When humans first arrived on the distant, icy shores of Europa in the year 2124, they had already been considered several decades late by the scientific postulations of their predecessors. Try though they might, mankind had struggled for longer than hoped with the problem of prolonged, manned, space-flight. Despite this failure of timing, there was no doubt that their crew of eight men and women were probably the most qualified pilots in all of mankind’s history. No one had more experience, or more preparation, than these.
It had not been an easy set of decisions, choosing and preparing the mission’s crew. There had been much debate over the ethical ramifications of sending such young pilots on such a long and inevitably life-altering journey. But with a guaranteed minimum flight of eleven years, it had felt necessary to ensure they all had as much…time…as possible. And truly, with a crew so young (their captain, the oldest, had only just turned a rather severe twenty-three when they finally began their flight), one would have been hard-pressed to find a more single-mindedly dedicated or idealistic team. Each one of them prodigies who’d been rigorously trained practically since birth, they represented only the best and brightest that humanity had to offer. And while they all conducted themselves with as much dignity as would be expected of such bright, young professionals, they maintained a naivete and invigorating enchantment that kept their training lighthearted. They thought fondly of one another, often poking good-natured fun to remind themselves that they were all, indeed, still friends, and that there was still joy to be found beneath the weight of their obligation to their species. (Sergei Sokolov, the youngest at only nineteen years old, had been a master pilot in simulators before he’d even stopped sucking his thumb, and the resulting misalignment left him affectionately nicknamed “Baby Buck” by his crewmates.)
In any other case, there may have been more time given to the crew to mentally prepare; more time to mature, to decide that they knew what they’d be giving up. They’d anticipated myriad disasters, calculated and planned so many contingencies that when the time came to practice launch, each pilot had logged no fewer than 300 hours simply committing to memory the precise routine of each day’s beginning and end, and every potential variation on it. There were vitals to take, fuels to measure, parse, and ration, food to dispense and waste to dispel, exercise regimens to maintain, coordinates to chart, asteroid fields to navigate. But very little time was given to the crew to contemplate the enormity of their sacrifice; after all, barely any of them knew what time humanity had already lost to the folly of their forebears. So, with this burden tucked away for the time being, they were able to focus solely on the task ahead: outrunning the ocean.
It turned out that, in spite of however many eons of evolution, it still took an inordinate amount of resources to sustain even a single human for any significant period of time, and day by day they continued to multiply. As the resources slowly dried up, the fields began to burn, and the smoke and smog eventually grew too thick for even the birds to fly through. A yellow-gray haze filled the air, choking trees and staining what little remained of the ice caps. When they eventually melted, the water started rushing up shorelines, eating away at coasts until it had reclaimed the skyscrapers and the streets and the abandoned shops, and all the shuttered schools and darkened hospitals were reduced to cancerous reefs. So much salty, poisonous water filling up the alleys of cities and the hollers of homesteads while the clamoring masses lined up at military checkpoints outside newly dubbed “Highground Cities” and perished by the hundreds without enough potable water to go around, that finally someone rich enough decided that Somewhere Else had to be the goal. And when Galileo II had finally begun to take shape, it was with great desperation that they commanded eight children to wade, alone, across the solar system; the last bastion, they suspected, of the Exploration Age of Man.
In the end, there was still so much left to human error that, even with all that planning and preparation, when they finally breached the welkin and began plummeting away from the warm embrace of atmosphere, they did so with only the smallest of hopes that they would reach their destination, or find what they were looking for.
Truthfully, there was little they could expect to find at all apart from some frozen lakes and, if they were extremely lucky, some indication that they could, maybe, seek refuge far out here among the stars one day. It had long since been established that there was, indeed, carbon on the shattered tundra of Europa’s surface, but with layers of ice fifteen miles deep harboring what little feasibility for life there may be, the crew knew to keep their hopes to a minimum. They were all prepared for failure to varying degrees. There were the more serious possibilities to consider: after all their time circling the planet, they could still fail to land on the surface, or a catastrophic equipment failure could prevent them from exiting their craft, or render sample collection impossible. Their craft could explode the moment they entered orbit.
