The sun was weary. Huge and red, it plodded on across the sky. The elderly star burned on its last leg: only thirty thousand or so years left.

Earth had aged with it. The home of humanity revolved still, parched and cracked with the crevices and scars of forgotten waterways — an ugly, inhospitable place. Yet it survived, and humanity upon it, due to the titanic efforts of six brilliant civilizations that managed to master nature, preserve the atmosphere, hoard what water remained, and most impressively, slide the planet’s orbit further out from the cantankerous sun intent on roasting them.

But great civilizations belonged to the past. Tuvra lived in a lonely age, when the last remnants of the human race dared nothing great. The people of her time lived alone or a few together in artificial habitats. They survived upon the ingenuity of generations long dead. Decadent and languid, they did not dream or hope, only stared up at infinity with wondering eyes and waited for sentience’s end.

Tuvra’s mansion, fashioned of glass and green metal, cooled and powered and served in every way by the ancient machines, sat on the coast of Earth’s last aboveground sea — which had been dry a few hundred millennia. In the mornings Tuvra painted on huge canvases the death of time. In the afternoons she sat by her pool in the tinted glass solarium and talked to her Nexus, and sometimes watched projections of animals long extinct or the beautiful and bloody history of her venerable race. It was not a bad life.

On a long afternoon Tuvra reclined at poolside with her dark hair splayed like the tendrils of nebulae, running her fingers through the azure water and singing softly. Her song ended. She sighed.

“Nexus, what is new?”

The voice came, prompt and clinical. “An object fell through the atmosphere last night.”

She half-rose, curiosity slightly piqued. “Space junk?”

“Unknown.”

Tuvra considered. “Send the servitors to fetch it.” Relics of the past amused her.

The servitors embarked, iridescent wings buzzing. They returned days later bearing a four-meter cylinder, arrayed with blue crystals and a needle on one end. When Nexus confirmed it was safe, Tuvra touched it, felt the vessel’s smooth bore and the sharp-edged crystal protrusions; how strange, wonderful, beautiful.

“When did we build this?”

Nexus answered, “Humans did not build this object.”

“What?”

“It contains data of a journey begun approximately two hundred thousand years ago on a planet orbiting the star X314914-87Z2. It has been attempting to transmit to that system; I have prevented it.”

Tuvra felt a thrill of excitement. After all this time, after all the ages of humanity’s long quest, others had found them! Others lived out there on some faraway world, another species who’d advanced to the level where they could send objects into space. “It’s a probe, then? An extraterrestrial probe?”

“Likely. It has detected my contact, and given me a message.”

“What does it say?” Never had such eagerness gripped Tuvra’s soul.

“Translating.”

Days more passed while Tuvra awaited the translation, days drawn out to ages in her eager heart. Waiting had never consumed her so. She found herself restless with anticipation. Her usual amusements felt barren — but her thoughts burned and blossomed. After all these futile eons, could there be a living world where humanity might start anew, and flourish, and really live again?

She awoke with the dawn, and painted scenes of green, growing things. Her mind ran through possibilities of a world abloom, of fields lush with life, of realities she knew only as projections: forests, rivers, gardens open to a gracious sky. Sometimes she stopped and puzzled over what to call this feeling that seemed to throb through her very veins. She decided it was hope.

When Nexus informed her it had finished translating, she dropped her brush to listen to the probe’s message.

“To anyone who hears this: our world is dying. We seek a new home…”