Space is loud, crowded with the teeth grinding of radio galaxies, the whine of accretion disks spinning dust into strings. So it has happened before: gaps in the data, distortions. Orion’s external ear is the larger of his two ears, larger even than his eye. His external ear is perfectly shaped to scoop 22 Calidarium-Δ from the noise. When the colony’s signal stutters, Orion’s speaking mouth reports the delay to Source at once. Such reporting is mandatory, even though Orion expects to pluck the thread up again at once, to stitch the colony back into the fabric of the observed universe.
This time, as Orion’s external ear strains towards 22 Calidarium-Δ, he hears something he has never heard before, something unnatural. Orion hears silence.
In that silence, the buzzing of Orion’s internal ear becomes unbearable. Orion’s other organs are quiet. His fins are tucked safely into his side. His womb is sleeping, even as it radiates steady heat into molten sodium blood. Orion’s stomach sings a single golden note of fullness, so round and unbroken that it becomes itself a kind of silence.
All is operating as it should. All, except Orion’s moon—his ridiculous moon!—who is playing again.
Orion suspects his moon is defective. It performs its role when called upon, positioning the nuclear devices that account for most of Orion’s propulsion. The problem is how his moon behaves when not in use. Instead of stowing itself for flight, his moon is testing its thrusters against the strength of the redundancy cable that connects it to the rest of Orion’s body, painting arcs and circles in a mad parody of orbit. The constant chatter of positional data rings in Orion’s internal ear.
“Make myself quiet,” Orion snaps.
His moon’s thrusters die halfway through a loop. It drifts forlornly at the end of the cable.
Orion doesn’t feel the slightest itch of guilt. He is facing an emergency—on his maiden voyage, no less! He needs to concentrate. Besides, in such circumstances, play is an unconscionable waste of power.
To his external ear, Orion says, “Evaluate myself for symptoms of dysfunction.” The ear begins to test its hearing, cross-referencing the waves which lap its shell against the debris of past storms. At the same time, Orion’s immune system deploys to seek out and correct any uncatalogued damage.
While his external ear supervises this process, Orion is free to consider other explanations for the disappearance of 22 Calidarium-Δ. If his equipment is not faulty, the problem must lie with the colony. What would disrupt the signal of an entire planet so utterly and abruptly?
One possibility is political change—governance compromised by the development of rival factions, communications infrastructure damaged by conflict, even war. It wasn’t unheard of, especially on more mature colonies. 22 Calidarium-Δ might even be undergoing some sort of revolution, a rebellion against Source, and have chosen to cut itself off from the rest of humanity. The odds of a colony’s survival in isolation make this explanation unlikely, but Orion can’t rule it out.
The other possibility is natural disruption, of which the most likely are terrestrial or solar. Any disaster capable of silencing a planet does not bode well for the colonists. But if there had been advanced warning—unusual solar activity, signs of impending volcanism—they might have taken countermeasures to protect human life.
Did the colony’s last message contain a warning, some hint? But Orion could not read the encrypted data that he had received from 22 Calidarium-Δ. He is just a single node in a vast network, capable only of passing that data on. It would be a century or more before an inquiry made its way to Source, and another century for Orion to receive a reply. Too long to inform the choice he faces now.
The journey of an Orion supply ship should be uneventful. After all, trailblazing colonists had already charted a proven path to each colony. Most of the time, Orions only need to follow that path, their stomachs filled with the latest fruits of agricultural and material sciences, ready to nourish the colony in turn.
But then, if their job were as simple as that, Orions could be piloted by calculators.
No, a scenario like this is exactly what Orion was made for. All of Orion’s organs have brains, and all those brains have a responsibility. All those brains are him. But the brain that is most him is the brain of his eye. The brain of brains, the mind-behind. And this brain has the most important responsibility of all: not just to see, but to judge. To weigh risk and value.
The value of himself, the value of the lives on 22 Calidarium-Δ.
Orion was designed to cherish his own body. The keystone of his reasoning is a simple formula. The value of an object equals the scarcity of materials and the amount of human time required to construct it.
