...that sounds familiar.

"What about loving beauty so much that you'll be willing to give up anything just to see what you love again for a moment?"

"I don't know of anyone who came to space for that. But it sounds like it'd do it."

He closes his eyes and imagines that a bud on that one hanging plant over there is in bloom.

The bud doesn't bloom. Tidal force doesn't work like that, however strong your gravity might be.

"Well, it's not dreaming, but it sounds like it might require-- some of the same way of thinking."

"Dreaming?"

"On my home planet, when some people sleep, their minds travel to a land called the Dreamlands which is a land of-- archetype, imagination, beauty, myth. Some people who are particularly imaginative can shape the Dreamlands themselves."

"Oh, Doctor Nix is going to love you."

And whatever Pluto was going to say after that is interrupted.

"Hello, ma'am," Randolph Carter says.

Luna-Terra was going to open with a fired hard-light arrow. Make the first move, force Pluto to respond on her terms.

But she doesn't know this voice, and that throws her off. From Carter and Pluto's position in the Krun Macula, her ship-self looks like a plastic toy, child-scale despite the spear in its hand and the ever-bleeding wound on its chest.

"Luna-T."

"Pluto."

She sounds nothing so much as tired.

"Can we delay the combat a bit and give me more of a sense of the political situation? I'm from a different solar system."

"A different--"

She cuts herself off.

"Guess I should have known better."

(She does not clarify what she should have known better than.)

"Anyway.

The pilot program was an international effort to fight the Existential Threat, more colloquially known as aliens. We can't understand them, we can't perceive them, they barely exist, and insofar as they do exist Pluto wiped them out years ago. So the space program was decommissioned, and Earth wants us back."

[Running from your feelings won't make you stop having them, Luna-T.]

"One year ago Memorial Foundation announced the end of the space program. That they were bringing everyone back to Earth, no matter how little they fit, no matter what they'd built up here or what it would do to them to be back in Earth's gravity. So Cradle's Graces declared independence."

If Luna-Terra even hears Pluto's imprints on gravity, she doesn't respond in kind.

"Yes. We've been at a stalemate since then, except that about three hours ago it turned out the Celestial Mechanics research branch of the Foundation broke about four different treaties and looked into technology they very much shouldn't have, when one of their pilots stole their prototype and made off with it."

[Because Earth and Halimede can't abide the possibility that anyone could learn to live without them.]

"We're offering as much forgiveness as possible," Luna-Terra continues, "but they've already been classified as part of the Existential Threat, and the grace period Earth gave Memorial Foundation to get everyone back down as gently as they can is about to be over."

"Why can't people stay up here if they want to? Do-- asteroid mining or whatever."

"Earth only barely thinks we're human at all. They've already declared Celestial Mechanics a part of the Existential Threat; if we stay up here they'll decide we all are, and then we'll have a real war."

"I-- don't want to make too many assumptions about how your physics works but if it works similarly to the physics in my solar system, if you have a war between people in space and people on Earth, the people in space are going to win."

Luna-Terra laughs, sort of. It isn't funny. You couldn't hear that laugh and think that she thought it was funny.

"How much do you know about ship-self combat?"

"Absolutely nothing, it's not a thing in my solar system."

"Right. So ship-selves-- they're not designed for real combat, and they were never made with practicality in mind. 'Death defeats the purpose of conflict, which is how humans communicate and change; death and war end conflict, while the Ship-self signals the transformation of conflict from suffering to love--' Pluto can quote you the rest, I'm sure she's spent enough time around Doctor Nix.

But Nix and Europa designed ship-selves, not Earth militaries, and Earth uses autonomous weapons that don't have anything to communicate except a bullet in your brain. If Earth and space get in a real war, we all die."