The Heirs of Earth

CHAPTER TWO

Most folk didn't believe Earth was real, but Rowan was not most folk. She believed.

She knew.

"It's real," she whispered, huddling in the steel duct. "Earth is out there. And someday we'll go there. You know that, right, Fill?"

Her robotic dragonfly tried to flap his wings, but they creaked and shed rust. The poor little creature looked a fright. Rust, dust, and grime coated him, and dents covered his little body. Rowan kept repairing him, but every day, air whistled through the vents, blowing the tiny robot away. Often it took an hour to find him in the ductwork, then another hour to repair him, lovingly tightening sprockets, unbending the teeth of broken gears, and oiling aching joints.

"Course I do, Row!" Fillister said. His voice sounded a little too grainy today, his speakers perhaps clogged with dust. "Real as the gears in me body."

Rowan smiled. "Someday we'll be there," she whispered. "We'll walk along the beach and feel the sand beneath our feet. Well, I will. You can fly beside me. We'll smell the sea air, then find a forest, and we'll walk among the trees and see horses."

"Horses knock about grasslands, not bloomin' forests," Fillister said.

"We'll walk in grasslands too, and we'll feel the sunlight, and we'll drink water from streams. Real water, cool and refreshing, not just condensation on air conditioners. We'll run and fly, not crawl through ducts, and we'll see sunlight, Fill. Warm and yellow like in the stories. And we'll eat real food! Not just scraps. Food like in the movies." She smiled shakily. "I've always wanted to taste some pancakes. They look really good."

Tears filled Rowan's eyes. When she tried to wipe them away, she winced. Her black eye was still swollen, still painful. She had dared to climb out of the ducts last night, to try to steal some food from the casino trash bins. The janitor had caught her—a hulking alien with stony skin and fists the size of her head. One of those fists had left her bruised and reeling and cowering here in the ducts. She had not eaten dinner that night, but Fillister had grabbed her some discarded seeds from the floor before artificial dawn.

She turned toward one of the stainless steel walls of the duct. In the dim light from Fillister's eyes, Rowan could see her blurry reflection. The black eye looked as bad as it felt. Her eye was narrowed to a slit. She touched the puffy bruise and cringed.

She sighed and looked at the rest of her reflection. As always, Rowan wondered if she looked like her parents. She could barely remember them, only what she saw in the single, smudged photograph she kept in her pocket.

Her hair was brown and short. She cut it herself, leaving it just long enough to cover her ears and fall across her forehead, but not long enough to cover her eyes. Those eyes were almond-shaped and dark brown—at least, the eye that wasn't squinting through a bruise. She had a young face, round and soft. She was sixteen already, but it was still the face of a girl.

Earth had fallen two thousand years ago. All the old races of humanity had mingled in their long, painful exile. But Rowan had watched many movies from the Earthstone, and she knew old Earth well. Often she thought herself a mix of Caucasian, Asian, maybe a touch of Hispanic tossed in—but it was hard to tell. The old nations of humanity were long gone, and the survivors had mingled in their diaspora. Today humans were few and far between, the last exiles from a long-lost world, struggling to survive in the darkness of space. As far as Rowan knew, she could be the only human left.

I wish I could see you again, Mom and Dad. She lowered her head. I wish I could see Earth.

"Chin up!" Fillister said. He flew under her chin and nudged it upward. "No need to be so gloomy, Row. Don't you worry. Someday, we'll have hot tea under a splendid warm sun. And you'll ride a bloody fine horse, you will."

She smiled. A while back, she had managed to figure out Fillister's internal programming and give him a Cockney accent. It always amused her, reminded her of Earth.

"A white horse," she said. "Like Shadowfax from The Lord of the Rings." She sniffed, tears on her lips. "Are you up for another movie marathon, Fill?"

The dragonfly bobbed his tiny metal head. "You know I am."

Rowan's smile widened enough to show her teeth. She caught herself and covered her mouth. She was self-conscious of her teeth, how crooked they were, but she couldn't avoid grinning. There was still some joy, even here. She still had a friend.

"Then come on. To the living room!"

