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Anna, one of the first grounder humans to join Eyas’s immigrant programme, was also the first to decide that she would be staying with the Exodus Fleet. Strangely, Isabel was the first person she told. Not Eyas, or the Garcia family whose hex she shared, or Sunny, or any of the other programme tutors or her friends on the programme. Isabel, an archivist Anna had met once or twice and that only as part of the education on the Fleet the immigrant programme offered, found herself the recipient of the confidence over a carefully brewed cup of mek.
“Oh,” Isabel said, sitting on a barstool at the Garcia hex kitchen counter. “Well, I hope you’ll be very happy here.”
“I think I will,” Anna said. “Thanks for having me, M. Itoh.”
“You’re welcome,” Isabel said, and took her leave shortly afterwards feeling an unaccountable strangeness. As though there were something that Anna had left unspoken, or that Isabel had.
“You’re being an idiot, Isabel,” Kip said, when she told him about it over yet another cup of mek, late that afternoon. It was the first time in their acquaintance that he had ever treated her with less than deference.
“Is that any way to speak to a senior archivist?” Isabel asked, the words coming out less light-hearted than she’d intended.
Then something – either her intelligence or self-awareness -- reasserted itself. A good apprenticeship, as Isabel understood it, entailed the principal learning from the apprentice, as well as the other way round. “Why am I an idiot, Kip?”
“Anna wanted to be recorded,” Kip said.
Isabel put her cup down and said, “Oh, no. Oh, no.”
“Yeah,” Kip said. He reached out and put a comforting hand on her arm. Again, it was a gesture not of deference but of companionship. Isabel took a moment to be grateful to the man who would be her successor and then devoted her attention to what she’d just royally screwed up.
“Tomorrow,” she said to Kip. “First thing in the morning, we will figure this out.”
Kip laughed. “I’ll bring refreshments.”
He was a good kid, Isabel thought – she varied between thinking of him as a good kid and a young man, and in more reflective moments, a good man – and when she went home that evening it was Kip she was thinking of as well as Anna, something taking its time to coalesce in her mind.
*
The next day began with an apology. Kip insisted on that. Isabel cuffed him around the ear and nevertheless went to do what he said. Anna was surprised to see them both, looking up from a breakfast of nutrient-fortified cricket meal that she was eating with all evidence of enjoyment. Together with the sharpness of her hands and face, the bones too close to the skin, it was indicative. Wherever in the GC she had come from, Isabel thought, she had come from hunger.
“M. Itoh, M. Madaki,” Anna said, pleased. “What can I do for you?”
Kip was clearly delighted to be 'M. Madaki'. “My colleague has something she would like to say to you,” he said, while Isabel resolved to cuff him around the ear again as soon as possible.
“Yes,” she said. “Anna, I understand you were trying to ask me for something yesterday. I apologise for being too dim to hear it. I’m afraid we in the Archives don’t have a standard ceremony for individuals joining the Fleet.”
Anna’s face fell. “Oh,” she said. “Uh. Sorry. I thought – you guys are so, you know. You write all that shit down.”
“We do,” Isabel agreed. “But as you’re the first, we don’t have anything off the peg, so to speak. We could make something for you.”
“Uh, no, that’s okay,” Anna said. She still looked crestfallen and now also nervous, peering around Kip and Isabel at the way to the door. “I, uh, I have to go. Job trial. Uh, sorry.”
She grabbed her things, went around them and out of the hex, the sound of her footsteps disappearing in an anxious scurry.
“Well,” Isabel said, in the resultant silence, “that went well.”
Kip was shaking his head as though trying to clear it of water. “We can think of something for her, right?” he said, his face scrunched up with confusion. “You weren’t making that up?”
“Of course not,” Isabel said. “In fact, if Anna is only the first, we will have to think of something. All the immigrants need to be on the Asteria roster even if it’s just so we know to check on them in a shipwide evacuation.”
Kip nodded. “Then why didn’t she like it?”
“I don’t know,” Isabel said, although she had a pretty good idea. “Come on, Kip. We’ve got work to do.”
*
It turned out to be harder than either of them had thought.
It was obvious, to start with, that the ceremony for a naming would not do. Kip made a sequence of expressive gestures as he tried to imagine picking up a full-grown adult and pressing their foot onto a scrib. “And it’s not even as if they’re being born or whatever,” he said, uncomfortably. “It’d be weird.”
“No,” Isabel said. “There are other ceremonies, though. Not just naming and funerals.”
“Only marriages, I thought,” Kip said, frowning.
“A few others.” Isabel reached for her scrib and retrieved a couple of citizen registry records from memory. “Remember the Oxomoco?”