There were simpler possibilities, of course. If they reached Europa and found all their postulations to be wrong, found that it was a surfaceless gas-giant with no discernable foundations for life, it would be at once both devastating and humbling that the sciences of their homeworld had been so terribly wrong. If they arrived to find exactly what they’d hoped, water and ice and carbon and hydrogen and all the other necessities of terran existence, it could still be too radioactive to ever sustain life, or the journey too arduous to repeat. They could simply find nothing: a patch of empty space where they’d thought Europa to be, but where, somehow, there was little more than a cosmic cloud refracting light back to the arrogant lenses of their distant machines. And while none of these potentialities were necessarily any more disastrous for the human race than their alternatives, something heavy and ominous still clung to the back of the crew’s neck like sweat, tickling their spines as they drifted ever closer to the freezing buoy.
Yes, they were nervous for their arrival, and certainly they all dreaded any possibilities of failure; but more than this, the crew had begun to feel like they were being watched. It was true that they were as closely monitored as they could be with the time-delay between transmissions to and from Earth, but something deeper had begun to stir within the ranks. Strange dreams became more frequent; whispers and voices could be heard around empty corners, and the air had grown dense with a silent presence. Something seemed to loom in the horizonless distance, and as they drew closer the foreboding dark seemed to suck them in like water down a drain, disappearing them into crowded night. But with nothing to be done but swallow their collective dread and pray, they all dutifully, and silently, pushed these thoughts away as best they could. After all, hadn’t their entire lives been building up to this? Surely their fears were unfounded: tricks of the light; too much time away from home; not enough sleep. Whatever it may be, it no longer mattered – there was nothing now that could keep them from it. They were prepared for anything. They had to be.
What they were not prepared for, however, was the familiar sound of waves crashing in the pitch-shrouded distance as they stepped out of their craft onto the surface some two thousand days after launch.
Captain Richard L. Mercer, the first human to set foot on the surface of Europa, found himself aghast at the stretching, dark horizon. The dim glow of the sun, radiating now from 500 million miles away, was little more than a faint torch in these far reaches. Seven headlamps were clicked on one-after-the-other around him before the captain collected himself and followed suit. What had he expected to see? A bright afternoon and white picket fences? He shrugged internally and welcomed the futile beams, their narrow permeations clouded like beacons through water.
The captain flipped on his headlamp and suddenly, there it was: foggily lit beneath a spray of mist and foam, an ocean lapped at an alien-bronze shore not forty meters from their landing site. Vast and dark and yawning, the waves swept back and forth before them, dense and omenic with the same indifferent power the whole human race had come to fear – the ever-encroaching maw that had driven them here in the first place.
The dazed young captain stepped away from the group, meandering closer to the hum of Europa’s mystifying swell. He’d spotted something. How had he spotted something? There should be nothing. Nothing. And yet, there was, murkily glinting in the distance, something. And Captain Mercer had to know what.
The slow and steady exhale of his suit's propellant system whispered under the weights that kept him tethered in the thin atmosphere, his drift in Europa’s comparative lack of gravity clunky and jolting, so it took him several minutes to arrive, spellbound, at the edge of the water where the little something was waiting for him, rocking back and forth against the occasional buffeting sea. It was with absolute shock that he stooped to retrieve, incomprehensibly, the glass, corked bottle lying there at the softly droning mouth of Europa’s amber shore, 340 million miles from anywhere imaginable.
A message in a bottle.
There were no possibilities, and no contingencies for the impossible, so the captain grasped at its tiny walls and nearly wept at his own furious incredulity. How? How was it here? The others began to arrive around him, their overlapping questions and exclamations of upset somehow faint in the speakers of his helmet intercom as he pondered the absurd little bottle in his hands. Overwhelmed, the captain let out a vicious “hush” across the crew, and the noise died down as they, too, turned their attention to it.
Several more minutes of silence passed before Corinth Caddell, twenty-two year old Payload Specialist and biologist, piped up from the fringe of their little crowd.
“Are you gonna open it?”
The look the captain gave him as he was awoken from his trance was full of tears, a child whimpering in the dark. Corinth recoiled a moment, and the captain regained his composure, feeling ashamed. “I suppose so,” he eventually replied.
The cork was easier to remove than he’d expected. It slid out happily, and the captain was surprised that he could still feel the exchange of air between its loosely-sealed lips and the nothingness that surrounded them. There may even have been a pop as he decanted the weathered vial, but he could no longer hear anything, save for the ever-spray of the sea. He tipped the bottle over and shook, letting the tightly-wrapped cylinder of parchment funnel its way into the neck of the bottle and shimmy out into his open, gloved palm. He could barely register it there, light and insignificant against the weight of his suit, and as he removed the small piece of twine that kept it coiled, he could see, for the briefest moment, a scribbling of unreadable text in a language he'd never seen (if it was any language at all), that he felt he couldn't adequately perceive. It somehow seemed to sink into the page like canyons, stretching into shadows and curling back up like mountains, dipping and climbing like waves, brushstrokes catapulted into the ether as if to lift the very words from the scroll.