She crawled through the steel duct. Her dress rustled. She had sewn it herself from a discarded blanket down at the roach motel. The ductwork coiled for kilometers, branching off, paths twisting, rising, falling, rejoining at junctions. Some paths led to massive furnaces that rumbled like ancient monsters, belching out fumes and fire. Other paths led to air conditioners taller than Rowan, icy beasts like polar giants, sending forth cold winds.

Paradise Lost was a large space station—among the largest in the galaxy, they said. It hovered on the frontier of space, near a wormhole where only the roughest sort traveled. Few decent folk flew this way. Not so close to the border with the scorpion empire. Here was a hive for smugglers, gamblers, thieves, druggers, and countless other lowlifes. They came from a thousand planets.

But not from Earth. Never from Earth.

Rowan had never met another human, only aliens. Large, rough aliens of stone and metal. Boneless aliens that left trails of slime. Reptilian aliens. Furry aliens. Clammy aliens. Aliens as large as elephants and as small as beetles.

All aliens who saw her—a human—as a pest.

And so Rowan stayed inside the HVAC ducts. It was dark and lonely, yes. But it was safe.

As she crawled, she passed by vent after vent, glimpsing bits of Paradise Lost. Through one vent she saw a gambling pit, dark and grimy. A group of aliens—ranging from giant reptilians to dank, feathered beasts the size of chickens—rumbled and shrieked and chortled. They tossed dice, dealt cards, and played slot machines that spewed out crystal skulls instead of coins. Through another vent, Rowan smelled cooking meat, and she glimpsed a group of humanoid vultures leaning over a table, ripping into a roasted alien with many tentacles. Rowan's mouth watered, and she hurried by before the scent could drive her mad. A third vent revealed a robotic brothel. Aliens were mating with robots shaped like their desired species—not always the same species as the customer.

Rowan kept moving through the vents, stomach rumbling. It would be a few hours before artificial dawn, the quiet time when janitors emerged to clean the space station. Then perhaps Rowan could pilfer some food—maybe a leftover tentacle from a restaurant, maybe just some bones from the trash. She kept moving over vents, passing over opium dens where the druggies slept, over clinics where doctors installed cyborg implants or pulled mites off inflamed genitals, over tattoo parlors that specialized in painting any type of skin or scale, and a hundred other establishments, each greasier than the last.

Paradise Lost—a den of sin and sensuality. A space station hovering between war and wormhole. Rowan's home.

The labyrinth of ducts was complex enough for a Minotaur, but Rowan knew every path, every secret in the shadows. She had been living here for fourteen years.

She barely remembered anything from before Paradise Lost. Only vague images. A cavern full of crystals. The soothing warmth of her parents. Her sister. A sister named Jade. A sister stolen away by a terror Rowan could not recall by day, yet often dreamed of, waking up drenched in sweat. She remembered a spaceship, remembered gruff aliens with clammy skin, grabbing her with tentacles, shoving her into a cage.

"Give us twenty scryls for the girl," a voice had rumbled. "You can sell her at the pet shop."

A snort. "She's mucking human! Nothing but pests."

There the memories ended. Over the past few years, Rowan had tried to piece them together. Who had killed her parents? Who had captured her, had tried to sell her at a pet shop? Was it the very shop here in Paradise Lost, a dingy place that sold deformed creatures from across the galaxy?

And most importantly—what had happened to Jade?

Rowan didn't know. So many times, she had strained, desperate to remember more, yet could not. And now she crawled through the ducts, the only home she had known since being a toddler.

"Someday I'll see you again, Earth," she said softly. "Someday we'll be there together, Jade. If you're still alive, I will find you."

A voice rumbled below her. "Mucking pests in the mucking air ducts!"

Rowan winced. She had spoken too loudly. She craned her neck forward and peered through a vent. A stench invaded her nostrils, and she cringed. She was crawling over a public washroom. Aliens filled the stalls, doing their business. Directly below the vent, a giant snail-like alien sat on a toilet, his white shell mottled with brown patches. With slimy tentacles, he held a glossy magazine with the title Seductive Slugs on the cover. The centerfold was open, featuring a fellow alien snail, lying naked in a barn, her empty shell resting beside her.

