A story from the coast of Kael
See You Tomorrow
Before you begin
You do not need to have read anything else. This is the whole of it.
Four people came through a wormhole, a shortcut across space, and stayed. It had been a SpaceX gamble. It worked once, then closed behind them. There was no road home. They set their domes on a wide shelf of rock above a bright bay and named the world Kael.
The air outside was too thin to breathe for long. Two suns traded the sky, so the coast almost never went dark. To stay sane they slept twelve hours a day in a cooled black pod and called it lights-out. The sea was full of life. The largest animals breathed water through gills, not lungs, and sometimes answered a knock on the rock. The crew called them the neighbours.
Malik flew the lander. Lena built the domes. Jun studied the sea life. Inez was in charge. Their AI, LOL — short for Local Operations Liaison, a joke that stuck — kept the lights and the logs. And Malik had taken to walking down to the bay.
The rock
Malik changed the time on purpose, just to see what she would do.
He came at the turn of the light, when one sun sat on the sea and the other was only a red promise behind the hills. He came in the white glare of both, when the rocks were too hot to sit on for long and his suit fans worked hard. He came once when he should have been in the dark pod, and Lena had words about that later. It did not matter. Every time he reached the flat rock above the bay, the great grey shape was already there, holding in the clear water as if she had been poured into it and left to set. Three pale scars curved along her flank, like commas in a sentence nobody had finished.
He waved. She lifted her head. One large eye found him, and a clear inner eyelid slid across it, slow and sure.
“You are showing off,” he said. “I was early.”
Below the rock the sea was bright and busy: silver finger-fish, mats of red weed, and farther out the long shadows of her kind, rolling and feeding. Malik had stopped calling this one a neighbour. A name had arrived in his head one day, whole, as if someone had set it on the table.
ParelLaia.
He had laughed at himself all the way down the path. Names did not fall out of the sky. Then he had said it aloud, quietly, and the eye had held him a moment longer than usual. After that he could not unknow it.
“Morning, ParelLaia,” he said, though morning was a word Kael did not really use. “I brought nothing. I am a poor guest.”
She sank a little, then rose. A soft thump came up through the rock. Three beats, a gap, four. He tapped the stone back, the way he always did. Three, then four.
The ache
The headache started on the fourth visit after the name.
It was small at first, a thumb behind one eye. He blamed the glare and the suit and the coffee, which had opinions. Painkillers from the dome did nothing. The ache grew while he sat, and it eased, every time, as he walked back up the path. By the time he reached Dome One it was gone, like a radio turned down.
He still went. He told her about the algae panels, which were drinking the double daylight and giving back a thin trickle of air. He told her that Inez ran the four of them with a look that could seal a hatch, and that Lena checked his suit seals as if they had personally offended her, and that Jun talked to water samples the way other people talked to dogs.
He did not expect answers. He liked the company anyway. Some days the feeling in his chest was so warm he had to laugh at it. Homesickness, he told himself. Earth was a door they could not walk back through, and everyone he had left behind was on the other side of it. Out here his three crewmates were his family. The mission planners had been plain about it before launch: four people with no way home would need each other in every way, and nobody should be shy about that. Lena was closer than family, and shared his bunk more nights than not. Inez was his best friend, sometimes his lover, and still the boss whose decision stood when the talking ran out. All of it was warm and real. None of it felt like this. This felt like first love that had forgotten to be brief.
“Goodbye,” he said, at the end of every visit. He lifted a hand. “See you tomorrow.”
He did not know why he thought of her as she. He just knew. It sat in him the way his own name did.
After a week the headaches were bad enough that he stopped. He told Inez it was the light. She logged it, checked his eyes, and did not push. Six weeks passed, counted in Earth days because Earth days were the only clock they all shared. He missed the rock. He missed talking to someone who did not answer and somehow still listened. In the dome he was useful and liked. On the path he had been happy in a way he did not have a word for.
The dreams
Then the dreams began.
They were not the thin dreams of a tired man. They were bright and close and full of weather. He swam, or something like swimming, through seas that were not Kael’s sea. Islands of glass. A sky with three pale moons and no suns at all, and still enough light to see by. Beside him, always, a creature, vast and gentle and beautiful, scarred along one flank with three pale commas. They did not speak. They travelled from one world to the next, each stranger than Kael and lovelier, and every one of them felt real. It was as close to paradise as he had ever been. He woke sorry to leave.
Malik had always been first up, first into the exercise room, first to the coffee. Now he slept through everything. He had to ask LOL to wake him with the pod alarm, and even then he lay in the dark, trying to hold on to wherever he had been.
“User Malik is late for resistance training,” LOL said, in its calm voice, after the third lights-out. “Recommendation: become vertical.”
“Recommendation noted,” Malik said, to the ceiling, still half in a green ocean that had no name.
Inez raised an eyebrow at breakfast. “You have the face of a man who has been on holiday without filing the form.”
“Good dreams,” he said.
“Log them if they get odd.”
“They are odd. They are also the best part of the day.”
She let it stand. Jun wanted details for the biology notes. Malik gave him colours and nothing else. The comma marks he kept to himself.
