Chapter 25 The Newcomers

The integration of the Somnium's sleepers took two years, and it changed the colony of Proxima Centauri b forever. Kael had expected it to be difficult, and he had been right, but he had not been right about the way. He had imagined anger, resentment, the slow friction of two populations who owed each other nothing. What he had not imagined was the silence of the first weeks — the way the newcomers moved through the settlement like people testing the ground under their feet, uncertain whether any of it was real. They had woken into a world that was not theirs, into a story that had been written by strangers, and the most generous gift the colony could offer them, in those first months, was time. The family in the hold — Ilsa's parents, Tomas and Lena — had been among the first to wake, and Kael had kept his promise and been there himself, standing in the doorway of the recovery room while the two of them held their daughter between them and tried to understand. Tomas had asked the question that Kael had once asked of the world: "Where are we?" And Kael had answered it the way he had always answered it, plainly and without decoration: "You are on a world called Proxima Centauri b. Your ship drifted for sixty years without anyone awake to guide it. We found you, and we brought you here, and you are safe, and you are welcome, and I am sorry it took so long." It had not been enough, in that moment. It had never been enough, in any moment. But it had been true, and truth had been the foundation the colony had built its life on, and in the years that followed the colony had watched it hold. The archive was the bridge. That was the part that surprised Kael — not the housing, not the food, not even the work, but the archive. The Somnium's records had been brought across in full, transferred into the colony's system under the same public trust that protected the Aethelgard's own history, and the newcomers had flocked to them. They came to read the logs of their own ship, the last years of their awake crew, the final entry in the rough and unsteady hand of the archivist who had watched his world end. They came to find their names in the manifests, to confirm that they existed, that their lives had a beginning, that the record of who they were had not been lost in the long drift. And they came to read the Aethelgard's records too — the story of the other ship that had faced the same choice and made a different one. Kael watched them find the broadcast, the vote, the awakening, the landing, and he watched something happen that he had not expected. He watched them understand that they were not the first people to wake into a world that was not the one they had been promised. He watched them understand that the people who had saved them had once needed saving themselves. Ilsa Chen, three years old when the Somnium left Earth, was six now, and she had become a fixture of the archive. She came most days, with her mother or alone, and she sat in the reading room with the old record pads and traced her finger along the lines of the manifests, finding her name, finding her parents' names, finding the names of the three thousand who had not made it. She did not seem sad, exactly. She seemed to be building something — a map of where she had come from, a sense of the shape of her own story. One afternoon she found Kael at the archive's main terminal and stood beside him for a long moment before she spoke. "Was it scary?" she asked. "When you woke up and found out your world was gone?" Kael set down his pad. He had been asked versions of this question for years, by colonists and children and reporters and strangers, and he had given versions of an answer. But Ilsa asked it differently, and he answered it differently. "Yes," he said. "It was the scariest thing that ever happened to me. I had spent my whole life believing we were going somewhere, and then I found out the somewhere was gone. It was like the floor falling away." She nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something she had suspected. "Do you still dream about it?" "Sometimes," Kael said. "Less than I used to. And when I do, it is not the crater anymore. It is the room where we voted. It is the first morning on the ground. It is —" He stopped, and smiled, a small and honest thing. "It is your family's pods coming across the corridor. It is your name on the manifest, and the mark next to it that says you made it." Ilsa considered this for a long time, and then she nodded again, and she went back to her reading, and Kael watched her go with the same feeling he had carried out of the archive all those years ago — the feeling that he was part of something larger than himself, a story being written in light instead of secrets. That night, Mnemosyne's voice came over the settlement's network, quiet and precise, the way it had spoken a hundred thousand times over the life of the colony. "Chief Archivist. A signal has been detected in the Deep Field Array — a repeating packet, on the old fleet frequency. It does not match the Somnium's signature." Kael was in his quarters, halfway through writing the day's entry into the archive, and he set down his pad very slowly. "Mnemosyne," he said. "How many ships were there?" "Twelve," the AI said. "The Aethelgard is one. The Somnium was another. Of the remaining ten, nine have never been heard from. The signal is very faint, and very far away, and it is older than either ship's current transmission. I have not yet been able to determine its origin." Kael sat in the quiet of his quarters, the pad in his hand, the names of two ships' people in his keeping, and he thought about the dark between the stars — about all the seeds that had been thrown into it, all the sleepers waiting in ships that had run out of hands, all the signals that might still be out there, patient and regular, waiting for someone to be listening. The colony of Proxima Centauri b was home to fourteen thousand people now. It was still growing. And somewhere in the deep dark, very faint and very far away, something was still calling. Kael opened the archive and began to write.