Last Contact

By: Evie Sum

It was already too late when the humans arrived. They were a young species, full of vigor and hope and curiosity. Thriving.

We… were not.

War had ravaged us, and sickness, and war once more, until our population slowly dwindled beyond recovery. We fought against it, of course, with genetic manipulation and cloning and even more desperate measures, but time was not on our side.

None succeeded.

When the humans arrived, we were sinking into despair and apathy, only a few tens of us left. We had begun to discuss plans for a mass suicide, or to simply wait and allow nature to take its course.

But the young species came, their ships clumsily built together, and asked us why we were so few.

“We are becoming extinct,” we told them. “There’s nothing left that we can do.”

It has long been custom to avoid races that are dying - once a species is beyond recovery, even the fiercest enemies fall back. The custom was born from poisons and plagues that could carry forth from a dying planet to a healthy one, but it now has the unrelenting weight of tradition imposed onto it. Once we have gone, once the others have waited for the predetermined period of quarantine to pass, a war for our world will be waged. Here in the cosmos, habitable worlds are few and far between, and this is a good one - with thriving forests, an abundance of animals and produces, fresh groundwater, and valuable materials.

It is a bitter thing, to be grateful for the custom that allows us to die in peace.

The humans, however, do not know of this custom. They do not leave. They seem distraught when we tell them we are dying, and attempt to offer their aid - but their technology is behind ours, and it is already far too late. When they realize they can’t save us, they do something that bewilders us.

They start frantically gathering information. Not our technology, though they accept when we offer it. But they go into our records, carefully preserving them, They make copies of our books and record our stories, whether it be about our history, songs or describing simple things - our food, our games, our lives. Anything and everything we are willing to share, they seem to want. It’s pleasant, talking about better times, the things the youngest of us only know of from the elders, but we don’t understand why they’re so interested.

Before long, they start to build things. In our abandoned cities, by our sacred places (never in them, only nearby), and by every spaceport. Large, stone structures, the purpose of which we’re baffled about.

I was one of the youngest, and am still hale enough to go outside and take a look at the stone thing they were building, in the middle of the town where the rest of us has gathered. It is tall - at least the height of ten humans, and five of mine. I see the images of both our races, as well as words in their language and ours, though they’re hard for my failing eyes to read. “What is this for?”

“It is a monument.” The nurse who has become my attendant - we all have them now, as our old age begins to rob us of strength - explains. She lays her small hand gently on my forearm, something humans find comforting. “We make them, to help us remember the past.”

I don’t understand that, so she shows me pictures. So many pictures, of buildings and statues, of great slabs and spires and pyramids of stone. Some have names, or pictograms, or even faces carved onto them. Some are millenniums old, yet still exist, zealously guarded and protected by the unimaginably distant descendants of those who built them. Others, she says sadly, have been lost, and she sounds as though she mourns those losses as she does the deaths of living beings.

“But what are they for?” I ask again, still probing for the deeper meaning. My people have never kept records such as this, nor can I imagine my spirit aching for a lost slab or statue. Perhaps it’s because they’re more reliant on sight than we are - my kind first communicated by scent, then sound, with sight being a distant third. Nor have we ever valued permanence, as metal and stone, while necessary, never held the same memory of life and scent as wood did.

“They are…” she hesitates, searching for the right words. “They are all here for different purposes, but… also for the same purpose, underneath.” Confusing and vague, yet it all becomes clear as she touches a picture of a statue, ancient and damaged and human, as human as the nurse next to me, and continues speaking. “We were here. We mattered. We lived. Do not forget us.” She touches my forelimb again. “We do not want you to disappear and be forgotten. We will remember you, when you are gone.”

I stay up that night, thinking about it, looking at the stars that we once freely traveled between. About us, an ancient species that valued the present far more than the past, and about a young species, so determined to remember not only their own history, but ours. A young species that tends to an older, dying one with kindness and compassion, that records our history and builds monuments to our memory. They don’t know what will happen to our planet when we are gone. The eventual fighting to take it from one species to another, the destruction of what’s left of us to make way for someone new. This is how it has always been.

But the humans are different. Perhaps this can change, too.

There are only thirteen of us left when I call the last Planetary Council. Thirteen, of a species that once numbered in billions. But the thirteen of us were, still, the Planetary Council, every dying member having nominated a younger being to take their place, until the last of us stood in command of an empty planet.

“We should invite the humans to live here,” I tell them, and I hear murmuring among the nurses who are gathered around us, for some are too frail now to move without attendants. They sound surprised.

“That is not the custom,” The eldest said, an attenuated, fragile thing of chitin so thin her pulsing organs showed through. “There will be a period of quarantine, then a battle. That is how it has always been.”

“Not always. Planets have been sold, or taken by conquest, or even settled in cooperation.” I fold my forelimbs together carefully. My joints are stiff, and old age reminds me of the time ticking by. “Now, we will create a new tradition. We will leave our world to the humans, who have cared for us, by bequest and death-right. We are the Planetary Council. What we declare is law will be respected as such in our own solar system.” It has always been so. If we do not respect the sovereignty of species in their own home planets, what are we?

Of course, war is different. The Ulvine will be furious, and we all chitter in pleasure at the thought. They were the ones who destroyed us, and no doubt have been waiting for us to die so that they can take our planet. However, if we will it to the humans, the Ulvine will have to defeat them before laying any claim to this world… and the humans, who have been so kind to a dying species, can fight like things out of nightmares when they feel they must.

The others agree, and my nurse helps me to the old communications array that the humans maintain for us. The last mandate of our Planetary Council goes out, and it is this - that if there are those who are willing to risk illness and plague and poisons, and tend to the dying with kindness and compassion, and preserve their memory, then the beings who have offered that last kindness may be named the heirs of that dying species. Keepers of Memory, we name them, and Preservers of History, and we leave them our planet for so long as we are remembered by them.

They come to thank me, the captains of the two ‘Aid’ vessels that stayed to tend to us and record our memories, and water flows from their eyes in that strange, silent display of grief as they promise to never forget. The monuments and the records will be treasured as one of their own, they say, and they will tell stories of us to their own children, so that they, too, remember.

There are six of us left when the first colony ships come. We are old now - we were never a long-lived species, not even so long as the humans - but we watch the colonists set to work. They study our planet, its ecosystems and its biology, and the nurses tell us that it is human custom to change themselves to fit the planet, rather than change the planet to fit them. They will engineer enzymes for their own digestive systems, and adjust their own biology, until they are comfortable here.

For the first time I, the last child of a dying race, hear children playing and voices raised in song. It is a comfort, and I leave the windows open to listen.

I am the last to die. When I am gone, they will do for me as they have done for the others, carrying my body out to the tomb they have built for us, laying me to rest with reverence. We did not preserve the bodies of our dead, but agreed to this, to let them remember us in the traditions of their own people. I am the last of my kind, but I will not die alone, nor unloved.

The humans will be happy in our world, or so I hope. They will settle to it, and adapt to it, and it will change under their hands as it changed under ours. But I believe that they will keep their bargain with us. Their records, their monuments, their images of us will remind them of who we were. Because of them, we will not entirely disappear.

We were here. We mattered. We lived.

They will not forget.