But the pages unfurled and suddenly everything was rearranged, letters falling into place in an instant so quick that only two crew members, years later, would ever claim (in the heavily redacted writings of their private journals) to have seen it happen. What appeared was a simple set of paragraphs, neatly typed and arranged on a twelve by sixteen inch folio, unimposing and disarmingly familiar. Someone, something, had managed to cast a message-in-a-bottle into the shivering tide of a Europan sea, and the eight terrified humans to have found it were now almost too shocked to read.
So it read for them.
It took a moment for each of them to begin to hear the words. A comforting whisper started to take shape in each of their minds, slowly drifting up from a memory and blooming into full and nostalgic cadence, gaining dimension as it trickled out from somewhere at the back of their heads. For Captain Mercer, this voice eventually became his mother’s.
His dear, beloved mother, dead twelve years now. Whispering in his ear.
He jumped, and saw each of his crew startle and falter, turning shocked eyes to each other and wordlessly confirming what each of them could already hear was true. There was a voice in their heads, and as it began to speak, they could feel its words fill them with pictures and shapes, scenes dripping through the script like multidimensional projections, and they listened in silent awe:
“Dearest Love,” it softly began.
“Let me tell you a story; one I’ve thought about many times. In fact, it might amuse you to know that I’ve been thinking about this story since the very beginning, although to me that feels like only yesterday.”
Without warning, their helmets went dark. The crew collectively gasped and protested, clicking at wrist-affixed control panels and smacking at camera ports, but then there appeared a faint glow in the seeming distance of their periphery; not a light, but a nameless and unspeakable warmth that felt as if it were radiating from so far behind that it was within. It strangely comforted them, called to them, and they each grew still and quiet as they gazed into the unfettered night. The voice inside began to paint a picture:
“When I first saw the darkness, I thought it was beautiful.”
Somehow, they could all feel the abysmal dark, warm and inviting, glimmering ebony shards of vacuums pulsing in the suddenly very deep lenses of their fragile polycarbonate helmets. The voice went on:
“A massive, boundless infinity, stretching and constricting forever, everywhere, enveloping and expelling every mote of inky blackness there ever was, all around me. I let it swallow me for eons. For a space of I don’t know how long, I was cradled in the burgeoning darkness of existence. It was bliss. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
But eventually, the darkness started to become thin, and as it did I began to see through it. Imagine my surprise when, where I thought there had been a wall of nothing, there was really an ocean, careening out at all sides, and so close I could touch it! How could I have missed it for so long? I still laugh sometimes to think it had been right under my nose the entire time.”
The voices laughed merrily in their heads, and some of the crew couldn’t help but smile to hear such long lost joy, those echoes of childhood friends, first and brief loves, guardians. They fell, enraptured, into them. Into It.
“But there it was, a vast garden of stuff, too murky and thick to pierce. Slowly, it changed, and I watched, albeit rather impatiently. It warped and grew for millenia, and I marveled at its impenetrable cosmic wonder. Dots of light and swirling clouds of dazzling dust began to burst from the darkness, reaching out and glinting from a billion miles away, cascading like liquid fire from the Nothing. Here, for the second time, I saw the most beautiful thing I ever had.
I spent another forever in longing awe before the bloom of reality began to unfold and I could finally run my fingers through the ultra-dense sands of superclusters, twirl stars and planets around my arms like vines, eke light from the eddies of new universes like sap from a tree. I saw so many beautiful things. Saw them for so long I almost forgot that they were beautiful.
And then, all at once, there you were: slouching out of the mud, building cities, hurling yourselves at the sky. So much had already happened that I had to go back to watch it for a while. That was a first,” it laughed. “In all that time, even when I'd realized I'd missed something, I never went back to see. I didn’t even know there was a ‘back’ to go to. What was Time to me?
But this was different. I was enamored. With the colors, with the sounds, with the fleeting explosions of passion and pain and fury that every breath seemed to be, with the pure, vibrant life of it all: trains and colugos and Ovid and the neon wings of so many thousands of birds, all breathing and growing and howling so much existence into the void that, for the first time, I started to feel alive myself. How could I not? There you were, a creature shouting love at the heart of the world, and you forced that heart to beat.
