©2025 SammyC

It wasn’t often that Percival Randall requested my physical presence in his spaceship. Over the twenty years since his arrival on the planet named after him, he usually appeared before me and others as a life-size hologram in the chambers of the Capitol in The Underground City or held private meetings in a neural space which our minds could share.

He had also requested that Alvin, my husband, and our 12-year-old twins, Georgie and Harry, accompany me.

“Is that our great grandfather, mother?” Georgie asked as we entered the shadow of the hulking spaceship nestled in the vast white sand beach leading to the great ocean off the west coast of our continent. She was pointing at the figure of Percival Randall standing beside the aperture rapidly growing into a doorway. Mr. Randall was dressed in his customary three-piece, double-breasted pinstripe suit, the very model of the modern, by 23rd century standards, billionaire industrialist. He was puffing on his customary briarwood pipe and winking at the twins as we approached.

“Well, well, such cherubic children. I can see the Randall lineage in their sunny faces. How are you Rani? And Alvin.”

“We are fine, grandfather. As you well know from keeping watch over us for twenty years.”

He ushered us into the tube that lifted us to the main deck of the ship.

“You may wonder why I’ve asked you to meet with me person to person, or should I say, person to hologram. I’ve made some lemonade for the children.” A tray with two tall glasses of lemonade floated in the air in front of the twins. “Yes, they’re real and substantial, kids. They possess the verisimilitude that unfortunately my hologram lacks.” The twins eagerly drank the sweet, refreshing liquid. “And you two, coffee, tea, or wine?”

“Milk tea if you have it,” Alvin replied. Seconds later, a tray with a tea service, complete with a teapot, two chinaware teacups and saucers, a creamer, and two spoons hovered in front of us.

“Please. Now, why are you here…”

Grandfather turned away from us and he cleared his throat. It was a minute or two before he continued, his expression impassive again.

“I wanted to say goodbye to my beloved acolyte and her family before—”

“Grandfather, what are you saying?”

“Rani, Alvin, children. The time has come for me to leave you. You and the people of this planet, the descendants of the colonists I dispatched into the great unknown so many centuries ago. I have fulfilled my moral obligation to you. Although I could not bring you all home, I have uploaded to you the bounty of all the knowledge that 28th century Earth has accumulated. You have reverse-engineered all the systems that this ship, my new body, holds. Two decades on, you have built highways, connected the continent from coast to coast, achieved amazing scientific and technological breakthroughs, raised the mode of life of your people from a medieval, feudal state to a jet-setting cosmopolis. All in a cosmically brief twenty years—”

“Thanks to you, grandfather,” I said, proud that I had been the primary agent, unwitting at the outset, of his mission of uplift.

“No, the greater credit should go to your cousin Lesley, who had the silly idea of accessing my slumbering uploaded brain emulation, four hundred years after my physical demise. It’s a pity that you two never met, Rani. I’m afraid she is most likely beyond the pale now.”

“But why are you saying goodbye, great grandfather,” Harry asked.

“I would like nothing more than to witness you and Georgie grow up to be brilliant, productive adults as I’m certain you will become but…my fuel cells are almost empty and your civilization has neither the resources nor the technology to synthesize the fuel this ship needs to operate. So, I’m going to submerge myself in the depths of the ocean where I will cease to function. Perhaps I will become the subject of myth like the sunken city of Atlantis, millennia from today…”

“No, there must be a way to save you!” I exclaimed.

“It’s alright, Rani. Everything must die, sooner or later. It’s the natural order of all things. I will have died twice. Quite an achievement, I must say. Finish your tea, children. The hour of farewell has arrived. My final wish is that I could actually touch you all, embrace you, be human one last time.”

We stood at a safe distance from the beach, shielded by our van and the foot of the low ridge rising behind us. Grandfather’s ship lifted noisily into the air, climbing as it neared the horizon. About three or four kilometers from shore, the ship executed an acute bank turn and slow-dived into the water, just short of generating a tidal wave that would have crashed into the coast. We waited an indeterminate period of time before turning away from the ocean and climbing back into our van. Alvin and the twins were stunned into silence but I let loose a torrent of tears. Alvin had to help me into my seat.

