@mine

In the ninth year of the dark, a child was born in the Karst Shelter, and she did not stop crying. This was the thing that undid them. Not the war, not the tablets, not the endless argument about the First Temple. A child, born the ordinary way, from two people who had aged enough to want one. The midwives had learned their craft from a manual and a corpse. Nobody in the shelter had seen a birth. Four hundred people stood in a corridor built for sixty and listened to a sound none of them could name. They named her Ceren, which in the old tongue meant *the young of the gazelle*, an animal that no longer existed and that none of them had ever seen. Ishak came down from the tablet-room to look at her. He was very old by then, and mortality had made him gentle in a way that immortality never had. He held the child for a long moment and then handed her back. "Well," he said. "That settles it." "Settles what?" her mother asked. "The argument." He gestured up, vaguely, toward the sealed surface and the asteroid belt beyond it and the seven factions preparing to kill each other over a temple none of them had ever entered. "They're fighting about who owns the sacred ground. And it turns out the sacred ground has legs and is currently screaming." He went back up to the tablet-room and did not come down again for two days. When he did, he had broken every tablet he owned.

They did not find the First Temple. It was never a building. The survey drone that finally mapped the coordinates — cross-referenced from four contradictory scriptures and one water-damaged municipal record — found an asteroid nine hundred metres across, unremarkable, tumbling. Its surface was regolith and iron. There was no structure on it. There had never been a structure on it. What there was, on the shadowed face, was a plaque. Aluminium, corroded, bolted to bedrock by someone with poor equipment and considerable patience. It was in the old script, and it took the linguists eleven days, and when they were done the translation was four lines long. HERE LIE 9,400 PEOPLE WHO CHOSE TO STOP SO THAT SOMEONE ELSE COULD BEGIN The seven fleets held position for a full day. Then the Karst ship — the smallest one, with the worst engines — broke formation and moved in close, and its crew went out in old suits and cleaned the plaque by hand, and put nothing beside it. One by one, over the following week, the others did the same. Not a single flag was planted. There was some discussion of it, and then there wasn't. Ceren was ninety-one when the last fleet stood down. She had outlived every person who was in the corridor the night she was born, which is a thing that had not been true of anyone for three hundred years, and which she had never once described as a tragedy. She died in her bed, in the dark, in a shelter that smelled of rock and water, surrounded by four generations of people who knew exactly how much time they had. It was, everyone agreed afterward, a very good death.