Every month Rafi's mother stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence.
Every month the ship released another part of her last message. The family allowance covered ninety seconds of incoming personal audio. Anything longer went into a queue, to be delivered as bandwidth became available.
She had never learned to be brief. She talked while cooking, interrupted herself to find a spoon, remembered something she'd meant to tell him the previous week. Rafi loved the wasted time. It sounded like being in the room.
His daughter knew her grandmother as a voice that arrived in pieces.
"Why does she keep stopping?" she asked.
"The ship has other things to receive."
That was true. Cargo prices. Machinery updates. Full-resolution entertainment for the officers. Personal messages came last, although the distance to Earth delayed every transmission equally.
Rafi worked on the communications array. His job was to keep it pointed accurately, not to decide which stored packets reached their recipients. When a fault in the archive required him to check the receiving system directly, he discovered his mother's whole message had been aboard for months.
So had thousands of others.
The ship was nearly four light-years from Earth. Anything arriving now had begun its journey four years earlier. The archive added a second delay, one selected by people in offices two decks above him.
Rafi opened his mother's file.
She was in the kitchen. He heard a saucepan touch the stove. Then a siren sounded outside her window.
"Don't worry about that," she said. "They've been testing them all week."
He stopped the playback.
The message they'd released to him ended just before the siren. The next part began with her talking about a neighbor's tomatoes. A section between them had been marked unsuitable for delivery.
Rafi played the missing section.
His mother said the port was burning. She'd been told to leave the district, but the buses had stopped coming. Someone had painted directions to a shelter on the bakery shutters. She was going there after recording this.
"If the connection goes, don't think I forgot you."
Rafi put both hands on the desk.
He searched the incoming news archive. The receiving station on Earth had stopped transmitting after the same date. Before it went silent, it sent accounts of attacks on several cities, the destruction of the orbital transfer ports, and emergency instructions that contradicted one another.
There was no confirmed report of what happened afterward. That uncertainty hadn't appeared in the passenger briefings. The ship still advertised return berths after the colony's first construction phase.
Rafi had been saving for one.
The communications officer found him at the archive terminal.
"You shouldn't be in that directory."
Rafi asked when they had learned the ports were gone.
The officer looked at the screen. "Before the first return-berth sale."
"You took people's wages."
"The company expects infrastructure to be restored."
"Do you have any contact with them?"
"No."
For a while neither spoke. Outside the compartment, the ship made its constant low mechanical noise. Hundreds of people were living toward a future built partly out of a place they believed they could go back to.
The officer said a sudden release would cause panic. There were counselors, schedules, plans for disclosing information as the population became ready.
Rafi asked whether he had listened to his own family's messages.
The officer looked away.
"Then let us listen to ours."
He told Rafi to leave the room. Instead Rafi opened the maintenance channel used to distribute received data across the ship when the central routing system failed. It could reach every cabin. He wasn't sending anything across the stars. All the voices were already here.
The officer reached for the control that would revoke his maintenance access.
"Think what happens afterward."
Rafi thought of his daughter listening to a woman discuss tomatoes while the part where she said goodbye remained in a locked directory.
Rafi turned the screen toward him. The officer's family name was there among the waiting recipients.
The officer withdrew his hand. Rafi left the screen facing him while he confirmed the transfer.
The files went to their intended recipients, together with the unedited news archive. Around the ship, conversations stopped as cabin terminals announced messages from home.
Rafi was removed from the array crew that evening. There would be an inquiry. The return-berth accounts were frozen pending a passenger meeting. People shouted in the corridors; others closed their doors. Nobody had to pretend the silence from Earth was ordinary anymore.
In his cabin, Rafi played his mother's whole message with his daughter beside him.
Near the end, his mother stopped talking to listen to something outside. There was a long silence, full of the kitchen's small noises. Then she said their names and told them she was leaving for the shelter.
The recording ended with her trying to find the stop control. She laughed at herself. Rafi had almost forgotten that laugh.
His daughter asked whether her grandmother was alive.
"I don't know."
"Can we send something?"
He explained how long it would take, and that there might be no receiving station left. She wanted to send it anyway.
Rafi opened a reply. His daughter described the garden they'd planted in a tray beneath the cabin light. When she finished, she asked him not to cut out the parts where she'd forgotten what to say.
He sent all of it.
