Legacy
"We’re going to make a future we can live in. That’s the least I can promise you."
Back then, when the Legacy arrived at my brother’s world, I was still more a child than a woman. Everything I knew, I knew in the abstract. I’d learned lessons from my schooling, from sports and music classes, not from life. I was seventeen. We’d been in passage for fourteen months then, expecting another year en route to the zone the forward expeditions had been calling the Battery. Our course was roundabout, exploratory, and what little work I did consisted of assisting the senior planetary specialists in analyzing and cataloging data as it came back from the periodic scans our fleet would take as we stopped along the way. My work felt much like science classes then.
It still hadn’t struck me that my brother, Heder, was the seminal person he would come to be, a leader far beyond his time. Heder was my eldest brother, so distant in age that he seemed more an uncle than a brother while I was growing up. I adored Heder. Most people adored him, and perhaps because I felt that way about him it didn’t strike me as out of the ordinary that everyone else did as well. But he was extraordinary. Even before we left Charris, people looked up to my brother. He was handsome and charismatic, and he had an intensity about his eyes that engaged people in such a way that he was taken seriously. Heder Floriston had gravitas. That was the word our father used long before I understood what it meant. Then, Heder, a teenager, would look at my grades and tell me, Tori, I’m proud of you, but the next time I see a report, I want to see progress. And I would dedicate my life to showing Heder that progress because he meant it. He wanted to see progress, and there was nothing more that I wanted in the universe than to make Heder proud of me, to make him notice me.
You can’t appreciate such things as a child, but ours was an exciting time to be alive. On Charris, we were branching out as a people. I heard the word diaspora as a child, and I had a vague sense of the word’s meaning, but I didn’t have an appreciation of the centuries of sacrifice and dedication that had gone into making it possible. Nevertheless, we were alive at perhaps the greatest turning point in human civilization since our branch of humanity had left the home world over a thousand years prior. Charris, with her population blossoming to over twenty billion was a greater world than the one humans had left before the columns, from where all our ancestors descended. The choices then were no longer choices of necessity but philosophical ones. Not how can we survive, but how will we choose to live. Those were the choices that came to define my brother, and for the hundred thousand of us who followed him, they came to define us as well. Someday, thousands of years from now, our legacy, Heder’s legacy, will be a living haven in the stars. This is the story of how it all came to pass, the story of my brother, Heder Floriston, and how he swayed the Legacy fleet away from expediency toward sacrifice, and ultimately, a kind of silent immortality.
Initially when we arrived at my brother’s world, it was supposed to be a brief stop to take a survey of the nearby systems. The secondary purpose was to survey the planet itself for the phosphorous that was discovered from afar in spectral analysis. It turned out to be a rare, wealthy deposit. Soon after, the entire fleet became embroiled in controversy. Heder wanted to stay.
The planet was far from habitable. It was a nothing place. By the letter of the charter, there should have been no discussion at all. We should have stopped, taken our readings, and proceeded along our way toward the developing Battery systems. The phosphorous would have been noted for future mining and shared with our allies on the frontier systems, and the little planet would have been nothing more than a mineral quarry.
Heder, however, took a party to the planet’s surface. He described it to me later as a quasi-religious experience. “I felt as though I was being called to preserve this world for the future. I would like you and Livia to come down with me, to see what’s there.” What Heder trusted in me then, I suppose, was my idealism, or perhaps my innocence. From my earliest memories of Heder, he was always immersed in serious ideas, serious things. I think he just wanted to know if I thought this was important.
Livia, Heder’s wife, was quite distant from me at that time, even though she’d been married to Heder for nearly eight years and had watched me grow up. She didn’t approach me in the way Heder did. To her, I was still a child, and she maintained an aura of authority over me, as well as a boundary between us that she seemed to put up between their family and the other members of the fleet. She was very much Heder’s guardian. That distance between us was so uncomfortable that I often invited my best friend Perla Warden whenever Livia was around. Perla was sixteen and travelling with her parents, so she was always happy to sneak away, especially in this case, as we would be going off-ship, and with Heder, whom she adored.
Under the charter, Heder was the commander of the fleet, but it was difficult for me to imagine him as anything but my brother. The chain of command, though, required a security escort, even on a solitary trip to an uninhabited planet, so a security team accompanied us to the surface.
As soon as we landed, Perla clipped her face-shield down and made for the hills.
“Wait!” I shouted, tailing off after her.
“Hang on,” Livia said.