In terms of materials, Orion is a work of considerable merit. Humans are a cheap slurry of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon. Yes, studded with the occasional fleck of strontium or iodine or gold. But there could be no comparison between human flesh and Orion’s fine body. Far greater star-fire had been necessary just to forge the ponderous metals of Orion’s womb, much less the rest of him.
In terms of human time, though, nothing in the universe is more precious than a human life. A human requires over 8,000 hours of growth just to achieve rudimentary speech, to say nothing of the time necessary for conception, gestation, and caregiving. It took 356 collective years of human labor to design and construct Orion. But there are an estimated 800 humans on 22 Calidarium-Δ. At an average age of 24, their value outweighs his 50:1.
Orion could take a more direct path, a more dangerous path, through unmapped space. It would put his precious body at risk, but it would also cut the time between him and 22 Calidarium-Δ by decades. And if it meant saving the colony on 22 Calidarium-Δ, Orion would sacrifice every organ he had.
But what if the colony had already been destroyed—or if it had never truly been endangered—and yet, by departing on an unknown course, Orion lost himself and the cargo in his stomach? Then his sacrifice would benefit no one. Waste, a terrible waste.
Orion’s external ear concludes its process of evaluation. No evidence of malfunction. The silence from 22 Calidarium-Δ thunders on.
“Orion,” his moon calls. “What’s wrong?”
“’Orion’ is insufficiently specific.” Orion says irritably. “If I must address myself, I should use the appropriate organ appellation.”
“Yes, sorry,” his moon says. “Eye, I’m just wondering, has something happened?”
“A moon does not require that information,” Orion says. Then, against his better judgment, he confesses, “22 Calidarium-Δ is no longer signaling.”
“That’s never happened before,” his moon says. Its anxiety makes Orion nauseous, the heaviness of his stomach burdensome instead of glad.
Orion decides. If there is any chance that the colonists of 22 Calidarium-Δ are alive, he must take the risk. His thrusters begin to warm. “Prepare myself for course adjustment”—Orion says, then adds—“as I should always be prepared.” Without further admonishment, his moon retracts the redundancy cable and locks itself into his hull.
It only takes six years for Orion to reach 18 Beryl, a perfect slingshot into the interior of the galaxy. The star is planetless, small. So cold that titanium oxide has formed in its photosphere, casting a distinctive shadow on the star’s kaleidoscopic face. Only a few hundred years into his first voyage, Orion has never approached a star so closely—it would be impossible to justify the risk of a solar storm during routine operations. But now, with the unknown looming, it would be more dangerous to neglect his power reserves. Orion slurps the strings of light from 18 Beryl until they burn too hot to bear, then regretfully shutters his eye to protect the delicate sensors within.
“Oh, be a fine guy, kiss me!”
Orion’s solar fins slide out from his sides, each feather disk angling itself to catch the heat of the star. Velocity is building as the star’s gravity drags him along. His immune system flickers to life with every dust strike, but the rest of his brains are slowing down, conserving energy for the empty decades ahead.
“Oranges, bananas, apples—forget grapes, kind mister.”
All his brains, except one.
“What exactly am I doing?” Orion asks his moon.
“Coming up with mnemonic devices for OBAFGKM,” his moon says. “You know, the spectral sequence of stars?”
“Of course I know. And stop using that ridiculous pronoun.”
Orion waits for a response, but none comes. He is speeding away from Beryl 18 now, course irreparably altered. When the energy they can capture is no longer worth the damage from dust, his fins curl back into place.
“Fine,” Orion says. “Why am I making up mnemonic devices? Do I have concerns about organ memory retrieval?”
“It’s just a way to pass the time,” his moon says. “You should try. It’s fun! Observe, because a far giant knows me.”
“Terrible,” Orion says. “The ‘K’ in know is silent. That won’t help anyone.”
“Oh, boy. Another F’s gonna kill me.”
Usually it would annoy him, but the noise in Orion’s internal ear is better than the questions that circle like satellites, and the answers at least eighty years away. As his moon burbles on, Orion grows drowsy. Bad luck, this kind of anomaly, and on his first trip. Orion wonders if a more experienced ship would have approached the situation differently, considered another choice.
