Ash had sent me a last message, a firm goodbye, from an adult to a child who had gone too far in trying to create a connection. The message, though, was structured oddly in the most subtle of ways. I obsessed over that oddity, poring over it, and unraveled her last, parting puzzle; a time and place, encoded in the differences in word frequency between the phrases she used and previous messages, diagonalized across the typographic variation between the fonts our communication system had used for the first message and the new ones.

The Gveintr system, the day after my seventeenth birthday. The first day of my adulthood. The certification code for a fully-certified navigator.

Amber and Zidanya exploded at that, and I let them. It was a balm to my old hurts and wounds. They were almost angrier at that than at how things developed. The not-a-coincidence of two Worldships meeting in friendly space for a long interval, two years, was lost on my youth; I had two brilliant navigators to learn from, when the time came, and the most brilliant, beautiful woman in the galaxy to court, as she played a game of slowly-thawing coyness.

Of all the people in my life, only two of them had warned me off of what I was doing. I didn’t understand why my parents were so incensed by the time I was spending at the other ‘ship, by the time I was spending with Ash. Their nav was as old as he was clever, and as clever as he was old; a hundred and ninety years and starting to fail in health, the longevity treatments still staving off senility as his body degraded and his organs began to fail, one by one, he still could think laps around me. He taught me unstintingly of the void, of mathematics, of software and hardware and how they interact, of the different ways we observe patterns where there are none and find the solutions to those patterns that we can use to navigate through to the reality we come from. I used a Volitional-class Coder for the first time, and he taught me about their limits and their advantages, and I marveled at them, a mind so complex it can almost think at the level of a human, a mind so complex there’s a risk it’ll lose interest in helping you.

And Ash was there, leaving me messages that strained my mind, introducing me to people whose brilliance I thought outshined the star we orbited, teaching me about thousands of years of art that I was interested in only because it was her talking about it.

Ash didn’t help me with the papers, wouldn’t answer questions about the process. I think even for me, that would have been verging on too obvious; she always kept just enough distance, always telling me it was my choice, never anyone’s choice but my own. That there were other navigators, other men and women who can bring a ship through safely to travel between the stars.

That I shouldn’t let her hopes interfere with my calculations for what was best for me.

I applied for citizenship there. Of course I did. I thought I was following my heart, thought that I had found the woman with whom I would bond, the stable home that we each would return to, the person whose joys would center mine and whose joy it would be to bask in mine in turn.

The amber liquid notwithstanding, by the time I get to that part of the story, my throat is choked up and my head starting to ache. Amber and Zidanya want me to stop and give myself space, but I tell them I want to get it over with; I’m on the verge of crying, sure, but I want it out and done. They accept it, and I wind up in the bed, curled up around Amber with Zidanya pressed against my back, and both of them pretend that they can’t tell there are tears flowing, just as I pretend I’m not taking reassurance and heart in the way their bodies betray how furious they are with the Fleet and with Ash.

The day after the papers were signed, while the hum of the engines was starting up to take us out of that world and towards the next, Ash visited after dinner. She was dressed in the same outfit I’d commented on in that picture I’d found, dress tight and cut low across breasts I longed to lose myself in, cloth draping tight around her waist and hugging her legs down to her ankles. One side of the dress was cut high, all the way up to her hip, and it showed off stunning skin in a promise of intimacy; and whether because of the heels or just how she naturally moved, every step swayed her hips in a way I couldn’t take my eyes off of.

She kissed me after the dinner, long and slow, leaving a bonfire of hunger blazing in every centimeter of my body, and then stood up, and told me she was leaving. That the bounty for my citizenship was enough to live two hundred years in majesty on any static or to live almost as well for that time as a grounder, that she’d hated my smugness, my interests, and my idiotic idolizing of her for so long that nothing was bringing her more joy than tonight and my pain.

She left, on the dresser, the papers that laid out the price her Worldship had paid mine, for a young navigator who could see patterns in the void, and the names of the dozens of people who had helped her craft hundreds of messages. Messages intimate in the way of the mind, messages so clever they didn’t, in the end, come from one person’s ability to write.

I didn’t kill myself that night, even when I saw that she’d highlighted the people who helped her with the parting message, that cleverest of goodbyes that had me yearning to be back in her orbit. Suggested reaching out to them, in the margins; get closure if you want, they won’t care.

