“They farm starlight.”

“Bullshit.”

“Okay, they’re going to farm starlight. For now they’re running fusion rigs. But that’s not their long-term plan.”

“No one in the sunforsaken Oort has a long-term plan. Other than slow suicide. You know what they told me, when I was first coming out here? ‘There are warmer ways to die.’ That’s in the bloody Kuiper.”

“You’re from Haumea, right?”

“I mean, to the extent you can be ‘from’ that rock, sure.”

“Haumea’s a real place. I’ve been. I’ve touched down there.”

“‘Touched’ is right. Take a step untethered, you fly right off. Gravity is more of a gentle suggestion than a rule. What do you mean, ‘a real place’?”

“It’s got, what, a thousand active and embodied living there? It’s got a laserline connection, a news feed. It’s not a world, exactly—”

“That’s for sure.”

“—but it’s got a sky.”

“Yeah, the famous spinning sky. Fastest rotation of any natural object inside of Sedna’s orbit. What’s your point?”

“No one out here in the Oort has that, right? Stability, normality . . . enough redundancy that you’re not always one glitch away from certain death. Enough bandwidth to taste the inner worlds . . .”

“You can have your inner worlds! All a big gravity well gets you is meme density and runaway feedback loops and people turning into day-glo mushrooms. Give me Ganymede or Triton . . . somewhere you can walk around, but people are still people. Humans! I know that word is unfashionable . . .”

“Uh-huh. My point is, everyone in the Oort is a suicidal drifter . . . except these people.”

“Your star farmers.”

“Starlight farmers. They’re seeding asteroids with life. Very-low-temperature life, this extremophile lichen stuff that will grow in hard vacuum . . .”

“On starlight.”

“Yeah, sunlight, starlight; this far out, who cares?”

“You realize the math on this does not work out.”

“It’s slow. We’re talking, you harvest a fruit every thousand Earth years. Maybe ten thousand.”

“What in . . . ? How long have they been out here?”

“I think about five hundred years?”

“So they’ve spent five hundred years preparing for a harvest they won’t live to see? So their descendants will have a snack . . . every millennium? In the Oort?”

“Well one thing the Oort has is room. Once they’ve got this ecosystem going, they can forage forever. The Earth gets swallowed up by the sun . . . they keep munching . . .”

“That’s . . . completely . . .”

“I know.”

“How can they imagine . . . ?”

“They do, though.”

“And this is where we’re going?”

“Well, they’re . . . hard to find.”

“Very funny. Anyone in the Oort is hard to find.”

“Harder. On purpose. Solar sails only, stealthed to look like rubble. Dissipated infrared.”

“Why?”

“They don’t want anything derailing the project. They’re ecologists, right? This whole ecosystem they’ve designed for out here . . . super cold and super slow, durable . . . sustainable. They don’t even like using fusion because it’s not reversible.”

“Has anyone mentioned to them that starlight is also fusion?”

“That’s different, that’s not in their garden. Starlight’s coming in anyway. But mining ice and then not putting the hydrogen back where they got it? That’s extractive. And that’s one of their worst curses. ‘Extractor,’ that’s what you call someone if you want to end a friendship.”

“But why are they hiding?”

“Their culture is part of their ecology. They’ve designed something they think can last a million years, or more. Continuity, stability. Everything that’s the opposite of the suicidal daredevils in the rest of the Oort . . .”

“And they don’t want anyone infecting it with random ideas.”

“Right. Disrupting their memetic homeostasis.”

“How do they find each other? If they’re so paranoid about being found? Tight-band, encryption . . . ?”

“Not even. They mostly don’t send signals. They have rituals, patterns; they know where to find each other. And I haven’t even gotten to the clans — they’re divided into clans by bacteriome, in a cladistic hierarchy, in descending levels of purity, so that an infection in one clan can’t travel up the chain to the pure strains . . .”

“An infection? What, like a communicable disease?”

“Yeah, in the people or their crops or gear . . . a cultural-memetic infection, an informatic virus, anything; it’s all usually sealed off. Hybridization encounters are carefully planned. When two clans are supposed to rendezvous . . . to send their children to set up house and create a new subclan with a merged genetic and memetic inheritance . . . they have the approaches and meeting points planned out decades in advance . . .”

“So they don’t even send signals, they’ve just got the meeting in their calendars . . . so how in Kelvin’s cold womb are we going to find them? We’d have to know in advance where they’re meeting!”

“Yeah.”

“. . .”

“. . .”

“So what happens if one of them breaks rank? If one of their kids get restless, down on the farm? What happens if they want to get out of this million-year project and go see the rest of, pardon the expression, humanity?”

“They don’t . . . take kindly to that.”

“I see. You’re . . . not actually from Xanadu Station, are you?”

“I never said I was from Xanadu Station. I said I was coming from Xanadu Station.”

“So . . . you do know where these star-farming hermits are meeting up. Because you . . .”

“Right.”

“What are the chances that they’re going to kill us?”

“I mean . . . they’re not usually violent. Among themselves. Their plan is usually to hide, not to fight.”

“Okay, but an apostate, who betrayed the million-year project, who knows all their secrets . . . that could be a different case. Their plan is to hide, but if someone left, and knows where they hide . . . ?”

“It hasn’t happened a lot. So I’m not sure.”

“. . .”

“. . .”

“You’re that homesick?”

“I’m not if sure that’s the word, exactly.”

“Of all the bloody voidsucking, suitleaked, asinine . . .”

“We can still turn around. We’ve got plenty of blast left.”

“Uh . . .”

“It’s fine. It was just an idea. I just . . . sometimes I hear their voices, and I wish I could show them . . . convince them their memeostasis is more robust than they think. Ah, it’s stupid.”

“It is stupid. The problem is, now I’m curious.”

“Yeah?”

“What the hell. There are less interesting ways to die.”