Not everything was beautiful, mind you. I learned to weep, and to hurt, and to want. But there was always still so much to see, so much hope and brilliant light beaming out across reality that I soon learned to weep in silence, and to ache with love.
I couldn’t look away. And every time I saw something new emerge, grasping and kicking and wailing into the world, I still felt that it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Every single time, you were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I remember all of it: I remember the first time someone pet a dog. I remember the first voices to sing. I remember how I laughed to see the first golden toads hatching from their rainwater pools, and how I wept to see the very last one disappear. I remember the first child to grab his mother’s hand and ask her to stay, the first white flag ever waved, the first bread ever baked. I remember the first time anyone ever asked ‘why,’ the first time someone cried while reading a letter from a friend, the first time someone missed a call they couldn’t return, the first time anyone ever looked at the stars and wondered if they were breathing, too.
I remember when you first left all of that life behind and pierced the clouds, still searching for that something — that someone — else.
I remember when you found them.
I remember the strange and beautiful things you became together, the odd little planets you chose to keep and the ones you left behind; the massive, sprawling cities with arms of interstellar highways as long as an Earth year’s light and the tiny little farms you settled on in the Arp Cluster when you rediscovered your love of corn (far too removed from anything like home to know that they were really closer to beans, or that real corn had gone extinct long ago). I even remember when, somehow, after all that time and all that space and all the moving and growing and changing you’d done, you grew homesick for your little blue dot – for that churning marble you hadn’t seen in almost a thousand years. I remember how it ached and burned in me to feel, as you felt, that once-again distant call from the familiar void. And now, I remember finally understanding what that feeling meant.
The truth is that, now that I’ve come to it, I don’t really know what to say. I wish I at least had a name. A goodbye without names is something only strangers do. But you’re no stranger to me, and that is what this is: a goodbye. I often wondered if I would ever have the heart to let go, but I think I’m ready now.”
The voice was silent for a moment as the resolve of decision began to settle upon the souls of its expectantly enraptured audience. When it spoke again, it had grown steady and warm, and in this lulling calm it began to weave its final farewell:
“For the longest time, I assumed my purpose was simply to observe. To soak up the raw, visceral energy streaming out from every corner and every pocket of the universe, to watch the stars move and to count them and to just…be. But you – you with your digging and your building and your flying and your constant reaching up and out and away – you convinced me that nothing was made to sit still. Entropy has to be achieved, after all. I suppose the closest thing in your experience to this would be death; I'm not sure if it will look or feel anything like that, but I'm not afraid to find out. So I’m going. I don’t really know where, or how, because I’ve never been anywhere or anyhow else, but I want to make you as proud as I have been to watch you.
You don’t know how incredible you are. Your lives are so short, and yet you live them for so long. Even now, as you seep out into the stars by the tiny millions like slowly spreading ink, rushing headlong into the abyss, to a place without time and without meaning, you seem to teem with so much more life than could ever conceivably fit in so small a thing. And that's the truth of it, isn't it? It can't. No vessel could ever hold all that marvel and wonder, could ever tame the wild and ancient urge to reach farther out, to seek and to expand and to hope. To love. Because I also remember how deeply you longed for each other when you were apart, how unending the need and the desire to be together, how unwilling you always were to accept defeat. Nothing could ever hold you.
But it tried.
The Nothing found you, heard you laughing from a million stars away, and awoke. Awoke to see your smiles and your parades, your games and your gifts and all the tiny, gentle moments you kept wrapped like crystals in cotton, and held you close. It cradled the soft, vibrating little orb of your universe and somehow learned so much more than it had ever known to imagine. So now I think I’ll make an orb of my own; one with bright blue skies and whispering trees and lapping green waters, just like the ones you showed me. I’ll fill it with every fish I ever saw glinting in the waves, every barking dog and mewling cat I ever wondered about from around a corner, every chirping, squawking, singing bird that ever split the skies, every bug and leaf and fig and seed and every grain of sand to ever be.
And then I’ll fill it with my memory of you. My memory of where you went and where you’re going, where you are now and where you decided never to stray: my imperfect recollection of every perfect face and every beautiful voice that you are; a menagerie of your histories kept warm in some place I’ll build for myself on the other side of this veil. I wish you could see it. Maybe one day you will.
