Everything we’re made of came to be in the first moments of existence. There was the beginning, and so quickly thereafter, so brief a glimmer of time we can only conceive of it in millionths of a second, there was matter: electrons and quarks. Another glimmer and the quarks became protons and neutrons, dancing madly where only emptiness had been before. Ages passed— minutes, but when all of time is the hold of a breath, minutes are eons. Particles clumped into pairs. Time and space stretched, stretched, days, years, centuries, millennia rolling outward into the nothingness. Electrons organized themselves into flickering clouds of probability around the nuclei. The first atoms of hydrogen and helium were born. One million years, then two, time passing with no one to measure it, no memory to weigh it against, before gravity nudged those lonely atoms together into fierce burning lights to spot the darkness.

“And that,” my mother said to me, “is where it gets interesting. Everything we are was born in the hearts of stars. Do you still think that’s boring?”

My answer that day was a noncommittal shrug. I heard her tone as teasing and scolding. I was too young to recognize it as loving. I would not hear the love in her playful tutelage until years after she was gone. I had never thought her lessons boring, but I was afraid to admit interest to my mother, whose mind was so much faster than mine, whose well of knowledge was so much deeper. I wanted to learn things in my own time, even the lives and deaths of the stars.

“Are you sure you’re my son?” my mother had asked, poking at my belly. “Maybe I picked up the wrong one at the maternity ward, because I know I asked for a child who doesn’t find the universe boring.”

The space between a truthful memory and a story made true only in the repeated telling of it is smaller than we imagine, but I believe my mother was full of joy that day, the day Captain Ngahere announced that House of Wisdom was going to intercept UC33-X and bring it aboard for study.

We were floating together in my father’s garden on Level 7. The ship was traveling at a steady velocity; within hours the propulsion drive would engage, and our feet would press to the floor, but that was yet to come. Around us the garden was an unending summer in vibrant hues of green, flowers fragrant and blooming. My mother had caught me skipping my lessons with the tutor to wander around the ship instead. Her punishment had been to bring me to the garden and teach me about the universe. Beyond the windows the stars were small, the sun behind us, the Earth tucked away on the other side of the solar system.