So you want my story. Or you think you do. I know your subscribers can’t get enough of the ‘Time Bomb Star,’ and that’s why I’m here. I’m the one face your viewers haven’t seen yet. The reclusive Chief Engineer, team leader, whatever title you’ve given me. The woman who led her people, the scrappy handful of survivors, off a doomed world. Living artifacts of a lost colony. Lost because you left us centuries ago, were kicked out really, but now lost forever because a supernova is a real bitch.
Sorry, that’s what Mona said about it: “A supernova’s a real bitch.” Rude, I know, but never a truer statement spoken.
Had I met you twenty years ago, I would have loved to tell you every detail, or even fifteen years ago, when I was applying for the first Outreach Mission. Had things gone as I planned, I would have been the hero you wanted.
The woman who’d applied was devastated when she was passed over. I wanted my legacy to be as one of the saviors of our people. I was so concerned with my career and my contribution and how special I was going to be.
But that me is gone, gone like Del itself. But I think she was gone before we ran away, to what? Preserve our legacy as a world? Tell the story of our people? Tell riveting anecdotes about power inductors and beating the booby traps that demolished our first mission for help?
My crew mates can tell—have told—those stories.
I only have one story. And I think it’s a truer story about Del, the kind of place it was, the kind of people we were. It’s funny because I think of anyone I met on Del, Mona would have fit in best here: you are all so nosey. And confident a solution can be found. But here, she wouldn’t have had a job. And that would have been intolerable. You have automated so much of your labor, or made recreation of it.
If there is any triumph here, it is as much Mona’s as mine. Maybe more. But not one person has said her name, or the names of anyone who really got us here. Heroism didn’t get us here, not all the way. Maybe one percent of the journey. But the other ninety-nine was survival.
And that's not a thing you do alone.
—not an engineer but I can still push a button. Oh okay, it’s on. You can go away now, Yan. Yeah, okay, fuck off and give me my five minutes.
These eggheads are really something.
Hi, Samira. It’s me. Mona. How are you?
Oh, that’s stupid. You can’t answer me.
Okay, where to start? Hi, honey. I miss your skinny ass. You put on any weight out there on whatever world you landed on? I bet the food is better where you are. Food in a landfill would probably be better than what we’ve been eating lately. Do core worlds have landfills? I wish I could see what you’re seeing.
I bet you’re eating fresh plants every meal. Never met a woman more horny for green vegetables. I bet they are real tender too, not like the kelp we had to beat to make edible. Do they even have fish there? That’d be funny, you jump to the next system and all they have is fish. I think you would be on your way back if that was the case.
May you never see another salted monkfish in all your days, my Little Professor.
What should I tell you about home? It’s HOT. All the Mother’s Children, is it hot. We don’t ever go out any more. ‘Mass coronal expansion’ is what the eggheads call it. Keeping themselves busy naming every stage of this thing.
Yan! I see you, could you just fuck off and let me talk? I swear to god it’s nothing but seaweed for you from here on in. Go get a hobby, Yan, and leave me alone.
Yan always liked you. You know we hooked up a couple times before you showed up. You. Who knew such a thing could happen?
Everybody fucks everyone at the end of the world, but falling in love? Seems like a stupid idea. But you were always the smartest woman in the room. Hate to admit it, but that’s the truth. When you fell for me, who was I to tell you you were wrong? If it was a mistake, at least it was an educated one.
Falling in love is the greatest survival tool you can imagine. Biochemically there is no comparable phenomenon. But what other means of achieving that kind of bliss and optimism could you conjure on a doomed world?
Mona was the de facto leader of the catering staff in the compound. I don’t know what her actual position was before the nova was projected. Some kind of cook. But she was their union delegate. That means she represented her coworkers when there were problems, like your labor network representatives—but your laborers are self-managed, and Mona had bosses, people who told her what to do—which is hard to imagine—but if there was trouble with the bosses or the work, they went to Mona. Everyone was just used to turning to her. And she was used to fixing their problems.
And knowing everyone’s business. She must have been an incredible gossip before everything collapsed. Who knew that would be a critical survival skill?
And I was in love with her. More than I ever thought possible. A woman I never would have noticed if I had gotten the life I wanted instead of the one I’ve had.
