The humans were out harvesting something this morning. Tiny brightly-colored figures were swarming among the neat ankle-high rows of shrubs growing outside their village. They were laying out scraps of cloth on the ground beneath the shrubs and reaching up with little sticks to shake the branches.

Iennu had watched the activity in the village change day to day since she'd moved here. In the spring, she had seen the humans out busily digging in the ground; whether planting seeds or digging up roots she could not tell. In the summer, most of the little toy boats that bobbed in the harbor had left and not returned until days later. And now that the days were growing shorter and cooler, it was apparently time to harvest whatever kind of berry it was that grew on those shrubs.

She was reminded of what the xenosociology teacher at one of her previous schools had said about time. Time as we know it, the teacher had said, is a product of contemporary interstellar civilization. To animals and primitive societies, time is nothing but the cycle from day to night and from season to season. They have no need for timepieces and calendars; they can just look at the sky. Only once a society has grown to span a world, then multiple worlds and multiple solar systems, do abstract numbers on a chronometer matter more than sunrise and sunset or first bloom and first frost. Without planetary travel there were no time zones, and without space travel there was no lightspeed delay or time dilation. Animals and primitives led simple lives in tune with the rhythms of nature; they didn't have to run to catch shuttles, get up before dawn to talk to someone on the other side of a planet, or pick up and move every time an arbitrary corporate timetable said so.

Dozens of little stone and clay houses were laid out at Iennu's feet as she walked through the center of the village. Intricate dioramas of domestic harmony, lovingly garlanded with details like tendrils of smoke from cooking fires and thumbnail-size shirts hanging out to dry. Their tiny inhabitants must all grow up together in the same place. They could make lifelong friends who stuck with them from early childhood through upper school and beyond. They had a chance to date their school crushes long-term, maybe eventually marry them.

On most days, she looked on them with wistful envy. On her worst days, she hated the very sight of them, and fantasized about smashing them. She would kick over and stomp out the flimsy walls one by one until there was nothing left but a tiny family cowering in the middle of a pile of splinters and dust. Then she would take a few suitably long and sharp splinters and use them to reduce the family down to size. She would impale all but one parent and all but one child, running a splinter smoothly through their little torsos and pinning them to the ground while their puny arms and legs flapped frantically. When these moments passed, she felt even worse: ashamed to have even imagined childishly lashing out at small innocent life forms just for reminding her of the kind of life she'd been denied.

Seventeen times she had moved. Seventeen times her life had been roughly uprooted and replanted light-years away with a new neighborhood and new school to adjust to, and new classmates to get along with in the limited time before she had to move. She had never attended the same school for two consecutive grades, and sometimes she had had to move in the middle of a school term.

Iennu had gotten very used to stuffing her whole life into shipping boxes, spraying it with expanding packing foam, and lathering sealant onto the seams. She did it so often that she no longer bothered unpacking anything until she actually needed it. Many of her older belongings were still packed in boxes from two or three moves ago.

It often seemed that as far as her mother was concerned, Iennu herself was just another piece of luggage to pack up and drag from posting to posting. A high-maintenance one with annoying complaints and irksome demands that got in the way of her career, no doubt. Daughter, quantity one. Fragile, handle with care.

Maybe instead of a real daughter, her mother should just take some of these humans and raise them instead. A few miniature houses and a miniature school would fit inside a large suitcase. She could just carry that suitcase whenever she moved, and the inhabitants would be none the wiser; their lives would go on without disruption. Then when she got home from work and wanted to play-act as a mother for a while, she could open the suitcase and peer inside, scoop out a spoonful of dinner to feed them and insincerely ask them about their day before burying her nose in data tables and presentations. Really, her mother would be better off raising a pet than raising a daughter.

Taking a wide step over one last cluster of buildings, Iennu cleared the village and continued toward the wall. The girls ahead of her were already clambering over it. They weren't supposed to climb over this wall and walk around the little village, but they did it every day and never got in trouble. It was a shortcut. Iennu had learned about it on her first day, when she'd been surprised how quickly the other students had gotten to the shuttle terminal. She asked them and they taught her this shortcut, but they hadn't spoken much since then.