“Yeah,” Kip said softly. “What about it?”
“I learned how to do this one by heart then.” She leaned back in her chair, and read from the record: “Aditya Bhattacharya. Born aboard the Oxomoco. Brought to the Asteria at four thousand, three hundred and sixty-seven GC Solar days of age. Then, as now, a member of our Fleet.”
“Adoption,” Kip said, the light dawning. “But you didn’t do any of those for adults, did you?”
Isabel shook her head. “Children who were adopted by Asteria parents asked for the ceremonies. Adults who had had to relocate didn’t want it. Too much hurt. We just adjusted the records in our own time.”
“Are there no other ceremonies we can crib from?” Kip asked, in the tones of a young man who saw a very significant amount of work coming his way. “Nothing at all?”
Isabel smiled. “The only other ceremony we do for adults is gender confirmation. I’ll find you the text. Sit down with it and the other ceremony texts and give the question some thought, you lazy child.”
Kip grumbled. She left to him to it. By lunchtime, he was too engrossed to move, so she got him one of the disgusting pickle things he liked and tiptoed out.
*
That night, in the in-between time after dinner and before lights out, Isabel looked up and said, “We could have had more children.”
Tamsin blinked and set down her thread. “Isabel? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Isabel said, getting up to pace. Tamsin was sitting in the corner of the courtyard, surrounded by greenery, idly sewing a patch in a child-sized jumper. It was Isabel who was restless, pacing around the plants and the workshop benches. “Just thinking, that’s all.”
“Clearly,” Tamsin said, sardonic. More gently, she added: “The place is crawling with kids. Ollie was here not an hour ago wanting me to inspect his bean crop.”
“Little ones,” Isabel said. “We have the babies and children, and we have middle-aged adults. We don’t have young people.”
The distinction was clear in her mind. Youth like Kip’s, that had just enough seasoning to know what it wanted, but burned with passion and light. As well as working with her every day, Kip often came over for dinner with Isabel; sometimes he brought his friends; even when he came alone he was full of stories about this person and that person; this girl he knew from school who was making it big on the GC modding scene, this other friend from his travels who was working on a novel; this college charthump band who had sent him their new track that he’d play for them after dinner. Isabel had met Kip’s Laru friend, Tuumuu, and enjoyed their enthusiasm for the Fleet and approved of their affection for Kip. But for the most part Isabel listened to tales of young people having adventures on worlds Isabel had never seen, and felt – such cliché – vital, refreshed.
“Bit late now, though, isn’t it?” Tamsin said. “Unless” – a mock gasp – “you’re knocked up, aren’t you? Who is it? Is the hot plumber from the al-Quam? Because who could blame you.”
“Tamsin!” Isabel laughed and threw a cucumber slice at her. Very un-Exodan, to waste food, even a single morsel. Perhaps it was Kip’s disreputable galactic influence. “I mean it. I just... you know.” She waved a vague hand. “I was thinking, if we’d been on the adoption list at the time of the Oxomoco disaster, we’d have a kid Kip’s age by now.”
“We didn’t want more,” Tamsin said. “We’ve made our contribution to the Fleet.”
More so than most, perhaps. Isabel hadn’t mentioned it to Kip, but she had reasons of her own to remember the form of the adoption ceremony. Queer culture in the Fleet had shed some of the specificity it had carried, earlier in human history – Isabel had read in the Archives of flags, parades, tryst clubs, lives led in marginalia – but queer families embodied some of the most fundamental Exodan values. They raised the lost children of the Fleet.
“Yes,” Isabel said. “I wasn’t really suggesting we sign up again at our age.”
Tamsin laughed. “If you really want to…”
“No.” Isabel was smiling, too. “I just think… well. Sometimes it’s all deaths, and sometimes it’s all babies. And sometimes you get to thinking, where your own life falls in the middle of it.”
Tamsin leaned over and kissed her. “You think too much.”
"I know," Isabel said. "I know."
*
It was Kip who finally understood what was bothering Anna, and it was Kip who thought of a way to fix it.
He hadn’t badgered her. Isabel would have disapproved of that. Instead he went to the Exodan Cultural Education Collective and hung around. He met with the other students, explained what he did, said he’d be available for questions. After a week or two of not pushing, not forcing the issue, not even speaking to Anna without being invited to do so, she came to him of her own accord.
He reported back on a quiet morning in the Archive. Isabel listened then sighed, long and deep. “Poor, poor girl.”
“I don’t get it,” Kip said. “Like… why would she think that? Why would she think she was second-best?”
