This is what I’ve been doing for most of your life, I said. And one day, not long from now, this is where I’ll go. To observe, guide if needed. I’ll be one of them, little one. I’ll be among their first and their last. But I’ll always be your mother.
*
Nuri, my poor girl, looked betrayed when I left. The light within her flicked off for a moment when she realized I wasn’t coming back. No more walks, no more telling bad jokes to the laughing tree, no more looking through the probability scope together at funny animals that may or may not exist in the future. And that’s all I could think about, trapped in my cradle, my space pod （whatever you want to call it） for centuries. I was so much older when my mother left me. I had already completed my training. She was too young to realize, you see. We could get from point A to point B much faster, sure—a day, a week, a month for the farthest corners—and maybe the elders wanted it this way, for the world builders to have the time to dwell on what they’d left behind, to become comfortable with forgetting. But how could I ever forget?
I landed beneath the water and washed ashore as a small sea creature, an ancestor of the starfish. My cradle, as far as I know, has long been trapped in hundreds of feet of ice. When I first arrived, I could not talk, obviously did not have the biological means to do so, could not write in journals or relay these words as I do now. I’ve confided in others now and then. But I had to be careful. I can’t come back from some things—the sorts of deaths that were popular for so long, burning and decapitation. For those first few eons, there was nothing but water, ash, the simplest of organisms, and the seed I had launched into the heart of the planet. I fell in love with a box jelly and then a trilobite, but these were single-sided love affairs.
*
She didn’t understand. She asked if she could go. Mommy, please, she said. I’ll be good. The elders, who determined seed launch order long before any of us were born, assigned my husband and Nuri to be among the last world builders to remain. And so we grew used to saying goodbye to everyone we cared about—our neighbors, my best friend, the boy who told me he would love me forever before leaving to care for a planet populated by bipedal crustaceans.
I remember holding the scope to the seed, helping Nuri carry its weight, adjusting the dials so she could see what might happen to Earth. Probability scopes are an important part of our technology—they’re like telescopes but fitted with lenses made from the jellylike remains of our ancestors. They allow us to see through reality based on the contents of each seed. My father used to say our planet and everyone on it was made of pure possibility and that’s what made us special, made us able to create, become anything we wanted.
And what happens to us when we leave our world? What happens to us as we travel the stars? Children were trained to answer: “We become everything we pass until we become the thing we created.” Our bodies would transform as we passed star system after star system, a catalog of everything our race had given birth to—a Xhilian, a Parsu, a Tarlian Mork, a Quiali, a Dimetrodon of Pangaea.
*
After millions of years I decided to start my first Earth family in order to feel whole again, despite the strict world builder tenet to observe, never to interfere. As a Neanderthal, I helped my tribes survive migration and winter and wars with early humans. I fell in love with a man who killed a saber-toothed cat with nothing but his muscular bare hands and a small stone blade. We made love in caves and beside the carcasses of woolly mammoths. And when my womb began to grow, I thought I could finally be happy with the illusion of a mortal life. But when my daughter, whose name was a series of trills, came, I realized that I had imperfectly shape-shifted into my humanoid form. Maybe a gene where there shouldn’t be one, or a chromosome, led to my newborn glowing like a nebula when she took her first breaths. She had her father’s brow ridges and eyes and stubborn demeanor. She had my nose and shards of my home world flowing through her veins like stars—and for a time, I thought my loneliness and desire to create from nothing but love and hope had produced a most beautiful life.
But then a virus bloomed in the fragile bodies of my cave mates around my daughter’s eighth year, and I realized there was a cost to my selfishness. At first, we believed it was a normal sickness from the cold of the tundra, the nights when our fires went dark. But then, one by one, our hunters returned with fevers, mothers caring for children struggling to breathe. I could see parts of me glowing hot inside their translucent skin. Soon I was the only one tending the fires, roaming the plains for game, cradling the lifeless bodies of those who would not wake. Everything I put in my daughter’s mouth came back up. I prayed that because she was mine, whatever plague I had inadvertently passed to the others would somehow spare her. But I watched her stomach sink into itself, the blood bubbling from her lips. I held her close to my chest, absorbed her last heartbeats, her last breath, the last sounds she’d ever utter, a strained and mournful krrrrrrrrrrrrr. I left my daughter on a bed of leaves and grass beside a carving of my star system, a place I wanted her to dream about as she left this world, covered her in a hide decorated with the seashells I had collected during my early travels as a hominid. I told her she had a sister somewhere out there. I told her that she would always be a part of me. I etched the memories and songs and science of my world that I did not want lost to time into the floors of the cave. I built a fire, sang one final lullaby to my daughter, and left as the sun rose. I crossed sheets of ice, transformed into a human, and lived alone for centuries, trying to forgive myself for being so selfish, so careless, ensuring my mistake would never happen again.