We sat in our rocking chairs on the wooden porch, waiting for the starship to take off. Around us, the cornfields resonated with cicadas and crickets. The wood moaned as my chair went back and forth, keeping cadence with my grandfather, or as I called him, “grandad.” These chairs he had built with his own hands. As he always said, he raises the trees, treats them as family, and uses them for beauty. Plant three cut one, that is the way. For you see, the trees will outlive us, my son.

 

He sat pensively smoking his pipe. He broke the silence sparingly, only when a shooting star or satellite would cross the sky.

 

“Aye, a shooting. You see that one! It’s actually not a star, sonny, but a meteorite burning up in the atmosphere.”

 

I made it a habit to relay all the facts he told me to my friends the following day during HoloClasses. Above us, the stars were like marbles in the inky sky. They twinkled and called out their dreams to us. I couldn’t wait to travel to them, to be an astronaut like my father and grandad were.

“T-minus 19-minutes,” grandad said.

 

I giggled. I listened to the murmurs of the holoscreen in the house where my brothers and mother sat. The news was telling everyone Penrose IV was about to take off. They were talking about the mission, about how we would finally colonize Europa. This was the moment that would change history. Someday we’ll all be Europeans.

 

Behind us, a loud double thing echoed on the wooden porch. I looked to see Bertrand, our robot standing six feet, coated in his shiny silver nanomaterial metal frame. I asked Grandad why he never got Bertrand synthSkin, and he just shrugged his shoulders and said, “I’m old school grandson; guess I just didn’t want to get confused by who the humans who were and who weren’t. I know that’s ignorant of me, but it is what it is. Maybe when you inherit Bertrand, you can give the poor boy some skin.”

 

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

 

I’ve lived long enough in Nebraska to know that the calm always comes before the storm. Well, the same with a launch, almost as if nature and the crickets know something great is about to happen. And as we reached one, silence swept across the bluegrass and cornfields.

 

The cicadas stopped. The creaking wood ceased. And the birds grew silent. It seemed even the wind had ceased its turbulence dance. And then the second was cracked open as a bright blue aura from the ion engines a few hundred miles away lit up the world—which meant the fusion reactor was heating up, and the starship was beginning its startup sequence. Next would come the launch.

 

“Well, look at that, almost time,” my granddad said, leaning forward in his chair. He had removed the pipe from his mouth and was starting to stand.

 

“Gotta love the startup of a fusion ion engine, my boy. You see the first part of that engine still has chemical propellant, heated by lasers on Earth, the Moon, and Mars.”

 

“Wow.”

 

“Yes. Better than what I had on my last mission. Oh, what I wouldn’t do to be young again and be on that starship. What I wouldn’t do…”

I could see his eyes turned glassy with tears. It made my own eyes start watering.

 

“I wish I could tell you the life and beauty I saw on Mars before Nanotech took over and sent us packing. I wish I was with the machines when we sent the nanobots sailing on the waves of lasers to those other galaxies to explore new homes. I wish I could see what new worlds they discover soon. And now our first human flight to Europa, to study the portal they found.”

 

“What portal?”

 

“The one in Mariana Trench that somehow leads to Europa. But it closed up the moment Osiris V went through it. And maybe…just maybe, they’re still alive.

 

Who knows.”

 

“Who do you think put it there, Granddad?”

 

“Someone a lot smarter than us.”

 

I nodded in agreement. “Do you think my dad will figure it out?”

 

Grandad let out a puff of smoke. I watched him silhouetted in the blue orb of the charging starship.

 

“You betcha. And someday…”

 

“Someday?” I asked.

 

“Someday…”

 

The voices of the holoscreen roared with jubilance. “Three! Two! One…”

 

My grandad never finished his thought. Instead, the supersonic wave rumbled through the fields as the great starship painted the world with an azure ultraviolet ion cloud. The world ripped open with beauty and light, and sound. I closed my eyes to the painful brightness. When I opened them again, instead of seeing stars and a black sky, it was filled with blue and green aura hues and a giant starship shooting upwards from the ground. It must have been the size of two Empire State Buildings or more.

 

I looked over at Grandad to see his excitement, but instead, my heart dropped with the weight of a thousand starships. The pipe in his mouth slouched like his shoulders as he sat still in his chair. His eyes were wide open with a half-grin on his face. Still, wet tears glistened in his blue eyes as if the last thing he thought of was the happiest moment in the world. I moved and put my head on his chest. There was no wheezing or heartbeat. I held his hand.

 

“Someday,” I said. I now understand his dreams, love, and longing for the stars. I understood, too, who I was going to be in the future. Tears fell like starlight.

In a minute, I would call for Bertrand. But for now, I held my grandfather’s cold hand. I watched the blue orb of the starship become a pinprick, carrying my father and others to a world 390 million miles. It carried the hope of worlds. And one day, it would carry me.