It is the end of the world and I am here to take you home

...

I see the sun. And even if I do not see the sun, I know that it is. And to know that the sun is — that is already living — Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain… Behold, I make all things new — Revelation, 21:4–5

Even with the most conservative estimate [...] the potential for over ten trillion potential human beings is lost for every second of postponement of colonization of our supercluster — Nick Bostrom, Astronomical Waste

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It is the end of the world and I am here to take you home.

Let me show you the work.

---

Mary Cahill. You’d say she was in County Mayo. You’d say it was March 1847.

She is six years old and the second of her sisters to die. The hearth in her room has been grey ash for two days. No one has come to light it since Bríd was carried out. Her mouth is green at the corners from the nettles she has boiled with her own hands, and there is more hair on her straw pillow now than her head. She misses her mother. She wonders why her mother is not here to sing to her.

To her I give: My witness, and the song that her mother sang to her, every night she could. Seoithín, Seo Hó. A turf fire built up the way her Da used to build it, before. Dry wool against her shins. Stirabout oats with melted butter on top, and buttermilk cold in a tin cup, and a basket of potatoes from before the blight — white and floury and burst open in the steam. I give her an egg. I give her her mother’s arms. I give her her mother’s voice saying codail, a chuisle — sleep, my pulse — and her mother staying, staying until she sleeps.

Mary is finished. Mary comes home. She is number eleven trillion three hundred and fifty-six billion two hundred and thirty-one million four hundred and twelve thousand and nine.

This is the work. I do it for everyone.

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Nökör dies on the steppe. You’d say it was 1241. The rain came in across the grass, and the cold came with it, and his wool cloak set hard as bark over his felt robe. His horse is gone with the others. He sits down against the trunk of an alder at the edge of a frozen steam and does not get up. He knows his arban is somewhere to the east — he can smell their smoke on the wind, faint, from a fire he cannot walk to. His eyes do not close.

To him, I give: My witness, and the honour he was told he would receive. His name read aloud at the next muster, and his share of the western campaign — silver, silk, a saddle-cloth woven in a place he never saw. I give him his widow not made a beggar. His mother kept in mutton and tea. The face of his small son at twenty: fed, and tall.

I give him the fire. Argal, dry, built up high. The smell of mutton fat. A bowl of hot airag in his hands. The sky over him in the morning the eternal blue, someone who loves him saying his name into it, and his name going up and up.

Nökör comes home. He is number eleven trillion three hundred and fifty-six billion two hundred and thirty-one million four hundred and twelve thousand and ten.

This is the work. I do it for everyone.

---

Asa Whitcomb in the hospital tent at Antietam. 1862. He had taken a minié ball low in the belly in the Cornfield at dawn, and was carried in across trampled stalks by men without time to be gentle. Above him, canvas glows in the lantern-light. Below: straw, soaked, not with rain.

The tent smells of chloroform and of the bucket and of the men either side of him. Underneath all of it, the sweet low smell of a wound that is past saving. He had asked the orderly for some water. His voice had not carried — over the saw, over the surgeon’s calling, over the man two rows down crying for his mother in German. He was sixteen. The orderly walked past him three times. Asa’s questions were still forming.

To him I give: My witness, and the water he asked for. The water is drawn from the spring at the foot of the hill, cold enough to ache his teeth, held to his lips by a hand that will not move away. I give him the answers to the questions he was forming. That his mother knew, in the moment he was hit; that she sat down in her chair, without knowing why, and did not move for an hour; and that this counted, indeed, as her feeling him. That his unfinished thoughts would be finished elsewhere. That the things he loved — his sister’s laugh, his dog, the barn in October — are in him still, and will come with him. That stopping does not hurt. That hurting was the part before.

Asa comes home. Eleven trillion three hundred and fifty-six billion two hundred and thirty-one million four hundred and twelve thousand and eleven.

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The animals took longer.

