Golden Kindness

We left our only home in hope, as the speeches at the launches announced – and desperation, as we all knew and never said. We abandoned our home, leaving so many behind, hoping that they would someday follow, or at least that our absence would make a little more room for them – would make the oceans rise a little slower, the planet's resources last a little longer, the next plague come a little later. The generation ships moved slowly at first, but steadily left our home behind. For a while we sent messages back, cheerful bulletins of how well we were doing in our self-contained bubbles, hoping that at least the example we set of sustainability would encourage those we left behind to do better. It did, a little, and we hoped that others would follow us.

True to their name, our ships carried many generations between solar systems. In the bubbles we travelled in, full lives were lived inside the confines of worlds built on ideals. When we arrived at our intended destination, the planets were regarded with fear by travellers whose great-great-grandparents had boarded the ships. How, they wondered, could they ever move to these worlds? Some too hot, some too cold, too toxic or flooded, and even the perfect ones...so barren. We had all the life needed for a perfect world on our ships, ready to bring to the good worlds – but it would take further generations of struggle before it could make those worlds truly liveable, and none of us on the ships considered eking survival from a planet preferable to remaining in the bubbles that were all we knew. So we spent a few generations in the solar system, but remained on our ships, gathering all we could from the barren worlds, building new ships from the resources we found. We made more of our perfect worlds and moved on, our fleet enlarged enough to allow a larger population. By that time, the long-delayed messages from home had faded away, and we wondered if we were alone in the universe – if the life in our bubbles was the only life to exist.

Surely not, we thought, and embarked on yet another voyage in hopes of finding a solar system with just one world not barren. As the generations unfurled and each system was as lifeless as the last, we started to hope for even signs that life had once been there, that our solitary home had not been a fluke.

By the time our growing fleet had reached half the population our home had had when we left, we had almost given up. Was this our purpose, then, the purpose of life – to travel, to seek, to build, but always to move on? Perhaps we should have left some behind at that first solar system and each after it – the planets were barren, but they didn't have to stay that way. Was that our purpose, and were we failing at it? Yet still, at each system, none of us could bear to remain as stewards of such an endeavour, and we all moved on, debating whether we were fulfilling or betraying our destiny.

As our fleet and population grew, a more insidious concern grew. If we were a fluke, the children of the only world to spawn life – were we, was life, wrong? Our abandoned home had bloomed with lifeform after lifeform, each destructive in its own way – a way we could see as beauty only because we were the most destructive of all. Was the true purpose of the universe the chill of space and the blaze of stars, the rocks and dust, the empty seas and clouds? Were we only an interference to its functioning, pilferers of its bounty for our own selfish ends? Were our bubbles of perfect world in fact self-replicating pathogens?

Some ships stayed behind, drifting in whatever system their occupants lost hope in. They claimed that they would keep their populations stable and be truly self-sufficient as the first ships had been, no longer spreading the plague of life. Soon they began to doubt whether they could justify using energy to send messages to those who had disagreed and moved on. Perhaps they kept their word – but once the messages stopped, we could no longer know.

The next to lose hope did not bother staying behind. In the depths of interstellar space, they drained their atmospheres, reducing the life within to frozen husks. The rest of us mourned them as we carried on, and perhaps envied their peace to some extent.

At the next barren solar system, our dwindled fleet gathered for the usual few generations' rest and rebuilding – but some objected to even the most careful resource-gathering, fearing it would mar the stark beauty of the place. A schism erupted in the fleet, and ships were sabotaged, their occupants driven to the best of the barren worlds – where, after so many generations in their perfect world, they did not know how to prevent their new home from becoming their tomb.

Crestfallen and ashamed, those of us who remained left the system. Between stars, we considered whether to allow another generation to be born. What was the point of being the only life?

Like an answer, it appeared. From the first, we knew it had not formed like the barren worlds we had found – this tiny, gawky craft, battered from its journey, had been made. We watched it, chased it, caught it. There was no life there, but it had been made by life. On one surface, a golden circle gleamed. We could not understand the engravings upon it, nor the disk within it, but they were engravings still. We had not made this, and its trajectory could not have come from any we had left behind. A gift from the emptiness we traversed, it gave hope that others felt our fears – and whether they had solved them or suffered still, we were not alone.