Variable Star

22

That’s essentially all I have to tell you.

Governor-General Cott’s more formal account of the events of our voyage is vastly more complete, accurate, and factual. But it was felt that future generations will need more than facts. Too many of them make little or no sense without the subjective context. And it was decided that I was both best able to recount that story, from an insider’s unique perspective—and the one least occupied with other, more pressing duties.

You have them, too. We all do, now. We need to know for certain, just as soon as possible, whether our civilization has been crippled and nearly killed by stupendous bad fortune—of which there is certainly no shortage in the cosmos—or by enemy action. And either way, we need to figure out what needs to be done about that.

I do not doubt we will. But you must hurry. You have a limited time now to move yourselves and your entire civilization underground, including all the native and introduced flora and fauna you need to survive… before the wavefront of death arrives, from the very part of the sky you’ve always thought of as home. You will need to be at least several hundred meters underground when it arrives; several thousand would be even better.

Yours is the fourth world we have brought the news to. At each of them, I have been asked why I don’t simply stay? I’ve done my shift, and more. Why not let someone else take up the torch? Having miraculously managed, against incredible odds, to set my feet on solid ground once more, why would I ever contemplate leaving it again? Evelyn and I have a child to raise now, after all.

The best I can explain it is, I’ve lost my taste for living on planets. It always was overrated.

The narrator of an ancient poem by Tennyson “held his purpose firm, to sail beyond the sunset.” My wife and I—all of us—have actually done that.

It’s going to get interesting now.