Chapter 64 The First Answer

They raised the red dwarf on a Tuesday, by the old Earth calendar the archive kept out of stubbornness, and the whole ship found reasons to be in the viewports when it did. The star was small and reddish and unspectacular, a coal in a sky of coins, and it was home to more human beings than any other object in creation except the sun itself. As the Song fell inward on approach, the frozen sea swung up into view — white to the horizon of white, cracked and patched and refrozen in its two-hundred-year history of winters — and there at the edge of it, smoke rising from the vents of the shore town and greenhouses glittering like spilled jewelry, the colony. Children reached it first, as children reach everything: figures in bright parkas pouring out onto the sea ice on foot and skates, racing the lander's shadow the last kilometer, so that the ship came down through a lane of screaming delight with fists of snow thrown joyfully after it, and Bren stood at the hatch with his arms spread like a man greeting weather, and wept without noticing, and noticed without shame. Maren had died in the winter. Her family met them at the longhouse — Noor's mother Sahar, broad-handed and red-eyed and upright as a mast — and she gave Sira the ledger's missing sister: a last page, written in the old woman's failing script six days before the end, addressed in full formality to *the Chief Archivist, whoever holds the office, and the crew of the Song, wherever the road has you.* Sira read it aloud to the assembled colony that evening, in the longhouse, by lamplight, because it asked to be heard: *I am told the ship went out along the bearing and that is correct and I am satisfied. I spent my life counting a stranger's question, and late in life I learned the answer was yes. Whoever reads this: you went. Good. Now come home and tell them what the dark is for. Tell them it is not empty and never was. Tell them the lamps burn for the might, and we were always the might, and the might is coming, and set another plate.* The colony sat quiet a long time after. Then Sahar stood, and thanked the ship formally, and said, in the tone her daughter used, which was evidently a household inheritance: "Enough grief. Show us what you brought." What they had brought filled the longhouse floor by midnight: the deep map rendered onto cloth, the gallery glyphs rubbed and mounted, forty cells of Mark Three's rescued vault, and the seeds of the last garden — black grains, sighing loam, the unclenching knots — which Ivo planted the next morning with Sahar's family in the shore greenhouses, in frozen-ground soil thawed by vent-pipes, under a red dwarf's patient light. Bren broke sea ice for the watering can himself. The black grain went in first, at Noor's long-distance instruction, nine seconds between furrows, because some rhythms had become simply how these people did things, and nobody could have said when. The report took two evenings, plainly told, numbers showing, and the questions afterward lasted longer than the report. The colony asked everything: whether the gardeners slept (they did not, quite); whether the seeds were safe (they were food-tested twice); whether the road was dangerous (the road, Elani said, was the safest stretch of emptiness in creation, which was why it existed). A girl of eight asked whether the marks got lonely, and Ivo, who had considered the matter seriously, said that lamps did not get lonely but keepers might, and that this was why the Song had left a girl with a ledger, and the girl was fine, he had letters. On the third evening the colony did the thing they had been building toward since the landers touched, the thing the tower's keepers had prepared in secret through the whole visit, and they did it publicly, at the tower, with everyone gathered on the shore. The tower had finished its count two hundred years into its asking, when the deep reply first came; its great question stood answered in the record forever. But the mechanism breathed still, maintained generation after generation by the family of the count, and it could be aimed, at cost, at any line of sky. The colony had aimed it down the inward road — toward Ross 128, toward Proxima, toward the yellow dwarf and whatever burned at the rim of the old home sky. Sahar's uncle keyed the transmission himself, reading from a card the schoolchildren had voted on, and the tower spoke into the dark with the accumulated grammar of the road behind it, and every radio on the shore carried the rendering as it went out: *We heard. We are coming. Set a plate.* The first answer humanity had ever sent up the road of gardens. It went out at lightspeed, lamp to lamp, case to case, and the tower's light guttered with the effort and steadied, and the crowd made a sound that was half cheer and half sob, and out on the ice the children began — nobody started it; it started itself — the planting song of the Garden, sung as it had been sung on that shore since the Anthem landed, and this time the verse had new words in the middle of it, words about lamps and might and plates being set, because songs, like ledgers, take additions. The Song restocked for six days and took on mail — sacks of it, letters for Proxima and Ross 128 and the rim, the colonies' words carried hand to hand the way the road carried everything — and on the sixth morning, as the ship rose, a mark far down the inward line answered the tower's broadcast in the only way marks could: its ninth-cycle word changed. Where it had said *go well* to the empty sky for eons, it now pulsed a new phrase, and the lattice rendered it smiling, if engines may be said to smile: *Told. Told. Told.* ---