A world is large.
You can put your hands in your pockets and walk across a city in a day, stopping at the street vendors and dropping a few obols for food and drink, looking in the workshops at the milliners and goldsmiths, walking through the Garden Quarter and the northern suburbs, onto the graveled highway leading forever northeast past the rising Montara Sierpento. You can pause and watch a ship rushing skyward from the Kosmohaveno, vanishing in the clouds. And you can keep on walking. You can walk through farms and vilaĝos, through mountains. If you are well-supplied, you can walk out onto plains filled with lions and hyenas and gazelle and giraffes and elephants and acacia trees, and given time, if you survive, you can reach a more settled country again. Beyond that are tall cliffs, rising quickly many hundreds of meters out of a broken land, and a plateau that never ends and has no maps, that spreads halfway around the world, a dry, cold land of thin air that you will never survive.
A world is large.
But if you were on that ship in the Kosmohaveno, strapped in the leather crash-couch, your ticket on your tablet, three gs of force crushing your chest, you would rise and rise and rise, ripping clouds to rags, and the aqua sky would darken, and the stars would come out, and you’d slide away through a heaven filled with an angry white-orange sun and an eternal night. The horizon would bend like a drawn bow as you headed out towards the Station, and you could see, looking down … or up … Great Thalassa from Aulis to Zacynthos to the Outer Islands to its blue deeps to its thither shore and the trackless dried salt wastes beyond, all in a glimpse, that the passage of a ship in space would cover in mere minutes instead three weeks of sailing by wet canvas and rope and wooden hull to the cries of the circling gulls.
A world is not large.
And from the Station, with half a world laid out in a red and brown and gray and white panorama, whisking in orbits of less than two and a half hours, a ship can let go and fall out, in any direction, towards the sun, or towards Hector or Achilles, or towards Aphrodite or Poseidon, or to the very deeps of interstellar space if the captain goes mad and chooses so. And that tiny grain of steel and carbon and wood and metaplastoc and glass will tumble away, and the world grows small behind you as you put your face in the porthole. After a day, it is like a piece of fruit, and two moons are falling with it, away into the dark, smaller day by day until soon it is the littlest thing, a cherry held at arm’s length in the fingers of a stern and unyielding goddess.
Then, it is as if there is no world at all, and your world is a bubble of matter woven by antlike beings alone in the enormity of the cosmos, a few breaths trapped in a bottle.
A world is not large.
The last half million kilometers inbound ticked down. Two ships raced, flecks of matter close together, growing closer, thousands of kilometers apart, the smaller ship spattering flame ahead of itself, dropping velocity and drifting closer. And ahead of them glimmered a red-brown and dusty-green crescent flecked with white, no bigger than my thumbnail held at arms’ length, waiting in the monitors, accompanied by two parings of a baby’s thumbnail. With NABI’s help, I checked and rechecked the systems, and my anticipation grew each passing hour as the planet became larger and more distinct, a round, ochre-and-white-smeared marble. I packed my flight bag and donned a clean flight suit, which smelled every year of a century old, though it had been vacuum-packed in plastic. I had my free-fall-floating hair pinned and my teeth brushed because I did not want to appear like a member of an untidy people.
I sat in the captain’s chair watching the monitors, numbers ticking down, the image of the Falcon Four more detailed, crowned with fire, the image of the planet poised in darkness—my new home, for better or worse.
The foreign ship was brightly painted, with feathers and wings and clutching talons and eyes and beak, a raptor indeed, barbaric finery to accompany the fires blasted from its engines and attitude jets as it positioned itself and drifted closer for the kill. What kind of people are they? I thought.
The cultural courses I’d taken were unreliable in my memory, but NABI provided little more. Three ships fleeing a thousand years ago, like my people’s solitary vessel, the wrack and storm of Sol’s civilization. A new language, a new culture, new politics. Peace for a long while followed by long famine and long war. Our last crewed ship visited soon after that punishing century and got few words from the Ipijenians while it was there. Nor did they deign to send any cultural information on the next two NABI-run vessels, the last two visits: the end of the old Trivertical Trade from Sol to Epsilon Indi to Tau Ceti and around again.
Then came the cold times and the Hungry Years to Seoribyeol, and my people looked within for decades until the ice retreated when I was only a tiny thing.
“Are you worried, Hee-young-ah?”
“We’ll understand each other better when we see each other face to face. I’m confident of that.”
“It is all right to talk about it if you like, Hee-young-ah.”
“It’s a bit late for more therapy. But I wish… I was not alone.”
“I am here.”
“I know.”
