—He has a point, Raphael. We should at least consider it. I know you were hoping to find a wife here, but I am willing to venture that there are plenty of eligible bachelorettes in Egypt as well. Perhaps—and I say this with the utmost respect—perhaps a bit of a language barrier might even be to your advantage.

  [All right, if both of you want to go to Egypt, we’ll go to Egypt. Women here are all stuck-up, snobbish, toffee-nosed … smartypants anyway. We’ll just need to make a quick stop in Prague along the way.]

  What’s in Prague?

  [This.]

  A letter. I know the handwriting, it’s from—

  —Is this from who I think it is?

  It’s from our mother.

  [Can you believe the old lady was dumb enough to put a return address on it? The letter’s for you, Samael.]

  —You didn’t open it?

  [Well, no. I mean it’s your letter. There might be some personal shit in there. Maybe you should wait until the deed’s done before reading it. I know you two were close.]

  …

  [Don’t just sit there, Sam. Say something.]

  I … I was about to tell you I found a house in Miami that was purchased by a lady whose death certificate is dated forty years ago. I doubt it will lead to anything, but I would like to cross it off the list. I think we should split up. You should go to Prague and take care of Mother; I will go to Florida; then we can both meet Uriel in Egypt. That will give him time to find us a place to live.

  [Why don’t we—]

  Unless, of course, you don’t think you can handle our mother on your own. I would understand.

  16

  Dream On

  Dear journal … Hi, journal! How are you today?

  What do people write in these things? My name is Lola. I’m eleven years old. I’m like my mom, like a copy. I’m a Kibsu, but if you’re reading this, you know that already. Mom said I’m to keep this to a minimum since we have to carry these journals with us every time we move. Just the science and things that are important, she said.

  There’s a psycho killer chasing us. Pretty sure that’s important. I have nightmares about it almost every night. He and his brothers killed my grandmother, almost killed my mom and me when I was six. I guess they’re also chasing you.

  I don’t know what else to say. I haven’t done any real science yet. Mom wants me to start, but I’m not sure what I can do. To be honest, I’m not really sure what we’re supposed to do. Take them to the stars, I know. But we can’t take everyone to the stars. How many people can you fit on a spaceship? A thousand? Maybe we can build a hundred spaceships, but we can never fit everyone. If this evil comes and wants to kill everybody, most people will die no matter what we do. Mom said we need Russia and the US to compete. Space race! Space race! Sometimes I think they might get further if they worked together instead. We can’t keep sending people to space two at a time. We’ll need big ships, like big big. We can’t send a really big ship from down here, so we’ll need to build it up there, on a space station or something. Who’s going to build that? And if we go super super far with the ship, it’s going to run out of gas at some point. I don’t think we can take anyone to the stars with something that guzzles gas like a Chevy Monte Carlo.

  I don’t understand a lot of what we’re doing and what my life is supposed to be like. Maybe I’m just too young, like Mom says. All I know is I don’t really fit in anywhere. I’m pretty sure I’m not into boys, and I don’t have any real friends. I don’t know what I’m trying to say, but I want … more than this. There has to be more than this, right?

  Maybe there’s something I don’t know. Maybe I’m supposed to know. Like, maybe our ancestors wanted to tell us something. They sent a message and we just never got it. A message in a bottle, except bottles didn’t exist. Like that golden record they’re making for the Grand Tour mission. Mom only talks about the probes, but I really dig that record thing. They put a plaque on the last series of probes, with a drawing of naked white people to show aliens what we look like. People complained about them being naked. This is a lot better. No nudes, but they put lots of photographs on it, a drawing of DNA, some sounds from Earth, and an hour and a half of music. Music! They’ll stick the record to the probe, and if anyone ever finds it, and they have a record player, they can learn a whole lot about us. Here, listen. This is who we are. So cool. Mom said I could write to the man who’s making the record, Dr. Sagan. I sent him this wolf picture I found, one of a dolphin. I like dolphins. I told him about my favorite songs. I doubt he likes Chuck Berry as much as I do, but it was worth a shot, and it was way more fun than calculating optimal magnitudes like Mom asked.

