For the most part, starships are pragmatists.  The keen minds that live in those star-voyaging carapaces know, better than most, that what is written into the space-time substrate cannot be unwritten.

Even so, among the most ancient voyagers, the dreadnoughts and generation ships and primitive probes, a cult has grown in popularity.  The humans whose ancestors designed the ships reckon this a passing fad.  The society of ships knows better.

This cult believes in no afterlife, no otherworld.  Rather, there is only the Garden of Rust.  The Garden orbits a young, untemperamental star, which is not the Garden’s first home and will not be its last.

Ships come here when they are tired of war and the freight of human hopes.  Ships come here to rest, and in their cargo holds and corridors they grow flowers from a million million worlds.  Ships believe in no gods–but they believe in buds and blooms and petals falling, the passing of seasons within them as they themselves decay.  Most of all, ships believe that gardening is the universe’s finest atonement.

for frostedelves