“Let them go,” Heder insisted. “It’s what we came for.”
Perla was halfway up a sand dune, climbing along a ridge of pink sand and stone that was like nothing I’d ever seen on Charris. The very ground itself was beautiful, pure, and unadulterated. I followed footprints in the sand and caught up with Perla along the ridge high above. She was sitting astride a long, horizontal sandstone ridge overlooking the valley where our shuttle had landed. Heder and Livia were mere specks on the floor of the valley, marching along the perimeter of the hills with the strike team following in tow.
“We just had to escape the Queen of Hearts,” Perla said.
“Livia’s no queen,” I said, “and Heder’s no king. That’s for sure.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about Heder,” Perla said. “People think he wants to stay here, build his kingdom on this planet.”
“People say a lot of things.”
“Look at this place, Tori. It’s magical.”
She turned toward the horizon where the sun was beginning to set behind the pillars of sandstone on the far side of the valley. We’d hardly been there a few hours and the sun was setting, no doubt part of what Heder wanted us to see. The colors were already breathtaking, with the pinks and reds of the rocks, and they only grew deeper and more penetrating as the sun descended.
“It’ll be dark soon,” I declared.
“Then Heder will have to come and rescue us,” Perla said, smiling.
“And Livia will be angry.”
We both smiled. She always seemed to be angry, at least with us.
“Could you ever have imagined a place like this, Tori. This world makes Charris look like a drab, gray place. If only we could breathe here.”
“Victoria,” Heder’s voice echoed in our helmets. “I’d like for you and Perla to return to the ship. Livia is preparing a meal. I’ve sent two strikers up to guide you in the dark.”
“The king beckons,” Perla said. “Let us return to feast at his table.”
“Oh, shut it, Perla.”
“Yes, my princess.”
We were grateful for the escort. On a settled world like Charris, where Perla and I had spent our childhood, there was no frontier such as this. Every space we’d walked around was well illuminated at night and it hadn’t occurred to either of us that once the sun went down we’d be immersed in complete darkness. Navigating the landscape would have been perilous without our guides. One lit the trail ahead, giving Perla a target to follow. I trailed behind her, and our second companion came down after me, ensuring we both made the trek down together. By the time we’d arrived back at the shuttle, there was only starlight and the dull glow from the planet’s small moons. Even in darkness, though, the openness of the landscape was spectacularly beautiful. For years I had wondered about Heder’s obsession for exploration, for leaving Charris and spreading out into the stars. I always knew I would follow wherever he went, but I’d never understood what had drawn him so powerfully to space. It was in those adventurous hours Perla and I came down from that mountain that I finally understood, bathed in starlight, pulled into the openness of the land. After months enclosed on a ship, it felt incredible to be out on the surface of a vast world, even wearing spacesuits as we were.
Livia had prepared the table in the rear of the shuttle compartment, and after Perla and I had taken off our suits, we came in and sat. Livia seemed agitated, I think because Perla and I had wandered so far.
The meal was quiet while we were eating, Perla mostly discussing the beauty of the sand and rocks, the sunset and the stars. Then, when we had finished eating, Heder asked me directly about what I thought of the planet.
“Is it not a rock like any other?” I asked him.
“Now it is,” Heder said. “Would you have any feeling if it became a quarry for the colonies in the Battery?”
“Why should I?” I said.
“Likely they’d carve up those mountains to build countertops and masonry in their cylinders and rings. I’ve heard they value such things.”
“I suppose it would seem a waste to spoil such a mountain.”
“I told you he wanted to stay,” Perla said.
“Perla!” I said.
“She’s perceptive,” Livia said. “How did you know such a thing, dear?”
“Rumors.”
“Do the rumors say why I want to stay?” Heder said.
Perla shrugged.
“How do people feel about these rumors, Perla dear?” Livia asked.
Perla looked at me and I shot back a look as though to say, don’t look at me.
“If my parents are any indication, I think people detest the idea.”
“That’s a strong word,” Livia said. “Detest?”
“Is it stronger than hate?”
Livia and Heder looked at each other.
“How do you feel about it, Victoria?” Heder asked me.
“I don’t know. I’d need to know why you wanted to stay. Forever? Or would we build a seed world like Charris here? And why here? I thought the whole point of leaving Charris was to spread further out into the stars. We’re not even halfway to the developing systems.”
“These are all the questions,” Heder said, looking over at Livia.
“I suggest we have some useful answers if you’re serious about this, my love.”
