” he asked.
“No,” Safrah replied, “not yet.”
“I’ll take a look at it tomorrow,” Awan said, “see what I can do.”
Mikhail slipped a light wand from his belt and turned it on. To their right, the tunnel led up to the dining hall; to their left, downhill to the greenhouse. They turned right and walked through the tunnel in silence. Even with the dim light of the wand, Safrah could not help noticing that there were new cracks in the walls and that some of the patches on the ceiling above them were flaking.
Mikhail stopped in front of the door that led to their dome and pushed it open. A glance around the common room revealed that no one had entered their dome while they were at the library, although any of the young ones could easily have done so. Packets of food, folded-up clothing, pottery, and a couple of reading screens sat undisturbed on the shelves, and there were no marks on the walls or the table in the center of the room. Anyone coming there would at least have taken some of their belongings, perhaps broken some of the pottery, or carved an insult or a threat on the table or walls.
When they were all inside, Mikhail closed the door, then set the pole they used as a brace against it. Anything stolen could be replaced, and damage could be repaired, but they needed to feel secure while inside their own dwelling.
Awan opened the small cooler in the corner and took out a bottle of juice and some bread and cheese, while Jina opened a packet of meat. They were running low on food and would have to get more from the dispenser in the dining hall soon. Safrah dreaded the prospect of going there, where the others spent so much of their time lately. At least the dispenser showed no signs of failing. She did not carry that thought any further than that.
Safrah went to a shelf for some pottery. They did not really need any plates for the food and could have passed the bottle of juice around; rinsing the cups and plates would only use up more water from their cistern. But Safrah preferred eating this way instead of grabbing at the food the way the children did. It was how they used to dine with Moise and the other elders long ago.
Awan poured out juice. “We have to start checking on the outpost signal again,” he said. “Somebody might come there to trade soon.” None of them had gone outside since the onset of the season of cold and ice, but by now the weather would be growing warmer; they had not needed to use their dome’s heater for almost a month. One of the few traders willing to trade with them might come north.
“I’ll take a look outside after dinner,” Jina said.
“I’ll go with you,” Mikhail added. Safrah looked down. He and Jina were finding more and more excuses to go off by themselves, and she expected that the two would soon announce that they were making a pledge. It would be easier to wish them well if she knew that there would someday be a mate for her, but Awan shied away from her whenever she made any gesture toward him, even if it was only to clasp his hand a little too warmly.
Awan had even more reason to keep his distance from her lately. It had been only three months since she went to the dining hall to trade with Morwen for a bottle of his alcohol. Even though the liquid burned her throat, it had been surprisingly easy to drink enough of it to feel delirious and wild and ready to corner Awan in the tunnel near their dome. “We can do it here,” she had whispered, and she had wrapped her arms around him and murmured about how much she wanted him and loved him, until he had finally torn himself away and knocked her against the wall. The shock of that, even though he hadn’t meant to hurt her, had brought her to her senses; she spent the next day feeling ashamed and apologizing and blaming her behavior on the drink. It wouldn’t have happened except for that, she had insisted; and it would never happen again. Awan had replied that he would never mention the incident to her or to anyone else.
Now, when she recalled what had happened before shame made her push the memory from her mind, she realized Awan had been struggling with her for a while, perhaps in an effort not to harm her, before at last freeing himself. Maybe that meant he did feel drawn to her, that he had been fighting against his own feelings for her. She had imagined that, after a while, he would come to her and tell her that he wanted her, too. It was only that she had taken him by surprise; that had to be why he had pushed her away. But lately it seemed that he was looking for reasons not to be alone with her. She had thrown out what was left of the alcohol, which had also made her sick and dizzy, and promised Awan she would never touch it again. She wanted to ask him what was wrong with her, what he wanted from her that she lacked, but had never summoned up the courage to do so.
There was no one else for her, and certainly no chance that she would come to care for anyone among the others in the settlement. But she would have to find someone to be her mate and give her children. Moise, who had taught them all about their duties and obligations, would have expected her to fulfill them.
She ate what was left of her food and pushed her plate away, missing Moise yet again.
Safrah lay on her mat, unable to sleep. Jina’s mat, on the other side of their small room, was still empty. Jina and Mikhail, along with welcoming some time alone, would also be enjoying the spicy clean scent of the outdoor air after being inside for so long, and maybe they had spotted a lighted beacon in the tower south of the settlement.
Maybe all four of them could go to trade with the lake and river people this time, even if that meant leaving their dome completely unguarded. If they braced the door that opened onto the tunnel before they slipped outside, that might be enough to keep anyone else from breaking in while they were gone.
She thought of the first time Moise had taken her and Jina to the outpost, when she was still a child and Jina not much older. She had been apprehensive about meeting the people who lived outside the settlement, but the small man and woman, barely taller than she was at the time, had seemed friendly, and she had felt both generous and superior at being able to give them new light wands in place of the ones they had brought for recharging.
Traders had not come to the outpost for some time now. That was perhaps just as well, since it meant less chance of any outsider learning the truth about their settlement. She almost hoped that Mikhail and Jina would glimpse no signal that night.
She longed for sleep. Lying there in the dark, too tired to sit up and find something else to do, yet unable to lose herself in sleep, she worried again over what had gone wrong and what she might have done differently.
