Caretaker

A short story

Nara Latka is known as The Mother. Mother Nara, Mother of The Homestead, Mother who guided us home.

It was something we grew up hearing, a bedtime story that all children on The Homestead were told in some form or another. Stories of how Mother Nara singlehandedly steered them through the stars to our new home. How she learnt their names and spoke to them during their hyper sleep. How she told them about her day, reassuring them that they would find The Homestead someday, that she would keep them safe.

Just like a mother would.

I wasn’t one of the original fifty that landed here, but my grandmother was. She’d known Nara before they left Earth. They grew up together, applied to be one of the pioneers together, entered their hyper sleep together. The stories I heard about Nara growing up were different from the ones my friends and classmates were told.

Not the tales of her care, or her bravery. Those aspects remained the same. They were indisputable facts; we have hundreds of hours of video diaries from the journey after all. From the technical mechanics of living day to day on a spaceship, to the personal ruminations of someone completely isolated from humanity. The Ark recorded it all. I have heard Nara’s voice, seen her laughing and singing, watched her cry when the loneliness grew overwhelming. She’s my hero, she’s the hero of everyone on The Homestead.

But she never wanted to be a mother.

It was something that nearly got her kicked off the pioneer list when she first applied. All settlers at The Homestead were supposed to have at least two children, to help keep the population strong whilst they built our new home. Nara agreed on the proviso that she could give those children to another family. She would do her duty to help The Homestead, but she had no maternal drive whatsoever, and no desire to do what was needed to create children in the first place. My grandmother always said that had Nara not been such a brilliant engineer, she wouldn’t have been accepted into the program.

I’m not the first one to focus my final thesis on Nara Latka or the fifty years she spent alone on The Ark. However, I am the first one to focus on detangling the truth of Nara’s heroism from the motherly figure she has become. My own mother has asked me time and again why I feel the need to do this, what I hope to gain from separating Nara Latka from Mother Nara. I think the genetic reminder letter sitting on my desk is reason enough. But perhaps, as someone who also has no desire to carry, birth and raise children, I feel as though I understand how annoyed Nara would be about her own legacy.

No one speaks of Nara Latka, the woman who built a working engine in under twenty minutes because she was brilliant, and she wanted to see if she could. Instead, they speak of Mother Nara, the woman who adopted forty-nine people and brought them home. As though only a mother could do that. As though that type of selflessness cannot exist in anyone else.

There is a tree outside the Latka education facility, a towering oak standing sentinel over our house of learning. Whilst it is the largest tree in The Homestead, it isn’t that different from the hundreds of other trees we have planted here. The main thing marking it as special is its age, the statue nestled between its roots, and the plaque nailed to its trunk.

The statue is of Nara, a bronze likeness of her so lifelike it’s almost unnerving. She’s sat at the base of the tree, her beloved cat, Aristotle, curled on her lap, and she is gazing up through the thick branches, a serene smile on her face. Above her head, engraved on the bronze plaque are two words:

Our Mother

I always feel a mixture of emotions when I walk past that statue. Happiness to see Nara caught in a moment of serenity, sitting cradled in the roots of the very tree she planted and grew during her fifty years on The Ark. Pride that I get to walk past this every day, knowing that in some way I am following in Nara’s footsteps, that I have managed to get one of the fifty doctoral places the education facility provides every four years. Sadness, because I know which video her statue has been modelled from and know that she is now frozen in the moments before one of her final breakdowns. Anger at the plaque, because I wish it said her name, and not the title we have forced on her.

That plaque is why I am so determined to get my thesis finished and published. Nara Latka should be known for who she was, who she truly was. She should be loved and admired for her brilliance, her selflessness, her perseverance and strength of spirit.

She cared for every one of the forty-nine pioneers she travelled with, had probably even loved them. Why else would she let them continue to sleep after her own hyper sleep chamber malfunctioned? It must have been a unique type of torture, being surrounded by people and completely alone at the same time. Knowing that with a few button clicks she could have company, and yet having the strength and kindness to allow them to continue sleeping so they wouldn’t be doomed like she was.

I have three days before I present my final thesis to the doctoral committee. Three days left and I finally have permission to view the video diaries that aren’t public property. The diaries where Nara isn’t self-assured and confident, the videos from deep in her depression. I’ve already watched some of them, my grandmother managed to make copies before the home council decided they were too distressing for public consumption.

That’s the party line at least.

I think it probably has more to do with the council wanting to portray Nara as a paragon of quiet, calm competence. Mothers shouldn’t shout, shouldn’t scream and carry on. Mothers should be loving and kind, always.

I already have my arguments written down. My thesis is basically ready to go, but there are a few key scenes from Nara’s diaries that I need as evidence. Nara never states verbatim that she doesn’t want to be a mother in her diaries, but there are a hundred little moments where it’s clear. To me at least.

