Perry initially felt like he should keep the four children in teaching sessions for at least half the day, five days a week, but he had realized quickly that he would run out of material.

“I know I’m lousy at math, so I can’t tell them anything beyond basic algebra,” he told Z, “but even so, I still don’t know how school chewed up six hours a day for me for so many years. What the hell am I going to do for that amount of time? There’s no way.”

He had some books, but he would need many more. He had arranged to print books with the zhranmin when the children were two:

“Listen, Z, I want you to fabricate something pretty complex. I hope I can explain it. I want a little table with buttons on it to be able for me to write, and I want to see the words I’m writing on a screen. And I want to be able to save what I write, so that I can add to it over multiple days. And weeks, months, years. And then I want you to print out these stories I write on paper; mashed up and dried wood pulp, in thin sheets, like leaves. Or however you can make it, whatever. About yay big. Eventually five copies of each so that each of us can have one. Is this making sense? I guess I will draw a picture of all the buttons and how they’re arranged, in the dirt outside.”

“We understand,” Z said. “I will give you a small table which you can make figures on, to show us the design.”

“That will be perfect.”

*

Perry did the best he could to convey the history of the human race to the children, although he often wondered how much it mattered. He also left huge gaps.

“The Roman Empire had a string of rulers known as the five good emperors,” he mused aloud to Z one day. “Although I only remember two of them. Hadrian and Trajan. And one of them adopted the other – they were consecutive – but I don’t remember which was which. These history books are not going to win any awards, I’m afraid. Ah well. But mostly I want to get across the ideas of causes and effects, and pendulum swings through history. Democracy to tyranny, and back.

“Sometimes it seems like history was just a string of rulers attempting to maximize their power as much as they could without sparking violent discontent that would get them overthrown.

“These lessons . . . it will be so long before they matter to anyone. It will take us decades to get up to even a hundred people, and even then it’s not like it’s going to be fifty Spartans and fifty Athenians. I’m just worried about – the descendants of these kids creating some horrific dictatorship someday. But any chance of that is so far in the future . . . I need to tell them something about how bad it got in our past, though.”

*

There were so many times when he wanted to talk to Jennifer about the job he was doing. He wanted to run things by someone who was not a child, and not an alien. And who had grown up in the same world he had.

These four children’s world was so different than his – his as it had been at their age – that he wondered if it was healthy. Sometimes at night as he lay in bed, after a day of taking advice from the alien avatar, and accepting goods it had fabricated, and answering a million questions from the kids, and basically working as hard as he could to ensure a functional future human civilization, his mind raced with doubt.

“It’s easy to stay busy and handle all that during the day,” he said to himself. “But at night, it’s another matter. As Hemingway sort of said.”

Was it normal for these kids if he let the zhranmin build them an entire freaking spaceship and truck them up to the Moon? Was it preparing them to run a sustainable society? Shouldn’t there have been some intermediate steps such as at least building, say, a wheelbarrow?

The gathering devices had brought them apple trees, cherry trees, blackberry vines, on and on. Would they have been better off striking out on their own to find them?

But what choice did they have? It was either eat nothing but fish and dandelion greens, and try to survive on that, or else accept help to get themselves started.

The zhranmin fabricator forged knives, saws and axes, made soap, created synthetic fabric, stamped threading needles, made thread.

But what were their other options, other than to accept these things? They would be stinking and dirty while wearing– if they were lucky – sun-cured deer skins, if they didn’t.

“We have an alien neighbor,” Perry said to himself. “It’s obviously normal and natural, in our universe; we just hadn’t known that, in my first life. So, they live near us, and share what they know. It’s like living next to a smart uncle. A smart uncle who can interplanetary spacecraft in his garage. What’s wrong with that?”

Not to mention the fact, he knew, that the children wouldn’t even exist in the first place without the aliens.

He and Jennifer had spent so much time bouncing questions about Araceli off each other. Was a certain book too old for her? And so what if it was? Was she old enough to sleep over somewhere? Had she been outside to play enough, a particular day? If she were uncomfortable about it would she have admitted it, or just said nothing and been miserable?

