It was eight years later that Perry came to judge that the carefree part of re-starting the human race had lasted . . . about seven years. The new friction, the end of the golden beginning, happened because of a pet deer.

The first seven years had not been easy; he would never have said that. They had been hard, sometimes tortuously hard, what with the four babies seeming to always get hungry all at once, but yet going through teething pains in a precise, drawn-out sequence, one by one by one by one; and, later, with them as terrified toddlers crying in thunderstorms; and, later still, with them as curious four- and five- and six-year-olds grilling him with questions, impatient for answers, staring at him like four owls as he tried to teach them and care for them and corral them, alone, doing the work that at least four adults, or maybe eight, or even two dozen or more (counting doting grandparents and uncles, aunts) would have handled in his first life.

But he had expected all that to be difficult. He had assumed – correctly – that he would not sleep well for probably two years. And of course he had the flying robot helpers of the zhranmin ship assisting him with everything from fetching clean diapers to fabricating a solar-powered heated bathtub.

“I’m worried this isn’t sustainable, Z,” he had told the reflection soon after this, as he monitored the four babies splashing in the warm water. He had them outside on a sunny day in front of the looming ship, with Z standing in the doorway as usual. “I’m going to have to heat my own water, one day. Or the five of us will. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to just have you build solar panels for us, for everything. I’ll have to teach these kids to chop and dry wood. Or dig coal. Or peat? Lord, we’ll end up baking this planet all over again.”

“We will try to make sure that by the time you’d be burning enough wood to be a problem, you’ll know how to make your own solar panels,” the reflection answered.

“ ‘You’ as in me, personally?”

“This would be some time in the future, Perry.”

“I know, I know. Just giving you a hard time.”

Perry had also known he would need to work hard early on to make sure the four would get along with each other. This was crucial to him. He was not going to have antagonistic siblings. This would not be – as Perry put it – a society in which Caracalla murdered Geta, or Henry I imprisoned Robert Curthose, or Edward IV killed George of Clarence. As soon as the four could understand unfairness, he would make sure he was fair to them all. As soon as they might realize that food, clothing, shelter could be finite, he would teach them that there was plenty for all. (This was not hard, with the supply robots whizzing around.)

Of course they still had their spats about who had found the shiniest rock, or the best flower, or who could jump the highest.

“But damn it, they’re going to know I love them all. They’re going to know they’re equals. We’re not going to single out Heathcliff and beat him. None of that.”

“You know I can hear you,” Z said from the door of the ship. Perry had been raving a bit in the yard behind his house.

“Yeah, well, they can’t.”

“And there’s no Heathcliff.”

“Damn right there’s not. And there’s not going to be.”

“Have you been getting enough sleep, Perry?”

“No.”

But all of that work, Perry had anticipated. What he hadn’t was their pet deer dying.

*

The kids had noticed a very young deer wandering the edge of the clearing, always alone.

(The kids:

The girls were Charlotte and Elizabeth; the boys, William and Jonathan. [Perry had chosen names which they could later shorten, if they wanted to; he thought that would be a bit of self-determination which would be good for them.] They had things in common in pairs:

Charlotte and Jonathan were quieter; Elizabeth and William spoke up more, both more loudly and more often. Charlotte and William loved ranging about the field, and into the woods; Jonathan and Elizabeth were content to spend more time in the house. The boys sang songs and were more interested in music – Perry had had Z and the robots knock together a ukulele and a xylophone, for them – while the girls spent more time drawing and painting.

And they were developing as individuals, too:

Charlotte would make up stories, many of them about a hawk like the ones they would see around their meadow.

Elizabeth spent the most time, by far, interacting with Z. She asked questions about the ship, the zhranmin home planet, distances among stars, the basics of flight, on and on. The other three spoke much more just to Perry. Perry had wondered about this, before the children were “born” and when they were babies: would they consider Z to be a co-parent with him? It turned out that they clearly did not.

William was a toolmaker, and a nascent inventor. He was driven to devise his own shovels, fruit-picking poles, baskets, on and on, even though the robots could fabricate better ones and do it much more quickly.

Jonathan was the most quiet of the four, but he would watch everyone closely and was the one who would anticipate needs, outings, chores. Elizabeth would take just one glance toward the front door and Jonathan would be headed outside instantly, retrieving her shoes from outside the zhranmin ship for her because it was obvious to him that she was looking for them, and he remembered where she had left them before she did.)

