Firstborn of Kepler-452B

by Jefferson Thomas

Firstborn of Kepler-452B

Tahlia gave birth in the pilot’s chair, with a blanket for a smock, and the botanist for a midwife. Her skin was marbled white-brown-red, with the blue of varicose veins throughout. All of us had skins which hung about us in big elastic wrinkles, as deep as if we were a hundred years old, but hers was exceptionally fragile: too dry, and crisp, and more like to tear than to stretch. She would scratch and rip and bleed and scab. Her skin wouldn’t heal itself, either, so the scabs continued to be scabs, and months-old wounds still bled from time to time. Her straw-blonde hair was thin, and came out often, but she was still beautiful. Even after everything that this planet and our sickness could do to her, she was still the most beautiful person in the world, and I say that with confidence and no hyperbole. There were only seven of us left.

We were in the cockpit for the birth, sectioned off from the room full of corpses that we had yet to bury. It wasn’t a large space, and only had room for Tahlia, for me holding her hand, and for Simone telling her to push. The rest of our surviving group sat helplessly outside: Rekha, Jiyun, Iñaki, and Eve—the neuroscientist, the lawyer, the painter, and the astronomer. My role was philosopher. On Earth, I’d made a name for myself as an evolutionary ethicist. I thought that I’d long ago proven my parents wrong about my choice of study, but turns out I really ought to have pursued medicine like they wanted. The doctors were all dead.

I closed my eyes and squeezed Tahlia’s hand and tried to block out her screams, as they triggered flashes of terrible memories from the last time that screaming filled this chamber. Closing my eyes didn’t help; it was dark back then too, when the machinery began warming us back up, and my cerebrospinal fluid filled back into my head. The technology was experimental, and 250,000 years is a long time for anything to last, even in the vacuum of space. I’d opened my eyes only to discover that they were already open, and I had, in fact, gone blind. For me, the blindness was temporary. Others weren’t so lucky. As fluid returned to my ears, I made out the muffled screams of the others. My limbs wouldn’t move. I could do nothing as the screams grew louder and more numerous, then gurgled out and died, one by one. By the time my pod unlocked itself, everything was terribly silent.

“I can’t see,” a voice cried out from the darkness. “Is anyone there?

I tried to answer, but my throat was dry, and I coughed instead. I fumbled for the latch, my limbs strangely buoyant in the zero-gravity.

“I’m here,” I croaked as I kicked open the pod door. “It’s Jim. Who are you? I can’t see either.”

“Tahlia,” she answered.

We located each other via Marco Polo, pushed ourselves against the walls, and collided together in the middle. We fumbled with our hands over each other, sensing in our blindness that yes, we were both still human. Her skin was cold and wet, like a recently thawed piece of fish. I found her shoulders, and hugged her, and cried in fear and relief to have at least one person left alive with me in the darkness.

I squeezed her hand again, to remind myself of that touch, and to ground myself in that part of the memory. I spoke to her, through the labor pangs, “Everything’s going to be alright. You are strong. You are the strongest and bravest of all of us. You’re going to make a dozen babies.”

That made her yell at me. “Don’t you! Tell me! Fuck off!”

“Jim,” Simone said to me testily.

“What?”

Simone bit her tongue, giving her attention over to Tahlia rather than telling me why that was the wrong thing to say. “I think it’s time to push again.” Simone was trained as a forestry engineer—a wizard at transmuting dead dirt into soil—but these life-giving skills did not really transfer over to the task at hand. It was all guesswork.

“I can’t…” Tahlia said breathlessly. “It’s too hard.”

“Just one more time.”

“It hurts.”

“On the count of three, okay? One, two, three, push!”

More screaming, and crying, this time from a baby. Simone announced it was a boy, and Tahlia collapsed into a gasping heap.

It was truly miraculous. I cradled the baby in the crook of my good elbow, propping his head up with the bandaged stump of my gangrenous left. The bloody gremlin, with his little red face scrunched up, was wailing from being thrust into the cruel world. A new world. 2,000 light years from home.

“Shhh, baby,” I cooed at him, and rocked him against my chest. “I know baby, I know.”

Tahlia reached up with both arms and said, “Give him.”

She looked like it was taking all of her energy to hold up her arms. Everything was harder on Kepler, because it was much larger than Earth, and the force of its gravity was almost twice as strong. I kept my hand on the baby’s back as I lowered him into her embrace. The light came into her eyes as she looked at him, and she cried.

“He’s so ugly,” she said, and laughed snottily.

I laughed too. “That’s what he’s supposed to look like.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him?”