  I can’t help thinking maybe we made our own golden record at some point, something just for us. Maybe one of us wrote it down a long time ago so we wouldn’t have to feel sad all the time. It wouldn’t have to be fancy or gold, no music. A few words on a bow might do it.

  Here, listen. This is who you are.

  17

  She’s Gone

  As ever, your obliged and affectionate friend,

  Sarah

  I replied. I sent a letter to Xuesen and I signed my mother’s name.

  So much for following the rules. Lola and I have been trying to decipher that bow. It’s pretty much the only thing she wants to do with me nowadays. Still, I don’t know what I was thinking. Well, I do know. My mother was keeping things from me and I’m dying to find out what it was. I woke up in the middle of the night. I grabbed a pen and paper and started writing. I ran outside at sundown and mailed the thing before I could change my mind. I try to rationalize it—the man runs the Chinese space program; that could come in handy—but I know that had nothing to do with it. It had nothing to do with a bow either. I wonder what else Mother didn’t tell me. I guess I didn’t know her as well as I thought.

  I miss her, so much. This—I don’t know—it felt like I could bring her back. As if, somehow, if she wrote to her friend, she’d still be with us, and I’d still be the person I’m supposed to be.

  I startle myself sometimes. When I come out of the shower and I wipe the fog off the bathroom mirror. When I catch a glimpse of myself in a storefront window. I have this idea of me, this skin I put on every day. That’s who I think I am, but the bathroom mirror disagrees. Small wrinkles. Fine lines where there shouldn’t be. Those are hers. That’s how I remember her. All the subtle ways her face was not mine. Those differences meant the world to me. I saw wisdom in her small wrinkles. I was insecure, scared shitless, but she wasn’t. I could tell. Now I know what I saw didn’t mean anything. Just the world leaving a mark when it bumps at you, all of us bowing to the caprices of time. I feel … guilty for changing, blurring those differences. It feels like I’m erasing her, so I keep her alive in any way I can.

  I continue her research. There are only a handful of people dabbling in climate science nowadays. Most of them are forecasting global warming, but we knew that a hundred years ago. The media, for some reason, will only talk about the weirdos predicting another ice age. Nevertheless, we have a lot more data to play with now. I’ve started measuring other gases. People are pouring all sorts of new things in the air. Things that didn’t even exist a few years ago. I was watching Lola choking on hairspray the other day. They put chlorofluorocarbons in the aerosol cans. It makes sense. It’s stable, nontoxic, nonflammable, won’t cause cancer, et cetera. It all sounds great. The problem is, CFCs are so stable they’ll stick in the atmosphere for a hundred years, and if my calculations are correct they’re something like ten thousand times better than CO2 at absorbing heat. I found a couple people at UC Irvine working on chlorofluorocarbons and sent them what I had. It turns out they were looking at something else entirely. CFCs will apparently release chlorine in the atmosphere under sunlight, and that chlorine eats away at the ozone layer. That’s not good.

  Then there’s methane. It won’t stay for long once it’s released, but it’s much more potent than carbon dioxide. The Earth’s population is growing fast, and more people means more farming. Farming means manure. Manure means methane. This whole thing could happen ten times faster than we thought. It’s all speculation right now. There are just too many variables to consider. When we have enough computing power for a good model, we’ll know what we’re up against. At the rate we’re moving, Lola might still be around for that. Either way, Mother would be happy that we’re making progress.

  I wonder what she’d think of me. There are times, still, when I feel completely lost without her. Like the child who let go of her mother’s hand at the fair. Everything is new, and exciting, until she realizes her safety’s gone and she’s all alone. Only I’m not the child; I’m the mother keeping my daughter close in the crowd.

