Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer

The screen turns to flickering white lines behind a ‘Connecting…’ prompt. I find myself smiling and look up at the night sky. What do the natives call that constellation? Sarg something. Sarga Nol? Bigger… ‘Sarghalor Noghath’! Yes. Conceptual translation gives us ‘The noghath watches’. Neither the indigens nor us have any idea what a Noghath is. The origin of the name predates two civilisations, and has survived four cataclysms, unlike those who gave it. All that remains are fragments of lore that speak of startling wisdom and phenomenal endurance. The latter being entirely appropriate.
Back when I was a child, my great-grandfather ran an antique bookshop. Being his favourite, he let the precocious and avid reader I was browse any tome he had. From an old one I read shortly before he died and the shop was sold, I came across a poem that ended ‘For distance is the answer to grief’.
I can’t remember book, author, or anything else. Just that final line. When June breathed her last after they let me shut down her life support, those words were blazing in my mind. They continued to burn through days of datawork, funerals, distant relatives, and hollow words. It was a mercy Suki, our daughter, had grown up before our loss turned me into a stranger to the life I’d loved up until June’s accident.
In the end, I just left. That final line was the content of the email I sent Suki by way of inadequate explanation.
I went down to the coast. Then across the sea. Then across a continent. Two. Three. Came back to my home from the opposite direction, then promptly took a left and set off again. When a second circumnavigation failed to help, I went up: the Moon. Mars. Titan. Waystation Ten. The Globes of Centauri. Luyten Sanctuary. June still haunted me. So I went on: all four Wolf outposts, and on again, and yet further.
Eight years and a distance I cannot comprehend later, I was sitting across the way but scant minutes ago when I realised my mistake.
A book written in the early 1800s by a broken man – while travelling by varied, primitive means between Britain and the Bahamas – captured his bleak, world-weary outlook all-too well, but was limited by that world: what he knew and understood. While his struggles spoke to me, the solution he realised was presented in his terms.
The relief he perceived as coming from distance is simply the softening of loss as time passes. While he pondered the waves on the passage around Africa, I spent a similar time travelling to Waystation Ten, out on the largest surviving piece of the Fifth Giant, far beyond Pluto. I’ve travelled further than the poet who penned the words that drove me could imagine, yet only seen marvels amidst my grief, instead of laying it down along the way.
The screen flickers to life. It’s too far for a stream, but with a connection made I can record a short video.
“Suki, I’m sorry. I’m coming home.”
With that sent, I look up again, then give a little salute.
The noghath watches a scruffy tourist turn from the callpoint and start to walk briskly towards the spaceport, a measure of wisdom having finally arrived.