Page 175 - Musings 2020

‘Remember the first year’ was a strange directive. The people of that time had been content
to track their history in transient digital form. With the result that little was left. Pete thought
with regret of the few scraps of paper that had come down to them.
Scrawled inventories, engineer-neat lists of meaningless names. In his darker moments, Pete
felt the first people were mocking him, conspiring to erase all knowledge of why they had
been sent away, what calamity had befallen Earth. But what did it matter? Earth was a planet
he would never see, and in just over four hours he would be walking the surface of a world
untouched by human hands. A place to start anew. Even Magda’s death could not entirely
remove the thrill of it. She had died well, clear, and alert until the last. And it was true the
dispersal would have been hard on her.

Dispersal! Soon they would spread across the surface of the unsullied planet, down amidst
the mottled green and black they had so far seen only on the vid-screens, where it hung in the
middle distance between the ship and the system’s star.

He came out on the archives level and picked up his pace. He had set up an interview with
Captain McAllister-Xo the night before, the first part of his duty. He would not have long to
examine the shelf of the first years. He was reaching for the panel to open the ever dimmed
rooms of the archives when he realized

Under, Magda had said under space.

*****
Captaincy was in McAllister-Xo’s bones. His family had guided the ship since the time of the
first people- or so it was said. He greeted Pete and spoke to him of approach vectors and
automated systems, stopping occasionally to check with an officer or to type arcane
sequences of keys into the mem-pad before him. In one of these pauses, Pete told him of
Magda’s death.

“That old witch,” the captain said, “I always thought she’d live forever.” he paused, coughed,
scratched his temple with his middle finger. “Sorry, I know you were close.”
“It was her time. But there was something she said before she passed that I thought you might
be able to explain.”
“Shoot.”
“She was talking of the Archivists’ Code: record and preserve.”
“I’ve heard it.”
“Um, yes. But it was how she described it: ‘In all these lifetimes under space, that has been
our calling.’ She said ‘under,’ not ‘in.’ What do you make of that:”

The captain shrugged, “She was old. She was dying. A slip of tongue, some missed
connection between her rain and her lips. What to make of it?”
The explanation made as much sense as any Pete could think of, but McAllister-Xo had not
been there. Magda had been too alert, her voice too clear and strong for the word to be
delirium or sickness. He was something to what she had said, he was sure of it.

He thanked the captain and made his way to Bottom. Perhaps popular memory could tell him
what high command could not.

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