Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers, #3)

by Becky Chambers

‘We are the Exodus Fleet. We are those that wandered, that wander still. We are the homesteaders that shelter our families. We are the miners and foragers in the open. We are the ships that ferry between. We are the explorers who carry our names. We are the parents who lead the way. We are the children who continue on.’

People got so hung up on what a thing had been, rather than what it was now. That

and a bad guest was on par with a petty thief (which made an odd sense, Isabel decided: guests did eat your food and take your time).

There was a difference between being shy and being sequestered. Rarely in history had things turned out well for people who chose to lock themselves away.

Perhaps none of us can truly explain death. Perhaps none of us should.

Maintaining things as-is? Do well, be consistent, keep things up for however long she had? She pressed her back into the metal floor,

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?

‘Let him be,’ Grandma Ko said. Mom sighed. ‘He’s so impossible right now.’ ‘Yes, well,’ Grandma Ko said. ‘You were a dipshit at that age, too.’

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?

Not everyone wants a busy, exciting profession that requires long hours and specialised training. Many are content to do something simple that fulfils the desire to be useful but also allows them plenty of opportunity to spend time with their families and hobbies.

Everything has a purpose, a recognisable benefit.

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

Societal machinations and environmental stability are not abstract concepts for the Exodans. They are an immediate, visceral reality.

A job is partly a matter of personal fulfilment, yes, but also – and perhaps chiefly – social fulfilment. When an Exodan asks ‘what do you do?’, the real question is: ‘What do you do for us?’

brevity, I will mention only that in the early days of the post-contact Fleet, anything coded as Martian – money, war, extreme individualism – was understood to be dangerously incompatible with Exodan morality.

this calm in the centre of it. I remember watching him, watching the ritual, absorbing everything he explained to me – me, directly – about the science of it. It was beautiful. Magic, almost. That

Doesn’t matter if I’ve got my wagon or am wearing my robes. They know. And so I always have to be Eyas the symbol, the good symbol, because I never know who’s looking at me, who needs to see that thing I saw in a caretaker when I was six. It doesn’t matter if I’m having a bad day, or if I’m tired, or if I’m feeling selfish. They look to me for comfort. I have to be that. And that is me, in a sense. That is a genuine part of

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

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.

It was a mixed bag, the view of the open. Breathtaking beauty and existential dread all mixed together. Far easier to focus on the former and avoid the latter, the thinking went, if you sat at the window with friends ready to hold your hand or listen or just share company with.

A person’s view of the stars was, ultimately, a matter of perspective. Of upbringing.

Cultural arrogance is depressingly universal,

down. The guilt lingered, even so. Ghosts were imaginary, but hauntings were real.

If one experiences oblivion daily – and for an enormous portion of the day, at that – should it not be familiar territory? I was wrong about this, of course. Some species have a more passive reaction to death than others – I am thinking here of the Laru, with their total lack of funerary customs – but sleep or no, all fear it. All spend lifetimes trying to outstretch its grasp.

A death always fixates Humans in one direction or the other. They either talk about it at any given opportunity, or doggedly avoid the topic.

Human infants are famously frail, and the amount of time they remain dependent on adults for needs as basic as eating or locomotion makes me wonder how the species didn’t give up on the whole prospect millennia ago.

stead, their progeny have but once to die.

friends. Just three strangers, a body that had been thrown away, and a story that elicited plenty of public thrill but little sympathy. People had been horrified by the discovery of the body, and satisfied when the culprits were caught. There was a general buzz in the air that something had gone too far, something had to be done.

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.

I don’t know if this will make sense, but I keep wondering where we’re going to draw the line. Nobody’s talking about replacing pilots or bug farmers or teachers, even though AIs could do all of those, because those are fun jobs. Jobs that mean something, right? But I liked my job. There were things in it that I found fun. I thought what I did was meaningful.

People aren’t just staying in the Fleet. They’re coming back. We have such disdain for outsiders who come and act like this is a museum, but what about the Sawyers? What about the people who don’t have a place out there, who think that our way of life has some appeal? We look at them and we say, oh, stupid city kids, stupid Martians, they don’t know how things are. They don’t understand how life works out here. So, let’s teach them. Let’s teach them, instead of brushing them off and laughing behind their backs. Let’s bring them in.’

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

forget. Make sure people remember that a closed system is a closed system even when you can’t see the edges.’

‘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

Once reality caught up with us and we started changing our stories to acknowledge it, it was too late.’

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.

‘That’s a slippery slope you’ll never see the end of. Head down the path of “how we’re supposed to be”, what we evolved to be, and you’ll end up at “hunting and gathering in grassy plains”. Maybe the Gaiists are right, and that is how we’re supposed to be. I don’t know. But if everything has to have a point: what’s the point of hunting and gathering? How is that more meaningful than any of this?’

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.

Spacers and grounders, we’re riding the same ship. We both depend on fragile systems with a million interconnected parts that can easily be damaged and will eventually fail.

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.’

Isabel paused. ‘I’ll only tell you if you understand that when a person tells you what they want of you, they’re not deciding for you. It’s their opinion, not your truth. Got it?’ ‘Yeah.’

You carried his body. You read the Litany for the Dead. You care about our ways, Kip, even if you think you don’t. The idea of them not being performed shook you so hard, you had to do them yourself. And that – that’s the kind of love the Archives needs. We won’t survive without that.’

There’s always another path you’ll wonder about. But that wondering is less maddening if you know what the other path looks like, at least. So. You should go.

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. If

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

Humans will never leave the forest, just as Harmagians will never leave the shore.

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. The Fleet was priceless. The only one. If it was gone, there wouldn’t just be nothing for other Humans to learn from. There’d be nothing for him to learn from.