This is where we landed the Khawla—in this dead place once so full of life. Both my fathers had concerns that I would be overwhelmed with the weight of what had happened here. That my heart would be too soft, that I was too young. I promised them I was ready. I had studied. I had learned their language, their consonants so similar to our own but the irregularities still twisting my tongue. I did not expect Salar to treat me any differently than he would the rest of the crew—to baby me. Not after he’d assured Papa that he was allowing me on this journey only because he had already been to this planet on five previous missions and because the atmosphere was no longer toxic to our people. The Great Melting was under way, and our Terrapathos work would resuscitate this planet. It is a profound thing to bring life from death, Salar had said. I could bear witness.
Looking around, maybe Papa was right—he is a poet and softer than Salar, after all. Perhaps sentiment does get the better of me sometimes; perhaps our people view that emotion as dangerous. But I see it as an asset in the future I want for myself, studying the archaeology of ancient civilizations.
Still, I am only seventeen suraj, the youngest by three saal on this voyage, and I intend to show my value. While Salar sees to the botanists and terraformers and hydrologists, I take my pack and set off toward a tall tower in the distance, still standing relatively intact.
There is no hope for survivors on Mirzakhani, but if any lived through the first melting and the bombs whose mushroom clouds blocked their sole life-giving star, then surely they would have sought shelter in structures built to survive the great storms that inevitably came.
The Khawla historian says the people of this planet were like a virus—multiplying endlessly, consuming every resource they could wrench from land and sky, acting as if all they could survey was theirs for the taking and the ruining. Every time their planet cried out, they ignored its pleas. Instead of curbing their wasteful desires—their fossil fuels and their petroleum-fueled lives—they simply expanded their settlements, moved to new places, plundered more ground, until their land could bear it no longer and erupted in fire. There were many among the young who had spoken the truth, who gave warning of what their future could hold, but on this planet, old men didn’t plan for futures they knew they wouldn’t be there to enjoy. They couldn’t see past themselves.
July 20, 2031
We thought it would all end in fire. In the ice caps melting and the oceans rising, seizing back the land we stole, abused, treated as an endless resource, when all along it was finite. I wonder if one day we will be the example they use on some distant planet to teach their children about hubris, when they read the morality plays and mythologies, just like we did about the mortals who angered the Greek gods. It was all fiction, of course, the legends we learned, but it was what we should have known. What we knew, maybe, but denied was that for as long as humans have lived, we wrote fiction to tell the truth. Somewhere along the way, we decided telling lies to ourselves was the easiest way to live.
The Earth disagreed.
Voice Log: Planet Mirzakhani, Diin 3 Saal 3027
The tower was an incredible trove. It feels wrong to be excited about bones of an extinct species, but bones give us information. Our biochemists will be able to test the level of toxins that seeped through the skin and blood of these people. Unlike people, bones don’t lie. They don’t try to make themselves look good by covering the wrongs they’ve done or by twisting them to hide the real truth.
It’s not just bones I found, though. Bones give us facts, but the other vestiges of people’s lives tell us who they really were. What they valued. What they loved and hated. Who they wanted to be. These people tried to save themselves, but they started too late.
As soon as I realized what I’d discovered, I hurried back to camp, and Salar returned with me and a small team of archaeologists and biologists and structural engineers, who tested the building to make sure it was sound for us to enter. Of course, I had already barged in without regard to safety, and, wow, did I get a tongue-lashing when I revealed that I’d breached protocol.
I wanted to rush in, sweep through every chamber and floor, but that is not how scientists work, even if that is what every fiber of our being screams to do. Curiosity may be my calling, but logic must be my guide. Waiting for the engineers to clear each area was tedious, but as I stood in the entry, with the debris and dirt and tiny green shoots that lay ready to reclaim this space, I found a wood-and-metal rectangle—a plaque, the historian called it—engraved with words in their language:
DON’T BE SATISFIED WITH STORIES, HOW THINGS HAVE GONE WITH OTHERS.
UNFOLD YOUR OWN MYTH.
—RUMI
The historian bagged and catalogued this plaque right away. These people did terrible things to each other and their planet, but they were beautiful, too, they said. What the historian doesn’t say is that they have a fondness for this people, more than a historian should. They have been with Salar on all five previous missions to Mirzakhani, and to be unmoved in the face of this tragedy that wrecked the world of this precious, broken species surely would be impossible.
August 1, 2031
We burned through the last paper today. Everything we could find. Everything that hadn’t been scavenged. All the old books in the library. The ones that no one had cracked open in a million years, because physical books were relics. A quaint throwback. They say a story can change your life—those books were what got us through this endless winter. It felt wrong to burn them, so I said a prayer as the ashes of words rose to Jannah. In gratitude, for all the stories that saved us, that helped us live a little longer.
God, I wish I had paper.
It’s a little ridiculous, because we’d all but eliminated paper from the world a few years ago. Planted more trees. A last-ditch effort, hoping they would help suck in the toxins from the mess we’d made, since we’d already poisoned the oceans.
No one missed paper. Except for a few curmudgeons who you could hear mumbling about wanting to hold the Tribune in their hands. As if that were even a choice. Journalism was already a relic long before we banned new paper.
I can’t explain it: longing for something I never particularly thought much about. Maybe the idea of tangible things—of holding someone else’s story in my hands—reminds me that I was once part of something bigger than what we’ve become. Yes, we could be monsters to each other—our crass, controlling politicians telling us who we could love and how we should worship and which of us were more deserving because of the tyranny of demography, while too many silently stood by. But we were also once a people who dreamed. We had moments of greatness, of tenderness toward each other. There were times we were beautiful. Alive in our songs and dances, in our words and our art. We didn’t always exist in this numbing state of deathlessness.
I don’t share this with Ummi or any of the others. It feels too selfish. Too small. But I don’t just want paper. I want my old life. I want homework. I want chocolate cake with too much buttercream frosting. I want my friends. I want Adnan’s smile greeting me in Calculus first thing in the morning. I want his holo-message waiting for me by the time I get home from school. I want to hear his voice.