Babylon's Ashes

The accepted etymology of the word religion was that it came from religere, meaning “to bind together,” but Cicero had said its true root was relegere, “to reread.” The truth was, she liked both answers. What brought people together in a sense of love and community and the impulse to go back to beloved books weren’t that different for her. Both of them left her feeling calmer and renewed. Nono said it meant she was an introvert and an extrovert at the same time. Anna couldn’t really argue against that.

Officially the ship was the Abdel Rahman Badawi operated by Trachtman Corporation out of Luna, but everyone on board called her the Abbey. The complex history of the ship was written in her bones. The hallways were different shapes, depending on the style when they’d been added in or what salvaged ship they’d been taken from. The air always smelled like new plastic from the recyclers. The thrust gravity was kept at a thin tenth of a g to conserve reaction mass. The cargo decks far below Anna now were cathedral-high and piled with all the things that the new colony on Eudoxia—shelters, food recyclers, two small fusion reactors, and a wealth of biological and agricultural materials—would need. There were already two other settlements on Eudoxia. It was one of the most populous of the colony worlds with almost a thousand people on it.

When the Abbey arrived, that population would triple, and Anna and Nono and Nami would be part of it. Would live out the rest of their lives, chances were, finding ways to raise food they could eat, learning about their new, broad, and problematic Eden. And hopefully, building the spaces and institutions that would shape humanity’s presence on that world forever. The first university, the first hospital, the first cathedral. All the things perched just outside reality, waiting for Anna and her fellow colonists to bring them into being.

It wasn’t the retirement Anna had expected or hoped for. Some nights she dreaded it. Not for herself so much as for her daughter. She’d always thought of Nami growing up in Abuja with her cousins, going off to university in Saint Petersburg or Moscow. She felt wistful now, knowing that Nami would likely never have the experience of living in a huge, sprawling urban environment. That she and Nono wouldn’t grow old together in the little house near Zuma Rock. That her own ashes, when she passed, would be scattered on unfamiliar water. But Abuja also had a few thousand less mouths to feed. Out of the remaining billions on Earth, it was nothing, except that enough nothings together might add up to something after all.

Her cabin was smaller than the house with two tiny bedrooms, a little sitting area with a scruffy wall screen, and just enough storage for their personal items. There were twenty like it in their hall, with a shared lavatory at one end and a cafeteria at the other. Four halls like hers on the deck. Ten decks on the ship. Right now, Nono was at the galley on deck three singing with a bluegrass quartet. The youngest of the musicians—a rail-thin, red-haired man named Jacques Harbinger—had used almost his whole personal space allotment on a real hammer dulcimer. Nami would be coming back from school on deck eight, where Kerr Ackerman was using the ship tutorials to teach the two hundred or so children about biology and survival techniques tailored for Eudoxia. After they both came home and they’d all had dinner in their own galley, Anna was going to the Humanist Society meeting on deck two, where she’d already won the role of the loyal opposition to George and Tanja Li, the young atheist couple who ran it. She didn’t fool herself into believing anyone would change anyone else’s mind. But the trip was long, and a good philosophical discussion passed the hours pleasantly. Then home to work on her sermon for next week.

She remembered something she’d read, she didn’t know where, about the life of ancient Greece. The private space had been thin there too, most of people’s hours spent in the streets and courtyards of Athens and Corinth and Thebes. A world where everyone’s home was not their castle but their dorm room. It was exhausting, but exhilarating too. She could already see the early shapes of the community they would eventually become. And the efforts she made now would have an effect on what happened when they reached their new home planet. The decisions they made in building their township would be the seed crystal for the city that might one day rise up from it. A few hundred years, and the work Anna did now to make this group a kind, thoughtful, centered one might be able to shape a whole world.

And wasn’t that worth a little extra effort?

She heard Nami’s voice before the door opened, serious and percussive the way she got when she was focused on something. She didn’t talk to herself often, so Anna assumed she had someone from school with her. When the door opened, she was proven right.