Her earliest memory was of sitting with Mikhail and Jina and Awan in the library as the older ones told them how much they could learn there and how much more they would have to master. She could not recall exactly what the old people had said in that memory, but she knew that they had often spoken of restoring the settlement and preserving their kind. There were few of their kind left, the older ones had said, but as long as they had a new generation of true humankind to bring up, their species would survive. Perhaps their numbers would even increase to the point where some of them could go live in the eastern part of the settlement, which had been abandoned two generations ago and was now useful only for scavenging. The young ones would have to persevere after the old ones were gone, and care for the next generation.
The young ones had wept for days after Moise died, and Morwen mourned even more deeply than the others. Safrah and her comrades had tried to spare them the worst, burying Moise by themselves before telling the younger ones of his death. When they did, Morwen had thrown himself at her, hitting her with his small fists and refusing to believe her. Moise had gone away, he had screamed, and Ship had gone away, and someday Safrah would go away, too. She had held the little boy while he cried, promising him and the others that she would never abandon them.
“We’ll all stay,” Jina had said, reciting the same words the old ones once recited to her.
“You’re our responsibility now,” Mikhail had murmured, repeating more of those remembered words, “and we won’t abandon you.”
“This is our home,” Awan had told them, “and you’re as much our children as if we had sired and borne you ourselves.”
The younger ones had eventually stopped mourning, but they had also started to keep more to themselves. They did not need Safrah and her companions anymore; or so they seemed to be saying. They did not want to depend on them. They would learn how to look out for themselves before they were abandoned again.
We failed you, she thought, imagining that Moise might somehow sense her regrets from his grave. She and her companions had done their best to look out for the younger ones, even after all the old ones except Moise were dead, felled by accidents, weakened bodies, chronic ailments that could be diagnosed by scanners but not treated easily or cured, or by the infectious respiratory disease that killed most elders who had not already died of other causes. They had stayed in the settlement even after being tempted to leave the outpost with the outsider called Tarki, who had traded with them more often than anyone else. “Most of your people chose to leave, you know,” Tarki had said to her the last time she saw him, almost two years ago. “Almost every one of the First in your settlement, or their children, eventually realized that their future lay with Home, not holed up inside your domes.”
She had thought then of never going back, of asking Tarki to take her with him. Just thinking about that, even though she had resisted such urges, nearly overwhelmed her with guilt. They would be abandoning those who needed them, betraying their people in the same way as had all those who had left the settlement generations ago to live south of the lake and along the river. However humanlike those who lived outside the settlement might seem, they were not truly human. Receptacles of nonhuman genes and alien bacteria; that was what Moise had called them. Trading with those people was useful, because it brought in a few goods, and it kept the lake and river people from growing too suspicious of or curious about the settlement, but it was better to keep them at a distance. When Ship returned, it would see that those in the settlement were the ones who had kept to its mission of preserving true humankind. Ship would reward them for keeping to that purpose, then decide the fate of those who lived along the river.
Safrah turned over onto her back. The outsiders rarely troubled her thoughts these days. Lately, she was growing more fearful of the rest of true humankind, of all those young ones in the settlement who seemed increasingly belligerent and resentful.
“Safrah.”
Surprised, she opened her eyes, realizing that she must have fallen asleep after all. “What is it?”
“Outside,” Jina began, “up in the sky, we saw—I think…” She knelt at Safrah’s side. “Come with me and see for yourself.”
Safrah shook herself awake and got up. Jina had already slid open the panel that led to the room Mikhail and Awan shared. The two girls hurried through that room, past the closed compartment of their lavatory and its cistern, and then through another opening into the passageway that led outside. Awan was ahead of them, holding a light wand. He halted under a ledge, the one where he and Safrah had recently stashed two screens with some of their essential records, until they caught up with him.
Mikhail was waiting for them at the open entrance. Safrah followed the others outside, then turned to slide the doorway shut. The night air was cool, but not cold enough to make her shiver. The only sounds were the sigh of the wind and the gentle, distant swish of the windmills near the top of the hill.
Awan’s wand went out. “Look there.” Mikhail pointed east. Safrah looked up at the cloudless night sky. The second of Home’s moons was well above the horizon, chasing the first moon. She continued to gaze at the vast black bowl studded with its familiar constellations and then noticed that one speck of light in the east was shining steadily instead of twinkling like the others.
Something new was in the sky.
“What is it?” she heard Awan ask.
“Jina noticed it first,” Mikhail said. “It was just above us, and then we saw that it was moving across the sky, to the west. We watched it until it disappeared, and after that, we thought we’d better wait for a while to see if we saw it again or if anything else happened.” He let out his breath. “So we waited for a long time, and just as I was thinking we might as well go inside, we saw it rising in the east. That’s when Jina went to get you.”
“What can it be?” Safrah asked.
“How can you ask that?” Jina responded. “You know what it has to be, either a planetoid or some other piece of space debris captured by Home, or else—”
“—it’s Ship,” Awan finished.
Safrah was shaking now, filled with anticipation and fear. “I can’t believe it,” she whispered.
“There’s one way to find out for sure,” Jina said. “If it’s Ship, it must be trying to contact us.” She darted toward the entrance and slid the door open. “Come on.”