"Humans in the vents!" the snail bellowed. He tossed down the magazine, drew a pistol, and fired at Rowan.

She yelped and crawled away. Gunshot holes burst open in the duct behind her.

"Don't forget to wash your tentacles!" she cried, rounded a bend, and left the toilets behind.

She kept crawling through the ducts, moving higher up the space station, fleeing the noise, smog, and smells of the lower levels. Soon she was crawling up steep shafts. Some were nearly vertical, forcing her to climb inch by inch while Fillister buzzed above her.

The sounds from below—the grumbles and shrieks of aliens, the slot machines expelling their crystal skulls, the music of lounge acts—all faded. Engines now hummed around Rowan, the great machinery that operated Paradise Lost, turbines and gears and pipes, a city of metal and steam all around her. Rowan liked this place, liked to feel the ducts vibrate, to hear the machinery clink and hum. She had always liked machines: little Fillister with his tiny gears, the rattling air conditioners and furnaces, and this machine she now crawled through, for Paradise Lost itself was a great machine.

Someday Rowan hoped to be inside another machine—inside a starship that could take her home.

Someday I'll see you, Earth. I swear it. Still you call me home.

Finally she reached the living room—or at least, the place she and Fillister called their living room.

"Home sweet home!" Fillister said, buzzing onto a shelf.

Rowan shook her head. "This is not our home. Earth is our home. But . . . this is some comfort."

The living room was a junction where four ducts met. It nestled a short distance over a furnace, just close enough to be warm but not sweltering. Machinery hummed below, a soothing lilt.

Rowan had placed a blanket on the floor, and she had nailed three steel slats into the ducts, forming shelves. The living room was small, of course. It was smaller than the toilet stall where the snail had yelled. The ceiling was too low to let Rowan stand—there was nowhere in the ductwork where Rowan could stand up, even with her humble height of five feet, which she had measured once with a string. But she could sit up here, and her head only brushed the ceiling. She could pull her knees to her chin. She could stretch if she wanted to. She could write poems on pilfered pieces of paper, or work at building her little machines with the gears, bolts, and wires she snagged from the space docks before dawn.

But mostly . . . mostly Rowan came here to use the Earthstone.

She pulled the amulet off her chain. It gleamed in her hand, a small crystal, barely larger than Fillister. Yet this was no regular crystal, no cheap bauble, not even a pricey stone like a diamond.

This was a memory stone.

A few years ago, she had found a magazine discarded in the washroom which contained an article about memory stones. They were rare devices, used to store binary data inside crystalline structures. They were, essentially, hard drives made into jewelry.

And this hard drive contained data from Earth.

A lot of data.

There was music—thousands of albums from every genre. Rowan had spent hours weeping as she listened to great operas, playing air guitar to the blues and rock, and dancing (as best she could in the ducts) to K-pop (both her guilty and greatest musical pleasure).

There were books. Rowan consumed them like hungry hoggers consumed truffles. She loved to read everything, but mostly science fiction and fantasy. She devoured books of a thousand pages, delving into lands of legend, battling dragons, flying starships, and exploring caverns full of treasures and wonder. She traveled through Krynn with the Heroes of the Lance. She explored the shadows of Amber with Corwin and his brothers. She marveled at Asimov's robots, how he had predicted beings like Fillister. Her favorites were the novels of Marco Emery, an author who shared her last name, perhaps an ancestor of hers. Rowan loved his fantasy trilogy The Dragons of Yesterday especially, but she had read all his books several times.

And there were video games! Hundreds of them. Many days, Rowan played her favorite arcade games like Alley Cat, Digger, and Bumpy. Many nights, she delved into quests like Monkey Island, King's Quest, and her favorite—Star Control II.

There were TV shows. She spent many days laughing with Alf, her favorite sitcom character from the twentieth century. She cowered under a blanket while watching Stranger Things, a twenty-first-century masterpiece. She admired the marvels of All Systems Go!, the greatest anime show of the twenty-second century.

And there were movies.

Rowan loved music. She loved reading. She loved games and television.

But she loved movies.

