Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers, #3)

by Becky Chambers

Was there any day for her that would not involve the same schedule, the same faces, the same tasks? What was better – a constant safeness that never grew and never changed, or a life of reaching, building, striving, even though you knew you’d never be completely satisfied?

‘Despite growing up in an environment that is utterly artificial, we default to the rawest, purest state at the end.

‘Knowledge should always be free,’ she said. ‘What people do with it is up to them.’

The constancy was a comfort, a reminder that whatever unpleasantness you’d just been through was only a moment, only a blink within a vast, slow splendour.

‘Academic prowess and base intelligence are two separate things.’

‘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.

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.

We’re meant to go. And we’re meant to stay. Stay and go, each as much as the other. It’s not all or nothing anymore. We’re all over the place. That’s better, I think. That’s smarter.’

We abandoned more than our ancestors’ world. We abandoned our short sight. We abandoned our bloody ways. We made ourselves anew.’