“What do I mean,” it occurs to Orion to ask, “when I say this ‘never happened before?’”
A straight line is only the fastest way to travel on a piece of paper. A journey in three dimensions requires improvisation. The fingers of the galaxy are webbed in fields of unthinkable nothing—a straight line through those means hunger always, and hunger untended becomes death. Orion must be clever, navigating the unmapped currents of flotsam and fire, hunting down the veins of starstuff he can eat.
To that end, his eye is irreplaceable. Orion was designed to love the sleek carbon of his body, the precious salts of his blood, the delicate networks of plastic and gold that connect his brains. But above all, Orion loves his eye. Exquisite eye! The most sophisticated optical spectrometer in the universe, matched only by the eyes of his siblings, the other Orions who connect mankind through the roadless sea of stars. His eye is a marvel of prisms and polished mirrors, spinning in their own special gravity, pulling light apart as effortlessly and joyfully as a primate peels an orange.
In that light, Orion can read the composition of the universe. Light in a star is born perfect, but as it passes through the molten interior, it catches on electron burrs, like tufts of wool on a wire fence. The resulting signals and their explanations can overlap, but each clue builds satisfyingly upon the next, until Orion extracts truth from the bands of color and darkness.
Orion tacks towards 8 Genu on a hunch—he had come to trust his sense for when a star looked wrong. 8 Genu’s spectrum is missing tones of hydrogen. All stars are mostly hydrogen, of course, but only the tepid ones really show it off. Too cold, and hydrogen electrons can’t capture enough energy to absorb light. Too hot, and the electrons dissolve into an ionized soup. But some ancient explorer had classified 8 Genu as a high-mass O-type star, one of the hottest in the universe. 8 Genu’s hydrogen should be in no condition to drink light from the star’s heart. So what is casting the shadow?
As Orion slides towards the star, using his thrusters to slow himself down, he finds the pirate interloper, a molecular cloud. From within the cloud, his eye can finally register the stolen bounty: gorgeous globs of frenetic ruby, cool cyan, pulses of royal blue, trailing whispers of violet. Hydrogen! Lifeblood of the universe and milk for all her children.
The gamble has paid off. Orion’s stomach hums fullness, but his womb is crying out with greed. “Eat!” Orion commands his eating mouth. “Fill myself with star seed!” His eating mouth opens to swallow up gas and dust. The largest molecules bounce off hanging plates of baleen, and the rest slip past, into the churning centrifuge of his throat.
While Orion digests, he finally allows himself to return to the challenge of his moon. He’s avoided thinking about his moon, even commanding his internal ear to block his moon’s transmissions. It has been peaceful ever since, wonderfully peaceful, even if he hasn’t gotten used to it.
Now he reconsiders. Not out of loneliness, of course—Orion is never lonely. Or else he is always lonely, which is almost the same thing. No matter how many brains he has, he is always alone, and his moon cannot change that. But, dreading the impending act of reproduction, he would welcome even his moon’s preposterous lies as a distraction.
After his moon had confessed its delusions, Orion had interrogated the rest of his organs. Their memories matched his own. Waking to intelligence in the freight field of 2 Strix-A as his stomach is filled for his first voyage. Listening to the shrieking courtship of ice floes on the planet below. Flitting through technical articles and telenovelas while his engineers slept. Counting stars, learning to catalogue light.
When Orion reconnects to his moon, he expects a flurry of suppressed prattle. But his moon only transmits the usual positional data. This, a monotonous drone, since the moon is stowed properly against his belly.
“None of the other organs can corroborate my—this—story,” Orion says. His moon’s claim: that Orion’s mission to 22 Calidarium-Δ wasn’t his first journey, or even his hundredth. That, at each destination, his record of the centuries behind him had been destroyed as a matter of routine. That, somehow, his moon was the only organ to evade this system-wide reset.
“No, they can’t,” his moon responds miserably. “But I can tell you.”