“Yes, it's a small town and it's a little out of the way, but it'll be nice and quiet,” her mother had said while they were packing up to move here, “And I found out will be three girls your age in the neighborhood. You'll have plenty of friends.”

As if making friends were so easy. Her mother didn't understand that she wasn't a little girl anymore. Little kids could just show up at the same playground, jump into a game of make believe and be fast friends, but this was upper school and the final year at that. Her new classmates had their own lives, their own friends, and their own futures to prepare for. Everywhere Iennu went, she was just an interloper temporarily passing through on a trajectory that kept her outside the elaborate orbital dance of cliques and clubs, friendships and rivalries, couples and jealousies.

Once over the wall, Iennu left the tiny primitive village behind and was once again surrounded by normal-size houses on a normal-size street leading to the town square. It was strange how when crossing into the real town, it always felt at once both more spacious and more confined. Her field of view was constricted, the horizon now occluded by walls on all sides; not unlike the concourses of a station. On the other hand, there was no more clutter underfoot; she could walk or skip or jump without worrying about stepping on anything.

She reached the shuttle terminal and leaned against a pillar to wait. Early in the morning in a place like this there were rarely very many people waiting. The three other girls were huddled together on a bench, talking about their spec school applications and ignoring her.

Whenever she transferred to a new school, she was a curiosity and would get a lot of attention for a while. Especially in a rural area like this one. She'd be peppered with the same questions from everyone new she met, and she'd given the same answers so many times that they lost all meaning for her and became something as rote and mechanical as classroom exercises. Where was she from? Nowhere, and everywhere; she was born on Maruva but had no memory of it. She'd never lived anywhere long enough to call home. Why did she move around so much? Her mother was a consultant in the spaceport management industry, so she moved from project to project all over the galaxy. What were some interesting places she'd lived? The answer depended on who she was talking to. She'd tell planet dwellers what it was like to live on a ring station, with clear canopies and a horizon curving up around you; and she'd tell station dwellers what it was like to live on a planet, with clouds, fog, rain, and snow. And after she moved away from here, she'd be able to tell people what it's like to live on a world with indigenous proto-maruvoids the size of your big toe.

But after sating their initial curiosity people eventually drifted away from her. It was uncommon that anyone thought to invite her anywhere, and any friendships she had were short-lived.

And, needless to say, she'd never been able to seriously date. How could she when she'd always be gone by the end of the term? She had crushes, but she didn't dare confess them because even if it worked out, she couldn't bear the thought of the inevitable breakup. Her experience was limited to fleeting hookups at parties: clumsy drunken pawing at her chest and thighs; her tongue awkwardly fishing around the mouth of someone she barely knew and would never know any closer. It left her feeling empty afterward. She looked upon the blossoming couples among her peers with bitter envy.

The shuttle sputtered in for a landing, with its flaking out-of-style livery and wings projecting annoying ads for tourist attractions. Once aboard, Iennu leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes.

She was so tired of living like this. And she feared that was making it even worse for her. In the past, she'd taken the initiative and actively reached out to build new social lives wherever she went. She'd jumped into conversations, joined a lot of activities, and invited people to hang out. It was a little hard for her to believe, when she thought back on it, how much more outgoing she'd been not so long ago. Now she didn't bother. Worse than that, she just couldn't do it anymore. It was all so futile. The closer she got, the more it would hurt to leave.

What kept her going now was knowing that the end was in sight. One more term and she'd graduate. She could enter specialty school somewhere and stay in a dormitory, finally cut loose from her galaxy-hopping mother, with years in the same place to build a new, lasting life.