“Six years,” Heder said. “That’s how long we’d stay. Long enough to set the change in motion.”
“How would you feel about staying here for six years, Perla?” Livia asked.
Perla shrugged. “Would we live on the ships or build structures on the land? Because I don’t think anyone would tolerate an extra month on the ships beyond what we signed up for in the first place. Six years would drive the fleet crazy.”
“Debark?” Heder said to Livia.
She nodded.
“It could be a worse place, my love,” Heder said, looking over at Livia. “The landscape is magnetic.”
“So we’re staying?” Perla said. “That’s decided?”
“It’s not for me to make the decision of my own accord, Perla,” Heder announced. “The charter dictates how a non-emergency course deviation must proceed. I merely make the proposition and the case. The people will decide, as it should be.”
“Good luck,” Perla said.
“Perla!” I said.
“What? Nobody will go for it, Tori. You think they’re going to want to hang around on this planet for six years, to what?”
“To terraform,” Heder said. “To start the process of making this a habitable planet. No suits, no re-breathers. A natural human environment.”
“How long will that take?” Perla asked him.
“Roughly two thousand years.”
Perla laughed. “As I said, good luck, Heder. Truly, though, I don’t wish you much luck. It is pretty here, but as you said before, this planet is a quarry.”
Heder and Livia exchanged a long look. I was not privy to the conversations they’d had about the planet, so I wasn’t sure what exactly was being exchanged between them, but Heder thanked Perla for her honesty and we stood and took the shuttle back to the fleet.
The delay at the planet only heightened the speculation that Heder was attempting to change the fleet’s course. That charge was a serious one, largely considered a breach of trust. The charter each voyager signs and the manifesto before it clearly spell out the intentions and philosophy of the expedition, the ground rules under which this new society will be formed. And on Charris, it was no small thing to lead an expeditionary fleet. For a leader to act against the charter called the entire founding philosophy into question. I knew Heder knew this, yet somehow, he was doing it anyway. There was tremendous angst with every minute we lingered at this little world. I could feel it around every corner of the ship.
Heder called me to his room the following day. He didn’t tell me what was about to happen, but he instructed me to dress for a formal occasion. When I arrived, both Heder and Livia looked like royalty and Heder bore the same serious disposition I remembered from when he was an athlete, the moments before an important match. There was a directness in his eyes that told me this was not just any day, any moment. Heder asked me, “Victoria will you stand beside me now?”
“Always,” I said.
It hadn’t occurred to me that these were anything more than supportive words, but he meant it in the literal sense, the legal sense, for he needed two members to stand with him against the charter to propose the amendment to it. My heart skipped a beat in my chest as I realized we were walking toward the executive conference room aboard Legacy to do just that. It was that one single beat of the heart, that was how long it took me to think about it, how long it took to remember that no matter the cost, I would always stand with Heder. Livia must have caught it, that moment, for she looked over at me and smiled in a way she’d never smiled at me before. It lifted me up.
When the conference room opened, the glare of the representatives met us, and I knew that beyond them, a hundred thousand eyes were trained on us—every last person on all the ships—and I stood at the right hand of Heder Floriston. He was given the floor, and then he spoke.
For the good of all the people and the galaxy. We all recognize those words as the opening words to our charter. Empty platitudes? I’m certain that’s what many on Charris thought of our words. Idealistic, empty words. Are they simply platitudes? I believed in them then, just as I still believe them now. And when I set down the words of our charter, I not only believed in them, I believed in you, the people who would sign your names to them and to back them with more than just your names, your words, and your presence here in this fleet.
The charter calls for two-thirds majority of both the section representatives and of the people to act against the charter. I tell you I will settle for nothing less than eighty-five percent, so confident am I in your judgement to either affirm my own judgement or to set it right. I seek neither to manipulate nor aggrandize to suit my own ego; rather, I aim today to share with you an experience I felt I couldn’t ignore while walking on the surface of this beautiful world.
This system was unmapped before our arrival, though other expeditions had passed close by. Our stellar cartographers were shocked by how near-perfect this planet is for habitation, for none of the signatures were registered by preceding expeditions. This place lacks only a breathable atmosphere and water. The star is stable, at a temperate distance, and the world is encased in a robust natural magnetosphere. This world is spectacularly beautiful, beyond the wildest dreams of Charris or any other natural environment humans have occupied for a thousand years easily.
