A tiger is one of the last surviving colonists on a distant and alien world; technology is a thing of the distant past, the stuff of mythology. He stumbles on a hidden cave which might just hold the salvation for the whole colony.

12,673 words
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Like fingers drumming on a taut skin, the rain outside pattered against the broad leaves of the archtree currently perched just by the entrance of my family's cave. The bigger moon, Elph, was low enough that it peeked beneath the cover of clouds, casting its eerie light through the mountains that surrounded us, and set the mushrooms aglow. It was just bright enough that I could make out the stripes on my arms, but not so bright that I could differentiate the orange fading with algal green. I could also see my brother's eyes flashing at me from across the small wet space, as though to say: You'd better not wake my cubs again.

I returned his gaze. No, Drek, no nightmares tonight, I tried to convey silently. Besides, I could tell that it was nearly morning anyways: I wouldn't be getting any more sleep.

Moving as stealthily as I could, I left my reed mat and padded out to the cave entrance, plucking my woven-root basket from its peg on the wall in the process. I looked down at the path running along the mountainside, connecting the little wall holes we all lived in. Some places it was so narrow that only a single person could pass by, in others it was wide enough for many; there'd been no slides in the night, no sign of weakened or washed-away footings.

Soon the chippers would be at work, using some of the few bits of metal left that hadn't rusted away to hack at the mountainside, widening the paths or enlarging the caves. The constant tap-tap-tap always drove me crazier than a batbird, and reminded me how lucky I was to be a gatherer.

Like Grob had been a gatherer.

I was out of my brother's cave now, and the rain was streaming down my face, so I allowed my tears to join the flowing water. How many mornings had I been faced with this grief, how many days had I known I wouldn't see him again? It had been many, I knew, as many as the glowing mushrooms I’d gathered yesterday, as many as the fleshy reeds I'd gathered the day before that. My hands reached out, feeling his fur in the air before me, looking into the deep brown eyes that looked at me in my nightmares as he fell.

I ran down the path, towards the river that coursed through the shifting trees and filled the trifeesh ponds, the river that had carried Grob's body away after it had been broken by the mountain, the mountain that had killed my bear.

As a tiger, I have neither the strength of a bear like Grob, nor the supple flexibility of an otter like our leader Arrn; instead I had both—but not enough of either. In my dreams I could feel his fingers slip past mine, his claws raking my pads but not finding purchase; how often had I woken up with pain in my hand, but no wounds? My toeclaws gripped the path as I ran, raindrops hitting my face and soaking me to the bone.

I was at the river's edge before I realized it, nearly falling into the torrent myself. But the vine bridge strung between two dead and petrified archtrees was just a few strides away, and it was easy enough now to cross by feel alone, without looking down at the racing icy-green waters.

As I walked, eyes open for new crops of mushrooms or moss that hadn't yet been harvested, I tried to sing one of the old songs from the teaching book. Grob had always said that we should stop letting the ancients rule us, that we should make our own legends and teaching songs, so thinking about the songs we'd all learned as cubs helped me not think about Grob...not as much:

"This man-u-al introo-duces
The overall pur-posee,
Objectives, org-niz-ashun,
And eelemunts of the
Exo planut arry
Laaandur.
By following these instruuctions
You willll—"

I was interrupted by a voice behind me, the low grumble of a bear. For an instant, for as long as it took a raindrop to hit the river and be absorbed by it, I thought it was Grob, chiding me for singing the same old childish songs. Of course, when I turned around I saw that my mind had only run away with me again.

"Good rain, Tog." It was N'see, the clan's healer.

I bowed to the bear, showing her the expected deference. "Good rain, N'see. What are you doing out here this morning?"

"I was looking for you. I was headed for your brother's cave when I saw you running down the path. Have you been nightmaring again?"

"No, not for the last few sleeps. But he is often on my mind."

She stroked her tapered brown muzzle and toyed with the strand of bone-beads dangling from her left ear. "And have you been eating the mudwort leaves?"

"Yes'm, two thumb-sized leaves before bed-down. It helps with the dreams, but it makes my sleeps light and fragile. All the time I'm tired now."

"Ah, that's good!" She seemed genuinely happy to hear that, and I couldn't keep the look of confusion from my own face. "The tireder you are, the less you'll be able to think about anything else."

"Aye...aye N'see." It wasn't at all what I'd hoped to hear.

I watched as she looked me over and, seeming satisfied, she clapped a heavy paw on my shoulder. "Work hard, Tog. Keep busy, spend time with your brother's cubs: the laughter of the young can cure many ills." She left, crossing back over the bridge that creaked under her weight, and I'm ashamed to say that there was a tendril of malicious hope curling up through my thoughts, hope that a rotten vine would snap and send her tumbling into the torrent too.

I'm too tired, no matter what she says, I thought, feeling like an eroded dam, with all manner of unwanted thoughts and feelings able to slip in and out without my control. Still, there was work to be done: without gatherers like me (And Grob, cried a thought that I managed to push down) our little tribe would soon starve.

Our ancestors had come here, had thought it a bountiful heaven: with lush growth and fat trifeesh, it was the perfect place to build their new colony. And then the rains came. It was a story we'd all learned around the small eternal fire in the back of the great cave—built on a rise in the floor, and fed with archtree wood kept on stilted racks, it was the last gift of our ancestors, along with the impermeable pages of the Man-u-al from which we'd learned our songs and letters. The rains had come and never stopped, rotting away tools, texts, clothes, and the thinking machines they'd used to journey here in the first place. With the exception of the rice, all of the crops they'd brought had died as well.

Even the colonists had not been immune. Other breeds had grown sick and died out, until only the clans of bear, tiger, and otter survived. I'd always wondered what that must have been like, people with hardened feet or smooth skin, pointed bones growing from their heads. There were so many questions, but the biggest one was always: how shall we survive to the next morning?

By now I'd reached the crest on the far side of the river, and I could turn around and look back at the home of my family, watch the chippers working against the mountain like little rockants, watch as the others arose, beginning the tasks of the day, talking and laughing and singing the songs of our ancestors. But I didn't turn around.

I kept walking, letting the ridge rise behind me. Somehow, I always felt a little relief being this far from the others, my whole being focused on the next foothold, aware for food to harvest or perils to dodge. So far all I'd passed was a furoil shrub; I'd plucked a handful of the thick waxy leaves and crushed them between my palms, smearing the juice across the tops of my shoulders and head and down my back. Being a gatherer meant being out in the open rain, and furoil was the best way to keep skin rot from setting in.

I reached a clearing between the archtrees: one of them must have moved recently, because there was an opening that I'd never seen before. One path was as good as another for a gatherer, so I decided to see where it took me.