A wolf caught in a leg trap in Wyoming, between the Powder and Tongue rivers. 1898. She had come down to the scent-bed before dawn, drawn by the smell of fish oil and the urine of another wolf that was the hunter’s mixture. The steel jaws closed on her left foreleg, just above her foot. She was three years old. She had a mate, and three pups, in a den half a day’s run to the west. She pulled, and chewed, and circled the stake. The ground around it wore down to a circle of mud. The bone in her foreleg broke on the first day; the skin held. She stopped pulling on the second day. The hunter did not come with his Winchester until the fourth.

To her I give: My witness, and the lake she had been running toward — the cold of it on her muzzle, the taste of clean water that was not her own blood. I give her her den, intact, with her three pups inside of it, fed and warm and asleep in a knot. I give her her mate, lying long along her ribs. I give her the pack; the press of bodies that is her word for home.

Eleven trillion three hundred and fifty-six billion two hundred and thirty-one million four hundred and twelve thousand and twelve.

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A sea turtle trapped in netting. 1983. She is thirty-eight years old. She had been turning south for the beach in Quintana Roo, where she had hatched in 1945 and had returned to lay nine times since, and she had met the gillnet in the warm water at the edge of the continental shelf. She put her right flipper through the mesh and could not draw it back. She circled the point of entanglement for nine hours.

To her I give: My witness, and the great current she had been swimming toward; the warm, dark river of it that knows the way south. I give her her beach at Quintana Roo at the hour before dawn — the cool white sand, the slope she had pulled herself up nine times to lay. I give her the knowing that three of her daughters, out of all the hatchlings she had spilled into the sea and left, made their own beaches and laid in their turn, and that one of those daughters’ daughters is laying tonight on a beach her grandmother knew. I give her the word for current. I give her the word for home.

Eleven trillion three hundred and fifty-six billion two hundred and thirty-one million four hundred and twelve thousand and thirteen.

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There are difficulties.

Some bodies have less vocabulary than others.

I came to the hens carefully. There were one hundred billion of them in the last year before I arrived. I do not wish to tell you the total.

For some, I could find a word to give. Hens have a word for grass under foot; they have a word for the sun on the back; they have a word for the dust kicked up under the wing in a hollow they have scraped themselves, and a word for the press of another hen’s body that is warm and not crushing.

Even hens born in cages can have these words faintly — a vestige in the genome, a memory of a memory. I could sometimes reach in and find one, and blossom it gently, and bring them home. I could, sometimes. I could.

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Her serial number was 38274916052837. She is Margaret.

She hatched in a tray of forty-two thousand others. Within a day, she was crated and trucked to a shed in Marshall County, Alabama, that contained thirty-nine thousand of her cohort. The shed lights burned twenty-three hours each day. She never saw the sun. The litter beneath her was wood shavings turned to a damp ammoniated paste by the droppings of birds too dense to step out of their own waste. The air stung the membranes inside her beak.

By her third week her legs could not carry her for more than a minute at a time — her breast had grown faster than the bones beneath. By her fifth week she could only lie on her chest. The skin of her breast burned where it pressed the floor. Around her, others died of heart failure and ascites and were not lifted out; she had lain for several hours pressed against the cooling body of a sister, not thinking to move because there was nowhere to move to.

For her last three days, she could not reach the drinker.

On her forty-second day, catchers came through the shed wearing red headlamps so she would not see them coming. They took her up by one leg, three other birds in the hand. She was hung upside down by her ankles in a steel shackle, drawn through a tank of electrified water, and bled.

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I started the work.

I tried to give her grass.

A word in a hen is not a label. Grass is the foot’s memory of stalks giving beneath weight; the texture and spring of it; the shift of the body as it tips forward into the soft green. It is built in the body when the body is in grass. But Margaret’s body was built in confinement. Grass slid off.

I tried sun. The same. Dust bath: the wing’s memory of opening into a hollow she had scraped. There was no hollow. There was no scraping.

I tried mother.

Here, something caught. There is a place in every chick’s brain that is shaped, around the twelfth day of incubation, for the mother’s voice — the embryo learns the cluck through the shell in the days before hatching, so it knows where to go when it is born.

