Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers, #3)

by Becky Chambers

You had to be able to catch yourself. You had to be able to raise your voice.

‘From the ground, we stand. From our ships, we live. By the stars, we hope.’

‘We’re made out of our ancestors. They’re what keep us alive.’

You gotta remember, baby, other sapients are people just like us. There are good people and bad people and everything in between.’

When you grew up and started a family of your own, you took the name of the home you settled in. In a lot of cases, your name didn’t change at all, not if you kept living with your parents and grandparents and so on. If you settled in the home of your partner, you took your partner’s family name. If you both decided to live in a separate home entirely, apart from both of your families, you’d both get the name of whoever’d taken care of that home before you.

Rarely in history had things turned out well for people who chose to lock themselves away.

Her wife looked at her seriously. ‘I am seventy-nine years old. If I want dessert twice . . . I get dessert twice.’

But then I began to think of the dead animals I have seen and disposed of and consumed, the ended lives I did not grieve for because I did not understand them fully. I did not see myself in them, and therefore it did not matter.

So many years of training and study, always striving, always chasing the ideal at the end of the road. She’d reached that end by now. She had everything she’d set out to do. So now . . . what? What came next? Maintaining things as-is? Do well, be consistent, keep things up for however long she had?

You become a doctor because you want to help people. You become a pilot because you want to fly. You become a farmer because you want to work with growing things, or because you want to feed others. To an Exodan, the question of choosing a profession is not one of what do I need? but rather what am I good at? What good can I do?

Even the most menial of tasks benefits someone, benefits all.

It is not that Exodans are lacking; it’s that the privileged of us have so much more.

‘No, I don’t mind,’ she said. I don’t mind talking about it with you, she meant. It was different with Sunny. Backwards. Usually, people had to get past what she did in order to get to know her. Sunny had come at it the other way around.

‘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.

‘Despite growing up in an environment that is utterly artificial, we default to the rawest, purest state at the end. So you can’t tell me that our souls are sick and broken when they’re inextricably linked to a force that powerful.

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

Cultural arrogance is depressingly universal,

Ghosts were imaginary, but hauntings were real.

Alone was easier. Alone was safe.

’Round and ’round the chatter went, at hundreds of tables with hundreds of families. Yet none of them seemed to care about the indisputable truth: a Human being was dead, and no one had come to mourn him.

‘Thank you,’ they murmured to the body as it passed by. ‘Thank you.’ Thank you for what you will become, they meant. Thank you for what you will give us.

My own research methodology professor phrased this concept succinctly: learn nothing of your subjects, and you will disrupt them. Learn something of your subjects, and you will disrupt them.

My brother just had to get a replacement for his old one, and he’s being very weird about it. It’s like he lost a pet or something.

Lovet :(

I thought what I did was meaningful. I thought I was doing something good. Who decides that?

But why? Why learn anything if you’re not going to do something with it? Why learn anything if everything worth knowing is in the Linkings anyway, and you can ask your pet AI?

Without us, there would be no tunnels, no ambi, no galactic map. But we achieved these things through subjugation. Violence. We destroyed entire worlds – entire species. It took a galactic war to stop us. We learned. We apologised. We changed. But we can’t give back the things we took. We’re still benefiting from them, and others are still suffering from actions centuries old. So, are we worthy? We, who give so much only because we took so much?

Are you worthy, you who take without giving but have done no harm to your neighbours?

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

She hadn’t really wanted a back-and-forth, to be perfectly honest. She’d wanted a recycling bin, a compost box, somewhere she could throw the junk cluttering her brain.

‘We die one way or another. That’s a given. What’s not is being remembered after the fact. To ensure that, you have to put in some effort.’

‘Our species doesn’t operate by reality. It operates by stories. Cities are a story. Money is a story. Space was a story, once.

We’re our own warning.

‘Good! Stars, the last thing I want is some cocky gifted kid who’s never had to break a sweat. Give me someone who wants it and had to work for it any day.’

You’ll always wonder if you did the right thing, no matter what the decision is, big or small. There’s always another path you’ll wonder about.

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

‘From the ground, we stand. From our ships, we live. By the stars, we hope.’