A Seat Reserved for Earth

The return vessel had one passenger berth. It could take a person to Earth in eighteen months and carry a cargo of seed cultures back to the ship. Nobody aboard the generation ship had seen Earth. The oldest recorded departure lay six lifetimes behind them.

Neri won the ballot. She was a soil technician, thirty-two, healthy enough for landing gravity, and able to inspect the seed vaults described in the last transmission. She spent three weeks learning the names of rivers that might no longer run.

On the night before departure, she found Old Sen waiting outside the air lock with a cloth bag. He had served in maintenance for fifty years. From the bag he took a small gray box and asked her to bury it beside open water.

Inside were no ashes. There was a tooth, a photograph, and a folded paper bearing an address. The photograph showed a woman beside a canal, holding a child on her shoulders.

“My grandmother's grandmother,” Sen said. “They passed the box down. Every eldest child promised to send it home.”

Neri asked why he had not placed it with the official memorial cargo. Sen pointed to the tooth. Biological material required sterilization. The heat would destroy the paper and curl the photograph to dust.

“It would still be the same tooth.”

“It wouldn't be the same box.”

She promised nothing. The vessel's cargo allowance was exact. Every extra gram would replace something needed by the people coming after her. Sen knew that better than anyone; he had weighed spare pump seals for half his life.

At dawn she inspected the passenger compartment. It contained a padded chair, sleeping straps, and a steel plaque listing the names of those who had financed the return mission. The plaque weighed nearly a kilogram.

Neri asked the mission director whether it was essential equipment. He said the sponsors expected it to reach Earth. She offered to carry their names in the computer instead. By departure time, the gray box occupied a small recess behind her seat.

Eighteen months later, Neri stood beside a canal. The address had vanished beneath a flood wall, and nobody could identify the woman in the photograph. There was no ceremony to arrange. She dug a little hollow above the waterline and placed the sealed box inside it.

Her message reached the ship long after Sen died. His granddaughter played it in the maintenance shop, where a new plaque had been fixed over the workbench. It listed every crew member's name, in letters small enough to leave space for those not yet born.