3. Statue

Jassia accepted the animal’s gifts with a smile. They stood, or floated, in a long queue before her, and took turns stepping forward. Then they placed a piece of food in her basket, or logs they collected, or their prettiest pebbles. And sometimes they looked at Jassia with guilt and pleading when they had not brought her a gift.

The humans had always found this ritual odd, but also funny. If the animals wanted to give them food, especially in times of need or destroyed food storages, then they were free to do so.

What creeped her out, though, were the statues that the animals made of the humans.

At the end of the ritual, as always, she stood eye to eye with herself. An entire herd of rabbits and beavers had cooperated to express Jassia’s likeness with wood and stone. And a few carrots.

“That, erm, thanks,” she said. She gave a rabbit a pat on the head, before she could stop herself. The others looked as if she’d blessed the animal with her godly touch. Some Dwellers claimed you used to be forced to keep a dog as a pet—another weird rule of which they’d forgotten the origin. But she didn’t know why she had the habit of petting other animals.

You didn’t pet your food, right? And still she did it time and time again.

On the other hand, your food usually also didn’t make statues of you.

The animals made their own sounds and left.

Finally. She could study the light bulbs again. Wonderful things! If only she could learn its mysteries, the Dwellers might soon be the most advanced society in the universe! Those ideas the children had weren’t “too crazy” at all. Carts that moved automatically? Fire that burns forever? Something to look forward to.

But like mother said: you won’t achieve anything by looking, go and invent!

And so, with a growling stomach, she dissembled the second lightbulb. Tibre had refused to leave his bed today, so she was alone.

She didn’t learn anything new. The light turned off once she’d removed too many components. And, well, that just gave her a dark room with a useless object. And a pet bear who juggled with the components.

She needed more components. Something to compare it to! As mother said: go and collect data. It took her entire youth to realize mother wasn’t talking about the plural of date, but about information. Since then she’d invented a lot more!

Soon after, she visited their largest cave. The one that held the Great Map on the wall. The Linecave wasn’t marked on the map, even though it seemed important. The places where the spaceship and light bulbs had fallen down also weren’t marked.

Well, let’s face it, when had this map ever been right? The circles were scratched into the wall with precision. Deep and perfect, even numbered, but—

Circles. Spaceships. Light bulbs. They fall from above.

She ran out of the cave and looked up. The map was burned into her brain from years of study and usage. How had she not seen this before?

No, the map didn’t fit the pattern of stars. There were far more light bulbs than circles in the sky, and they seemed to move over time.

But Piponre was right: everyone had seen a few of those stars extinguish before, or disappear, or dim their light. Between the blinding stars were other circles that represented something else.

Planets.

She shivered, frozen in the entrance. It fit almost perfectly. If she modified the map, and rotated it a bit, the circles matched precisely with the larger circles in the sky. Those that barely emitted light and were only sometimes visible.

“The Great Map is a map!” she yelled.

“Yeah, duh, obviously,” said the children near her.

“But not of our planet—of all the planets around us!”

The others assembled around her. One by one, with some effort, they saw what she saw. Parts of the Great Map were drawn in the sand with a stick, right where they stood. To make sure their memory wasn’t fooling them again.

But no, she was right. Their ancestors, she thought, had drawn a perfect map of their galaxy in the cave wall.

In fact, they were missing a few planets. They were on the map, but not visible in the sky today. Jassia fully believed those planets existed and were in the right place too. It also meant that the closest planet to them was very close, and looked like a small yellow dwarf. It was probably hard to see with the naked eye because of the yellow light bulbs interfering.

Oh, it had to be beautiful! If they could ever build those automatic machines, and then, yes, they might even float to a different planet. One where a thousand new discoveries awaited her. Would they have cute rabbits too? Or animal species she didn’t know? Maybe the light bulbs grew there, and they only fell down if the wind broke them loose. Anything was possible!

“I must return to the spaceship!” she said.

“Nothing left of that,” said Zandir. With his spear, he checked if the planets in the sky really matched the big circles of the Great Map.

“There must be some wreckage. There must be something. I feel it, I know it, our future is out there—in space.”

