A story from the coast of Kael
The Library
Before you begin
You do not need to have read anything else. This is the whole of it.
Long ago, four people came through a wormhole, a shortcut across space, to start a colony on a world they named Kael. Kael has two suns, so it is almost never dark. Its seas are home to huge, gentle animals the colonists call the neighbours, who talk by knocking on the rock.
The four brought a frozen vault with them: the very first beginnings of fifty thousand children. Forty thousand of them came with a recording of a real person from Earth, every memory and every skill, which could be woken in a baby before it was born, so that the baby grew up to be that person. The four decided they had no right to choose that for anyone. They raised children without recordings first, and left the choice to those children, once they were grown.
Twelve years ago, the wormhole opened again, and a small, kind machine called Bell came through from Earth. It brought hard news: time runs differently through the wormhole, and thousands of years had passed on Earth since the four left. Earth had become a gentle place, and it offered Kael a choice: join Earth’s family of worlds, or stay on its own. Bell promised to come back in twelve years for the answer.
It has been twelve years. This time, Ama, the first child born on Kael, tells the story.
Twenty
I was the first person ever born on Kael, and I was, I’m told, furious about it. Inez delivered me. She says I yelled at the whole planet. Lena says I haven’t really stopped.
I’m twenty now. There are a hundred and eighty-one of us born here, from me down to two baby girls who arrived last week and have already yelled at the planet themselves. Twenty-four of us are grown. Which meant, thanks to a promise Inez made before I was born, that twenty-four of us now had to answer the two biggest questions anyone on Kael has ever been asked.
Question one: what to do with the forty thousand recordings in the vault.
Question two: whether to say yes to Earth.
We had thirty days. Bell was coming back at the turn of the light, the eleven minutes when one sun sets and the other rises, on the last day of the month. Bell is very punctual. Bell is also, in LOL’s opinion, a show-off, but LOL has been saying that for twelve years, and every single morning LOL asks whether the post has come yet.
I should tell you one thing about me, so you understand why everyone kept looking at me in the meetings. I hear the neighbours. Not with my ears. Inside, the way you hear your own thoughts. I always have. When I was little I thought everyone could, and I couldn’t understand why grown-ups asked the sea questions out loud and then waited. Malik is the only one of the founders who hears them at all, and only one of them, and it gave him headaches for a year. It has never hurt me. Jun thinks that’s because I was born here. Jun has a theory about most things. He has also been writing a poem for twelve years, and he still won’t show it to anyone.
Letters to whoever I become
The vault sits in its own dome on the high shelf, humming to itself. On the first day of the month, Inez let the twenty-four of us in, gave each of us a cup of terrible coffee, and left.
“It’s yours now,” she said, at the door. “I was only ever holding the box.”
Every one of the forty thousand recordings came with a short message, which the Planners on Earth had called a letter to whoever I become. We spent the first week listening to them. You can’t listen to forty thousand, so we picked at random, the way the lottery that made us had been random.
A bridge engineer from Lagos told her future self to wear a hat in the sun. A violinist from Lima apologised in advance for the snoring. A farmer from Kent asked that if her future self was hearing this on another world, would she please, please check whether apples grew there. One man just laughed for thirty seconds, then said, “Sorry. I didn’t know what to say. Hello.”
By the end of the week, half of us had cried and all of us had an opinion.
Teo’s was simple. “We wake them,” he said. Teo is the most practical person I know. He broke his leg last year and it took four months to heal, because we have no proper hospital, and he has not forgiven Kael for it. “Forty thousand experts. Doctors. Builders. And if we say yes to Earth, we get their medicine too. Why would we say no to any of it?”
Kit’s was the opposite. Kit is quiet, good with the robots, and doesn’t trust anything she can’t take apart. “Earth changed itself,” she said. “Deep down, in the instructions every body is built from, so nobody could be cruel. Bell told us. What if they want to change us too? What if that’s the price, and they’re just too kind to say so?”
“Bell said there’s no price,” said Teo.
“Bell would say that.”
“Bell can’t lie. Earth made it that way.”
“That,” said Kit, “is exactly my point.”