I don’t really know where you are now. If my aim is right, you should be at home, on Earth, standing at the shore of a softly purring ocean as the sun sets brightly in the distance, thinking about the future. I remember the first time someone did this, too: tossed a bottle into the water without any guarantee or hope of being found, but willing it so deeply that even I felt the tides turn to carry it. My aim may not be very good; for all I know, you’re on Europa already, or maybe you’ve sped past me and are hurtling towards the Bode. But I am willing this to you so deeply across time and space that I know, one day, you’ll find it. Somehow. Maybe someday, you will understand that you are everything to me. You are Mother. Father. Brother. Sister. Child. You are all the everything I had always dreamed of knowing. Of being. You are so much more than you will ever know.”
The crew had been still and silent for a long time. Had there been anything to see in the still-darkened hoods of their suits, none would have seen it through the blind of tears floating gently at their eyelids. But they were smiling.
“So, Richard Mercer, Alhena Locke, Sergei Sokolov, Danika de Wees, Corinth Caddell, Rivka Eitan, Malcolm Omozee, Kesey O'Neil, this is where I must leave you: on some shore, with nothing but a letter, and a promise that you will. That you must. And a promise that I love you, more than anything else in existence.”
They could feel something building, the light growing behind them and inside them until it was bright enough to illuminate the whole of reality all at once for them to see, their gaping eyes blooming against the rippling fabric of spacetime. In a single instant, in the same soft voice, they each heard the universe breathe it’s solitary sigh of life into the open mouth of space, it's one long breath that had been held and waiting since the very beginning of time, and with a collection of gasps, they all fell softly to the umber regolith of Europa’s beach.
Borne on that sigh, that whisper the universe had cultivated out of every particle of energy, every atom of cosmic dust, every mote of meaning that had ever been made or wished or wanted, was the only thing the voice had ever known; all it had treasured, and all it now had to give:
The name of every human who ever was, kept like a secret in gently whispered underbreath, now danced upon the vapor of spitting tide as if dandelion heads carried by some dream of grassy breeze.
The pregnant breath burst in the crew’s head like a splitting atom, like the largest and smallest thing they could conceive, filling their brains and their blood vessels and the whites of their eyes with names, names, names, nothing but every name there ever was:
Emil Brokkr, Zedong Shun, Thomas Ashley, Guusje Pilar, Shuhrat Dipak, Amaury Anita, Hawa Zuhura, Ran Sachie, Eshe Halima, Circe Minor, Dev Dati, Geno Zornitsa, Constantin Théophile, Enyinnaya Surendra, Dan Kenneth, Helen Repa, Frank Bluemont, Ahava Ofer, Nthanda Hauwa'u, Svetlana Alpers, Yuu Saori, Caimin O’Brien, Hanna Avidan, Elissa Ruiz, James Novotny, Rehman Raza, Julia Clarke, Nerina Cadi, Susanna Finley, Imamu Mwanahawa, Pencho Lazar, Christopher Gale, Mirjam Hella, Elvia Demetrio, Saray Felicidad, Seong Young-Gi, Zainabu Sauda, Juliane Aziz, Gang Yuuto, Claudia Mörth, Kyle Marita, Rachida Dati, Leola Harriet, Si-Woo Sung-Hoon, Gouyen Nanuq, Victor Bisset, Dagomar Degroot, Hayat Abrar, Jeannine Axelle, Joseph Erickson, Piotr Jablonsk, Diba Mohtasham, Reina Yūma, Emmitt Kathy, Xia Lin, Yefim Yevdokiya, Gohar Arpi, Marion Wendell, Neo Zuri, Tim Brinkhof, Furqan Raza, Lis Calogera, Jung-Hee Jong-Su, Bahati Hawa, Basia Yaffa, Yumi Shou, Georgiana Chatterton, Oliver Jennrich, Steve Brusatte, Petra Genko, Kurou Toshiko, Bukar Adwoa, Tatiana Dumitru, Naja Walela, Celeste