I glanced at Simone, who shook her head. She was the smartest of us, or at least her school of knowledge had proved to be the most useful, and so she was more or less in charge. She looked terribly concerned.

“He’s perfect,” I told Tahlia.

“Thank god,” she said and laid back and closed her eyes.

It was a miracle. Everything about our bodies was calibrated to a different planet by billions of years of evolution, and we didn’t know if the air or the gravity would make it impossible to give birth here. We had expected something to go wrong, but Tahlia and I thought we had no choice but to try. We felt that if we couldn’t reproduce and continue the human race, then everything we were trying to build was in vain. We were alone. No one was coming to save us. It was up to us to make more than a graveyard on this planet.

It was just like when we first landed on the surface, and Iñaki (who was the only one who could see clearly by then) told us that the air outside should be good to breathe. I could make out the smudge of an orange light on the dash, indicating a warning about the oxygen, but I chose to believe Iñaki instead. If it wasn’t true—if the air wasn’t breathable—then we were all dead anyway, so he had to say it was true, and we had to believe him.

I volunteered to be our canary. I curled up inside the airlock while the hissing air depressurized around me. I knocked twice on the inside hatch to let them know I was ready, then held my breath as the outside door opened into a wind that filled my little chamber with its howling. A flaring light assaulted my eyes, making me blink as it brought visions of a rocky, reddish landscape, purple sky, and low clouds. Still holding my breath, I wrapped a hand around the hot lip of the exit and pulled myself out to the edge.

It felt strangely nostalgic. Purple-sky aside, it could have been earth. I closed my eyes and imagined myself back there as I took my first breath. The air was sour and metallic and stuck to my throat. It was thick, so that even a shallow breath seemed to fill my lungs, and it hurt to suck in much of it at once. I inched my legs out of the airlock, then dropped myself onto the ground. The sound of grit under my shoes—that, too, sounded familiar. I kneeled down to touch the scraggly copper grass with the fingertips that could still feel. It was much sturdier than the grass that I was used to—more like pineapple spines—but it really was vegetation. It was alive, and so was I. So, I wept. I laid down in the sand and wept. I scared the others half to death, until I stood up again, took a walk around, and returned with the news that this would work. We could live here, after all.

I watched my son curl up against my, well, his mother’s chest, and I felt lucky. The two of them were both asleep when Simone tugged on my sleeve.

“I can’t stop her bleeding,” she told me tearfully.

Tahlia would have been absolutely fine if we were in a hospital on Earth. Even with the sickness that kept her wounds from closing up, a doctor could have pumped blood into her. But we didn’t know how to do that, even if we’d had the tools. We couldn’t do anything to stop the river of red from flowing out of her as her mottled skin grew paler.

“Tahlia,” I urged her, gently. “Tahlia, you need to drink something. Eat something. You’re losing too much blood.” She wouldn’t wake up…until I tried to take her son from her.

“No,” she murmured, and tried to clutch onto him, but her grip was weak. The baby cried, and I let him back down.

“Tahlia,” I said, “drink something for me.”

“Is the baby okay?” she asked.

“Yes, he’s fine. He’s perfect.”

She wept. It was like an apology when she said to me, “I don’t think I have another one in me.”

“That’s okay!” I said, struggling to keep my voice and face steady. “This is enough, more than enough. This is a miracle.”

“He is,” she said, gazing down at him with love-swollen eyes, and pet back his wispy yellow hair. “He’s worth it. He’ll make it a better world, I know already.” She laid back, closed her eyes, took one more deep breath. “Luke…his name is Luke.”

Nine months before, Otto died. It wasn’t a surprise; he was the sickest out of all of us. He had black and green spots all over his chest, and a cough that wouldn’t go away. We buried him in the same manner as we’d been burying the corpses from the ship: in his own hill of enriched dirt, topped with a tree sprout. We didn’t talk much while we dug, then after he was safe in the ground, I went down to float in the river—the one place where the extra weight of this new planet didn’t feel so heavy. We all deal with grief in different ways. I wanted to be alone.

I was lying in the water, looking up at the purple sky, when I heard splashing. I slid a depressed glance to the side. Tahlia was wading over to me, with her handsewn cotton dress blooming out in the water around her.

“I want to talk,” she said.

I took a heavy breath. “Shoot.”

Tahlia would always insist on being hopeful. She and I got along in that sense. She was usually one to bear things with a smile, but she wasn’t smiling then. She scratched at her scalp, which was always irritated and red.

“Are we going to die?” she asked me.

I responded flatly. “That’s the human condition.”

