Fiction

My grandmother said that she would tend the flowers herself. We walked together across the spacecraft to the fields. We left the meadow wild for the bees. They earned it; they kept the entire farmed ecosystem humming with the relentless work of pollination.

We weeded the dwarf wheat and the field of tomatoes, and I snuck a few into my mouth. There’s nothing like a cherry tomato off the vine. We looked at the meticulous reports on water consumption of the plants. We swirled a small vial to test the alkalinity of the dirt, and my grandmother peered at the sensors which monitored the nutrients of the soil. All healthy and within normal bounds. We walked through the fields to the experimental plot, where she refined what was known about Arabidopsis growth in the radiation of interstellar space. The plants expressed different proteins to deflect some of the radiation which made us sick in so many ways.

We finished up and began the walk back to the living quarters. We chatted about the growth of the fruit and the changing climate as we approached the spacecraft’s programmed autumn—when suddenly my grandmother seemed to sag. Half of her stiffened, went limp, then all of her collapsed. I called in an emergency, and soon she was scooped up and straightened onto a stretcher. Soon we were in the hospital. We learned then of the magnitude of the stroke.

The sky burial grew from the Tibetan tradition. On the Earth, long before the departure of the ship, the bodies of loved ones would be placed on a mountaintop for recycling by microbes and birds who scavenge. Thus those deceased and loved were welcomed into their next lives. The practice diminished as urbanization spread across the world and decimated vulture populations, but it was not forgotten.

So as we said goodbye to my grandmother, the vitrification team arrived at the hospital. After her final heartbeat and respiratory arrest, they introduced the preservatives into her circulatory system. The network of intricate blood vessels delivered the chemicals to each cell of her body. Simultaneously, the fluids cooled, so that as I held her hand she was soon cold to the touch.

The body is a frail vessel for our beatitude, since we are the universe as it knows itself. Be prepared with liquid nitrogen; our qualia deserve better than a combusting paper hut. From this premise, the modern sky burial took root.

On the day of the memorial, I returned to her beloved fields to collect wildflowers. I could almost see her strolling among the blossoms and crops, telling me about their nutrient affinities and the cellular metabolism of their roots. I felt a tremendous loss of love. Without her, life would always be a little bit worse. A lonely tear leaked from the inner corner of my eye. I let it fall onto her precious plants; the aqueous sensors would take note. I collected wild flowers of every color from the land. I plucked pink lady slippers and purple lilacs. Dandelions shouted with their bright yellow faces that they wished to be included in the bouquet, and I obliged.

We hope she will be rediscovered by future humans, or perhaps other life. Vastly superior technology would be required to recover the complexity of the body. We know this is fantastically unlikely, but the molecular complexity of her nervous system—the patterns of the self—will remain intact. At the three degrees kelvin of space, the vitrified body has a shelf life of a billion years, which by any measure is a little while. The hope is worth having. It’s consolation to know your loved ones aren’t gone—they’re out there, frozen in time. They’re immortal, in their way. She was born on the ship, and she died on the ship. The same will be true for me. But eventually, a descendant will arrive at Proxima Centauri.

Like intricate glass sculptures, the wildflowers I gathered were frozen with her in the little space capsule. We nestled them in her hair and in the crevices of her arms. May whoever finds her have the technological sophistication to revive her and her precious plants, together.

The inner airlock opened, and I smelled the characteristic burnt smell of space. The inner closed, then the outer airlock did the same. The little capsule containing my grandmother was released into the great field of stars.

I’m religious in the sense that I want to know everything about the vast abundance of other suns and exoplanets in this universe. We are atoms fused within stars that have become conscious on a wet and verdant little world, all the more beautiful for its improbability.

A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight laid out where to begin. It was a race—the sooner we launched the sooner we’d get results. We were young, but the 46 years of the Starkite pitching out of the solar system to the nearest star and then another 4.37 years to beam the data home was a hard deadline. We knew it was an intergenerational project, an investment in the future. We knew we might not live to see the end, but the sooner we got started, the more likely we’d live to see the discoveries.

