Peter David - After Earth

“And suddenly I knew one thing with perfect clarity, and it obliterated all other thoughts: There was no way I was gonna die before I’d met my son. Before I met you .”

Kitai felt a lump grow in his throat. Me?

“I look around, and I see its pincer through my shoulder, and I decide I don’t want that in there anymore. So I pull it out, and it lets me go, and more than that, I can tell it can’t find me. It doesn’t even know where to look.

“And it dawned on me: Fear is not real. The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future. It is a product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity, Kitai.

“Do not misunderstand me: Danger is very real, but fear is a choice.

“We are all telling ourselves a story. That day, mine changed.”

Kitai thought about that: We’re all just telling ourselves a story . It made sense, as if he had known it all his life and had just never had the words to express it.

Kitai looked around the geothermal zone and took in the sight of the animals all resting in close proximity to one another. He wished his father could see it, could see the majesty of it. Maybe someday , he thought. He sighed. It didn’t look like he would get a lot of sleep that night.

And how could he, with his father’s words still fresh on his mind? If we’re nothing more than the stories we tell ourselves… we can change the story, the way Dad did .

And if the story changes, we do, too .

From the cockpit of the ruined ship, Cypher watched the geothermal zone flood with dawn light. Somewhere, Earth’s sun was breaching the horizon.

Kitai, who had been drifting in and out of sleep as far as Cypher could tell, roused himself. He grabbed his gear and stood up.

“Fourteen kilometers from the falls,” he said, giving his son an objective. “That’s our halfway checkpoint. Over.”

“Reading you,” Kitai said.

He began his day’s trek slowly and steadily. No doubt, he was feeling the weight of the immense distance he had to cover. And without any real sleep.

Cypher spared his leg a glance. The puddle of blood on the deck below it was growing, spreading. On the holographic readout in front of him, it said: “ARTERIAL SHUNT—58%. TRANSFUSION CRITICAL. 7 UNITS NEEDED.” Seven units , Cypher thought. Be lucky if I had even one.

He turned off the screen. I need to focus on my son , he thought. And that, despite the pain and the worsening loss of blood, was what he did.

Kitai hacked his way through the forest with his cutlass, the end of which he had turned into a machete. It was hard work. The cutlass was light, but the leaves he was fighting his way through were tough and heavy. After a while, he paused and took a swig of water. Then he pulled a nutrition bar from his pack and ate it.

“Seven kilometers from the falls,” his father said, as if to remind him that they didn’t have time to stand around.

“Roger,” Kitai said.

He balled up the wrapper from the nutrition bar and threw it on the ground. Then he began to walk away. But before he got very far, he stopped himself and went back for the wrapper. Can’t just leave it here , he thought. That’s how we lost this planet in the first place .

Except when Kitai bent down to grab the wrapper, a gust of wind blew it out of reach and carried it through the thick vegetation. He frowned. Then he made his way forward through the chest-high leaves and lunged. His hand closed around the wrapper, giving him a little thrill of accomplishment. But the feeling lasted only a moment because when he looked up, he saw a scene of unexpected devastation.

For a wide stretch in front of him, the forest had been trampled as if by a gargantuan foot. Trees had been ripped down. Baboon carcasses were lying everywhere, some of them torn in two. Kitai got the sense that a battle had taken place there. But with whom? And for what reason?

“What could do this?” he asked out loud, his voice sounding strange in the stillness.

He hadn’t really expected a response. But he got one.

“Double-time it,” his father said in a tone that left no room for disagreement. “We need to make it to the falls. Hurry!”

Kitai started walking again. Overhead, the wind rustled the forest canopy. It sounded like claws scampering along a rooftop. Suddenly, he heard a boom . Not knowing what it was, he crouched, his cutlass at the ready.

“Volcanic eruption,” Cypher informed him. “Twenty kilometers east. There are volcanoes all over the planet now. You’re fine. Keep moving.”

Expelling a breath in relief, Kitai resumed his progress through the woods. For a while, it was uneventful. He liked it that way. Little by little, the ground underfoot began to rise. Then the rise became more pronounced, too steep to negotiate without some assistance.

Pausing for a second, Kitai tapped a combination into his cutlass. The handle separated into two pieces, the end fibers of which formed twin picks, each half a meter long. With them, he began to scale the hill. He was getting better with his father’s cutlass. Good thing , he thought. There were plenty of things on this planet capable of killing him without his doing the job himself.

As Kitai climbed, he felt the fatigue of not having slept. But he couldn’t let it slow him down. He had an objective to reach. Then he heard something in the forest behind him. Or he thought he did.

“Is there anything behind me?” he asked his father. “Over.”

“Negative,” Cypher told him.

Normally, Kitai would have trusted his father’s observation, trusted it implicitly . But he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was following him. He froze and cocked his head like a dog. Then he heard it: a sound. Like static in the distance.

“I hear something,” he said emphatically. He listened some more. “I think it’s water. A lot of it.”

“You’re close. Keep hustling,” Cypher told him.

Kitai climbed faster, digging into energy reserves he didn’t know he had. Whatever fatigue he had felt seemed to fade, at least for the moment. Abruptly, he came to the end of the foliage. Pushing aside the last of the leaves with his hands, he emerged onto a rocky ledge. The sound around him was deafening, the product of an immense waterfall that stretched in either direction as far as the eye could see. A thousand feet below, it crashed into a shallow basin and raised a thick white cloud of mist. Birds circled above it in flocks. Every so often they dived into the mist and came up with something in their beaks.

Beautiful , Kitai thought. It looked as if two continents had smashed into each other, one coast considerably higher than the other. No longer in need of the cutlass’s help, he connected its two halves and tapped them with his fingertips. A moment later, they contracted into a single piece. Then he took that piece and snapped it to his back, where it stuck magnetically.

“Inventory your remaining supplies,” his father said, bringing him back to reality.

Kitai began unloading his gear. As he did so, he described it to Cypher: “Roger. Food rations half available. Flares full. Med-kit half available. Breathing fluid—”

He bit his lip. Was he going to lie to his father again? Yes, he thought, though not without a considerable load of guilt.

“Breathing fluid—four vials available,” Kitai reported.

“Why are you not showing me the case?” Cypher asked. “Let me see it.”

Kitai swallowed. “What?”

“Show it to me now.”

“Why?” he asked.