BOWED WILLOW

I digress to bring up the EPR paper—our first attempt at faster-than-light communication. The idea was simple: take two entangled quanta, separate them, and measure the spin of one. The spin of the other is guaranteed to be the opposite, no matter how vast the distance. Like a switch that, when flipped, remotely flips its pair.

But as we know, there is no way to flip our switch, let alone choose which direction to flip it in, making it impossible to transmit any meaningful information this way. The switches have already been flipped, one up and one down, by the hand of God. All we may do is pull back the veil and observe.

- from “Shūbun 53: Annual Findings Report” by Leiblich K.K.

EVIE

It did not take them long to build the second ark: Egret. It was a mirror image of Mobius, ready for its maiden flight. Each held about two hundred embryos each. Drake had acquiesced to my request easily enough—the humans had no reason to risk generating a pair when you were available. I left out the details of your fatal wound—trivial, considering you would recover during the trip.

“This is her,” I said, looking at your comatose body in the pod, frozen in milky ice, barely visible through the glass.

“Alice, you said?” Miriam said from beside me.

“Yes. I owe all I have to her. She saved me, once—no, more than once.” Your wound had sealed, but your vitals were still flat.

“What was she like?” Miriam asked, wiping the condensation off the glass to reveal your face, frozen in ice.

What was she like? I had spent far longer looking at you through the glass than the brief time we had lived together. The lilt of your voice as you spoke, and the places you showed me—all slipped through my fingers like soapy water, leaving only the lingering warmth of a pleasant dream and the bitter regret of having woken from it. “She liked to paint.”

“Paint? That’s wonderful! Can I see a painting of hers?”

“No, they’re gone. Soldiers burned them all a long time ago.” I stared at the floor, too afraid to look at Miriam, though I knew her name was mere coincidence.

“What? Why? That’s awful.”

“I angered some people. They came after me, but mistook her for me.” The words came mechanically, one after the other, devoid of hurt or grief. “I knew a nun back then. She was named Miriam too.”

She stared at me, not sure how to react. “Where is she now?”

“Who knows. It must have been centuries ago.”

She held my hand, sympathy on her face. Not empathy—no mortal could know grief that has festered for so long. “The arks will leave soon. If there’s anywhere you’d like to see before you go, just ask.” She looked at me as a mother sees her children, making memories for them to look back on. To me, however, she was a walking corpse—her life a fraction of my own.

“Do you know of the Pink Sea?” I asked.

“The Pink Sea? No… Do you mean the Coral Sea, perhaps?”

“Is that what it’s called?”

“I think so. The coral is what makes it appear pink.”

Names change over time. The next to live here, if any ever do, might call it the Pink Sea again, ignorant of what gives it its hue. “Do you know of any convents near it?”

“Convents?” She scratched her head. “Not that I know of.”

Oracle orbited my head. “I still have the cached satellite data from when we dropped her off, if it may prove useful.”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“You do?”

“Yes. It is long out of date, but the coordinates cannot have changed much. Miriam,” he said, turning to her. “Perhaps you have a map with you?”

She pulled out a digital tablet with a map and held it out for him. “I don’t have hands,” Oracle drawled. She scrolled and pinched the surface according to his instructions, pinpointing the exact location we once landed at hundreds of years ago. It was unlabelled. Miriam looked up at me, confused, but knew better than to question Oracle.

*

It took almost two hours by car. The coordinates led to a meadow of fading bluegrass that stretched into the west, past the horizon. To the east lay a chalk white beach that lined the Coral Sea with waters grey and dull. A thick, slate sky hung low above hid Myrmidon and its scorching heat.

“Is it raining?” Miriam asked as she stepped out from the other side and held her palm up.

“No. Just a gloomy day.” Before us lay a crumbling building that could only have been the convent. It was far too big to have homed just a family, and its wooden turrets might have once housed scopes to gaze at the stars with. Now, however, they lay in ruins, barely upright, eroded by time and salt, more grass and moss than brick and stone. A faint lane stretched past it, piles of rubble on either side. That was all there was to this town—a convent and what had likely been a handful of stores to supply it. That, and the Coral Sea.