I set eyes on the sundown on this world, remembering the accounts of the peoples of Earth, who wrote sonnets to the beauty of their starlit skies, and I swear to you the words of our charter came to me—for the good of all the people and the galaxy. And I knew them to mean more than I thought when I first set them down. We are the people, but we are not all the people. Far more came before us, and far far more will come after. And I swear to you I felt certain that this world was meant to belong to them, so many souls that numbers mean nothing in describing their multitudes and their brilliance. I knew that we had stopped here for a purpose, to pay a cost, not for us to reap, nor for our children or grandchildren, but for those who succeed us by such distance that they will be far more distant than strangers. Yet those people are kindred to us, for they will walk this world for thousands of millennia because we believed in the words we signed our names to. I trust you now to honor those words, and I promise to abide by the people’s choice in accordance with the people’s charter.
When Heder had finished speaking, we left without much sense for the reaction of the fleet. The section representatives themselves didn’t make their feelings evident. Their job was not to be reactionary, and so soon into the expedition, they were still learning their roles and their constituencies. My emotions hung somewhere between pride and shock, for I was caught by surprise by the moment and by the power of Heder’s message and delivery.
“I’m proud of you,” my love, Livia said, kissing his cheek as we returned to his state room. “Now, it’s in their hands.”
She embraced me as well, genuinely. I felt as though my emotions were a poor guide for what the fleet would decide. After that moment, nothing would feel right to me except staying and finishing the job Heder had called us to.
I was not privy to the rebuttal, nor did I know the speaker. From what I learned afterward, he had appealed to the facts of the charter, the potential cost to the fleet, and the delays it would certainly cause us in the founding of our new world. Those points failed to sway the fleet. Section representatives fell on Heder’s side by eighty-seven percent, largely as a reflection of the fleet’s sentiment. The people’s vote was above ninety percent to terraform the planet. What remained was to settle the logistics and begin.
Beneath the section leaders, there were scientists, engineers, and specialists of all kind. Heder insisted that I be with him at all times, learning the intricacies of the project. He called me his assistant to the leaders and project managers and he treated me with the respect of a colleague in front of them. Whenever I erred, though, he would wait until we were alone and set me straight.
“I need us to be perfect, Victoria. They need to see us working in unison for them. When the time comes, we will have to endure the hardest of hardships.”
“I am prepared,” I would tell him, but for what, I had no idea.
In those early days, there was zeal amongst the fleet for the mission. This adventure was merely a delay for the great adventure of settling our new home. The challenge here, though, was met with a different kind of optimism, a philanthropic one. None of the doubts that would come with time and the hardships of the project had taken hold yet in their minds. There was a near-universal eagerness about the fleet, especially when everyone had a chance to set foot on the planet themselves. The world became a place in their hearts and minds standing on it, watching the sun rise and set over it. There was a debate back then about naming the planet. XB-150-Gamma was its designation in the cartography files, and there was enough more pressing work that everyone simply called her Gamma.
On the planet, engineers and builders oversaw the construction of chemical plants. There were sites in the northern hemisphere for mining metals for the bots that would carry out much of the labor. There were rare battery elements in abundance all over the world, so much of the transport and labor could be automated more easily than if we needed to go searching in the asteroids for minerals and metals. Much of the labors of the early days went into building a temporary settlement, the outpost we came to call Gamma City.
Heder oversaw most of the project from his state room aboard Legacy. Whenever it was time to be seen, Heder always had me at his right hand. Livia, meanwhile grew ever more friendly with me, often pulling me away from work at late hours to get Heder to stop for the night.
“You’re working your poor sister to death, dear,” she’d say. “Victoria deserves a few moments at the end of the day to take a breath, even if you won’t take one yourself, Heder.”
I hardly saw my friend Perla during those early months. Each time I saw her she called me princess and genuflected. But after all that, we were back to our normal selves, enjoying one another’s company. On a rare free day aboard Legacy, she introduced me to a boy she was seeing named Marcos, whose family was on the Telios, and they were from Telios on Charris. I’d never been there, but from the stories he told and the images he shared, it seemed a lovely city to grow up in. Marcos seemed to sour on me when he recognized who I was. “Heder’s sister,” he said, “oh.” I’d known there was a small minority in the fleet who didn’t like Heder, but it was rare for me to experience that sentiment directly. After a few hours of awkwardness, he opened up about it.