She ran to Tibre’s home cave, by habit, but he stayed inside and refused visitors. Piponre just left, his face thunderous. When he saw Jassia, he tried to clear up and smile, but still shook his head: no, his father wasn’t leaving the bed.

She was eager to ask if Piponre would join her then, but stopped herself. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe out of shame or fear of making Tibre feel even worse.

Eventually, she visited the Linecave alone, as night fell. She used the first lightbulb that had crashed, and was missing half of its glass case, as her light source.

Leaning against the cave wall, she found her first piece of wreckage. A bent plate. It seemed made of that same metal as Zandir’s spear. It contained symbols drawn with colorful paint, but she couldn’t read them.

She stepped inside the Linecave. It was unlikely, yes, but maybe some pieces had landed inside the cave. That’s what she told herself anyway. In reality, she just wanted to count the lines herself and research them. Collect data!

Tibre, though, had miraculously counted them perfectly. 728. What could it mean? Number of days in a year? Number of planets around them? And why would their ancestors, or another civilization before them, want to communicate that?

She took another step and tripped over a heavy object. Her head landed in ash; the lightbulb shattered even further. She reached for the object as it rolled further down the slope, but wasn’t able to catch—

Footprints. They dug deep into the ash and led back to the spot where the spaceship crashed.

Spaceship. Sailing through space. It sounded like a fairy tale, but what if it was real and then—focus, Jassia, focus.

The footprints were too large for her feet. She had to drag Tibre home last time, so he didn’t leave footprints then. And they were the wrong around? Hold on. That meant they started from the spaceship and then—

Her body shook. Piponre, Tibre, Zandir, she should have taken someone with her tonight. Stupid!

She threw the lightbulb away to run faster. Then she fled the footprints.

As she ran back home, she looked over her shoulder, again and again, but nothing and nobody followed her. Still she didn’t slow down, no, not until she was safely back inside her own cave.

She yelled: “I found footprints at—”

Tibre sat beside the lightbulb, fascinated by something on the inside.

For inside the lightbulb were drawings. Not just any drawings, no, moving drawings.

Jassia noticed the drawings resembled each other. As they were played in sequence, it looked like humans were walking around inside the lightbulb. As if they, like gods, were watching a tiny world within. But when she put her hand inside the lightbulb, she only felt empty space—they were moving drawings, but not real.

A voice called out to them. Jassia and Tibre looked around, searching for who was speaking, only to discover the lightbulb magically produced this voice.

“I can’t see another end,” said a young man in a lab coat. “I’ve simulated millions of years into the future. I’ve tried all options. But the science is clear.”

“Science doesn’t know everything,” said an older woman.

“We know science doesn’t know everything, otherwise it would stop existing.”

“Try again.”

The two figures walked around a cave that seemed excessively white. Everything inside that room had wires and lightbulbs.

The young scientist shook his head. “We think our world started with a huge explosion, the Big Bang. Anything that will ever exist, was pressed into a tiny marble. That obviously didn’t fit, so it exploded and gave us this vast universe. A universe that is still growing in size every second.”

“The start doesn’t interest me. I’m talking about the end of the universe.”

The scientist gestured for her to calm down. “It is likely that the universe will end by doing the same, but in the opposite way. We have grown so large, stretched so thin, that we snap back like an elastic, back into that marble. Nothing will survive.”

“And the other end?”

“Statue. We lose more and more energy, planets drift further and further apart, until the entire galaxy just … freezes. All warmth gone. All movement gone. Nothing can reach or see each other, and it will stay that way forever. Nothing survives—”

Tibre kicked the lightbulb through the room. The lamp turned on again; the drawn memory that was playing inside stopped abruptly.

“It’s all useless,” he mumbled repeatedly. “I give up.”

“Like you gave up yesterday, and stand next to me now?” asked Jassia with a smile.

He walked away.

Jassia carefully tried to replay that memory inside the lightbulb, again, and again, and again. What a wonderful world. What a magical people.

She hoped more lightbulbs with these memories crashed soon. And that she’d merely imagined the footprints from the spaceship.