‘Okay.’ Kip put his palms up. ‘Okay, that’s the rules. I’m sorry.’ He surrendered the argument, but he didn’t understand. He tried to imagine the same situation playing out back in the Fleet. This is a First Generation telescope, and you can’t attempt fixing it, you can’t recycle the metal and glass, and you definitely can’t touch it. We’re just going to put it here on the shelf, spending space and fuel on something nobody can use.

Tuumuu seemed to read his mind. She fell alongside him as the group continued through the hall, walking on four legs and keeping her neck down so as to match his height. ‘Don’t you have museums in the Exodus Fleet? You obviously don’t have buildings, but collections or . . . or museum ships maybe, or . . .’

‘No,’ Kip said. ‘We have the Archives, I guess.’

‘What’s that?’

‘They’re like a library. All on servers though, no paper or tablets or anything. Just recordings of . . . of . . .’ The Archives were such a basic thing to him, such an everyday given. He’d never had to sum them up before. ‘Of everything. Earth, the Fleet, families. Seriously everything. We don’t need to carry museum stuff around.’

‘But you – you don’t have any physical artefacts of your history. None at all.’ She looked bothered by that idea. Tuumuu lived and breathed for artefacts.

Kip started to say no, but realised that wasn’t true. He thought about his hex, where he’d watched Mom melt down old busted tools, where he’d watched Dad refit an exosuit that was still good and sealed after three generations. He wondered how Tuumuu would react to that. If she freaked out over him just picking up an old thing, she’d lose her mind at a neighbourhood smelter. ‘We . . . use stuff,’ Kip said. ‘If we can use it, we use it, and if we can’t, we make something else.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I guess everything is an artefact, kind of. Like . . . I dunno, a plate. A plate wasn’t always a plate, see. It could’ve been a bulkhead once, or . . . or flooring, or something. Or maybe it was a plate all along, and my great-great-great-great-great-grandparents ate off of it. I’m still going to use it.’

Tuumuu got that cute fold in her face that happened when she was putting ideas together. ‘And that plate would’ve been something else down on Earth first. A machine, or a house, maybe.’

‘A house?’

‘Well, because of the metal foundries, right? Where they took apart the cities.’

‘I guess so,’ Kip said. The Laru beside him had a better grasp on Earthen history than he did, and he was kind of embarrassed about it. He’d been meaning to get a Linking book.

‘Wow,’ Tuumuu said. ‘Wow. So you can touch everything. You’re touching your artefacts all the time.’ She let out one of her weird alien chuckles. ‘So that star-tracker, you would’ve just . . .’

Kip shrugged. ‘Made a plate.’

‘Made a plate,’ she repeated, disbelieving. She pushed her face a little closer to his. ‘Can I come visit some time? Can I stay with your family?’

Laru, Kip had learned, didn’t find it rude to ask for exactly what they wanted, be it a favour or part of your lunch or, apparently, a cross-galaxy trip to stay with your parents. ‘Yeah, sure,’ he said, and as he said it, he realised that he really, weirdly, did want Tuumuu to visit. He thought about the Fleet through her eyes, and it wasn’t the same Fleet he knew at all. He thought about the murals he walked past every day without a second thought, the theatres he went to because it was something to do, the farms that were just farms until you saw farms on the ground. He imagined how Tuumuu would see those things, what they’d mean to someone who never shut up about artefacts. He imagined saying, ‘Go ahead, touch anything you want.’ He imagined her fur fluffing and her big feet bouncing and her face folding and folding until she exploded from excitement. He thought, for a second, about taking her to the Archives so she could meet M Itoh, who would totally be able to tell Tuumuu anything she wanted . . . but that imagining wasn’t as good. He wanted to be the one to tell her. He wanted to know stuff, like Tuumuu knew stuff. He wanted to hang out in his district with her and have the neighbours come stare. He wanted to teach her things. He wanted his alien friend to think the Fleet was cool.

And maybe . . . maybe it was.

‘Hey, hurry up!’ Dron called back to them. The rest of the group was rounding a corner. ‘I’m not coming back if you get lost.’

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

Tessa, Two Standards Later

The sun spike was a weird plant. Not quite a succulent and not quite a tree, it rose from the desert sand on its spindly trunk, an improbable support for the pod-like leaves and bright orange fruit that puffed out from its upper arms. The sun spikes weren’t native to Seed; they were an introduced species, just as the Humans who tended them were.

Tessa watched the sun spikes go by in neat rows as she flew the low-hovering skiff down the orchard road and back toward the village. ‘What’d I tell you?’ she said to her passenger. She threw a glance over her shoulder to the bed of the skiff, full to the brim with bushels of fat fruit.

Ammar raised his calloused palms. ‘You win,’ he said. ‘I’ll never question your pollinator maps again.’