You love Earth the way all adolescents secretly adore two-century-old video of nai nai and ye ye dancing on New Year's Eve. She thinks you cannot help but love Earth if you grow up in space. She was nineteen years and nine months old at the moment the ship began its transtellar injection burn, although this is true only if you count by the calendar of a planet she has barely visited but will always love. She is of no single race or ancestry, and the light on her skin is the color of starlight: She drifts with her suit tinted clear so she can soak it up. Yang Liwei is accelerating, slowly but inexorably, toward the stars.
If she slips off this ledge, she will fall down the ship's length at one-third of an Earth gravity, not because there is anything pulling her, but because the ship is pulling away. Down below, along the slim spine of the ship, the shielded bulb of the engine glows invisibly infrared. Upward, the black umbrella of the shield and the matter storage, and the docked ships which make Yang Liwei not just a mothership, but an entire traveling fleet. Of course up and down are defined only by the thrust axis of Yang Liwei. The stars shine brilliant here, because the sun is only fractionally brighter than the rest of them. The woman sits on a ledge that overhangs infinity. Hear these whispers from the lips of Queen-Egged God. If you have grace, then see our sorrows, but swallow back your tears. All things told, all truth revealed, if through mist and mystery. The brave voyagers' fate, the timeless birthing-place, my Milton reenactment, the ruins made ours, the riven twice riven, the daughter's blood scabbed hard on mother's wound.
Beware the one who feeds on truth-adjacent lies! Beware the space between Reality-As-Imagined and Reality-As-Is, for it is abundant to those with appetite. Think too eagerly, and as the digging hand leaves its print in soft earth, so you will find only the image left by your own presumptions. Cut too deep and too quick, and you will kill the thing you want to know. If you do not, then I name you majescept, doubter-of-royalty, and I suggest you watch your edge. If you recognize My Authority then I command you to pass onward as gently as the lover passes a razor over beloved skin. That which digs for truth may bury deeper lies. A wounded insect buried deeper: the secret now half-blind. Comes away with a single whisker, meaningless: the searcher disappointed. A grasping hand reaches for the buried secret, finds the antenna, and pulls. In the nitrate earth of the lightning crater, where the firmament has joined in electric fury with the fundament, there lives a burrowing insect with two trembling antennae, thin as whiskers, long as life. Do you come in hope, o reader, for the secrets of My reign? A parable.
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