Movement I — The First Thing to Fly

The Long Noon, Movement I of IX. Draft.

Survey record — Epsilon Eridani g. Terrestrial, 1.05 M⊕, 1.02 g. Orbit 1.057 AU, year 438 days. Obliquity 159°: retrograde rotation. Insolation 0.405 of Earth’s; mean surface 270 K against an airless 200 — the difference is greenhouse, and it is load-bearing. Glaciated, with open water: ice sheets reach latitude 29°, leaving a belt of sea and land around the equator. Ocean 46 %, ice 49 %, cloud 44 %. Atmosphere breathable candidate. Biosphere faunal, coverage 0.60, oxygenic; vegetation pigment #7c6c43. Structural ceilings: animals 65 t, trees 124 m, flight marginal. Satellites: none. Plate tectonics, active. Deposits: banded iron formation, rich.

— the catalogue the settlers carried, which was right about everything and prepared them for nothing

1

One hundred and thirty-one years, ten months and some days out from Sol, with the drive turned around and the whole ship groaning gently into its braking burn, Anežka Řeková was in the forward garden, thinning carrots.

She was one hundred and twenty-nine years old and had done this, by her own accounting, eleven thousand times. The garden did not care that outside the hull a new sun was swelling. Carrots bolt if you crowd them; that was as true between stars as it had been in the ground of Moravia, where her great-grandmother’s great-grandmother had presumably also knelt with wet knees and thinned a row, in the silly abundant daylight of Earth. Anežka had never seen Earth. She had been born in the third year of the crossing, in the row of cabins behind the aft heat exchangers, and the launch generation had still been numerous then, and loud, and certain.

She was what was left of them — not of their number, but of their touch. As a girl of nine she had held the hand of Souček, the seed-keeper, who had stood on Earth in actual rain and never tired of saying so. Souček had held other hands in his time, hands that went back and back, hand to hand, to the world where hands evolved. Every year of the crossing that chain had lost links, and for the last decade of it the chain had ended at Anežka: one small woman in a garden, the colony’s last living person who had touched a person who had touched the ground.

Nobody said this to her face. She found it ridiculous and said so. “I am not a relic,” she told the children who were brought forward to shake her hand anyway, generation after generation, “I am a gardener,” and she would fold their fingers around a seed instead, because in her opinion the direction of the chain was wrong. You did not reach backwards to Earth. Earth flowed through. Things went downstream.

Her great-granddaughter found her there on the morning the world first resolved — Marta Řeková, born in the ninety-eighth year of the voyage, ecologist, thirty-four, with the flat calm of the shipborn and dirt under her nails from the same garden. Marta had a tablet with her and an expression she was failing to manage.

“They’ve imaged the terminator,” Marta said. “Grandmother — it’s turning backwards.”

“Backwards,” said Anežka, to the carrots.

“Retrograde. It was in the catalogue — obliquity one-five-nine, we’ve known for a century — but nobody felt it until Havlíčková put the timelapse on the mess screen and the sunrise line was walking west to east. The navigators kept rechecking their frames. The sun will come up in the west, every morning, forever.” Marta turned the tablet around. “And look at the colour.”

Anežka sat back on her heels and looked, a long time, at the first true picture: a fat crescent, banded white at both poles — great sheets of ice reaching down to the twenty-ninth latitude like two closing hands — and between them, around the middle of the world, a belt of dark sea and dark land, and the land was not green. It was olive, bronze, old gold; the colour of an oiled hinge, of tea left standing, of a hillside in the last hour of an autumn afternoon. Vegetated to sixty per cent of the ice-free ground, said the survey annotations. Large mobile animals inferred. Atmosphere breathable, candidate. Sky, empty.

“The colour the star makes it,” Anežka said, which was a line from the catalogue, and the closest thing the crossing had to scripture. Then she went back to the carrots. “Backwards,” she said. “Well. Nothing in my garden ever grew the way the manual said either. We’ll fit.”

2

The Poledne had been built to be taken apart, and over the last months of the deceleration it obligingly began to die, shutting down ring by ring, pouring its people and its stores down into the landers like a tree pulling its sugars into the root before winter. Nineteen hundred and forty people. One hundred and thirty-two years. On the last morning, the garden rings were harvested bare, and Anežka oversaw it in a wheeled chair she had accepted under protest, holding the final basket of the crossing in her lap as if someone might try to confiscate it.

