By the time the requisition ship arrived, there was no one left to object.
The city was still there.
The towers along the coast, the homes on the hillside, the rail bridge joining two continents—all were still recognizable on a map. But when night passed over them, not one window lit up.
The population check took some time.
The surveyor searched above and below ground, including several places where shelters might have been built. Every report came back the same.
There were no residents to relocate.
The requisition could proceed.
They had known the disaster was coming.
The records they left behind showed stellar anomalies growing more frequent. The earliest reports still debated the odds. The later ones discussed only when it would happen.
They had built spacecraft.
The farthest had reached the edge of the star system. There was no world there on which to land, and it carried too little fuel to take anyone to the next star.
They had also dug cities underground.
After the catastrophe, some shelters lasted many more years. The areas under cultivation shrank. Equipment was taken apart to repair other equipment. The voices on the broadcasts grew fewer each time.
In the end, the broadcasts stopped too.
The surveyor filed the material away. An interstellar migration that had failed. A disaster beyond the local civilization's ability to handle. Records like these were not uncommon.
The gallery was found while the underground transit network was being cleared.
It had no life-support systems, only several layers of protection and a lighting system that had long since shut down. For preserving stone, that had been enough.
The surveyor restored its power.
A shaft of warm light fell into the room.
The gallery was smaller than expected.
Pale steps followed the curve of the wall. Seven busts stood on plinths of different heights. No weapons, no scepters, no tablets inscribed with deeds.
A child stood in the front row.
Her face tilted slightly upward, her hair gathered in a loose knot at the back of her head. The corners of her mouth were raised, as if she had just heard something funny.
Behind her, some smiled quietly; deep creases gathered at the corners of others' eyes. An old man held his head to one side, as though listening to someone beside him. A younger man lifted his chin a little, with a trace of pride that had not quite faded.
Different faces. Different ages.
All of them looked happy.
The lighting system simulated a local afternoon. Light moved slowly across the stone, past an arched window frame. Beyond the window, the preserved mountains and sky remained fixed on a day long ago.
The surveyor read the gallery's construction records.
By the time the sculptures were completed, the final attempt at a voyage beyond the system had failed. The local people no longer disputed what would soon happen on the surface.
It checked the subjects' records again.
They had not shared in some great achievement. There had been no celebration, no victory worth commemorating.
One had repaired lifting machinery. One had taught school. After retiring, one of the older people had grown a small patch of flowers.
The child at the front had not even had time to finish school.
This was no hall of achievements.
The surveyor placed the dates when the sculptures were made beside the dates in the disaster forecasts.
Then it looked at the smiling faces.
Storage units beneath the plinths held the materials each person had submitted.
Photographs, voices, a few pieces of writing too short to make a story.
The child's collection was the largest.
Along with the images taken for her sculpture, there was a scan of a thin notebook. On its cover she had drawn an animal with legs that were much too long. A few faded stars were stuck beside it.
Its title was:
Happy Things.
Below it, in smaller letters, she had added:
So I won't forget.
The writing on the first page was large.
Dad's pancake tore today.
He said it was supposed to be round, but now it was a map.
I ate the biggest piece of land.
Farther on, her handwriting grew a little smaller.
I learned to ride my bike.
Dad said he was holding on the whole time. Then I looked back and he was standing far away.
I rode back and told him off.
I'm riding again tomorrow.
A small dried flower was pressed onto one page.
Grandpa fell asleep, so I put a flower in his hair.
He didn't know when he woke up. He went shopping with it still there.
When he got back, he said everyone had smiled at him today. He must be very popular.
The surveyor opened the photograph attached to that page.
An old man stood in a doorway, a flower tucked crookedly behind one ear. He had deliberately left it there.
The child was laughing in the photograph.
Her upturned face looked very much like the bust in the front row.
She had not written in the notebook every day.
Sometimes two or three days passed between entries; sometimes there was a long gap. She wrote about a bad lunch, a friend who promised to come and did not, and a cup she liked that she had broken.
