For a while we worked together in stolid silence, my brother and me. The light leaked out of the sky, and my mother’s porch lanterns, big cool bulbs, popped into life. Mosquitoes buzzed and swarmed.

John made small talk. “So how about the digital millennium, huh? You’re the engineer; tell me if I need to worry.”

I shrugged. “We’ll survive. Just like Y2K. It won’t be so bad. They’ve done a few trial system excavations to check.”

John laughed at my choice of word. Excavation.

It was the latest scare story to sweep the planet. Next year’s date, 2048, was an exact power of two, in fact two to the power eleven, and so it would require an extra binary digit to represent it in the memory of the world’s interlinked computer systems. Nobody quite knew what that was going to do to the “legacy suites,” some many decades old, crusted over with enhancements and embellishments, that still lay at the heart of many major systems, grisly old codes rotting in computer memory like the seaweed on my mother’s beach.

“So,” John said, “just another scare?”

“We live in a time of scares and wonders.”

“It’s not a rational age.” As the Paint continued to thank him, John sighed. “Listen to this damn stuff. Lethe, maybe it’s rational not to be rational.”

Intrigued, I asked, “What do your kids think of the millenium?”

“Nothing, as far as I know. I try to get them to watch the news, but it’s a losing battle. But then, nobody watches the news nowadays, do they, Michael?”

“If you say so,” I snapped back.

This conversation, tense, on the edge of fencing, was typical of us. It was the thin surface of an antagonism that went back to our late teens, when we had started to become aware of the world, and we had begun to shape our attitudes to the future.

I had aimed to become an engineer; I wanted to build things. And I was fascinated by space. After all, when I was ten years old they discovered the Kuiper Anomaly: an honest-to-God alien artifact sitting at the edge of the solar system. For those of us who cared about such things, our whole perspective in the universe had been changed. But we were in the minority, and the world continued to turn, and I was out of step.

John, though, became a lawyer, specializing in environmental-damage compensation suits. I thought he was cynical, but in the wake of the vast political and economic restructuring that had followed the Stewardship program he was undoubtedly successful. By tapping into the vast rivers of money that sloshed to and fro in a destabilized world he had become hideously rich, and was now aiming for greater ambitions — while I, an engineer who built things, could barely pay the bills. That probably tells you all you need to know about the state of the world in those days.

We really got along remarkably bad, for brothers. Or maybe not. But still, this was my brother, the only sane person left who had known me all my life, with due respect to my mother.

And I longed to tell him about Morag on the beach.

I’d never told anybody. Now I felt I should. Who else to tell but my brother? Who else should know about it? He would mock, of course, but it was his job to mock. Standing there working with him, as the lights grew brighter in the gathering gloom, I plucked up my courage, and opened my mouth.

Then the lights fizzed to a silver-gray nothingness. Suddenly John was a silhouette against a darkling sky, holding a useless paintbrush. We heard cries of disappointment from the kids inside the house.

“Damn it,” John snapped.

The house, or anyhow the Paint, was apologizing. Sorry, sorry for the inconvenience.

It was a cooperative brownout, as the sentiences dispersed in the neighborhood houses and bars and shops and streetlamps, and in the water pumps and buses and boats, responded to symptoms of alarm coming from the local power microgrid — usually a glitching in the main supply frequency — and shut themselves off. It was better this way, better than the bad old days of stupid systems and massive blackouts, everybody said. But it was a royal pain in the butt even so.

My mother stuck her head out of the window. “And that’s another reason I don’t like that silver stuff.”

John laughed. “We’ll have to finish tomorrow, Ma. Sorry.”

“You’d better come in; the mosquitoes will be at you in minutes now that the electric fences are down. I’ve got no-brain-chicken slices, and cookies, and cards to keep the kids quiet.” She shut the window with a bang.

I glanced at John. I couldn’t see his face, but glimpsed the whiteness of his teeth. “Gin rummy,” he said. “I always hated fucking gin rummy.”

“Me, too.” It was one thing we had in common, at least.

He clapped me on the back, a bit more friendly than before. Side by side we walked into the house.

That was when I got an alarm call in my ear so loud it hurt.

There had been some kind of explosion in Siberia. Tom, my son, was out of touch, maybe hurt.

As she had grown up and become aware of her world, Alia had always known that the Nord was a ship, an artifact, everything about it made. And that implied it had an origin, of course, a time before which it hadn’t existed. She had never really thought about it. The present was the thing, not some discontinuity in remote history; wherever you grew up you always assumed, deep inside, your world had existed forever.

Nevertheless, it was true. This ship had once been built, and named, and launched, by human hands.

The Nord had once been a generation starship. Crawling along at sublight, it was designed to journey for many generations, after which the remote grandchildren of its builders would spill onto the ground of some new world. It was believed it had been launched from Sol system itself, probably built of the ice of a remote moon, perhaps of Port Sol itself — and perhaps even by the legendary engineer Michael Poole, descended from the subject of Alia’s Witnessing, an earlier Michael Poole who had been doomed to live in a much drabber time.

But that was probably just a story. The truth was the Nord’s port of origin was long forgotten, its intended destination unknown. Nobody even knew who its builders were or what they had wanted. Were they visionaries, refugees — even, it was whispered deliciously, criminals?

Even the ship’s name was a subject of intellectual debate. It might have derived from nautilus, a word from old Earth referring to an animal that lived its life in a shell. Or perhaps it derived from North or Northern, an earthworm’s word for a direction on a planet’s surface.

But whatever its target had been, the Nord had never reached it. Long before it completed its voyage it had been overtaken by a wave of faster-than-light ships, a new generation of humans washing out from Earth and rediscovering this relic of their own past. It must have been a huge conceptual shock for the crew on that day when the first FTL flitters had come alongside.

But when that generation had passed, the crew had accepted their place aboard a bit of bypassed history. They had begun to trade with the passing ships — at first with the Nord’s reaction-mass ice, billions of tons of which still remained, and later with hospitality, cultural artifacts, theater shows, music, elegant prostitution. The Nord was no longer a vessel, really; it was an artificial island, drifting between the stars, locked into a complex interstellar trading economy. Nowadays nobody aboard had any ambition for the voyage to end.

Of course if you lived on a spaceship there were constraints. The Nord’s inner space was always going to be finite, and the population could never grow too far. But two children were enough for most people: indeed most had fewer. Alia knew that she was fortunate to have a sister in Drea; siblings were rare. Her parents, though, had never made any secret of the deep and unusual joy they had derived from their children.