In no time at all, I'd half-filled my basket with mushrooms and thick mats of moss. The strap of batbird leather around my shoulders was already heavy, and I thought about going back, but I wanted to fill my basket to bursting. Accomplishing something meaningful might help me to feel better, I hoped.

The archtree that had moved from the clearing had headed in almost a straight line away from the river, elbowing aside other archtrees, its roots dragging furrows in the mud and trampling mushrooms and moss. There had even been a rockant nest in its path, the tall tower (made from saliva-dissolved stone and gluey excrement) with its precise little windows and terraced algae beds had been knocked aside like a finger-thin reed, with rockant bodies crushed along with their home.

I watched for a moment as the swarm of little creatures worked, already rebuilding, chewing up the ruins and depositing the new goop on the foundations of the old. If only we could do that, we might be able to make someplace un-wet, with many fires. But of course I knew it was just a fantasy. Unlike the rockants, the chippers were the only way we had to alter our stony home.

A few of their scouts had turned in my direction, so I continued on: their acid saliva could eat through flesh and bone as easily as rock, and I had no intention of losing a foot. Soon the archtree's path curved, but straight ahead I noticed a cluster of deadskull mushrooms. Despite their name, they were a gatherer's most-prized find.

Looking like the skull of some dead creature, complete with holes for eyes and nose, and a fringe of teeth around the bottom, and white as any bone, the flesh of deadskull mushrooms was sweet and filling; it was a shame that any attempts to cultivate them resulted in mushy masses of grey slime. I gathered as many as I could—until my basket was almost too heavy to carry—making sure to leave the biggest, strongest, healthiest-looking specimens to continue on for the next season's crop.

When I reached the far side of the deadskull grove, and topped a little rise of rock—half again as tall as I was—that seemed to be an effective barrier against their spread, I was presented with a vista I hadn't seen before. Beyond the swaying tops of the archtrees, sloping down away from me, I could see far out into the distance: a broad swath of flat ground that stretched out almost to the horizon, with only a fringe of low mountains at the farthest edge of sight.

There was something sitting on the plain too, what must have been a vast structure, with great jagged spars sticking out of it like the ribs of some great dead beast. Clustered at its foot was an assortment of lumps, scattered around like a cub's toys at bedtime. It was hard to tell from that distance, but it looked like there were holes cut into some of them, like little caves. The whole arrangement was surrounded by water, glittering in the afternoon sun, and was probably as swampy as the rice terraces.

As I watched, thick puffy rainclouds drifted across that flat plain, the air below them as hazy as the air around the waterfalls of the great river, obscuring my view of the ruins. Grob would have loved to see this, I thought, then amended: No, Grob would have loved the deadskull crop. He would have looked out at that plain and wondered if there were anything worth gathering. My bear had been the most dedicated gatherer in the whole tribe; I sniffled and swiped a stripy arm across my nose, then hefted the basket onto my shoulder. At least I'd accomplished something that day.

The journey home was uneventful, with only a bit of tension as I skirted the rockant nest; when I reached the river, however, I was met with a terrible surprise. The archtree that had moved to reveal the path down to the deadskulls must have agitated its brothers, causing the whole grove to stir. I could see the roots of the dead archtree to which the bridge had been tied still clinging to the rock, but the tree itself (and the bridge along with it) were nowhere to be found: they must have been knocked off the edge by a moving tree, and then fallen down into the river's rapids.

It was coming down dark, and I couldn't see anyone on the other side of the destroyed bridge; no one answered my hollering, at least. The river was too wide to jump, to far even to throw my basket, and I knew if I stayed out in the open I'd be vulnerable to any passing predator: a legsnake had been spotted in the trees a few days before, bloated and sleeping off a meal of batbirds or trifeesh. I'd seen how their tails can slash into the water to spear a meal, and their long bodies were springy with muscle, allowing them to leap off a branch at any creature flying by. I had no intention of contributing to its next meal, so I had to find shelter before it was too dark to see.

I had noticed some dark openings in the rock wall beyond the deadskull grove, and wondered if perhaps they might be caves; everyone knew that legsnakes had an aversion to stone, or so the stories went. I trotted back again, thankfully the rockants were already back in their nest, having walled themselves in for the night. When I reached the rock its top was still dusted pink with the last rays of sunset, which is how I found the cave opening off to one side, and about a cubit higher than my head.

I gripped the ledge and pulled myself up. There was a deep tunnel, bending back a few cubits away from the entrance and preventing me from seeing any further into it. The up-sloping floor was clean, and there were no signs of any inhabitants, nor anything I could hear. It was my best choice, really my only one, since I couldn't see any other holes deeper than a handspan or wide enough for me to fit into.

Dropping back down, I hefted my basket up and gently pushed it into my little cave, then followed myself. Ears wide for any sound, I slid up the slanting floor as far as I dared. Hoping that I was far enough back to not be visible (or smellable) from outside, I leaned back on the wall and tried to quiet my thoughts the way N'see had taught me. It was only then that I realized I had no mudwort. I kept a store of the leaves by my pallet in my brother's cave, and—until the bridge was destroyed—there'd been no reason to think I'd need any while out gathering.

I glanced out of the cave mouth: it was completely dark, apart from the reflected glow of the shelf fungi that clung to the archtrees outside, and I could hear the buzzing of night insects. It would be foolhardy to try to harvest any mudwort now, and I wasn't about to risk injury, sickness—or worse—just to ensure a good night's sleep. Knowing what kind of nightmares I was in for, I leaned back again, trying to get comfortable on the hard stone.

The nightmares came, as they always did. Running along a cliff's edge, trying to reach the river before the bridge fell and took my family along with it: from leagues away and at the same time close enough to see the patterns of their stripes, I watched as my brother and his wife skipped along the bridge, the three cubs in line behind them, with Grob taking up the rear. My big bear turned around, still frolicking forward, and smiled at me. As I watched, running but helplessly motionless, his face distorted, becoming the horrible needle-toothed grin of a legsnake wearing the hairy pelt of my beloved bear.

The legsnake-bear turned its long neck back around and leapt forward, gulping down each tiger cub in turn, then my brother's wife, and finally my brother, who cried out "Join us, Tog!" as he slid down the stretched-long neck. Then there was a light, and the ruins I'd seen out on the plain were there, a hulking jumble of shapes and forms, glowing with mushroom-lit eyes. The arching spars were the ribs of its massive chest, and chains of lumpy mounds were bound together into grasping fingers that tore at the bridge and plucked at the legsnake-bear.