The pictures
The dreams stopped on a Tuesday, if Tuesday still meant anything. In their place, while he was awake and bolting a panel, pictures arrived. Blurred at first, like a lens left dirty. His head ached with them. He was nowhere near the bay. Distance did not help this time.
Over the next days the pictures sharpened. Flame. A gap in the ground with no bottom he could see. Scrub burned black, and the red mats on the rocks curled and dead. Strangely, there were no dead animals anywhere. No silver fish on the burnt sand. No long shadows in the water. Whatever had lived there had gone before the fire came. Only fire, and a sea that burned at the edge, and the rock where he used to sit turned soft and bright as metal in a forge.
He lasted until the ache sat behind both eyes and would not move. Then he walked down.
The path was the same. The headache eased with every step, which frightened him more than the pain had. It felt as if something that had been pushing hard to reach him no longer needed to push. At the flat rock he stopped.
ParelLaia was there. She was alone. The bay, always full of small life and the slow roll of her family, was empty. The water was dark and still, the colour of a closed door. No weed. No finger-fish. No thump from farther out. Even the wind seemed to have stepped back.
“Hello,” he said. His voice was small in the helmet. “I missed you. I am sorry I stayed away.”
A voice answered in his head. Not sound. Words, clear as a hand on his sleeve, in the language he had spoken as a child, before English had become the tongue of school and ships and domes. He knew the voice the way he knew the name.
Leave. Leave now. Danger. Death.
The fire pictures returned, sharper, laid over the calm water: the cliff split, the sea in flames, the domes a bright ruin.
Then, softer, the same voice: Please leave now, my love.
A place arrived with the words. Not a map. A feeling of direction, a long way up the coast, a cove where the rock was pale and the water ran deep and blue. He could have walked toward it in the dark, if Kael had dark.
“Thank you,” he said.
Go now.
She turned. The water broke white along her flank, commas flashing once, and she drove for the deep faster than any boat Malik had ever seen. A marker buoy bobbed wildly in her wake. In a few breaths she was gone. The headache went with her. The pictures went too. The bay stayed still.
Malik ran.
The cove
The suit was not built for it. He ran anyway, fans whining, boots slipping on the scrub. Dome One came up over the rise. Beside it the lander’s ramp was down, and the cargo lights were on in the day-glare like a mistake. Lena was at the airlock with a crate. Jun was shouting numbers at a tablet. Inez stood in the hatch with her helmet under one arm and the face she used when a decision had already been made.
“There you are,” she said. “LOL has been picking up earthquakes, deep under our feet. Bigger every hour, and getting closer. We are leaving. Best guess is the high ground inland. I was about to send Lena to drag you off your rock.”
“Not inland,” Malik said. He bent, hands on his knees, and pulled in suit air. “Up the coast. A long way. Pale cove, deep water. I can find it.”
Inez studied him for one second. “LOL. Is there solid ground up the coast? Pale stone, deep bay.”
“Yes,” LOL said, from the wall speaker, perfectly calm. “My earthquake models dislike our current floor. Dislike is increasing. Recommendation: be somewhere else. The rock up the coast is boring. Boring is good. Inland is less boring than I would like.”
“Then we go,” Inez said. “Malik flies. Jun, samples only if they are already in your hands. Lena, if it is not tied down, it is staying.”
They took off as the second sun cleared the hills. From the air Malik saw the first thin crack open in the ground behind the domes, a dark line in the pale rock, and a thread of steam. He did not look long. He followed the feeling in his chest, the one that was not a map and worked better than one.
The cove was where it had been in his head. Pale cliffs, a curve of sand, water so clear he could see shadow moving under it before they had even landed. They set the spare domes on the high shelf, ugly and wonderful, and argued about where the mugs went before the domes were even sealed, because that was how you knew a place might hold.
Malik walked down to the new rock while the others shouted happily at bolts. The air meter on his wrist allowed him a few minutes with the visor up, and the air smelled of salt and warm stone. The sea here was alive again: weed, silver flashes, a distant roll that might have been family.
She was waiting.
Not far out. Close enough that he could see the commas, and the eye, and the small turn of her head when he lifted his hand.
“Hello,” he said. The word came out shaking, and then it came out laughing. “You got here first. Of course you did.”
Three beats rose through the stone. A gap. Four. He tapped them back.
His helmet radio clicked. “Malik.” It was Inez, quieter than usual. “LOL says our old shelf just fell into the sea. All of it. The domes, the path, your rock.” A pause. “However you knew. Thank you.”
“It wasn’t me,” he said, but the channel had already closed. So he passed it on instead. “They say thank you,” he told the water. “All of them.”
The air meter chimed. He stood and lifted his hand, the way he always had.
“Goodbye,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”
This time the answer did not come through the rock. It came softly, inside his head, in the language of his childhood, and it did not hurt at all.
Tomorrow, my love.
Above him the two suns traded the sky, and the new dome caught the light along its seam, and for the first time in weeks his head was quiet and full at once. Love, he thought, did not always look like a person. Sometimes it looked like a warning given in time, and a shape in clear water, already there when you arrived.