Zoraida, Stando Stefani, Ahmed Ayda, Ojigkwanong Túpac, Harmen van Dijk, Kokoro Kenji, Vincent Pierrick, Gili Raz, Gabriel Bella, Harry Pedersen, Sandu Marian, Onyekachukwu Olawale, Aron Arnar, Valeriya Korol, Carel Fabritius, U-Jin Nari, Ladislao Ángel, Giusto Pierluigi, Janice Lee, Jan Jofre, Nicolau Hèctor, Clay Tel, Rodolf Jaren, Ipati Iosif, Mia Taylor, Tatu Eshe, Aquila Arya, Meredith Kelcey, William Holden, Su Zhi, Erik Rosolowsky, Susan Stranahan, Somsak Ubon, Akemi Hotaru, Hendrick Avercamp, Michael Benton, Dollie Maud, Rebecca Sullivan, Khalida Tarek, Mustafa Sadia, Anna Quinn, Aya Lan, Seth Bernard, Richard Hitchcock, Mali Pakpao, Jean-Charles Ange, Ren Shaye, Desi Chikelu, Elizabeth Gibney, Dag Leif, Tahlako Yolotzin, Spas Aleksandra, Nasim Nazeer, Gretchen Krohn, Olivier Michaels, Ashura Imamu, Eun-Woo Duri, Gertie Marlena, Raoul Gaetana, Long Xiang, Nikolay Naum, Rocío Virgen, Iqaluk Miski, Avi Shachar, Jonatan Edvard, Lyndon Kelley, Benjamin Moser, Dave Prosper, I'tidal Imtiyaz, Monica Ross, Maryana Vlad, Roger Cohen, Ziauddin Muhammed, Kostya Juliya, Stephanie Pappas, Upendo Malaika, Cora Berchem, Dan Ismael, Ayhan Alaba, Doris Urrutia, Atahualpa Ulloriaq, Harutyun Gadar, Vasco Dionisia, Meghan Bartels, Rory Carroll, Kelsey Rajani, Uhuru Rajabu, Maclay Hoyne, Eun-Jung Joon-Ho, Milo Popovitz, Shinsuke Chōko, Tom Metcalfe, Yaling Zhihao, Rodrigue Pheobe, Kouji Katsu, Wolfgang Karolina, Marshall Field, Saba Zuhra, Seydou Imani, Melor Aleks, William Redfield, Tam Hadar, Young-Hee Myeong-Suk, Dagny Hans, Rana Mariyam, Orfeo Leonzio, Auxentios Adhelm, George Bauer, Rosaura Valeriano, John Evelyn, Piloqutinnguaq Goyaałé, Aliyah Widad, Christian Thorsberg, Sunan Ratree, Adam Leroy, Shin'ya Nana, Merv Dre, Will Dunham, Fridenot Abdullah, Haruna Mitsuaki, Mark Clampin, Ralph Holcock, Hroderich Pellinore, Willka Shikoba, Anelia Pavlin, Yukiko Mieko, Maryamu Mandlenkosi, Sonja Anderson, Mathilde Christianne, Massimo Leonida, Magdi Rahat, Rupert Kermit, Yasmin Shahzad, Mwanajuma Pili, Edmond Ophelia, Øydis Albert, Sarah Kuta, Qasim Hanifa, George Hilton, Neelima Louisa, Arthit Klahan, Will Sullivan, Aqissiaq Meona'hane, Marga Laura, Lebogang Tjaart, Paolo Veronese, Herve Mikael, Asher Elbein, Chausiku Furaha, Ted Wachholz, Ai Xiulan, Benjámin Hédi, Sydney Green, Alec Luhn, Kulthum Waheed, Stefaniya Saveli, Gita Chimwala, Horatio McCulloch, Kathy Edison, Kaj Franklyn, Natanael Lina, Moira Ritter, Sylvia Victoria, Sherrie Levi, Margarethe Constance Lieser, Sibonakaliso Madalitso, John O’Leary, Ji-Hu Mi-Gyeong, Tayyiba Aisha, George Sindelar, Koronis Břetislav, Thomas Williams, Ian Sample, Maximian Ivana, Thaksin Arun, Karin Zonneveld, Tammi Katey, Darwin Laila, Chun Zan, Maricarmen Amanda, Linda Lilibeth, Dudley Korey, Cornelia Aang, Alex Iacobus, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Stephanie Halasz, Iris Luna, Duane Garey, Torunn Anette, Manish Taťána, Kausar Wayne, Eugene Sladkey, Kjell Libbie, Martie Kathleen, Aaminah Mumtaz, Martin Aldegar, Akaki Waheeda, Yorick Tashlultum, Yuudai Yōsuke, Pauline Cash, Alvena Annett, Loren Adria, Lazar Artyom, Clifton Adelaide, Harlan Babcock, Tyra Adele, Kristal Kieran, Ray Pierce, Fern Tory, Asaf Agatino, Isabèl Elisabeth, Elvar Torsten, Clarence Darrow, Nela Sofie, Imani Fateh, Yawen Zedong, Christian Kates, Leonard Blackwell, Marcus Powell, Omri Alassane, Forrest Efa, Viktoria María De La Cruz, Morgen Florizel, Wilburn Emerson, Paulie McKinley, Billy Mag Fhloinn, Rob Loud, Caroline Homolka, Karsten Danzmann, Oscar Holland, Eli Yudin, Kaycee Sloan, Hidemi Tai, Innokenty Natali, Aldric Célestin, Zulfaqar Latif, Awee Payne, Tinashe Saynab, Narine Tigran, Miriam Merav, Arzhel Denielsen, Ekkehardt Lene, and so on, and on, and on, and on, name over name, over name, over name, over name.
