Earthseed

the room jutted out from the far wall. Inside the cube, holograms from Earth, the world they had never seen, could be shown.
    Lillka was curled up in one chair, a reader on her lap. She looked up from the flat rectangle as Zoheret and Anoki came near, then went back to her reading. Lillka lived in the library; she would have spent all her time there if Ship had let her. She had grown shortsighted from all her reading, and Ship’s surgical lasers had already made adjustments in her eyes.
    “What are you reading?” Anoki asked her.
    “Just a story.”
    “You shouldn’t read for so long. Have Ship tell you a story, or show you one.”
    “It isn’t the same.”
    Zoheret skated toward the cube. “Ship?”
    “Zoheret. Hello.” Ship’s voice was an alto. “You did not eat your lunch yet.” The voice dipped, and became a tenor. “You should.”
    “I’m not hungry.”
    “You won’t get extra food at supper,” the tenor voice warned her.
    “I know. Show me my parents again.”
    “Certainly.” Ship was speaking in its alto once more. A woman appeared inside the cube; she had long, dark-brown hair and olive skin. The image was so real that Zoheret felt as though she were looking through a window. Behind the woman, Zoheret saw a barren, brown landscape and, on the horizon, the glitter of tall, shiny spires. The woman disappeared, and a black-haired man took her place. His bearded face smiled at her uneasily as he sat in his laboratory, his fingers around a microscope. The image changed. On one side of the cube, the woman stood before a small group of people, while on the other the man, now clothed in a long, white robe, sat in a garden; a hooded falcon clutched a perch near him. The images were still, frozen in time. Zoheret wondered how long the two had been dead.
    The woman’s name was Geula Aaron; the man was Hussein Taraki. It was from their genetic material that Ship had made Zoheret. Ship had told her that the two had worked on the Project together, but it did not know whether the two had known each other well. It had also told Zoheret that Geula had been a chemical engineer and that Hussein had been a medical researcher and poet.
    Zoheret stared at the images, searching the faces. She had asked about them at first only out of curiosity. She had wanted to know something about the people who had built Ship, who had wanted to send something of themselves into space, to another world. Ship had explained enough to her for her to know that they were dead, that they had been dead long before Zoheret had been born. Ship had been traveling through space for over a century.
    Zoheret had not thought much about her parents until recently. She was fifteen years old, as Ship reckoned time; on the day she had turned fifteen, she had found herself gazing at the images and asking herself if it had bothered them, knowing that a child of theirs whom they would never see, would never know, would be traveling to another world. It was silly to think of it that way, she knew; she had not been alive then, and they would have had to worry about someone who did not exist.
    “You look like her,” Anoki said as he came to her side. “But you have his nose.”
    “I know. My nose is too big.”
    “It is kind of beaky. It looks all right on you, though. It wouldn’t on somebody else.”
    Zoheret smiled, knowing that this was as close as Anoki would come to a compliment. “Do you want to see your parents?”
    “No.” He said it quickly. “I’ve seen them before. What’s the point? They would have been disappointed if they had known how I turned out.” He frowned. “Maybe it was on purpose. Maybe I was supposed to be like this.”
    “You can’t believe that.”
    “Why not? Maybe it’s part of the Project, seeing whether someone like me, or like Willem, can survive.”
    “But Ship—”
    “There’s a lot Ship doesn’t know. I’ll bet there’s a lot Ship hasn’t told, either.”
    “I convey everything I can,” Ship said in its alto. “And I know quite a lot—more than you do, I might add. Do you wish to continue viewing, Zoheret?”
    “No.” The images faded. Ship always showed the same holograms; Geula standing in a desert outside a city or with her friends, Hussein in his laboratory or garden. They never spoke; she had never heard their voices. They could have left a message, she thought. They could have recorded something for me to hear.
    “Do you want to see something else?” Ship asked.
    Zoheret