The starship Voyager, lost 70,000 lightyears from home, has finally found a place to settle. A world unwanted, uninhabited. Breathable air and living seas, but the land is very dry. For a decade or more, the crew labors to terraform, create a large oasis. The children born on the voyage are now in their teens; they've never seen Earth. To them, this is home.

One asks me "The adults see this as barren compared to Earth. Is it really, or are they sentimentalizing?"

"Many parts of Earth are greener and wetter, but there are parts that resemble this very much, one of them near where I grew up in fact, called Arizona." It isn't such a bad planet, and they're doing a good job with it.

Then a flotilla of ships built by many local races pulls into orbit. Emissaries land, of many species. They're all peoples that Voyager visited through the long years of wandering.

They want the humans to go on, leave the quadrant. Humans disrupt things, bring new technology, social change. The humans protest they're no longer Voyagers, they're Settlers now. "We won't be bothering you again."

Not good enough! The locals think they may be able to contact Earth, far across the Galaxy. Maybe there's a way to send these humans home. The flotilla plans to find a wormhole... "But if we can't, you'll have to move on..."

Adults have mixed resentment--and hope. With all these technologies pooled, the humans may see home in their lifetimes!

But the kids! They're utterly defiant. They aren't exiles. This oasis, this world, IS home! They built it--a place no one else valued.

They refuse to move. They'll fight for their home.

NOTES ON WAKING UP

This isn't about "Star Trek: Voyager". This dry world is my private life of art and dreams--the oasis I built in the desert of solitude, when my environmental illness was so severe I was unable to join the human world. Now I'm healing; I can go out in the world, make social, sexual and career connections. I can return to Earth!

Only the children born on my long voyage, the spiritual and artistic sides of me I developed in dreamwork, don't want to "return to normalcy"--to them, the life of a shamanic recluse, lonely though it sounds... is home.

And if I don't stay rooted in that home, I'm heading for trouble. For civil war.

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