Counting Stars

The first thing she noticed was that the sky was blue. It was disconcerting, to say the least. Blue was for water, and some crystal formations, and nebulae, not the sky. She wondered what it had done to whatever inhabitants used to live here, to have such a bright, unwieldy color as the backdrop of their days. If they used the light spectrum to see at all, that was. Well, she thought as she carried her surveying monitor away from the shuttle, she’d find out.

The second thing she noticed was that the ruins were invisible from the ground. All she could see for kiloms and kiloms was wildly ambitious vegetation, some rocks, and the melodramatic blue of the sky. The ruins must have been old enough that any wood or rock or even petroleum deposits would have broken down into microscopic pieces, from time or the weather, or been buried. Whatever she was dealing with wasn’t just gone, it was long gone.

Arc felt herself start to get interested, despite her desire to go home. Junior surveyors like her didn’t get mysteries like this. Ruins were one thing, the residue of a solitary existence before the inhabitants discovered, or were discovered by, other planets and polities, and they left to make a new life among the stars. But mysteries were something else.

She found a flat place to set up her surveying monitor, and set the aperture. Immediately she was surrounded by a hologram re-creation of her surroundings. She figured five thousand years was long enough, to start with. She flipped the dial back, clacked her secondary limbs for luck, and told it to go.

Nothing. The hologram was the same, just ruins and vegetation.

Arc checked the monitor. It seemed to be working fine. She turned it off and turned it on again just to make sure. Then she set it for ten thousand years.

Ruins. Vegetation. Nothing else.

Arc turned the hologram off, and sat back and looked around. The vegetation gave her no answers. She clacked her limbs in confusion, and then thought, Fuck it, and set the monitor for a hundred thousand years. Even if she missed the departure point, the thing she was always told to capture first, at least she’d get something.

Nothing. Even so far back, everything was exactly the same.

Arc started to get a bad feeling. She tried two hundred thousand years, and nothing. Three hundred thousand years. Then, feeling like she was losing her mind, she set it back five hundred thousand years.

And, there.

It wasn’t the inhabitants, but she could see traces of the buildings they had built for themselves, in the process of crumbling to nothing. She started creeping slowly back in time from there: year after year. The weather patterns on the monitor were very different from what she was experiencing now, with scorching heat and hurricanes, the air filled with ash. There was no vegetation. Arc’s bad feeling crystallized into fear.

Finally, finally, she found a living soul. Just one, wandering through the ruins, shielding itself from the blistering sunlight. It walked right in front of her on the hologram, and turned and looked straight through her. She stared at it, trying to understand.

It was a soft, squishy thing, bipedal and barely coming to half her height. It moved like nothing she'd ever seen, and she shouldn't have been able to read any emotion in that strange face and those alien limbs. But she saw grief there, she was sure of it.

Back, and back. The ruins rebuilt themselves, the weather patterns steadied. Arc saw more of those strange bipedal beings, and other squishy creatures that connected to the beings with string. She saw small fauna and stone roads, machines that moved and buildings so tall they blocked out the sky. She found a group of three, a taller being and two very short ones, and watched them for a long time, as they came and went from the image of the building in front of her. After watching them for a while, she realized that they were a family.

Arc found another being, and watched it making something out of wood: a little carving of one of the creatures that moved along on string. She saw beings creating machines that made images, and she saw beings painting colors on walls. She saw beings fighting each other, killing each other, mourning each other. She saw them raising each other, playing with each other. She saw them making and making: creating by themselves, creating together. And all of them so long ago, long before even Arc's people, the oldest civilization she knew, had begun to walk among the stars.

These beings, the ones that had lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, had spent the entire course of their existence alone in the universe. The ruins weren't ruins because they had left for better things. The ruins were ruins because they had died out, all of them, millennia before they could be found.

Arc felt grief well up inside of her, and she began to keen. This wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Life was meant to find other life; that's what life was for.

How lonely they must have been, she thought, singing her mourning song for them. All that creation, all that art and all that play, the machines that made images, the paint scrawled on walls, the carvings made with strange limbs but with so much love that Arc could feel it even now — and they couldn't share it with anyone. How impossible the galaxy, the universe, must have felt to them.

I’m sorry, she thought, and keened for them. I’m sorry you were all alone. I’m sorry we were too late for you, and that you were too early for us. I'm sorry for all of it. But we’re here now. We have you. You’re not alone anymore, and you’ll never be alone again.

After a while she calmed. The holographic images were still going, and she found herself struck by another family: this one had many large beings and a few small ones, and it was clear in their movements how much they loved each other. That was important, she thought. That love was what was left, after everything. That love was what she was here to preserve.

Arc got up off the ground on shaky limbs, still grief-stricken but feeling stronger. She went back to her shuttle and sent the images she had recorded to her supervisors, along with a note that they needed to send more of her colleagues, now, so that everything could be captured faithfully.

She also sent a note to Ecba. “My star,” Arc wrote. “I have memories I need to excavate here. I am sorry I will not be home soon. I will come back when I can, but in the meantime know that I love you, and our family.”

Then she got her carving tools, and her clay. She wasn't as good as Ecba, but this memory, these stories, deserved the work of her hands.