Through a broken window lay only rotting furniture and mould—death and decay. My hair fluttered around me, blinding me, as the sea breeze picked up and rolled in. I brushed it away—and before me lay the dining room, pristine, its wooden floor varnished and sparkling after a good cleaning. The dining table was round and plain, carved from unadorned wood, dyed in a deep shade of oak brown. A prim white tablecloth covered it, trimmed with gold, ironed flat. Miriam sat on a simple stool, munching on an apple, her chin in her palms, resting her elbows on the table, still garbed as a pupil. She stared straight through me, bored of this town, past the shore, beyond the sea, dreaming of what lay past it. The waters were pink, reflected in her eyes, glittering under a clear blue sky. This was a day like any other. It was nothing special. It would, in time, become a precious memory—one so dear to her that she would come to beg me to return her to this town. She should never have left. Then again, she would never have learned to love home had she remained here. The envy and anger I bore towards her had long since passed through me, leaving nothing but a stifling void. Why did you have to do that to us? Why couldn’t you have let us be?

My hair blew into my eyes again, breaking the spell. I blinked, and the dining room was in ruins once more, the table in pieces on the floor. There was nobody left to answer, and nobody but me left to ask.

“Is there something inside?” Miriam asked as she stumbled over a stone next to me.

“Nothing,” I murmured. We continued around the convent. A small yard lay behind it with a few crumbling tombstones.

“Graves?” Miriam asked as she reached out to touch one. “They’re in remarkably good condition, given their age.”

I read each headstone. Nuns only stayed here to learn before being posted to chapels around the country—some, across the ocean. They did not come here to die. These graves, then, were for people that stayed here, not those who studied here.

One of them read Mother, though I did not recognise the name beneath it. I squatted next to the one next to it, which also read Mother, but below it was inscribed her name in full: Miriam Psusennes. There was nothing else; no epitaph, nothing save for her name and title. You returned to teach, then. That’s nice.

“Someone you knew?” Miriam asked behind me as she kneeled, reeling slightly at the name. “Oh.”

“She’s the nun that torched our cave and killed—injured—Alice,” I said, to which Miriam did not respond.

The arc of her life seemed so trivial now. The glory of basking in the town’s love and the grief of having it turned against her; the guilt she bore as Alice’s blood stained her white cloak—all of it lay dead and buried beneath this inconspicuous headstone, mossy, crumbling, surrounded by bluegrass. A fleeting star.

“I haven’t read much scripture, but they often speak of the One Sin—that must have been by her, no? Though nobody really knows where she went after that.”

“Perhaps. I haven’t read any. I suppose some of the troops that fled must have stuck around to watch from behind the trees.” I did not believe in spirits. She was gone, and that absolved her from any judgment I might pass. I was not foolish enough to curse a crumbling stone. I could only regret meeting her as a deity. Our friendship was built on a lie, and I was a fool to think it would never crumble. That was my sin.

My heart burned, jealous. Her regret had lasted only a few decades. Mine—centuries, millenia. Concord had reclaimed her—she was both the soil and the grass growing in it. She was the wind that carries bees and honey and the dangling apple that falls in the breeze. The bugs and the animals that graze on meadows and munch on fruit—she was there, too. She formed the villagers and the shepherds and the soldiers, all bowing their heads in prayer; the nuns too, of course; the children hiding in fields; the kings and queens squabbling over fresh grapes in court, and the commoners starving in the slums. She flowed, spreading thin but never fading, a drop of her in each bawling infant born and fed with Concord’s bounty. Faith does not heal like a balm. It moves us from within.

“Let’s go,” I said as I stood up. “There’s nothing left here for us.” The sea sighed as we trudged back to the car, the tide rising, reaching towards us before pulling back.