Authors: Sonya Writes
“Right now we don’t have much
choice. There are too many of them and they could easily pick us off one by one until everyone agrees with their opinion.”
“So, do
we
pick
them
off one by one instead? Until we’re in the majority?”
“If you’re suggesting murder, I sincerely hope not.”
“No, no, of course not. Ten of us can’t build a society. Thirteen of us can’t. Unless our grandkids all had incestuous relationships together, which I certainly wouldn’t suggest, and they’ll already have to strategically marry as it is to make sure that doesn’t happen. What I mean is, pick them off one by one on their opinions. Change their minds.”
“No. I don’t think that would work. That would let them know something is up. All it would take is one person to say, ‘hey, so-and-so is
talking about Earth again and trying to convince me we should teach it to our kids’ and then they would put on their power displays again. They’ve already burned the books and I don’t want to find out what their next step is.”
“Well, then our only hope is our kids. Teach our kids the truth…but
only when they’re old enough to know that they shouldn’t tell anyone else. If we teach them right, they could possibly turn this all around when they become adults.”
“But you’re forgetting something. The people against us aren’t dumb, and I think they know we’re not going to truly drop this. They’ll be teaching their kids their way of thinking, and unless we form really big families, our kids will be just as outnumbered as we are.”
“What if we start a new city? We can go somewhere else and build.”
“And have two quarreling nations? That sounds like a solid plan. We would have no houses to live in, no electricity and no water system in place. It will take years to put all that together with only
ten of us working on it. And nothing would stop them from coming to us, wherever we go, and taking our children anyway. We’re all stuck here together, so we should try to keep the peace as much as possible.”
“There’s another way,” a young woman said. “Our children can marry their children and teach our grandchildren in secret. The grandchildren can make the difference.”
“You’ll be dividing up families if you do that. The kids will be torn between their parents who won’t trust each other, and whoever is the stronger one will win. I don’t see that there’s any way out of this.”
“There’s a way; we just have to find it. For now we have one simple plan:
as each of us have children, we’ll start teaching them secretly as soon as they are old enough to keep a secret. We will not let the memory of Earth die without a fight, and we will instill the same passion in our children.”
It wasn’t long after the meeting that a man named Matthew started courting Etana. He was one of the six who’d initially been on the fence about the Earth issue, though by this point he was strongly leaning toward the same conviction Etana had. Etana allowed him to court her and she enjoyed his attention, though she was not sure she would ever fully trust him because of his chronic indecisiveness on important matters. Still, no one else was showing a particular interest in her, and everyone was feeling pressured to start their families before much time passed. She didn’t have very many options, and she needed a husband if she was to have children. It was up to her and the others to keep Earth’s memory alive on Zozeis.
Etana
entered into marriage with Matthew after a few months of courting. There was no legal system in place to define their marriage, but the relationship was officially recognized in front of everyone else. Several others formed relationships as well, and there were four marriages in all so far, with everyone else rushing toward that state.
Matthew was good to her as a husband
. He loved her and cared for her and became the best friend she had on Zozeis, but still she never fully trusted him in her heart. She never told him about the secret room in their basement, and she was careful not to appear too strongly in her opinions on any topic unless she was sure he agreed with her. Time went on and she became pregnant with the first baby to be born on Zozeis.
As soon as everyone realized that
Etana was with child, the other women entered into some sort of madness. It was as if they’d never previously considered that there was no medical staff here to help deliver babies. The only doctor was a man who worked as a brain surgeon on Earth, but that was a far cry from obstetrics. Still, Etana wasn’t particularly worried about it. She knew that her body was designed to carry and deliver a child, and she felt sure that everything would be fine.
“Promise me,” she said to Matthew, “that when I go into labor, you won’t tell anyone else until after the child is born. The last thing I want is to be surrounded by everyone else’s fear and worry in a time of joy.”
After much discussion, Matthew agreed to the promise, but he was reluctant to agree, and Etana wondered whether or not she would even tell Matthew when the time came. In the end, she couldn’t keep it to herself, and once Matthew knew, neither could he. Her labor and delivery ended up being very stressful with several other people surrounding her and talking in frenzied tones. Noise filled the room and she wanted to shout at them to go away, but she bit her tongue. Finally, after several hours of labor, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy.
Once
their son was born, Etana and Matthew named him Aaron, and unintentionally started the next major argument on Zozeis.
“All the children should be named alphabetically. Any other children born this year can have an A name, next year a B name, and so on. Upon meeting other people our descendants will always know how old they are by their name, and also, it will help us keep track of the years for now until we’ve settled on a calendar.”
The calendar. There was so much disagreement about how to set the calendar. They knew that the year was approximately 325 days long, but they weren’t completely sure yet and hadn’t made any official decisions on how to keep track of it. Some people wanted to use the 7 day week that they had on Earth, but others were opposed to the idea, and even if they could agree on how to set the week, they still had to choose a time for the new year to officially start. When this idea came up of tracking the years by naming of babies, more than half of the people were in agreement. Aaron was born around the time of the autumn equinox, so that was chosen as the start of the year. It wasn’t a full calendar yet, but it was a start.
The others, though, did not agree with this idea. Several of the women, particularly, already had lists of baby names they loved, and they didn’t want to wait 10 or 15 years
before they could use their favorite names for a child. Etana was in the camp of disagreement, but Matthew agreed with the notion.