“But soon?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.”

“But you know, don’t you?”

Tahlia was the daughter of one of the big investors in the space mission. She didn’t have a role in the establishment of a colony on Kepler, other than to survive. I figured that she was looking at me to offer her some kind of shallow hope, but I wasn’t in the mood.

“Yes, probably soon,” I said.

“How long do you think we have left?”

I huffed and didn’t answer, angry at the question. I hadn’t told anyone, yet, that the fingers on my left hand wouldn’t bend anymore. It was hard on that day to pretend that they would magically start working again.

Tahlia changed tack. Bobbing in the water, she bumped up against me and asked, “Why did you choose to join this mission, Jim?”

I paused for a moment to remember. “I wanted to be our conscience,” I said. “I wanted to set us on track to become a better world than the one we left.”

Tahlia snorted, then laughed at me.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said, and I still don’t know what she thought was funny about it.

“Why did you join? Just to survive? And now we’re going to die, is that it?”

“Not really,” Tahlia kicked her way around in the water. “First off, I didn’t choose to join. My dad made me, because he wanted to survive. I’m here as a carrier of his genes, more than anything, and he survives as long as I do.”

“I’m sorry for that,” I muttered. “Maybe if your dad could’ve seen the reality, he would have let you live out the rest of your life on earth, for whatever time it had left.”

“I don’t wish that,” she said. “Not at all. And you don’t either.”

“Don’t I?”

“Of course not. I’ve seen you, Jim. You like this. You like being the first. First to breathe the alien air. First to jump into an alien river. First to hunt, first to eat, first to get food poisoning off of alien meat. You don’t care if the experience is good or bad; you want to have it just because no one else has had it before. And you take your time and you savor it, even if it hurts. I admire that.”

I realized, finally, that she wasn’t as depressed about Otto’s death as I’d thought. I had projected my depression onto her; whatever she was there for, it wasn’t to be reassured. Maybe she was just there to reassure me.

“I didn’t know, didn’t realize, that you were watching me so much,” I admitted, with a small flutter in my stomach.

“Yes, I’ve been watching you,” she said. “You’ve been watching me, too. It’s human, isn’t it? You know, when we first got out here, and everything malfunctioned, I was terrified. I felt like I was going to die out here for nothing. But then I watched how you savored your terrible experiences, and I realized that all of this, every moment that we have here, is beautiful. It is absolutely a joyous thing to be alive. I’m alive. You’re alive.” She touched me on my chest. “And it’s beautiful.”

We had been on Kepler for over a year at that point, but were always in crisis mode. The thoughts of, well, what she seemed to be getting at, were often on my mind, but it was always something that I wanted to put off to another time, after the current crisis was resolved, and there was always a crisis. We had even kissed before, once or twice, but I’d always pulled away, trying to refocus on the crisis at hand.

“You’re right,” I said, and added, bitterly, in opposition to the mood, “This is the first time that a friend has died on Kepler.”

“And it won’t be the last,” Tahlia said. “But Jim…that’s not the part of this moment that I want to savor.” She slid her hands around my neck, so that our eyes matched up against one another, and fluttered hers at me. “Please.”

I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her into me. I kissed her chapped lips, and she kissed me hungrily back. She was strong and fit, but soon we were both breathless, as our lungs had difficulty keeping up with our libidos in this alien climate. I pulled back, shoulders heaving, and she pressed her forehead up against mine.

“Don’t stop,” she whispered to me. “I want to make a baby.”

I was taken aback. I was well and truly enlivened by this entire circumstance, but still I made the protestations that I knew in my more sober heart that I ought to. “Tahlia…you know just as well as I do that we aren’t ready to support more life, and our bodies are so weakened…”

She gripped my neck and the small of my back, and shushed me. “Before it’s too late. We’re not recovering; this is as strong as I’ll ever be. And I am strong. Touch me, feel it yourself. I am ready.”

I was folding fast, but still I said, “This is a responsibility for all of us to discuss, and we haven’t talked, all together, about this …”

“Don’t you want to be the first father of humanity? Don’t you feel the urge? Let’s make more of you. More of me. We don’t have time to wait.” She said it all breathlessly in my ear. “Touch me, experience me, for the first time, on this alien planet. Together, let’s be the first.”

Of course, I succumbed. She was speaking my language, after all.

That was not my typical way of getting over grief, but it did work. We weren’t the only two, either, to use sex as a means of reasserting control over our own short lives. Eve and Iñaki had grown very close while trying to map the unfamiliar sky together—Eve was an astronomer, but she was still blind, and Iñaki had been acting as her eyes—and when they brought up the idea of having a baby to the group, Tahlia and I had to sheepishly confess that we had already succumbed to the madness of our reproductive instincts, and now the biological clock was ticking down.