I go around and around in my head: if I’d been on the first Outreach Mission, I would have died. I would have never met Mona. My good luck is only good because of a massive tragedy. My life was spared because of someone’s bias, my eventual joy possible because of worldwide collapse.
Hardly seems possible, much less right.
So yes, I was the leader, if there was one, Chief Engineer would be the title technically, of the single ship that survived the supernova of the star you call M-876. We called it Nan. And our home was Del, the fourth planet from Nan.
By the end everyone called it ‘Del the Child,’ or ‘Del the Fourth.’ Child of Nan, our Mother Sun.
Your viewers know that just the news that our sun would go supernova almost destroyed our world. Panic and hopelessness overtook whole societies. But the world’s governments joined together. Their plan: to muster a force that could use the old colonial jump gate to reach our long lost kin in the next system.
Our ancestors’ fight against your ancestors’ rule wasn’t our concern after thirty generations, so it did not hurt our pride to turn to you. Our leaders made a great show of their stoicism and humility, in going to our old enemies for aid, but if you’d wanted to recolonize us, I think we would have known.
I had applied to the first mission, the Outreach and Evacuation Mission, and was qualified, but was rejected in favor of a candidate who met the expectations of the selection committee more than I did. A man. A native Hent speaker. I was a migrant to Hentun, so I was fluent, having learned it in college, but spoke with an accent, so was considered less qualified. That was our enlightened world.
So your great hero was stuck in a back office, on a remote team, running a backup of a backup communications system.
You know what happened then.
No one expected there to be safeguards on the gate. The whole planet witnessed the destruction of the ship that was meant to reach you in time to return and evacuate our world, or at least try.
But did you know when we lost that ship, we lost hope? A deeper despair than we could imagine. To have a shred of hope—and to lose it. We had been on the brink before the mission; its failure ushered in a period of total madness. World leaders assassinated, coups that collapsed hours or days after they occurred. Militaries split and fought themselves, obliterating cities.
The backup of the backup survived in our remote locations. Someone had contacts at Northern Wenns University, the original remote location. Your press has made much of it being one of the original survey spots during colonization, saw some symmetry or poetry in our return to our roots.
But you don’t get it: we were the second-rate, the also-rans. Retreating to a place that hadn’t been important in generations. We lived because we were rejected for reasons we couldn’t control. We piled into a semi-fortified college campus that had survived the riots because it was like us: second tier, isolated.
Sometimes it felt like fate. Doomsayers claimed the mission failed as a sign that the Mother was unhappy with us.
Despair was seductive. Death was everywhere. From natural causes like rapid desertification and mass extinctions as temperatures rose. And our cultures turned to death. Religions mutated like viruses, preaching suicide as self-determination before the sun went nova. Ritual euthanasia became common after the Outreach Mission failed.
But for me it felt like the opposite, I had avoided certain death at the gate, and had the data on what had gone wrong. I felt chosen. We still had a choice about whether to succumb to despair or make another go of it, and oh, did I rally people to the cause. It felt like my destiny.
That was a stupid thing to think.
We thought that we, in the scientific community, the academics and intellectuals, were insulated from the mayhem. But when we arrived at Northern Wenns, we learned the entire former University and observatory administration had walked out to ‘meet Mother Sun’ as they said. Mass suicide.
Before the collapse, the Holy Children had been just one of the major religions. Monotheistic sun worship. But there was no religious fervor: most adherents said their morning and evening prayers and didn’t think much about it. Solstice dinner with the family, days off for Equinox.
But a supernova: that changed everything. We weren’t cursed, we were blessed: the Mother missed us, wanted us with her forever in her bosom. We were special. Dying became special, and doing it voluntarily was holy.
But not everyone believed. The team didn’t. I didn’t. We had our work. The sun was a clock, yes, a time bomb. We wanted to escape Mother’s embrace, not fall headlong into it.
We had a mission that could not err, could not fail. We were almost another messianic cult, worshiping math. Because we had hope.
Somewhere along the way, people began to conflate the possibility that we could get off-world with the possibility that we could reach someone who could send ships to evacuate. There was the part of us that was hoping this was true, but there was no evidence it would be possible we could even reach you before core implosion.
So we let people believe it. We let false hope fester because it was the only hope people had.
But in private, I had something to live for, something I’d never had before. On a world with no future, I had a present that I savored every spare second of. I was the only one not counting the days to launch.
