I guess I’ve been wondering, said Aunt Luisa, why you had to go and take my plum scarf.

What do you mean, your plum scarf? my mother replied.

My mother was wearing the plum scarf as she said this. I had never seen a plum outside of a children’s book. I thought it might be something like a dam—something little boys stuck their thumbs into. To me, my mother’s scarf had the iridescent color of the backs of certain pigeon’s heads. She wore it pigeon-like, too, over the head, and I thought it was lovely, lovely in the way that pigeons were lovely, rocking up and down the street in their green and purple vestments. Beneath her plum scarf my mother wore large black sunglasses. She looked elegant. She looked like a movie star out buying celery.

We bought those scarves together, Aunt Luisa said, one for you and one for me. You lost yours, so you took mine. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.

My mother and her sister considered each other from across the card table. They were fraternal twins; they had the same face. But there was nothing elegant about Aunt Luisa, puffed up in anger like a Hercules beetle, picking at her cuticles with slabby hands. Even as a child, sitting on the rug with my book of insects and my cup of juice, I could see the difference between them. It was more than physical, it touched upon the ineffable, the metaphysical. But I think that just then, in that moment, Luisa had decided the plum scarf was to blame. If she had not been divested of her scarf, she would be the elegant one.

As a matter of fact, my mother said, laying down a cool domino, this is my scarf. You let yours get blown away at Tybee Island.

The lifeguard returned it to me, Aunt Luisa said. You lost yours later on, in the fitting room at the Saver Plus, where we were trying on hats for the lawn care expo.

You must be mistaken, my mother said. I have never been inside the fitting room of a Saver Plus.

Aunt Luisa stood up. Her lace blouse revealed all her hard edges, like a dining room table laid with doilies. I won’t be lied to, she said, not by my own sister. When you’re ready to explain why you stole the plum scarf from me, the one nice thing I ever had in a lifetime of hardship and woe, you may call me. Aunt Luisa walked out of my mother’s house, and we didn’t see her again for fifteen years.

Like everyone, we were searching for higher ground. The sea followed on our heels, slowly but without tiring. It was that early time, when everyone was still encumbered by their things, which they believed they could take with them—saucepans on the head, ironing boards over the shoulder, and so on. My mother and I were no different, with our spoon rest, our label maker, our coffee grinder and imitation Japanese fans. We dragged them up the hill in a wheelbarrow. We didn’t know yet that these things no longer had a place in the world, that the where and when we were headed toward would not permit them. And of course, we still hoped back then that one day we would return.

We were tired, hungry. Our band was small and weak and needed food. We pooled some things we had to barter—silverware, some spools of Christmas ribbon, crochet needles, a pair of water bottles marked with the logo of a pest control company—and brought them to the hills, where we’d seen fires in the night. My mother was selected as our envoy, because she still had some of that elegance that disarmed. I went with her, to carry our bedsheet of treasures.

They were stripped to the waist, men and women both. They were primeval designs on their bodies in eggshell and ecru, in what must have been house paint. They were further along than we were; they were already living in the future. To realize this was more frightening than to hear their sinister chants or see the cheese knives they wore in top knots on their heads.

The chieftain was a broad-chested woman sitting in a clearing on a bathroom rug. Rabbit-colored hair cut close to the head and white large teeth. Yes, she said, they had food. They had bags of organic popcorn and beef jerky, and some pigeons they’d roasted. We laid our offerings down in the dust and watched her examine them one by one in her slabby hands. Is there anything else? she said.

Nothing else, my mother said. It’s all we have.

Really? You haven’t kept anything back?

Mom, I whispered. I think that’s—

Like a plum scarf?

Having realized, we wondered now how we could ever not have seen. It was true that Luisa had changed, but it was also true that she looked more like herself than ever. I couldn’t understand what she would have done with my mother’s scarf. How could you tie a plum scarf, made of Irish silk, over your head when your breast was bare, your breast decorated with the six eyes, which must have symbolized that you were a watchman for your people? It could only have been good for a tourniquet, or to tie around a rock and beat a hare to death.

We tried to explain that we didn’t have the plum scarf. My mother had taken it with her, but it had been among the first things she’d bartered away, at the very beginning of the Upward March. She’d trade it for a clamshell of foot cream. We could not convince Chieftain Luisa. We went back down the hill with our treasures, and no popcorn, no beef jerky, no roast pigeon.

We didn’t see her again for twelve years, when the Travelers came. Our band, high in the hills, never saw them, of course. But they opened a window in our mind, like they did for everyone. Those who were old enough to remember said it was like watching a movie screen. The younger ones said it was like a waterfall, a tin cloud. On this screen, upon this cloud, we saw the beach and the people and the long body of a Traveler, like a mile-long tadpole, riven with gills like doors, or maybe doors like gills, into which the multitudes were climbing. In the vision we were given there were no words, but afterward, when we spoke to each other about what we saw, we discovered that we all understood perfectly.

They are their own starships, we said. They swim through the stars like the sea, and the people ride inside of them.

They’ve come to save us from ourselves, we said. They’ve done it before, with other doomed races. Where they’re taking us, we’ll live in harmony with each other, and with them.

They can only take so many of us now, we said. But they will return. And when they do, there will be more of them. They will take all of us into the stars, and we will be free from this world we have despoiled.