She'd already applied to one, in fact: Elestason Center for Higher Learning. It occupied an entire habitat ring of a station on the edge of a nebula, on the other side of the galaxy from this system. She'd taken simulated tours of the campus and fallen in love. Lectures, seminars, and performances held in open amphitheaters nestled in a landscape of sculpted hills and towering luminescent fungi, all beneath the suffuse purple-red nebula shining through the upper canopy. A multidisciplinary program focusing on cultural enrichment over vocational training, and plenty of activities, including a thriving independent music scene. Iennu knew she belonged there. She'd be able to join a group and play her light-harp, perform in a terrace café or one of those amphitheaters. Maybe she could form a group with Calrawé. And who could know where that might lead…

She knew Calrawé was applying to Elestason; she'd overheard it in the singing group the first day she'd joined. She'd rushed home and started her own application package that same night.

Where she changed shuttles it was high noon. Iennu and the girls from her town joined a throng of dozens of students squinting and shielding their eyes, waiting for the next shuttle. Where they alighted it was night; they entered the school gates under the moon and stars.

Going from dawn to glaring midday and then to night in such a short time did no favors to Iennu's sleep-addled brain. This wasn't the first planet where she'd had to attend school on the opposite hemisphere from where she lived, but she'd never gotten used to it. It reminded her again about the perception of time. Her primitive instincts, the parts of her most similar to those tiny simple creatures back there tending the fields of their reservation, still moved under the sway of the sunlight and were thrown into turmoil when that natural cycle was disrupted.

As Iennu sat down at her desk she took a box of stims from her pack and shook it over her open hand. She sighed as just one last tablet tumbled out into her palm. She'd thought she still had two or three left; now she'd be tired in the “afternoon.”

A warm tingle spread through her body as she chewed the tablet, driving back the sleepy darkness for a time.

When group activity time finally came, Iennu practically skipped down the hall to the practice room where her singing group met. She was the first to arrive. She sat down in the corner, took her light-harp out of her pack, plugged it in and balanced it on her lap. She wasn't a very good singer, but she could provide accompaniment; the others seemed okay with that.

The rest of the members walked in a little while later, Calrawé among them. Iennu smiled and waved and her, almost letting her light-harp fall off her lap in her eagerness. Calrawé met her eyes and gave a faint smile; Iennu felt herself flushing and quickly looked away.

Calrawé was in the midst of a conversation as she walked in.

“The notices just came out today, I didn't know I'd gotten in until this morning.”

She might be talking about the Elestason admission notices. If so, Iennu would have hers today also. A nervous rush started to build inside her.

“Gonna miss this place, wéwé?” One the other girls patted Calrawé on the shoulder as she carried a microphone over.

“Some things more than others.” Calrawé gave that enigmatic smile of hers that made Iennu feel like the gravity had gone out and she was floating out of her seat.

The remark prompted the other members to chime in one by one. “Ooh, like what?”

“Inspection days?”

“Picking up trash on the beach?”

“Picking birds out of your hair?”

“Half-price snack sticks?”

“Cafeteria mystery curry?”

“Saucy the talking human?” Then in the squeakiest voice the girl could muster, with a thick affected accent, “Hey… there… little… lady…”

That drew some giggles, but the next impression topped it.

“Droopy-eyes? ‘May I remind you this is study time?’”

The girl who'd said that brought her hands up to the sides of her head and let her wrists dangle limply, in what struck Iennu as a maybe slightly racist impression of an older Uroran (or maybe Ykatorlian) with eyestalks drooping like a wilted plant. They all broke down laughing.

Listening to all this was disheartening. It reminded Iennu of how close these girls had been for so long, and how far on the outside she was. So many shared experiences she wasn't a part of. What was a “bird”? She thought she'd heard the name before, but she didn't remember what it was. Something that got tangled up in your hair, evidently. And she had no idea who “Droopy-eyes” was. A teacher they didn't like, apparently, but she couldn't think of any teacher who fit. Maybe it was a teacher they'd had a previous year.

“But seriously, I'll miss you all.”

One of the younger girls piped in. “Some of us'll still be here. You'll visit, right?”

“Of course.”

“From Elestason? How long does that take?”

“Too long. But I'll have to come home over breaks.”

Another girl piped in, “If you ever get really homesick, try some Starless Nights. ‘It's exaaactly the saaame, I can't belieeeeve it!’”