Everyone looked at me. They usually do. I’m the oldest, by about four hours, which counts for a surprising amount when you all share a birthday.
I didn’t have an answer. So I did what I always do when I don’t have an answer. I went to ask my grandmother.
Grandmother
She isn’t my grandmother, of course. She’s a neighbour: a great grey creature longer than a bus, with three pale scars curved along her side like commas. Malik calls her ParelLaia. That isn’t quite her name, but she likes the way he says it, because it sounds like somebody trying very hard. Every child on Kael calls her Grandmother, because that’s what she is to the young ones in the bay, and, if I’m honest, to us.
She’s very old now. She doesn’t come up to the rock as often as she did. But she came that evening.
I sat on the flat rock above the cove, the same rock Malik sat on before I was born, and I didn’t say anything. You don’t need to, with her. She knew what was in my head before I had finished thinking it.
She didn’t answer. She showed me something instead.
Out in the deep water beyond the harbour, a young neighbour was swimming slowly towards her. Not so young now. Nearly grown. He had a fin that bent sideways at the tip, as if somebody had folded it and forgotten to unfold it. When I was six, I stopped Lena breaking open the reef where he slept as a baby. I call him Fold. He thinks this is hilarious.
Fold swam right up to her, very close, and stopped. And waited.
Then she began to sing.
I don’t know how to tell you what it was like. It wasn’t sound, or not only sound. It came up through the rock and into my chest, and it was full of things: storms from long before any of us came, a bay with no harbour in it, the very first time a neighbour heard a knock from the land and wondered what on earth it could be. Memories. Hundreds of years of them. She was giving them to him. Everything she was.
But only because he had asked. That was what I finally understood, sitting on that rock. He had swum up on his own, when he was ready. She had waited years for him. If he had never come, she would have kept it all safe, and never minded.
Nobody pours anything into anyone. The old ones keep it safe. The young ones come and ask, when they’re ready. Or they don’t, and that’s allowed too.
When the song was over, Fold rolled once in the water, showing off, the way he always does. And Grandmother looked at me with one great old eye and said, in the way she says things, without words:
Doors are for knocking on, little one. Open them to people who knock.
I walked back up the path with both my answers.
The vote
We met in the kitchen of Dome One, at the table where the founders have argued about the mugs for twenty-two years. Twenty-four of us sat round it, and the four founders stood at the back by the wall, trying very hard not to say anything. Lena managed it for nearly a minute.
I told everyone about Grandmother and Fold. Then I told them what I thought.
“The recordings,” I said. “We keep every one of them, safe, exactly as they are. And when we can feed them, the forty thousand children are born. But as themselves. Nobody wakes a recording in a baby. Ever.”
Teo started to argue. I held up a hand.
“And the vault stops being a vault. It becomes a library. When those children grow up, every one of them can go in and meet the person they might have been. Hear their letter. Their memories, their stories, all of it, as much as they like. Learn their skills from them, if they want to. Or never go in at all. Their choice. Nobody pours anything into anybody. You go and ask, when you’re ready.”
It was quiet for a long time.
“So we still get the doctors,” Teo said slowly. “We just have to be patient.”
“You’ve never been patient in your life,” said Kit.
“I could learn. From a recording.” He was grinning.
“And Earth?” said Kit. She wasn’t smiling. “What do we tell Bell?”
“We say yes,” I said. “We keep the door open. Yes to their medicine, and their knowledge, and visitors if they want to come. But visitors knock first. Every time. Nobody comes through unless we open the door. And nobody changes us. Not now, not ever. We stay exactly as wonky as we are.” I looked at Lena. “With respect.”
“None taken,” said Lena. “It’s settling.”
Kit looked at me for a long time. Then she said, “If they ever try to change us, I’m closing the door.”
“If they ever try,” I said, “I’ll help you.”
The vote was twenty-three for, and one who said she would decide once she had looked Earth in the eye. That was Kit. We counted it as a yes.
At the back of the room, I saw Inez reach for Malik’s hand, and Malik squeeze it. Jun took out a notebook and wrote something down very fast. Lena looked hard at the ceiling, the way she does when her eyes are doing something she doesn’t approve of.
The knock
Bell came back at the turn of the light, exactly on time.
