I almost laughed.
“Well, they’ve got a surprise coming. Earth’s not there.” Relief poured over me, and all the tension in my neck flowed away. “They’re heading for a big hole in space.”
The look on Shiro’s face silenced me. I glanced around the room. None of the Siitsi looked at me. They were all bent over their instruments, but no one was working. Even Priya avoided my eyes.
“What? What’s going on?” It felt like that was the story of my life now, waiting to figure out what was happening.
Shiro straightened up. “Let’s take a walk, shall we?”
I followed him out through the hatch, leaving everyone else behind. A million questions burned in my brain, but they all seemed ridiculous. Why would the Botanists go to a solar system that was basically empty? The whole Horizon project started when Mercury started wobbling in its orbit. Our scientists calculated that it would eventually fall away from the sun and head straight for Earth. Both planets would be destroyed by the collision, and the energy released would throw Venus right into the sun, and Mars right into the path of Jupiter. The chain reaction would destroy everything around our little star. It had all happened two hundred years ago. There was nothing but empty space there, and maybe a scattered debris field.
We trekked through the close hallways of the Siitsi ship. All my questions hovered on my lips, but I could tell from the set of his shoulders that there was no point asking Shiro. He’d tell me what he wanted to tell me on his own time. I’d learned that much already.
He waved a hand and a hatch opened before us. I stopped in my tracks, awed by the view in front of me. He ushered me into the room, and the hatch closed behind us, leaving us alone in a small, dark room.
“I come here to think,” he said. “Magnificent, isn’t it?”
And it was. The entire wall was a window looking out into the glory of space. No lights distracted my eyes from the glittering array of stars spread out before me. The entire bright swirl of the Milky Way shone in that window, and I was speechless at the beauty of it.
We had windows in the Delta. Tiny, thick-glassed portholes allowed us to squint out at the darkness. After so many years in space, they were cloudy and dim. But this was clear. The blackness between the stars was a perfect void.
In the dark of the room, Shiro guided me to a bench. I sat down next to him, awed by the spectacle in front of me. I knew the galaxy was huge. I had spent my whole life flying, then drifting through it. But I had never seen it like this.
He pointed, and I followed his finger.
“See that group over there?”
I had no idea which stars he was pointing to, but I nodded.
“That’s Cetus. The constellation named after a whale by the ancient people of Earth. Tau Ceti is the star in the middle. It’s where the Alpha landed. Where my son lives.” He adjusted his point a tiny fraction. “And there, that’s Eridanus. The fifth star from the bottom is Epsilon Eridani, where the Beta people live with their bugs.”
I knew my constellations, and the groupings of stars looked nothing like what I remembered. “They’re not shaped like I thought.”
He dropped his pointing arm. “Not from where we are. Those stars are on the other side of the galaxy from us. Lucky for them.” He pointed in the opposite direction. “That’s where we all came from. Siitsi don’t name the constellations like we do, and our sun wasn’t part of any constellation humans ever named. It would look different depending on where you were looking from.”
I strained to see where he had pointed. Which star was our sun? They all blurred together in my vision.
“There’s nothing in that part of the galaxy. Where we are now, in this ship, we’re part of the most populated area. You were heading for Chara, and it’s a good thing you didn’t get there, because there’s not a habitable world in that system. Your descendants would have all died in orbit around a planet with no atmosphere. But there are a lot of worlds in this relative area. Lots of alien species. Some of them are friendly. Others . . . Well, you met the Botanists. Some are even worse than them.”
The grandeur of the view was starting to wear off.
“So why does it matter if they’re heading for where Earth was?”
He sighed. “Because it’s still there.”
Words failed me. I couldn’t do anything but wait for him to explain.
“A couple hundred years ago, a lot of space-going species were just developing the grav drive. They tested it in what they considered to be an uninhabited part of the galaxy. It didn’t work very well and sometimes played havoc with other star systems near it. Doesn’t work like that anymore, but back then, everyone was making a mess of things trying to get it right.”