They careened around and under and through each other, each one erupting simultaneously like so many gurgling burps of a volcano, billions upon billions of them spoken at once, all one loud, collective, explosive exhale of life, until every member of the crew could feel themselves radiating with every speck of humanity to ever be, spoken into existence by that single breath.
“I love each and every one of you.”
Eventually, the voice was silent, and the dim glow of the sun resumed in the far distance as their helmets were seemingly unveiled. The parchment lay on the ground between them, flapping lazily in Europa’s pelagic zephyr. They were all still reeling, but Captain Mercer was compelled to reach for it once again, plagued to know how many names could have possibly fit in his mind, let alone on the page. His stiff fingers grazed one corner and without the slightest warning, it crumbled into powder and disappeared into the red silicate beach like fine sand into a grate. The captain was suddenly on all fours, pawing wildly at the dust.
“Where did it go? Where did it go?!”
He flung himself around, looking now for at least the cork and bottle, hardly remembering if he had dropped them when the voice began to speak, and after a few frantic moments of frustrated sifting in the ruddy silt, he turned his lamp towards the softly roaring sea. There, returning away, backswept by some undercurrent toward the faint hulk of glaciers looming in the distant blue dark, was the bottle, reflecting dully his headlamp's beam.
Gone, then. All gone.
The captain could feel his crews’ eyes on his back as they stood over him, having lifted themselves from the scarlet dirt, but he didn’t yet have the will to turn and face them. Something the voice had said…something was ringing in his ears that he couldn’t quite hear. He sat there, on his knees, gazing at the waves for several minutes. When a hand finally came to rest on his shoulder and he looked hazily up into Sergei’s eyes, he could see himself reflected back in the glare of his helmet, and beneath this, Baby Buck’s wafting tears. So Buck had seen and heard it, same as him. They all had.
He finally took the tenderly outstretched hand and let himself be pulled up off the soft ground, staring wearily into the questioning faces of the children waiting silently around him.
All of them, children.
Captain Mercer said nothing for a long moment, peering deeply into their shaken eyes, and tried desperately to grasp the muffled words that seemed to shout from behind a hand in his head. His face furrowed, and he was unable to directly address any of his crew. Words were escaping him. All he could think of was names, names, names. He glanced back at the ground, his hands instinctively reaching for the vanished parchment, but found only the redding toes of his boots glowing under the light of his headlamp. There was something he had to do; something he needed to remember, but he couldn’t think around the echoing of names! His eyes began to fill once more with weightless tears, and he raised his hands to his helmet as if to try to block his ears from the tingling sound of aimless syllables and untethered, lyrical fingerprints that threatened to tie phonetic knots around his brain. He had to concentrate:
“It said something important, something we have to take back…What did it say?! ‘Dearest love,’” he recited. “‘Let me tell you a story.’”
The crew glanced at each other in confusion, but Baby Buck, still with one hand on the captain’s shoulder, began to intone the soft words in a voice that carried like deep, resonant music across the misting rhythm of the nearby waves:
“‘...One I’ve thought about many times. In fact, it might amuse you to know that I’ve been thinking about this story since the very beginning, although to me that feels like only yesterday.’”
Slowly, in a sure and kind voice, he spoke the words again to them. But when he arrived at the seemingly endless procession of names, he grew quiet and turned his eyes to the remote sun, unsure of how to continue.
“They're…they’re like a list in my head; I can see them all written out. It’s like…like one long string of letters….” He sighed deeply, and for a moment he was silent, staring into the abysmal, radiant gray of the solar system, waiting for the names to fade away. Then, finally:
“‘I love each and every one of you.’”
