Later, when you settle in your bunk, after Mina has finished running back and forth between you and Lem with an endless and infectious excitement, you find yourself looking at your ID film once more. You both stare wide-eyed at the vast hull of the Sidereal Horizon, and try to think of this huge machine as a home. The lack of gravity means you can't feel her weight, only the grip of her small hands on your clothes. You keep moving, up into the docking bridge, then along that thin, glass-walled connector, all the time Mina clutching onto you. Leaving with Lem and Mina A Long Journey to a Small Unknown Planet And then you squeeze Riko's hand, and you wake up. Riko's hand.Īnd in that moment you understand why you made this choice. Riko's hand with its brittle bones and crumpled skin. Riko's hand, gripped hard around yours, trembling a little, sweating a little. Who would choose this weight? This anxiety? This deep well at the center of existence.īut then you feel it. Things you can focus on, hold onto.Īnd then, after an age of crossing, you are there, settling back into the chair, into a body in a chair, and the overwhelming sensations that come with being a living thing with a rich and detailed sensorium.įor a moment you feel like you have made a terrible mistake. So you don't focus on it, you don't think about it, on what feels like such a long journey back through the dark.

It doesn't understand you, and you don't understand it. It isn't a person, a flesh and blood person, with wants, with desires, with the capacity for love and hate. The river whirls around you, but it doesn't pull, it isn't jealous. Instead you follow the thread, delicately, carefully, like a diver following their lifeline back to the surface.

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