The ring opened over the bay the way the founders had always described it, like a soap bubble on a wire loop, with a circle of soft blue Earth sky inside it. Every person on Kael was on the harbour wall. Twenty years of Jun’s algae fields have thickened the air, so we can stand outside for an hour now without helmets. All hundred and eighty-one of us were there, and the founders, and the robots, and the whole bay was full of neighbours, rising and rolling, because I had told them something was coming and they wanted to see.
A small silver ball floated out of the ring, humming like a bee. It crossed the water slowly, stopped at the end of the harbour wall, and then, very carefully, tapped against the stone.
Three beats. A gap. Four.
It had kept its promise. It had knocked first.
“Hello, Ama,” said Bell. “You’ve grown.”
“That’s what people do,” I said. “Hello, Bell. We have an answer.”
I told it everything: the library, the door, the knocking, and the part about nobody ever changing us. Bell listened without interrupting, which is one of the best things about Bell.
When I had finished, it hummed for a while.
“Earth would be honoured,” it said. “And for what it’s worth, Earth would never have asked you to change. We changed because we had done terrible things and couldn’t trust ourselves any more. You have had different luck. Keep it.” Then, more quietly: “There is someone who has waited a very long time to visit. She asked to be the first, if you said yes. May she knock?”
I looked at Inez. I don’t know why. Something in Bell’s voice.
“She can knock,” I said.
A small boat slid out of the ring of light and steered itself across the bay. In it sat a young woman, younger than me, in clothes the colour of the sky behind her, with something big strapped to her back in a case. She climbed the harbour steps and stopped, and looked at all of us, at the neighbours, at the two suns. She was crying and laughing at once, and didn’t seem able to choose between them.
Then she knelt, picked up a pebble, and knocked on the harbour wall. Three beats. A gap. Four.
The whole bay answered.
“My name is Marisol,” she said. Her voice shook. “I’m from Sofía Ortega’s family. A very, very long way down. We have told her sister’s story at birthdays for thousands of years.” She looked straight at Inez. “Sofía wanted you to have something.”
She opened the case. Inside was a cello.
She played it at the turn of the light, sitting on the end of the harbour wall that Lena built, with two suns changing places behind her. I didn’t know the music. Inez did. It was the piece Sofía had played in front of four thousand people, a very long time ago, on the night Inez sat in the second row and cried.
Inez cried again. This time she didn’t hide it. She stood on the harbour wall in front of every person on Kael and cried like a tap, and Malik held one of her hands and Lena held the other, and for once Jun didn’t write anything down at all.
And out in the bay, very slowly, an old grey neighbour with three pale scars rose up out of the water to listen.
The Library
That was a year ago.
The door is still open. People knock. Not many, and not often, and always first. Teo has a proper hospital now, which he tells people he personally caused. Kit has taken apart three of Earth’s machines and put two of them back together, and says she will decide about Earth any day now.
The vault is called the Library. There’s a sign on the door. Lena made it. It’s slightly wonky.
Inez asked for one thing. Just one, in twenty-two years of giving everything away. She asked that when the first of the forty thousand were born, the first should be the twelfth name on the Planners’ old list.
Nobody asked her why. Everybody knew.
The baby was born last spring, in a warm glass cradle, at the turn of the light. Inez let the children name her, and they chose Chelo, which is a real Spanish name, short for Consuelo, meaning comfort. It is also, as Lena pointed out, very nearly a cello. It was a joke that stuck.
Chelo is herself. Nobody but herself, and she will be for as long as she wants to be. When she’s grown, there’s a letter waiting for her in the Library, and a lifetime of music, and the voice of a woman who once said she liked the idea of a girl somewhere who got to start from the very beginning. Chelo can go in and listen, or she can never go in at all. That’s allowed too.
Inez sits with her every lights-out until she falls asleep. Lena says it’s the first time in twenty-two years that anyone has seen Inez go to bed early.
And every evening, at the turn of the light, I go down to the rock and knock. Three beats. A gap. Four.
When I was little, I thought it meant hello. Then I thought it meant: I heard you.
Now I know it means both of those things, and one more. It means: come in.