Perry and the children raised and then dried corn. The robots had initially found ears of it, who knows how far away, and Perry had then been able to grow it easily in a field on the other side of the clearing’s treeline. William discovered that the lone deer they’d seen wandering around would approach him for tossed handfuls of the dried corn, and soon thereafter would come up to just eat out of his hand. Before long the deer would stay close to them, seldom straying from the house. William spent the most time with the deer, but all of them considered it their pet. Perry had been glad to see this. He considered having pets a part of childhood, and he had wondered if it would be possible to acquire one. He had seen no feral dogs or cats around which they could try to domesticate. There were rabbits, but he didn’t want to steal one from its mother.

Local animals which would never be pets included cougars. Perry had never seen one very close to the clearing, but had come across one a few times while on walks some distance away. They had always turned away upon seeing him. Or it may have been the same cougar, for all he knew; he had never seen more than one.

*

The children came up with a name for the deer which they all agreed on, which Perry considered a miracle of consensus: Hoofer.

Late in September, the deer was away from the house and clearing for five days. After three days, they had all considered the absence unusual.

Charlotte and William found its remains in a glade past the area of the bend of the stream which they visited most often. After they brought back the news, all five of them went out to see the body.

The young deer was on its side, its blank eyes open. Perry saw that the neck had been bitten and broken. Flesh had been torn away from the lower ribs. Dried blood stained the fur, and the ground.

“I think the cougar must have done this,” he said. The children stared, silent, at the corpse.

“Let’s take him back and bury him,” he told them. “We’ll have to dig a deep hole. If it’s not deep, the cougar may come back and try to dig it up.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

It was Charlotte who asked the question, the next day, after they had buried the deer:

“Do you think Hoofer is still here?”

“No, Charlotte. He’s dead.”

“I know. The deer is dead. But is Hoofer still here?”

Perry wasn’t sure if she was hoping that it was mistaken identity; that maybe it had been a different deer they had found.

“That deer was definitely Hoofer,” he told her. “He’s gone.”

“I know that the body was Hoofer’s. But is Hoofer – still going?”

Perry looked at her in silence for a moment.

“Do you mean,” he asked, “is Hoofer separate from that body we found?”

“Yes. Is Hoofer a – shadow now? Is Hoofer’s mind still here?”

She didn’t have the vocabulary, Perry realized, to ask about a spirit, or a soul. He had very intentionally made sure none of them did. But this concept had occurred to her on its own.

He was gobsmacked.

“It’s hardwired into us,” he said aloud.

“What?”

“I just mean,” he said, catching himself, “that we often want a piece of things, things that we love, to be with us even after – after they die. But – I don’t think they stay with us, Charlotte.”

“I don’t think.” He had cracked open that door.

*

Perry had been raising the four of them without any religion.

“I don’t want you fighting about gods or prophets,” he had told them one day, years before, while they were tiny and in their cribs. “I don’t want you killing each other over Albigensian heresies. Or Cathar heresies. Or Lollard heresies. There will be no heresy. There will be no apostasy. Got it? I don’t want any crusades. The Williamites are never going to launch a crusade against the Elizabethans. There will be no martyrs. There will be no inquisitions. We’re not excommunicating anyone. We’re not communicating anyone to begin with, either, for that matter. We’re not converting anyone. We’re not going to have pogroms. We’re not going to have ghettos. We’re not having cavaliers, and we’re not having Roundheads. We’re not having a massacre at Magdeburg; we’re not having a massacre at Mainz; we’re not having any massacres. We’re not arguing about which son-in-law was the true whatever. We’re not having jihads. None of you has his own separate promised land. This is all promised land, all of it, for all of us.

“I don’t want you wasting your time arguing if you'll be saved by your faith or your works. None of you are getting saved, and that’s because you’re all fine already. You’re fine. We’re leaving all that behind.

“For all I know,” he finished, “all of that nonsense was why they blew themselves up to begin with. If that’s what they did. Anyway, we’re not doing it all over again.”

*

When they were old enough to talk, Perry explained natural phenomena as soon as he could, and as thoroughly as he could – given their ages – every time a question arose. Thunder, lightning; rain, snow, hail. The atmosphere is thicker than you might guess, Jonathan. The Earth is round and it’s on a tilt, Charlotte. There’s something called evaporation, Elizabeth. The stars that shift around each night are actually planets, William. Perry knew he probably overdid it; he noticed eye rolls from them, by the time they were six, when he rushed to explain fireflies or bee stings.

