DATE: Year 487-A, Sol 4

  LOCATION: Arrokoth (Kuiper Belt)

  Ganna Grover was sick of the Saganites. She learned as a child, like all Saganite children did, about the history of her people. The departure from Earth in the late 22nd century, two hundred fifty years after the birth of the scientist from whom their founding society took their name, the arrival on Jupiter and the transformation of the ark ships that brought them to Jupiter into the Jupiter Sagan Cities, sky cities atop the gas giant’s atmosphere, the departure from Jupiter in some of the same sky cities for the brown dwarf Nemesis after Saganite scientists were finally able to confirm its existence.

  This part she was proud of. Saganites were a people, who had gone out into the solar system with intention, on a project that spanned hundreds of years and continued to this day. Not like other humans, whose ancestors largely went out into the stars in search of quick profit, or with lofty dreams but no sense of planning, braving the elements on hope alone.

  Grover didn’t like how rigid everything was. When she first learned about the Jupiter Saganites, the Kuiper Belt Saganites and the Nemesis Saganites, she felt intensely that her family had gotten the raw end of the deal. Jupiter Saganites got to interact with other humans, the solar system was within reach for them. Nemesis Saganites were on the final frontier, reaching out of the heliosphere and toward the literal stars.

  Kuiper Belt Saganites were just here. Mostly on Pluto, with a few spread out on other Plutoids. They traveled a lot back and forth but there didn’t seem to be much purpose to it, at least from where Grover could see it. She understood, on another level, that the rigidity she bristled under was what accounted for the Saganites’ longevity.

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  Grover thought about the Plotinus quote at the start of one of the books by their namesake all children read. Mankind, the Greek Egyptian philosopher had written two and a half millennia ago, was situated half way between the gods and the beasts. Two millenia later, the Saganites’ namesake didn’t seem to think humans had progressed all that much further. But now, Grover thought, the Saganites were midway between the Earth and the heavens. And she was stuck here, hopping from rock to rock in the icy outer solar system, but not so far out to be reaching for the stars.

  She’d didn’t have a problem staying on Arrokoth because she knew nobody would come looking for her, and the transmission station had a pretty substantial cache of living supplies.

  The transmission station had been converted into an unmanned one rather suddenly. For a long time there had been a crew of four, with men and women taking ten to twenty week terms there. Eventually it became three when the table chiefs couldn’t reliably find four suitable candidates. The term lengths were doubled, then doubled, then made indefinite. When one of the crew died of a heart attack, they weren’t replaced and there were two. The last two were evacuated from the transmission station when one of them became pregnant, a rarity anywhere by that time—most children were cloned—but especially in conditions as harsh as the rocks of the Kuiper Belt. The two were never replaced. A team showed up to automate remaining functions. No one bothered with the supplies because there wasn’t really a way to pull them out of the underground storage in a way that made it worth bringing back to Pluto to actually use.

  The last two at Arrokoth were Ganna’s parents. Naturally, she was selected for running routes that included the transmission statement, though this had been her first time there. Her parents had told her lots of stories about it. One that stuck out after she’d heard what happened at the Hotel Florida was about the egg-shaped asteroid.