“You’re the one who’s being an idiot now,” Isabel said softly. “She thinks she’s second best because that was her reality. Have you ever been hungry, Kip? Have you ever known, really known, deep inside yourself, that without creds you wouldn’t eat?”
“Well, sure, not everywhere’s like the Fleet—“
“Almost everywhere isn’t, in fact.” Isabel resisted the urge to ruffle his hair, then gave in to it. “So think about this. You’re Anna. You grew up on Mushtullo. You were hungry, more often than not. And then you found something that you thought was new, something good, something you wanted and you thought wanted you back. But she comes to you and me and we don’t have what she needs. We don’t have a ceremony for her. We can make something up, but it won’t be the real thing.”
“Sure it’ll be the real thing! Once we write it – wait till you see what I’ve got, by the way – and practise it and invite a few people—“
“Kip, listen,” Isabel said. “She’s not Exodan, remember? She doesn’t know that we make do and mend. She doesn’t know that what we put together ourselves is as real as anything out there in the world already.”
“You’re wrong,” Kip said, his face set.
“Kip,” Isabel said, frustrated. “She thinks she’s second best because she wasn’t born to this life. She thinks it matters more, where she came from, then where she’s going. Surely you understand?”
“Of course I do.” He looked up at her, eyes bright with all the determination of youth. “I meant, she is Exodan. I’ll show you how.”
*
Tamsin came to the ceremony. Isabel wanted to make jokes about her wife never turning down an offer of free food, but Anna was so delighted that someone she didn’t even know wanted to come to her ceremony that Isabel kept her mouth shut.
A lot of people wanted to come to Anna’s ceremony. Isabel and Kip, of course, and Tamsin; Eyas and Sunny; Bruno and Lam, who had been with her in the first cohort of students; the other members of the Exodan Cultural Collective who had been running the programme; and the members of Garcia hex who Anna lived with; and also Kip’s parents, who didn’t quite understand but knew it was a big deal for Kip, and some others – mostly, Isabel’s fellow archivists from the other ships – who knew something unprecedented was happening in the history of the Fleet, and had come to do their jobs as archivists and witness it.
“Thank you all for coming,” Kip said, when everyone had filed in, sat down and been persuaded to shut up. “We are here to welcome Anna, who joins the Exodus Fleet. Who chooses to join us, despite our past.”
“Tell me about your past,” Anna said. She was standing at the front, still, composed. Isabel had said that they could practise this in advance, if she wanted. She hadn’t wanted to. To do this, she had said, meant doing it for the first time.
“We destroyed our world, and left it for the skies,” Kip said. Isabel’s heart quickened. “Our numbers were few. Our species had scattered. We were the last to leave.”
They had discussed it, Anna and Kip and Isabel. Over hours, and eventually days; because, as Kip said, they were the Exodus Fleet. They discussed things; they were part of things; they shaped, they built, they chose. And if Anna were Exodan, Kip said, she too, should shape and build and choose.
“We abandoned our bloody ways,” Kip said. “We made ourselves anew. Do you choose to join us, Anna?”
He had missed out a large part of the litany, at Anna’s request. This isn’t about you, she had said. About what you were before. This is about us, and what we are now.
“Yes,” Anna said. “I was not born aboard the Asteria. I was not guaranteed shelter and passage here. I did not eat. I did not fly.
Anna had said: don’t rename me. Whatever I was before, I’m not ashamed.
“I choose these things,” Anna said, her voice clear and bright. “I choose these ways. I choose to wander, to wander still. I am the Exodus Fleet.”
“As of GC standard day 212/310,” Kip said, his voice hoarse. “We welcome you home, Anna.”
Isabel rested her head on Tamsin’s shoulder for a moment. From the ground, we stand, they murmured with the chorus; from our ships, we live; by the stars, we hope.
*
“You know,” Tamsin said, over the buffet that followed, “you don’t have to have more children or get married or become an apprentice or immigrate into a brand new society if you want to do something different.”
Isabel looked up from a plate of mixed vegetables. She was, finally, off the clock; the guests were busy tucking into what felt like a week’s worth of food, and she and Tamsin had settled into a corner like the old ladies they were. “What do you mean?”
“I’m just saying, we could take a trip,” Tamsin said. Diffidently, which wasn’t like her. “I mean, we don’t have to go away forever. But we could go to Mars. Earth. You could visit your Harmagian friend on Haskath. If you’re restless.”
Isabel smiled at her, thinking about how she’d liked it so much, just recently, to hear of other places. To help Anna make something new. To – here was a new thought, a freeing, enormous and beautiful thought – leave Kip in charge.
“I’d like that,” she said, slowly. “You and me. We could try something new.”