“It’s not that we don’t like your brother, I guess. It’s nothing personal, Tori. But we should have caught up to the Dreesons already. And now we’re going to spend six years orbiting this planet none of us are going to live on? It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, I understand, but practical sense is what I mean.”
“It’s perfectly okay for you to disagree, Marcos,” I said to him. “It’s the cost of leadership. I just hope it won’t prevent us from being friends.”
“No,” he said. “It’s just, you know, it’s like my dad says, two years to get to the Battery is a voyage; eight years is an exodus, and none of us signed up for an exodus. Heder just talked us into it.”
Marcos and Perla were not the only young people struggling with the transition to life around Gamma. I brought it to Heder’s attention that the sentiment could easily shift quite negatively against the project if we didn’t get the younger generation off the fleet and engaged in the work on the planet’s surface.
“Organize it,” Heder told me. “You set it up, Victoria. Mentorships with the terraforming specialists and robotics engineers, corresponding coursework shipside. I want a plan within the week and I want it running within the month.”
I worked sixteen hours a day for the next twenty days setting up the program and pairing apprentices with workers. One night, Livia found me in the office asleep on my desk. She’d come for her husband, who was still in his office as well. It was the only time I ever saw them properly fight.
“You are abusing your sister’s devotion, and it’s shameful,” I remember her shouting at him, and I remember her shooting me a pre-emptive look when I instinctually opened my mouth to defend him. “You’re going to bed, dear,” she said to me. “Come now.”
A few weeks later, the program launched to the support of almost everyone in the fleet. It reduced the number of idle hands to near zero and would double the number of capable personnel for when we arrived to settle in the outskirts of the lettered systems where other fleets from Charris were settling. It changed the trajectory of the fleet’s morale, and the two years that followed were perhaps the best time for our people of the entire decade of resettlement.
During those years, Livia was my greatest advocate, pulling me away from work and insisting that I keep a social life with my friends. She knew that I would work endlessly if she didn’t intervene. Heder was even more dedicated than I was. It was important for him to be on site as much as possible, even working through the night on occasion or sleeping on bunks planetside. In Heder’s mind it was his vision. He abhorred the idea of a single person working harder than him to realize that vision, so he toiled alongside the workers on every site on the planet.
After the first two years, all the infrastructure was built to construct the chemical reprocessing plants. We were even growing food on the planet’s surface to the delight of the Ag specialists and the cooks. Had it not been for this long string of successes in the buildup, the fleet may have fractured entirely following the tragedy at the Blackbird site.
A few months into year three, we were bringing the chemical plants online one-by-one, spreading out across the southern hemisphere with one team while another team worked its way down from the cold north. These were atmospheric processors, passive flow, designed to capture sulfides and release oxygen incrementally over thousands of years until the balance was correct.
I didn’t understand the chemistry, so I didn’t have any sense for the danger of the work. As I understood it, the dangers were modest. At times, though, there’s no accounting for how the simplest things can go wrong. The explosion at the Blackbird site killed three engineers instantly in the blast, while two more workers died when they were caught in the fire trying to rescue a remaining colleague. She died three days later, suffering from the after-effects of prolonged exposure to the native atmosphere when their work space was breached. One of the engineers killed in the initial blast was Armand Warden, Perla Warden’s oldest brother.
Work ceased immediately around the planet. There is no good time for a tragedy, but some times are clearly worse than others, and this accident occurred just as fatigue for the project was setting in across the fleet. Even I had been carrying a strange, dark sense of foreboding about some intangible force that seemed to cover the pink horizon on Gamma. Then, as if on cue, it arrived. The outrage wasn’t simply about the deaths, for no one leapt to the conclusion that Heder had expected something like this to happen. But, as the accusations held, he should have known it could, and for a time, tired as we all were, and angry as everyone was, that sentiment became enough.
Opposition factions formed demanding the very inquiry that Heder and I were already selecting independent investigators for. Then, we were accused of choosing loyal people to whitewash the results, though we had no desired result but the truth, for we’d done nothing wrong. Heder wanted understanding as much as anyone. Yet it seemed every outburst of anger preceded our earnest efforts by hours, which only seemed to enrage people more. We were accused of reacting to the people’s reaction rather than dealing with the situation itself.
That week was the first time I’d ever seen my brother doubtful. One of the engineers who’d perished was a boyhood friend of Heder’s, and he asked me if he was responsible, as everyone said he was, for the death of his friend and for Perla’s brother.
