THE BECOMING

Sorath had stopped counting years somewhere around his four hundredth. He was the oldest living Ketheri, and had been for longer than most of his people had been alive. At some point the number became less informative than the fact.

He walked the upper observation level of the research station every morning before the light-cycle shifted. This morning he stood at the viewport and looked at the stars for a long time. And he thought about the people he was leaving.

Essa had died two hundred and eleven years ago. A biologist — careful, precise — who had found his obsessiveness more interesting than exhausting for much of their life together, and then had found it simply exhausting. They had not separated with anger. They had separated with the quiet understanding of two people who had tried to occupy the same life and found that one of them kept leaving it for somewhere else inside his own head.

She had raised their son Soel largely without him. Sorath had shown up for the milestones. His body had been in the chair. He was not sure, looking back across two centuries, how much of himself he had actually brought to any of it.

Soel had died eighty-three years ago. His grandchildren had been polite at the memorial — the specific politeness reserved for someone they had been told to respect without being given a reason to.

He had a great-granddaughter named Teva. She had sent him a message three years ago asking to meet. He had read it four times. He had not answered it.

Standing at the viewport, he held the knowledge of this without looking away. He had made that choice. He had made many choices like it, and they had accumulated into the shape of a man who had done extraordinary work and had not been, in the ways that required presence and patience, particularly extraordinary at anything else.

He asked himself whether he actually wanted to do what he was about to do. The real question, not the prepared answer.

What he found was complicated. The yes was there — forty years of work, two centuries of watching the Vorai patterns grow closer in the data. And underneath that, something older: you are about to stop being yourself. You are calling it a transition because transition is easier to say than ending.

He stood with the discomfort. He did not resolve it. He turned away from the viewport and continued his walk.