The ruin-creature tossed them all down its hollow gullet, then turned its green-glowing eyes to me. I tried to turn, to run, to fight, but I couldn't move. As soon as one of the giant fingers touched me, though, I woke.

Drenched in sweat and spread out flat on the floor of the tunnel, I blinked in the morning light and tried to remember where I was. Tears still dewed my face, and my tongue was sour with stale drool. I nibbled on a chunk of deadskull mushroom to assuage my hunger and get the taste out of my mouth, and determined that I'd look for mudwort first thing.

That's when I noticed the other end of the cave, sloping up away from the entrance, the air cool and...un-wet. I'd been too tired to notice the night before, but there were marks in the wall, lines of parallel grooves like a set of short claws dug through the rock over and over, widening the tunnel the way the chippers worked, only much more efficiently.

Breakfast finished, I stood and walked up the slope. I reached the turn at the back, and found that the tunnel continued for a bit, then bent again. None of the light streaming into the entrance reached past the double-turn, so I scampered back and grabbed one of the mushrooms from my basket. Its dull green glow was enough for me to see by, so I went on.

The tunnel continued upward zigging and zagging as though it were trying to shake me off like a legsnake bucking a bloodsucker fly. Away from the entrance, the tool marks on the walls and floor and ceiling were much more noticeable. Another turn and I found a branch lying on the rocky ground. Not a branch, I realized when I picked it up: metal. A tool! It had a long handle and the end was like a double-fang, one pointing in each direction. The tips were still pretty sharp, and I had to wonder how long it had been sitting there. The chippers would love this.

I kept it with me, just in case something unfriendly lurked in the back depths of this tunnel...however long it went. But I was in for a surprise: one bend more and I ran up against a wall. It was flat, cold to the touch, metal just like the tool, but slick-smooth, as though it had been coated with something.

After a moment, I realized why it felt so familiar: it was the same impervious clear substance that had protected the pages of the teaching book all these generations. In the mushroom's glow I could see something darker lurking just below the surface: letters, just like in the teaching book.

It was tricky, puzzling out the characters in the dim green light, and remembering what I'd been taught of the shapes and sounds of each letter, but eventually I came to: "Caut-ion: Do Not Bre-ak Hy-dro-seal. Keep Dry." And below them a bar of coated metal, sticking out of the wall at about waist height, the perfect size for a hand to grip.

The bar had letters around it too, two little arrows pointing in a circle, with the word "Open" on either side. I wanted to run back down the tunnel, ask the elders, ask N'see, ask my brother; I didn't trust myself to decide what to do—what if I misread the ancient characters? What if we weren't meant to muddle? It was hidden here for a reason...

And why did it say not to break the Hy-dro-seal, whatever that was, when there were other instructions saying how to open...what, a door? I was so confused, but I knew that there was no way for me to reach the others, not unless I scouted up- and downriver to find a dead archtree spanning the gap. I could hear the dull roar of rain outside the tunnel's mouth, the brief morning sun had been swallowed up by another storm, a waterfall over all the forest. My fur felt sticky, a clear indicator that the furoil I'd put on—had it only been the day before?—had dried up and wouldn't do me any further good.

So even though my brain told me to leave the tunnel's mysteries, my instincts kept me there, staring at the arrows marked "Open". My hand reached out; my claws brushed the bar's surface. And, with the swiftness of pulling out a thorn, I turned it.

There was a sharp cracking sound, like the breaking of a trifeesh bone; I leapt back and watched as a crack opened in the wall, starting next to the handle and spreading up and down. When the crack's ends got within two finger-spans of the rock, they made a sharp turn, running parallel to the cave's floor and ceiling for about two cubits, before making another sharp turn and meeting again in the middle of the wall. A large rectangle, the width and height of a man, was now marked on the glossy wall, and with a creaking hiss, the rectangle popped forward.

At first it looked about to fall on me, but then I saw it was pivoting on the side opposite the handle. I pulled and it swung further open, allowing me to see behind.

I saw darkness only slightly allayed by the mushroom's fading glow, but then with a pang sound, a light clicked on. I leapt back, expecting a glo-bug attack: I'd never seen any other kind of light go from off to on so suddenly, but this was so much brighter than any single glo-bug. But, as I brandished the old tool's sharp points before me, I noticed there was none of the hissing chitter of the insects, and the light wasn't swaying hypnotically—it wasn't moving at all.
Almost as though it were pinned to the stone, I thought as my eyes adjusted to the brightness. Behind the rectangle I'd pulled out was a little space, with a similar handle on the opposite wall, the whole thing covered in hard cold metal.

Again, my brain wanted to leave, but I couldn't turn away. Something about this felt very much like the hulking ruins I'd seen out on the marshy plain, down below. Still clutching the tool, I stepped inside the little room and waited. Nothing changed, and the other handle didn't seem movable. I was about to give up and work on getting back to my tribe, when I noticed some of the ancient writing on the wall.

"Air-lock Opera-t-ion:
1. Close Outer Door
2. Press Red But-ton
3. When Green Light Flashes, Open Inner Door
Rep-eat To Exit."

It was the same writing, the same blend of mystical words with normal words, the same unfollowable instructions of the teaching book, but there on the wall was a red lump that could be a button, there above it was a green circle, and the rectangles might be whatever they meant by "Doors". I stood and stared for a long while, unresolved.

The elders had said that the teaching books were instructions for living, magical metaphors for good behavior. But, I thought slowly as the realization dawned, what if they were actually actual instructions? What if the things we'd been singing about had been the tools of the ancestors, tools that have been lost, leaving us only the instructions, only the what to do, but not the thing to do it to.

Of course, came the next thought, perhaps we've been reading them wrong, upside-down or backwards, perhaps the "O" makes the "D"sound, perhaps it's a relic from some alien race and not from our ancestors at all.

And on the wall before me, just a cubit away from my face, I had a way to find out which thought was correct. Stretching out one arm, I pulled the outer door closed. There was a click and it wouldn't close any further. Then I pushed a fingertip at the red button.

It didn't move.

I pushed with two fingers, keeping my claws sheathed so I didn't scratch the surface. Still nothing. Starting to feel silly, I slapped it with the palm of my hand. I felt it give, sinking slightly into the wall. The whole room filled with a hissing sound.

Frantic, I spun around, eyes quickly scanning the ceiling and floor and walls and corners. Now I've done it: I did something wrong and it's released legsnakes to kill me! But there were no legsnakes, just a feeling of un-wet that seemed to suck the moisture out of my mouth and make my eyes feel scratchy and tired. Even my fur was starting to feel frizzy and uncomfortable. I shut my eyes and mouth, breathing through my nose, and waited for the hissing to stop.