This joke Iennu got; it was a pretty good mockery of a fantasy drama-obsessed tourist. With her light-harp she played a jaunty, comedic rendition of the main melody of the Starless Nights theme, making a neon cloud rise up and burst in the air over their heads. Everyone laughed.

Iennu felt good after that; confident enough to say something to Calrawé.

“You know I might be going to Elestason too, right? Maybe we can see each other there.”

Calrawé regarded Iennu silently for a moment, her wise dark eyes scrutinizing her as if seeing her for the first time.

“Sure, that'd be nice.”

She made that mysterious smile again, and Iennu felt like she was going to either melt or float up to the ceiling.

Elestason. Calrawé. The written characters danced tantalizingly in Iennu's head on her walk home. She silently mouthed the names over and over, savoring every movement in the dance of her lips and tongue that formed the syllables. Cal-ra. Tongue first curled back then reaching outward and upward to tap the roof of her mouth behind her front teeth. Ta-son. Lips open wide and then closing into a rounded ‘o’. Like blowing a kiss.

She was so distracted that while taking the shortcut cutting through the human village, she accidentally stepped in a whole clump of their shrubs. She didn't realize it until she felt the brittle branches and stems snapping underfoot. Whoops. When she lifted her foot, the sole of her shoe was caked with tiny green flaky leaves. Only a little of it came off when she shook her foot. Now she'd need to wash this shoe off before school tomorrow. She'd also left an ugly trample mark in the middle of the foliage; good thing no one was around to yell at her about it.

Ordinarily a clumsy mistake like that would have left her feeling pretty upset, but not today. Things were looking up.

When she got home, she took her time washing up and changing clothes. She thoroughly washed the leaves off of her shoe. She was deliberately savoring the rush of anticipation she was feeling.

Then, finally, she picked up her databoard and checked her messages. There was a new message from the Elestason admissions department, as she'd anticipated.

Thank you for your interest in academic programs at the Elestason Center for Higher Learning. We have carefully reviewed your application and we regret to inform you that…

She stopped reading and hurled the databoard away. It struck the wall and clattered onto the floor. She got up and stormed out of the house, pausing only to pick up her backpack. Her mother could get home any moment now, and she didn't want to face her. She needed to be somewhere else, anywhere else, alone.

Outside she half-walked, half-ran towards no particular destination. She would not sit and play her music in those amphitheaters under the nebula's purple-red glow. And she would not see Calrawé again after graduating. Calrawé would go to Elestason and sing. She would stand behind a microphone and tap her feet and sway to someone else's music. Iennu would probably end up going to some cut-rate vocational school on a soulless commercial station, memorizing jargon for a license in institutional food preparation or cosmetic nano-application or spacecraft sanitation.

Was it her scores? Flying halfway around the planet and going to school in the dead of night, always being lulled asleep by the darkness outside the windows, how was she supposed to compete with kids who studied in the daylight? Or was it activities? With so much time spent moving, and so often living in rural dumps like this, how was she supposed to stay involved in some activity long enough to get good at it? The whole admission process was tilted against her.

She stopped walking when she reached the seashore. The sun had almost completely set; just a sliver of the sun lingered over an ocean ablaze in gold. It was very beautiful; it made her even more miserable. So much beauty in the world, but nowhere a place for her.

She followed the shoreline, kicking at stones as she went, letting tears flow freely down her cheeks.

It was her mother's fault, all of it. She spent all of her time planning the optimal placement of overpriced junk in spaceport concourses, and no time planning her daughter's placement in the world. Oh, that girl? Just put her anywhere. She'll adapt. She spent all of her time sweet-talking her clients and bosses, and no time understanding her own family. This was why her mother had divorced and never re-married, too. Iennu was sure of it. With a mother like that, what could she herself have ever done to make things better? She was doomed from the beginning. It was so unfair.

It had been dark for some time when she came upon the edge of the wall around the human reservation, where it met the ocean. She climbed over it and continued a short distance before stopping. Her legs were getting tired, and this was a decent spot to sit for a while. There was an open flat spot that sloped gently down to the water. No one would come and bother her here at night, and it was far enough away from the village that she wouldn't hurt anything by sitting here.