The video of Nara beneath her tree is going to be my final statement, and today I get to see it for the ‘first’ time. I’m unusually nervous when I sit at my desk. The video is already loaded on the screen, I just need to touch it and I’ll hear her voice again. I take a few deep breaths, knowing that by the end of this video I’ll probably be in tears. Just like every other time I’ve seen it. I press the screen and watch; pen poised above a scratch pad to take notes I don’t really need.

Video transcript:

Nara is sat beneath the oak tree, petting through Aristotle’s fur. Her hair is tied in her customary ponytail, now completely grey, with wayward strands framing her lined face. She looks up from where she had been gazing down at Aristotle, directly into the camera, and smiles.

“If I haven’t got my dates mixed up, we should be four months away from The Homestead. If I haven’t got my dates mixed up, and if everything goes well with the hyper sleep chambers, I should have company in a month.” Nara huffs a laugh, leaning more heavily against the trunk of the tree. “Forty-nine years is a long time for even the hardiest of machinery to last. I should know, mine didn’t survive past a single year. If I was being pessimistic, I’d say there is a 50% chance those chambers won’t open. I’m choosing to be optimistic though, so instead I’ll say there is a 50% chance those chambers will open, and all my friends will wake up.”

Nara lifts Aristotle and smiles at him. “All of my human friends at least.” She presses a kiss to the cat’s head before setting him back in her lap again. The geriatric cat instantly goes back to sleep with nothing more than a disgruntled huff and Nara laughs, but it’s tinged with mania.

She looks up through the boughs of the tree, and for a second, she looks peaceful. Then her eyes fill with tears, and she begins to sob. She covers her face with her hands, wailing like a small child. Heart wrenching, unashamed sobs. This continues for at least five minutes, until Nara is short of breath, her eyes swollen and her skin blotchy as she hiccups.

“Forty-nine years,” she gasps, suddenly looking older than she is. “I...” She heaves another few sobs, mixed with a desperate laugh devoid of any humour. “Forty-nine years. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to deal with this. How am I supposed to hold a conversation with someone that can speak back after this long? How am I going to share this space with forty-nine other human beings for the next three months?”

Nara rubs a hand down her face, another huff of laughter escaping her. “I mean, even before all of this I always did better on my own. People made me uncomfortable, but at least back then I could still be with them if I wanted. I fear I’ve lost the knack now.”

There’s an uncomfortable stretch of silence where Nara simply stares at something out of frame, one hand gently petting through Aristotle’s fur. “Loneliness has become something of a comfort to me. It feels like a knife to my stomach, but it’s an expected knife, something I’ve learnt to live with.” Nara laughs again, something she’d been doing an increasing amount during her video diaries. It’s an uncomfortable laugh, a noise without true happiness, almost like a tick that Nara has developed during her isolation.

“Maybe I’ve simply cracked. I mean, it was bound to happen at some point, right? Even the most introverted of people need some company. Perhaps I went insane the second I started talking to them.” Nara looks directly at the camera again. “Did you hear me when I did that? When I spoke to you? I hope so.”

Nara slumps back, suddenly looking tired and drawn, but the smile lingering on her lips is more genuine now. It’s loving and soft, content in a way she hasn’t been in many of her diaries over the last year. “I hope, even if I’m not there when you wake up, that you realise how much I care for all of you. I hope I took care of you well enough. That you’ll forgive me if I get too scared to wait for you.”

Aristotle wakes up as Nara is speaking, stretching on her lap before making an attempt to leave. Nara scoops him into her arms and cradles him to her chest, tears once again falling. “I hope I’ve been a good caretaker.”

There it is. The thing I’ve been looking for, the final evidence for my argument.

I write her final speech word for word, replaying that last, heartbreaking video so many times to ensure I get it right that it’s engraved in my mind. This is what I can do for the woman who gave everything she had to bring us to our new home. I could have laboured the points in previous video diaries, the ones where Nara quips and jokes about the fact that the accident with her hyper sleep chamber means she escaped physically bearing children. Those videos are in the public domain, and yet no one seems to have lingered on the fact that Nara celebrated when her biological clock ticked down and her womb remained empty.

The early diary in which she describes the deal she had written into her pioneer contract, where she would only bear children if they had been implanted in her via IVF, are shown to all the children of The Homestead during our schooling. As evidence of Nara’s asexuality and her dedication to her new home.

“See children, Mother Nara shows us that no matter who you love, who you choose or do not choose to spend your life with, we can all help The Homestead grow.”

People are going to place their own emphasis on the actions of others, and Nara is no longer here to speak for herself. Even when she does, people will interpret her words however suits them best. I know I won’t change their minds. To them she will always be Mother Nara, and in the end that’s fine.

However, I will still take the podium for my thesis presentation in three days and make my arguments. Not that the myth of Mother Nara be erased, just that we should give Nara Latka the respect of using the title she gave herself.

If we truly love Nara the way a child loves their mother, then isn’t that the least she deserves?

I can only hope I speak well enough that one day I’ll walk past her statue and read the words:

Nara Latka, Our Caretaker