I started humming one of the teaching songs at the back of my throat to fight my rising anxiety:

The Po-wer Drillll is
Compu-ter controlled,
Self-contained,
Battery powered, and
Pi-stol gripped: a very
Smart elelelect-ric drilll.
Tor-que, speed, and
Angle can
All be set
By hand or pre-
Program-med
To assist with
Eeee Veeee Ay
Tasks.

The battery and—

I'd just begun the second verse when the the noise filling the little flat-walled cave stopped.

Peeking through my slitted eyelids, I saw that the shiny round thing high up on the wall was indeed glowing green. The air around me felt dead, empty, the way it sometimes does when you're standing on a high point with the sun beating down on you and it's been a while since the last rains.

Following the instructions had worked so far, so I gripped the handle of the other door and pulled. Nothing happened, not even when I braced my foot on the wall and pulled with my whole strength. Then I tried the other direction: it pushed open with hardly any effort, giving that same click as it left the wall.

Once again, I was staring at darkness, but overhead one light clicked on, then another, and another; a whirring sound filled the cavern—which had the same metal-coated walls, floor, and ceiling—and there was a soft chittering sound as though I'd come across a sleepy nest of rockants. But there were none to be seen: no bugs, no plants, no mushrooms, the whole space was devoid of life. There were squarish lumps mounted to the walls and floor, and their surfaces were subdivided into further squarish and rounded lumps, most of which had little letters on them. Some of these lumps had little lights too, burning and blinking like glo-bugs.

I had no idea what they meant, so I set that puzzle aside for a moment. Examining the rest of the chamber, I found that some of the rectangular lumps weren't actually attached to the ground: I could lift them up and move them around. There was a triangle design on the ceiling too, shiny and orangish, like the lines of copper ore (before the rain turns them green) that the chippers sometimes unearth; it was longer than both of my arms stretched out, and each triangle had a smaller triangle inside of it, upside-down, on and on until the smallest triangles that were barely bigger than a claw, and looking very much like a cross-section of a trifeesh.

That's when I noticed the whitish rectangle propped up on one of the wall-mounted lumps. It had a drawing of a fishing spear, a straight line up with a little point on the top end, and below that were three words:

Push to
Start

I stared at it for a long time, confused, and confused as to why I was confused. Then I realized two things: the shapes of the letters were the same as the ones in the teaching book, but they were sloppier, with none of the book's precision and sharpness. And, below the faded brown of the words, the yellowish-white rectangle on which they'd been painted was the exact same shape and size as the pages of the teaching book, but without the clear shiny stiffness.

Reaching out to touch it, I felt the smooth thin surface, felt it bend and flex under my fingers, and wondered if this was what the pages of the book felt like, under their hard shells.

The fishing spear had been lined up below another one of the mushroom-like things sticking out of the wall; it was labeled "C.O.D.I." Taking a breath, I pushed it.

The lump in the middle of the room began to whir in earnest, making the occasional wonk-wonk sound, and lights filled the air, forming a pair of eyes, then a face, and then a whole body, hovering just a finger's breadth above the floor.

I stared at it: watching the unblinking eyes, the chest that didn't move with breath, the hands that hung still. It looked like a dead thing standing upright. And then it moved—jerking—hands going from beside its waist to shoulder height and back down in a blink, head tilting to one side and back, one eye closed and the other wide open. The lump made more wonk-wonk noises, and suddenly the dead glowing figure looked alive.

"Hello," it said, holding up its right hand in a little wave.

I didn't realize how tensely I'd been standing there, coiled like a legsnake about to strike, until that moment. I leapt back, banging my side against the wall lump and brandishing the old digging tool in front of me.

"No need to shout," the figure said. It spread open both hands, showing me its palms. "See? I'm harmless."

"Ahhh!" I shouted again, but with less conviction.

"Look," it said, waving a hand to one side, "I'm not really solid." Sure enough, the hand passed right through the tall rectangle in the middle of the room. It looked more like a cloud of mist broken by an archtree trunk.

"What are you?" I lowered the tool a little. It doesn't look like it wants to hurt me, and anyways, if it isn't solid, what good will swinging at it do?

"I'm a hologram. Coded Organic 3-D Interface: Codi. What's your name?"

"No, I mean, what are you? You don't look like a bear or a tiger, and you're too tall to be an otter." Its head, long and blocky, tipped over to one side, while its pointed ears flagged back and forth. A long tail that seemed to be made only of hair swished behind it.

"I'm an Equus ferus caballus," it said. It must have seen my confused look, because it added: "a horse. I'm a horse, and you're a tiger...and naked...and infested with algae."

I sank to the floor, sitting with my legs crossed and the tool stretched between my knees, as I realized where I'd seen a face like his before. In the teaching book was a little face, a tipped-down rectangle with tall ears and wide eyes, depicted on the corners of pages where it explained what certain words meant, or pointed to other sections of the book (or other books that had since been lost). The elders had called him a spirit guide, a depiction of the ancestors' Great Helper.

I asked him if that was true, if he'd known the ancestors. It took him a while to understand what I meant, but eventually we were standing beneath the same rain, as the saying goes.

"My program was included as part of the standard complement of colonist resources, including the manual for the Exoplanetary Lander. The designers decided to use my image throughout the technical documents for both consistency and ease of use. After all, a colony needs a good doctor, not a doctor who can pilot a ship without looking at the manual. Ha ha."

My confusion must have shown on my face, because he stopped his odd little laugh and tried again: "The instructions needed to be simple enough that anyone who could read them could use them, like the instructions in the airlock." He pointed behind me, at the pair of doors and their little hissing room. "You called them ancestors, the colonists. How long has it been? Is Captain Tyson still alive?" He looked up at the triangles on the ceiling: "My antenna seems to be mostly undamaged, but I can't reach the homeship. It must be orbiting out of range."

"I know of no Kaptun Tysin, Codi, but I do know the ancestors lived four-times-forty years ago."

"Four times forty?"

I nodded, feeling good that I knew something he didn't. "That's what my mother taught me when I was a cub, and what her father taught her."

"Oh, I see." The glowing horse paused, hand on his long chin as he thought. "Well, once I'm able to get in touch with the homeship I should be able to determine the date. I'll need your help, though."

"Me? What can I do that you can't?" I watched as once again he waved his hand through one of the blinking lumps.

"I'm...not really here. I only exist as light driven by machines—"

"Like the sun, and the moons?"

"Yes...no. Not really. Look, it's very simple: I need you to be my hands. I'll tell you what to do and you do it."