From file 121.554.6.212: Mother Sun origin myth. Mythology/Children’s story of the Northern Continent.
(Possibly adaptation/reimagining of homeworld’s ancient religion of M—, precursor to modern N—) Thought to be an explanation of frequently observed solar activities from solar flares to eclipses of M-876.
Once, long ago, the universe was all Light. Darkness was unknown, and Mother Sun lived alone. She had always Been and would always Be. Unchanging. But to be, and never become is above all else: boring. Mother Sun loved Herself, for She was everything. She was love itself. But She could not know Herself because She could not be outside Herself.
In Her vanity She wished to experience Herself in new ways, so She tore Herself. Where there was Light, Darkness shone. Mother Sun laughed in delight: She hungered to study this new thing, Darkness. So for the next period of the universe, there were two things, the Light and the Dark.
The Darkness showed new things to Mother Sun about Herself. Now there was shadow, there was edge and depth and movement. She studied until She knew everything there was to know about Darkness, which was inert, and cold.
If Darkness was still, She was motion.
If Darkness was empty, She was full.
And in this way, Mother was satisfied, if only for a time.
The real religion of the compound was survival, and Mona was its high priestess.
You think it’s a miracle we were able to mount a second launch, you should have seen what the maintenance and catering crews were pulling off every day. Every single day. People have told you about the work we did, but they didn’t mention that someone had to feed us, secure us water, and power.
I met Mona at a bar the night my colleagues and I arrived on the campus. We couldn’t find any administrators and only Cheney’s was open—the horrible bar the staff hung out at. We didn’t have housing assigned. We didn’t know at the time it was because the administration didn’t exist, our contacts had failed to tell us, if they even knew themselves.
Mona was there carousing with a bunch of nonacademic staff. She corralled everyone and let them know where they’d be living on campus.
She made sure I knew where my room was, with two other team members who were already there. But I didn’t go that night. And I rarely ever did, between Mona and the lab.
She was tough and funny and judgemental and rigid and had no formal education and was utterly competent at everything she did. Whatever room she was in, she was the authority everyone looked to.
Later, when I asked her what it had been like to lose the entire administration in one fell swoop, she just shrugged. Not like we lost the foragers or the plant engineers. What did that crew really do? What were they gonna tell you about astronomy, or me about catering? Just a lot of wasted calories that we can’t get back.
Mother Sun then understood that She had changed the universe irrevocably. She considered this new truth, and in Her wrestling with it, made a discovery: She could change it again. And with every change would come newness, something new to study.
So She tore Herself again, making more Darkness, which was a change in quantity.
To make each unique newness, She needed more than more. So She shredded Herself, letting small masses of Herself go, floating into Darkness.
Mother Sun had made Her Children. The Light had made the Darkness, and then filled it with Her Children. And they were grand.
Marvelous in constellation, each individually was a little different: She had torn them carefully at first, but being infinite, grew more careless, moving in joy and impetuousness. Some burned white and others smoldered red; they clustered into families and sparked against each other, playful as pups and restless as flies.
Hard to know what to say, what to tell you. You know how it was here, just more of the same every day. After you left, a few of the team went to Mother’s Children, said they’d made their contribution and it was time to go.
Wonder what you would have said to them. You can probably guess who it was. Monvi, who was always a complainer. But not a quitter. But she was old and had that respiratory thing that just got worse with the heat, so I can see her reasoning. But Ely went with her. I think that surprised everyone. I went to talk to her about it, why would she want to do it. The guys told me not to, to mind my own business for once. But you feed someone for six, seven years and you get to feel like they owe you an explanation.
We knew it wasn’t gonna be long after you left. I asked Ely, why not wait a few more months, a year, what difference did it make? Didn’t she want to hang around, just for curiosity’s sake? You know what she said? She didn’t want Monvi to go alone. I said she won’t be alone, Mother’s Children do the euthanasia every day. And not for nothing, people were lining up after the ship left.
She said she didn’t want her to go off with strangers. Because that was the end, the real end. That’s the problem, she said, with being an atheist.
I asked her then why go to the Children at all?
She said because there are the things you know, and the things you hope for.
I couldn’t argue with that. It’s not as if I haven’t seen something strange in the sky and wondered if it’s you coming back.
