The Edge of Darkness

Chapter Thirteen: Return to Earth

Lima inherited my tanned skin and her father's blue eyes. She had straight blonde hair that tended to flop over one eye. She was an intelligent, questioning, wilful child. I spent all my energy trying to keep her that way: no way did I want her growing up to accept her fate, the way her father and I had accepted our fates for so long. She loved the cats we bought to keep the mice away from the grain bins and adored playing with their multitude of kittens. Ethan and I adored having animal company after it had been forbidden for so long.

I was asked to make a speech about acceptance, and then after the speech they asked me to write a book. I began travelling around the world to promote said book, but I missed my family so much I said no when they offered me a second book. It was hard being away while Lima bossed around her two little brothers who were learning to walk. I missed the animals and their stinky noise and mess. But most of all, I missed Ethan. I missed the peace I still found in his arms after all these years. I missed his tender kisses, and his more demanding and playful ones. I missed the way his blonde hair blew in the breeze and the way he dressed like a cowboy to go herd the cattle, just to make me laugh.

Lance and Sam were like two little bundles of joy that came out of nowhere and improved our lives dramatically. They had the same skin tone as Lima, but darker hair. At first I panicked a little because they were identical and I thought I'd mix up which one was which. I quickly learned that that wasn't the case, however. I was worried my milk would dry up too quickly with both of them demanding feeds, so Ethan and I turned to formula earlier than I would have liked. When Lima was due to start school, they were toddling around on wonky feet, exploring the farmlands and beyond.

The children loved the beach as much as their father and I. While Ethan practised his surfing, the kids and I would sit on the sand and build sandcastles, or wade into the water until Lima came squealing back to me because she thought she'd seen a jellyfish. We'd race each other from one end of the beach to the other, or Ethan would take Lima out on his board and straddle behind her as she tentatively balanced with her arms and legs spread wide. Pretty soon we bought her a mini board and Ethan began teaching her about winds and currents and wave strength. The twins would watch with envy from their safe position with me on the sand – and I promised them that when they were big enough, they too could go out with Daddy and surf the waves. The beach was always deserted, as it was entirely private – we had our own path straight from our house down through the elephant grass to the perfect white sand.

When Lima started school, she wasn't the only child there of mixed race. It made me happy to see the old racism I had experienced simply not affect my proud, intelligent daughter. The twins were a few years behind her so we sent them all to the same school. The three of them would march off to catch the bus with their schoolbags way too big for them, Lima herding her younger brothers to keep safe on the road. I was so proud of them.

Ethan and I were married after all three children started school. We had talked about it for years, but we had felt for so long that we were married already that we ended up doing it only to make it official and for legal reasons. Inheritance was sorted out through matrimony, as was taxes. I wore a sky-blue dress, and Ethan wore a black suit. He looked radiant and totally yummy. Lima wore a pink dress, and the boys wore miniature suits. The guest list was enormous – full of the former cyborgs we had known and grown to love.

Neither my parents nor Ethan's made it to the wedding. I didn't even bother contacting mine when we landed on Old Earth. I suspected that they had already mourned me and moved on. After I released the book, though, where I mentioned them in some detail, my mother tried to contact me. When I specified that I didn't want anything to do with her, my father tried to contact me. He yelled at my agent's assistant about parental rights and God's will and some other bollocks. In the end I apologised to the assistant, gave her small boost to her salary for the week, and called my father. I told him that I had mourned them and moved on, and that I didn't want anything to do with him. No, they couldn't meet their grandchildren. No, his shouting at me wasn't going to change my mind. No, God didn't mean anything to me anymore. Maybe when he had experienced what I'd experienced, it would open his eyes to the real way of the world and the potential it could realise, and he'd be less certain of his beliefs that were backed up by centuries of propaganda. The evidence the world was packing for the behaviour of black holes was more solid than his flimsy book, and it turns out we were completely wrong. He tried to tell me that it was God's will that all this happened – I asked him that if it was God's will, why did he drop me like a hot potato when I became a cyborg, mourned my lack of a soul like it was a death, and got over my loss, only to contact me again now?

In his ensuing silence, I hung up the phone.

After the children started school, I started writing more. I wrote two other books – the first one was a commentary on social politics, and the other, my third book, was again talking about cyborgs. My second book didn't sell so well: turns out all people wanted to hear from me was about being a cyborg, the rebellion, what it was like flying through the black hole.

The critics started kicking up a fuss about my adventures, claiming that we never were cyborgs and that it was all a load of propaganda conning the government into handing out compensation that was sapping the system. Seeing as how most of the evidence was deliberately lost, the cyborg race was kind of condemned to myth status. I didn't mind so much. My cyborg books were taken off the autobiography shelf and placed on the science fiction shelf in book stores.

The sales soared, because everyone pretty much still believed it was autobiographical, and a movie deal was offered. I was sorely tempted to accept the payments from handing over my rights, and Ethan and I talked about what was best for our children and their future. Was it really OK to let them make a film about something that had really happened but people were ignoring in the hopes it went away – much like the Holocaust?

In the end we decided to let them make the film. The sales of my book weren't getting any higher, and we wanted the story to be told.

When the movie came out, negative press impacted the sale of tickets. I wasn't disappointed: it was higher than I expected. We faced a lot of criticism from history bashers claiming that cyborgs were just a myth, despite them having lived in the times when a cyborg would have been their personal slave. You can't erase four hundred years worth of history just by denying it.

The protestors even found our little house and tried to camp out on our lawn. By then our dogs, Half Fang and Midnight, were well trained at protecting our property and chased them to the borders. They walked the children to the bus stop as well. After a few years, the interest died away: as did the books and the film. We went on with our lives, but we never forgot where we came from nor what happened to us.

But they couldn't wreck our comfortable and lovely home life. The life we'd built with such love.

In the depths of winter, we would snuggle up with each other in front of the heater, bundled up in blankets; the children would inspect our fingers, and marvel over how one of our fingers appeared different to the others. Then Ethan and I would place one hand over the other, and the children would point out that Mummy had one of Daddy's fingers attached to her own hand, and Daddy had one of Mummy's attached to his own hand. The join was hidden by the wedding band, and in the privacy of our own home, we would tell the children exactly how the great finger swap came about, and told them who they were named after, and the great adventure we'd had in the sky, teetering on the edge of darkness.