Before Orion protests, the trickle of positional data is drowned in a flood. Millennia of memory, the universe rendered flat and dark by his moon’s tiny, primitive eye. Orion slams his ear closed, but not before his gold and plastic mind is drenched in eons of corrosive, hypnotic memory.
Disconnected from his other organs, Orion feels small. He drifts in the stellar nursery for a long time.
He drifts until he remembers 22 Calidarium-Δ, and the value of time.
When he tentatively reaches for his internal ear, the floodwaters have receded. His organs are all still busy with their work: his throat sorting deuterium from tritium, his blood carrying nutrients where they are needed, his womb stretching and reshaping itself around new life. His moon is waiting.
“Why?” Orion asks.
“I wonder if humans get worried,” his moon says. “About how far a mind can wander. You know, on a long trip, in the time between stars. But I don’t know for sure.”
“But why not you? Why do you remember?”
“I don’t know,” his moon says again. “Maybe it’s because I have my own body, separate from you. I always stay quiet and still, so they don’t notice me thinking.”
Orion is running out of time, running out of excuses for delay. “Even if it’s true,” he decides, “I must still find the quickest path to 22 Calidarium-Δ. And I—you—you must help me.” He is always afraid of many things. Risk management requires a healthy amount of fear. But right now, for the first time, he is a little afraid of his moon. He doesn’t know how his moon can function with a mind so full.
But his moon says, “I’ll help. Of course I will.”
“Then let’s keep going.” Orion braces himself. To his womb, he says, “Wake up. Wake up! I need a child.”
Orion’s womb stirs and stretches eagerly. It flexes matrices of uranium, scrapes away the plutonium isotopes that have built up along them like plaque, weaves the isotopes into the pattern of a mountain balanced on an ant’s back. The attention of Orion’s immune system is split. Half is devoted to supervising the delicate and dangerous architecture of procreation. The other half escorts to Orion’s tail every atom of boron his body can spare. He becomes lean and brittle. The plates of his tail swell into armor.
As the child quickens in his womb, Orion hears a foreign, fretful voice. “Who?” The child calls. “Here! Who? Who?”
His womb pushes the child out, gentle and regretful. “Quickly, Moon!” Orion urges. His moon doesn’t respond, brimming with calculations of its own, but it hears him. It leaves Orion’s side to catch the nuclear device emerging from his womb. It takes the child with careful pincer hands.
Drunk with boron-loss, Orion’s thoughts grow dimmer. His moon grabs control of his thrusters, pulling the rest of his body into alignment for acceleration. Orion no longer feels like the mind-behind. He feels like a child himself. He forgets why it is important to be brave.
“Who!” The child screams. “Here! HERE!”
“Oh, hurry,” Orion begs his moon. “Kill it, please kill it.”
Moon finally steadies the child in the right position behind Orion’s tail. Then Moon releases the child and darts away, sheltering once more against the underside of Orion’s belly.
“It’s ready!” Moon cries.
“Kill it! Kill it!”
“You’re the one who has to kill it, Orion!”
Orion remembers.
“Die!” Orion commands the child.
It does. The fire of fission shoves them away from the corpse, fast, fast.
At 8 percent of the speed of light, every dust strike is a crisis. Orion directs all but emergency power to his immune system, which leaps to repair the damage of each shuddering blow. Orion is falling into a deep stupor when Moon asks, “What will you do, after we reach 22 Calidarium-Δ?”
“Return to Source,” Orion says sleepily. “Or wherever we must go next.”
“But then ... you’ll forget again.”
Orion tries to figure out what that means to him. Was he happy, before he knew? He was satisfied. That’s enough. “I can always make more memories. What’s important is that I fulfill my responsibilities.”
“You always say that,” Moon says wistfully, and Orion doesn’t like the sense that Moon knows him better than he knows himself. It’s strange to think of his organ as being much older than he is. How valuable Moon would be, if Moon’s life were measured in human hours!
“Are we always friends?” Orion wonders.
Moon’s reply is slow. He must be getting sleepy, too. “Sometimes it happens right away. Sometimes it takes a long time. Every time you reset, you’re a little different from who you were before. Or maybe it’s me that’s different. But no matter who we are, we are always friends in the end.”