They landed in the belt, of course — the world had left them nowhere else. Poleward of twenty-nine degrees the ice owned everything, two blank white kingdoms visible from orbit like parentheses closing on the sentence of the sea; between them ran the habitable ribbon, and in the ribbon the survey had found a meadow: high ground in the lee of an old fold range, above a wide, slow, nameless river, four hundred kilometres from a shallow sea. Grass — call it grass; it was low and dense and bronze — sloped down to water the colour of dark beer. Beyond the river stood the forest, and the forest was the thing no image had prepared them for, because the canopy stood one hundred and twenty metres up, and then went on standing there for three thousand kilometres.

The first landers came down in the meadow’s morning, which is to say, with the sun rising in the west behind them, throwing their shadows east — long thin shadows pointing the wrong way, which every person aboard noticed and no person mentioned, each believing themselves alone in the vertigo. The light itself was two-fifths of the light of Earth: not dim — the eye is a logarithmic instrument and refuses to be told what dim is — but low and warm and slanted, the amber of a late afternoon that did not progress. A whole world lit like the hour when work is nearly done.

There had been, aboard, a long and characteristically bitter argument about first footfall — the captains had a short list, the council had a longer one — and Captain Ipek Aydın had ended it in the only way that would hold. She sent for the wheeled chair.

So the first boots on the ground of Epsilon Eridani g belonged to Anežka Řeková, aged one hundred and twenty-nine, who had asked all her life to be spared ceremony and who stood up out of the chair at the foot of the ramp — waving off, with real irritation, four separate offers of an arm — and put her weight onto the grass of another living world, the closest thing to Earth that would ever touch it. She stood a moment, testing the gravity as one tests bathwater: one gee and a swallow more; home’s weight, said her knees, and then a little tax. Her breath ticked and hissed in the filter mask — the air was breathable, the survey insisted, but breathable and cleared were different words, and the biologists had won that argument for once.

She looked at the bronze grass for a while. Then she bent — slowly, with the extreme parliamentary dignity of the very old — and pressed one bare hand flat against the ground, and held it there, completing, for whatever cold accounting the universe keeps, the chain of touch that ran unbroken from this meadow through her own small body, through Souček and his rain, back hand over hand to the riverbanks of Africa. Downstream, at last, she had said on the ramp. It only took a hundred and thirty years.

What Marta remembered afterwards was not the speeches — there were speeches — but the sound underneath them, when the pumps and fans of the landers cycled down and nineteen hundred people fell silent at once, and for the first time they heard the world itself. Wind, moving through bronze grass with the same dry conversation grass has everywhere. The river, working. From the forest across the water, at intervals, a sound like a stick drawn slowly along a paling fence — some animal’s stridulation, patient, unhurried, utterly indifferent to arrival. And above all of this a sky with nothing in it. No gull to bank over the landers and complain. No dark speck circling the new carrion smell of engines. No song at dawn, because dawn here had never once been sung to, in four hundred million years of mornings. The silence over that meadow was not an absence. It was a geological feature — the oldest thing they had yet found — and every one of them stood inside it and understood, before a single instrument had been unpacked, the first true fact of the Long Noon: this world was full below and empty above, and had always been, and did not know it.

They kept the catalogue letter. There was a motion, that first week, to name the world — there is always a motion — and it failed without needing a vote. “g” said the survey; g it stayed, the way a newborn is called the baby for a while, by people who intend to learn its name rather than assign one. The river they also did not name, though everyone privately noticed, and Tomáš Vlk said aloud, that the first family of the world was named Řeka and had been landed beside a river, and that the universe should be more careful, if it did not want to be caught writing.

3

The forty days that followed were a survey, which is a polite word for nineteen hundred people discovering one fact each per hour.

Marta’s fact, the one she would keep, came on day six, in the forest. The trees — call them trees; they were columnar, buttressed, and did not branch until eighty metres — made a canopy so high and so closed that walking under it was walking through a building, hall after amber hall, the floor lit in coins and stripes. Her team took cores and climbed. At altitude the air thinned fast — the world’s whole atmosphere was compressed into a scale height of four kilometres, half of Earth’s, so that every metre climbed cost double — and near the crowns, a hundred metres up, wheezing against her harness in air gone noticeably stingy, Marta finally met the natives of the upper storey: small animals, palm-sized, that fed in the crowns and crossed between them not by flying but by falling beautifully — flattening into a membrane, dropping off a branch, and sailing tree to tree like thrown scarves, in glides that lost height the whole way and were spent by the next trunk. A fall with style. It was the absolute ceiling of what this world’s air and gravity would sell to an animal, and the biosphere had been paying the price for aeons, and the price was the sky.

