“I actually don’t want to hear stories today,” I said. “I’ve been talking to Mother, and—”

“Now, now,” Gran-Gran said. “No stories? What has happened to you? Surely they haven’t ruined you already, up there in flight school.”

I sighed. Then decided to approach this from a different direction. “Were any of them real, Gran-Gran?” I asked. “The heroes you talk about. Were they actually people? From Earth?”

“Perhaps. Is it important?”

“Of course it is,” I said, dropping beads into cups. “If they weren’t real, then it’s all just lies.”

“People need stories, child. They bring us hope, and that hope is real. If that’s the case, then what does it matter whether the people in them actually lived?”

“Because sometimes we perpetuate lies,” I said. “Like things the DDF says about my father, as opposed to the things we say about him. Two different stories. Two different effects.”

Both wrong.

I dropped another bead into its cup. “I’m tired of not knowing what is right. I’m tired of not knowing when to fight, not knowing if I hate him or love him, and… and…”

Gran-Gran stopped what she was doing and took my hand in hers, her skin old but soft. She held it and smiled at me, her eyes mostly closed.

“Gran-Gran,” I said, finally—at long last—finding a way to voice it. “I’ve seen something. It proves to me we’ve been wrong about my father. He… he did turn coward. Or worse.”

“Ah…,” Gran-Gran said.

“Mother doesn’t believe it. But I know the truth.”

“What have they told you, up above, in that flight school?”

I swallowed, feeling deeply fragile all of a sudden. “Gran-Gran, they say… they say Father had some kind of defect. A flaw deep inside him, that made him join with the Krell. Someone told me there was a mutiny on the Defiant. that some of our ancestors might have served the enemy too. So now, now they say I have it. And… I’m terrified that they might be right.”

“Hmmm…,” Gran-Gran said, stringing a bead. “Child, let me tell you a story of someone from the past.”

“It’s not the time for stories, Gran-Gran.”

“This one is about me.”

I shut my mouth. About her? She almost never talked about herself.

She started talking in her rambling, yet engaging way. “My father was a historian on the Defiant. He kept the stories of Old Earth, of the times before we traveled into space. Did you know that even then, with computers and libraries and all kinds of reminders, we found it easy to forget where we came from? Maybe because we had machines to do the remembering for us, we felt we could simply leave it to them.

“Well, that’s a different topic. We were nomads among the stars then. Five ships: the Defiant and four smaller vessels that attached to it to travel long distances. Well, and a complement of starfighters. We were a community made up of communities, traveling the stars together. Part mercenary fleet, part trade fleet. Our own people.”