"I see." I listened as he explained what he needed me to do: the first task was repairing the triangles-within-triangles above our heads, which he said was an antenna. At first I didn’t understand him, because he pronounced it an-ten-a, instead of ant-enna the way we’d always read the word in the teaching book. He showed me where to find a container of shiny paste, and told me how to dab it on the spots where the triangles had been broken by shifting rock or eroded by time.

He had me push buttons and pull handles on the lumps coming out of the walls, many of them labeled with names that seemed almost familiar from what I'd seen in the teaching book. The room filled with a humming, clicking sound, as if there were a nest of rockants somewhere in the walls. "And now," he said, "we wait."

"How long? What are we waiting for?"

"I don't know how long," Codi replied, running a ghostly hand along his ghostly muzzle. "It depends on where the homeship is in its orbit: it could be a few minutes, it could be ninety-two, it could be forever if it was disabled or its orbit degraded." He shrugged. "Anyways, while we wait, how about we take care of you. See that door over there?"

I looked at the side wall where he was pointing: a rectangular lump seemed to be growing from the floor, up to the ceiling, a blocky stalagmite that would have been large enough to hold an adult inside. I stepped towards it and he nodded.

"Open the door and go in. Then pull it shut behind you until it clicks, then you can push the big green button." Just before I closed the door, I heard him add, "You might want to close your eyes."

I found myself in a little room, a cluster of little buttons on the wall in front of me. The green one was set apart, and had been labeled. "Au-to Wash," I read. I pushed it, and was immediately drenched. It was like going from a rare sunny day to the worst storm I'd ever experienced in a single instant; not only did the rain seem to come at me from all directions, but it tasted funny too and stung my eyes.

I tried to open the door, to back out, but it was stuck. Remembering the way the room with two doors had worked, I tried pulling, but that didn't work either. "Let me out!" I shouted over the roar of water in my ears.

"It's ok, just stay calm, it'll be over soon." Codi's voice seemed to be in the little room with me. I opened an eye but couldn't see him: just a circle in the upper corner—where it sounded like his voice originated—covered in a mesh like woven reeds. Next to the speaking circle was a glowing rectangle that showed numbers. Two-five, two-four...twenty-three, twenty-two—it's counting down.

Not knowing what it was counting down to, what would happen when it ran out of numbers, I resolved to face it with courage, the way Grob would have. I un-clenched my fists, closed my eyes and mouth, and simply stood there as the enclosed storm raged around me. I sang one of the teaching songs to myself, humming in the back of my throat as I thought the words. Then I heard a high hard sound, like the call of a distant bird, and the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

I cracked an eye. The numbers now showed only zero-zero, and the lights around me were warm. I felt back with my hand and gasped as I felt the door click, felt it open behind me. Once I was out of that little room, I spun around and saw Codi grinning at me.

"There, doesn't that feel better?"

My whole body felt itchy...no, not itchy, not like a bloodsucker fly bite or brushing up against a scratchbush, but almost itchy, like the way the room-with-two-doors had made me feel, but moreso. I looked down at myself.

The mud caked between my toes was gone, as was the algae in my fur; the little storm-room had even cleaned the shiny paste from my fingers. My fur looked as bright and fluffy as my brother's cubs had—once Khern had finished licking the birth fluids from them—sharp orange and black and white. "What was that?"

"It's called a shower. And now that you're clean, you can put on some clothes. There should be some coveralls in that trunk there," he pointed at one of the lumps that wasn't growing out of the floor.

I'll admit, I was hesitant. Given the way the show-wer had behaved, I didn't like the sound of cover-alls; as though it would cover me in some sort of gummy coating, like those bugs that get trapped in sap. But Codi was built by the ancestors, to help them, I had to trust that he wouldn't lead me astray.

Leaning back as far as I could, I flipped the latches on the trunk, expecting something to burst out and engulf me, but nothing did. I peered into it, and saw soft looking things folded and stacked. At the horse's urging, I reached in and pulled out one, the light-blue material flopping in my hand like a wet leaf. It was shaped like a person, with arms and legs and a short tail, but without hands or feet or head; it was also empty inside, like a skin.

I needed some help from Codi, but I was able to put it on. It felt weird, rubbing my fur every time I moved, and it didn't help that my fur wasn't wet and algae-laden anymore. On the left of the coverall—right above my heart, I noticed—was a circle. Of course, I'd seen it before: the same design was on the front cover of the teaching book, but it didn't have color and texture like this.

Now the black lines and white spaces made a little more sense. The circle was filled with black and dotted with stars, their twinkle frozen. A mottled green and blue lump rose from the bottom, and above it was a long and segmented silver lump—it looked like a stick with some balls of mud and two reed hoops attached to it. And around the outside were the words "New Earths - Exoplanetary Colonization Expedition."

"That's the mission patch," Codi explained when I asked. "The black is space, and those are stars, and—" He paused, cocking his head to one side. "The homeship is in range! Give me a second and I'll summon the lander."

He closed his eyes and stood motionless; I waited as the noises in the room around me increased. He'd said lander. Could he maybe mean—

"Ok, it'll land in about 3 hours. You might want to get some rest, we've got a busy day ahead of us."

I didn't know what he meant, and to be honest, I didn't really care that much by then: you can see only so many wonders before you stop taking them in, just as a pond can only hold so much rain before it overflows. I pulled a few of the still-folded coveralls out of the trunk and used them as a makeshift reed mat. I didn't realize I'd fallen asleep until I heard Codi shouting.

"Wake up! Wake—there you are. Times like this make me wish I'd been created with a physical body. I had the lander put down just outside this cave, but I'll need you to carry me out to it."

I looked him up and down. He was easily a handspan taller than me, and if he'd been flesh and blood I wouldn't have been able to, but who knows how much light weighs?

As it turned out, I wasn't even carrying him. There was a little box attached to the lump with the first button I'd pushed, and he told me if I pulled that out, it would hold him until I could "plug it into a matching port" in the lander. Codi gave me instructions for how to get into the lander too, and I hoped they'd make sense once I was standing before it. After I'd repeated them back to him successfully, he sighed and nodded, adding: "My life is in your hands."

I pushed the buttons he wanted, and when he disappeared, I pulled the little lump, which detached with a little click. I carried it like an egg to the room with two doors; the airlock, I corrected myself, using Codi's word for it. Again I followed the instructions on the wall, and soon I was back in the cave.

The air felt different, thicker than I remembered, and wet. It seemed like my lungs were sucking down mouthfuls of water, warm and dense. After just a few steps through the stone tunnel my fur felt heavy, since the shower had stripped out any remaining furoil bush juice, and the coveralls were starting to turn a darker blue, damp with sweat.