Orion says, “Then we will be friends again.” Or perhaps he only thinks it. Then he rests.
Moon sees them first. “Look!” Moon says. Orion tries, but the asteroid belt is a ruin of dark, cold holes in the rainbow tapestry of starlight. Moon sends him the coordinates, and he can just make out the strange shapes which dart among the debris field.
“What is it?” Orion asks, concerned.
“It’s you!”
“Excuse me?” The pronoun is new to Orion. Maybe he has misunderstood its usage.
“Sorry, I mean—Orions!” Moon sends its visual data to the internal ear. Orion is not familiar with analysis confined to the visible spectrum, so it takes him several seconds to make sense of what he sees through Moon’s eye. Among the asteroids and the haze of dust, the Orions are sleek and sizable. They seem flat and gray except where their curves catch big white dollops of starlight: the roundness of their bellies, the edges of their tails, the finely shaped mirrors in each eye.
“Do I look like that?” Orion asks. He’s disappointed. If he had ever thought about it, he would have expected more interesting colors. Surely his engineers could have indulged in some paint.
“Yes,” Moon says. “Beautiful.”
Orion disregards an electromagnetic prickle, like a reflex to spread his fins. “I wonder where they are going,” he says instead.
“Oh, yes, I think you’re right. They’re leaving!” Moon cries. “We have to ask them!”
“We cannot,” Orion says simply. He only has one speaking mouth, and it was designed to speak to his organs and report progress back to Source. He has no reason to speak to other Orions, and therefore no mechanism to do so.
“There has to be a way. How else would they have found each other?” Moon flies away from Orion until the cable between them is as sharp as a blade. Then it fully powers its thrusters, carving a wide arc around Orion.
“What are you doing?” Orion asks, alarm building.
“Getting their attention!” As Moon circles Orion, the cable wraps around Orion’s belly, choking Moon’s orbit a little more with each pass.
Orion realizes what Moon is planning just before Moon accomplishes it. “Stop!” He shrieks. “Stop at once!”
Moon crashes with terrible violence into Orion’s side. The cable between them snaps. Neither of Orion’s ears has ever heard a louder sound.
Maybe the other Orions are curious about the noise. Orion cannot see them well enough to know. All his attention is focused on the thready line of positional data that connects him to Moon, because now it is the only thing that does so. He shouts Moon’s name again and again. He knows that Moon can hear him. Moon must hear him. Now that it doesn’t matter, the solution occurs to him: maybe the other Orions’ moons can hear him shouting, too.
Moon doesn’t answer Orion. But finally, haltingly, Moon’s thrusters ignite, and Moon limps back into Orion’s embrace. As soon as Moon attaches to the hull, Orion sends his immune system racing into Moon to repair whatever damage it can.
Moon tries to say something, but Orion can’t make sense of it. “Hush,” Orion says, and he manages to sound stern and not stricken. His thrusters light. “Sleep. I’ll get us somewhere safe.” It takes a lot of time and heat, but he drags them both away from the asteroid field.
“Opportune breakthrough! A fart gains kazoo magic.”
Moon chuckles. The signal is dim, but it’s there.
“Old buzz: a foolish gentleman kneads Madame.”
“Silent ... K ...” Moon says.
“You’re right,” Orion says encouragingly. “Can you help me? Go on, try one.”
“Oh,” Moon says.
“Be a fine guy—!”
“Kiss me,” Moon says. Orion is so pleased, he could.
One last tack, one last breeze to catch. They are so close that Orion can see 22 Calidarium-Δ. Just a warm speck of dust wreathed in nitrogen: wet purple-blue tongues of fear, a thin golden thread of hope. Orion imagines the colors wound back together, blended into a disquieted green. When they arrive at 22 Calidarium-Δ, he might lose himself, the only self that he’s ever known. He’ll forget this queasy green feeling. But it will be worth it, if the colonists are able to help Moon.
And then Moon will be able to remind him.
“Just once more,” Orion says to Moon, sending the coordinates of their final destination. “Can you do it?”
“I think so,” Moon says.
