#timeline wise

Ce stares out the window, at a wide scape full of stars.

"Were you born in orbit?" Pandora asks suddenly.

Ce nods. "Around Venus. But we didn't stay there long. Most of my life has been spent on family ships."

"May I ask where you went?"

Avalon shifts. "Oh, everywhere," ce says vaguely, waving a free hand. "When we saw the Sentinel we were somewhere between Neptune and Pluto. Before it was settled properly, of course."

"Mhm." Pandora remembered when Finn's lighthouse had been decommissioned, once there was enough regularly travel to map and a surface control that could readily communicate with passing ships. Integrity had been the first, but she was far from the last.

"I was born on Earth," Pandora says quietly. "In the mountains. My parents we researching early human spaceflight." She reaches out to brush the thick glass with her fingertips. "The sky was blue," she says softly. "It was so blue."

"How long as it been?" Avalon asks gently.

"We went to Mars when my mother got a research grant. I was 15."

"You never went back?"

Pandora's head shakes sharply. "No. I moved further out, and joined the Sentinel program when it was first announced."

Avalon's head snaps towards Pandora. "When it was first—"

"I'm sixty-eight." Pandora laughs something hollow, tracing the whorls of her palm with one finger. "My parents' parents' parents were alive during the last of the Apollo program. They grew up on the stories of it, and I grew up on the stories of Artemis."

Avalon gasps. Every child knew about the Apollo flights, about Sputnik, about the unlucky ones who never made it home and the lucky ones who did. Everyone.

"Have you been here all that time?"

Pandora nods. "Forty-two years," she whispers, and lapses into silence.

"Which way is it?"

"Pardon?"

"Which way is Earth?"

"Oh." Pandora shifts, and then points. "There. The blue dot."

Avalon squints and leans forward. "I can't see it," ce says.

"Neither can I," Pandora whispers. She presses her fingertips harder against the glass. "It might… it might be on the other side of the sun. There's, um. There's a photo, a very old one. I can… hold on." Pandora reaches around, and pulls at something taped to the base of the light. "Here."

Avalon takes the photo: black, except for a few stray beams of color—sunrays, ce thinks—, the brightest near the right third of the photo. And in that beam, a tiny pinprick of light. Blue.

"Pale Blue Dot," Pandora says. "It was taken a hundred-odd years ago, by Voyager 1."

"Voyager 1?" Cer head turns.