When I neared the end of the cave, I at first thought it was still night out, but then realized why it seemed so dark: an angled wall of metal—more than I'd ever dreamed to see in one place—was blocking most of the light. Rain streamed down its surface as I left the cave and saw that it was indeed the giant wedge-shaped exoplanetary lander, just as Codi had said.

It had landed barely half-a-dozen cubits from the cave mouth, and in doing so had smashed through the forest, flattening mushrooms and knocking aside squirming archtrees, one of its feet planted squarely where the rockant nest had been. I tried to ignore the destruction as I found the hatch—outlined in bright green—and climbed inside.

Just like on the airlock in the cave, the ancestors had written instructions on everything: how to close the hatch door properly, how to cycle the hatch's airlock, which colored line on the wall to follow to get to the control cabin. And through it all I recognized words and phrases, objects and actions from the teaching books. If only Grob could be here to see this, he'd never be able to say that the teaching songs were a waste of...

I froze in the tunnel-like corridor, my fur and coveralls wet and heavy, the metal cold beneath my paws. How could I think that way about my lost beloved? How could I revel in proving his beliefs incorrect? My tail drooped to the floor as tears lost themselves in my wet facefur. There had been so many new things that I'd momentarily forgotten the one old thing that would be forever absent.

To curtail my sorrows, I fell back on what often felt like the only remedy: I sang. And as I sang I felt my feet stirring again, following the blue line on the floor until I reached the control cabin and, as instructed, found the matching port into which to plug the little lump I'd carried from the cave. I was still singing when Codi appeared:

"This man-u-al introo-duces
The overall pur-posee,
Objectives, org-niz-ashun,
And eelemunts of the
Exo planut arry
Laaandur.
By following these—"

"What are you singing?"

I explained about the teaching book, and how we used it to keep the letters and words of our ancestors alive.

"So, you've been reading the manual all these years and never knew what it was about? Incredible."

I didn't know how to respond to that, so I just kept quiet. After a moment's thought, Codi waved his glowing hand.

"Well, go on then, show me what you've learned."

This is it, an ancestor testing my reverence, I thought, feeling the weight of the situation pressing down. But the tunes came to me, and with them the words. The images I'd seen and wondered at, the precise drawings with their perfect straight lines now matched things I saw before me: control panels, display screens, buttons and dials.

I sang myself hoarse and still the songs came, working through me as my fingers danced. "Before init-i-ating launch," I croaked,

"Ensure all carg-oo
And crew are safely
Securr-ed. When securr-ed,
You may push the button
Marked Auto Piii-lot."

My finger hovered over the button as I finished the song; the har-ness was fastened, holding me tight against the seat, and I tried to ignore the way the coverall bunched and tightened around me, like it was trying to rub the stripes out of my fur. But Codi didn't say anything, so I assumed this was just how the ancestors lived.

I pushed the Auto Pilot button, and suddenly the coverall was the least of my worries. It was as though a giant hand had latched onto my chest, trying to squash me like an errant rockant. My arms and legs felt like they were pulled by invisible tendrils, as though the roots of the world were resisting my attempt to leave. A roar deeper and louder than any tiger or bear could make was echoing through the cabin, rattling my teeth and tucking my ears back. I glanced over at Codi and saw him standing with his arms folded behind him, unaffected by the shaking and the noise.

His mouth moved when he saw me, but I couldn't hear his words. He held out both hands, palms down, as though he were patting the air. Stay calm, he seemed to be saying.

I tried to be calm, but when the noise, the hand, the tendrils finally stopped—all at the same time—one noise continued: a tiger's roar. My roar. I closed my mouth as Codi stepped up beside me.

"Feel better?"

"I—oh no..." I clutched at my belly: along with the noise and pressure, it seemed all sense of weight had gone too. Even though I was still strapped into the chair, it felt like I was falling, forever falling. Tears welled up as the bile rose in my throat, So this is how Grob felt, this is what it's like to fall off a cliff.

"Keep it down, man!" The ghostly horse shouted at me, waving his hands. "I do not want to look at old vomit for as long as we're up here. Push that button, hurry!"

I flung out my hand and mashed the button he indicated, which was flashing yellow. Suddenly there was a sense of down-ness again, and the world stopped spinning. Gulping back the foul taste I saw the label and realized my mistake: the very next line of the song said that after the Auto Pilot finished its job, we were supposed to push the Artifeeshul-Garrrvity button. Burping, I told this to Codi and asked what it meant, why it made things stop falling.

"Artificial Gravity," he corrected. "It simulates the gravitational pull of a planetary body...makes things heavy again. But not as heavy, only half a Gee, which would be about point-eight-seven-two of what you're used to here on Demeter." He saw my confusion and added, "That's what your...ancestors called the planet they found, because it was so fertile."

Following his directions and the teaching songs I remembered, I used the Naav-pewtur to set up Auto-Docking. And then there was nothing to do but wait while numbers counted down.

"Codi, it seems like a lot of the things I'm doing have 'Auto' in front of them. Why is that?"

"Well, Tog, the mission planners—the same ones who made me and put together the manual—decided to leave nothing to chance. So they built powerful computers. Thinking machines...like me...who could perform complex actions all by themselves. That's what 'Auto' means: Auto Dock, Auto Wash, Auto Pilot. It's the same reason they put labels and instructions on everything."

"They wanted things to be done right?"

"No, well, yes actually. In space, there's very little margin for error, so things have to be right. But they also couldn't be sure who would be using their systems, or how much training they would have had. Just look at you: a lot has changed since they landed, hasn't it?”

"I guess. I never really thought about it that way. Growing up I assumed they lived as we did." I tugged at the fabric of my coveralls for emphasis. "Guess I was wrong."

"Perhaps, but you survived, didn't you? Survived and found me."

We sat in silence as I stared at the blackness laid out in front of me, pockmarked with more stars than I ever could have seen on the clearest night outside my brother's cave. I was suddenly filled with sadness, wondering if they were missing me, or if they assumed I'd been killed when the log bridge fell away. Would they be grieving or relieved? I didn't even know how long I'd been gone. I tried to picture their reactions, but then I saw something moving in the blackness, obscuring stars.

It shifted, the edge catching the light with a hard brightness, and as it turned, as more came out of the shadows I could make out its shape. It looked like a stick with some mud balls and two reed hoops attached to it, a silvery lump like on the mission patch. But it was growing larger now, and I could see intricate details, shapes and patterns, protrusions and depressions. It was like breaking open a rockant nest and seeing the delicate traceries within.

As massive as the lander was—bigger than an archtree grove—this was bigger by far, like some mountain broken off and set adrift in the sky. The lander slowed, turned, and I could see a mottled blue-green circle with vast swathes of dark white looming up from beneath it. Part of my mind kept trying to tell me it was just a flat circle, like a design traced on a cave floor; but I could also sense its size and depth, as if somewhere inside me I remembered the constant falling before I'd turned on the artificial gravity, and knew that I could fall into that vast circle.