I still think I’ll see you at the end of the day sometimes. Forget that you are gone. Are not coming back. Something strange or funny will happen and I’ll think ‘I can’t wait to tell Samira when I see her.’ I’m happy in those few seconds.
Of course, now that they gave me time to record you a message I can’t think of a single thing. If Yan is listening, they’ll probably be disappointed.
I miss laughing with you. And at you. No shortage of that. That time I snuck radish cake up to the lab and you thought I meant like birthday cake. The look on your face when you ate it.
You are one of a kind, Little Professor. You could keep the spin of the planet and the orbit and the direction of the old gate and solar flares’ shock waves and whatever else in your head but not basic shit like remembering to eat. I got used to you knowing all sorts of wild things about the universe; the day you told me our solar system was moving in a different direction from the one you’d be going to I thought I’d never recover. I’d worked around astrophysicists for twenty years and didn’t know that.
I never really had patience for your type. “You’re addicted to your own specialness,” I told you at Cheney’s that first night; you seemed so arrogant. Eggheads always are. But special isn’t all bad, it turns out. Thanks for teaching me that. By the end, seemed like I was the one addicted to your specialness.
I always thought the academics and professors were just staring at the stars, gratifying their egos. Thought they couldn’t do the hard shit that needs to get done. A lot of mental masturbation.
Like all those idiots who went to the mass grave to meet their Mother years before our launch. Couldn’t hack it. No more purpose once the classes were canceled. Should have picked up a shovel and helped keep the place from getting buried in plastic. Could have learned to filet a shark while they were at it. But no, if they can’t have a title and a cushy job, the Mother Herself must be calling them home. You said it was because there was no one left to serve and organize, so they lost their purpose.
Maybe we should have eaten them after all. That was fun to joke about; “gallows humor” you called it when I told you we spent the week after talking about who would have been made into what. Dean Bourguignon. Bursar Curry.
We had to laugh about it. What else were we supposed to do, when there was so much work to do? Fall apart?
As Mother Sun had created Her opposite, Darkness, so had Her curiosity brought its twin: doubt. If these Children were knowable, was she? Mother Sun was infinite still, but somehow smaller. In Her infatuation, had Mother Sun lost something of Herself birthing these Children?
This was another newness, but an unpleasant one. Mother Sun had learned the twisting clutch of doubt.
She hungered again to know them in their strangeness and to know Herself in how they changed her.
To reclaim Her certainty, and to know Her own will, She set out to rejoin with Her lost selves. She set out to eat Her Children.
Mona was unsentimental, which is what it took those days. She’d worked on the coastal trawlers for most of her early adulthood. She regularly had to finish off fish larger than herself with nothing but a wooden cudgel. She said you have to be able to turn part of yourself off to get through the day, especially if your day involves braining a beautiful animal that was just trying to live its life.
So much of our days were spent with the part of our brains that registered our impending doom turned firmly off. We had to. And most of us descended into a kind of fog of denial that became so thick that we continued to talk about evacuation long past the point that it was feasible.
But with Mona, I got to step out of the fog. I clung to her. She could be harsh and unsympathetic to my exhaustion, make little jokes about how my calculating hand must be so tired.
But she came to my lab day after day, night after night. She made sure I ate. She’d insult me until I’d pick up my fork, saying maybe I was too scrawny to fuck any more. One night she asked me had I donated my ass to science? Even a year and a half after I arrived, sleeping with her was one of the only things that brought me back to myself.
Love was always difficult for me, ephemeral and frustrating. It is incalculable, unknowable, unmeasurable. While my colleagues fell into existential crises, I worried like a teenager that Mona would lose interest in me. Loving her felt too much like speculation, all hypothesis and no proof. Every day I worried she would give up, and she would show up in the lab or the cafeteria or my own room, exhausted, usually sarcastic, but in love with me.
Do you know what it means to love someone that desperately? To work against the sun that could kill you all with no warning? How precious and terrible it is to fall asleep next to someone you know you can’t take with you when you leave? And that the reality is, you can’t actually save?
Mother Sun opened Her great mouth, sending out tongues of heat and flame, growing as She recombined with Her Children. But as She did, She realized She would miss them, and She would remake them.
