“I want these flying creatures to live,” she said. She wanted her world to have a fighting chance, a species of furry animals that might fly one day. That world has a 70 percent chance of being known as Vara to its first civilizations and as a series of three long, high-pitched whistles by the last intelligent species to inhabit it before its star burns away its history. I’ve watched the possibility of this last civilization, seen their slim chance of escaping their star’s destruction. You see, this is partly why Earth hasn’t received any messages from other worlds. Most have perished by the time their light reaches our sky. Sometimes hundreds of light-years exist between even the simplest forms of life.
*
You’d think someone who came from outer space wouldn’t be as susceptible to astronomical pickup lines, but you’d be wrong. In the sixteenth century, I lived as Marina Gamba in Venice, and was taken in by the passion of a scholar who, of course correctly, believed that the Earth revolved around the sun. He said the cluster of moles on my back looked like the Pleiades. Now, what else can I tell you about Galileo? We mapped the stars together before and after making love. And even though we couldn’t see many worlds with his telescope, I would point to a dark patch of sky and say, There. There is so much light you cannot see. And there, past it all, is where I come from. He’d ask me about other species, why the spaces between civilizations were so great. And I’d tell him that most worlds can’t handle the company. They’d destroy each other out of fear or ignorance. So, the spaces are a deterrent, but they are also a challenge, for the worlds to rise above the odds, to thrive together, and perhaps even find us—what is left of us.
In the seventeenth century, perhaps fifty years after my death as Marina, I became Isaac Newton’s roommate while at Cambridge. Isaac mostly thought I was a fool, but maybe a part of him believed my stories every time I corrected his math. When we got drunk, he’d ask me to tell him tales of my home world. I told him about Earth’s seed and Nuri and the promise my husband made to send my daughter to me, to care for Vara in her stead.
“But you would never see him again,” my dear Isaac said, as I again corrected his math.
“We’ve spent more lifetimes together than you can imagine,” I answered. “I spent my little girl’s childhood creating this planet. I missed it. I need to see who she’s become.”
*
As more opportunity and freedom pulled many across the ocean, so did I find myself aboard a ship to America, landing first in Virginia in 1820. I lived quietly for decades, exploring this young country with whatever face and society could grant me passage and access. I attended the Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights in 1848, posing as a milliner from Delaware, filled with the spirit of possibility, and listened to the words of Mott and Stanton. I thought about all that had become possible for humanity simply because I had chosen to break the rules, to dare to dream.
I unexpectedly found love again not long after the conference and headed south, instead of following the gold rush as I had originally planned.
“A big family. Three boys. No, four,” my Elliot said one evening as we worked to build our house outside of Raleigh.
“I see. And where am I during all of this?” I laughed. I had told him I wanted a family, too. I think it took a few thousand years for me to really want to try again. I told myself I would be careful this time, that I had become adept at understanding the human form. Despite the tremors of war, our farm felt like it existed in another realm of hope. And for a time, it seemed like the distant echoes of musket fire would never reach us.
Now, I won’t dwell on the specifics of what those soldiers did to me or to my husband or our little boy. But after they left me for dead, I had nothing. I buried my family next to our dogwood tree and burned our home. As I have done so many times before, I moved on from human life to human life. The very nature of my existence, the pull of seeing my creation, the knowledge that I can help others in need, demands that I reinvent myself, though I still dream of my children. I still whisper their names in the dark.
Japan was reinventing itself when I arrived during its Meiji period—first as an American soldier in the late 1800s, helping to train the Japanese in heavy artillery, and then as the wife of a cormorant fisherman. We had three children, all boys, who died fighting. My husband died a year later, executed in the street for spreading lies against the emperor, or so they said. We missed our boys. We wanted the fighting to stop. Our neighbors believed that I jumped off a cliff in my grief, but I merely walked to another prefecture and onto a ship, waving goodbye to no one in particular as I searched for another life.