"And that's...a planet? Dem..." I tried to remember what he'd called it, "Demeda?"

"Demeter. That, Tog, is your home. And that," he added, pointing at the silvery lump drawing ever nearer, "is the homeship. That's what brought your ancestors from Earth, from our original home planet, all those years ago. I just hope everything still works." He fell silent, watching the wiggling sticks and counting numbers on the control panel.

As we got even closer, I could see that the…homeship…was spinning: the long stick in the middle, twirling on its axis like one of my nephews' tops, the hoops attached by little sticks that kept the stick straight through their middles. We were heading towards one of the balls at the end of the stick, and as we drew up to it, we started spinning too. Despite the artificial gravity, I could still feel the little jerks and pushes as the lander pushed itself to turn faster; I had to close my eyes and hold onto the chair to keep from throwing up.

At last there was a crunching sound that I didn't so much hear as feel through my paws on the floor. We were still twirling, but I could tell it was slower, steadier, and without the bouncing shifts that had made it almost intolerable only moments before. "We've docked," Codi said with obvious relief. "Follow that red line to the docking bay. I'll meet you there." With that he vanished.

I got to my unsteady feet and followed the line painted on the wall. Occasionally I'd see a flicker of blue glow and a glimpse of Codi as he appeared from a little nub in the wall here, then vanish and reappear from a nub further down, hopping ahead of me. When I reached the end of the red line I was in a room about the size of the cave where I'd first found him. There were chairs along one wall and tall boxes on the other: I could see through their fronts, and inside each one was a bigger coverall, with a head like a bubble, and all sorts of buttons and tubes running over the outside.

"You can't believe how good it feels to be able to move about without being tethered to one projector," the horse said, making a show of stretching and enjoying his newfound freedom. Seeing my interest, he explained: "Those are space suits. They protect you from the vacuum of outer space."

I recognized the word from one of the teaching songs, but no one really knew what "vacu-uum" meant, only that it was something to be avoided.

"But you shouldn't need it," he continued. "The meters all show good air pressure and quality on the homeship, thank the makers, and the seal is good. Are you ready to taste the air of your ancestors' home?" Without waiting for my answer, he had me push a large red button marked "Cycle Airlock"—just like the airlock in the cave—and with a flurry of hissing and clanking the big door opened, revealing a little room, white and bare. "Go on in. I'll see you on the other side, since the data linkup is good."

He vanished again, and I was left to enter the room alone. Thankfully the ancestors' planning had kept the procedure the same—even the lettering was the same on the wall within. I felt like I was starting to get the hang of things...at least, the hang of working the airlock. The door behind me closed and, after a momentary hesitation, the door before me opened. There was Codi, glowing from a projector on the other side, smiling and beckoning me on.

The first thing I noticed was the air: it tasted dead, like breathing rock, and it had that same something about it that seemed to suck the moisture from my mouth and nose and eyes. I could smell things, too, ancient pheromones of bear and otter and tiger—those I recognized—but there were other smells I couldn't define. We were in another little room with chairs on one wall and boxes of spacesuits on the other; we might have been back in the same room on the lander, were it not for the rectangle mounted on the wall above the chairs.

The rectangle had a raised, lumpy border, and within was a...person. I could tell by the eyes looking back, motionless, that this was another being like me, but the long pointed muzzle and tall triangular ears were nothing like any otter or bear, and the person lacked any tiger stripes, from what I could see of their fur under the dark blue clothes, picked out with shiny metal. There was something on their head too, between the ears, blue as well. Beneath the big rectangle was a smaller one, with letters: "Captain Helene D. Tyson."

I looked up to find Codi staring at the flat person in the rectangle too. "That was Captain Tyson. She was a good captain, brought us here safely, and led the team that installed me in the cave once we realized what was happening with the weather."

"What is...she?"

"That is a dog. From what you've said, I suppose they died out on Demeter, just like the horses and camels and..." He seemed to shimmer, white specs like archtree pollen flickering through his body. "I'm sorry, I'm not really programmed to handle emotions." He stood straighter, and it looked like he was taking a deep breath, even though I couldn't feel any movement in the homeship's dead air. "They built me to keep moving forward, to help colonists look towards their future, to plan ahead."

"Well, Codi, what's our next step then?"

"We need to get to the communications room. It's at the other end of the homeship, so we can take one of the central lifts." He seemed relieved as he guided me through the door at the other end of the small room, leaving the painting of Captain Tyson alone once more. He seemed to hop from one projector to another as we went, and they were spaced so regularly that there was hardly a flicker as each one handed off his glowing light to the next.

Codi led me to another, smaller room; unlike the airlocks, it had only one set of doors, and a cluster of buttons studding one wall like a crop of mushrooms. He told me to push one and waited, shimmering, as the feeling of a giant hand returned, gently pressing down on the top of my head. Then, just as abruptly, it stopped and there was a ding.

The doors opened to reveal a completely different space than the one we'd just left. Ahead stretched a long tunnel of smooth white not-quite-rock, and above were gaps in the roof through which I could see the same profound blackness I'd glimpsed from the cockpit of the lander. I felt myself drawn to it, as though it were trying to pull me off the floor and into its depths. I noticed that the stars spangling the sky were moving, and as they rotated, I saw the same blue-green-white circle rising up into view.

Seeing my home like that, and watching the white masses and threads swirling around over water and land, it made me feel suddenly very small. How big was this planet I'd lived on, how little of its surface had I actually explored? My grief for Grob didn't seem so futile now, as though I were the only thing keeping his memory alive: one gnat remembering another gnat. I suppose that was why Codi's memories of Captain Tyson resonated so much.

Eventually, I got the feeling that he was watching me, waiting for me to come out of my reverie. I felt my ears fold back and my tail droop, "Sorry."

"No need; I can remember most of your...ancestors doing just that, both when leaving Earth and when approaching Demeter. It's definitely an experience. Even Helene..."

He seemed to be lost in thought, so I started walking slowly down the long hallway. The light shifted from white to blue-green, the angle changing as the planet swung over us, like a new sun arcing through a shorter day. By the time I reached the end of the hallway, it had disappeared past the edge of the openings. I could also feel something tugging me forward, growing in strength the further along I walked.

Codi reappeared at the projector mounted just above the door before me. "Ok, this part can be tricky the first time. In the central shaft and the spokes we have artificial gravity, just like on the lander. But to save energy the rings just use the centrifugal inertia imparted by their spin." He must have seen my look of confusion. "It's a bit complicated, better to just show you. I'll walk you through it. Open the door."