She had watched the Monty Python films, especially Holy Grail and Life of Brian, so many times she could quote them by heart. She still watched them every few weeks, laughing just as hard every time—laughing so much she sometimes forgot to hide her crooked teeth. She could quote This is Spinal Tap and The Big Lebowski at will. She had a crush on Indiana Jones and Marty McFly, and she still dreamed of E.T. someday visiting Paradise Lost. Though of course, her real dream was to someday become a Goonie. Or a Ghostbuster. Or possibly a Jedi. Maybe all three.

But her favorite movies . . .

She smiled.

"Are you ready, Fill?"

The dragonfly nodded. "Always and forever, Row."

Rowan placed the Earthstone into an adapter. Lights shone. Her small monitor, not much larger than her palm, came to life on the shelf. She began typing on her keyboard, pulling in data from the crystal. She had pilfered the electronics from the starship docks, scavenging through the repair shops when everyone was asleep. Fillister had coded an interface, translating Earth's old protocols into the alien code that could read the data.

And like magic, the secrets of Earth were available to Rowan.

She scrolled through her beloved file libraries, then smiled and clicked the right icon. She leaned back, pulled a blanket over her knees, and delved into Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

When she was watching these movies, she was no longer in the ducts. No longer in Paradise Lost. No longer in this universe. She was in Middle Earth. She was enjoying sunlight in the Shire. She was visiting Rivendell, admiring its spires and waterfalls. She was crawling with Frodo and Sam across Mordor, and crowds were bowing before her across Minas Tirith. Instead of a scrawny orphan, a pest in a duct, she was a heroine with a world to explore.

Secretly, Rowan dreamed of someday becoming a filmmaker. A screenwriter, a director, maybe cinematographer too. Not an actress. You needed straight teeth to be an actress. Rowan didn't crave the spotlight. But she craved storytelling. Often she stole napkins from the buffets below, and she filled them with her movie scripts. She had already written a movie titled Dinosaur Island about an island where dinosaurs had never gone extinct. Sometimes when she slept, she dreamed that she was a real director like Spielberg or Lucas, filming Dinosaur Island in the Caribbean.

She lowered her head.

Yet how can I ever achieve this dream? Earth is gone. Tropical islands? I've never even left this space station.

Rowan sighed.

"I've never seen Earth," she said to Fillister when the movie ended. "And I've never met another human, at least not since I was two. But we have a piece of Earth with us." She patted the Earthstone. "We have a bit of home."

Fillister nodded. "Do you reckon we'll someday see Merry Ol' Earth for real?"

Rowan nodded. "I'm sure."

Yet she was lying. They both knew that.

Earth was gone.

Earth had been destroyed.

The Earthstone was a rich library, but it ended in the year 2270. After that year, there were no more movies, no more music, no more books.

After that—silence.

That had been two thousand years ago.

Since then—nothing. Not a whisper from Earth.

Perhaps, Rowan sometimes dared to hope, the Earthstone had simply been made in 2270, and there were other memory crystals out there, some containing treasures from the following centuries. But this was wishful thinking. According to the tales, 2270 was when the Hydrian Empire, an alien civilization that no longer existed, had destroyed Earth. Had slain billions of humans. Had driven the last few survivors into space, into exile.

Now only a few humans remained in the galaxy. Pests, the aliens called them. Vermin.

Every once in a while, the Paradise Lost administrators would hire an exterminator or two, and Rowan would spend a day fleeing through the ducts, avoiding them. They could never catch her. She knew this labyrinth better than anyone. But she heard the exterminators speaking amongst themselves. They spoke of finding humans inside asteroids, lurking outside alien colonies on distant moons, sometimes even infesting large starships. To aliens, humans were no better than mice or cockroaches.

But we're not pests, Rowan thought. We wrote books once. We composed music. We made movies. We're noble, and we're wise, but we're homeless and hunted and afraid.

Her shoulders slumped. Iciness filled her belly. Those familiar demons of loneliness, of depression, of despair—they threatened to reemerge. They had tormented her so often here in the ducts.

With numb fingers, Rowan reached into her pocket, and she pulled out a rumpled, laminated photograph. She caressed the photo, gazing at it through the crinkling plastic.

A photo from fourteen years ago. From when she had been only a toddler. A photo from the Glittering Caves, her family's old hiding place.

