Earthseed

suggest,” Ship said, “that we hear what the Earthfolk have to say for themselves.” Its voice came from several places at once, echoing in the clearing. “Their companions in the corridors have told me little. I think you should hear their story, and I myself would like to know how much of my programming rests on truth.”
    The Earthpeople, standing in front of the porch steps, huddled together; at last Petra stepped forward, holding up her bound hands. “I‘ll speak.”
    “Tell us why you came aboard Ship,” Aleksandr said.
    Petra smiled contemptuously. “I’ll have to fill you in on a few things first. There’s a lot you weren’t told. We wanted you to know what was best about us, the image we had of ourselves. But perhaps we should have told you everything, instead of programming the ship with our tales.” She looked down.
    After a while, Ship said, “Go on.”
    Petra cleared her throat. “We were a small part of human civilization, but we liked to think we were the best. Hundreds of years before the Project, a few people had abandoned Earth for space, building habitats along Earth’s path around the sun. It was not long before the spacedwellers outnumbered Earth’s people—they had no limit on their growth, while we were forced to limit our numbers and allocate our resources carefully if human life was to survive on such a finite world. By the time of our Project, there were fewer than a billion of us on Earth, while billions upon billions lived in the space habitats.”
    “Then the people in space had come from Earth, too,” Kieu said. “Didn’t you feel a bond with them?”
    Petra’s lip curled. “They had diverged from us. At first, Earth went its own way and they went theirs. But many people began to desert Earth for the habitats, and then the spacedwellers began to change. It began with little things—small alterations in their bodies, implanted links with their cybernetic minds. They became ever more alien. Many of them didn’t even look like human beings by the time we left.” She shook her head. “They tried to help Earth. That’s what they called it, help. Earth moved most of its industry to the space between Earth and moon, so that our damaged ecosystem could recover. Earth thought it was saving itself, preserving true humankind. But we became dependent on the help that had been given to us. By the time of our Project, Earth could not have survived without the help of the spacedwellers. There was nothing left for us to do, to accomplish. We could not even cut ourselves off from the space habitats without causing great upheaval and suffering.”
    Everyone was quiet; Zoheret heard only the muffled sounds of breathing.
    “Kameko Sato and Halim al-Haq were the first to have the dream,” Petra went on. “They saw that Earth could not survive without hope. Earth had stagnated, but there were other worlds where humankind could flourish. Earth had its limits, but there was the rest of space, and the chance to leave the spacedwellers behind.” She frowned. “You would have thought Earth would have rallied to the Project. But many laughed at it and scorned the dream. Sato and al-Haq were dead before we even began the Project, but their dream survived.”
    Petra looked down at her bound wrists, pulling at the rope, then shook back her hair. “My parents were followers of Kameko Sato and Halim al-Haq, and I grew up with the Project, recruiting others to the cause. We had to fight for every person, every scrap. We used persuasion when we could and other methods when they were necessary. We built our seeding ship with an asteroid the spacedwellers had given us—oh, yes, they were willing to throw us a few bones, though they thought we were foolish for trying. They were satisfied with sending out probes while they stayed in sunspace. We swallowed our pride and took their help. They could mock us, but space would belong to us, not to them.”
    The woman was silent. Her companions looked at her uneasily, as if afraid she had revealed too much. Petra lifted her chin. “We ran into a problem. With all our skills, we could not build a system complex enough to operate this vessel and care for the children who would be born. The spacedwellers had built many such systems—we had to turn to them for that, too. The mind core of this ship was their last gift.”
    “Then I am their child, too,” Ship said. “I am not just the child of Earth.”
    “You’re ours,” Petra said angrily.