I pushed the usual button and found myself looking at a wall that curved away to either side. Strips of bright yellow-and-black stripes outlined a path in front of me, curving down until it met the wall, with a silver stick running part of the way at about waist-height.

"Walk forward slowly, use the hand rail if you need to, and please try not to throw up. I'd rather not have to activate the cleaning droids."

Stepping out onto the path, I felt myself pulled in two directions: one invisible hand forcing me towards the wall ahead, the other keeping me planted on the floor. It was indeed disorienting that first time, especially when I realized that the curve I was walking was centered almost at the middle of my head, so as I walked forward it stayed almost in the same place. After a very long couple of seconds, I was standing flat on the wall, which I now realized was the floor; from the way it curved up on either side, I guessed that this was one of the big silver hoops circling the center stick of the homeship. I also noticed that the invisible hands had aligned, and now both were pulling me to this new "down."

"Bravo," Codi said, appearing from a projector a few feet ahead of me. "Now, let's get to the communications room and see if we can reach anyone."

My sense of balance was still twirling, making me think of the solstice feast where I'd drunk too much moss-juice wine, but I managed to stagger after him down the hallway that seemed always rising to meet my foot a little too soon. It helped to keep my eyes focused on his glowing form as it walked the center of the corridor before me, never pausing as his light was tossed from one projector to the next.

There were more doors along the hallway, each one closed, each one labeled: Maintenance, Astrometrics, Hydroponics, Sick Bay, and many that simply said Cabin and a number. One of them was actually open as we passed, and I peered in as Codi paused, mumbling something about how it was Crewman Letha's room, and how he'd have been disciplined for leaving it open, were he not long dead.

I tried not to be unsettled by the horse's odd little laugh, instead focusing on what I could see of the room beyond the doorway. It seemed very large, about the size of the cave I shared with my brother and his family, but there was only one sleeping area: a knee-high rectangle draped with giant leaves...or perhaps they were made of material like my coveralls. The rest of the space was open, with a few cubbyholes in the walls and a flat workstation jutting out of the corner. Most impressive, though, was the big hole on the opposite wall.

Like the ones in the front of the lander, this let in a view of the blackness that seemed to surround the homeship. And arcing through that blackness was the other silver hoop; I could just make out little round-cornered rectangles of dark glinting in its surface like spots on a legsnake's back. Behind each one must have been a room like this one. I couldn't count them all, and it was only a small segment of the hoop that I could see, and then only one side.

"...he didn't even make his bed." Codi was saying, shaking his head.

"How many were there?"

"Beds? Oh, you mean how many people. The final compliment of crew and passengers was 4,812, not counting robots and—ahem—sentient software packages."

"There are only 58 of us."

"So few? But, surely, there are other groups? Do you have no legends of...tribes that split off, perhaps some argument or the need to spread out in search of food?"

I shook my head. We had always lived in the cliffs by the great river, as far as I knew. If there had been others, they'd been long ago forgotten. Indeed, the elders had always spoken as though we were the last ones, the only ones, the sole remnants of society. I never felt that so strongly as I did now, looking at the emptiness of the room—the many thousands of rooms—in the empty homeship, floating amid the empty blackness, with only the stars to watch as we dwindled away.

Codi flickered, as though he were struggling with the same bleakness that threatened to overwhelm me. One gnat remembering another gnat? No, it seemed, we were less than that, merely mites to be born, live, and die upon a gnat's back, thinking it the entire world.

"There," he finally said as his image solidified once more. "I've set the homeship's sensors to scan for life signs on the planet's surface. With the orbit we've got, it shouldn't be long before we've got a full scan. Now, let's see if there's anyone else left in the galaxy." He sounded cheerful, but I could sense his concern.

We continued along the corridor—after Codi had me shut the door to Letha's room—and finally stopped at another door marked Communications. Inside were boxes with lights and buttons, just like the ones in the lander and Codi's cave. I did not know the songs for these, however, so Codi had to tell me what to do.

"And now, we wait, again."

He was wrong, however: just a few seconds after I finished sending the message as Codi instructed, a green light lit up on the console before me. At his nod, I pushed the button indicated and the room was filled with beeps and tweets, like a chorus of birds during the mating season.

But as soon as it had started, it had stopped, and a feminine voice crackled from somewhere in the room. "Who is this? I swear, Dillon, if it's one of your hacker friends messing with me again I'll see you put on Proxima Centauri duty."

"Laelynn, come on, you know I'd never do something like that...after you yelled at me last time. Besides, who else would keep you company on these long late nights. Personally, I prefer working the Lost Colonies room, and Prox is sooo busy—"

"Hello, can you hear us?" Codi interrupted. "This is C.O.D.I. 183, reporting from Tyson Colony, and—"

"Tyson Colony?" The male voice laughed. "Ok, this definitely isn't one of my ideas: you know I wouldn't pick something so far-fetched."

"Dillon, wait, 183 was the one assigned to the Tyson homeship. Codi, state your full serial number."

I waited while the glowing horse rattled off a string of numbers and letters almost too fast for me to discern them. The two voices mumbled some things to one another, asked Codi to verify a few of the digits he'd given, then asked us to "Please hold."

After a moment of silence, I mustered up the courage to ask: "So, they've been hiding in this room the whole time? Are they...holograms, like you?"

Codi chuckled. "No, Tog, they're actually very far away, many lightyears in fact, back on Earth...possibly Mars or Ceres, depending on if the New Earths Expedition headquarters have moved in the...however long it's been since we left. You see, every homeship has an atom-sized wormhole linking it with the station on Earth. Those beeps were the electronic signals that open and close the communications, and then one end pulses an input of additional energy to effectively widen the link to include video and data. In essence, it's WiFi via a hole-in-space."

I wanted to ask what “wai-fai" was, but figured it better to keep quiet, especially since the two voices returned.

"Tyson Colony homeship," said the male voice, audibly shaken, "we are opening the beam, standby for visual." One of the glossy black rectangles above the control panel flickered to life, and suddenly I saw two people before me.

Unlike the image of Captain Tyson, however, these people moved, breathing, blinking, shifting in their matching clothes. One was a tiger, I think, but with black and white in her stripes instead of orange; and the other was a horse like Codi, as brown as the stones of my brother's cave. They stared at us, eyes darting from me to Codi and back, as though they didn't believe we were sitting before them.

I tried to smile, and waved a little. "Good rain. My name is Tog." Apart from Codi, this was the first new person I'd ever met, and I wasn't sure quite how to handle it. Given the rest of what I'd seen from the ancestors, it was fair to assume...