In the end,
once again, the majority ruled. There was no threat of taking away children or locking up parents for non-compliance, simply the decision that if any parent didn’t follow the guideline, then the other adults would get together to choose a name for the child and call the child by that name instead of the one his or her parents had chosen. This would be particularly easy to implement. Most of the couples were in disagreement on the issue, so for the most part there would already be one parent in each home who followed the new rule. When no one was looking, Etana wept over the matter. She was the first and only woman on the planet to have total freedom in naming her baby, and because of the name she chose, she’d inadvertently taken that freedom away from all the other parents.
Caring for a child on Zozeis seemed a lot more difficult than it should have been. Etana realized a few months prior to Aaron’s arrival that there would be no access to disposable diapers, formula, or even a crib. Matthew was adamantly against having Aaron sleep in their bed with them, which upset Etana because she wanted to keep him close, but she chose not to argue. They certainly couldn’t let him sleep on the twin bed in the other bedroom, lest he fall off, so instead they decided to lay blankets on the floor as a bed for him. Etana folded washcloths over hand-towels and tied the towels over his bottom to resemble a sort of diaper. It took a lot of trial and error, but she finally figured out how much cloth needed to be there to prevent a major leak, while not having so much there that the diaper was uncomfortable for Aaron. She was thankful for running water and a washing machine, but it was still a lot more work to keep up with than she’d anticipated. Being the first mother on this planet, it was her job to figure out what worked and what didn’t, and she had no one to go to for advice.
When he was a few weeks old, Aaron started to stay awake for most of the night and sleep during the day. Since she had to nurse him
and change the diapers, Etana stayed up with him each night and slept when he did. Matthew kept his regular schedule and helped the other men with their duties around the town. They had planted fields with cotton, grain, fruits and vegetables, and they frequently worked to clear out the school building and make decisions about how to use the construction materials it contained. It was suggested that they take all the windows out of the buildings, one by one, and board up the holes. They could get more wood from the forest, they reasoned, but they didn’t have a way yet of obtaining or producing glass, and the glass might be needed one day. The decision wasn’t made yet, but it was one they discussed regularly.
The women spent the
ir days working with cotton and studying the books that showed them how to turn it into cloth. Etana wasn’t part of any of this now because she was nearly always asleep during the day. One night, Etana took Aaron outside to nurse him on the porch and star-gaze, when she saw something strange in the sky. It looked like a blue ball of light coming down from the sky, and it landed somewhere beyond the trees. Etana made a mental note of the direction in which it landed. She sat and stared in that direction for a long time, wondering about it. Then, the next night, after Matthew had gone to sleep and the whole town was silent, she went for a walk through the woods with Aaron happily cradled in her arms.
The moon was full and provided adequate light, but the trees overhead blocked much of it out. As the wind blew through the leaves,
Etana was reminded that though they hadn’t yet seen any animals here, it didn’t mean that they didn’t exist. The last thing she wanted was to run into some sort of alien bear while walking alone through the forest.
But she didn’t run into any bears or anything else. She trekked through the trees in as straight a path as she could, toward the place where she was sure she’d seen that
strange ball of light land. It was a long walk, about five miles, but it seemed even longer because of the darkness and the baby in her arms.
When
Etana came out on the other side of the trees, she was on the side of a hill, and as she came around to the front of the hill she saw a very large building down at the bottom of it.
Etana
stopped in her tracks when suddenly the roof of the building came open, and out emerged the blue ball of light; only, it wasn’t a ball of light: it was a spaceship, orb-shaped and quite small compared to others she’d seen.
When the spaceship was gone, the roof of the building closed back up and all the lights went out, but of course this didn’t stop
Etana from moving forward and going in.
She was quite surprised whe
n the door opened automatically, and even more surprised when she saw that there were two more spaceships and no one else in the building. She’d half-expected to be caught trespassing here, though she’d disallowed herself from pondering the possible consequences of such happening. She knew that thinking too much of consequences would’ve held her back from exploration.
W
hen she saw that she was alone, she felt quite free to do whatever she wished, which was primarily to study the spaceships and the computer system. As she looked them over, she realized that if anyone else here found out about this place they would destroy it as a way of putting Earth behind them. None of them seemed to have any interest in going back, though she occasionally wondered how many of them were simply keeping their mouths shut the way she was. Still, even if others were interested, once they were in their mob mentality they would destroy this place and go on as if Earth had never existed. She couldn’t tell anyone about this.
It didn’t take long for her to find the history log in the computer system and discover that her every move had been tracked since a few days before she left Earth. She quickly scrolled through the list of names and saw that everyone was in here.
It would be useful to know who my enemies are
, she thought, and so she quickly read through several people’s interactions over the last few weeks. For the most part it didn’t seem that anyone was talking about her specifically behind her back, but there were two conversations that alarmed her.
Several people got together to discuss her pregnancy. They
knew she wanted to keep Earth’s memory alive and were already preparing to take the child away if she showed any sign at all of not following their rule.
The second conversation
, which alarmed her even more, was one in which Matthew told the others that he agreed now with putting Earth behind them. He agreed to keep an eye on Etana and tell them if she started speaking about Earth to their child. He loved Etana, he said, but he didn’t want their child to lose both parents if she refused to follow the rules, and he was willing to turn her in if he had to so that he could keep Aaron. Matthew agreed to watch her carefully and tell them if he saw any sign of noncompliance.