Keep what you can carry. Carry what you can’t replace.
Carpe Diem boarding instructions, 2170
My youngest nephew asks whether a tree can miss someone.
I’m on my back under my sister’s kitchen counter when he asks, a drain valve in one hand. With the other, I find the plug of cold cooking grease somebody has poured into the waste line.
“Depends,” I say. “Who’s the someone?”
“Granddad.”
Above me, a spoon stops stirring.
Lena doesn’t answer for me. She learned years ago that I hate being rescued from certain conversations, even when I’m losing them badly.
Niko crouches at the cupboard door. He’s six, which means his questions show up without knocking and never have the decency to be small.
“The big tree has his name on it.”
“Your granddad helped plant the grove.”
“So it knows him.”
I look at the clogged valve. There are five boys in this household. Any one of them could have poured the oil. Every one of them has perfected the face of a choirboy who has never heard of oil.
“It might,” I say.
“How?”
“Roots remember where they grew. Even in the dark. Even when the tree is gone.”
Outside the window, New Haven is waking up.
The eastern tram slides between the residential stacks, trailing the hum of old magnets. Growers in green coveralls cross the upper walkway with seed trays balanced on their shoulders. Below them the pressure crews file down toward the plant, carrying the continued existence of eleven thousand people in dented, unremarkable toolcases.
And at the center of everything, the Carpe Diem.
Nobody calls her a ship anymore.
She came out of a dying Earth fifty-odd years ago with nineteen thousand people asleep in her belly. My father was one of them, six years old, clutching a recording of a yellow kitchen. She settled into Stickney Crater beside the old mining town and never lifted again.
Earth went quiet two years after she landed. The long-range receivers kept listening for another decade. Then the council stopped publishing the logs.
As far as anyone knows, we’re all that’s left.
