Work Text:
We called out into the dark over and over. We sent out messages in hopes someone would call back. We searched every planet we could reach, in hopes of any sign of life. Any at all.
We thought we were the last, hoped we were the last, because we couldn’t bear the idea of being the only ones this awake and alive in a world as vast as this.
And we died alone.
When the others are born, many, many years later, they find us, everything we left for them.
They recover The Golden Record and look at it a million times over. They dig up our fossils and put us in museums, for their children to wonder over, and daydream. They name us in their own languages, sounds we wouldn’t understand.
Toys and movies and books and other things that we don’t quite have yet and never will have are made. Vigorous debates between those in the study of us, about this and that, endlessly though exercises about biology and culture and technology. All to answer the question of who were they? And none of the answers will ever be exactly right, but the questions are asked anyway, and maybe it’s more about that than anything else. Maybe you ask to ask, because you know you’ll never fully understand. But you can try.
And they do understand some things. They understand we were alone, and they wonder if we were lonely.
They understand that too. Of course they do. Everyone knows what it feels like to be lonely.
(The study is always changing, you know. They learn something new about us every day. They’re always hungry to learn more.)
(And maybe it’s just the fact of being something alive in the universe. To make a picture you can’t complete, to find something that’s been gone for far too long to love, and loving it anyways. You grieve things you never met.)
They study us for years and years, loving us as we love our ancestors’ painted hands on cave walls. We could never completely understand them. Not really. But we loved them anyway.
You can never completely understand.
But you can try.
In a lot of their languages, the word they use for us has the same root as the word they use for “mother”.