Part Four: The Three Clocks

Entry 100. 2634. Rest. The first landfall.

The reader will have noticed the entry number, and the record, which has never once organized itself for ceremony, notes only that if a testimony is going to carry a hundredth entry, it could do worse than this one. (The calendar note first, for the reader keeping the ledgers: this part and the last overlap; the cradles were still filling and failing while the events below began; the record files by weight, not by clock, which is fitting, because this part is about what happens when a species stops sharing one.)

The GS Perpetua, first of the great March ships, departed the Ceres ring in 2231, two thousand and eleven souls, toward a star her crew renamed, at the departure liturgy, in the custom their whole culture was inventing as it went: REST. Four hundred and three years, at the speed of earned distance. Five and a half generations. And in the summer of 2634 she performed, flawlessly, the braking burn her builders had designed four centuries dead, and made orbit around the world of Rest, and found it lit.