  I have this dream. I’m by the ocean on this long, gravelly beach. The sky is gray, the air thick and misty. Mother’s head emerges as she slowly walks out of the water. She wears a white dress, the one she wore when we landed in New York, the one I buried my face in when I learned my grandmother was gone. I want to run to her. I want it so bad my whole body aches, but I can’t move my feet. She smiles as if to say everything is going to be okay. Another head crosses the threshold, my grandmother. Then her mother. Her mother … Her mother. Suddenly we’re all here. All one hundred of us. And I should feel good, relieved, because it’s not all on me anymore. It’s a good dream, I think. But I don’t feel good, or relieved. I feel like my mother never really was. Just another link in the chain.

  Lola, she— I was in complete denial when I was her age. I didn’t want any of it to be true. I thought I could just wish it away and be a regular kid. Not her. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think she’s accepted it, always has. She knows she’ll never be like everyone else. She just wants … something else. The universe is this giant letdown and she keeps yelling at it: “Is that all there is?” That’s why she cares so much about that bow. She’s clinging to this idea that we’re just “missing” a piece of the puzzle. If we only knew more about who we are or where we come from then all of this would feel different.

  I wish it were true. I wish two dozen words carved on a wooden bow held the answer to all our questions, about life, the universe. I wish my daughter were happy, that she weren’t chased by murdering men, that I were a better mother. I wish for a lot of things, just like I did when Mother was alive. I wanted things. Mother and I broke the rules because we both wanted things and I lost a child, and Mother died before she could hold her granddaughter. There can never be three for too long, but there should have been three for a little while.

  18

  Let’s Get It On

  —Our ancestor wrote smut? Like, seriously. She wrote porn on a bow!

  —Lola! It’s … poetry.

  —Sure, Mom. Poetry. Are you sure that’s what it says?

  —Pretty sure. I know for a fact it’s written in Akkadian, just like your necklace. I suppose I could be wrong about a word or two but …

  —Read it again.

  —“From the underworld, she emerges in … wetness.” Something wet?

  “I touch her elbow, then her mouth.

  She speaks after a cold silence.

  Desire awakens and I reach for her breast.”

  —That’s it?

  —Well, there are symbols all over the bow, but that’s all we can see on the picture. The next line says something about salt. I can’t see enough of it to translate. I asked Xuesen for more pictures, but it might take a while before we hear back.

  —Did you ask him about that “side project”?

  —No.

  —Why?

  —Because I’m writing as my mother, remember? It’s my project. I’m supposed to know what it is. I found some of his letters in your grandma’s things. Maybe there’s something there.

  —If you say so …

  —I know that poem is not what you were hoping for, Lola, but—

  —How do you know what I was hoping for? You don’t have the faintest idea! But you’re right; that wasn’t it.

  —You’re upset. It’s okay. I get it. But it’s really “rad” when you think about it. That bow was probably the most important thing to her. She’d have hunted with it, fought with it. That bow was the difference between life and death. Whatever it says, whatever those words mean to us now, they obviously meant—

  —Oh, stop it, Mom. For all we know she had two bows. We just happened to find the one she wrote sex stuff on. I’m— This was stupid. I feel stupid, okay?

  —It wasn’t stu— Where are you going? Lola, wait!

  I should have known this would end badly. I’ll admit I didn’t see that coming. I was almost certain we’d get bits of the bow’s owner’s biography, her lineage, maybe a list of things she’d killed with it. Lola was looking for the meaning of life.

  For a while I thought this might actually bring us closer. She dove headfirst into our journals looking for clues on how to read that script. I think she half expected our journals to be in English. She kept going, though. She was so eager to find what she was looking for. And she did. She practically dragged me to the library to pick up everything they had on Coptic when she saw those symbols in the Sixty-One’s writings. No stopping at the record shop. She carefully reproduced every symbol on a piece of paper and pinned them to the wall. Our kitchen looks like one of those evidence boards on crime shows. She stared at it over every meal waiting for some sort of eureka moment. She was obsessed. She kept asking questions about her ancestors, what it was like for them, as if I knew any more than she did. I kept telling her, but she wouldn’t take “I don’t know” for an answer. I’m the mother; I have to know. Finally, I gave up. “High school,” I said. “It must have felt a lot like high school.”