The same cycle of loneliness and regret, with a few brief pleasures of discovery along the way. And knowing what She knew, which was everything, She did as knew She would. For the knowledge could not stop her, because Her joys and curiosity were greater than Her pain.
Her Light was and will always be greater than the Dark, Her desire for knowledge and self-knowledge infinite. Mother Sun knows all Her Children, of fire and stone, metal and ice.
And in turn they love Her, and know Her. They beckon to Her, knowing She will come for them with Her fierce embrace. They are glad to have their brief slivers of infinity separate from Her, so that they may appreciate Her. And appreciate what She has made them to be:
For even in the blackest night, Her descendants shine.
I miss you. The way you could fall asleep talking and suddenly wake up and start again, like there was a bookmark in your brain. All the things we did when you really needed to be sleeping. I hope you sleep soundly now, knowing you saved our world from oblivion.
Remember that one night, you were really low, and you said how many worlds have already disappeared that we don’t know about, did it really matter if any of us got off the planet?
I don’t remember what I said, probably called you stupid. But it matters. I think about how much of my life I didn’t know you, and how much better it was that we met. I want our distant cousins to meet us, to meet Del. And I want you to be the one to tell them. You’re all of us now, even me, which is weird to say, since you are so fucking tiny. But I know I’m in there.
I love you, Samira, you dummy. I hope you know that, that I told you enough. I tried to get it through your thick skull, my Sam. My sugar, my star.
I have to go. Yan is being a real pain in the ass. Probably will listen to this after I go.
They say it’s just a matter of days now. I’m not scared. I can’t waste my time worrying. We’ll be mashing our last kelp soon, so that’s a blessing.
At least I’ll go knowing that you’ll get this, some day. It’s following you through space, just ahead of Mother’s terrible teeth. Also known as solar flares. She already ate the stars, it’s the strangest thing to never have night any more. But with no one to look at them with, they are hard to miss.
Okay, Yan is really getting pissed. I have to go. I do miss you. Every second. For as many as I have left, you’ll live in them all.
Goodbye my love, goodbye!
Who knows? Maybe we will meet in Mother’s arms, like they say.
I’m gonna kiss you so hard if we do.
Anyone who understood anything about the old system of stellar navigation knew evacuation wasn’t possible on our timeline for launch. Those who wanted to believe, believed. Those who didn’t had already given in to despair.
Mona did neither. She looked reality in the face, and kissed me goodbye. As if it were forever. Because it was. She kissed me like she always did, like I was good, like I mattered. Not like I was hiding from the truth behind a fiction of salvation.
But she knew. She was never one to soft pedal the truth.
One night, toward the end, after a night at Cheney’s, I said to her I should stay. She called me an idiot and a child. She said she didn’t put up with all my egghead bullshit just to watch me die. She called me a selfish bitch and said I could join one of the Holy Children’s death marches if life wasn’t worth it any more. “What the fuck,” she yelled at me, “did we do this for, if it’s not for you to live?”
There wasn’t a scenario where we grew old together. “That’s not an excuse,” she told me, “for you to not grow old.”
With time dilation, it’s six years ago. My whole planet died. Almost a billion people. A colony thirty generations old.
And she died. Her. Mona. My Mona.
Every single day I wonder if I should have stayed.
But sixty-three of us survived. Sixty-three of us who might grow old with the memory of our home. We have to remember all of Mother Sun’s Children, who She swallowed.
According to your satellites, they lived thirteen months past when we left; we were through the gate, in deep stasis when the core imploded. I know you know this, but I have to say it because I can’t grieve it if I can’t admit it.
I knew I’d never see her again, never hold her, or hear her voice again. I knew it when I left.
But you can’t really imagine the pain. Or else you’d never get anything done. Or death. If you really think about death, it becomes quite hard to function. But if you never think about it, it’s hard to feel like anything in life matters very much at all.
I hope she was asleep when it finally happened, or drinking at Cheney’s, talking shit and repeating old work stories. I hope she died happy.
But if I’m being honest: I also hope she died heartbroken. Because I am selfish. Because I am grieving. I am heartbroken. Not just for her, but our love, which never had a future. “All lovers are star-crossed, but a supernova is a real bitch.” she told me.
I hope she grieved that, too.
No, don’t include that. Because I don’t hope that. I don’t have to.
I know she did.
Originally published in Fusion Fragment #19.
