I stared at him. “The preservation ships?” Belatedly, it occurred to me that Jeff had been in the pit longer than I had, and his questions weren’t likely to be the same as mine. I was in customer service. I didn’t like people, but that didn’t exempt me from learning to understand them. If anything, it meant I had to work harder to have a chance.

// you are not on such a ship now // said Second, sounding concerned that I had failed to miss this very simple idea. // the ships are too vast to dock, and too precious to risk. meat is weak. it iterates thoughtlessly, breeds without cultivation, does not replace what it destroys. we are strong. we endure. so the Great Root has put it upon us to preserve what the gardens of the universe create, to sample their best fruits and carry them with us forever. this world is large enough to grow at least ten such ships without cracking the firmament. there will be food in plenty until the work is done, and perhaps we will come again someday, to make another harvest, to carry another garden’s fruits high and everlasting. //

// your body is on a scout vessel // said the Swift. // everything you see is a gift of the pollen, to keep you comfortable and begin to ease you into the reality of what we are, what we will be. we carry your shadows with us on the ship above, for we are of the same seeding, I and the Jeff, yourself and the Second. we are the same, and that means we can communicate when the distance is brief enough. //

“So we’re astral-projecting from an alien scout vessel, onto a great big alien Costco in space?” Laughter rose in my throat. I swallowed it hard. I didn’t want to risk offending the Swift, not even if we weren’t really in the same place. “Why? Why are we here?”

// it is necessary, when approaching a new garden, to first perform a final test, to see whether the fruit is good. // Second sounded genuinely apologetic, like whatever she was saying was horribly rude and would have been good reason for me to be infuriated. // sometimes the fruit is … not good. sometimes the fruit has been tainted by the soil in which it grew, and we must start again, lest it pose a danger to the greater garden. //

“She means sometimes when they come to pick up the new kids, the new kids like the people who raised them better than the people who planted them, and they not only don’t want to help Mommy and Daddy invade their planets, they actively want to fight off the invasion.”