After launch in 1977, for decades the past and future anachronism that was Voyager—at once a relic and a prospective dream—swung round the solar system, eventually traveling 17 kilometers per second, less than 0.006% the speed of light. With a photograph here and a swooping gravity assist there, it was the farthest object humans had sent, the first to taste the heliosphere. The farthest, that was, until Starkite launched. We hoped to follow in the footsteps of Voyager’s golden record and Beresheet’s payload, sending monumental works of human art and an analog copy of Wikipedia, but size constraints did not allow it. In the end we settled for a digital archive of human achievements, collected for the world by my colleague with a more virtuosic bent. May any minds that find it have the technological sophistication to figure it the hell out.

We set about powering the lasers, developing the photoelectric sails, and—with the help of Moore’s law—shrinking the sensors. When we finished, the sentinel spacecraft fit on the tip of a finger. A little sail on a laser string in the heavens. A minuscule computer on a wafer, to be propelled at 16% the speed of light out of the solar system by a beam of photons. Three days in, we got word that Starkite reached interstellar space; we were elated. The waiting game began.

I wasn’t the youngest by any means. My children were teens on launch day. My graduate students earned their PhDs and became postdocs. Presidents turned over; science and technology policies changed. My children grew into adults. Postdocs earned their place on the tenure track or left academia for industry. And still, Starkite raced on to its new star system.

Our granddaughter arrived. When my children were born, I learned what it was to have your heart beating outside your body, but my granddaughter split my heart into pieces afresh. She arrived home from the hospital swaddled in a blanket, with miniature hands blossoming open. She grasped my pinky finger as she fell asleep.

She grew and grew. At ten she was struck by the reddish-brown surface of Mars. She poured over books on Martian craters and canyons. The first hundred people on Mars set up shop, and together we followed their every construction, farm, and rover journey out of camp. All the while, my partner and I watched our granddaughter grow like a marigold in spring. Thus while Starkite hurtled on, I learned a thing or two about my place in the human lineage.

Without experts on the global disease surveillance system working tirelessly to detect pathogens that spilled over from animal reservoirs, there might not have been anyone to receive the information. Without scientists dedicating their lives to malaria vaccines and mRNA platforms, the Starkite data streaming home would have returned to a worse world. Without efforts to coordinate governments globally to improve billion-player political Nash equilibria, the discoveries might have arrived to Earth without any communication dishes tipped to listen. Without converting the world's infestation of nuclear weapons into electricity, the information might have returned to a devastatingly warmer planet.

We waited for the data to come home. Hair grayed. Spines curved. Statures shrank. I slowed down, but the Starkite did not. One by one, my colleagues departed this world. Those burning the candles at both ends and the jejune anti-aging experts alike succumbed to programmed senescence. Old age came for them all.

Thus the years passed in joy and sorrow. I too felt the impacts of aging. My mobility was limited, but that did not stop my mind from wandering the universe, daydreaming of past and future. I was sure I, too, would face death before seeing the fruits of our labor. But when the day finally came, I was the lone founder to make it through to see the data beamed home.

There were treasures to be discovered along the Starkite’s journey, which I shared with our granddaughter. The old paradox puzzled us, I told her: comets’ orbits were unstable—either they would collide with a celestial body or be ejected from the solar system, while radiation boiled them away on each pass past the sun—and yet the comets kept coming. Jan Oort hypothesized in 1950 that there was a reservoir of icy planetesimals on the outskirts of the solar system: the Oort Cloud. No other spacecraft had made it far enough with enough power for its instruments to confirm the hypothesis. Starkite finally sent us the evidence. It beamed home glorious images of the debris that sourced our comets. At the beauty of the discovery, tears swelled and spilled from the corner of my eye.

There were mind-bending revelations about the possibility of the sun as a gravitational lens, to directly image exoplanets with twenty-five kilometer resolution. The difficult and long-discussed project of this imaging might finally be realized as a result of our efforts.

I explained the heliosphere to our granddaughter. She listened intently and asked curious questions about the bubble of charged particles known as the solar wind, and its outer boundary, the heliopause. Starkite gleaned information about the balance between the interstellar medium and the solar wind at this edge that would take another generation to analyze. My granddaughter resolved that this would be her life’s work; this left me buoyed with hope for the human future.

Information about Alpha Centauri’s solar system sent a ripple of goosebumps down my arm to my fingertips. A photo showed an exoplanet where storms swirled. The strangely colored sun set my toes tingling.