Long ago — or far enough into tomorrow that it might as well be long ago — in a galaxy that turned the way galaxies do, there lived a boy named Liam.

Liam was eight years old. His spacesuit was a little too long in the legs and a little too snug in the shoulders, because it had belonged to a captain before him, and the captain before him had been a different shape. His helmet was sharp enough. His starship was slow.

The trouble in the galaxy that year wasn't trouble exactly. It was something quieter.

There was a planet drifting at the edge of the system, silver-green, soft as cotton in the lens, and nobody on any of the charts had been there. Not the comet captains, not the moon-cats, not the long-haul freighters that hauled ice between the planets. It was on no map. It was assigned to no mission. The grown-ups in the galaxy looked at it once, shrugged, and moved on to brighter things.

Liam couldn't stop looking at it.

He went to the admiral's office on a Thursday. The admiral's office was a big round room with a window the size of a wall, and through the window you could see every starship parked at the dock. The admiral was old and slow and had read every chart there was to read.

"Sir," Liam said, "I want to go to that planet."

The admiral looked up. "Which planet, son?"

"The silver one. The one nobody's been to."

The admiral set down his pencil. He looked at Liam in his too-long spacesuit and his sharp-enough helmet, and he said, "There's nothing to rescue out there. There's no enemy to fight. There's no prize."

"I know," Liam said.

"You don't have to go."

"I know," Liam said. "I just want to look. I want to know the end."

The admiral was quiet for a long time. Then he reached into his desk and brought out a heading written on a paper card, and a name written above it: the Starship Brave. The Brave was a small, square, old ship, parked at the back of the dock behind all the bright new ones. Nobody had asked for it in years.

"She's slow," the admiral said.

"That's all right," Liam said.

He took a thermos from the cafeteria, packed a lunch in a tin, climbed aboard the Brave, and lifted off.

Three days of empty sky.

The first day was the loudest, because Liam was excited, and excited fills a small ship like steam fills a kettle. He talked to the dashboard. He checked the heading every ten minutes. He drank half the thermos by lunch.

By the third day the ship had gone quiet. The kind of quiet that gets into the corners of a small ship and stays. Liam sat in the captain's chair with the thermos in his lap, the engine humming low under his boots, and he didn't say anything for a whole afternoon. He wasn't lonely exactly. He was just listening to the galaxy in the way only a captain alone in a slow ship can listen.

And then, on the morning of the fourth day, he saw it through the porthole.

The planet was pale. The planet was soft. The planet was the color of the inside of a seashell, only larger, and lit by a sun he couldn't quite see yet. Liam set the Starship Brave down on the biggest plain — and down, on the silver planet, was a thing the ship had to figure out, since nothing had landed there before — and he opened the door.

The air was thin and clean. The ground was not dust and not grass, but something in between, the texture of pencil shavings, soft under his boot. The gravity was light. When Liam stepped out he came down slower than he meant to, the way a feather decides to land.

He stood there for a moment in the soft pale dust, helmet on, thermos in his hand. He looked. The planet stretched out around him — mountains in the distance, a river curling quick through a low valley, a wide round crater at the horizon where something old had once landed and left.

Nobody had been here before. Nobody had named any of it.

Liam pulled a folded paper out of his pocket and a stub of pencil out of his pocket and he started to draw.

He drew the biggest mountain first, the one closest to the ship, because the closest things get the best names. He looked at it for a long time, and then he wrote Mama under the line, because the mountain was steady and would hold up the rest.

He drew the river next. It was small and quick and ran in tight curves like it didn't want to be caught. Iyla, he wrote. The river took the name and ran on.

He drew the wide low valley. Ava, he wrote, because the valley ran the place — the river drained into it, the mountain drained into it, the planet's wind found its way through it. The valley was where everything had to come.

He drew the crater out at the horizon. He thought about it for a while. The bear's crater, he wrote, because the crater was soft and round and slept in.

Then he walked the planet for the rest of the afternoon, drawing as he walked. Every stone got a small mark. Every stream got a thin line. The map filled the front of the paper and then it filled the back. He scooped a tiny jar of the pencil-shaving dust into his pocket, careful, so he could show somebody at home what the planet was made of.

By evening the map was finished. Liam folded it small and slid it into the seam of his captain's coat — the inside seam, the one captains use for the things they can't lose. Then he climbed back into the Brave and pointed the heading at home.

The Brave was slow on the way back, too. Three more days, the way the slow ships do.

The admiral met him at the docking bay. Lifters were unloading freight from the bright new ships behind them, but the admiral didn't look at any of it. He looked at the Brave.

"What's it like out there, son?"

Liam took off his helmet. He thought about how to put it.

"It was quiet," he said. "It was pretty. It was one."

"Aren't you scared of going first?"

Liam shrugged. "No sir. I just looked."

The admiral nodded once. Then he took the folded paper out of Liam's captain's seam and opened it on the wall of the docking bay, and the map of the silver planet — every mountain, every stream, the wide valley and the soft round crater and the names of Liam's family on each one — went up under glass in a gold frame, the first map of a place no one had been.

That night Liam slept. The thermos sat on the floor beside his bed. The Starship Brave was parked, slow and square and quiet, at the back of the dock.

He was the first to look.

Bedtime Stories — Vol. 2: Among The Stars.