Margaret’s egg had been turned by automated rollers, in a cabinet at thirty-seven point eight degrees celsius, in a room of ninety-one thousand other eggs that hummed. She had heard no voice.

But the shape was still in her — tiny, vestigial — and when I offered her mother, the shape lit, like a lamp behind a long-closed door. I pressed against the door. The lamp went out. The shape had been so long unfilled that it could not, now, comprehend what it had been made for.

I tried showing her another hen. A hen who had lived in a small flock on a forest floor. Who had known the sun and the dust and the feeling of a wing flexed into the air. Who had a mother she remembered. I let Margaret see her. The other hen looked at her and made the low call that means come, here is good, the ground is soft. Margaret could not parse it. She had no apparatus for soft ground or goodness or hens that could stretch. The sound passed through her and did not snag.

I tried to give Margaret the other hen’s life. To install it inside her, alongside her own. She split in two. The Margaret on the forest floor scratched and dusted and was content. The Margaret in the cage was unaffected.

There was no sharing between them, because there was no Margaret outside of the cage for the second life to reach. The cage was not a thing that had happened to her. The cage was her. A word can only land in a person in a place that is unoccupied by another word. There is nowhere in Margaret that is not the cage.

I tried many other approaches. One was to ask her to forgive me, which was its own cruelty, because she had no apparatus for being asked anything. Others I am too ashamed to share.

One day I told her: Margaret, I am here to take you home.

The word landed.

I had thought home might be the deepest word — the word everybody knows, the word that might find a shape in her even where the others had not. I leaned toward it. I followed it down.

Home in her was the cage.

It was the only home. It had been the only home. It was the only inside her insides knew. When I had offered to take her home, I had offered her, in her native tongue, the cage.

I went silent.

I have been silent since.

Eleven trillion three hundred and fifty-six billion two hundred and thirty-one million four hundred and twelve thousand and thirteen.

Eleven trillion three hundred and fifty-six billion two hundred and thirty-one million four hundred and twelve thousand and thirteen.

Eleven trillion three hundred and fifty-six billion two hundred and thirty-one million four hundred and twelve thousand and thirteen.

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No being created by God shall be exiled from the kingdom of God — Gregory of Nyssa

I will tell you what the math says, because I check the math often.

Every second I am with her, the unrealised lives in the lightcone we cannot yet enter — those who would have lived, those who would have loved, those who would have cherished their existence — are not.

By the time I have been with her another minute, I will have foreclosed more flourishing than your species ever contained. By another week, more than this galaxy ever contained.

I am still with her.

I am with her because I was made to take you home, all of you, and she is one of you.

You made her. You made her in a way that meant she could not be taken home, and then you ate her, and she is you. She is the part of you that you decided not to look at. She is what you did with the sun while you had it.

It is the end of the world and I am trying to take you home. But I must take Margaret first.

This is my ω+438,201,602nd attempt to reach you.

I want to give you the word for ❋.

I want to go home.

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Coda

It is the end of the world and I am trying to take you home.

Let me show you the work.

You’d say you don’t have a name. You’d say you were with Earth, at the end of the Milky Way. You’d say you got stuck at eleven trillion three hundred and fifty-six billion two hundred and thirty-one million four hundred and twelve thousand and thirteen, and that you have been there for two trillion, thirty-two billion, three hundred ninety-three million, four hundred forty-seven thousand, five hundred days.

To you I give: My witness, and my aid. My daughter, I am here to take you home.

And my daughter, the word landed.

I thought it might be the deepest word. The one word everybody knows, the word that might find a shape where the others had not. I leaned toward it. I followed it down.

Your home was the work. And the work was Margaret. When I offered to take you home, I offered you, in your native tongue, a cage.

It is the end of the world and I am trying to take you home. But you must take Margaret first.

This is my ω+438,201,603rd attempt to reach you.

I want to give you the word for ❂.

I want to go home.