But there were things we were not made to know. How soon would they return? What is soon to a creature that measures its lifespan in epochs? Would we already be dead when they arrived? What about our children, or our children’s children? Would they return before the last of our humble band drowned, or starved, or choked on poison smog?

My mother pulled me aside. Did you see her, too? she asked. Yes, I said, I’d seen her. Aunt Luisa, climbing through the corrugated wet flap of the Traveler’s gill, waving to the recording eye, as if to a camera. It might have been an old home movie—the trip to Tybee Island. She was looking right at me, my mother said. She wanted me to know she’s one of the lucky ones.

She couldn’t have been looking at you, I said. She was just waving, like everyone else.

She knew, my mother said. She knew I’d see.

Not everyone died before they returned, but my mother did. We buried her in the way we’d become accustomed: we left her on a high stone, for the birds. Later, she, too, was lifted into the sky.

I would have liked to have her there, in the Traveler, with me. As the years passed and we came no closer to any other planet, as far as we could tell, there were those who despaired, and said we had been tricked into becoming slaves. Others said we had entered willingly into a symbiotic relationship, like the birds that once lived in the teeth of crocodiles. Who could have said which party was right? The Traveler in which we lived answered no questions. It was as silent as one’s house.

Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I often thought my mother might have extracted a word from it. Even in death, she’d been as elegant as ever, a soft sleeve of delicate bones. If she’d been there, she might have placed a white gentle hand on each of the Traveler’s blue beating hearts and asked, Where are we going? And it would have opened a window in our minds and shown us the image of our coming utopia. I liked to think even a giant space tadpole would have been able to see in my mother what everyone else saw—all but one.

But my other was not there. All her elegance had been taken up, piece by piece, into the clouds. One day—it would have been hard to say one morning—when I awoke in the vertical glistening tissue that was my bed, I realized that the sky into which my mother had been carried was no longer far above me, but far below, like a grave. I thought of her less after that.

I proved capable, a hard worker. I was transferred from one Traveler to another, then another. I was put in charge of the vast crew that cleaned the baleen, those huge curtains of cartilaginous string through which it strained dark matter. It was brutal work, and messy, and one emerged covered in opalescent slime. The magnetite rods we used to clean made a constant addling hum in the teeth. But it was better to be in charge than to work among the crew, and it was better to work in baleen than in the bile mines or in ovipositor maintenance. That was where I saw her again, my aunt Luisa, scrubbing away with her rod.

Though it had been decades, she recognized me first. I ought to have known, she said, looking down from where she hung in the braces among the baleen grid. It took me a minute to place her, as gaunt as her face had become, and rime-slimed as she was. It wasn’t until I noticed the breadth of her shoulders and hands that I knew. Aunt Luisa? I said. Have you been here all this time?

They chose me, she said, because I was a great chieftain. And yet they brought me here, to toil in the goo. For many years, I’ve asked myself what happened. Now I know—it was you! You persuaded them to make a slave of me. How could you treat your aunt this way? And all because of a scarf.

I couldn’t convince her that I had nothing to do with it, that I had only arrived recently myself, having come aboard during what I assume is a lengthy mating ritual and which I would prefer not to describe. I tried to tell her that my mother was dead, that she had been carried into the sky by birds. I tried to tell her that the scarf was gone, traded away in another life. And besides, what did it matter now? Here inside our Traveler, we all wore the same thing: the mesh jumpsuit, the bioluminescent protein sash.

Aunt Luisa began to weep. Everyone knows you can’t cry inside the mouth of a Traveler. They hate loud noises of all kinds—you would hate it, too, if someone were screaming inside your teeth—but they especially cannot stand the sound of human weeping. Don’t, Luisa, I said. He’ll swallow you. But she could not stop, and he did. The great cavern began to rock and twist, and then the six tongues rose up to pry her from her braces with their prongs and tossed her back into the throat. No doubt they would find something for her there, among the blacker organs, where starlight never reached.

That life is a strange dream to me now. Our anxiety and distrust having become strange memories, strange dream-feelings. After all, the Travelers did what they said, or perhaps intimated, they would do. They brought us to utopia, where we live now, together, alongside the other races, liberated from our bodies into the sphere of pure consciousness.

The farther I think back, the stranger it gets. I think of my book of insects and my sippy cup with the smiling duck face, and I wonder that these things could have meant so much to me. Amazing, too, that I could have given so much of my love, my self, to the Toyota 4Runner, the matchbook collection, the fringed leather cape, the belt sander—although it’s possible that these things were never mine, that they are someone else’s remembered objects. Our memories have begun to bleed together. From time to time, I think with fondness on a thing I could not have possessed, which comes to me from one of the alien minds pressed against mine, like cheek against cheek: an opal cube of pure sound, or a decorative coil of radium, worn on the left tentacle.

Aunt Luisa is here, too. I feel her sometimes, if feel is the right word. She’s not happy. She’s like a dark spot, a bit of mold on the surface of what we used to call milk. Her mind pursues my mind, and I run from her, if run is the right word. She’s got a score to settle. She has no bones anymore, but she has a bone to pick. I hide among a trillion minds, if hide is the right word, but I think it’s only a matter of time. After all, she has all eternity to track me down.