Every decision we made was fraught with the weight of powerful emotions, and none of these decisions, it seemed, had any options that would satisfy the faction that was now calling for a no-confidence vote on Heder’s leadership. The motion, they decided, was to be put forth after the memorial service out of respect for the dead. I suspected it was less out of respect than for the optics of the moment, but Livia instructed me never to speak that way.
Livia and I planned the state service. Heder himself paid visits to each of the families, and though I wasn’t present, I was present when Livia insisted on watching the playback from Heder’s security bots. The scenes grew progressively more hostile toward Heder with each family as the anger built in the community. The one exception was the last of the families, the Friars. The father of Emily Friar, the girl who was an apprentice to the chief Blackbird chemist, he shook Heder’s hand and told him, “She believed in you Mr. Floriston, and we still do. Em wouldn’t want us to turn our backs on you or on this project.”
Still, I could almost see Heder beginning to buckle. For the first time in my life, my brother seemed mortal. The evening before the memorial service, Heder, Livia, and I met in his stateroom to review his role in the service, to refine his speech one last time. He kept shaking his head, and I could tell it didn’t seem right to him.
“How can I face these people and say this?” he said at one point. “This is a political speech, Livia.”
“You wrote it.”
“I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t. How do I pay respect to their people without it appearing I’m trying to absolve myself?”
“I don’t know, love. Maybe you don’t. Maybe there’s no way you won’t be perceived a certain way. But you will go out there, and your family will be at your side. You will speak to our people. To do any less would be the end of you, Heder Floriston. So you’d better set your back straight and fast.”
Livia left us after that.
“I should be alone,” Heder said, gesturing to the speech. “I need to work on this.”
“Maybe you don’t, Heder. Maybe you should just speak to them as though you were a brother, a friend. Tell them what’s in your heart and forget about the planet for a moment.”
“The planet is the moment!” he said. “It is the moment. That’s what I cannot say. It means more than our lives.”
“This planet?”
“No. Not the planet. I cannot say. It’s what the planet means. Victoria, it’s about who we are.”
“And who they were?” I said.
He looked at me angrily.
“If that’s what you intend to say of the dead, Heder, then we may as well fly back to Charris right now, because that is not what this fleet wants to hear. This isn’t about philosophy, brother. Those people were not an abstraction.”
“I know that!”
“It won’t sound that way to anyone if you speak of the planet instead of the dead.”
“We cannot allow their loss to break our resolve,” he said, shaking his head.
I didn’t want to leave him that evening. I was afraid for him. He was in pain and confused and grieving far more than those six lives. It was as though the universe had broken when they died. I was afraid for what he’d say the following day. I didn’t know what to say to him, though, and I knew if I stayed my presence would be no help to either of us. I didn’t see him until the following day when we flew down to Gamma City together. Livia and I exchanged looks but little more. Apart from the hum of the shuttle, the ride was nearly silent.
There wasn’t a venue fit for purpose in Gamma City. The largest courtyard held hardly more than a thousand of us, nor was it a fitting place to remember our friends and family by. All of these structures were drab, temporary fixtures that were functional and nothing more—round metal girders that looked like scaffolding, a pink dirt floor, a dusty dome clouding the sun above. What little was recovered of the victims had been cremated. It was hard not to long for the constancy of Charris in such a moment.
Prayers were said and songs sung. The families spoke of their memories and their sense of loss. Then eyes turned to Heder. Livia was beside him, as was I. Neither of us knew what he would say. He drew in a long, deep, silent breath before speaking. Then he began.
I have been asking myself a question for a very long time now—long before we left Charris together. The question is this: Why must our convictions cost us so much to hold? Even in the best of times, we sacrifice something to hold them. Otherwise, they would be mere idle thoughts. Now, it is easy to see that our convictions can cost us everything.
We honor the value of these six lives because we feel a loss for their absence. And we feel that loss in our bones because we know their lives meant something, not just to their families but to all of us. That truest of feelings is the same conviction we set out with from Charris. If we had been content to merely exist, we could have done it there. We could have been comfortable, led safe, pleasant lives back home. But we didn’t choose to do that. Our departed friends and family didn’t choose to do that. And they didn’t because of their conviction that our existence here in this universe isn’t merely for the sake of it. We expand into the darkness together because we are creatures of light, and our charge is to bring that light with us where we go like a beacon.
