Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers, #3)

by Becky Chambers

‘Does it hurt?’ he asked. ‘Does what hurt?’ The boy tugged at the edge of his shirt. ‘When you get turned into dirt.’ ‘Oh, no, buddy,’ the man said. He put a reassuring hand on the boy’s back and kissed the top of his head. ‘No, it doesn’t hurt at all.’

‘I mean life and death. Can’t have one without the other. If my work has taught me anything, it’s that death is not an end. It’s a pattern. A catalyst for change. Death is recycling. Proteins and nutrients, ’round and ’round. And you can’t stop that. Take a living person off Earth, put them in a sealed metal canister out in a vacuum, take them so far away from their planet of origin that they might not understand what a forest or an ocean is when you tell them about one – and they are still linked to that cycle. When we decompose under the right conditions, we turn into soil – something awfully like it, anyway. You see? We’re not detached from Earth. We turn into earth.

He looked down at the dirt he was crouching in, the dirt smeared across his palms, the dirt staining his knees. There were dead people in that dirt. Lots and lots of dead people. They were dead, and he’d be dead, and he’d be dirt, too. He didn’t like smash anymore. He didn’t want to feel like this. He wanted to be okay. He wanted to live. He wanted to live so badly.

Slowly, carefully, they laid him in. He was cold now, and heavy, but those things would soon change. He’d followed his ancestors. He’d rejoined their ancient cycle. They would keep him warm.

learn nothing of your subjects, and you will disrupt them. Learn something of your subjects, and you will disrupt them.

‘Either we are all worthy of the Commons, dear Tamsin, or none of us are.’

‘Our species doesn’t operate by reality. It operates by stories. Cities are a story. Money is a story. Space was a story, once. A king tells us a story about who we are and why we’re great, and that story is enough to make us go kill people who tell a different story. Or maybe the people kill the king because they don’t like his story and have begun to tell themselves a different one. When our planet started dying, our species was so caught up in stories. We had thousands of stories about ourselves – that’s still true, don’t forget that for a minute – but not enough of us were looking at the reality of things.

We’ll become just another story, and not one that seems relevant. Sure, we broke Earth, but we won’t break this planet. We won’t poison this water. We won’t let this invention go wrong.’ She shook her head. ‘We are a longstanding species with a very short memory. If we don’t keep record, we’ll make the same mistakes over and over. I think it is a good thing that the Fleet is changing, that our people are spreading out. That’s what we were meant to do. That’s what our species has always, always done. But we must remember.’

‘So what you’re saying is Humans aren’t really supposed to do anything in particular, and we get to choose the kind of lives we have. But that doesn’t mean any of it has a point, son.

‘Do you know why people – why Humans started heading out into the open? Oh, there was lots of military posturing involved, no mistake, but the true believers, the ones who couldn’t bear the thought of not going out there – that’s where they thought they’d find answers. They said, hey, we haven’t got the context right. We need a sample size bigger than one lonely planet if we’re ever going to understand any of this. And in many ways, they were right. We found other people out here, so that question got answered. We found out that life isn’t rare. We’ve learned exponentially more about how planets work and how physics works, and the technology we have today would’ve blown their minds. We understand the galaxy in a way we never could have if we hadn’t left. But the big question – the end-all, be-all question – well, that’s still up for discussion. Why? What’s the point? Kip, there isn’t a sapient species living or dead that hasn’t grappled hard with that. It scares us. It makes us panic, just like you’re panicking now. So if the lack of a point is what’s bothering you, if it’s making you want to kick the walls and tear your hair out, well, welcome to the party.’

Go wherever calls to you. And maybe you’ll find out that life out there is good, that it suits you. Maybe you’ll find that thing you’re missing. Maybe not. What you will find, no question, is perspective. What that perspective is, I have no idea. But you’ll find one. Otherwise, you’ll only ever think about other people in the abstract. That’s a poisonous thing, thinking your way is all there is. The only way to really appreciate your way is to compare it to somebody else’s way.

Figure out what you love, specifically. In detail. Figure out what you want to keep. Figure out what you want to change. Otherwise, it’s not love. It’s clinging to the familiar – to the comfortable – and that’s a dangerous thing for us short-term thinkers to do.

She closed her eyes for a moment. She got up from her chair, sat down on the floor, and rested her head against her father’s leg like she used to when she was small, like she used to when he was huge and handsome and knew everything there was to know. He pressed his palm into her curls, and she closed her eyes. ‘I love you, Pop.’ ‘I love you, too, Tess.’

‘A city made of cities,’ my host told me during our first day. ‘We took our ruins with us.’

If trying something new was valid, then keeping something old was, too.

He moved through the museum, passing intangible history and thinking of home.

And he’d told her, when she’d demanded to know why he was back, that seeing so many singular things had made him realise he came from somewhere singular, too, and even if it was ass-backwards and busted – his words – it was theirs, and there was nothing else like it.