Amber and Zidanya need a moment when I tell them that; I don’t think they know that without their fury, there’s too much emotion inside me to talk. They’re my proxies, in a way, acting out all the anger I didn’t act on, all the pain that was so carefully cultivated and used to move me.

Their tears on my behalf are the tears I’m not shedding, so that I can finish telling them my story.

There were no knives in that home, no medications. Why would there be? I didn’t have any hobbies that would call for the former, no conditions that would call for the latter. I don’t know if I would have killed myself if there had been, but certainly the thought crossed my mind. I equally don’t know how I motivated myself to go to the meal hall to eat, but I did.

Melody found me there. Melody, soft and pleasant and more dull than not. Melody, unthreatening and warm. She didn’t ask me for anything, didn’t ask me anything, but just walked home with me and came into my home without prompting, undressing me with warm, kind hands, wiping my face clean with gentle patience as I cried. When she kissed me, when she provoked my reactions, it was tentative and untutored, as far from Ash’s terrible skill as possible.

It took me a long time to come to realize how deliberate that was, on the parts of the people who had set her course to cross mine.

Melody stayed with me four months, moving in without fuss, as simple as piling her clothes into the dresser that would have been Ash’s. She rode out the nine days of my first wormhole jump with me in the navigation blister, ten meters of living space; she calmed my panic, induced me to rest when I was overtired, and woke me up when I needed to get back to work all with the same soft, insistent affection, as though her language of how to relate to me and how to take care of me, beyond the basics of food preparation and cleaning, consisted only of the act of intercourse.

She left with as little fanfare as she’d come into my life. I lived alone for a month; I was fine for a week, until I reached out in desperation and hunger for touch and found it, even if I was still lonelier than ever, until I made a more genuine connection, and then soon she departed, too.

I was never alone for a wormhole jump. That, more than anything, betrayed how calculated everything was. Transient emotional support kept me in a state of reliance on that support while pulling it away often enough to keep me off balance, and I was never fool enough that I didn’t know it was deliberate. I took what I could, anyway. What else could I do? There was never another navigator. It was always a choice between whatever joy I could find and letting down millions, millions who had never done anything to harm me. Millions who saw me only as a fellow citizen who did the one job nobody else on the entire ship could, the man who saw patterns in the void.

I spent the intervals doing, in general, whatever I please, whether it’s creche work or art or, most often, studying mathematics and formal logic and software engineering. I built friendships with the hundreds who live in my township. They never lasted long, but they lasted just long enough that I kept seeking out more. I built relationships stayed until they failed, and sometimes I noticed a partner’s body subtly changing right before, no matter how the relationship was going, they left, and it didn’t occur to me to wonder until years and years later; and all the while I found comfort where I could, and pleasure where I could, and while it was always there, it always left me yearning for more.

I’m crying again when I try to put why it hurt so much into words, for Amber’s and Zidanya’s benefit but mostly for myself, to find a way that rings true that I can say it out loud. It isn’t just that I’d been lied to and manipulated, by a woman who’d discarded me without any pretense to feeling anything but disgust, but I can’t find the words for it until Zidanya cuts me to the heart, calm and reasonable: they’d never given me a chance.

I might have happily lived as a fellow citizen, instead of something like a somewhat-pampered, in other ways abused slave, if they’d let me. Might have found someone to make a home with, and brought the joys I found outside of it home to share with her, and she with me. The Fleet was a beautiful place, a place full of art and love and care and compassion, a place where nobody had to be alone and everyone could work at what their passions were. The Fleet was a place where people belonged, and where people could figure out how to be their best selves and live a long life being that person.

I would have loved to have belonged there, if they’d given me a chance, instead of belonging to there.

I’m not sure how long I weep, head cradled in Zidanya’s breasts with Amber’s arms around me. Eventually, my stories and explanations and attempts to excuse a society that needed me so desperately they couldn’t take the risk grow less coherent, and I fall into slumber, bloated with food and with the feeling of having purged myself alike.

It’s not until I’m drifting off to sleep that I realize I somehow hadn’t said a word about that last, desperate dive into the void on their behalf that brought me here.