My wife Livia’s father was a builder. And before he let us go into the stars, he said that he admired what we were attempting to do, but he told us that if he’d learned one thing as a builder it’s that it costs something to build anything but that no one ever knows the cost in advance. I didn’t understand what he meant until now, because he joked that if anyone knew the true cost in advance, nothing would ever get built. The cost to me of this expedition is that I will never again set my head down at night without the memory of the sacrifice of these six brave souls here on Gamma.
Why must our convictions cost us so much?
Because at times like these, when tragedy unmoors us, shatters our confidence and our pride, besieges us with grief and sadness, and shows us the vastness and depth of the darkness, it is our convictions that remind us who we are. They set us on our feet again.
We were meant to bring light to this world, even if it is not upon us that such light ever shines. I promise I will do everything in my power to see that we honor their memory by spreading their light to the darkness, whether that be on this world or another, for they were far more than flesh and bone, just as all of us are and forever will be.
A long silence followed Heder’s words, so long that I wondered whether the people felt what I did that day.
After the service, Livia and I walked with Heder as he went to pay his respects to the families one last time. He was surrounded by people in the crowd. Countless hands came to rest on his shoulders as he passed.
Neither Perla nor her boyfriend Marcos were present when we greeted the Wardens, though I waited even after Heder and Livia carried on. I didn’t see Perla that day, and she stopped responding when I tried to contact her afterward. Marcos called me later to say that Perla never wanted to see me again. I couldn’t help but think that had been my cost.
The no-confidence motion never materialized. Quietly, with no formal planning or discussion our expedition’s mantra became “for the six.” People would say it when heading off for work, when getting up from the table, when a shuttle departed, when a job was complete. There wasn’t a question of leaving. We counted down the days for them. No longer did we wonder about our purpose or its cost. We were changing this world for the six now, every day until it was done.
The cost wore on Heder, though. Perhaps no one but Livia and I could see it, but even as he smiled when greeting section leaders and workers, there was melancholy there. And as the months ticked by, while I expected his grief to recede, the weight only seemed to take deeper root in Heder’s heart. His eyes grew distant. On Legacy, he would spend his time staring out the window into the abyss. On Gamma, his eyes were always fixed on the hills along the horizon. Even when I asked about it, Heder would smile and look down. Livia confided in me that she felt sometimes that she was married to Heder Floriston’s shadow, and she joked that if it weren’t so formidable a shadow, she’d have left it long ago.
As the final two years of the project approached, the workload became so reduced by our efficiency and the increasing number of capable engineers, the problem of idle hands returned. Heder suggested mining. This, he said, would reduce the workload for the people who came to settle the planet in the future. Not only would they arrive to a breathable atmosphere, but there would also be workable metals in stockpiles at the most desirable locations waiting to be shaped into cities. He challenged our metallurgists, miners, and geological engineers to test their skills in ways that would amaze our successors in the millennia to come.
By the final year, water was beginning to bubble up from the lowest plains in pools and puddles. To be among the first to visit one of these sites with Heder and Livia beside me was a sublime experience. Heder, at one point, turned to the section leaders with us, and with a bewitching passion about his eyes, stated, “Friends, you are standing upon the floor of an immortal sea thousands of meters deep. An unfathomable force of nature takes its first breaths.”
Livia knelt and filled a container with that water, sacred as it now seemed to all of us.
We walked beside Heder in those final months, but it seemed Livia and I were no closer to him than the people, most of whom no longer knew what to think of him. Livia and I did much of the talking, both in meetings and formal functions of the government. Nearly all the decisions fell to me, and when I had doubts and brought them before Heder, he would almost always tell me, “Victoria, your judgement is sound and your heart true,” which was his way of telling me that he trusted me to do what was right. This usually drew his eyes from the horizon for long enough for a smile to escape his lips, and once, toward our final days on the planet, he looked at me and said, “My, you have grown.”
In the months before departure, there were murmurs within the fleet of staying. The talk hardly rose to the level of debate. The isolation was the main reason we didn’t consider the possibility in the first place, and it was one of the reasons the thought of remaining gained no serious traction. Sister civilizations were getting their feet beneath them far off in the Battery, and we were now six years behind. The reality that it would be two thousand years before residents of this world could be anything but prisoners of their technological structures was another strong reason to depart. In my mind, though, Heder was the real reason. His presence loomed over the fleet in an almost mythological fashion by then. To live here ourselves after all the work we’d done, supposedly for the benefit of others, I think people would have been afraid to even suggest it in Heder’s presence.