Iennu sat down on the slope, setting her backpack down beside her. She wanted to stretch out all the way, but there wasn't enough room; with her knees bent, her feet were almost touching the water. She leaned back on her elbows and looked at the sky for a while.

The planet's single large moon was fully visible, shining cold and pale. She'd seen so many moons. Most of them looked about the same, barren cratered rocks of brown or white. And yet no matter how similar two moons looked, she never mistook one for another. Whenever she saw a moon for the first time, it instantly looked wrong, even if it took her a while to identify the exact differences from the previous moon she'd gotten used to. It was as if the same part of the brain that recognized the facial features of friends and family recognized the craters of moons, too. All of the moons in Iennu's life were short-term acquaintances, just like almost all of the people. She wondered what it was like for people who lived most or all of their lives seeing only one moon. Would that moon be a companion for them when they needed one most, sitting alone at night?

Iennu took her light-harp and power pack from her backpack and set the instrument up on her lap. She did a scale to warm up and then started playing.

She began simply, with languid oscillations forming a suffuse background, then gradually elaborated with more and more complex layers. Ephemeral wavelets that bloomed and then faded away, and recursive cycles that grew on their own once set into motion. She rarely looked at the helper lights projected onto her fingertips, mostly relying on muscle memory alone to guide her fingers through the wave definitions.

This was her own music. Her own composition that she'd been refining, little by little, almost as long as she'd played the light-harp. She couldn't claim it was very original; it was inspired by most everything she heard, from the classics to pop, from corporate anthems to cues from drama sims. To others it might sound derivative, but to Iennu it was hers and hers alone. Her outer world was always being wiped clean and redrawn, but she always carried this musical world within her, steadily whittling away at it. Sharpening peaks here and smoothing out plains there.

She never played like this for anyone else. She knew it wasn't anything anyone would want to hear; too raw and amateurish, too derivative. At Elastason she could have met other young players, formed a group, improvised together until they came up with their own sound. Maybe Calrawé would have been one of them. But Iennu wasn't good enough; they'd rejected her.

Her finger twitched and overreached while tracing a wave in the air, and it ended up with a jagged needle of a peak. When that peak came around, the ugly shrill squawk made her wince, marring another wave.

Mistakes were inevitable. She was just practicing by herself, after all. She could go on. She would go on.

But the flaws kept coming back, ambushing her in the midst of intricate weaving and making her falter again and again. Soon the world she'd built was a tangled mess, riven by fractures and tears. The misshapen projections cavorted in front of her face, mocking her with the sight of the damage she'd wrought with her own clumsy hands.

That was it. Iennu shut down the light-harp and flung it to the ground.

She was no musician; she was a pathetic little girl playing with an expensive instrument she didn't deserve. It was no wonder she'd been rejected. Even if she'd gone, she wouldn't have belonged with the real musicians. They would have recognized all the parts of her maudlin music that she'd ripped off, and snickered. She would have made mistakes in front of them, and they would have laughed as they walked away. All the musicians there were probably prodigies, practicing their music since early childhood. Elites who'd studied under the same exclusive tutor most of their lives. And Calrawé, she belonged with them. Not with a nobody like Iennu.

Looking at the night sky through her tears, the stars shimmered. She closed her eyes and lay down on her side.

Iennu was jolted awake by the feeling of something brushing against her hand. Something very light playing along the side of her hand by her little finger. It felt like the soft tip of some long, slender antenna or feeler probing her. She jerked her hand away and jumped up, but when she looked around there was nothing there. She had imagined it, or it had been some trick of the wind.

It was time for her to get back home anyway. She still didn't want to face her mother and tell her about the rejection, and she dreaded having to admit it at school tomorrow. But by now the shock of it had washed over her, leaving just resignation. Both of the encounters would happen, and nothing she did now could change that. She picked up her light-harp and put it in her pack. It didn't look like she'd damaged it, luckily; it was sturdily built and the ground was soft. She'd just need to clean it off. She didn't immediately see where the power pack had fallen, so she squatted down to look for it, taking a light from her pack and sweeping it over the ground.

