The first thing I explain is that the Fleet, the Life-Fleet of the Blessed Faith And Its People - I can hear the capitalization in my voice, the exacting pronunciation that I learned through how people would flinch or their faces would twist if I got it wrong - is stable. Stable like no other institution in settled space. They, Amber and Zidanya, are skeptical about it, but it’s true; in space for almost a millennium, and even if not a single ship, not the small nor the vast, dwells still in the stars from those days, the continuity is there.

And the only way to be that stable is to be happy, so since stasis is the point, since the purpose of the Fleet is to maintain the Blessed Faith and the society of the Blessed Faith as it was before we left Earth, it’s full of happy people.

I let them vent a little about how little they believe me while I eat. I’m not nearly used to the degree to which Amber spices the food, and from what I overheard with Zidanya, I’m very grateful that it was my Paladin choosing how much of this and that to add. It’s strong, and the flavors are almost overwhelming, but it’s very good, and I make sure to thank both of them. They both act like they barely believe me, but neither of them is so crass as to suggest I’m lying, and the pace at which I devour the food ought to be pretty convincing.

I get back to the point pretty quickly, waiting for my stomach to settle before I go for seconds: the Fleet is full of happy, content people, by design. A millennium of iteration on the things that weren’t considered core to the community, combined with the technology we’re always improving on, means that if you’re spending your days in toil, it’s because you’re toiling on a project of passion, and someone’s going to make sure you get dragged to the meal hall often enough not to waste away. It’s machines that do the toiling, machines running software that’s so far from self-aware it’s not in the same solar system.

Nobody hungry, nobody pressured to work. Maybe one in ten of the adults in the Fleet don’t do hardly anything with their time, at any given time; but they’re the audience. They read the stories others write, they dance, they look at the art and listen to the concerts, they stop everything from crawling up its own ass, frankly, which is what you get when you have more people producing a kind of content than you have people consuming it.

Two in ten work the creche, more or less, and that’s the biggest sticking point I have with my audience. It’s too alien to them, just as a pair of new parents raising a child with hardly any support is to me; they retort that it’s not hardly any if your extended family and community are around to assist, and I retort that it’s not abandonment just because an infant’s primary, for-the-rest-of-their-lives social bonds level of primary, caretakers aren’t necessarily their parents, and aren’t the only adults around full-time.

Frankly, I don’t think either of us gets our points across. I’ve worked the creche, spent a three-month interval doing it, twice. I can’t imagine wanting to have more children in a caretaking setting than adults, and I especially can’t imagine wanting to have more small children than adults. When would you sleep? How would you maintain your edge in your profession, in your passions, while doing it? How would you maintain your social bonds, when the work of dealing with a baby means you’re short on sleep and your world has narrowed to something with which your friendships and other lovers share no context? So I move on, and they let the subject drop after more ranting and bonding over ranting at me about it, and I eat my seconds while they do that.

I was born on a static, if only barely. In my case, it was a ten-kilo singleton station, roughly a donut ten kilometers in radius, with one “floor” instead of the grand honeycombs of a Worldship, a hundred kilometers in radius of intricately woven surface-area-maximizing construction meant to rival the size of a continent instead of a city. No, station Gloria was anything but glorious, and it orbited a toxic shithole of a mining colony, and I was only born there because as a Nu Nispar colony, it had better medical care than the ‘ship my parents lived on. They didn’t count the cost, when it comes to medical, and even a shitty Nispari static orbiting a worse planet on the trading routes is still in a better situation for those things than a ‘ship.

We left when I was six months old, a double short interval, the kind of leisurely stop you make when you don’t need to make repairs or seriously stock up but you’re fairly confident you won’t run out your welcome. The Fleet doesn’t do single short intervals at a Double N station as a rule, policy says it’s best to have regular stops where you can let the mail catch up, if nothing else. I obviously don’t remember anything about it, but my parents were surprised at how easy I took to the jump, and when we jumped out of Severa Noct three months later without me even waking up, they knew something was wrong, or possibly right.

I don’t remember much of my childhood. That surprises neither of them, and they laugh, claiming that nobody really does; I don’t bother disagreeing with them, but I’ve known a fair number of people who remember their birthdays and childhood friends, at least. They bring out desserts, and I’m glad I didn’t argue, because I’m far more interested in the baked fruits - apples, they call them - with molasses and sugar, sweeter than anything I’ve ever eaten. There’s spices on it, some I recognize and some I don’t, but mostly I just boggle at the carbohydrate counts I’m shoveling down.

I get to the point pretty quickly after that: I was six years old when I snuck into the nav blister for a wormhole jump. I thought I was the height of cleverness and guile, at the time, but securing a week’s worth of non-perishable food and a backpack to carry it in couldn’t have been anything but obvious.

We were six days making the jump, and I solved not a single one of the sub-problems she set me, not in time to contribute to the work of navigating through the hyperspatial eternal storm between wormhole entry and exit, and not for years afterwards. I cost her a day, and she told me she didn’t want to see me during a jump again for eight years, but I didn’t care. The Chief Engineer chewed me out, chewed my parents out, and I still didn’t care.

I’d seen patterns, there in the void. Patterns where the sensors saw only chaos, and patterns where sensors saw only nothingness; it stirred something in me, and the navigator I’d done the jump with told me I wasn’t crazy. It was the truth, she said: the universe cannot be fully perceived by recording it, and even a Volitional Coder can’t see the patterns under the patterns. Her partner couldn’t, either; he cooked, cleaned, and kept us sane, and she brought a ship of ten million humans through a void in which it should be impossible to exist.

I don’t remember her name, and that bothers me, because what we shared was truer and more fundamental than I appreciated, then; and when, eight years and a day later, I walked into the nav blister with the confidence of my apprentice nav-cert, she wasn’t there.

A year later, I heard from Ash for the first time, and my voice breaks for the first time as I’m telling the story. Zidanya pours me about four decileters of a warm-looking amber liquid; Amber doesn’t look like she approves, but she doesn’t say anything, so I drink it. It burns on the way down and relaxes my throat enough that I can keep going, so that’s something.

Ash was twenty when I was fifteen, or said she was, and I don’t think she was lying about that. About her name, though, and so many other things, ah.

I was taken with her, obviously. Her messages were impeccably crafted, challenges and little secrets I could pull apart and read, just shallow enough that I could do it without relying on external resources but enough depth that I could dive into it and grow obsessed. Ciphers, cryptics, messages embedded in references to music and physics, I learned more in the year we talked than I had ever before, driving myself to understand every drop of the sips I was offered. She was a genius, I thought, and she introduced me to other geniuses; a few on my ‘ship, some on others, and mostly on hers.

I sent her an inappropriate message on the first year’s anniversary of our... friendship. It wasn’t my fault, mind. The obsession was one she’d carefully cultivated, and the public directory pictures of her were stunning and artfully posed. The locational metadata and referential-link metadata led me to parts of the data stores and data streams where I found more pictures of her, and when I made a fumbling reference to one of them, she sent a message flatly severing contact. I was a child, she was an adult; since I had introduced even a hint of the intimation one of us was courting the other, our conversations were over.

It had metadata, links to explanatory materials that used words like sociopathology and predatory. Those materials were thorough: ethics, power dynamics, history, the explanation of why we absolutely could not be anything to each other was extensive and brutally frank, and I wept over it, but I understood, as best as any child could understand.

Except that there was one last message, hidden inside there. All a lie, in the end, wrapped in the truth.