After a public briefing on the migration plans, she wrote:
Mom was on the phone all day.
She spoke very quietly. When I went over, she stopped.
That night she held me for a long time.
I asked if she was scared.
She said yes.
I am too.
The next page held only one sentence.
I couldn't find a happy thing today.
The rest of the page was blank.
The surveyor paused before reading on.
A few pages later, she wrote about the rain.
It came suddenly. She and a friend sheltered under the awning of a shop, catching rainwater in two empty bottles to see who could fill theirs first. The shopkeeper came out to chase them away twice. The third time, he brought them each an old towel.
She thought hers was bigger.
Another day, school let out early. On the way home, she found that a shop she often visited was still open. There was just one piece of her favorite cake left in the case.
The shopkeeper cut it in half.
He gave the other half to the boy behind her in line.
He kept looking at my piece.
I kept looking at his.
They were the same size, really.
She drew two squares below.
She scribbled over one of them and drew it again.
The entries about the sculptures came in the second half of the notebook.
We went to choose photos today.
They said they'd make the statues look like the pictures we chose.
Mom brought the one where I'm wearing my new clothes. I don't like it. The collar is stiff, and I was angry.
I chose the photo from the day Grandpa wore the flower.
Grandpa said I look like a fool in that one.
I said you do too.
One page later, there was another entry.
We went to see the statues before they were finished.
There's a bit of my hair missing at the back. The man making it said he'd add it.
I asked if people later on would know what we were laughing at.
He said I could leave this book here too, if I wanted.
Farther on, her handwriting became less tidy.
They had begun packing to move underground.
There was a limit to what they could take. For a long time she could not choose between an old stuffed animal and a few books. The toy had been sewn up before. Its belly bulged, and it looked little like the animal on the notebook's cover.
She chose it anyway.
The last few pages were about what had happened lately.
At last, her father no longer had to hurry out. Her mother taught her how to tie up her hair; when she tried it herself, it came loose and looked worse than before. An old neighbor downstairs brought them a few little pots and said they could take seeds underground.
She asked if they would still flower.
The neighbor said that depended on how well they cared for them.
The last page of the notebook had no date.
Hello, whoever comes after us.
There are lots of happy things I still haven't written down.
Like blankets that have been out in the sun. And the water that comes out of your ears after swimming.
There are things I can't remember right now. By the time I do, I might have handed this book in.
I don't like these last days.
But look at the pages before this, too.
We had a good life here.
The surveyor brought up the records used to make the sculptures again.
This time, it did not look at the completion dates first.
The photograph the child had chosen was taken one afternoon before the migration plans were abandoned.
The old man had chosen an image from a trip with his partner. His partner was outside the frame; only a hand reached in from the edge to straighten his hat.
The younger man with his chin raised had just repaired something that kept breaking down. He stood beside it, waiting for the person taking the picture to praise him.
Each of the others had chosen a moment of their own.
They had not agreed to wear the same expression.
The surveyor placed the dates back beneath the images, one by one. They were scattered across different years and different seasons. Some were far from the disaster. Some were already close.
Until now, it had assigned all seven faces the same time.
Before extinction.
Now the days it had left out appeared in the record again.
As the requisition ship prepared to depart, the surveyor requested that the gallery be taken aboard.
The transport system calculated its weight and asked whether a copy of the storage units would suffice. The faces, the architecture, and all the accompanying materials had already been recorded.
“Bring the statues too,” it said.
It did not request that the requisition be withdrawn.
There was no one left here waiting to go home. Nor would preserving a few stone figures bring back voices that had gone silent.
When the gallery was moved into the ship, its lights went out for a moment.
The child's face darkened.
Then the system restored power and, following its original program, resumed the afternoon it had never finished.
Warm light passed over the windowsill and fell on the front row.
The surveyor looked at the child once more.
Her smile was no different from when it had first found her.
Only this time, it knew.
That afternoon, Grandpa had come home wearing a flower.