“We spent the rest of the day drinking coffee and wandering the farm, with me explaining Earthly lore to Torina. It struck me that the story of our planet was fantastically complex, which made me realize that every planet I’d encountered, dozens of them, had histories as rich, and complicated, and nuanced, and sometimes ridiculous or infuriating, as Earth did. When I thought about the sum total of all that stuff, I was quiet for a moment or three. The galaxy was… complicated.”