The photo showed her father, David Emery, slender and somber. Her mother, Sarai Emery, her eyes green and fierce, her braid golden. In the photo, Jade was six years old, her hair long and blond, and she held a toy sword carved from white crystal. Rowan was there too. Just two years old, her hair short and brown, her eyes solemn. The photograph was wrinkly, blurry, the faces barely visible. But it was her greatest treasure, even greater than the Earthstone.

"My family," she whispered. "I miss them."

"As do I," said Fillister. He nuzzled her. "Chin up. Might be we'll find Jade again someday. She's a tough girl, she is."

Rowan nodded and wiped tears from her eyes. "She is."

"Oi, Row, you up for the second movie now?" Fillister said. "The Two Towers is me favorite, especially the battle of Helm's Deep. Splendid film, that one is."

Rowan rolled her eyes and allowed herself to smile. "I told you, Fillister, the best movie in the trilogy is The Return of the King. It's the most emotional one. I always cry at the end."

The robotic dragonfly rolled his tiny eyes. "Blimey, I'm a robot. I have no bloody emotions."

She snorted. "Is that why you're always a mess when we watch Batteries Not Included?"

Fillister grumbled. "You know that's just the dust in me gears."

"Sure, sure." Rowan sighed. A deep sadness filled her, one that even Middle Earth could not assuage. She thought of all those movies, those books, those songs that would nevermore be written. She thought of her lost planet, her hunted people.

She thought of her parents, slain among shadows and crystals.

She thought of her sister, of Jade, of a girl she could barely remember.

Rowan rubbed her eyes. She began to crawl through the ducts again, leaving the living room. Fillister followed. She climbed higher and higher, the shafts vertical now. Her progress was slow, but she was determined. She rarely moved this high up the space station. It was cold up here, the ducts were narrow, and when air blew through them, it sounded like ghosts. But today she would climb to the top. Today she needed to be there.

Finally she reached the end of the labyrinth. The highest duct in Paradise Lost. The top of her home.

She crawled onto a little ledge, and there she saw it. The porthole.

It was a small window, smaller than her head, gazing out into space. It was the only place in Paradise Lost where she could see the stars.

Oh, there were other windows in Paradise Lost. Before dawn, when she crept into the casinos to rummage through the trash, she saw larger windows than these. In some bars, where Rowan sometimes stole nuts and paper for her scripts, there were windows taller than her. But the view from them was distorted, bright, blinding. Neon lights covered the exterior of Paradise Lost, advertising the brothels, bars, and casinos within. Sometimes you could catch a glimpse of the wormhole outside; its opening was large, as bright as any neon sign. And you could see the starships lumbering outside, belching smoke. But not the stars. To most visitors here, the stars were pedestrian. They preferred the glow of neon or the shine in a bottle of grog.

But things were different up here at the station's top, a sanctuary where antennae rose and wind moaned through pipes. Up here, gazing through the porthole, Rowan saw the most beautiful lights. The stars.

She sat on the ledge, pulled her knees to her chest, and gazed out at those distant lights. Fillister sat on her shoulder. She could only see a handful of stars from here—only four tonight. But Rowan imagined that one of them was Sol, Earth's star. She had read that the stars were so distant that light took centuries, even millennia to arrive here. Maybe the light reaching Rowan now was two thousand years old. Maybe it was the light from a living Earth, light from a world where humans still thrived, still made movies and wrote books and sang songs.

Her eyes dampened, and Rowan sang the song of her childhood, a song she could remember her parents singing. A song called Earthrise. A song of home.

Into darkness we fled

In the shadows we prayed

In exile we always knew

That we will see her again

Our Earth rising from loss

Calling us home

Calling us home

She yawned, then quickly covered her mouth, hiding her crooked teeth. She was shy even around Fillister. Her stomach rumbled. She should try to sneak into the kitchens; they would be closed now, and she could find some scraps, maybe even some paper for writing movie scripts. But she was too weary to climb all the way down, even to make her way back to her living room. She curled up on the ledge, and she slept with the starlight upon her. She dreamed of green hills, of blue skies, and of a lost home.