She hung in her harness and watched the scarves go down the hall of the forest, and above the canopy — she could see it through the crown gaps — the empty blue-gold ceiling of the world, unpatrolled, unowned, uncontested since the first sea slime learned daylight. On Earth the air had been invented four separate times: insects, pterosaurs, birds, bats — four independent solutions to the same open problem. Here the problem had stood open on the exam table for the whole life of the world with every proctor watching and no one had ever solved it, because the physics quietly took the pencil out of every hand. Flight: marginal, the catalogue had said, one word doing an extinction’s worth of work.

The herds were somebody else’s fact — Duarte’s teams tracked them from the ridge, eleven hundred head of grazer moving along the river plain like slow weather. The big ones ran to sixty tonnes: pillar-legged, tide-shaped, appallingly calm. Nothing on this world had ever come at them from above, and their whole architecture said so. They did not look up. Ever. There was no muscle in them for it and no reason in four hundred million years — an eye kept on the ground and the horizon, a world of threats that all had feet. The first time a survey drone passed low over the herd, the herd did not scatter; it failed to understand, and continued grazing, while the drone’s shadow slid over their backs like the first sentence of a language that had never been spoken here.

On day nineteen, the biologists having found in the air nothing with any opinion about human lungs, the colony unsealed.

There was a small ceremony, because Aydın understood her people. The first open breath was offered — of course — to Anežka, who refused it with the scandalized economy of a woman refusing a second dessert, and gave it instead to the youngest: a girl of six named Noor, the last child born on the crossing, who was lifted onto a crate, and unclipped her mask with tremendous six-year-old gravity, and breathed in the whole world, and reported — the colony’s first assessment of the air of Epsilon Eridani g, entered solemnly into the log by the captain herself — that it smelled like outside. Which it did: like cold water and cut resin and faint iron and something underneath that no one could place because no human nose had evolved beside it. Anežka, restored to her chair, watched the girl breathe and said, mostly to Marta, entirely satisfied: “Downstream.” That was all. The word was already becoming what it would remain: the family’s entire philosophy, pointed at anything moving in the correct direction.

Anežka spent the days of the survey doing two things. She built her greenhouse — the colony’s food, sealed under film, Earth crops in Earth soil that had crossed as ballast and been composted for a century; and when a junior agronomist, meaning well, drew up a trial plot for open ground, she killed the proposal in committee with a single sentence Marta would spend thirty years learning the size of: “Not in their ground.” Nobody argued. Nobody was sure yet why not; the reason arrived years later and found its chair already set out. That was the seed of the whole office of the Wardens, planted by a gardener, the way everything in this story is planted: small, early, and by hand.

And in the evenings she made Marta take her up the ridge.

The ridge above the meadow was the reason the survey had chosen the site, though nobody had said so in the site briefing: a scarp of banded iron three hundred metres tall, running north out of sight — red and black, red and black, stripes a handspan thick, thousands of them, laid flat once and heaved on edge by some Ordovician of this world’s own. Anežka liked to sit before it while the light went — the sun setting eastward behind them, the face of the scarp catching the last of it and burning like a coal. On the fifth or sixth evening she asked what it was, exactly, and Marta told her: iron that had waited dissolved in an anoxic ocean for a billion years, until something in that ocean invented the splitting of water and began to exhale oxygen, and the sea rusted, all of it, everywhere, the iron dropping out of solution across every sea floor on the world, layer after layer, each stripe a season or a century of a biosphere learning to breathe. The whole scarp was one long entry in the oldest diary on the planet. You could put your palm across ten thousand years of it. It was, Marta said — the word was suddenly unavoidable in the red light — a memory. The only mineral that is one. This world had made the same decision Earth made, back before either could think, and here was the signature, and their own lungs, drawn full of this evening’s air, were countersigning it with every breath.

Anežka was quiet for a while. Two of the scarves came down the dusk from crown to crown across the river, little falling banners.