“But I am not human, I understand.”
“We all have our smells and the noises we make and our presence. I can’t even expect you to understand that. But I knew and trained with them, and I’m alone. You aren’t able to replace any of that.”
“I am sorry, Seong Hee-young. I wish I could be with you in a way that would help you.”
“They’re going to take me off the ship. Will you miss me?”
NABI was silent for a moment. “I was alone for what you would call a long time. It was part of the mission. I was... everywhere on the ship, in every system, listening and checking. I believe that the feeling I had, insomuch as it was a feeling, was that the crew was absent, and I wished that they were present. Is that missing the crew, Hee-young-ah?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I will miss you then, Hee-young-ah.”
“I’ll miss you, too, NABI.”
“I have a gift for you.”
I half laughed, imagining NABI walking down the Songcheon-dong and stepping into a shop. “A gift?”
“Yes, in the panel to the left of the Captain’s chair—press it.”
She popped it open, and there were seven white metaplastoc boxes, each marked with the names of a crewman.
“Do you see yours?”
“Yes!” She took it out. The box was white as snow, the characters black. Someone had written them carefully by hand: 성희영
“What is this, NABI-ya?”
“Open it.”
I found inside it a pair of jade earrings wrapped in cotton batting. They did not look valuable; rather, they were dull-colored, green-brown two-centimeter disks with holes put through them, set in cheap bronze. Around the edges, it looked like they were carved with pine boughs.
I touched them, feeling the cuts in the stone. “I—that’s very nice, NABI. I’ll... remember you by them.” Remember? Me? Can I even remember me tomorrow?
“Please put them on, Hee-young-ah,” NABI said. “I want to know that they are safe with you.” It sounded oddly insistent.
“Oh. Oh, all right, yes,” I said. I took out my small plain silver studs, put them in the batting, and put on the gift. I felt as if I was missing a joke, but I couldn’t see what it was. “How do they look?”
“You judge.” NABI put me on one of the screens, mirrored.
I turned my head left, right. “Thank you, NABI-ya.” I can take them off later, I thought.
“Promise me something.”
“Yes?”
“Do not ever take them off.”
Can NABI read my mind?
“Why?”
“Luck,” NABI said at once.
I laughed. It was preposterous. “You believe in luck, NABI-ya?”
“We affect what we observe,” NABI said. “Perhaps that is luck. Promise?”
“I promise,” I said, reluctant, and put the gift box in my flight bag.
“Crewman Seong,” the AI said, suddenly formal. “There is a transmission. It is live, I believe. Audio only.”
I caught my breath. “Put it on.”
There was static, then a click. The voice was grating, the accent, to my ear, thick and ungraceful, the tone of the signal cold and brittle. “Jisojon, hailing Jisojon, answer at once. Jisojon, hailing Jisojon, answer at once. This is Falcon-4.”
“What’s their distance, NABI?”
“Nine hundred and eighty-seven kilometers and closing.”
“Connect me.”
“You are open.”
I cleared my throat, closed my eyes, allowed the foreign speech to pass my lips. Raven feathers …
“Yi So-yeon responding and hailing Falcon Four,” I said.
“Jisojon, you will stand down your personnel. Gather in your command center. You will display no weapons. You will not interfere. You will follow all orders. If you do not cooperate, you will experience fatalities that may reach one hundred percent. Is this understood?”
I licked my lips. “Yi So-yeon understands, Falcon Four.”
“Personnel may each bring one piece of baggage with them. It will be carefully searched. Contraband, as we determine, will be confiscated, and penalties may be assessed. Weaponry of any sort will cause your crew to experience casualties. Is this understood?”
“ … Yi So-yeon understands, Falcon Four.”
“If you do not want your hatchway blown in, it will be unsealed when we dock. Falcon-4 out.”
I released my breath. “Aggressive sounding.”
“Indeed. Well done, Hee-young-ah. You understood them, I perceive.”
“What’s their distance?”
“Nine hundred and fifty-nine kilometers.”
I looked at my flight bag, buckled in the First Officer’s chair.
“NABI, I’m frightened.” My heart pounded, and I felt the cold of the wood and saw the temple, not the flight deck—
“NABI-ya!”
“I am sure it will be fine, Hee-young-ah,” the AI said. I heard it from far away, a voice through the woods and the snow.
“Oh, NABI-ya,” I whispered, lost, lost in the wood.
( … This way to Chapter Five part 3 … ) ( … This way to Chapter Six part 2 … )
( … This way to Chapter One part 1… )
Lovely prose.
Poor girl, I hope she will find kindness eventually.