Once I would have said I wanted “freedom” — the freedom to range, to explore, to soar as high as I liked — but I wouldn’t have said that, because freedom was the atmosphere in which I swam. Once I would have said, “knowledge, to know everything” and I did say that once, as a child, and Yuki-Iskri smiled and said, “The universe is big.”

I was six or seven then, and I replied that I’d want to know everything anyway. I looked at the night sky and my mind was large enough to compass that sight, so I thought that knowing the details of it shouldn’t present an insuperable difficulty.

I hadn’t learned my limits. I would have told you at nineteen that I looked forward to finding them — except that it wasn’t in the sky that I found them but on the ground, and some of it was merely that I was free and others were not, which is to say that I was a different sort of cog in the machinery.

I think I had the sense that studying the past would free me. If it was far enough back, nobody cared. In present tense, people told all sorts of comforting lies.

***

Character interview with the archaeologist and Expedition Chief, Martisset yr Astok, from NaNo 2013, Inside the Jump. Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.