Our final days on Gamma were spent extracting equipment and breaking down structures that were destined to disintegrate over thousands of years of exposure. I kept so busy I couldn’t truly consider the realities of leaving this place.
On the eve of departure, I took a shuttle down to Gamma City for one final sentimental walk through the dome before the bots began to deconstruct the superstructure. Several groups of people had the same idea. In the courtyard, among the stragglers, my eyes met Marcos first and then Perla Warden. I hadn’t seen her for nearly two years at that point. She looked older, and she was pregnant. She instinctively attempted to look away as though she hadn’t seen me before turning back toward me. She’d left Legacy to live with Marcos aboard Telios after the Blackbird tragedy. We’d never reconciled.
I took a half step toward her before realizing what that space meant to her. That temporary forum was the place her family had gathered to bury her brother. My doubt about encroaching on her at that moment must have been apparent to her, because she came to me.
I tried to smile at her sympathetically. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it. Perla smiled at me much the same way. I don’t think she could have understood how totally alone I’d felt all those years, buried in work, standing like a statue in the shadow of my great brother, quietly toiling. I’d missed her so much I nearly broke down in tears at the sound of her voice.
“Oh, Victoria,” she said. “I can’t tell you I’m sorry. All I can say is that sometimes your heart hurts so much you don’t know where to put it.”
I threw my arms around her. “I’m so sorry,” I said, weeping the way I wanted to the day of the service. “I’m so, so sorry, my friend.”
Perla didn’t linger long. She embraced me, but she didn’t make conversation. When she pulled back, she nodded and held my hand for a moment before turning and walking back to Marcos, and there I was again, alone, buried in all the emotions of leaving this place. I took a long, deep breath in the courtyard before leaving for the airlock and walking out to Legacy’s shuttle just as the evening sky was turning red.
The following morning, with little fanfare, Heder gave the order to resume our course to the outlying systems. The work was finished, yet underway, I struggled to find more, to find something to occupy my mind, something that would give me anything to do but process the reality of those six years of life that had faded behind us. I was twenty-four years old. We were embarking on a new life on a new world, yet there was no sense of adventure in it for me any longer. I found Heder one night in his stateroom, staring out into the darkness, trying to catch the light of a streaking star.
“What are you doing in here, Victoria?” he asked me.
“I was going to review the extraction reports from the outlying mining sites.”
“We have a year,” he said, smiling as he turned back toward the window. “You know I told Livia I was going to ask you to lead when we got to Dreeson’s.”
“What did she have to say about that?”
“That I would do no such thing. That you’d done a life’s work and were owed a life.”
“None of us are owed anything.”
“Careful, sister, or you’ll end up an old woman at thirty, staring out an empty window at open space.”
“Does it feel like a dream to you sometimes, brother?”
He turned to look at me again.
“A lost speck in the cosmos,” he said. “Drifting away, never to be seen again. And all that work. The most important work ever done.”
He looked out the window again.
“Livia’s right. She always is. You deserve a life, Victoria. It was our idea to wrestle with immortality, let us pay the cost.”
“You don’t need to pay anymore, Heder. The work is done.”
“They’re going to pin my name on that rock. Even after everything. All the work of others. The lives. The deaths.”
“Maybe our ignorance was a blessing, Heder. If we’d known the cost, surely we wouldn’t have paid it. Then who would we be?”
“Different people. Happier people.”
“Lesser people.”
“Perhaps.”
“I love you, brother. I always will, no matter how far you go into the distance.”
He turned back to me again.
“When we get to the Battery, Victoria, I promise it will be different. What we build, we’ll build for ourselves. We’re going to make a future we can live in. That’s the least I can promise you.”
So many nights aboard Legacy, I thought about the world we’d left behind—Heder’s world, breathing, her seas bubbling to life. I thought about the sunsets, the pink rocks. I thought about someone—millions of someones—taking a breath there, then another. In the early days, on our long nights working, Heder would tell me about the green fields that would roll over the pink sands, the white clouds of water vapor dressing the skies, and the future good fortune of the peoples who would walk his world. Now, from a hundred light years away, speeding into the darkness two thousand years before their world would even be habitable, I imagined I could see their faces, the residents of Heder’s world. How fleeting and insignificant all those imagined lives seemed on the scale of a planet’s lifespan. I’d picture a face I’d never seen before, and then I’d imagine it was real, and then I would ask myself if there was one among all those countless faces I wouldn’t have given my heart for.
I reach back to Earth in awe. I reach forward. Every last word I have written is true.