The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1)

by Becky Chambers

“Littlejohn’s Plant Emporium—Your One-Stop Shop for Transgalactic Hydroponics.”

The point of a family, he’d always thought, was to enjoy the experience of bringing something new into the universe, passing on your knowledge and seeing part of yourself live on. He had come to realize that his life in the sky filled that need.

Acting all sanctimonious while spouting bad info was a terrible way to win a debate, but a great way to piss people off.

Food stalls offering everything from greasy street snacks to curious delicacies, some with rambling menus of daily specials, others with offerings so specific that the only acceptable thing to say at the counter was “One, please.”

I am the end product of a few very stupid, well-intentioned people who thought it would be a great idea to redefine Humanity. It didn’t start with much. A tweak here, a splice there. But things escalated, as they always do, until it became something completely beyond reason.

The galaxy’s sapient species could find many cultural commonalities, but few topics were quite as contentious as the proper way to get clean.

She had once read a paper by an Aeluon historian who suggested that the Harmagians’ physical frailty was exactly what had helped them develop a technological edge over other species. “Want and intelligence,” the historian had written, “is a dangerous combination.”

Time was a curious equalizer.

“She’s a rashek. There’s not a word for it in Klip. She’s got a disorder that makes it difficult for her to interact with others. She has trouble understanding other people’s intentions. And she speaks oddly, that much was obvious when I first approached her. I offered to couple with her, but she couldn’t quite bring herself around to that. So, yes, she’s shy, but she also has a hard time figuring other people out. It makes her act a little . . . well, for lack of a better word, weird.”

The idea that a loss of potential was somehow worse than a loss of achievement and knowledge was something she had never been able to wrap her brain around.

Ashby didn’t care much for gravity that couldn’t be turned off.

To some Humans, the promise of a patch of land was worth any effort. It was an oddly predictable sort of behavior. Humans had a long, storied history of forcing their way into places where they didn’t belong.

Tweaking your body, it’s all about trying to make your physical self fit with who you are inside. Not that you have to tweak to get that feeling.

Rosemary let her eyes trail over Sissix. Polished green scales. Festive quills. Artful swirls painted around her claws. The way her trousers hung just so over her strange hips. Even when goofing off amid old crates and edible bugs, she was lovely. “You’re too pretty to be a dinosaur,” she said. She felt her cheeks flush as she said it. She hoped it didn’t show.

We tend to think about coupling the same way that—hmm, how to put this—okay, like how you think about good food. It’s something you always look forward to, and it’s something everybody needs and enjoys. At the low end of the scale, it’s comforting. At the high end, it’s transcendent. And like eating a meal, it’s something you can do in public, with friends or with strangers. But even so, it’s best when you share it with someone you care about romantically.”

The people we remember are the ones who decided how our maps should be drawn. Nobody remembers who built the roads.”

She did not have the same primal fear of oblivion that organic sapients did, but after being awake for two and a quarter hours—two and a half, now—the idea of being switched off was an unsettling one. She rather liked being self-aware. She’d already taught herself to play flash, and she was only halfway through studying the history of Human development.