Last Contact

It was too late when the humans came. They were a young species, still exploring outwards, vital, and thriving.

We…were not.

War had ravaged us, sickness, and war once again, until our population dwindled beyond the point of recovery. We struggled against that, of course. We used genetic manipulation, cloning, and even more desperate measures. None succeeded. When the humans came, we were sinking into apathy; only a few tens of us left. We had begun to decide whether we should commit a mass suicide or simply fade away.

And then the young species came, in their clumsy ships, and they asked us why we were so few.

“We are becoming extinct,” we told them. “We have passed the point of recovery.”

It is customary to avoid the races that are dying—once a species reaches the point of inevitable extinction, even war is suspended, and the fiercest enemy pulls back. The custom was born of plagues and poisons that could be carried forth from a flying world to afflict a healthy one, but it has the implacable weight of tradition now. After we are gone, after they have waited for the prescribed period of quarantine, there will be a fight for our world. Habitable worlds are few, and this is a good one with plenty of free groundwater and thriving vegetation. It is a bitter thing to be grateful for the custom that allows us to die in peace, but we are grateful.

But the humans don’t know that custom, and they do not leave. They seem distraught when we tell them that we are dying and try to offer us their aid—but their technology is behind ours, and it is too late. When they realize that they can’t save us, though, they do something that bewilders us.

They start frantically gathering information. Not our technology, though they accept that when we offer it. But they go into abandoned records, carefully preserving them . They make copies of our books and record us talking about our history, singing our songs, and describing the simplest things—our foods, our games, popular stories for children. Anything and everything that we are willing to share, they seem to want. We find it pleasant to talk about better times—the things the youngest of us only know from the elders, but we don’t understand why they are so interested.

Then they started to build things. In our abandoned buildings, by our sacred places (never in them, but nearby), and at every spaceport. Stone structures, whose purpose we didn’t understand.

I was one of the youngest, still hale enough to go outside and look at the stone thing they are building in the town where the last of us have gathered. It is tall—at least ten times the height of a human, five times my own height—and when I look up at it, I see images of both our races, as well as words written in both their language and ours, although it is difficult for failing eyes to read. “What’s it for?”

“It’s a monument.” The nurse who has become my attendant–we all have them now, as age begins to rob us of our strength–lays her small hands on my forelimb, in what humans see as a comforting gesture. “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 of statues, and of great slabs and spires and pyramids of stone. Some have names written on them for remembrance. or pictograms or even faces. Some are thousands of years old, but still exist, protected zealously by the unimaginable distant descendants of those who built them. Others, she says sadly, have been lost, and she sounds as grieved over that loss as if they were living beings she mourns.

“But what are they for?” I ask again, groping for deeper meaning. My people do not keep records in this way, and never have, nor can I imagine my spirit aching for a lost stone tablet or statue. Perhaps it is because they are more reliant on sight than we are–my species first communicated by scent, and then by sound, with sight always being a third distant to us. Nor have we ever valued permanence… we resigned ourselves to the necessities of foged metal and hardened ceramics, for space-flights, and we have a few stone buildings, but we always preferred wood, for it’s scent and memory of life.

“They are….” She hesitates, seeking the right words. “They are all for different purposes, but… also all for the same purpose, underneath.” She touches a picture of a statue, ancient and undamaged, yet clearly of a woman as human as the nurse beside me. “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 think about th, all that night, looking up at the stars that we once travelled between. About an ancient species that lived always in the present, and a young species so determined to remember not only their own history, but ours. A young species that tends a dying one with kindness and compassion, that records our history and builds monuments to our memory. They don’t know what will happen to this planet when we are gone. The fighting to take it for one species or another, the destruction of what is left of us to make way for someone new. That is how it always has been.

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

There are only fourteen of us left, when I call the last Planetary Council together. Fourteen, of a species that had once numbered ni billions. The Council had once had hundreds. But the fourteen of us were, still, the Planetary Coucnil, every dying ember having nominated a younger being to take their place until the last of us stood ni command of an empty planet.

“We should invite the humans to live here,” I tell the others, and I hear murmuring among the nurses who are gathered around us, for several oare too frail now to move wihtout attendants. They sound surprised.

“That is not the custom,” says the eldest remaining, an attenuated, fragile thing of chitin so thin that her pulsing organs showed through. T”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 now. “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 as law is law within our solar system.” It has always been so. If we do not respect the sovereignty of other species in their home systems, what are we?

Of course, war is different. The Alnathids will be furious, and we all chitter in pleasure at that thought. They were the ones who destroyed us, and no doubt have been waiting for us to die so they can take our planet. However, if we will it to the humans, the Anathids will have to declare war on them and defeat them before they can lay any claim to this world…and the humans that have been so kind to us…we know they can fight like a nightmare if they must and even when they mustn’t.

The others agree, and the nurse helps me to the old communication arrays that the humans maintain for us. The last mandate of our Planetary Council goes out, and it is this: if there are those willing to risk plagues and poisons and ill-luck, and tend the dying with compassion, and preserve their memory, then that species may inherit our land.

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

There are six of us left when the first colony ships come. We are old now—we are not a long-lived species, not even so long as the humans—but we watch the colonists set to work. They change themselves to fit the environment. They will engineer enzymes for their own digestive systems and adjust their own biology to live comfortably. When I ask the nurse why they don’t simply change the planet, she says, “We don’t want to make the same mistake another time.” I’m not certain what that means, but I lay my head back anyway.

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 we agreed to this—to let them remember us in the traditions of their own people. I am the last of our kind, but I will not die alone nor unloved.

The humans will be happy on our world, or so I hope. They will settle it, and adapt to it, and it will change under their hands as it changed under ours. Although I have no way to know, I choose to believe that they will keep their promise. Their records, their monuments, their images of us will remind them who we were. Because of them, we will not entirely disappear.

We were here. We mattered. We lived.

Please.

Do not forget.