Engine City by Ken MacLeod Page B

Implementing the program on the ancient onboard computers of the Bright Star, the ship in which Gregor’s ancestors had been hurled across the galaxy to humanity’s second home, had taken Gregor and Elizabeth across the four light-years to Croatan and, a month or two later, the four light-years back. The lightspeed jumps were subjectively instantaneous. While they’d been away, people had grown up or aged or died. That first experience of skipping forward in time had been a jolt. As the Cairns clan’s starship fleet had expanded and new planetary systems were laboriously added to the navigation programs, their journeys’ reach had extended, and that first jolt had been followed by many more. Already, the oldest members of Elizabeth’s family, who’d had decades yet to live when her starfaring had started, were long dead. Her parents were barely recognizable centenarians. Her children—at least they had kept pace, because they’d traveled with her. Elizabeth was already beginning to feel that disconnection with common humanity, and that identification with her traveling-companions, that was so patent in the long-established merchant families who for millennia had traveled in the krakens’ ships, slipping through centuries in months.
    —And she thought for a moment of Lydia de Tenebre, still young in the momentary eternity of her century-long journey to Nova Terra, and she blinked that thought away—
    It had seemed their task was done. It was no longer necessary for Gregor, the First Navigator, to go on each newly charted course; or for Elizabeth, the Senior Science Officer, to accompany him. They had been able to get away, to leave the pioneering to others, and to return to exploring their own underpopulated and diverse world. And even, for once, to leave the children at home. Weeks, then months, of wandering the planet’s oceans and islands in the skiff had not tired them, nor ceased to bring them new discoveries each day. This day’s discoveries would end all that.

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RTFM
    M AT C AIRNS, OUTWARD bound from Rawliston on Croatan to Kyohvic on Mingulay, mooches about among a few hundred other milling passengers. There’s not much to do. The ship is just a more or less airtight box with an interstellar drive, inadequate seating, and a few refreshment stalls. There isn’t even a window. After the lightspeed jump, Matt has become so bored that he finds himself reading the orientation leaflet for newbie passengers. It’s available in various languages and in a variety of formats, including one entirely in pictures. The one he selects has a little boxed note at the foot in tiny print:
Literate, largely prescientific (suitable for sailors, traders, shamans, etc. Not recommended for clergy of desert monotheisms.)

    Long ago, he had written the first draft of it himself. His private title for it was: ‘ GREETINGS, IGNORANT SAVAGES ’:

Welcome to the Bright Star Cultures

This may be your first journey in a starship navigated by human beings. Please take a few moments to read this document, which should help you to understand your journey, and your destination. It explains how we on the English-speaking planets of Croatan and Mingulay explain the worlds in which we live. Your own explanation may well differ from the one given here. We respect your opinion as much as you respect ours.
When you look up at the sky at night, you see a broad, bright band of stars overhead, which is sometimes called the Milky Way or the Foamy Wake. What you are looking at is the edge of an immense disk of stars—a galaxy. There are many galaxies in the universe, the nearest of which you may know as the Little Cloud or That Fuzzy Dot There.
The Foamy Wake galaxy contains a hundred thousand thousand thousand stars. The stars are suns like the one you know, but very far away. The worlds on which we live travel around these suns. (See “Copernican Hypothesis, Evidence in Favor of.”) They are so far away that the distances between them are measured in