There were no sleepovers for these four children, of course – but William did indeed absent himself from the house, now in the summer he was eleven.

*

He had left the house with an ax and a bow saw, and departed the clearing for an entire day, several times before the night when he didn’t come back. Perry had noticed, and had asked him about it:

“I saw you walking out of the clearing yesterday with the saw and the axe. Are you doing anything interesting?”

William had been quick with an answer. It was obvious he had prepared it in advance, and had rehearsed it, and was not being completely open with it:

“I’ve seen some wood I want to work on. I’ll show you what it is, if it works out.”

His eyebrows had risen as he said this. It was clear to Perry that this was not the whole story.

Perry loved this boy so much.

When he looked at him, he didn’t necessarily feel he was looking at himself. He knew that William shared his DNA – there was nowhere else it possibly could have come from – but the boy, the young man, was not an obvious carbon copy of his own jaw line, or eyes, or build.

But William felt like his son. Or maybe his brother. Perry was moved by the way the boy would sit himself down to study new things, whether it was a new book the zhranmin had printed, or a bulge-eyed toad, or a lone feather. He would be quiet, just absorbing what he saw; Perry liked to think that he himself looked that serious when he was learning.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

And Perry admired him for his tool-making, his ingenuity; they all did. It had been William who had figured out how to process raw cotton into yarn, and then into cloth, on their own.

This had been yet another thing that had been hard for Perry to explain to Z so that the gatherers would know what to look for. He had mentioned it toward the end of one July:

“So there’s a plant that develops pods of fiber that is white. The fiber looks like dandelion heads when they’ve gone to seed, but much thicker. It would grow in pods about this big, I think. It has a lot of seeds mixed in with it. I assume it would still be around. I know it grew wild in many places. That’s what I’m looking for. It would be at this latitude or to the south; it grew in warm climates. I don’t really know when it will be ready, blooming, whatever it’s called. But probably around now, I’d guess.

“Brother,” he added. “I don’t really know what we’ll do if you find any; I think it was hard to grow. But we could plant it and see. I don’t know – on the one hand, people used slaves to grow it, for a hundred years or more, because it was so hard to do; but on the other hand, it was successful enough as a crop that they needed tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of slaves to process it.

“And then,” he finished, “it would just be a simple matter of converting that fiber into cloth. Which I have no idea how they did.”

The gathering devices did indeed return after a few days with their tubs full of cotton pods. He set the kids to pulling it all from the pods, and separating out the seeds.

“Feel how soft it is? People would make clothing out of this. They would spin it into yarn, and then use that to knit or weave cloth. I don’t really know how it was done, though. Obviously they weren’t tying together all of it strand by strand. And then once they had yarn, it must have taken a long time to make cloth. They did that by weaving it; lacing it together. They would sometimes make a frame to do that, and slide in the lengths of yarn one by one. So it must have been hard, but at the same time people all over the world figured it out, and they did so a very long time ago. I mean thousands of years before I was born.”

“If you pull it out a little flat,” William said, “it sort of holds together still. I wonder if you could just – pull it out pretty thin and then roll it back up. To get a long sort of string out of it.”

He had figured that out himself just by manipulating this plant he had never before seen.

*

The night he didn’t come home, Perry tried not to look too worried in front of the other three.

“He’s not in his room?” he asked them.

“No,” Elizabeth said. “I saw him leave this morning, again. With the saw and axe. I didn’t see him since.”

They ate dinner together, with one chair at the table empty. Perry tried to keep a normal conversation going. At the end, though, he asked them:

“Did he seem upset, or anything, to any of you? I didn’t notice that he did.”

None of them had, either.

“I’ll go look for him in the morning. We’ve always seen him heading the same way, to the east, right?”

“Can we go too?” Charlotte asked.

“Charlotte, for this, I really want to just go by myself.”

Perry knew he could have just asked Z to send the robots to look for William, but he didn’t. This just seemed like something he wanted to handle himself; or themselves. Without the zhranmin. When Perry set out that morning, he noticed that the avatar was not standing in the doorway of the ship as it often did. It, too, seemed to understand this.

