It was the last day of a three-week flight, but Seo-yun still shivered every time she saw her pilot.

Keremy had unsettlingly long, gangly limbs—as skinny as a ruler. Seo-yun had seen pictures of people who grew up in null-grav, but it was an altogether different experience to actually see a spacer on his ship. The way he climbed through the ship’s weightless corridors, endlessly long arms effortlessly reaching for faraway handles, had an altogether inhuman appearance. Like a spider.

“A spida, ye say?”

Seo-yun would have jumped if there were gravity. Behind her, Keremy’s smile was hidden by his thick beard, but the edges of his eyes were wrinkled.

“Di—Did I say that out loud?” Aigo, I’m an idiot!

The spacer laughed, and it was a breathy, sandpapery sound.

“Don’ go worryin’ around. I’ve hea’d worse from pricks with flatta tongues and bigga noses than you.” Keremy swung his way to Seo-yun, joining her in the lounge. “Not goin’ to shitlist ye for a little loose-lippin’.”

She only recognized a little of the slang, but it was enough.

“I still feel pretty bad.” Seo-yun cast an apologetic gaze to the side. “I wouldn’t be happy if someone called me a spider, even if he didn’t mean it.”

“He’d be lyin’ though. Ye a pretty one, like an actress from a vid.”

Seo-Yun had encountered Keremy’s odd bluntness before, but this was the first time it made her break out into self-conscious laughter.

Keremy looped his elbow through a handlebar on the opposite side of the porthole that Seo-Yun floated next too. Outside, the stars were like little grains of sand sliding down a sheet of black silk—spinning and drifting to the side as the ship tumbled through space.

“Look,” said Seo-yun, pointing out the tiny window. There was a shining spot, half the size of a dime, sliding lazily across the porthole’s field of view. “That’s Earth, isn’t it? I see it every few rotations, and it’s getting bigger each time.”

“Yea, that’s her ol’ right. 'Bout four or five light-ticks away.” Keremy scratched his beard. “Ye could turn on the coms and find some tunes on the radio, if ye’d like it.”

Seo-yun thought for a moment.

“No,” she decided, “I think it’d ruin the moment. It’s beautiful, just seeing it from here, you know?”

Keremy nodded; his elongated neck made it a slow, exaggerated movement.

“Distance makes things pretty,” he said. “Nobody’s gonna want somethin’ ‘til you don’ have it.”

“Yeah," Seo-yun trailed off. “I've never been to Earth. What about you?”

“Been there plenty o’ times,” he said with a shrug. “Just neva outside m' boat. The grav'll crush my lungs like eggshell.”

“Oh.” Seo-yun suddenly recalled hazy memories of null-grav physiology in an anatomy class she had mostly slept through. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’ be. Not ye fault.” Keremy’s eyes drifted. “M’ pappy wasn’t no spacer. He live’ on New Eden. When the Hard Times came, they hit tha’ planet bad. Couldn’t afford no house no more, ‘cause the dirt under it got unaffordable. Folks was sellin’ all they had to rent fifty feet o’ ground to sleep on.”

The pilot's weightless beard shook as he exhaled.

“Pappy always gots tha' look in the eye when he talk about tha’ time. Tha’ look o’ regret,” Keremy continued. “He sell his house and his clothes and his t’ings to buy a space-boat to live on. He takes job with the gov’ as a hauler—he flies his family around space, carryin’ cargoes for the rich pricks who sold his planet in the first place.

“And then he gets tha’ look o’ regret, when his kids grow up all gangly-arm’d and long-legg’d. He gets tha’ look o’ regret, ‘cause there will be no more planets for his kids, or their kids, or their kids. End o’ the Earth for us. We can only make more spacers, now.”

A silence fell over the still, sterilized air.

“That’s terrible,” Seo-yun said. But her words felt limp to her own ears. “I... I hear they’re working on grav therapy. Maybe they’ll find a cure?”

Keremy shook his head. “Not in time fo’ me, they don’.”

Another of the ship’s turns brings Earth into view again for a minute or two.

“But it isn’ so bad,” said Keremy.

He presses his thumb against the glass, where a faraway planet hurtles through space towards them.

“Methinks it makes life more beaut’ful.”

Keremy smiles, and his admiring eyes meet Seo-yun's.

“The view from a distance.”