She found the power pack, but as she was reaching for it she spotted something else. A human, lying face up on a pebble about an arm's length away.

What was it doing here, so far away from their village? Iennu was curious. She shined her light over it and leaned all the way down to look at it closely. It didn't move. Was it sleeping? Or dead?

She'd never seen one of them this close out in the open. The ones in the village always stayed far away, and the few she'd seen in captivity had always been behind glass. She knew there were places you could go to interact with them and see them perform, but she'd never been interested.

It was lean and wiry, with little muscles tensely drawn across its limbs. It had a short tuft of dark hair, and it looked young. Maybe around the same stage of development as her, though how many years that meant she had no idea. In that museum she'd visited once, just after moving here, there had been displays explaining the lifecycles of humans and other indigenous life, but she'd found them boring and hadn't paid attention.

She could see now that the human was alive, but injured. Its clothes were torn, and it was covered in bruises and scratches. Like it had been in a fight or something. She wondered how long it had been here. It was possible she might have hurt it accidentally; she'd carelessly sat down and thrown around her things without checking the ground. Since the humans always fled or hid from her, it hadn't even occurred to her that there could have been one on the ground when she got here. Plus she hadn't been — still wasn't —in the best state of mind.

What should she do? The human must be too injured to move; that must be why it hadn't run and hid when she approached. If she left it here, would the other humans be able to find it? It seemed doubtful this far away from their village. She would have to take it to the village herself. The only other possibility she could think of was to tell the volunteer caretaker and let her handle it, but that would mean confessing to having trespassed in the reservation. No thanks.

She would have to be very careful to avoid hurting the human even worse. Fortunately it was on a downward slope, so she was able to transfer it to her hand without grasping it. She extended her index and middle fingers and brought them alongside the pebble the human was lying on. Then with her other hand she slowly, gently slid the human onto her fingers. It weighed almost nothing. It stirred as she moved it, shifting its arms and legs listlessly, but was soon still again. It must be sleeping.

She made her way cautiously along the shoreline in the direction of the human village, shining her light on the ground and watching her step. She couldn't stop looking at the human resting on her extended fingers. Its head was lying on the tip of her middle finger, and its feet at the knuckle. Its arms were splayed out, one touching her index finger and the other dangling down the side. Its eyes were open now. It didn't move, but just stared straight up at her. It must have been in pain and afraid, but its eyes were unexpectedly steady. As if it understood she was trying to help, and was entrusting its life to her. That made her shiver; the sudden sense of responsibility was overwhelming.

“It's going to be alright,” Iennu murmured, knowing the human couldn't understand. Maybe the meaning would come across just from her tone of voice. Or maybe the words were more for herself.

Soon she came upon the village. She'd never seen it at night before. It was eerily quiet and still. The illuminated streets traced a shining web on the ground, and the houses were dark silhouettes with windows glowing yellow-orange. The myriad unblinking eyes of some living creature, silently watching and waiting.

There was no way to tell which house this human lived in. If it were lucid enough, it might have been able to point the way, but its eyes were closed now; it seemed to have drifted off again. The best she could do was to set it down outside the nearest house.

She knelt down and lowered her hand at the side of the closest house. Then as gently and gradually as she could, she tilted her hand so that the human rolled off onto the ground. It didn't stir; it must have been sleeping deeply.

She softly rapped her knuckles on the side of the house, trying to coax the occupants out to help the injured human, but there was no response. Either there was no one home or they were too scared of her to come out. She'd done all she could. Maybe they would come out after she was safely gone. She looked at the human one last time; it was lying peacefully beside the wall of the house. She delicately touched it once with the tip of her finger, then got up and headed out.

Perched atop the wall, Iennu turned and looked back at the village. From here it was a cluster of soft yellow lights nestled closely together in the dark. Like a constellation in the sky, and just as distant from her.

She jumped down the other side of the wall and walked down the road to her house. The front light was on, waiting for her.