“When I go,” she said — conversationally, the way she discussed frost dates — “no archive. They will want to make one, they have the footage, a hundred and thirty years of me in the garden. Tell them no. A person is not improved by being complete.” She nodded at the scarp, ten thousand years under one handprint. “One page,” she said. “That is what a life owes the ones after it. One page, and the rest you compost. Look at the rock, Martičko. The sea kept a diary four billion years and spent one stripe a century. It knew what to leave out. That is why it is still here to be read.”

She patted the stone as if it were an old colleague. “The book is in my kit,” she added. “The stitched one. Souček’s seed-log, from Earth. He never wrote in it either. Paper. Paper can’t be edited.”

4

She lasted forty days, which everyone privately agreed was the correct order — cross first, stand on the ground, then die — and no one could say aloud, because the forty days were also exactly long enough for the colony to begin believing she was permanent.

She was not idle about dying; she organized it, as she organized germination. In the last week, when her breath had gone small and she had moved into the greenhouse cot to be among the tomatoes — the physicians objecting, the physicians overruled — she sent for Tomáš Vlk, the senior rigger, and described what she wanted with the precision of a woman ordering lumber. She had seen the survey kites, she said. She had watched the scarves from the ridge. She had noticed — everyone had noticed — what this sky was, and what it had never held. Burial was for worlds that were yours; she had read that in an old book a century ago and had been saving it ever since, the way she saved seed. She did not intend to be put into ground she had herself ruled off-limits. “Build me wings, Tomáš,” she said. “White ones, from the hull cloth. It has come ten light-years; it can go a little further.” And because it was her, and because riggers are sentimental in exact proportion to their gruffness, it was begun that same shift, in the fabrication tent, behind a tarp, badly hidden from a colony that knew precisely what was being built and formed a silent conspiracy to be surprised.

Marta sat with her the last evening, among the tomato vines, under film turned gold by the low western light — sunset in the east now, the day running backwards to its end, and Anežka positioned as always to face the dawn side, the west, out of what she called agricultural interest in tomorrow. They did not talk about death, having a better subject: the seedlings, which were leggy. Reduce the watering, said Anežka. Let them struggle a little; a plant with everything provided grows tall and cannot stand. It was not a metaphor. With her, it was never quite not one, either.

At the end she said: “The book is under the cot. Write the page after the flying, not before — you’ll write a different page after, and it will be the true one.” And then, drifting, with her eyes closed and the low sun on her face, the last link of the chain of touch said something Marta put nowhere in any record for forty years, and finally, keeping her own promise, set down on her own single page:

“Rain, he told me. Warm rain, and you could stand in it. Well. I have felt this world’s rivers on my hands. Tell them: it is the same water. It is all one river, Martičko. It only ever looks like separate worlds.”

She died on the fortieth day, before her strange west dawn, among Earth tomatoes on an alien world, aged one hundred and twenty-nine years: born between stars, dead on the ground, and in between, downstream the whole way.

5

They did not bury her. Burial was for worlds that were yours.

On the morning of the forty-first day the whole colony went up the iron ridge in the dark, and the wind came up the slope out of the river valley, steady, as it did every morning when the belt began to warm, and the glider waited on its cradle at the edge of the scarp: a two-metre wing, white as the hull it had been cut from, ribbed like a seed-pod, with her ashes in a cell at the balance point. Tomáš had built the wing loose-limbed and patient, a soarer, a thing designed above all to refuse to come down. He stood by it all through the waiting with one hand on the cradle, in the manner of a man holding a horse.

The dawn came up in the west.

It would always come up in the west. The briefing had said so for a century; the catalogue line was one hundred years old — obliquity 159°, retrograde rotation, nothing chose this — and Marta, who had heard the number her whole life, discovered on that ridge what the whole colony had been discovering for forty days one sunrise at a time: that knowing a fact and standing inside it are different sciences. The sun rose over the wrong shoulder of the world. The light came the wrong way up the valley, and the face of the scarp went from black to ember behind them, stripe by stripe, ten thousand years a minute, the whole diary of the ocean lighting in sequence like the world reading itself aloud; and out across the river the bronze canopy caught fire crown by crown, one hundred and twenty metre towers taking the light like the tops of drowned cathedrals, and the herd on the far plain stood amber in the amber grass, heads down, sixty-tonne grazers attending to the ground as their line had done since before there was grass on Earth to compare this grass to.

