Renascence

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I think he told me this because I am his daughter. Not that he begot me in his flesh. When I was born, he was still homebound on a voyage that had begun almost three hundred years before. When we spoke, he was machine. But my father and my mother bear the genomes of him and his mate. They were created with the same basic memories, harking back to Earth itself, and even with some shared recollections of lives lived afterward. Also, it happens I resemble her as she was when young. Machine or no, of course he loved me once we had met.

What he said was that if I cared to hear the full tale of why he had returned so much earlier than planned, he would be glad to tell me. Oh, but I cared!

I think, too, he needed this. He had downloaded his knowledge into the appropriate databases, but that is impersonal. He had communed with the Life Mother of our planet, but that is sacred. I wonder if she counseled him to seek ordinary human connection. She may well have. In his awareness, the terror and solitude were only days behind him. Unbroken, he was nonetheless shaken, wounded. Maybe those hours with me helped speed his healing. Maybe he went back the stronger for it, to face the thing again. I would like to believe so.

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