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"And then the nights." I told him of the sky of Dawn at night, ablaze with stars, a hundred times more than earth’s deserted skies. Dawn was closer to the centre of the spiral arm of the galaxy, and the stars in its sky shone in swathes of red and blue and yellow. I told him of the rain of Dawn, falling straight down from the upper reaches of atmosphere in a crashing torrent that seemed to beat the breath out of your body and yet left you feeling cleansed and alive.

"Dawn is a wonderful planet, Mr Kangas," I said. "Earth-sized, with a breathable atmosphere, no dangerous predators and no lethal diseases, but then you know all that anyway. What you don’t know is what it means." I waved a hand at the window. "Outside, there, this world’s dying. Whatever anyone pretends, everyone knows that it’s dying." We both watched the polluted rain fall down past the concrete canyons of buildings for a minute. "All we have here," I reminded him, "is economic collapse, environmental holocausts, and wars over resources. It can’t go on like this forever, you know. And on the other hand, we have Dawn."

He looked down at his hairy twisting hands. "From what I found out," he said, "this immigration isn’t actually legal."

"It isn’t," I said frankly. "But the laws are strictly for the books. My ship is a regular cargo liner, as you know; we go out on a multi-stop trip, mostly to barren little planetoids and mining stations. The only really important stop is on Dawn. We have accommodation that’s never used, an entire bank of stasis units, twenty of them, and –"

"You mean the coffins," he said, with the slight shudder I’d come to expect from those who had never used one.

"They’re stasis units," I said firmly. "Not coffins. They’ll keep you in suspended animation for the trip. Even though we’ll be going at nearly the speed of light, in ship time, a couple of years and more are going to pass. Yet you won’t get older by more than a day or two."

"And can you tell me one more thing?" he asked. "Why me? It’s not as though I’ve got any special skills to contribute. Nor can I pay enough to make it worthwhile for you."

"It’s not a matter of pay, sir. Nobody can pay enough to make it economically viable. But some things are beyond economics." I wasn’t about to tell him that we’d take anyone of productive age who was willing to go and wasn’t so significant as to be missed. We needed people on Dawn. "You do realise that once you go, there’s no return? It’s a one-way ticket, strictly."

"I know," he said, staring down at his hands. "That, I know."

I sat back in my seat and looked down at my control panel.

Outside the viewports, a billion stars spangled the black. They were like gauzy veils across the face of space, tiny white glittering jewels that crowded the forward viewports – an illusion caused by the velocity at which we were moving. Once, in my first few trips as a trainee and as a new commander, I used to sit for hours between watches, just gazing at the gulfs of infinity, and wondering what strange eyes were staring back at me. Now – more years later than I cared to think about, years that my bones felt even though relativistic velocities kept my body young – I no longer did anything like that. The romance was long gone, and the job was just a job like any other.

The lights on the control panel screens, the curved lines, the scrolling figures, all told of a ship in good health. The gigantic scoop of the ramjet engine sucked in hydrogen atoms, crushed them, and spat them out again as white-hot plasma, hurling us through interstellar space at nearly the speed of light. The gigantic cargo holds, the reason for the existence of this ship, were all stable and undisturbed by radiation, physical damage, or any of the thousands of other things that could happen.

As I checked, for the third time this watch, all the systems, I remembered what friends had told me, over and over. "Jamileh," they had exclaimed, one and all, "what a wonderful job you have. Oh, if we only had a job like that! The places you must have seen!" I’d always remember, then, the awful loneliness of the life of a cargo liner pilot, of how we spent most of our time alone on the ships, at almost the speed of light, and how the only places a cargo pilot ever saw was grey transit stations and shuttleports before the next leg out.

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