Perry walked out of the clearing and kept heading east. He walked through trees; he jumped a stream that fed into the larger one to the north where they had their weir; went through glades.

He thought of William walking this exact path, and what the boy would have been thinking. The boy was his own person, taking in the world through his own eyes.

William knows this land just as well as I do. Or better.

Eventually, in another clearing, Perry smelled smoke. Not much; it was just barely there. But smoke was so rare, it was easy to notice.

At a distance, before the next treeline, he saw a few flames. As he neared, he saw William crouched by a fire. It was under control.

Closer yet, Perry saw something round hanging from a tree.

It was a turkey. William had hunted one, and was preparing to roast it.

Perry stopped. Should he make a sound? Clear his throat? He was still too far for William to hear that. There was no door to shut, no corner to drop a tool down in with a thud.

William looked over at him, right then. He stared a moment, and then turned back to the fire.

*

“You got a turkey,” Perry said, once close enough.

“I did.”

“Good job hunting. How did you do it?”

“With a spear.”

“You just threw it?”

The boy nodded.

“Just threw it, yes. But with this.” He stood and moved over to the tree. He picked up a short stick leaning against it. Perry saw that one end of it was a smooth handle, while the other had been carved into a socket.

“I figured out that if I put the end of a spear in here,” William said, pointing to the socket, “and then hold it like this, and throw, it goes a lot faster and farther. It’s hard to aim. But it worked for this one.” He nodded toward the turkey hanging from the tree. It was tied by its feet, its wings hanging down to the ground.

“You’ve invented the atlatl,” Perry said. “Out of the blue. Very well done. It never occurred to me to tell you about them. I’d forgotten about them. But Native Americans used these. And right around here, I’m sure. They’d be proud of you.”

“Atlatl?”

“That’s the word, yes. That’s – remarkable you came up with that. Really impressive.”

The boy didn’t answer.

“You know,” Perry said, “you’re going to need to be careful with – ”

“Something coming after the remains of this at night, I know. My lean-to is over there a ways. I’m not sleeping close to the fire and this blood here.”

Perry saw William’s little shack, then, about forty yards away. It was a wedge-shaped structure built around a log beam that had been suspended between two trees which were about ten feet apart.

“Reminds me of the base entrances we saw on the Moon,” Perry said.

“I guess so.” William looked back at the fire.

“William, it’s fine that you’re out here. Stay as long as you want. I’d say be careful, but I know you will be. But you should let us know when you’re away for the night. The others worry. I worry.”

The boy stared at the fire silently and then answered:

“I know. I just wanted to do this myself. I didn’t want anyone along. Now that I’ve done this much, I don’t mind if anyone wants to come. And I’ll come back home tomorrow night.

“I just – ” he continued. “I get tired of that thing doing everything. Z. Always watching us. We’ve done things on our own. I mean, people. I know the aliens are ahead of us, but – we went to the Moon. We went to Mars. We did whatever it was that kept you alive all that time. Z doesn’t have to do everything for us.”

“I know, William. I don’t want it to, either. And we’re getting better and better.”

“It’s so slow,” the boy said. “It’s going to take us so long to get back where we were.”

Perry put his foot on one of the rocks that William had put around the fire, and rocked it back and forth.

“William. You’re doing great. You’re doing so well. I’m so proud of you. Your life is not easy. Yours and the others’. You’re the first person, the first children, to ever grow up like this. I mean getting everything you know from just one person, and from an image of an alien. It’s hard. You guys are all doing so well. And you, especially, you have so much to teach. I’m so impressed by you. You know, kids are going to learn a lot from you.”

“Kids,” William repeated.

“Yes. It’s time for more. More people. I think we should get another four. Soon.”

“It’s time for that?”

“It is. You’re all eleven. You’re old enough to help. We’re going to double the size of our – family. Clan. And I’m so glad you’re going to be along to help with these kids. They’re going to be lucky to have you. I couldn’t do this without you. We’re going to come back, William. We’re going to come back even better than we were in my first life. And you’ll get to see it. You’re going to help make that world.”