The First Sky

I.

Anna had been a ship's engineer for eighteen years and had learned to dread the kind of silence that came over a hull when something was about to be felt. The hull was silent now, in the long curve of approach, and she stood with her hand on the back of her daughter's chair at the observation port, and she waited.

Iris was eight.

Iris had been born in the medical bay on Deck Four, had been weaned in the nursery on Deck Three, had taken her first steps in the observation lounge where she now sat — but the observation lounge had, until this morning, looked out only on stars, and stars were a thing Iris understood. Stars were holes in the dark. Stars were friends she had named: Pan and Berry and the Crooked One and the Bright Hard Thing that lived above the kitchen.

The planet was not yet visible. The screens were still showing the navigation overlay. Anna watched the timer count down — six minutes, four minutes — and tried to think of a single word she could say to her daughter that would be sufficient.

She could not think of one.

She had been born on Earth herself. She remembered grass. She remembered, specifically, the feeling of damp grass against her bare ankles in the summer of her ninth year. She had tried, several times in Iris's life, to describe damp grass against bare ankles. Iris had listened politely.

Iris had no language for what was about to arrive.

II.

The dark moved.

That was Iris's first thought. Not: *the planet is appearing.* Not: *we have arrived.* The dark moved. Something inside the dark, something that had been hiding in the dark all this time without her knowing, was slowly and shyly turning its face toward her.

The face had a color.

She did not have the word *blue* — they had taught her *blue* but she had no referent for it; *blue* was a square on a screen in the science lab. The face had this color, the screen-color, but breathing, but moving, but bigger than anything had ever been allowed to be.

There was something white on it. The white was moving too. The white looked like the steam that came off her soup but it was on the face, it was not coming out of a bowl, it was on the face, and it was moving.

She heard her mother make a sound. The sound was the sound her mother made when she had cut her hand on the wiring last winter and had not wanted to wake her up.

Iris pressed her palm against the port.

The port was cold.

The face — was that a face? — was warmer than the port, somehow, even though it could not be, even though there was vacuum between them, even though her mother had told her many times that vacuum did not transmit warmth. The face was warmer than the port. She knew this the way she knew that the Bright Hard Thing was friendly and the Crooked One was sad.

She said, without turning: "What is it called?"

Her mother said: "Earth."

Iris said: "Oh."

She would think, later, that *oh* had been the wrong word. There had been other words, in her — the smaller words she used for the toys she had outgrown, the bigger words she used for the equations her father showed her on rest day. But none of those had come.

*Oh* had come.

It was the word, she would understand, that one used when a thing one had not known was missing was given to one anyway.

III.

I am sixty-five years older now, the daughter would write, in a journal, in a house, in a town, on the slow blue planet she had first seen through the port. The hull is in a museum. They have preserved the observation lounge, exactly as it was. Schoolchildren go and sit in my chair.

I went last summer.

I sat in the chair and looked through the port — they have replaced the port with a screen now, of course; the original port is in a different museum — and they were showing the approach, in real-time, sped up. The dark moved. The face appeared. I was eight again, for the duration of the approach, and the equipment in my chest that has, in recent years, become temperamental, did its temperamental thing.

There was a child sitting next to me.

The child was perhaps six. The child had been born in the town and had never been on a ship. The child had been told that I was a person of historical interest and had been promised an autograph, and so was waiting, with the particular patience of children who have been promised something.

I said, because I could not help it: "What does it look like to you?"

The child said: "What?"

I said: "The planet."

The child looked at the screen. The child considered. The child said, with the slight impatience of a person who has had this kind of question asked of them by adults all their life: "It's home."

I sat with that for some time.

I have decided, since, that the child was right.

I have also decided, since, that I was right.

There is room in a life for both.

The dark moves, even when you are old. The face appears. The face appears whether you have a word for it or not. And the word *oh*, when it comes, is — I have come to believe — the only word that is ever entirely true.