I wasn’t present in the Comm Nexus on Work Level 73 when the ancient starship arrived in the Lock —or should I say “tried to arrive and somehow succeeded"?— but I felt it. Everyone did. The entire Station, two hundred levels of it, shook. Why? Because the starship shouldn’t have gotten in, I was told later. It registered, by its proton profile, as a Highland Class A, one of the first designs— which it was, or had been once, though it was bigger now, bigger than the newest classes. When our starlock and its concentric tokomaks accepted the ship’s jump, the stress of it cracked viewing plates throughout the Station and the Lock itself spit out rivets trying to hold the thing that had appeared suddenly in its embrace. 

When you are a ship that has been traveling the galaxy for a thousand years, and the nanomechs have been repairing your outer skin for those thousand years, you have a lot of scar tissue. Your outer hull is twice as thick. The starship-class identifier just doesn’t know it and you get a go light. It thinks you’re the same size you once were and realizes too late you’re not.

Had the ship collapsed, its pilot would have died in the implosion. Had the Lock ruptured, the Station and its five thousand citizens would have died. Somehow neither gave. It was like a strange homecoming, one that both pilot and Station community wanted even if they didn’t know it, and so the Lock took the ship in.

 “Sidha!” the starship pilot called out on a hundred frequencies, a cry. He called out the name the instant his ship materialized in the Lock, and he kept calling it, like a beacon, as the ship sat there. Or should I say the ship called it out, since the pilot had, over that millennium, become the ship. They had been a single thing for a long time.

“Sidha! Sidha! Sidha!”

What is love? It is, scientists tell us, what it needs to be to serve human beings in whatever circumstances they may find themselves. To serve them by providing connection to others in the formation and function of a “tribe,” and to nurture emotionally —because millions of years of evolution on a distant home planet cannot be overridden in mere millennia— the individual who must operate within that “tribe.”

“Romantic love” as it was once experienced in other “circumstances” occurs occasionally on a Station like ours, but it does not serve the operations and survival of the Station as it may have once served small, planet-based communities or a societal economy based on consumption of cultural “stories” and values. On this Station, if we feel a “romantic” love, we are told, it should be for the Station itself, the greater cause and purpose of it, and not for another individual with a forename and surname and number. “Romantic love is selfish,” they tell us, “unless it is for a higher purpose.”

Have I ever “loved” another discreet human on this Station? No. I have never needed to. Why would anyone here have that need? In my units on the Domicile levels (I have lived in four) I have had sex in order to nurture body and psyche, those relics of evolution, but that is not the same. I may have felt affection for my sexual partner, whose face was attractive, but that is not what I mean by “love” as the Protocol staff used the term in our meeting a few hours ago. I have had more than one long-term, shared-cell partner in my life of thirty-three standard years. I am of course attracted to the human body, but that isn’t “love.” Though partnering may generate comforting emotions simply by a routine of a psychologically safe intimacy that may or may not involve sex, partnering isn’t “love” either.

Why the Station is willing to oblige the cyborg pilot, who has asked to see me, I do not know. They could refuse him, citing the same reasoning my supervisor cited for my endless questions: it would be “destabilizing to Station operations.” Perhaps it is because of an old law. Or simple courtesy. Perhaps it is at the request of the Station’s behavioral scientists. Perhaps only the “curiosity” of someone at a supervisory level, though why resources would be spent satisfying that emotion I do not know, especially if the cyber-consciousness running the ship is, as they claim, “insane.”

I spend time on the Station’s computers as I wait to be called again. I spend it wisely, but what I find myself looking for surprises me, though perhaps it shouldn’t: What is “insanity”? Can it be fixed, and even should it be? And this too: What is it that really lies beyond the Station and Lock? What is “the universe,” “the galaxy”? How can something that is dark and endless, so blind, also be full of light and wonder and seeing? How could one be unhappy out there?

This is curiosity, I know, and it creates problems, the behavior analysts say. I have been reprimanded before.

When the time comes later in the day, the Protocol staff escorts me through three quarantine-styled mini-locks (they have tested for microbial contamination and there is none) onto the starship. We walk for an hour from one deck to another, our bootsteps echoing, a strange energy everywhere, and finally we reach the bridge, which is smaller than I imagined it would be for such a vessel. I have never been on a ship before. Few of the Station’s citizens have, though a dozen ships pass through the Lock every standard day.

Standing on the bridge, they show me a hand-held hologram of what they imagined he would have looked like as a discreet body. Pale skin, pale hair, brown eyes without an epicanthic fold, short but bigboned. A uniform of the kind the interstellar fleet officers once wore. The hologram is small and doesn’t move. It tells me less than what I need to know. Than what curiosity would want me to know.

“Where is he now?” I ask.

“On the other side of that wall,” a staff member answers. “It was once sleeping quarters, but was long ago refitted to contain, oxygenate, feed and rejuvenate a human body to whatever degree the ship’s resources were able. You could say he is sleeping, but he is quite awake, and waiting for you. If you speak, he’ll know it is you. We’ve synched your voiceprint to the gen-profile.”

“Hello,” I say to the air, not knowing what else to do.

We are not wearing suits. The ship makes its own oxygen, stale though it smells, and the Station’s own vast system is ready to supplement if necessary. I can hear the breathing of the six Protocol staff members near me, and I can hear my own. 

“Hello, Sidha!” a voice booms suddenly. The software is old and the voice like an ancient transmission from space, from another corner of another galaxy. It is strangely androgynous, neither man nor woman, or both, but for some reason it makes me happy. 

“Hello, Captain Salceda.” I have been given his surname and told to use it. It was a name from three of Earth’s continents, from a strange world where the people often spoke more than one human language and traveled from continent to continent when they were able.