The Floating Cradle

Twenty-Seven

The major swore the pilot and crew of five to secrecy, not that this little mission would be worth bragging about. By all records, they were en route to repair another shuttle that had broken down outside of Baton Rouge. They were not to change course until they were well into the troposphere.

There is still a grimy film on the window (which is also her work screen) where she had rubbed off the blood using her sleeve and some Purell. She sits at her station and reviews incoming reports with a sort of efficient numbness, walling her mind off to all but the essential figures populating the screen, glazing over the stars. An alert: the general has scheduled a leadership assembly in the Whelk's highest spire, which the major is compelled to attend in a half hour.

A message laps at the edge of her window. The major does not recognize the sender, and she has work to do, but as she raises a finger to dismiss it, something in her hesitates. She allows the message to wash over the screen.

She blinks, her eyes adjusting to the blocky characters, so ponderous and plodding compared to the language she is used to. The message is long; there is no time to decipher this now, she decides, and so she shelves it for later, returning to her reports, checking the time every few minutes, staving off all thought of the shuttle from her mind.

But I can tell you what it says.

Old Friend—

I am typing this on a child's hand-held gaming device—her father made her lend it to me, and now she's glaring at me like I'm an old witch. The keyboard only has human letters (English) so I hope you can keep up.

You asked me why I came to Earth, but you never asked me why I left Cognata. Both questions beg more answers than I can provide in this format. Naturally I have spent many hours reflecting on my reasons, and whether or not you approve of them will do little to my ego at this point. You won't find apologies or regrets typed here. I can only hope by sharing some abridged thoughts with you that you will be more inclined to help my son.

Years ago, as a young woman, before I met you, before I had been approved for motherhood or even submitted my application, I came to a certain realization: there are no true accidents on Cognata. Not anymore. Just generalities, and the tacit acceptance that equilibrium for all is, at best, equilibrium for most, with statistics rounding out the edges. What would you, and most people, say is the main reason for our species' success? Calculated decisions, correct? Exchanges in which what is relinquished is lesser than that which is gained. Clever manipulations of imperfect systems that can be made, with our intervention, near perfect. Near. Don't call me an idealist—I know what I am. I am not demanding perfection—I am insisting that we do not forget what lies in between. The near.

If you ask me, the first time in generations any tantum really did the numbers justice was when we made the Cradle. It had to be exact. It had to be perfect to make the distance, to deliver us safely. That's when I knew. I knew if I was to trust any numbers with my body, it would be those numbers. That if I lost my life out there, it would truly be an accident and not due to acceptable oversight, collateral slough. Perhaps it was selfish to take my son with me. But it was selfishness that made him to begin with.

I have been called a thousand terrible things for this decision, been told that I am no real mother, because a real mother does not put her own desires above her child's safety. Humans and tanta alike have said this to me. I have no authority to refute them. It is true that I took him from Cognata just as much for my own sake as for his (if not more), that his benefit from such an uncharted life would be ancillary to my own. Perhaps I was never his mother by anything but blood and proximity and intent. Perhaps that is not what motherhood is.

I did not come to Earth for the empirically "better," for myself or for my son. Earth is not empirically better. The humans are lacking in so many regards. I miss being among my own kind, the familiarities of the land, the ease of my ancestry all about me. My son would have been comfortable living as I once lived. The numbers that be would have almost certainly done right by him. Well, they can do right by someone else in his place.

He has not grown up into some enlightened, celestial wonder because I raised him on Earth. He is more vain than I intended, more elitist—he takes after his mother, you might say. I know for his part it is largely self-defense, the pain of loving a species that reciprocates only with understanding, tolerance. He likes himself, but he resents me because he thinks he will probably never love himself, eternally stretched between two worlds. But if that's the case, then if you ask me, self-love is overrated.

I made an alien of him by bringing him to Earth, it's true. There are few like him, with his combination of blood and upbringing, and I wonder if, thanks to the bombs, that loneliness will persist throughout his entire generation. You probably think after the exodus, no tanta will ever return to Earth. Forgive me, dear, but that is the single most foolish thing you could think. Nothing will keep our people apart after all it took to find each other. And I suspect these bombs will start the humans on their own passage through the dark.

In many respects, my son was my proxy as we navigated this new world of ours. My body and mind were too old to undergo the experience I craved firsthand—that "memory of birth," as I phrased it to you earlier, perhaps ineptly. But my son was just young enough that Cognata was no more real to him than the twilight before living, that his passage across space was gestational, the Cradle his chrysalis, and Earth the only world into which he would emerge a thing of active history. There had been none of that on Cognata since they first conceived of the ex-womb, not until we heard the humans stirring across the stars and the Cradle exhumed our potential. What did we ever do on Cognata but spin, like an ouroboros of "good enough," nothing ventured and nothing lost? Almost nothing lost.

I love my son. I know I love him selfishly, but still I love him. I love what it says about me that he exists; even when he is unfathomable to me, infuriating—especially then—do I love him. I see the strange, wondrous thing he has proved lies dormant in us all, his life uncoiling infinity. In him, I remember the future.

I suspect I've lost you by now. Whatever translator you're using has no doubt botched the essence of my words—it's a stiff and shallow language these humans use, but in my seventeen years here I have learned to appreciate it. If nothing else, it lends itself well to telling tales.

Please, Old Friend.