Diaspora Ad Astra (11 page)

It had been two years since Philippines became one of 40 countries adopting the two- or three-child rule—and a year since I have stopped counting the number of babies
born each day. It was as useless as my womb. Tumors ran in the family. I had one removed last year, along with my physical ability to procreate. I stopped fearing the prophesied darkness and let
the gray days go by. I stopped feeling almost anything.

I was not in any way interested in the new set of students softly typing their exercises on their computers. I only wished to end the class soon so we could all pass that gate
again, get scanned for surgically embedded ID codes in our wrists, and go home. The E.T., a little white robot with a monitor for a face, processed their answers and gave each student a score. I
started missing the point of having to watch the whole evolutionary education.

I could make out ghostly faces with the monitors illuminating them. Aside from that and the blinking and flying lights coming from the E.T., the room was dark. It was the same
room where I had my classes for the last three years. But it was colder and more unfamiliar. It suffocated me.

I went out for some fresh air, if there was any. I walked along the forefront of the building to the wide quadrangle, tracing the corroded railing in that open part of the
ground. Standing there—a lone human being at the center of a cold, hard marble structure that stretched far and wide under my feet and rising high and looming above me—my breathing got
worse. My head began to spin and tears of helplessness threatened to burst out of my hurting eye sockets.

Just as I was ready to run for the gate at the far side of the quadrangle, it opened. A little boy burst in running to me. It was my son, Noah.

Tiny fingers clutched my arm. He clung to me with his right hand and reached for the ground with the other. When I half-kneeled to lift him, I noticed a rectangular patch of
amazingly brown and loose soil at the base of the railing. A corner of the marble had cracked away, letting that part of the earth breathe. When I looked closer, I smiled.

In the patch of soil was a fleshy white bud tipped by a bright green leaf. It was the healthiest and greenest bud I had seen in twenty years. Then I stood up and noticed that
the sky was brighter and the marble structure that was about to swallow me seemed friendlier.

I took my son to the gate where my waiting and smiling husband was. He had in his arms a squirming two-year-old Hope. My husband smiled wider and looked at me lovingly, setting
a palm lightly on my womb. Slow, warm tears flowed on my cheeks. But they did not hurt.

There was one more thing I could do.

By Carljoe Javier

Sometimes it got to be a real drag for Jeremy being on a generation starship.

But then when you think about it, wouldn’t it be a drag if you were on one, too?

There’d be nowhere for you to go, except around the starship. There aren’t many places for stopovers, since a planet with a hospitable atmosphere rarely comes
along. The only friends you could have would be on the ship, and they’d get pretty boring too. Your parents would have been born there, you’d have been born there, your kids would be
born there, and you’d probably die there.

What made things even worse was that Jeremy was weird. It’s not that he was a freak or anything like that. It just so happened that Jeremy didn’t like big groups,
or loud people, or speaking in public, which was pretty much speaking anywhere on a generation starship.

He liked to brood.

And on a generation starship, brooding was extremely weird. He liked sitting around and thinking, talking to himself, figuring things out like why they were there or what his
purpose was; deep things that didn’t really have any answers.

When he was a little kid he’d be brooding when the other kids would run by and slap him on the back of the head. As teenagers it was found that they were the first
generation to develop telepathic powers. So when the other kids weren’t making out with each other in their minds, they’d swing by and interrupt Jeremy’s thoughts, just to annoy
him. To stop them from invading his mind, he developed a neural band which he wore around his head to block out any external forces.

Jeremy had to admit that it wasn’t always a drag on the ship. The ship was almost as big as the country it had come from, with different simulated ecosystems, a holodeck
that could transport him to any time or place, and a humongous library where he could read all the knowledge of the Earth, at least up to the day that the ship left; they couldn’t have any
idea how things were going on Earth because it would take years for any communication to reach them, so the people on Earth didn’t bother to send messages and the people on the ship
didn’t expect any.

His liking to read in the library made him even weirder. Everybody else preferred the holodeck, since the virtual world was created there for you. It was the main instructional
tool. He was the only kid who liked going to the library. He was so weird that he was the only kid who understood the Dewey decimal system. These days you’re weird enough if you understand
the Dewey decimal system, so what more on a generation starship that had been in space for, well, generations?

But then who else on the generation starship should this story be about? What fun would it be if we just talked about one of the normal kids? All we’d have is a fairly
typical story of an ordinary youth growing up on a generation starship. And most of the other people on the ship wouldn’t have any recollection of what really happened on the crazy days that
started when they began receiving TV transmissions that traveled all around the universe and back and into the generation starship’s receptors. This is a story about scantily clad women and
zombies and a weird boy named Jeremy.

***

On that day, Jeremy was brooding in a corner near his family’s apartment. He was thinking about something philosophical, probably something existential. After all,
didn’t the meaning of things become more complicated on a generation starship where the designated purpose of your life was to survive and reproduce so that there would be one generation or
other still alive when the ship reached its destination?

Then his brother and sister ran in, back from their sessions at the holodeck. By this time Jeremy was exempted from going to the holodeck, since he had read about most of the
things being shown. But the teachers didn’t exempt him because he’d read a lot, rather it was because they found him weird and irritating since he knew what they were teaching even
before they taught it, and that embarrassed them for some reason. They didn’t want him around when they were teaching class. Who needs a know-it-all in class anyway? Especially if the
know-it-all apparently doesn’t need class either. They told him to keep up his reading, go home, and keep out of the classroom.

Jeremy thought that this would impress people. Make him more interesting and maybe even a bit cool since he was so smart that he didn’t have to go to the holodeck for
class. Instead, it made him even weirder.

