Excerpt from The Grand Conjunction:

by Sean Williams

She was thirteen years old and doing her homework. The Ancient History and Philosophy of Science had always bored her, but it was a required subject on New Esperance, the Prime colony to which her parents had moved in order to procreate. Their home town of Shizaru was especially conservative when it came to sticking to curriculum. She didn't understand why it mattered to anyone whether Albert Einstein had invented Special Relativity or Quantum Chromodynamics. Who cared if Karl Popper was born on the Earth or the Moon? That was old news of the worst possible sort. She was more interested in singletons and Forts. She wanted to be a reverse engineer like Andavan Carvanan and travel the galaxy, stealing from those considerably more advanced than common-as-muck Primes.

Of course, that was just an entertainment, both the show from which she stole the dream and the dream itself. She was smart enough to know what was likely and what wasn't. Secrets weren't stolen; they were doled out to goad the masses in the direction the Forts wanted them to go. Nosy reverse engineers mostly likely ended up spitted on incomprehensible weapons or absorbed into gestalts. Real life was always more boring and deadly than fiction.

Still, she was determined to do more than live, breed, and die, as her parents seemed content to do. She was a backward kid on a backward world, and only an extraordinary effort on her part would lift her out of it. That meant doing her homework, whether she saw the point of it or not. "Stab with the point and miss," as she had read in an old book on warfare once, "and the battle is over. The sword is sharpest closest to the hilt."

The first ship that came along looking for interns, she swore to be on it.

"Enrico Fermi," she dictated, "was a prespace physicist best remembered for building humanity's very first nuclear reactor. This legacy is a mixed one, since without nuclear power it is unlikely that we would ever have lived in space and reached the stars, but neither would our ancestors have been burdened with the nuclear pollution that poisoned life on our home world until clean technologies were invented.

"Fermi was considered remarkable in his time for being both a theoretician and an experimentalist. (The short life spans in those days made it very difficult for people to follow up on the inspiration of their youth before they died.) Although many of his theories now seem outdated, one of his propositions still troubles philosophers even today. The Fermi Paradox, as it is known, asked the question: why, if life is as probable as it seems to be here on Earth, isn't the galaxy full of it? 'Where is everybody?' Fermi wondered if civilizations destroyed themselves before contacting their neighbors. Later speculators devised complex theories to explain why Earth's siblings were somehow unable to make their presence known. These theories were all debunked by the exploration of the galaxy, which uniformly turned up no evidence of extraterrestrial life more complex than plants and slime molds, anywhere.

"These days, the Paradox remains, although the emphasis has shifted from interstellar to intergalactic civilizations. We fill the Milky Way from end to end. There must be other species out there doing the same in their home galaxies. Why haven't we heard from them yet? The question, perhaps, should not be 'Where is everybody?' but 'What happened to them?'"

Her mother interrupted her the old-fashioned way, by yelling from the kitchen to say that dinner was ready. She saved the essay and sent it, even though she knew her teacher wouldn't approve. Paranoid speculations were frowned upon in a history class; she'd heard that line before. She couldn't help it, though. It seemed obvious to her that absence of evidence sometimes was evidence, just not of absence. If you walked into a city and found it empty, you'd wonder what had happened to everyone. Wasn't it the same here? Wasn't it worth at least thinking about what would happen when humanity did stumble across someone?

"You're too young to worry about this," her mother chided her when she complained over the simple meal. "Besides, you'll hear plenty about it in the history of the Expansion, next semester. I remember being bored of hearing about planet-wreckers and death-seeders or whatever they were called. Just be patient. All your questions will be answered soon enough."

"Aren't there always questions?" she protested. "The Forts don't know everything. It's impossible to know everything."

"That's not what I'm saying, dear. I'm talking about all your questions. We only have a finite number in us. When they run out, we can get on with life as we're supposed to."

By growing old and dying, she wanted to say, full of scorn and bile for her parents' lack of ambition. She looked at them and wondered if they had ever questioned anything in their lives.

"I'm off to Kikazaru tomorrow," her father said through a mouthful of naturally grown beans. "Want to come with me? We could look for that new guitar you've been asking about."

She couldn't contain her excitement, even though she knew she was being bribed for compliance. The instrument she had been playing was an old virtual thing, full of glitches and odd harmonics. She dreamed of a genuine Gibson acoustic made from maple grown on Earth. That was a dream worth having, albeit another one likely to remain out of reach, for now.

After dinner, she went for a solitary walk through the plantation forest neighboring their home. The evening was cool and windy. Pinprick, New Esperance's bright blue primary, was almost completely occluded by its yellow companion, giving the dusk an autumnal feel. Soon the light would be completely yellow and shadows fall sharp-edged again. It made her feel, for the first time in her life, like she was getting old.

It didn't help that her brother still called her "kid" when he came home to visit. It certainly didn't help that Clay Michailogliou had turned down her advances, saying she was too young to experiment with anything too "odd." Just because they were mucking around sexually, Clay said, didn't mean they should form a gestalt. Perhaps they could change genders for a while instead, experiment at being two boys for a while, instead of two girls. Or find a third to spice things up a little--perhaps someone their parents didn't approve of, just to see what would happen.

It wouldn't be enough. She knew that. Clay was as stuck in Shizaru's conservative mire as her parents. She renewed her pledge to get off New Esperance as soon as she could in order to see what else was out there. She would become a singleton and live for thousands of years in thousands of bodies. She would take lovers and do things that would turn her parents' hair green. She would even go to Earth one day and play guitar for the oldest minds in the galaxy. If she wanted to.

By the time she returned home, chilled and refreshed by her walk, the grade for her essay had arrived. It was acceptable but not outstanding. As expected, she had been penalized for speculating too much. At least it wasn't a fail, which meant that her Ancient History and Philosophy of Science unit was safely on track. Next week she had "The Naïve and the Macabre," a tract on what had passed for modernism in the twentieth century, followed by a primer in Old-Timer society. Both were on her wishlist: to see a real Mondrian and to meet someone who might have been alive when it was painted.

Not only was anything possible for citizens of the galaxy, but it seemed to her, on the outside looking in, that anything was perfectly permissible as well.