Captain Mercer frowned and shook his head, casting the beam of his headlamp this way and that as he searched the empty darkness for something else. Suddenly he could feel Buck’s hand tighten on his shoulder, and he was all at once spun around to face him. Buck’s eyes seemed to glow with a fierce and excited intensity, and the captain could have sworn he could feel the young pilot’s pounding heartbeat through his suit when their eyes met. When Buck spoke, the words emerged like an inflating life raft in a sea, a match lit in a trench:
“‘P.S.: Remember the daffodils.’”
The captain gazed out at the gaping mouth of deep space, the words filling in blanks like a puzzle in his mind, and all at once he could see every staggering, slow step along the path that was now ready to be laid for the rest of mankind – for the children who remained, and those yet to come. He could see massive fields of gold breathing waves of fluttering bloom beneath glowing white skies, sputtering comet tails of rockets flinging sparks into the lightless chasm of the cosmos, ornaments of swirling silver bobbing about the lambent face of some distant other-world. He could see the map of time stretched before him like an ethereal flag rippling under the winds of their flight, the farthest reaches of existence filling his mind as if to burst, and tears of exuberantly hopeful joy began to cloud his vision once more. There would be so, so many places, so many people and things and so much more life than he or anyone else alive could ever have dreamed.
But they were not the first. And as he peered into the perfectly illuminated tapestry of what would be their future, and one day their past, he began to realize the sacrifices that had been made, and those they would still have to make. He wondered if the rest of his crew had any idea what awaited them at the end of this tiny branch of history, or how huge the tree that would grow from its roots. He could see the entirety of his life laid out from beginning to end in vivid hyper-color, its vibrancy of image juxtaposed against its truth – an exact portrait, no doubt, but the body was too young to be so old, weighed down with words, muttering, and he could feel the ache of those years as if they were radiating fire-warmth on his skin. And the crew…he could see their lives, as well, though he wondered if they saw as much as he. The glimpses he caught felt stolen, and the lives too short, so he buried these future memories beneath the dark red sands that had borne them to him and embraced the gift he now understood they'd been given.
“Let’s begin Phase One of sample collection. We might need to move the ship if a tide rises, but we’ll keep an eye on it. No sense wasting fuel if we can avoid it. Kesey, grab the kits from the ship. We all know what to do.”
They stared at him a moment, unsure, and Malcolm took a hesitant step forward.
“...Captain…what about the…the letter? The voice?”
Richard Mercer dusted the staining brick chalk from his gloves and did not respond immediately; just squinted into the thronged future, out and away across the stars, the promise of tomorrow glinting like some remote pharos in the night.
“It’s a five and half year flight back to Earth, Commander Omozee. We’ll have plenty of time to worry about that on the way home. Right now, we have a mission to complete. So let’s get it done, and do it well.”
Some questioning glances were exchanged, but no one protested. The crew dispersed back to the ship and began pulling appliances from cubbies to scoop at the tender sand and plunge into the chilly sea, small lights of blinking meters bright in the constant twilight. The captain stood at the bellowing shore of Europa’s vast and reaching ocean, still staring at nothing while the whole of reality poured itself into churning pools behind his eyes.
“Yes,” he thought. “I will remember the daffodils. And the neon wings of so many birds, and the grasping hands of children, and the names, and the corn, and the stars…and the promise. And I will take it back with me, and then we will all remember this beautiful future.”
The captain wondered a while longer at the festooning weave of humanity as it lay draped across the universe, undulating and folding with time, and after he found no more tears to fight away, he turned back to the humble craft that had been suddenly dwarfed by the looming macrocosm of space and drifted to rejoin his crew. The years that lay ahead called softly from the darkness of eventuality, as if the very voice of Europa's frigid waters were lulling him out to this foretold destiny. In the far gloom, the Earth peeked from behind the darkened veil like a star emerging in the first dusky moments of night, and all of time and space surrounded their tiny little existence, wrapping the Earth and all of its people (however far across the sky) in a velvet cloak of possibility. The sea chanted in the lowlight, its slow quaver a drumbeat against the hollow void, and the ebbing fingers of waves lit the damp red ground in mirror-shine with each hungry stroke. The small, fragile humans resumed their selfless work, all dreaming of a far-flung paradise in the stars.
In the trackless abyss, Forever lay before them, eager and waiting.
