The Last Cuentista

Lita is Petra’s elderly grandmother. She is a cuentista who teaches her stories to Petra and encourages the girl to make each traditional story her own by introducing new variations. Lita represents imagination and creativity, but she isn’t one of those chosen to journey to a new planet. When Halley’s Comet strikes the Earth, she dies. Even though she knows her fate ahead of time, she calmly accepts it.

When Petra protests losing her, Lita insists that loved ones live forever in the heart. She represents the imaginative spirit that the Collective is trying to phase out of humanity. Even after her death, Lita manages to contact Petra and encourages the girl in her dreams. The cuentista legacy is the greatest gift that the old woman passes on to her granddaughter.

At the beginning of the story, Javier is Petra’s seven-year-old brother, who bears a distinctive birthmark on his thumb. Unlike Petra, he doesn’t have any vision problems and promises to be his sister’s eyes if she needs him. When Petra emerges from stasis, Javier is gone, which makes the reader conclude that he died during the journey. In reality, he was revived many decades before his elder sister and is now an old man who serves the Collective as a botanist.

Petra is able to restore Javier’s lost memories by showing him his favorite childhood book, Dreamers. At the end of the story, Javier stays behind to ensure that Petra and her band make it safely to the planet. His final act is to neutralize the toxin that the Collective intends to use to exterminate the colonists on Sagan. Javier believes that his sacrifice will make his parents and ancestors proud. 

Nyla is the current head of the Collective. Like the rest of her kind, she is so pale that veins show beneath her skin. Her eyes are violet, and her blond hair is braided into a pretzel shape. Nyla embodies all the traits that the Collective values: She is cold and devoted to the survival of the group, and no individual life has any meaning to her. She is willing to sacrifice members of the Collective to further the aim of securing a homeland somewhere. She is also ruthless enough to try to exterminate the human colonists on Sagan because she views humans as a threat to universal peace.

Despite her devotion to order and conformity, Nyla has hidden away the belongings of the original Earth survivors along with all their programming related to history and art. She believes that someday a member of the Collective will have to download this knowledge. If she were to do so, this would give her absolute power over the group. Not knowing that her scheme to poison the humans on Sagan has failed, Nyla commands her ship to travel for several more centuries to find a better home for the Collective.

Voxy is approximately six years old and a member of the Collective. He shares quarters with Nyla, presumably because she is grooming him to be her successor one day. Despite his high status in the group, Voxy is enthralled by Petra’s cuentos and steals into the sleeping room she shares with the rest of the Zeta group to listen.

Voxy demonstrates compassion, curiosity, and resourcefulness. These traits are at odds with the values of the Collective. By the end of the tale, he has smuggled himself aboard the shuttle taking Petra’s group to the planet because he does not want to live in a world without stories. Even though he must wear a spacesuit outdoors to protect his vulnerable skin, Voxy doesn’t hesitate to embrace a new life on Sagan with the others.