Appendix I -- Excerpts from Koichi Kyhana’s Journal

Translated by Nykkyo Kyhana

Day 1 [0.001 APF -NK]:

For the benefit of posterity, I, Koichi Kyhana, set forth this journal. Today is our first day on our new world. After nine months in space, we all welcome the open sky and warmth of sunshine ... This planet would not be our first choice for establishing a colony, but we had none. We have transferred the surviving members of our ship’s company to the surface in our shuttlecraft, and we have brought the Floran down. Our first order of business is survival. None of our nearly thousand men, women and children harbors any hope of returning home. None of us holds any illusions that the upcoming days and years will be easy.

We are pioneers -- facing many of the same difficulties our forebears faced colonizing new lands on Earth. We differ in the absolute knowledge that return to, or even contact with, our homeland is impossible...

Day 311 [1.059 APF -NK]:

... How odd it is to look up at the night sky and not see the familiar patterns of stars. I recall looking up at the stars from the surface of Beta Centauri 2 on one of our scouting missions. Many of Earth’s constellations were recognizable; distorted, but recognizable. There’s no mistaking Orion from the surface of either sphere. But this planet’s sky is so different, we can’t positively identify a single star, even though we know the familiar ones certainly must be visible. One day, no doubt, astronomers will map this sky and name the patterns the stars make. I wonder what familiar forms will lend their names to these constellations. The shuttlecraft? The hydraulic ram? The cutter beam? This planet’s night sky is very beautiful, dazzling in fact, compared with Earth’s. I do miss the moon, however...

5.121 APF

... Our daughter Yasuko has become quite the big sister, helping Sarah with the chores of raising our second child, son Tetsui. Yasuko was born during our voyage -- she is truly a star child. She would be about four and a half Earth years old now. How different her childhood has been and will be from mine, without the wonders and diversity of Earth to inspire curiosity and reward with beauty. I remember walking the shore near my family’s summer home on Long Island, hearing the calls of the gulls and watching the sanderlings scurry across the sand. Our children will never have that experience, here; and what saddens me most is the knowledge they will never know what they are missing...

9.043 APF

... Food, shelter and security. Those are the basic human needs. Our band of pioneers have all three, but little else. In the past nine-plus years on our new world, our agriculturists have produced a surplus of food, mainly in the form of beans and grains, using the hydroponic growing beds intended for Beta- Centauri 2. We have adequate water, piped in and purified from the sea.

Our needs for shelter are quite modest, the climate is warm and dry, and we have no enemies and no predators from which to be secured ... Our population growth has been healthy. I am heartened the signateurs of the Floran Compact are adhering to the clause emphasizing the importance of enlarging our numbers. Sarah and I have done our part, she is due to deliver our fourth child within twenty days. In the past nine-plus years, we have seen the births of nearly four hundred children, and the deaths of only twenty-four of our band...

11.221 APF

... We are now able to draw upon the resources of our new world for all our needs. We are no longer cannibalizing pieces of the Floran, and we’ve agreed that what remains of her hull should be preserved to commemorate the hardships we have overcome. We have found sources of iron for steel, copper and tin, and aluminum. Our iron smelting facility became operational two days ago. We have begun construction of a polymer plant, now that our chemists have discovered how to build molecules of plastics from the oils produced from rapeseed and euphorbia...

15.013 APF

... After fifteen of what pass for years on Floran, our family is going on a vacation. We are spending a few days on our own, by the sea. We have been in need of some time away, so I expropriated the use of a land vehicle and we drove it toward the sea. We slept under the stars last night; we have no need for a tent or other shelter. Sarah and I have walked the sands with our five children. This world’s sea appears as full of animal life as the land is empty of it. I have seen a myriad of shells and carapaces of sea life tossed upon the shore. The sea fauna is undoubtedly like the land flora -- inedible to the verge of being toxic. I may never become acclimated to the stench of decay on this world, but Sarah claims to have become accustomed to it, and to the children it seems natural. Hearing the sound of the surf washing against the shore fills me with deep longing for my family’s summer home by the sea.

I can look up at the night sky and know the direction of Earth’s sun; I longed to be able to leap the distance between our stars until I realized five thousand Earth years must pass before that house on Long Island will be built. Now, instead, I muse on how the construction of the pyramids is progressing...

19.101 APF

Today was Sarah’s funeral. Her death was mercifully swift, perishing from a cerebral aneurysm that ruptured after a fall, if I am to believe the doctor. Perhaps it was for the best. This mission did not turn out as Sarah and I expected, and the past nineteen-odd years have been difficult. Difficult, especially, for Sarah. I salute her strength and courage. She never succumbed to despair, as had some of our party in the early days. She so desperately missed the friends and family we left behind, and I was incapable of giving her the comfort she deserved ... Yasuko has been a great comfort to me. I see traces of her mother in her face, even though her features remain more Asian than Euro. Yasuko never knew Earth, and she, like all the second-generation Florans, regards this planet as her homeworld ... Following the traditions we have established, Sarah’s body was cremated in the electric furnaces. We have agreed we do not wish to put our dead into this ground. I have taken Sarah’s ashes and sprinkled them onto the surface of the sea. The children and I agreed it was a fitting tribute to her...

24.050 APF

... Today, my son Tetsui has married Phaedra Allen, the daughter of one of the machinists among the Floran crew. They tell me they are eager to do their part to enlarge our population, but they look so young to me. And they are young, and even after twenty Floran years on this planet I still prefer to think in terms of Earth years, of which Tetsui has seen merely sixteen, and Phaedra is a full Floran year younger. We are saddened Sarah won’t number among us in celebrating this rite of passage. But this is what Life is -- the big circle of birth, childhood, maturity, procreation, aging and death. I am attempting to convince Yasuko that, with the children maturing and with Tetsui starting a family, I can manage adequately by myself and she should consider finding a mate of her own...