Now you’d think that there would be some weird scientist on this ship that Jeremy could turn to as a mentor. Someone a bit weird too, someone interested in science and
literature and philosophy, things like that. But Jeremy missed the last smart guys on the generation starship by a few generations.

When the ship left for the far-off planet that was its destination, there were scientists, scholars, and specialists on board to ensure that things went right on the ship. They
would study the way that people reacted to living on a ship and in space. They would record the ship’s progress, passing on the responsibility to the next generation by educating them.

There were also a lot of families that were there just so that they could leave the Philippines. The smart guys thought it would be alright to bring in people who weren’t
experts so that there would be people that they could study. And so that they could educate these people’s kids, providing education that the kids probably wouldn’t have been able to
receive on Earth. This sounded like an idea that could work, but the smart guys didn’t count on politicians sneaking on board the ship.

The first few generations weren’t susceptible to the temptations the politicians offered. But the other families were. As Earth became a memory and the integrity of the
first generation was lost or corrupted, competition and factionalism developed. The great ideals of the first generation had gone out the exhaust pipes along with the consumed space gases. Only
remnants of it, like scattered space dust on the airlock floor, remained.

For generations there was feuding among the politicians and scientists-turned-politicians. Massive debates would be held and factions would be exiled, left on the next
hospitable planet. Unless they could pull off some coup and overturn things, thus leaving the other faction on the planet.

Then the smart guys that Jeremy missed by a few generations came along. These were just a few guys who tried to bring back the ways of the first generation, tried to get focus
back on the development of their knowledge, and tried to turn people away from politicking. Tried, of course, is the operative word. They wound up climbing into an escape pod together and making
their way to the nearest hospitable planet where they hoped to establish a colony without politicians.

So here Jeremy was, without anybody as weird as him to turn to, brooding about existentialism on a generation starship, when his brother and sister come running in. His brother
and sister were too young to realize that he was brooding, and they thought he was just bored. So they decided to entertain him.

“Kuya Je-my, look what we learned in holodeck,” his sister Janine uttered; it was something between speech and a giggle. “Watch, hehehe,” she began to
dance in front of him.

“Wait,
ate
, you have to do this,” Jeremy’s brother Jon-Jon said. He pulled his shirt up halfway so that his baby-fat belly showed, then pulled the
slack part of his shirt taut.

“
Oo nga no
,” then she tied the front of her shirt into a bunch, revealing her belly.

Jeremy’s eyes widened in shock as Janine continued her dance. She began by putting her hands up and making Ls with her index fingers and thumbs. Her hips gyrated in a way
that Jeremy had never seen before in real life. He may have been a weird boy, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t look up certain things when he was in the library video archives
alone.

“Where did you learn that? You’re just a kid, you shouldn’t be dancing that way! They’re teaching you that in holodeck? When I went to holodeck we
didn’t have anything like that!”

Janine kept dancing, then screamed in as high a voice that she could make, “Ow!” This surprised Jeremy, so he jumped back away from her.

Jon-Jon laughed at him. “
Kuya
, you’re weird.”

“
Laban-laban
,” Janine and Jon-Jon sang together as Janine made Ls with her fingers and Jon-Jon clapped the beat, “
o bawi-bawi
.”

“Stop that! It’s disgusting. How can your teacher let you do something like that? You’re a kid and you’re dancing like a—” Jeremy bit his
lip. He didn’t know any word that he could use that he could allow into his little sister’s vocabulary.

“But Kuya, it’s fun! And everyone else is doing it, too. Look,” she said and she stopped dancing so that she could use her chubby little fingers to point
outside.

Out in the front yard, in the simulated park, outside apartments and in the hall he could see children dancing, showing their parents what they’d learned in the primary
level classes. Instead of looking appalled, as Jeremy expected, the parents were laughing and clapping along. Some of the mothers were even learning the steps and dancing along.

“What’s going on here,” Jeremy said to himself. He whipped off his neural band and rubbed his eyes, for dramatic effect, since in the movies he’d
watched people would take off their glasses to make a point. He didn’t have glasses, but he thought the neural band could provide the same effect.

It’s the newest craze
, he heard in his head. It was Lena. Wow, Jeremy thought, a girl actually went into my head for a conversation. She was so pretty and he
thought she didn’t notice him, or maybe she did notice him but only because he was weird and he didn’t know which one was worse—

No, I won’t make out with you
, she said next.

Oops, sorry, didn’t mean to think that
, Jeremy said.

Would you stop thinking that!
She said.

Sorry, I’m really sorry. Can you meet me out front? I want to ask you what you know about this
. Jeremy thought it would have been fine if it were a mental
conversation, but he was having a hard time getting the image of Lena dancing the dance in a skimpy dress out of his head. He had to get the neural band back on.

Okay, meet me there in three minutes. And will you stop thinking that!

***

“So what’s going on?”

“Let’s talk over here,” Lena said. She brought him to one of the storage rooms outside the park. She may have wanted to be nice, but she also had to take care
of her reputation. Being seen with the freak was sure to send her cool points with the boys plummeting.

Jeremy, of course thought that she wanted to be somewhere private for other reasons, and he ventured to take off his neural band.

No. Put that thing back on. No wonder all the other girls say you’re so weird.

“Sorry.”

“Okay, so what do you want to know?”

“Well, what’s going on?”

“It’s a new dance the kids learned. You know how rare it is for us to get something new, so naturally everybody wants a part of it.”

“What do you mean new?”

“It’s new. It’s not something in the archives.”

“Where’d it come from?”

“I don’t know. You’re the geek genius around here. I gotta go. Holodeck in five minutes.”