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My grandfather used to teach me the names of the constellations, the names of plants and trees, the verses of long-forgotten songs. How is it that he gained this information? How is it that no one wants it anymore? There must be a generation of children who learned it, those who remember it are scattered in what is left of Earth. Hiding in the corners of the southern isle I came from, perhaps ranging all across Europe, the union of nations that never bothered with the stars. They were happy enough with Mars and with their own history, and left space to the greedy ones. Someday, perhaps, I will travel back there and find what remains. A work of a lifetime, perhaps of many lifetimes.

The Primos system is the second closest system to our own, my grandfather would point out its sun in Ophiuchus, or as he called it, the Serpent Holder. “Folk live there” he said, “People like you and me, looking back at us”. He had never been adrift in space, but he knew the minds of others already in the black. Hadrian was a hazy twinkle in Leo, the Lion, who roamed overhead those long southern nights. Lys, my own lion, was there as I looked up through the void. Every time I cast my eyes upward, I was staring at him, though I did not know it yet.

They had barely started to settle Michaela when my grandfather died, but it was I who showed him where it was, swimming in Pisces. He loved mythology, said it was the way the ancients ordered their world. They explained everything with stories, and then set the stories in the stars. We’re doing the same thing, now, making stories in the stars. This time we have hardly a glace to spare at anything else.

Delta Pavonis is one of many stars that points a way south, in the constellation my grandparents affectionately called “The Saucepan”. The Romans had no story for it, they could not see it, but those more ancient than they used it to find their way home. We’re no different than those ancestral navigators. They, like us, have no real idea what any of this truly means.