"Yriad" by Jenny Rowland

The last survivor of a doomed race?  Not quite.  But one of the last, yes.  Exactly how many of us are left, I'm not sure.

My wife sleeps peacefully beside me as I write this.  Would that she knew of the sudden urge to write which has seized me, she would laugh at me.  Or smile, perhaps.  She has made her own agreements with the past, and it no longer haunts her.  But I am still plagued by its specter.

Twenty years now I've been away from Yriad.  More, by the standards of this planet, but I am loath to keep time by such alien standards.  When I and the few of my kind who are left have forgotten the ways of Yriad, might it then just as well have not existed at all?

It is not right that my home should be forgotten.  Yriad was once a wondrous place; its people were once the most advanced in the known galaxy.  It is not right that that green and glorious world's legacy should be this handful of pitiful survivors.  It is not fair.

As hard as it has been for me to accept the decimation of my world, it must be far more difficult for my sister.  I, after all, gave up my citizenship years before all this happened -- moved to the colony world Taem, where I had met my wife while on sabbatical.  Poor Klim had only been visiting me when the disaster occurred, and while I lost only my heritage, she lost everything.  My telepathic link to the rest of Yriad had faded slowly over the years, so I will never know how terrible it must have been for her to hear the screams of a world full of people, and then nothing.

Laev and I fled the dying system, taking my sister with us.  Somehow we wound up here, on this world known as Earth, and we began our lives anew as best we could.  I had nearly come to terms with the fact that a race of billions had been reduced to the three of us.  But then Gongge made contact.

I don't know why he wasn't on Yriad when the Curdling hit four years ago... perhaps a business trip, a vacation, a spur-of-the-moment jaunt to the Asteroids.  Maybe he was on the run from the government, I don't know; though Klim might.  All I know is that he's here now, and his presence is troubling to me.  Because, really, how do we know we're the last?

Laev and Klim and I, we thought we were.  For months I kept constant watch over the channels my people used for when telepathy was not enough.  The silence led us to conclude that we, and only we had escaped death.  But here is Gongge, whose ship is not equipped with communication devices.  He never responded to our signal, because he could not hear.

How many more are there like him?  How many others were out of system, or scuttling the Asteroids, or quick enough and lucky enough to flee Yriad at the first sign of danger?  How many others on Taem knew, as my sister did, when Yriad came into deadly proximity with the sun, and escaped before the altered gravitational pull tore Taem apart minutes later?  Are there more?  Or are we alone?

And how many others, on how many worlds, are asking these same questions at this very instant, not knowing that I exist?  A thousand, a hundred, one, none... I do not know.  I have only my questions, my family, and my memories.

And my hope.

I find that once again, after all these years, I have that as well.