A horrible thought dawned on me. “Someone did it? Someone pushed Mercury out of orbit?”
He sighed again. “I’m sure they didn’t mean to. And who even knows what species it was? Everyone was testing their own versions all over the place. When the Siitsi finally noticed what had happened and went to investigate to make sure there was no civilization anywhere around, it was way too late. The Horizon ships were long gone. Earth was a disaster, and not just from the gravitational changes.”
He lapsed into silence for a moment and I waited, still looking out at the black sky full of stars.
“All of Earth’s hope rested on the Horizon fleet. When our ancestors left, there was nothing left for the rest of Earth’s people to hope for. The planet had maybe three years left before Mercury was going to hit it, but all the cooperation the world had found to put together the Horizon fleet crumbled to nothing. Cities fell into chaos. What remained of governments fired nuclear weapons at each other. The weather was going haywire, with most of the Earth either too hot, too cold, or too underwater for people to live. Civilization as we think of it was destroyed, and hardly any humans survived.
“That’s how the Siitsi found it. They’d improved their grav drive by then and stabilized Mercury and Earth back to normal. But it was way too late. The few humans that survived, under a million, were bombed and rioted and frozen and baked back to the stone age. No technology. They were hiding in caves and bunkers, and by the time they realized the planet wasn’t blowing up, there was basically nothing left.”
I could picture it. A wasteland full of radiation. “But some of them survived?”
He nodded. “Some did. They’re primitive, but they’re alive. The Siitsi have left them alone to rediscover what they lost. They’re no threat to anyone, and there are no other inhabited worlds anywhere near them. They’re safe.” He grimaced. “They were safe.”
“Why didn’t the Siitsi help? If there were people there, why didn’t they give them shelter or take them somewhere safer?”
Shiro’s face looked blue in the dim light of the observation room. All the lines around his eyes were highlighted. He looked old and tired. “They have a lot of self-imposed rules for dealing with other sentient species. It would have broken their laws for them to interfere on the humans’ home world. Even if they were helping.”
“Why?”
“Years ago, when they were new to space travel, they found a planet of primitives. They were birdpeople of a sort, and the Siitsi were overjoyed. When the primitives started dying off in droves, the Siitsi realized they’d brought a disease with them, something the primitives had no defense against. More than half the population was wiped out. They made a law that they would never again set foot on a sentient species’ home world. They sent their own beacons out to all the planets they knew about that didn’t have sentient life, so that if another species ever colonized it, they could go meet them without endangering the world the colonists came from. It’s how they found us. But they will never go to Earth. Not even to save it.”
“But now the Botanists are going there.” How could they not? However they figured out where we came from, they had found us, with our alien DNA. All the seeds we had in storage . . . How tempting to a species that lived for new life forms to assimilate into their own. The humans of Earth were sitting ducks.
“Humans are totally unknown to every other species.” Shiro’s words echoed the line of my thinking. “Earth is in a wasteland of uninhabited systems. Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani are far removed from everything else. Someday someone besides Siitsi will find them, but hopefully they’ll be ready by then, and those worlds have Siitsi help. Earth doesn’t.”
I remembered the cloak and mask he’d worn. Pretending to be a birdman. “It’s why you go out in disguise. No one else knows humans exist.”
“Right.” His eyes dropped away from the night sky. “They have your people. They’re heading for Earth. If they get there, it will turn into another Botanist world, nothing but vines and plants. They’ll destroy everything. And if they found it by analyzing data from the Delta’s computers, the Botanists on that ship might even know where the Alpha and Beta ships went.”
He finally turned to look at me. “They seem to be a secretive species. They won’t have told any other Botanist ships about what they know. No competition from their own kind for the planets they want to colonize. But Jonah,” he said, eyes boring into mine, “if we don’t stop them, it won’t just be your brother and your friends that die.
“It’s every single human in the galaxy.”