Tahlia fell asleep with the baby on her chest. He woke up soon afterward, and resumed his wailing, but Tahlia never stirred to comfort him. She was gone.

We buried her near Otto. Only half of us were in digging shape, so it took all day to do it. The hours passed in a blink, and it was sunset. Rekha and Simone laid her in the grave while I stared down, shellshocked, and silently berating myself for all the things that I could have done differently. I tried to burn her face into my memory as I dumped dirt overtop of it. Eve held the baby, but he wouldn’t go to sleep, nor stop his crying.

Once we were done, Simone planted a tree sapling on the mound’s summit. I couldn’t bring myself to walk away from it, even as the sun set and the breeze turned cold. Jiyun came and put a hand on my back.

“I’m okay,” I said to her, preemptively.

“It’s not like you’re supposed to be.”

“No,” I said. “It’s good. There’s nothing to regret. He is a miracle, and he, and his children, will inherit all of what she is, and what we are. They will have to carry all of us forward. This is as far as we could ever carry us. I wish—no, I know—that we will survive, and she will survive, because of him.” I said it because it had to be true. Because I might die if it wasn’t. Because despair would kill me faster.

Jiyun shifted uncomfortably; she wouldn’t meet my haunted gaze.

We all gathered in the same communal area, each grieving quietly to ourselves. Nestled beside our downed ship, our gathering place looked both like a campsite and a junkyard, with clothing lines hung between storage crates, and a solar-powered hotplate where the fire pit should be. Eve held baby Luke, who wouldn’t stop crying. I warmed up a fresh bottle of rehydrated formula for him on the hot plate. We had enough formula powder in our colonial supplies for generations to come. Eve was relieved to hand Luke over to me. I set him in my lap, using the stump of my arm to prop up his head, while my working hand fed him formula.

I asked Eve, “Are you and Iñaki still going to…?” I asked it quietly, but with the baby feeding, the night was still enough that even my whisper carried to the rest of the group.

Eve took a rattling breath, then tearfully whispered back to me, “We already have.”

That admission gave me a sudden, terrible relief, which was immediately followed by a shame at having felt it. Luke wouldn’t be alone.

“Oh,” I said, and the relief must have snuck into my voice. I glanced at Rekha, who heard it, and glowered at me, as I thought she would. She’d always hated the idea of being forced to give birth—which I couldn’t blame her for—and Tahlia’s death could only make that feeling worse. She said that she had signed up to be a scientist, not a breeder.

Simone and Jiyun were both stuck in their own heads, staring forward into the wispy alien sand that danced across the dunes. Iñaki, too, was lost in some secret thought. He glanced often towards Eve with longing, but didn’t bring himself closer.

When the baby finished eating, he resumed crying. Rekha stomped off, fuming, to the other side of the ship, and Simone followed after her. I tried bouncing Luke on my knee, and burping him against my chest, but when he kept crying, I told the others that I was going to take him for a walk. I bundled him up and carried him away with me, swaying as I went, as though in a waltz.

I took him down to the river, past the sandy part of the bank where he was conceived. He wouldn’t stop crying. I unswaddled him, and carried him into the water, extra careful with every step. I lowered him down and let him float atop my hand as I watched over him. The crying, miraculously, stopped. It was replaced by a curious cooing. He wiggled in the water and tried to turn his face into it, but I shushed him and raised his head up out of it.

“Just like me,” I said warmly and pulled him into my chest. “See, it’s not so heavy all the time.”

I felt like I should sing, so I sang some nonsense song in a lullaby voice: hey little baby, sweet little cutie pie, little wriggle goblin, see how you float, and so on. I just wanted him to feel the rumble of my voice against his ear. Once he fell back asleep, I wrapped him again in the blanket and carried him back up the hill. Everyone else was already asleep. The next day, I would fashion him a cradle. For now, I nestled him into the crook of my dying body, and fell asleep around him.­­­

---

Author Jefferson Thomas is an author from North Carolina who recently published his first novel, Against a Sea of Troubles. He graduated with an MFA in creative writing from American University. He has also published a short story, “The Beast of Moorland Manor,” in Griffel Magazine.

Artist JC Alfier’s (they/them) most recent book of poetry, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, River Styx, Southern Poetry Review and Vassar Review. They are also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work after the style of Toshiko Okanoue, Francesca Woodman, and especially Katrien De Blauwer.