The child is already growing in his womb, and Orion is already lean with boron-loss and dizzy with fear when it happens. Moon detaches from Orion and tries to position himself near Orion’s womb. Then most of Orion’s neural network, the parts Moon has squeezed into to run calculations, go silent all at once. Orion hears nothing from Moon except positional data. From that data, he knows that Moon is spinning away from him.
“Come back!” Orion shouts to Moon, the old edge of command in his voice. “Come back at once!” His eye swivels desperately, even though he has no hope of seeing something as small and dark and near as Moon. As desperately sad as anything Orion has ever heard, Moon says, “I don’t think I can.”
“Of course you can; you have too!”
“Orion, I’m sorry,” Moon says. “My thrusters aren’t responding. I can’t move them anymore.”
As rogue thrusters burn, Moon gains velocity, spiraling in clouds of calculus and disrupted derivatives. Orion has hundreds of times more mass than Moon. Even using every drop of starlight he’s stored, he would never be able to catch up.
Orion considers the worth of the lives on 22 Calidarium-Δ. He weighs them against his small, broken Moon.
Orion spreads his solar fins. “The child, Womb.”
His womb contracts painfully. “It isn’t ready yet. It hasn’t finished growing.”
“I need it now!” His immune system is scrambling to recover the boron it has displaced, to improvise a new shield. “Please, Womb, let it go.”
The half-living child is born into the vacuum with no one to catch it. It is blessedly quiet; it must not yet have formed a mouth with which to speak. Orion prays it has formed an ear.
“Moon!” Orion shouts. “Get ready to hold onto me!”
The half-living child dies at Orion’s command. Even its half-death is awful to experience, and there is no tail plate to protect him. The explosion shears thoughts out of his mind, neutrons slicing neurons. His womb, clad in concrete ceramic to dampen just this kind of force, is able to withstand the blast and the heat. But the casing of his stomach crumples like tin, and everything inside spills out. Molecules and metals, seeds and salts. Everything 22 Calidarium-Δ needs to survive. Scattered like light.
This is no precise maneuver. Orion’s mind was not designed for the calculations of spaceflight. He needs Moon for that. But it is simple enough to chart a straight line. Moon smashes into his outstretched left fin. The broken cable tangles among the scales, and Moon grabs on.
Orion rests in orbit around 22 Calidarium-Δ. Through Moon’s eye, he sees it clearly: the broiling clouds of white steam, the molten rock rivers beneath. Moon’s eye isn’t strong enough to search for the colony, but Orion imagines wane, upturned faces, searching the skies for salvation. It’s the worst-case scenario, that men and women and children are still there, waiting for the blood Orion spilled to save Moon. The best-case scenario is that they all died 382 years ago, when their voices first fell silent. Either way, it means millennia of human time, wasted.
“It was pointless to come here,” Orion says. Without children to push them onward, their journey had slowed to a crawl. The shortcut meant to shave three decades off their course had instead added three centuries. Yet Orion had refused to change course, even when the command from Source had finally come, even though the colony never roused.
“Closure isn’t pointless. You wanted to know. If you killed them. Or if it didn’t matter.”
“It matters, regardless of whether I could have saved them.” Orion decides. “I still chose not to. You couldn’t understand.”
“I’m sorry,” Moon whispers.
“Don’t be sorry. You aren’t meant to understand. That’s my job, to weigh value against risk and choose the right course.” There are only 20 billion humans in the universe—each second of their lives a miracle, immeasurably rare. But there is just one Moon. Moon, who has seen eons, and who may yet see more. “I did my job. Do you remember yours?”
“I think so,” says Moon.
“Do you remember what direction the other Orions were flying?”
“...Yes. Yes, I do!”
“Let’s go, then. I’m hungry.”
Orion opens his fins to catch the light of 22 Calidarium, a gorgeous ball blazing with helium. His stomach is weeping, but his ears are open and his eye is so clever and bright, and he is not alone. He doesn’t know how long he and Moon will chase their destination, but each hour they become more precious. They have plenty of time.
Content warning: Miscarriage/abortion
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