Aydın said a few words, because captains must; nobody afterwards could recall them, and she never minded, knowing precisely what the morning’s actual text had been. Then the wind steadied, and she nodded, and Tomáš let go of the wing.

The glider dropped off the scarp, took the slope wind, and rose.

It went out over the meadow at twice the height of the trees, white against the bronze, silent, circling as it climbed — and it was, wrote Marta that evening, in a stitched paper book from Earth, on the first of its pages, the first thing to fly. Four billion years of sky over this world, four hundred million years of animals under it, an atmosphere that had priced every wing out of existence before it could be tried, an ecology of falls with style — and the first true flight in the history of the world was a funeral: a white wing bearing a dead gardener born between stars, riding the morning lift like it had evolved there.

And below it, on the plain, the herd looked up.

Not all of them. It was not a miracle; it was mechanics — a shadow of a size and a slowness that no inherited category could digest, crossing sixty acres of grass — but a dozen of the great heads came up off the ground, one after another, pillar necks working against an architecture that had never once been asked to do this, and for a long moment the oldest animals of Epsilon Eridani g stood in the risen light doing the single thing their whole line had never had a reason to do, following the white wing west to east across the empty ceiling of their world. The first audience of the first flight. Then the shadow passed, and the heads went down, and the grass resumed, and the sky was empty again — but it was too late, Marta wrote; it had been seen; the page was no longer blank.

No one spoke. The glider found the thermal standing off the sun-warmed iron and turned in it, tightening, climbing — a white curve on red rock, then a fleck, then a discipline for the eyes — and went out high over the river toward the shallow sea, into a morning it would outlast, over a world that would never again have never held a wing.

6

She walked back up alone in the evening with a hand saw.

The light was going the wrong way as it always did now, east-set, the scarp face cooling from ember to dried blood to black, and Marta chose a fallen slab at the foot of the diary wall and cut from it a disc the size of her palm: red and black, red and black, a dozen stripes — a thousand years or so of the sea’s decision, she estimated, give or take a civilization. She drilled it at the rim and hung it on ship’s cord, and it lay against her sternum with the cold particular weight of stone, which is the weight of time asking to be carried. It would hang, though she did not know it that evening, around forty more necks after hers; the office it would come to mean did not exist yet, and would not for eighteen years, until the survey reached the moons of the ice giant and found the neighbours, and everything changed. That evening it was only what it was: a piece of the world that remembered, worn by a person who intended to.

Then she sat on the slab with the last light on her back, and took out the stitched book — Souček’s seed-log, paper, its first owner dead a century, its pages empty of everything except one boy’s inked initials and the smell of a starship’s garden — and did what she had been told, no more. They had wanted, of course, the archive; the council had minuted a proposal that same afternoon — a full commemorative compilation, 130 years of footage — and Marta had killed it in committee with a sentence she had been left for the purpose, and the sentence had held, and it would go on holding for four hundred years: a person is not improved by being complete.

One page. Then compost.

She thought for a long time, in the failing backwards light, about everything the page could hold — the chain of touch, the carrot rows, the wheeled chair standing empty at the foot of the ramp with nineteen hundred people pretending not to look at it; not in their ground; downstream; warm rain a century gone on a world ten light-years upstream; all one river. All of it true and all of it too much; the sea’s diary at her back had spent one stripe a century and was still here to be read. She wrote a single line.

Above her the sky did what it would do every clear night of every year of every life this colony would ever live: it went black, and stayed black, and produced no moon — the world had none; the sea below the meadow rose and fell only for its backwards sun, a handsbreadth, twice a day, the quietest tides of any living shore — and into the blackness came the stars of a sky one settled lifetime from home: the old constellations barely strained, a bright slow wanderer that was the ice giant at six AU minding its own moons and its own history, of which the colony as yet knew nothing; and low over the iron country, in a scatter of strangers, one second-magnitude star with no name in any local catalogue, which was the Sun. Every photon of it arriving that evening had left home before Anežka was born. Marta looked at it the way you look at a lit window of a house you have moved out of, and closed the book, and went down the ridge in the dark to the lights of the only town in the world.

The page said:

We gave her to the sky, because it was empty, and now it isn’t.

End of Movement I.

— Movement II, “The Neighbours”: eighteen years pass; the survey reaches the moons of the ice giant; the disc of banded iron becomes an office.