The captain always closes her eyes during a jump. It’s somewhere between reflex and superstition, and it’s consistent. After each jump, she opens her eyes on a new world. And every time, for just a breath, we catch a spark of hope in her eyes.

Sometime there is no world there at all, especially if Petros is navigating.

Navigating. If you can call it that.

We have mixed feelings about the captain. She’s doing the best she can, but there’s so much she doesn’t understand, so much she can’t understand, not until…well. We don’t like to think about it, but until she’s no different from the rest of us, the ones she summons with her songs and talismans and figures in chalk on the metal floor of the bridge.

We don’t argue. We let her be. We listen to her whisper about how all she wants is a little dirt to sink her toes into. Just a little dirt. Is that too much to ask?

It’s a lot.

Lately she’s grown discouraged. There are so many of us now, and only one of her. Things can get a little chaotic. It’s hard for her to summon us one at a time, and very hard for her to control which one of us she brings across the filmy barrier that separates our world from hers. In fact, she can’t control it. She only thinks she can. And without controlling who she summons, it’s hard for her to control the target of our jump, and if she can’t control where the ship is going, what good is she, really, as a captain?

And so she studies us. Magdalene is the oldest, in the sense that she was the first to die. A child of the ship whose mother told her stories about a lake she swam in as a girl, a high alpine lake with waters so clear and pure you could drink as you swam. That lake, if it ever existed, must have dried up before our ship left Earth for the dark, as was the fate of all lakes by then. Magdalene is good at bringing us to water, but not all of us are so reliable. Petros was older when he passed, but age didn’t make him practical. Quite the opposite. Petros loves color. And after so much time on this spaceship, color has its attractions. Petros takes us to a lot of supernovas. And then there’s Sebastian, the most dangerous ghost of all. He hates everyone and everything, or so it seems. Whenever he takes the ship in hand we end up a million light-years from anything at all. None of the instruments work. No stars visible from any of the ports. It’s horrible. If it were possible to jettison a ghost, we’d jettison Sebastian.

There was a time when this ship was bright and lively with the business of living. There was a mission. We would find a place to land where we could dig into the new-earth and grow plants and babies. Now we’re a ship compelled by the wants of the dead. It works about as well as you might think.

We worry about the captain. We even sent Petros in response to her last summoning, not because there was a chance in hell he’d take us where she wanted to go, but to cheer her up a little. This time, when she opened her eyes post-jump and saw the iridescent wings of Minkowski's Butterfly, she laughed, but it was a choking laugh, and her eyes were wet. To be honest, we’re impressed she continues at all. What can she hope to accomplish, even if we find the most perfect of planets? We’ll have nothing to contribute to it, no future to build, nothing to plant in the dirt.

Finally, one morning, to the extent we have mornings around here, the bridge is quiet and empty. The captain has not emerged from her quarters. A couple of younger ghosts are tossing an old orange peel back and forth. The game might be pathetic, if you had something better to compare it to, but we don’t. Hours pass, and we decide that enough is enough. Magdalene is selected to seep through the mechanism of the lock on the captain’s door, which is, ironically, the easiest way to get in. When she reports back she’s in a tizzy, spinning and sparking and difficult to understand. The captain, it seems, is in bed. With a bottle. And she’s toying with the old captain’s straight razor, tossing it from hand to hand. Not all of us know what this means. But some of us do.

And so, one by one, we enter the captain’s quarters. We sing for her, and we dance. We gather her belongings and toss them back and forth in little rainbows. At first she buries herself in blankets, letting the bottle fall to the floor and roll back and forth, drunkenly. But eventually we see her peeking out, and finally, a smile.

We dance her back to the bridge where she belongs. This effort buys us another year or so, until the morning she doesn’t rise from her cot. We know what’s happened. We lose heart. For days, if you can call them that, the bridge is quiet, until one morning it isn’t. There’s a chanting, like before but softer, and we don’t feel summoned by it; it’s more of a greeting. And then we hear her words. Dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, over and over again. She wants it more than anything, after all, more than any of us ever did. That’s why she’s the captain. But we wouldn’t mind a little plot of earth, a home away from home where we could sink our weary bones. The afterlife isn’t exactly perfect, and a little hope is better than none.

We close our eyes and jump.