Elizabeth actually asked him, once: “Why are you so worried about explaining everything so fast?”

“Because we know things, Elizabeth. We’re a clearing of people who can explain things.”

And he wasn’t going to have them attributing any of it to a supernatural power, he said – to himself only.

The kids had been afraid of the dark. He had guessed that they would be, no matter how rational he was about it; and it was very obvious how his ancestors so easily attributed all sorts of devilry to spirits of the night. He just did the best he could. He kept them awake in the summer, sometimes, to show them owls’ eyes and raccoons. He explained to them what the screeching fox yelps were, and hoped to see a fox make such a sound during the day although he never did. The four of them did not love the dark, when they were little, but at least they didn’t fabricate evil night beings.

He felt it had gone well. The kids weren’t invoking God, or god, or gods to explain dry weather, or wet weather, or storms, or bad luck, or good luck. The idea never would have occurred to them, because they had never heard anyone bring it up.

As for any sense of an afterlife, the question had not come up in their eight years, probably because no one – nor any animal important to them – had died. They ate a lot of fish, but none of the four ever asked Perry about any eternal permanence the fish might have.

(Perry and the children never ate any animals apart from fish. He wasn’t against doing so, but it just struck him as a hassle and they had never gotten around to it. He was content with the fish, grains, legumes, fruits, tubers, vegetables they had; and the kids of course didn’t realize they were missing anything else. He would not have minded having milk, cheese, and eggs, but there were no animals around they could milk, nor any chickens or other fowl they could domesticate.)

They came across the occasional dead squirrel, or crow, but asked nothing beyond what the cause of death might have been.

But that had changed with the pet deer. When Hoofer was killed, it punched a hole in their group, and then Charlotte had come up with her question.

*

“You don’t think there’s anything left of Hoofer still here?” she asked him, now.

“I just don’t. Charlotte,” he started. He frowned.

He felt he had to come out with it.

“Charlotte, back when I was first here, there were people who did think that something was left of a living thing after it died. Maybe a shadow. Maybe an echo. Maybe. People just didn’t know. But you’re not the first one to wonder about it. You deserve to know that.”

*

Someday she’ll be a grown woman, and I’ll be gone, he thought. This was the crushing responsibility he felt, sometimes. It was the exact same thing he had worried about so long ago with Araceli:

I am raising a grandmother. I’m raising a supervisor. Someday she’ll be fifty. She’ll be older than I am now. She’ll be a leader. People will look up to her. She’ll have her own office. And it’s up to me. It’s freaking up to me – and Jen – to not botch this.

He would shake his head.

It takes a village to raise a child, but just one person can single-handedly screw up the kid completely.

*

“And if a person dies?” Charlotte asked.

“Yes,” he said. “People would wonder the same thing about – people. If any part of them went on.”

She stood silent for a moment, and then asked:

“And everyone you knew – died.”

“Yes, they did. A few of them, while I was there. And then all of them, afterward.”

“Do you think that any part of them went on?”

“I – I’ve never seen that they did, Charlotte. Some people thought so, but I never saw anything, back in my first time here, to think that.”

But this was hard for Perry, because . . . he wasn’t sure. He just wasn’t sure. He had heard people he trusted and respected talk about afterlives.

Bob Schwartz had been an old man, around eighty, who lived a few doors down from Perry’s parents’ house. Bob had stopped by frequently to talk with Perry’s father. And Perry had listened in, once, when Bob told his father about dying in a hospital room, floating above the table, and watching the doctors work on him.

“It was very peaceful,” Bob had said.

Perry had just heard too many similar stories to write them off. He’d also heard repeatedly of staff in nursing homes mentioning electrical anomalies in rooms after their occupants died; lights flickering, or turning on or off by themselves.

He’d heard too much. He couldn’t promise Charlotte that Hoofer was completely and finally gone. And he was stunned that she had come up with the idea on her own.

“She didn’t associate it with a supreme being, though,” he told himself, that night. He found that a relief.

He often wondered about the possibility that there would be an afterlife, with departed souls gathered there, and chatting, all while there was no sign of any supreme being. And if the departed would pick up their old arguments anyway.

“Watch dead people in a godless afterlife just argue that God is still somewhere else,” he said to himself.

*

Charlotte didn’t talk to any of the other three about her question – that Perry was aware of. But he wondered, now, if religion was hardwired into them. He felt dread that from now on he would have to keep an eye out for crusades and inquisitions.