Percival Randall had rescued our civilization from the Dark Ages. For that, as long as humans exist on this planet, his memory will always be honored and revered. I’m sure there will be statues and monuments commemorated in his name. Perhaps, a few centuries from now, if we can traverse the stars, we can provide testament to his staggering achievements by returning to our home planet, Earth.

But, to me, Percival Randall was the person who freed me from the error of my birth gender and gifted me the opportunity to live as a woman, not someone trapped by the wrong physiology. I owe him the life I lead as Alvin’s lover and partner, the blessed mother of two beautiful children, and his esteemed ambassador among the diverse communities of our humanity.

Grandfather had miscalculated. Somehow power had drained more quickly from the ship’s batteries than he had foreseen. The plan had been that I would relieve his watch when I reached the doorstep of death, perhaps in my seventies or eighties. My mind would be mapped and uploaded into the ship’s operating system. Sometime in the second decade after his arrival, grandfather realized the situation but chose not to inform me.

I believe he thought we had progressed to the point where the presence of an over mind wasn’t necessary. That we could attain the highest technological levels at an unexpected speed. Well within another two centuries, we would be able to cross the ten light years between here and Earth. Of course, I won’t be around to witness that amazing denouement.

Seven years later, I was the one consoling Alvin, my arms around him as we stood on a hill overlooking the vast soybean fields of our farm. His mother, Georgia, had just passed on. She went peacefully at the age of 82, surrounded by her family and close friends. To her dying day, she could not understand why her son preferred being a “gentleman” farmer to being the president of a whole planet.

In recent years, I had occupied my time with building a preserve for my beloved Rumperdons and campaigned to dissuade people from raising them for the dinner table. Emma, the Rumperdon I had ridden since childhood, had died ten years ago. But her children roamed my preserve now, free and protected.

“We’re truly orphans now, Rani,” Alvin stated solemnly.

Both sets of parents were gone now. My father, King Harold, and mother, Queen Hortense, had died a year apart, five years ago. Eric, Alvin’s stepfather and Luna’s father, had passed away last summer.

“What was it Percival Randall said? ‘Everything must die, sooner or later. It’s the natural order of things’,” I remarked, gripping Alvin’s arm tighter.

Ten years after that, Alvin and I were sitting at home, watching the live broadcast of the successful salvage mission of grandfather’s submerged spaceship, on the video screen that filled the wall of our living room. We were intensely interested in this, not only because of its historical significance, but also because Georgie, our daughter, was the leader of the salvage team.

The mission had been undertaken so that the spaceship could be the centerpiece in our new national museum. Millions in donations had sponsored the mission with even more millions projected to come from the tourism that would result. There was a debate over the site of the planned national museum. Neither Alvin nor I had been consulted but I preferred a site in the old Eastern Kingdom while Alvin strongly suggested a location near the Underground City.

We hugged each other when Georgie answered questions from the media at her press conference. At that moment, my phone rang. It was a video call from our son, Harry, who was now Director of the Science Academy at the tender age of 29. Alvin and I were very proud of him. We were proud of both our children.

“Mother, we have some disturbing news…”

“What could possibly be so bad that you’d call me in the middle of your sister’s press conference?”

“Remember those stories you told me about The Dagger of Heaven?”

“Oh, Harry, it turned out to be your great grandfather’s spaceship. We were a superstitious lot back then.”

“Our observatory in Randall City has spotted a fleet of six ships decelerating at the edge of our system. We calculate an ETA of four weeks—”

“Are you sure? Could they be meteors or a cluster of comets?”

“No, all visible characteristics correspond to intelligently directed spacecraft, not natural objects.”

“Perhaps it’s a convoy from Earth. They’ve finally come to take us home!”

There was silence from Harry. Finally, he said in a trembling voice, “They’re not coming from the direction of Earth’s solar system…”

I dropped the phone onto the floor and Alvin turned toward me in alarm.

“They’ve returned—”

“Who?”

“The miners. The alien miners.”