Chapter 1

4 Years After Launch

My first memory is of floating in starlight.

My sister and I first experienced the Cupola when we were three years old. Voyaging across the ringriver and halfway along the habitat’s length through biomes of permanent winter and blistering heat, our mother brought us to a door set at the end of a deep shaft beneath the mountains in the bow of the vessel we called Longshot.

I don’t recall the ride up in the capsule through five kilometers of air, or the illusion of gravity disappearing as we rose towards the hub. All I remember is the sense of utter freedom when the hatch opened, and we floated out into space.

A crystal-clear, pressurized dome three meters across, the Cupola’s base is fused to the surface of the nickel-iron asteroid that forms Longshot. With a little finesse you can float from the open capsule at the back of the dome, limbs starfished, all the way to the apex. At that point, silent and alone, the rest of the station disappears from your visual field, and you become one with the Universe.

From there I could see stars burning all around me: some glowing as embers behind dark veils of interstellar dust, others bright and hot; the reddish orange of dwarf stars, giants an intense blue. And in the center, clear, steady, and very small, the white pinpoint light of our destination.

Of course, I was not truly alone then. I’ve very rarely been so, during the entirety of my long life, and at three years of age I had the mind of a child: I’m sure that I spent as much of my time gazing out in awe at the stars as I did wriggling in microgravity, trying to chase my sister through the air, or throwing up.

When I need patience or calm I think of that idealized first memory, polished to a sheen across three centuries: floating weightless in starlight, wrapped in the cosmos.

Without outside context, every child regards the circumstances of their life as utterly normal. It wasn’t until sometime after our visit to the Cupola that I began to question things –not for what they were, but why they were.

Clothing choices were minimal for our small family. We spent most of our days on the banks of the ringriver in the midsection of the hollowed-out asteroid, where the climate was one of constant summer. My sister Zuri and I spent almost as much of our time in the river as out of it, making garments more of a hinderance than anything else.

The lack of clothing helped me realize that I was different. No matter how long we played under the lightline, my skin never darkened further than a golden tan, while my twin sister’s never changed, remaining as dark as ebony. The hair on my head was a light blond, almost ice-white, sticking in random directions like a field of ripe wheat, while my sister’s was a tight cap of springy black curls, and my mother’s locks grew in lustrous, deep brown waves down to her shoulders. A year after our visit to the Cupola, I asked her why.

“Your haplogroup,” Mother explained, in her patient voice.

By then I knew what haplogroups and phenotypes were, even if my mouth couldn’t pronounce the words reliably. “But what about it? Why?”

She smiled. “That aspect of you comes from a place in Old Sol known as Northern Europe. It was called Hallstatt.”

I looked at my sister lying naked next to the riverbank on the blanket that was our sole permanent possession, drying off after another dip in the water, her body glowing in the lightline. “And Zuri?”

“She is Dinkaid. From the continent of Africa.”

“And you, Mommy?” I was filled with curiosity.

“Gracile Mediterranid. From Palestine.”

“Why are we all different?”

She blinked – a sign that she had been multitasking, mentally working on something, and had now dismissed it – and looked at me evenly. She was always working, always serious. “Is difference bad?”

I screwed up my face. “No.” The question was nonsense: it was like asking if I liked water or land. I loved them equally, without favor.

She nodded, mollified. “I didn’t decide on your haplogroup. Ship did.”

I frowned. “Oh.” Ship was the omnipresent AI that took care of our home, acting through the factotums and a hundred different other sub-systems. Only my mother spoke to Ship; my sister and I weren’t yet old enough. “Ship decided how we look?”

“Yes.” Her eyes got that distant, far-away look again. “Was there anything else, son?”

“No. I’m going to try to catch a frog now.”

She smiled, turning back to her work. “Keep one of the factos with you.”

“I will, Mommy. Love you.” I hugged her side, feeling the warm length of her, from hip to shoulder, as her arm slid around my back, pressing me against her for a moment. The smell of the jasmine I had slipped in a chain around her neck earlier that day was still fragrant where I burrowed my kisses.

“Love you,” she echoed absently, as I rushed off to the shallows of the riverbank, where a cutback beneath an elderberry tree created an Eden for amphibians. If I was very lucky, Zuri might still be drying her back when I put a frog on it.

In those years we lived in constant migration, sleeping at a different bend of the river every evening. Wherever we settled, our world curled up.

Our sun was a laser waveguide that ran through the centerline of the ship, five kilometers above our heads, its light so intense that it hurt to look at it directly from our home in the summerlands. As it dimmed to send the ship into night, it was possible to see all the way across Longshot.

Lying on our backs we could see the water of the river rise slowly on either side of us, crawling along the vast interior of the habitat through different biomes: canyon, clouded rainforest, prairie. At some point it would pass through the scattering of buildings that was the deserted central polis, flowing under the arched bridges and past its darkened towers.