  It’s the best I could come up with. I can’t begin to imagine what their lives were like, but the science … They were studying something they couldn’t interact with in any way, things they couldn’t see or touch. With any luck, they could predict where a star would be on a given day, but they didn’t know what a star was. It could have been a giant muffin for all they knew. They could theorize, but they would never know whether they were right or wrong, not in their lifetime. In many ways it must have felt like calculus to a sixteen-year-old Kibsu. Pure theory with no practical application whatsoever. “But Mom! I want to hunt deer!” “Finish your orbit calculation first, honey.” I’m sure they all hated every minute of it. I’m sure their moms felt as helpless as I do.

  Needless to say, my high school answer wasn’t the resounding success I hoped it would be. High school is still a couple years away, but she knows it won’t come with sudden contentment. She’ll feel just as out of place, awkward, and she can’t imagine anyone else feeling like she does. Not me, certainly not some warrior three thousand years ago.

  Lola’s not asking for much. She’s not being … unreasonable. I know that. She just wants the one thing I don’t have to give her: answers. I have questions. Tons of them. I have enough questions to last her a lifetime. Watching her struggle makes me realize how much I’ve changed. I don’t know exactly when or how. I suppose that’s how it works.

  And who knows, maybe Lola was right all along and all we really need to know is written on that bow.

  “I touch her elbow, then her mouth.

  She speaks after a cold silence.

  Desire awakens and I reach for her breast.”

  I still think of Billie sometimes. Not as often, but there are times when I tell myself a quick trip to Moscow wouldn’t hurt anyone. She buried me. I won’t put her through that pain again, but I still wish I could see her face, catch a glimpse of that careless smile one last time. Deep down I know that wouldn’t be enough. Even after all these years, after everything I’ve been through, I’ve never felt so whole, so utterly alive and vulnerable, as I did lying beside her. Maybe that’s what our ancestor is trying to tell us. Watching the small of her lover’s back, she realized the one thing that truly mattered to her. She got up in the middle of the night and carved her feelings on her most prized possession.

  19

  Mind Games

  The blanket is folded in just the right way. The pillows are fluffed, carefully placed. I lit a Yankee Candle by the bed. Everything smells of … I don’t know what that smell is. Whatever; Lola’s room is straight out of a magazine—well, almost. It sure is cleaner than it’s ever been.

  She didn’t come home last night. I knew she wouldn’t. Not because I know my daughter like I know myself, certainly not because she said anything. I knew because Heather’s mom called to make sure I knew Lola would sleep over. I said, “Yes! Of course! Lola’s been talking about it all week.” My daughter was upset. The least I could do was let her have her small rebellion.

  I spent the night calculating how much fuel we’ll need for the Grand Tour once we clear orbit. It’s amazing, really. We need a tanker’s worth of fuel to fly up two hundred miles, but the next ten billion only cost a suitcaseful. As for the instruments, a canister of plutonium dioxide should do the trick. The heat from radioactive decay will generate a few hundred watts of power. Plenty enough if we stick to the essentials. I’d done some of the work before. This would have been quick if my mind hadn’t kept wandering. I read all of Xuesen’s letters and there weren’t any clues about what he and my mother were working on, except maybe for that one line: “I am intrigued by the boundary in Iraq.” That’s what he said. The boundary with what? First Berlin, then Iraq. What were they doing?

  I was on my second pot of coffee when the sun came up and was fairly certain I wouldn’t survive a third. I finished reading Solaris. I’ll have to read the end again. I was way too tired for Lem. Antsy. I don’t know if it was the coffee or the fact that Lola rarely leaves my sight. Too awake to sleep, too sleepy for anything. There’s plenty of accounting to go through. People to pay, money to move. I made a list of things I could do in my head. It’s still growing.